I’m reluctant to leave the easy warmth of bed, and Richard, still asleep, curving into me. It’s one of those quiet days after Christmas, the turn of the year, when all the energy seems withdrawn from the world. A little light leaks round the edges of the curtains. I turn back the duvet, gently, so as not to wake him, and pull down my nightdress, which is long and loose, like a T-shirt, the kind of thing I started to wear when Daisy needed feeding in the night, and then got rather attached to.

I go to Daisy’s room. The stars glimmer on her ceiling in the glow from the lamp I leave on all night. I push back the curtain. Thin gilded light falls across the floor, where various soft toys and yesterday’s clothes are scattered. Her favourite cuddly sheep, Hannibal, is flung to the foot of her bed. He owes his name to Sinead, who once saw The Silence of the Lambs illicitly at a friend’s house, having promised they were borrowing 27 Dresses. Daisy is still in bed, but awake. She has a strained, stretched look on her face, and her eyes are huge, dilated by the dark.

‘I feel sick,’ she says.

‘What a shame, sweetheart.’ I put my hand on her forehead, but she feels quite cool. ‘Especially today.’

‘What day is it?’ she says.

A little ill-formed anxiety worms its way into my mind.

‘It’s the pantomime. Granny and Grandad are taking us.’

‘I don’t want to go,’ she says.

‘But you were so looking forward to it.’ Inside I’m cursing a little, anticipating Richard’s reaction. ‘Snow White. It’s sure to be fun.’

‘I can’t,’ she says. ‘I can’t, Mum. I feel sick and my legs hurt.’

Daisy always gets nauseous when she gets ill. They each have their own fingerprint of symptoms. Sinead, when she was younger, would produce dazzling high temperatures, epic fevers, when she’d suddenly sit up straight in bed and pronounce in a clear bright shiny voice, the things she said as random and meaningless as sleep-talk, yet sounding full of significance. Daisy gets sickness and stomach aches. She’s been like that from a baby, when she used to get colic in the middle of the night, and I’d walk her up and down the living room with the TV on, watching old black and white films, or in desperation take her into the kitchen, where the soft thick rush of the cooker hood might soothe her at last into sleep.

I go downstairs to make coffee; I’ll take a cup to Richard before I tell him. It’s a blue icy day, the ground hard and white, a lavish sky; but the fat glittery icicles that hang from the corner of the shed are iridescent, starting to drip. Soon the thaw will set in. It’s very still, no traffic noise: the sunk sap of the year. With huge gratitude, I feel the day’s first caffeine sliding into my veins.

When I go back upstairs with the coffee, Sinead has drifted off to her bedroom and her iPod.

Richard opens one eye.

‘Daisy’s ill,’ I tell him.

‘Christ. That’s just what we needed. What’s wrong?’

‘Some sort of virus. I’m not sure she can come.’

‘For goodness’ sake, she’s only got to sit through a pantomime.’

‘She’s not well, Richard.’

‘They were really looking forward to it.’

‘So was she. I mean, she’s not doing this deliberately.’

He sits up, sprawls back on the pillow and yawns, disordered by sleep, his face lined by the creases in the pillowslip. He looks older first thing in the morning, and away from the neat symmetries of his work clothes.

‘Give her some Calpol,’ he says. ‘She’ll probably be fine.’

‘She feels too sick,’ I tell him.

‘You’re so soft with those children.’ There’s an edge of irritation to his voice.

I feel I should at least try. I get the Calpol from the bathroom cabinet, take it to her room and pour it into the spoon, making a little comedy act of it. Normally she likes to see this, the sticky recalcitrant liquid that won’t go where you want it to, that glops and lurches away from you. Now she watches me with a slightly desperate look.

‘I can’t, Mum. I feel too sick.’

I take the spoon to the bathroom and tip it down the sink.

Richard has heard it all.

‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, let me do it,’ he says.

He gets up, pulls on his dressing gown, goes to get the Calpol. But when he sees her pallor, he softens a little.

‘Dad, I’m not going to,’ she says. ‘Please don’t make me.’

He ruffles her hair. ‘Just try for me, OK, munchkin?’

I watch from the door as she parts her lips a little. She’s more willing to try for him; she’s always so hungry to please him. He eases the spoon into her mouth. She half swallows the liquid, then noisily retches it up.

