The Wrong Mother

by Sophie Hannah

  I turn on my computer, open a file so that it looks as if I’m working. It’s an old draft of a paper I’m presenting in Lisbon next month: ‘Creating Salt-marsh Habitats Using Muddy Dredged Materials’. That’ll do.

  Is there any evidence that taking deep breaths ever made anyone feel better?

  Someone followed me in a red Alfa Romeo. I memorised the registration: YF52 DNB. Esther would tell me to ring the DVLA and sweet-talk them into giving me the name of the car’s owner, but I’m not good at sweet-talking, and although every Holly-wood film contains at least one maverick office-worker eager to break company rules and give confidential information to strangers, in the real world-in my experience, at any rate-most employees are champing at the bit to tell you how little they can do for you, how absolutely forbidden they are to make your life one iota easier.

  I’ve got a better idea. I pick up the phone, ignore the broken dialling tone that tells me I have messages, dial 118118 and ask to be put through to Seddon Hall Hotel and Spa. A man with a Northern Irish accent asks me which town. ‘ York,’ I tell him.

  ‘Oh, right, got it.’ I hold my breath, silently urging him not to ask me the question that always makes me want to bash my head against something hard. He does. ‘Would you like to be put through?’

  ‘Yes. That’s why I said, “Can you put me through?” ’ I can’t resist adding. Think for yourself, dork. Don’t just stick to the script, because every time you do that, every time one of your colleagues does it, it’s five seconds of my life wasted.

  Even if someone isn’t trying to kill me, I still haven’t got any life to spare. I try to find this funny and fail.

  The next voice I hear is a woman’s. She gives me the good-morning-Seddon-Hall spiel that I’ve heard several times before. I ask her to check if a man called Mark Bretherick stayed at Seddon Hall between Friday, 2 June and Friday, 9 June 2006. ‘He was in suite number eleven for the first two nights, then in suite fifteen.’ I can picture both rooms clearly, on the top floor of the courtyard bit, on the galleried landing.

  The pause before she speaks suggests she might have watched the news lately. ‘Could I ask your name, please?’

  ‘Sally Thorning. I was a guest at the hotel at the same time.’

  ‘Do you mind me asking why you need this information?’

  ‘I just need to check something,’ I tell her.

  ‘I’m afraid we don’t normally-’

  ‘Look, forget Mark Bretherick,’ I cut her off. ‘That probably wasn’t his name. There was a man who stayed at Seddon Hall from the second to the ninth of June last year and I need to know who he was. He booked suite eleven for the whole week, but then there was a problem with the hot-’

  ‘I’m sorry, madam,’ the soft-voiced receptionist interrupts me. I can hear her computer whirring; she’s probably looking at his name on her screen right now. ‘I don’t mean to be unhelpful, but we can’t give out guests’ names without a good reason.’

  ‘I’ve got a good reason,’ I tell her. ‘Whoever that man was, I spent the week with him. He told me he was Mark Bretherick, but I don’t think he was. And, for reasons that I can’t go into because of my own confidentiality policy, I really need to know his name. Urgently. So, if you could check your records…’

  ‘Madam, I’m really sorry-I’m afraid it’s unlikely that we’ve kept records from that far back.’

  ‘Yeah, right. Course it is.’

  I slam down the phone. So much for sweet-talking. Was I too honest, or not honest enough? Or did I sound like a bossy cow? Nick says I sometimes ask questions in a way that makes people pray they won’t know the answer.

  Last night-because I had to do something-I waited until Nick went to bed and wrote a letter to the police about the Brethericks. It contained almost no information, only that the man identified as Mark Bretherick on the news might be someone else. On my way into work this morning I stopped at Spilling Post Office and put it in the police postbox. By now someone might have read it.

  They’ll think I’m a crank. I told them the bare minimum. Anybody could have written what I wrote, to get attention or cause trouble-a drunk teenager, a bored pensioner, anyone. They’ll put me straight in the Wearside Jack category.

