The Wrong Mother (10 page)

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
im
perfect, 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.

‘No!’ he said, grabbing my arm. ‘It’s not like that. Listen, I’ve probably said it all wrong, but . . . what you said before, about needing to come away this week and sleep and rest because you’d never had the chance before and you wouldn’t again, well . . .’ He looked as if he was struggling for the right words. He didn’t find them. Eventually his face sort of crumpled and he turned away from me. ‘Forget it,’ he said. ‘You’re probably right. I’ll bugger off, as instructed.’

His vehemence had shocked me, and his sudden dejection was as much of a surprise. He looked as if he might cry, and I felt guilty. Maybe I’d misjudged him.

‘What?’ I asked.

He sighed, leaning over his drink. ‘I was going to say that sleep and rest aren’t the only things you don’t get enough of once you’ve had a child.’

‘You mean sex?’

‘No.’ He almost smiled. ‘I meant adventure. Fun. Not knowing exactly what’s going to happen.’

I couldn’t speak. If only he hadn’t said that, if only he’d said something else, I’d have been fine. I’d have been able to stand my ground.

‘You know, I’m away a lot for work,’ he said. ‘Overnight. Often. One or two nights at a time, once or twice a month. This time it’s a week. And whenever I check into another hotel on my own and throw my overnight bag down on the bed, I think to myself, I don’t know what I want more—sleep or adventure. Should I order dinner in my room, watch telly in bed, get my head down early and wake up late, or should I go down to the hotel bar and try to pick up an exotic woman?’

I laughed. ‘So tonight you opted for the latter.’ Though for him I could hardly have been exotic. I lived less than half an hour’s drive from his house. ‘Didn’t you say Lucy was five?’ I said. ‘She must be sleeping by now.’

He looked miserable, as if he wished I hadn’t said that. ‘I can’t remember the last good night I had,’ he said. He seemed needy, yet at the same time strong and determined. Almost angry. I suppose I found him intriguing.

‘Shit,’ I said. ‘No one warned me it might get worse.’

‘It might.’ Unexpectedly, he grinned. ‘But it could also get better. For a bit. Say, this week. Couldn’t it?’

I had never been unfaithful to my husband before. I never will again. I am not the unfaithful type. I hate the whole idea of infidelity. ‘You’re wasting your time,’ I told him.

‘You can’t, in all conscience, say no,’ he said. ‘I’d be too embarrassed. The only way you can save me from the fate of massive humiliation is by saying yes.’

I knew I ought to be finding him more annoying by the second, but I was starting to like him. ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I can’t. I told you, I need to rest. Spending a week with another man—that’d be a big deal for me. It’d send me into panic mode, and I’d go home in a worse state than I was in when I left.’ Part of me couldn’t believe I was taking this seriously enough to give him such a considered response.

‘It could be this week only,’ he said. ‘We wouldn’t have to keep in touch. We’re both happily married, neither of us wants to break up our family. We’ve both got a lot to lose. We’re parents—in other words, nobody expects us to do anything secret or exciting ever again.’

He was right. My best friend, who was and still is single, was always telling me I was prim and proper, just because she occasionally saw me trying to persuade my children to eat broccoli, or changing the TV channel if someone was being hacked to pieces on the screen. She thought I’d become a boring mumsy type, and this idea enraged me. And I found this man—Mark Bretherick—physically attractive, especially when he promised that we could confine our adventurous activities, as he called them, to the daytime and early evening, so that I could still have my seven nights of unbroken sleep.

We didn’t share a room. We never spent a night in the same bed. By ten thirty each evening, we were back in our separate suites. But we ate together, had massages together, sat in the outdoor hot tub and the hammam together—and obviously we did the obvious.

One evening, in the restaurant, he started to cry. For no reason, it seemed. He burst out of there, embarrassed, and when he came back he asked me to forget it had happened. I worried he was starting to fall for me, having second thoughts about not keeping in touch once our week together was over, but he seemed all right again after that, so I stopped worrying.

However terrible it sounds, I didn’t feel guilty. I thought about a book I’d read as a teenager,
Flowers for Algernon
. I don’t remember who wrote it, but it’s about a retarded man who (I can’t remember how) suddenly becomes clever and fully aware. Perhaps he takes a drug of some kind, or someone experiments on him. Anyway, for a while he is bright enough to realise he was retarded and isn’t any longer. He feels as if a miracle has happened. He falls in love and starts to live a full, happy life. And then the effect of the drug or experiment starts to wear off, and he realises he will soon be retarded again, unable to think clearly—he will lose this brilliant new life that is so precious to him.

That’s how I felt, like that man, whatever his name was. I knew I only had a week, and I had to cram everything into it, all the things my life lacked—rest, adventure, being able to concentrate on myself, my own needs. More importantly, I felt I would be able to do everything I had to do more happily and more efficiently when I got home. I was certain my husband would never find out, and he hasn’t.

And then last night I saw the news. I saw a man who was supposed to be Mark Bretherick, and he wasn’t the same person. Maybe the man I met could only do the things he did—the things we both did—as somebody else, which would be understandable. But, whoever he was, he must have known the Bretherick family well because he knew so much about them—enough to convince me that he was one of them.