He steps smartly back.

‘Sorry, sweetheart. Maybe that wasn’t such a good idea.’

He wipes her mouth and kisses the top of her head, penitent. He follows me back to the bathroom.

‘OK,’ he says. ‘You stay. It’s a damn shame, though, when they’ve paid for the tickets and everything. Especially when Mother hasn’t been well.’

I think of them: Adrian, his affable father; and Gina, his mother, who favours a country casual look, although they live in chic urbanity in Putney, who reads horticultural magazines and cultivates an esoteric window box, who reminisces at some length about her job as an orthodontist’s receptionist. There’s something about Gina I find difficult: I feel colourless, passive, beside her. It’s not anything she says; she’s always nice to me, says, ‘You and Richard are so good together.’ Sometimes I feel there’s a subtext that I’m so much more satisfactory than Sara, Richard’s highly assertive first wife. But it’s almost as though it’s hard to breathe around her, as if she uses up all the air.

‘Daisy can write them a letter when she’s well,’ I say.

‘It’s not the same,’ he says, frowning.

Richard’s intense involvement with his parents fascinates me. I know that’s how it must be for most people, to have your parents there and on your side, to worry about them and care what they think about you; yet to me this is another country.

Sinead comes down when I’m making breakfast, still in her dressing gown but fully made-up, with her iPod. She takes one earpiece out to talk to me.

‘Cat, I really need your opinion. D’you think I look like a transvestite?’

‘You look gorgeous.’ I put an arm around her.

It’s part of my role with her, to be a big sister, a confidante, to be soft when Richard is stern.

‘Are you sure my mascara looks all right?’ she says. ‘I’m worried my left eyelashes look curlier than my right ones.’

‘You’re a total babe. Look, I’ve made you some toast.’

‘How is she?’ she says then.

‘I don’t think she can come.’

She sits heavily down at the table, a frown like Richard’s stitched into her forehead.

‘Do I have to go, then?’ she says.

She’s cross. She’s too old to go to the pantomime without her little sister. Daisy was the heart of today’s outing, its reason and justification: without her it doesn’t make sense.

I put my arm round her. ‘Just do it, my love. To please Granny and Grandad.’

‘Snow fucking White,’ she says. ‘Jesus.’

I overlook this. ‘You never know, you might enjoy bits of it.’

‘Oh, yeah? You know what it’ll be like. There’ll be a man in drag whose boobs keep falling down and lots of EastEnders jokes, and at the end they’ll throw Milky Ways at us and we’re meant to be, like, grateful.’

She puts her earpiece back in without waiting for my response.

They leave at twelve, Sinead now fully dressed in jeans and leather jacket and the Converse trainers she had for Christmas, resigned. I go to Daisy’s room. She’s sitting up, writing something, and I briefly wonder if Richard was right and I was too soft and I should have made her go. But she still has that stretched look.

She waves her clipboard at me. She’s made a list of breeds of cats she likes, in order of preference.

‘I still want one,’ she says.

‘I know.’

‘When can we, Mum?’

‘One day,’ I tell her.

‘You always say maybe or one day,’ she says. ‘I want to really know. I want you to tell me exactly.’

I rearrange her pillows so she can lie down, and I read to her for a while, from a book of fairy tales I bought her for Christmas. There’s a story about a princess who’s meant to marry a prince, but she falls in love with the gardener; and he shows her secret things, the apricots warm on the wall, the clutch of eggs, blue as the sky, that are hidden in the pear tree. I read it softly, willing her to sleep, but she just lies there listening. She’s pale, almost translucent, with shadows like bruises under her eyes. Maybe it’s my attention that’s keeping her awake. Eventually I tell her I’m going to make a coffee.

When I look in on her ten minutes later, she’s finally drifted off, arms and legs flung out. There’s a randomness to it, as though she was turning over and was suddenly snared by sleep. I put my hand on her forehead and she stirs but doesn’t wake. I feel a deep sense of relief, knowing the sleep will heal her.

This is an unexpected gift: an afternoon with nothing to do, with no one needing anything; a gift of time to be slowly unwrapped and relished. I stand there for a moment, listening to the quiet of the house, which seems strange, so soon after Christmas, when these rooms have so recently been full of noise and people; it’s almost as though the house is alive and gently breathing. Then I go up to the attic, moving slowly through the silence.

