‘Really know you: the difficult bits as well as all the fun stuff.’ He kissed her again, for longer this time. ‘I want to see where you grew up – I want to get to know your mother. And I like the idea of being there. Not just with you but – you know what I mean. I know you don’t find Christmas easy. If I’m there, maybe I can . . .’
To her shame, Hannah had felt a lump form in her throat. ‘It’s not that I don’t . . . It’s just that Mum’s always so sad.’ Her voice croaked slightly and she coughed to disguise it. ‘She tries to hide it but it’s worse at Christmas, especially because she knows my dad’s mobbed with people and . . .’
Mark had tipped her sideways so she was resting inside his arm, her head on his shoulder. She’d felt his breath in the parting of her hair. They’d lain like that for a couple of minutes, neither of them talking, until it dawned on her how selfishly she’d thought about the whole issue.
‘Where do you go?’ she’d asked him quietly. ‘Normally, I mean?’
She’d felt his chest rise and fall. ‘Last year I went to Dan and Pip’s,’ he said. ‘That was fun – Pip’s a great cook, as you’ll see, and all her clan was there, and their little boy Charlie was playing in the boxes and ignoring his actual presents. You can imagine.’
She pressed further, as gently as she could. ‘How about before that?’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘when I was with Laura I spent it with her – once just the two of us in London, once at her parents’ in Somerset.’ Hannah felt her usual flare of irrational jealousy at his ex’s name. ‘But last year,’ he said, ‘I was on my own. I’ve done three Christmases on my own, actually – I realise that makes me sound like a miserable bastard . . .’
‘No.’
‘I don’t know, it’s just a weird time, isn’t it? Since my parents died, I haven’t really felt like it. It was her thing, you know, my mum – she loved it, looked forward to it from about June on. She used to make so much effort: home-made Christmas puddings and mince pies and a huge Stollen and these little decorations that she’d had since we were children, all carefully wrapped up again in tissue on Twelfth Night.’ Mark’s profile was silhouetted against the glow of the lamp on her bedside table and she could see that the muscle in his jaw had set hard.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean . . .’
‘No, it’s fine, it’s good. It’s nice to remember. Poor Mum.’
Hannah hesitated before she asked, ‘What about your brother?’
He’d turned his head sharply, almost dislodging her from his shoulder. ‘What about him?’
‘I mean, you’re not in contact at Christmas? You don’t ring each other once a year, just to . . . ?’
‘No.’
Seconds passed, and through the open door she heard the last bars of the Wilco album playing on her iPod in the sitting room.
‘What?’ said Mark, and she was surprised by the brusqueness of his tone.
‘Nothing. I was just trying to imagine what it would be like not being in touch with Tom, and I can’t – he’s like this unchangeable fact of my life. In a lot of ways he’s my best friend as well as my brother.’
Mark shrugged. ‘You’re lucky.’
And without Tom, she’d thought but hadn’t said, she might not at that moment have been lying in bed with Mark, inviting him to Malvern, letting him into her life in a way she’d never done with anyone before.
Just after Christmas the year previously, before his school term had started up again, Tom had flown back with her to New York for five days. He wanted to see her New York this time, he’d said, not the Empire State Building and Grand Central and the Met; he’d done the obligatory-landmark circuit. So they’d spent the days walking for miles in the excoriating cold, stopping for coffee at Joe’s and Oren’s Daily Roast, hot chocolate at the City Bakery. She’d taken him to the Strand for used books and then down to McNally Jackson and the Tenement Museum on Orchard Street, which he’d loved. On his last full day, they’d had dumplings for a dollar apiece on Ludlow and then walked on down through Chinatown to join the throng of tourists on Brooklyn Bridge in the afternoon. They’d leaned on the railing beneath the great central arches, the intense winter light over the East River almost burning their eyes as it reflected off the water and the gleaming glass canyons of Lower Manhattan. Beyond, the new World Trade Center was still under construction but already dwarfed them all.
They’d stood shoulder to shoulder for several minutes, watching the Staten Island ferry ply back and forth, a small tanker rounding the tip of Manhattan on its way up the Hudson. Some brave souls were out in a yacht, its sail a sharp white triangle against the prevailing blue. A sudden gust of wind had blown the ends of her scarf into her face and Hannah had straightened up and shoved her hands into her pockets. ‘Come on, Thomas, let’s get moving. We’ll solidify if we stand here much longer.’
Tom, however, had said nothing and stayed put.
‘Did you hear me, cloth ears? Let’s go.’
He’d shaken his head. ‘There’s something I need to say.’
‘So let’s walk and talk.’
‘No, let’s stay here a minute.’