The story I’ve just told you might have nothing to do with the deaths of Geraldine and Lucy Bretherick. If it doesn’t, I apologise for wasting your time. But I can’t get it out of my head that the two things might be connected. Geraldine and Lucy Bretherick died several days ago, and my husband tells me it’s been on the news and in the papers every day. I didn’t know this—I don’t think I’ve sat down with a newspaper since my first child was born—but if it’s true then the man I met in the hotel last year is bound to have seen the reports. He will have guessed that by now I know he isn’t who he told me he was. I know this sounds totally crazy, but yesterday somebody pushed me into the road and I was very nearly run over by a bus. Today I was followed by a red Alfa Romeo, registration YF52 DNB.

I’m sorry I can’t tell you the name of the hotel, or my name or any more than I’ve told you. If by any chance you find out who I am during the course of your investigation, please, please contact me at work and do not let my husband find out about any of this. My marriage would be over if he did.

 

A low, rasping voice from behind me jolts me out of my seat. ‘I see dead people,’ it says. I make an undignified whimpering noise as I whirl round to see who is behind me.

It’s Owen Mellish, my least favourite colleague. My body sags as if it’s been punctured. I turn back to my screen and quickly click on ‘close file’, feeling my face heat up. Owen is laughing loudly and slapping his knee, pleased to have given me a fright. His short, paunchy body, squeezed into a tight green T-shirt and ripped denim shorts, is sprawled in a swivel chair which he rocks back and forth with one of his trunk-like hairy legs.

‘I see dead people,’ he says again, louder, hoping to attract laughter from nearby colleagues. I want to rip out his stupid goatee beard hair by hair.

No one responds.

Owen gets impatient. ‘Haven’t you all seen
The Sixth Sense
?’

We tell him that we have.

‘That woman that’s been on the news—Bretherick. The one who killed her sprog and herself—she’s a dead ringer for Sal, isn’t she? Spooky!’

I’ve never met anybody with a more irritating voice. Owen sounds, all the time, as if he badly needs to clear his throat. Every time he speaks you can hear the phlegm rattling inside him; it’s disgusting.

‘You will be dead soon if you don’t learn how to drive.’ He laughs. ‘Before, on the road. What was that all about?’ He is looking at his audience, not at me. He wants to belittle me in front of everybody.
Like Pam Senior yesterday, yelling at me in the street.
It must have been Owen who beeped his horn at me when I came to a standstill outside our building earlier.

‘Sorry,’ I mumble. ‘I’m tired, that’s all.’

‘It’s all right.’ Owen pats me on the back. ‘I’d be in a state too if I were you. You know, legend has it that if your doppelgänger dies, you die too.’

‘Is that a fact?’ I grin at him to show that his words have had no effect. Actually, that’s not true. They’ve made me feel more robust. Owen could never be anything other than utterly prosaic. Hearing him drone on about doppelgängers inspires me to pull myself together. So what if Geraldine Bretherick looked like me? Plenty of people look like plenty of other people and there’s nothing sinister about it.

I don’t dislike many people, but I do dislike Owen Mellish. He thinks he’s witty, but all his jokes are against other people. They’re jibes concealed behind a thin veil of humour. Once when I rang the office to say I was stuck in traffic and had been for nearly an hour, he laughed at me and said triumphantly, ‘I came in at sparrow’s fart and there was barely a car on the road.’

Owen is a sediment modeller, and unfortunately I have to work with him on almost every project I undertake. He creates computerised hydrodynamic models of sediment structures, and I can’t work without them. The programs he writes can apply any conceivable tidal or water change, natural or man-made, to sediment with any ratio of silt to sand to cohesive mud, any flock-size. It constantly annoys me to think that, without Owen and his computer, my work would be far less accurate.

At the moment he and I are working together on a feasibility study for Gilsenen Ltd, a large multinational that wants to build a cooling plant on the Culver Estuary. Our job is to predict future levels of contaminant concentrations and industrial enrichment, in the event of the plant being built. We have to deliver our final report in two weeks’ time, and Gilsenen has to pretend to care; it’s crucial to its image that it appears ecologically responsible. So I have to speak to Owen often, and hear his rattling voice, and I can’t get it out of my head that his wife had their first child only four months ago and two months later Owen left her for another woman. Now he takes his new girlfriend’s daughters to the park every weekend, and even has a photo of them on his desk at work, but he never mentions his own son, who was born with a serious heart defect. It’s a pity his computing expertise doesn’t extend to making a mathematical model that can assess the effect on a baby of being abandoned by his father.

‘ “To whom it may concern”.’ Owen’s looking at my screen, reading my words aloud. ‘What’s that? Making a will, are you? Very sensible. What happened to your face, anyway? Hubby been beating you again?’

I grab my mouse and try as quickly as I can to close the file I thought I’d already closed. Do I want to save the changes? In my flustered state, with Owen looking over my shoulder, I click on ‘no’ by mistake. ‘Shit!’ I open the file again, praying.
Please, please . . .

There is no God. It’s gone. The draft of my salt-marsh article has been resurrected.

I push past Owen, out of the office and into the corridor. All that effort—gone in the time it took to press a button.
Shit.
Would I have sent it? I doubt any police force anywhere in the world has ever received a letter like it, but I don’t care—every word of it was true, and writing it made me feel better for as long as it lasted. I ought to go back to my computer and start from scratch but that’s a prospect I can’t face at the moment.