I push open the door. The scents of my studio welcome me: turps, paint, the musty, over-sweet smell of dying flowers. From one of the little arched windows I can see across the roofs towards the park. I lean there for a moment, looking out. There’s a velvet bloom of dust on the sill; I rarely clean in here. I can see the tall bare trees and their many colours, pink, apricot, purple, where the buds are forming at the ends of their branches, and the dazzling sky with a slow silent aeroplane lumbering towards Heathrow.

I put on the shirt I always wear up here. Richard doesn’t like to see me in it; he hates me in baggy clothes. But I welcome its scruffiness and sexlessness, the way it says Now I am painting—the way it defines me as someone who is engaged in this one thing.

Here is everything I need: thick expensive paper, and 4B pencils that make soft smudgy lines, and acrylic paints, and watercolours with those baroque names that I love—cadmium yellow and prussian blue and crimson alizarin. And there are things I’ve collected, postcards and pictures torn from magazines, a print I cut from a calendar—a Georgia O’Keeffe painting of an orchid, very sexualised; I laughed when Sinead stared at it and raised one eyebrow and said, ‘She might as well have called it, “Come on in, boys.”’ And there are pebbles from the beach at Brighton, and bits of wood from the park, and a vase of lilies I brought here when the petals started to fall.

I feel a kind of certainty. There’s a clear dark purpose at the heart of me, a seriousness; today I will be able to work well.

I pick up a piece of bark, and see, in the thin golden light, that its soft dull brownness is made of many colours. I take out the pastel crayons and start to draw, using the blues and reds I see there, melding them together. I love this—how you can look intently at the quiet surfaces of things, and see such vividness.

There’s a part of my mind that is focused, intent, and part that is floating free. Images drift through my mind, faces: Sinead in her new Christmas make-up, pretty and troubled; Richard, thin-lipped, annoyed with me and with Daisy. They’ll be at the pantomime by now. Snow White will be a soap star in a blonde extravagant wig, and the Queen perhaps a man in taffeta and corsets, playing it for laughs. Yet she can be so scary, this Queen, like in the Disney film Snow White I saw when I was a child; I remember her shadow, sharp as though cut with a blade, looming and filling the screen. And I see Nicky at the carol-singing, her eager face and her dancing reindeer earrings; and thinking of Nicky I think, too, of Fergal O’Connor. And as I think of him, immediately I’m touching him, putting out my hands and moving them over his face, his head, feeling the precise texture of his skin. He is quite still, watching me. I feel the warmth of him through the palms of my hands. This shocks me, the precision of this picture—when I wasn’t sure I even liked him.

I draw on, in the suspended stillness. The drawing takes shape, but I don’t know yet if it pleases me. For the moment, I’m not judging it or wondering whether it’s any good or whether people will like it, just moving my hand on the page. There’s a compulsion to it, as though I don’t have a choice. Soon the light will dim; already pools of shadow are collecting in the corners. I draw quickly, with rapid little strokes in many colours, wanting to get it finished before it’s dark.

When the doorbell rings, I jump, I’m so lost in my own world, and the crayon makes a random jagged mark across the page. My first impulse is not to go, it’s such a long way down. But then it rings again, and I worry that Daisy will wake, requiring drinks and comfort, so I run down the two flights of stairs, through the gathering dark of the house.

It’s Monica, our neighbour.

‘Sorry to disturb you,’ she says.

She’s wearing a tracksuit and running shoes: she’s off for a jog in the park. Her two red setters are with her, milling around at the foot of the steps. She’s bright-eyed and virtuous, and the cold has already brought a flush to her cheeks.

‘That’s OK,’ I tell her. ‘I was up in the attic.’

While I’ve been drawing the world has changed. There are sounds of water and a wet smell, and our breath smokes white in the raw air. As we stand at the door there’s a noise from the roof like tearing cloth, and a lump of snow slides off and spatters on the gravel.

‘Nice Christmas?’

‘Great, thanks,’ I say routinely.

Her hair is very short and in the dim light she has an androgynous, classical look: Diana hunting with her dogs, perhaps, or some figure from a Greek frieze that I saw once with Richard in Athens, a taut young runner bringing news of slaughters and defeats.