She’d squeezed in next to him at the railing again and glanced at his face. He’d looked serious, almost grim, and she’d started to feel worried. What was he going to tell her? Was he ill? Was it Dad? Mum? She’d jostled him, needing to leaven the sudden atmosphere. ‘Enough of this mystery – say your piece.’
‘Han,’ he said, turning to her, ‘I think you should stop messing around.’
‘Messing . . . ? What are you talking about?’
‘With men. Relationships. You’re wasting your time.’
She laughed. ‘Have you been talking to Mum? Has she put you up to this?’
Tom’s expression stayed utterly serious. ‘No. This has got nothing to do with her. This is what I think.’
‘Oh, no,’ she’d groaned and thrust her hands deeper into her pockets. ‘Et tu, Brute? Just because I’m thirty-three – there’s more to life than marriage and babies, you know.’
‘I do know. But that doesn’t mean those things aren’t worth having. You know I’m proud of you, I think your career’s amazing, we all do, but . . .’
‘But what?’ The wind whipped her voice away, made nothing of the steely note she’d put into it.
‘It’s a waste if you don’t have someone to appreciate it with.’
‘Oh, come on . . .’
‘I mean it. I want you to be happy.’
‘I am happy!’
‘But you could be happier. You don’t need to prove anything to anyone any more, Hannah. You don’t need to prove you can do everything on your own. I know it’s all to do with Mum, and making sure you’re never in her position, but—’
‘It’s got nothing to do with her,’ Hannah had replied, her voice suddenly savage. ‘Nothing. I’d never be like she is.’
‘Reacting against her is still a response to her – it’s still . . .’
‘I’m not reacting against her,’ she cut him off. ‘I’m not trying to prove anything – anything at all. This is about me. Me. This is my choice. This is how I want to live.’
‘Bullshit,’ her brother said, and the expression in his eyes was hard. ‘It’s about her, and you’re being a coward.’
She’d felt fury bubble up inside her. ‘My God, I don’t believe this. What the hell . . . ?’
‘You’re being a coward. You fucked things up with Bruce and now you’re too much of a coward to try again.’
She’d taken several steps backwards, away from him, and collided with a man taking photographs of his girlfriend. Hannah was too disorientated to apologise. Instead, she stared at her brother, not trusting herself to speak. Bruce – even then, years later, three thousand miles away, the name was like a punch in the guts. ‘That’s what you think of me, is it?’ she said. ‘That’s really what you think?’
‘Yes,’ Tom had replied.
She’d felt a flare o
f pure rage. Hands shaking, she reached into her bag, detached her house keys from their leather strap and threw them at him. Caught off guard, he made a grab for them, but too late. They fell to the floor, where they settled in a perilous gap between the planks. ‘Take them,’ she said. ‘You can have the apartment tonight. If that’s what you think of me, I couldn’t stand to be under the same roof as you.’
She’d expected him to soften, to move towards her and say something placatory, but instead he’d looked at her, his face hard. ‘What will you do?’ he said. ‘Go to a bar and pick up some bloke to use for a few weeks until you realise you might actually like him?’
She’d stared back, as angry as she’d ever been in her life, then turned and started walking away, sticking her middle finger up over her shoulder. ‘Fuck you,’ she’d shouted, her voice eddying on the wind. ‘Just . . . fuck you.’
She’d waited for the quick footsteps behind her, the hand on her shoulder, but they hadn’t come. Disciplining herself to look straight ahead, she’d marched back alone the way they’d just walked together, needing to run but thwarted by one ambling knot of tourists after another until she’d wanted to scream. Twice she’d strayed into the bike lane and almost lost an arm.
At the foot of the bridge she paused for a moment. What was she doing? Where was she going? Conscious that he might be watching and see her hesitate, she plunged across the road, crossed Broadway and headed into Tribeca. She’d walked until the cold made her face numb and her teeth started to ache, barely thinking, walking just to keep moving, with no plan or destination. She criss-crossed Tribeca, then SoHo, doubling back on herself, taking one street after another, the beat of her feet against the pavement drowning out the swirl of thoughts in her head. Finally, as the last of the daylight drained from the sky, she’d found herself in Hudson River Park, where the anger finally burned itself out.
She sat down on a bench and sank her face into her hands. It was shock, she told herself, that was all. She was shocked that Tom could talk to her like that; that he had these negative thoughts about her. She’d thought that he loved her, respected her. How wrong could she be? She’d felt a surge of defensive bitterness then. Stuff him – stuff him. If that was what he thought of her, then he could go to hell.
The last burst of fury kept her warm for a minute or two but then it, too, was gone and she heard the other voice, the one she’d been walking so furiously to shut out. He’s right, it said, and you know it. You messed up, it hurt, and you’re too cowardly to put yourself on the line again.
