The Perfect Mother by Margaret Leroy Page A

knowing, in the lamplight. I made to help him undo my zip; he moved my hand away.
    When he’d taken off all my clothes, he took the pendant and fastened it, still standing behind me, watching us in the mirror. I seemed somehow more naked with the chain around my throat. The metal was cold against my skin, and I felt a quick taut shock of desire. Though I had done so many things, some of them things I now regretted, the men who’d fucked me hastily in cars or riskily in public places or with their wives downstairs, I felt the shock and thrill of it so keenly. I think it was the sense of exposure, him looking at me and taking me in so completely, when we had as yet no sexual connection, when he’d scarcely touched me.
    He looked at me for a long time. Then he lifted up my hair and kissed the back of my neck above the clasp, still watching me in the mirror, and pulled me down and made love to me on the rug in front of the fireplace. And it was good, but more ordinary, pleasant but predictable.

CHAPTER 11
    W e went to Venice for our honeymoon. His choice; I loved it too. It was so beautiful—like walking through a fairy tale, at once enchanting and confusing, so I never quite knew where we were. It was almost as though the patterning of the streets and alleyways changed—shifted from day to day, from hour to hour; so that what this morning had felt familiar, this afternoon, in a new light—grey, with mist coming in from the lagoon, and sad with the cries of seabirds—started to seem strange. Alone, I’d have been permanently lost, needing a pocketful of pebbles or a ball ofwhite wool to trail behind me, marking out my path. But Richard could invariably find our way, and I let him take over, take charge: liking this, that I could be so dependent, that I didn’t have to struggle.
    Our hotel room looked out on the Ponte della Libertà. The room was wide, high-ceilinged, as though devised for people much larger than me. There was a bed, vast as adult beds seem to a child, a long mirror, a padded window seat, and out of the window the shimmer and lilt of the water.
    Our days fell into a pattern. In the morning we’d wander the city, exploring some mossy basilica of a church, or walking beside the canals, where the little waves lapped at the steps of the crumbling palaces, stuccoed dull pink or purple like rotting fruit. After lunch in some hushed restaurant, we’d go back to our room, and he’d take off my clothes and make love to me on the window seat, so if the curtain moved in the breeze I worried we might be visible from the street. And at night we’d make love in the big bed, and again perhaps at three or four, when the yowling of cats woke us.
    As a lover he was sure, quiet, definite: a man who knew his mind, who never spoke, except to say what he wanted. But now that we were married and away from the flat where he’d lived with Sara, I found him less reserved, more adventurous. Or perhaps it was something to do with the staginess of Venice itself, the self-consciousness it inspired, so even the most intimate act seemed to require extravagant props, red ropes or velvethandcuffs, and to be acted out with a certain panache as though for a secret audience. I was very willing, and intrigued, and he never hurt me. But it wasn’t quite how I’d imagined marriage. I’d thought this kind of thing was for mistresses, not wives. That marriage was a safer, quieter place—that it wouldn’t have quite this urgency, nor all this apparatus of desire.
    He liked to buy me things. I wanted a souvenir, so in a little dark shop by the Rialto, where everything smelt of the fishmarket, he bought me the masks that hang now on our wall. But mostly he bought me clothes or jewellery: a filmy dress, pearl earrings, silver chains; and a long fringed scarf of white silk with a pattern like frost on a window. When we made love he liked to see me in the things he’d bought me: the silver chains he twisted round my ankles or wrists when he