‘These came for you while we were away,’ she says.

She thrusts two envelopes at me. I glance down at them: one is for Daisy, with a local postmark, probably a school friend, a child who was away at the end of term and missed the school postbox; the other comes from abroad and I recognise the writing. I have to control an urge to thrust this letter straight back at her.

She watches me. Perhaps she sees some trouble in my face, that she misreads as criticism.

‘We’ve been away,’ she says again, a bit apologetic. ‘Or I’d have brought them round earlier.’

‘No, no. It’s fine. They’re just Christmas cards anyway.’

‘It wasn’t our usual postman,’ she says.

She’s moving from one foot to the other, wired up and keen to be off. The dogs skulk and circle at the foot of the steps, vivid and nervy, damp mouths open.

‘Thanks anyway,’ I tell her.

‘We must have coffee some time,’ she says. As we always say.

‘I’d like that.’

And she’s off, jogging down the steps, pounding across the damp gravel, the dogs streaming out in front of her.

I put Daisy’s card on the hall stand; I’ll take it to her when she wakes.

I go into the kitchen, sit at the table, hold the other envelope out in front of me. My heart is noisy. It enters my head that this is why Daisy is ill, as though everything is connected, as though this letter brings ill fortune with it, clinging like an unwholesome smell of past things, a smell of mothballs and stale cigarettes and old discarded clothing.

The house has lost its sense of ease; it feels alert, edgy. I hear the little kitchen noises, a drumming like fingertips in the central heating, the breathing of the fridge, and outside the creak and drip of the thaw. I tear at the envelope.

It’s a perfectly ordinary card: a Christmas tree, very conventional, with ‘Season’s Greetings’ in gilt letters in German and French and English.

I open it. At the top, an address, printed and underlined. The handwriting is careful, rather childlike.

Trina, darling. ‘Someone we know’ gave me your address. What a stroke of luck!! The above is where I’m living now. Please PLEASE write.

There’s an assumption of intimacy about the way it isn’t signed that I resent and certainly don’t share. Like the way a lover will say on the phone, ‘It’s me.’

I look at my hands clasped tight on the table in front of me. I notice the way the veins stick out, the pale varnish that is beginning to peel, the white skin. I feel that they have nothing to do with me.

I sit there for a while, then I get up and put the card in the paper recycling bin, tucked under yesterday’s Times, where it can’t be seen.

I long for Richard to be here, but they won’t be back for hours; it’s only four o’clock—they’ll still be in the theatre. It’s the interval perhaps; they’ll be talking politely and eating sugared popcorn. I want Richard to hold me. Suddenly I hate the way we’ve let our love leak away through a hundred little cracks, like this morning, the irritation, the disagreements over Calpol; and my fantasy about Fergal O’Connor embarrasses and shames me. Stupid to think such things, when I love and need Richard so much. Without him I feel thin, etiolated as though I have no substance. As though I’m a cardboard cutout, a figure in that Nativity scene on the mantelpiece: intricately detailed, looking, in a dim light, almost solid—yet two-dimensional, with no substance, nothing to weigh me down. Only Richard can hold me and make me real.

CHAPTER 3

The house has a fresh January feel, everything swept and gleaming. All the decorations, that some time after Christmas lost their gloss, as though their sheen had actually tarnished over, have been packed away in boxes in the attic. There are daffodils in a blue jug on the kitchen table; they’re buds still, green but swelling. Tomorrow they will open, and already you can smell the pollen through the thin green skin. And we have all made resolutions: Sinead to stop biting her nails; Richard to drink wine instead of whisky; Daisy to have a cat—though Sinead protested at this, as she felt it didn’t quite qualify as a resolution; and I have resolved to take my painting more seriously. And to that end, today, the first day of term, I am going, all on my own, to an exhibition that I read about in the paper, at the Tate Modern. It is called Insomnia and this is its final week. It is a series of sketches by Louise Bourgeois, done in the night, fantastical—dandelion clocks, and tunnels made of hair, and a cat with a high-heeled shoe in its mouth. And I shall buy a catalogue, like a proper artist, and be inspired, perhaps, and start to draw quite differently: not just flowers, but pictures from my mind.

