The Perfect Mother by Margaret Leroy

about himself, his work, his parents, his childhood at a repressive boarding school. And he told me about Sara, his ex-wife: how it had started going wrong a long way back; how independent she’d been, how she hadn’t had time for Sinead; how they’d scarcely ever made love since Sinead was born. This had made him unhappy: sex was pretty crucial to him, he said, his eyes searching mine. In the endhe’d moved out of their bed, slept on the futon in the spare room. Looking back, it was the most open he’s ever been with me. Perhaps it was easier because we were strangers still, as people in a railway carriage will share astounding confidences. And then—well into my third glass of champagne—I said, ‘I need you to know this now,’ and I told him about myself: what I had never before told anyone. Told him about my mother, about The Poplars, about Pindown: sensing what kind of person he was, and what he liked in me—that my vulnerability would be acceptable, appealing even, to him. That after Sara, who had never seemed to need him, my neediness might be welcome to him. That I might make him feel he had something to give.
    ‘There’s something so hurt in you,’ he said. ‘I can feel that.’ And I thought, Maybe he says that to every woman he wants. Yet really I didn’t care, it was certainly true for me.
    When the dessert arrived and I eyed his greedily, wondering whether the crème brûlée I’d chosen, though silkily delicious, could really compete with the clafouti with frosted blueberries on his plate, he reached across and fed me some of his portion with his spoon. Watching me, his gaze moving across my mouth and my eyes. It was the nearest he’d come to touching me.
    He drove me back to the flat in Garratt Lane. He didn’t kiss me.
    The next week he invited me out again. He told me he didn’t much like the dress I was wearing—it was the only other dress I possessed, ankle-length and lacklustre, from the bargain rail at C & A—and he took me to ahushed boutique off Sloane Square and bought me another. It was in a rather obvious style, strappy, made of silk, but the colour of it was wonderful and subtle, red with a blackish bloom, like mulberries.
    The third week we went again to Mon Plaisir.
    ‘Sinead is with her mother tonight,’ he said, his eyes holding mine. ‘We could have coffee at my flat. Would you like that?’
    I nodded, I understood.
    We drove there in silence. I wondered how it would be. I worried that he saw something almost virginal in me, something that was an illusion, a kind of innocence—a product perhaps of my diffidence and rounded open face and ignorance of the urbane world he inhabited: that he would therefore be disappointed in me.
    He took me into the living room.
    ‘I’ve bought you something,’ he said.
    It was a long thin box. I felt unsure: I’d never been out with the kind of man who buys you jewellery. But he’d chosen well, it was easy to be pleased; it was charming, a silver chain with a stone the colour of cornflowers. I had no way of knowing what kind of gem it was. Precious stones were a mystery to me then, like Rolexes or makes of car or expensive bottles of wine.
    ‘It’s beautiful,’ I said, and made to put it on.
    ‘Wait,’ he said. And when I looked at him quizzically, ‘I want it to be perfect.’ As I’d said in the restaurant, taking care over my choice.
    ‘Come here,’ he said. He stood me in front of him, infront of the over-mantel mirror. I thought he was going finally to kiss me. He put his hands very lightly on my shoulders, turned me to face the mirror, started to ease the straps of my dress down off my shoulders.
    ‘Someone might come in,’ I said.
    He pushed the front of the dress down over my breasts, doing it very slowly, in this concentrated way, yet scarcely touching me, so I felt only the slight brush against my skin of the warm tips of his fingers.
    ‘No one will come in,’ he said.
    I saw how my face looked older, more