  I think about what I told the Seddon Hall receptionist: whoever that man was, I spent a week with him. I could have written that in my letter to the police without giving away my identity. Why the hell didn’t I? The more detailed my account, the more likely they would have been to believe me. If I explained everything, how and why it happened… Suddenly I feel a burning need to share the full truth with somebody. Even if it’s only the police, even anonymously. For over a year I’ve kept it completely secret, telling the story to myself but no one else.

  I highlight the draft of my salt-marsh habitats article and delete it, leaving only the heading in case someone looks over my shoulder. Then I start to type.

  7 August 2007

  To whom it may concern

  I have already written to you once about the Brethericks. I posted my first letter this morning at about eight thirty, on my way to work. Like this one, it was anonymous. I am writing again because, after posting my last attempt, I realised that it would be easy for you to dismiss me as a time-waster.

  I can’t tell you my name for reasons that will become clear. I am female, thirty-eight, married and a mother. I work full-time, and the work I do is professional. I am university educated and have a PhD. (I’m saying this because I can’t help thinking it will make you take me more seriously, so I suppose that makes me a snob too.)

  As I said in my last letter, I have reason to believe that the Mark Bretherick I saw on the news last night might not be the real Mark Bretherick. This story may seem irrelevant at first but it isn’t so please bear with me.

  In December 2005, my boss asked me if I could go on a work trip abroad, for the week of Friday, 2 June to Friday, 9 June 2006. At that time my children were very young and I was working full-time, juggling several different projects and not getting much sleep. Every day felt like a struggle. I told my boss I didn’t think I’d be able to do it. Since having my second child, I hadn’t been away from home for more than one night at a time. To go away for a whole week didn’t seem fair on my husband and the children, and I felt utterly drained when I imagined getting home afterwards and having to clear up the mess that would have accumulated in my absence. It simply didn’t seem worth it. I felt slightly disappointed at having to turn down the work because it sounded like an interesting project, but I barely gave it a thought because I was so sure it was out of the question.

  I told my husband later, expecting him to say, ‘Yeah, there’s no way you could have gone,’ but he didn’t. He looked at me as if I was mad and asked why I’d said no. ‘It sounds like the opportunity of a lifetime. If anyone asked me, I’d go like a shot,’ he said.

  ‘I can’t. It’s impossible,’ I told him, thinking he must have forgotten we had very young children.

  ‘Why not? I’ll be here. We’ll manage fine. I might not stay up till midnight every night ironing socks and hankies like you do, but who cares?’

  ‘I can’t,’ I said. ‘If I go away for a week, it’ll take me two weeks to get on top of everything once I get back.’

  ‘You mean at work?’ he said.

  ‘And at home,’ I said. ‘And the kids’ll really miss me.’

  ‘They’ll be absolutely fine. We’ll have fun. I’ll let them eat chocolate and go to bed late. Look, I can’t look after the kids and keep the house tidy,’ he said, (he could, of course, but he genuinely believes that he can’t) ‘but we can hire some help.’ He mentioned the name of a woman who babysat for us regularly.

  As he outlined a possible plan-and I can remember this as vividly as if it happened yesterday-a weird feeling started to grow inside me. At the risk of sounding melodramatic, it felt like some kind of explosion or revelation: I could go. It was possible. My husband was right, the children would be absolutely fine. And I co
uld ring them every morning and every evening, so that they could hear my voice and I could reassure them that I was coming back soon.

  Whoever you are that’s reading this: I’m sorry to make it so personal. But if I don’t tell you all this, the rest won’t make sense. It’s not a justification, just an explanation.

  A week away, I thought. A whole week. Seven unbroken nights. I could catch up on my sleep. At that point my husband and I were getting up three or four times a night, and each time we might be up for an hour or more, trying to settle a wakeful child. And we were both working full-time as well. It didn’t seem to bother my husband. ‘What’s the worst that can happen?’ he used to say. ‘We’ll be tired, that’s all. It’s not the end of the world.’ (My husband is the sort of person who would say that even if he bumped into someone who was holding a large nuclear bomb and wearing a name-badge that said ‘Nostradamus’.)