I am dressed to go straight to the station after dropping Daisy at school. I have a new long denim coat, stylishly shabby, that I chose from an austere expensive shop, with unsmiling scented assistants and very few clothes on the rails: my Christmas present from Richard. It’s cunningly shaped, clinging to the body then flaring towards the hem, and almost too long so you’d trip without high-heeled shoes, and it’s dyed a smudgey black, like ink, and the fabric feels opulently heavy. Not the sort of thing I’d ever normally wear to the school gate; but today I shall wear it. The thought of my outing gives me a fat happy feeling.

I make toast. Sinead is packing her bag in the hall, cursing under her breath. Yesterday we had the usual end-of-holiday panic: she’d just come back from Sara’s, and she suddenly thought of an essay that had to be done, on something complex to do with the growth of fascism in the thirties, and therefore requiring major parental input. Richard was provoked into a rare outburst of irritation with her.

‘For God’s sake, Sinead. How the hell did this happen? You’ve had the whole bloody holiday.’

She shrugged, immaculately innocent, with an expression that said this was nothing to do with her.

‘I forgot,’ she said.

Then Daisy, who’s now recovered from her flu though still not eating properly, decided we had to go shopping: there were girls who’d given her Christmas presents and she’d had nothing for them. Even at eight that intricate web of female relationship, of things given and owed, of best friends and outsiders, is beginning to be woven. So we bought some flower hairclips from Claire’s Accessories, and found an obliging Internet site so Sinead could finish her essay, and today we are organised: clothes washed, lunchboxes packed, everything as it should be.

It’s a windy busy morning. Large pale brown chestnut leaves torn from the tree in Monica’s garden litter our lawn. The letterbox keeps rattling as though there are many phantom postmen. When this happens, I jump.

Daisy comes downstairs dressed for school, neat and precise, but her face is white. I put some toast in front of her.

‘D’you want honey?’

‘I’m not hungry,’ she says.

She sits neatly in front of it, her hands in her lap, looking at the toast but not touching it.

‘Try and eat something,’ I say.

‘I don’t want anything,’ she says.

I can’t send her to school with nothing inside her.

‘Perhaps a Mars Bar—just this once?’ I’m a bit conspiratorial, expecting gratitude.

‘I don’t want one,’ she says.

Sinead leaves to catch her bus, her body misshapen from the weight of the bag she carries on her shoulder. She wears her uniform according to the girls’ illicit dress code: her skirt rolled at the waistline so it’s far too short, bracelets of peace beads hidden under her cuffs, her socks pushed down and tucked inside her shoes.

I brush Daisy’s hair in front of the big mirror that hangs over the fireplace. Her fair hair is thick, lavish, the brush won’t go right through it. I’ve washed it with shampoo that smells of mangoes; a faint fruit scent hangs about her.

‘Will you be at home today?’ she says.

‘No, sweetheart, I’m going to an exhibition.’

‘Oh,’ she says. Her face collapses a little, as though she is going to cry. I run my hand down her cheek. Her skin is cold.

We go out to the car. The wind sneaks under the collars of our coats. Above the roofs of the houses, dark birds are swirled around like leaves in the millstream of the sky.

There’s a sudden ferociousness to the traffic, now term has started. Daisy sits quite silently in the car.

‘I wonder what Megan had for Christmas,’ I say cheerfully.

She doesn’t reply. I look at her in the rear-view mirror; she is crying silently, slow tears edging down her white face.

‘Sweetheart, what’s the matter?’

‘I feel sick,’ she says.

‘Are you worried about something?’

She shakes her head.

‘You’ll be fine once you get there. You’ll see Abi and Megan, catch up with everything.’

Her tears always bring a lump to my throat, and then a kind of worry that she has such power over me, a feeling that this shouldn’t be, that it’s weak, ineffectual. I know I’m overprotective, that I find it hard to tolerate my child being unhappy. That I’m not like other women, with their anoraks and certainty. I know this is a flaw in me.

We park down the road from school. I give her a tissue and she wipes her eyes.

‘Is my nose red?’ she says.

‘You look great,’ I tell her.

‘You didn’t answer my question, Mum,’ she says.

