Sophie Hannah - The Wrong Mother

Mum, who ought to be a great help to me, is out of the question. I rang her last night, but never found out whether she could or couldn’t have Lucy to stay for that fortnight because the conversation didn’t get that far. She told me I ought to want to look after my own daughter during her school holidays.

‘Ought I?’ I said. ‘Well, I don’t. I can’t face a fortnight of not being able to do a single thing I want to do. I might as well spend two weeks bound and gagged in a cellar.’

Saying things I don’t mean, ‘barking worse than my bite’, is a necessary outlet for me, one way of exercising my power and freedom. Mum should be relieved that I’m dealing with my frustration humorously, verbally. I do it-I say these terrible things-to keep myself sane. If just once Mum would say, ‘Poor you, two weeks of being on mother duty, what a nightmare,’ I wouldn’t feel quite so negated. Or, an even cleverer response: ‘You need to start putting yourself first-why don’t you send Lucy to boarding school?’ I’d never do that, Gart forbid. I like to see Lucy every day, just not all of every day. The suggestion of boarding school would stir up my maternal fervour, which (anyone shrewd would by now have worked out) might be exactly what I need.

Sadly, Mum doesn’t understand about reverse psychology. She started crying and said, ‘I can’t understand why you had a child. Didn’t you know what it would involve? Didn’t you know it would be hard work?’

I told her I’d had no idea what it would feel like to be a parent because I’d never done it before. And, I reminded her, she had lied to me. She’d said, over and over again while I was pregnant, that being a mother was hard work but that you didn’t mind because you loved your child so much. ‘That’s rubbish,’ I told her. ‘You love them, yes, but you do mind. Why should loving someone mean you’re willing to sacrifice your freedom? Why should loving someone mean you’re happy to watch your life become worse than it used to be in almost every way?’

‘Your life isn’t worse,’ said Mum. ‘You’ve got a beautiful, lovely daughter.’

‘That’s her life,’ I said. ‘Lucy’s life, not mine.’ And then, because of an article I’d read on the train yesterday, I said, ‘There’s a “conspiracy of silence” about what motherhood is really like. No one tells you the truth.’

‘Conspiracy of silence!’ Mum wailed. ‘All you ever do is tell me how awful your life’s been since you had Lucy. I wish there was a conspiracy of silence! I’d be a lot happier.’

I put the phone down. She wanted silence, so silence was what I gave her. I could have won the argument decisively by pointing out that I am only as selfish as I am, as reluctant to subordinate my own needs to someone else’s, because from the moment I was born she treated me as if I was made of gold. Never did I get even the slightest hint that she had needs of her own and wasn’t simply there to serve me. In Mum’s eyes, I was an infant goddess. My every whim was attended to instantly. I was never punished; all I had to do was say sorry and I would be forgiven, and indeed rewarded for my apology. Lucy will be a more considerate woman than I am, I have no doubt, because she has grown up knowing that she is not ‘the only pebble on the beach’.

My relationship with Mum has never fully recovered from the Big Sleep row. The Christmas after Lucy was born, Mark was away at a conference. Mum came to stay. She bought me an extra little present: a mug with a book cover on it, The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler. I unwrapped it on Christmas morning after four sleepless nights in a row, four nights spent dragging myself round the house like a corpse with Lucy over my shoulder, patting her, trying to persuade her to close her eyes so that I could close mine. ‘The Big Sleep?’ I snapped at Mum, unable to believe she would be so cruel. ‘Is this your idea of a sick joke?’

She acted all innocent. ‘What do you mean, love?’ she said.

I lost my temper, started screaming at her. ‘ Big Sleep? Big fucking sleep? I haven’t slept for more than an hour at a time for ten fucking weeks!’ I threw the mug at the fireplace and it smashed into pieces. Mum burst into tears and swore she hadn’t done it deliberately. Looking back, I don’t suppose she did. She’s not nasty, just thoughtless-too sensible to be sensitive.

I couldn’t help noticing that, having told me I ought to want to look after Lucy during half-term, Mum didn’t ring back and offer to do so herself, as many a doting grandmother would have in her position. I am increasingly convinced that she only worries so much about Lucy because, in terms of offering practical help, she is willing to do so little.

8/9/07

‘This isn’t about me,’ said Mark Bretherick. ‘You’d like to pretend it is, but it isn’t. Do you know what your men are doing with the earth they’re digging out of my garden?’ He pointed out of the lounge window at the teams of officers in overalls. Sam Kombothekra, more silent and serious than Simon had ever seen him, stood guard beside them, hands in his pockets, shoulders hunched. Simon knew he was hoping they’d find nothing. Kombothekra hated the unpleasantness crime brought with it, the social awkwardness of having to arrest a person, of having to look a man in the face and tell him you think-or know, more often than not-that he’s done something terrible. Especially hard if that man is someone you’re used to treating very differently.

His own fault. A bit less of the ‘Mark, we understand what you’re going through’ and he’d have found today a piece of piss.

‘Our men will repair the damage as best they can,’ Simon told Bretherick.

‘That’s not what I meant. It’s a very clever metaphor you’ve got going here. You look as if you’re unearthing, when burying’s what you’re really doing. That’s the true purpose of all the earth that’s flying around out there!’ Bretherick had finally exchanged the blue, sweat-stained shirt he’d worn for days for a clean, mustard-coloured one, which he wore with gold cufflinks.

‘Burying what?’ asked Simon.

‘The reality of the situation. You got it badly wrong, didn’t you? When facing up to that became unavoidable, you decided to make me the villain of the piece because it was easier than admitting that I’ve been right all along: that a man called William Markes, who you can’t find, murdered my wife and daughter!’

‘We don’t decide to make people villains. We look for evidence that will implicate or exonerate them.’

Contempt twisted Bretherick’s features. ‘So you’re hoping to find proof that I’ve committed no crime hidden beneath a begonia, are you?’

‘Mr Bretherick-’

‘It’s actually Dr Bretherick, and you still haven’t answered my questions. Why are you hacking my garden to bits? Why are there people at my office, disturbing my staff, going through every scrap of paper? Clearly you’re looking for evidence that I killed Geraldine and Lucy. Well, you won’t find any, because I didn’t!’

Simon and Kombothekra had said something similar to Proust yesterday: Bretherick had long since been proved innocent of the only crime known to have been committed. Why exactly were they here?

‘You’re right, Waterhouse,’ Proust had said for the first time since records began. If Simon had been wearing a hearing aid, he’d have taken it off and given it a good shake to check it was working properly. ‘Be grateful you aren’t in my shoes. I had to make a choice: either I end up a laughing stock, fooled into wasting thousands of pounds by some nameless fantasist’s rip-roaring tale of dead cats, red Alfa Romeos and bereaved men gardening at inappropriate times, or I go down in history as the DI who dismissed an important lead and never found the bodies hidden in the perishing greenhouse. Which you can bet your police pension would be discovered five years later by a pip-squeak bobby out sunbathing on his day off.’