  I rang my boss and told him I could go after all. I hired the babysitter that my husband had mentioned, and within a couple of days my trip was arranged. I would be staying in a five-star hotel in a country I’d never been to before. I started to fantasise about the trip. All the work stuff would happen during the day, leaving my evenings free. I could have long, hot baths and lovely room service dinners that I wouldn’t have to cook myself. I could go to bed at nine thirty and sleep until seven the next morning-that was the most alluring prospect of all. I’d assumed, without even realising it, that my relationship with proper sleep was over for good.

  What had so recently seemed impossible quickly became a necessity. Every time I had a stressful day at work or a bad night with the kids, I recited the name of the place I was going to in my head-the hotel and the city. If I could manage until then, I told myself, I’d be fine. I’d spend that week refreshing my mind and body, repairing all the damage that had been done by years of overwork and refusing to rest. (I am a workaholic, by the way. I didn’t even take any real time off when my children were born-I just worked from home as much as I could for the first six months, sitting at my computer while they slept in their baby-bouncers next to my desk.)

  The trip was scheduled for June last year. In March, my boss told me the project had been cancelled. My trip was off, just like that. It’s the closest I’ve ever come to crying in a professional situation. I think my boss could see how disappointed I was because he kept asking me if I was okay, if everything was all right at home.

  I wanted to scream at him, ‘Everything is absolutely f ***ing great at home, as long as I can get away from it for just one week!’ I honestly couldn’t imagine how I would manage without the break I’d been banking on. Reconciling myself to going without wasn’t an option. I needed something, a substitute. I asked my boss if he could send me somewhere else. The company I work for does similar sorts of work for many different organisations, so it didn’t seem too unrealistic a request. Unfortunately my boss had no equivalent trip to offer me.

  Feeling absolutely wretched, I turned to leave his office, but he called me back. He gave me a stern look and said, ‘If you need to get away, go. Take a week off, go on holiday. ’ I blinked at him, wondering why I hadn’t thought of it myself. He then ruined it by adding, ‘Take the kids to the seaside,’ but I could feel the smile forming on my face. He’d planted a seed in my mind.

  I decided I would go away, on my own, without telling anyone. I pretended that the trip had not been cancelled, and booked myself into a spa hotel, safely far away from where I live. I would relax, recuperate, and come back a different person. I didn’t feel guilty for lying to my husband, not at that point. I convinced myself that if he knew he would approve. Once or twice I considered telling him. ‘Oh, by the way, my work trip was cancelled, but I thought that instead I’d go and spend a week lying beside a swimming pool in a white towelling bathrobe. Oh, and it’s going to cost us about two and a half thousand quid-is that okay?’

  He might not have minded, but I wasn’t prepared to risk it. And, actually, even if he’d said, ‘Fine, go ahead,’ I couldn’t have done it. I couldn’t have done it openly-left my kids for a week and swanned off to have orange-blossom oil rubbed into my back. I had to lie about it because it seemed so frivolous, so entirely unnecessary. And yet-and I don’t know how to convey to you how much-it was absolutely, desperately necessary for me at that point in my life. I felt as if I might die if it didn’t happen.

  I set off on the morning of Friday, 2 June, not even bothering to pack the things I’d have needed if I’d been going on the work trip. My husband would never in a million years notice something I’d left at home and think, Hang on, why hasn’t she taken that? He doesn’t notice anything, which I suppose makes him easy to lie to.

  The hotel was unbelievably beautiful. On my first afternoon there, I had a full-body massage (I’d never had one before) and it was like nothing I’d ever experienced. I fell asleep on the table. I woke up six hours later. The therapist explained to me that she’d tried to wake me by shaking a set of bells in front of my face and saying my name, but I was sound asleep. Then she’d read the form I’d filled in at the spa’s reception and seen that I’d rated my stress level, on a scale of one to ten, as twenty, so she decided to let me sleep.