In the road outside school, there’s the usual stand-off, two lines of traffic facing one another. There are parents who persist in dropping their children here, optimism triumphing over experience; they hoot futilely but nobody can move. Children mill round in padded winter coats, some of them newly purchased and a little too large; they’re moving fast and anarchically, as though the wildness of the weather is inside them. People have changed over the holiday. One child looks cute in new glasses, another has visibly grown. Natalie’s mother, who so liked my house, is pulling at a frenetic puppy. Someone else, hugely pregnant in December, has her immaculate baby in a sling. The baby still has that translucent unfinished look, so you feel if you held his hand to the light, perhaps you would see straight through. The sight pulls at women’s eyes and the same expression crosses all their faces, eyes widening, as though this is still a surprise. Crocuses are coming up in the lawn in front of the school; they have the tender colours of paint mixed with too much water, a fragile buttery yellow, and purple, pale as the veins inside a woman’s wrist. It’s only been a fortnight, and there’s so much that is new.

We’re holding hands as we walk towards the gate; her hand is tightening in mine. I look down at her. Her face is set, taut.

‘D’you want me to wait with you till the bell goes?’

I offer this as a choice, though really I have no choice: her hand is wrapped around mine like a bandage. She nods but doesn’t speak.

We stand there together by the gate as the children surge forward. The wind blows my hair in my mouth, but I’m holding Daisy with one hand and her lunchbox with the other, and I can’t push it back. My black denim coat, though stylish, is a little too cold for the day. We hear broken-off bits of conversation, blown round us like fallen leaves. Someone is making a complicated arrangement for tonight, involving tea and maths and ballet classes; someone else had fifteen to dinner for Christmas, and honestly it was like a military operation…

Over the heads of the children, I see the back of a man’s neck, his leather-jacketed shoulders, his rumpled head. It’s Fergal with his little boy. He must have walked straight past me. This makes me uncomfortable. I don’t know if he’s forgotten me, or simply hasn’t seen me. I start to feel unreal with no one to talk to.

And then Nicky is there, her children tugging at her, the ends of her stripy scarf streaming out behind her. Her smile warms me through.

‘Wow!’ she says. ‘So this is the coat. Fabulous! I am green.’

‘Thanks,’ I say.

As always she’s rushing, everything on the most feverish of schedules, dropping off the boys before jumping into her car and heading off to her other life at Praxis, the advertising agency. But she sees that Daisy is troubled and she ruffles her hair with her hand.

‘Not feeling too good, lambchop?’ she says. ‘Trust me, you’re not the only one. I hate the first day of term. Neil had to positively kick me out of bed.’

She pats Daisy’s shoulder; Daisy doesn’t turn to her. The boys pull at her, and she’s off, her scarf fringes flapping.

The bell rings.

‘There we go,’ I say, bending to kiss the top of Daisy’s head.

She wraps herself around me.

‘Come on, sweetheart.’

I try to prise her fingers away from my hand, but they stick like pieces of Elastoplast.

‘Mum, I can’t do this,’ she says. ‘Don’t make me.’

I cannot disentangle her from me. I know this is ridiculous, but I can’t.

People are looking at us with unconcealed curiosity. There are all these warnings in my head, slogans from the war between parents and children. They do try it on…Give them an inch…And I hear Gina at her most dogmatic, pronouncing on the pitfalls of modern parenting: You don’t want to go the brown rice and sandals route, you’ve got to show them who’s boss…

‘Sweetheart, you’ll be fine when you get into class.’

She is crying openly now, shivering with it. She doesn’t even seem to hear me.

‘Come on, let’s go in together.’

I try to move towards the gate, but the whole weight of her body is pressed against me.

‘I can’t, Mum,’ she says again.

Fergal passes, coming out. He looks at me and nods but doesn’t smile, recognising my difficulty. Embarrassment washes hotly across my skin.

Something gives way inside me.

‘OK. We’ll go home,’ I tell her.

I bend and hug her, burying my face in the mango smell of her hair. Immediately she stops crying, though she’s shivering still. I have a sudden doubt: if only I’d pushed a little harder, I could have got her into class. I feel a pang for the exhibition, for the cat with the high-heeled shoe and the tunnels made of hair. Now I will never see them. But it’s done, we can’t go back. The front of my new black denim coat is damp where she’s been crying against me.

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