The Perfect Mother by Margaret Leroy Page B

made love to me in front of the long mirror; and the white silk scarf he sometimes liked to tie around my mouth.
    The sex—the memory of it, the anticipation—was always there, so the smell of him seemed to permeate my skin. Yet in some ways we were almost formal still. There were subjects that were closed between us; we never talked again about his marriage to Sara, or my childhood. Mostly we talked about art or classical music. He knew a lot and taught me, and I liked that. Sometimes I looked at him and felt I scarcely knew him. Yet mostly it was happy and we were at ease with one another.
    On our last day we had our first and only disagreement, and about something so trivial. We were in a café near StMark’s, sipping coffee from tiny gold-rimmed cups, when I was aware of him watching a woman at the next table. She had high strappy heels, a dress that was tight and shiny. She was perhaps fifty-five, and plump: she bulged in her glossy clothes. As she got up to go he raised his eyebrows at me, made a disparaging gesture.
    ‘What’s wrong?’ I said, a little sharply.
    ‘Old women shouldn’t dress like tarts,’ he said.
    ‘I thought she was just fine,’ I said. ‘She was enjoying those clothes, enjoying her life.’ There was an edge to my voice. ‘Why shouldn’t she wear what she wants?’
    He looked across at me, surprised. Then he patted my arm. ‘Darling, why does it matter so much?’
    I smiled apologetically, feeling I’d been over-emotional, getting too upset, as women will. ‘Well, it doesn’t really.’ Wanting to seal this crack, to make it all as it was.
    But I didn’t like what he’d said. I thought, I too will be old one day.
    On our way back to the hotel, he must have taken a wrong turn: the street grew narrower, the houses almost meeting overhead. Washing lines were stretched across the street with washing hanging from them, and we could hear what sounded like a Western on someone’s television. We came to a dead end, a promontory with water on three sides, and opposite us over the water a tall strange house, each window with a window box, but nothing much grew in them, just a few plants, herbs mostly, straggling, untidy; and there were little plastic windmills stuck in the earth in each window box, like the windmills thatchildren stick in sandcastles, yet they didn’t quite have the cheeriness of toys. They were all yellow but in many different shapes, a star, a flower, a sickle-moon, and others less obvious, serrated, sharp, like parts of a great machine. The shadow of the house reached out across the water, and over to where we stood. Where the sun was shut out, the canal looked different. Without all the surface flicker and luminescence, you saw how dirty the water was, how full of mud and rubbish.
    He had his arm round my shoulder and he felt my hesitation.
    ‘What’s wrong?’ he said.
    ‘I don’t like it here,’ I said.
    He seemed amused. He pulled me to him and kissed me lightly, sliding his hand down under the hem of my skirt, easing a finger up the inside of my thigh.
    Something made me look up. Over his shoulder I saw a woman right at the top of the house, leaning out to water one of the window boxes. She paused for a moment, looked down at us with a hard, cold, curious stare, then pulled back into the darkness inside the house. A cool wind stirred the windmills, so the whole house seemed alive, and the windmills turned like Catherine wheels, spinning so fast they made new shapes, the serrated circles becoming whole, entire, making a buzzing sound like the whirring of insect wings. I shivered. And then it passed as suddenly as it had come. We found our way back to our room, and he took off my clothes and made love to me, tying my wrists to the bed with the white silk scarf, and I forgot my feeling of unease.
    Afterwards, there was music through our window. I went to lean on the window sill, still drugged and high with sex. A man with hair down his back and a rucksack covered