  When I woke up, I felt unbelievably different. I wasn’t at all tired. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt like that-not since I was at university. All the different parts of my brain felt clean, efficient and ready to go. That night, from the hotel’s plush bar, I phoned my husband. I told him I’d arrived at my hotel. He’d forgotten its name. I told him I would be out and about most of the time and that if he needed to contact me my mobile was the easiest way. But I couldn’t avoid saying the name of the hotel I was supposed to be staying in, a hotel on the other side of the world. And a man heard me.

  As I was putting my phone back in my bag, I looked up and saw him watching me. He had dark auburn hair, green eyes, pale skin and freckles. His face was boyish, the sort that will never look old. His drink was in front of him-something short and colourless. I noticed the blond hairs on his forearms. I remember he was wearing a blue and lilac striped shirt with the cuffs rolled up, and black trousers that were moleskin, I think. He grinned. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I shouldn’t have been eavesdropping.’

  ‘No, you shouldn’t,’ I agreed.

  ‘I wasn’t,’ he quickly explained, looking a bit flustered. ‘I mean, not deliberately.’

  ‘But you heard, and now you’re wondering why I lied about where I am.’ I don’t know why, but I told him-about the cancelled work trip, my massage, my six-hour sleep. He kept saying that I didn’t need to explain myself to him, but I wanted to, because my reason for lying, I thought, was about as benign as they come. It was self-defence, basically. I really believed that and still believe it. He laughed and said he knew how hard it could be. He had a daughter too: Lucy.

  We started talking properly. He introduced himself to me as Mark Bretherick. He was married to Geraldine, had been for nearly nine years. He told me he was the director of a magnetic refrigeration company, that he made fridges for scientists to use that were much colder than normal fridges-nought degrees Kelvin, which is the coldest possible temperature. I asked him if they were white and square, with egg compartments in their doors. He laughed and said no. I can’t remember exactly what he said next but it was something to do with liquid nitrogen. He said that if I saw one of his fridges, I wouldn’t recognise it as a fridge. ‘It hasn’t got Smeg or Electrolux written on it. You couldn’t put your stuffed olives or your Brie in there,’ he said.

  After we’d been talking for a while, it emerged that he lived in Spilling. At the time I lived in Silsford-a short drive from Spilling-and we couldn’t get over the coincidence. I told him about my work, which he seemed to find interesting-he asked me lots of questions about it. He mentioned his wife Geraldine all the time and seemed to be very much in love with her. He didn’t say this, but it was clear she was very important to him. In fact, I smiled to myself because, although he
was obviously highly intelligent, he was also one of those men who cannot utter a sentence without it containing his wife’s name. If I asked him what he thought about something (as I did many times, not that evening but later, during the course of our week together), he would tell me, and then immediately afterwards he would tell me what Geraldine thought.

  I asked if she worked. He told me that for years she ran the IT helpdesk at the Garcia Lorca Institute in Rawndesley, but that she’d always wanted to stop working when she had a child, and so when Lucy was born she did. ‘Lucky her,’ I said. Although I would hate not to work, I felt a pang of envy when it occurred to me how easy and calm Geraldine’s life must be.

  On that first night at the bar, Mark Bretherick said one odd thing that stuck in my mind. When I asked him if he thought I was immoral for lying to my husband about where I was, he said, ‘From where I’m sitting, you seem pretty close to perfect.’

  I laughed in his face.

  ‘I’m serious,’ he said. ‘You’re imperfect, and that’s what’s perfect about you. Geraldine’s a perfect wife and mother in the traditional sense, and it sometimes makes me…’ He stopped then and turned the conversation back to me. ‘You’re selfish.’ He said this as if he found it admirable. ‘Practically all you’ve told me tonight is what you need, what you want, how you feel.’

  I told him to sod off.

  Far from being put off, he said, ‘Listen. Spend the week with me.’ I stared at him, speechless. The week? I’d been wondering whether I even wanted to spend the next ten minutes with him. Plus, I wasn’t sure what exactly he meant. Until he added, ‘I mean, properly. With me, in my room.’

  I told him he had a phenomenal cheek. I was quite rude to him. ‘You want a week of sex with someone you regard as worthless before returning to your perfect life with the perfect Geraldine. Bugger off.’ That was what I said to him, pretty much word for word.