In her coat pocket she felt her BlackBerry buzzing for the eighth or ninth time and ignored it.
Bruce – when was the last time anyone had even said his name in her presence? It was years, three or four at least. But it had been seven years now since they’d split up. Since you dumped him.
Bruce was one of her brother’s best friends, one of the small but tight group of mates he’d made when he started at university in London. Hannah had liked him as soon as she met him, the first time Tom had invited him and Ben and Adam up to Malvern for the weekend to go camping. She’d thought Bruce liked her, too, from the way he’d smiled at her and included her, asked what she was reading, but she hadn’t stood a chance then: she was sixteen to his nineteen, years that made the difference between school and university, uniform and jeans every day, a child and an adult.
When she was at university herself, though, three years later, she’d come down to London for Tom’s birthday party, a bash in the upstairs room of a pub somewhere in Brixton, and they’d talked the whole evening. At the end of the night he’d kissed her and asked for her number, and the following weekend he’d driven down to Bristol in his clapped-out Vauxhall Corsa, Maude, to see her. They’d been together for six years after that until she’d sensed that he was ready to do ‘the grown-up thing’, as she’d called it, her voice dripping sarcasm. ‘I don’t want to “settle down”,’ she’d shouted at him. ‘I’m twenty-five, not forty. Where’s the adventure? Where are the wild nights on a beach in Brazil? Where’s the achievement? Where’s my life?’
So she’d ended it and then watched as, within two years, he’d married someone much more successful than she was – apparently she was nice, too; Tom refused to say he didn’t like her – and had a son. She had been on Facebook in a quiet moment at the office when she’d seen him and the baby, Arran, tagged in a mutual friend’s photograph, and the pain had felt like someone had taken the paperknife off her desk and jabbed it up under her ribs.
Since then she’d been careful not to get too close to anyone. She liked men, their company, flirting, sex, but she couldn’t allow herself, she thought, to get into a situation like that again. She had stuff to do – to prove. She couldn’t let herself be sidelined by biology. Even the thought of it made her feel trapped, actually physically breathless. So instead she had fun. She met people, hung out with them for a few weeks, and then she moved on. They enjoyed it, she enjoyed it, no one got hurt. What was wrong with that?
In front of her, the Hudson glinted blackly, the lights of Hoboken glittering out of reach on the other side. She wrapped her arms across her chest, the heat she’d worked up inside her jacket dissipating fast. Coward, said the voice, louder now. You think you’re brave and independent, but really you’re just afraid.
In the end, so cold she couldn’t feel her fingers, she’d stood up and walked slowly back to the apartment. She’d found her brother sitting on the stoop smoking the last of the packet of cigarettes he’d bought that morning. She’d climbed the steps between the glossy potted magnolias and sat down next to him, not pressing against him as she had on the bridge but three or four inches apart. A single yellow cab cruised along the street below them with its off-duty light on. After a minute or so, Tom had reached across and taken hold of her hand.
‘It’s still what I think,’ he said.
‘I know.’ She’d gestured to him to give her the cigarette. She took two or three revolting puffs, felt her head spin then gave it back. ‘You’re right anyway,’ she said. ‘I am a coward.’
‘That bit wasn’t fair. I—’
‘It was – no, it was. I’m afraid of . . . relying on anyone, being dependent. Not in control.’ She’d never realised it consciously herself before, let alone said it aloud.
‘Don’t worry about it all so much,’ he said. ‘Take a risk: trust someone. Let them trust you.’
As she hurried along Shaftesbury Avenue towards Chinatown, now almost half an hour late, Hannah thought about what she was going to say, or if she was going to say anything at all. She wanted to – she needed to get this stuff out, stop it churning around in her head – and she wanted Tom’s perspective on it, his calm good sense. But what she really wanted, she knew, was for him to tell her that she was overreacting and there would be a simple explanation for it all, and in her heart she knew he wouldn’t do that. However much she wanted him to, Tom wouldn’t lie to her; he never had.
And if she told him about Rome and Mark’s phone being lost and his not being at his hotel and the missing – taken – money, it would all be out in the open. Real. And it could still be all right, couldn’t it? There might still be a simple explanation – and then she would have made Tom think badly of Mark for nothing. And, said the voice in her head before she could stop it, you’d have made him think he was right all along.
‘So, as you can see, I’m in a bit of a tight spot.’
Hannah picked a fragment of prawn cracker off the paper tablecloth and pressed it between her fingers until it turned into greasy dust. ‘But if you’ve kept quiet about it so far,’ she said, ‘why say something now?’
‘Well, that’s it.’ Tom dragged his hand through his hair, which was in need of a cut to prevent it from veering off into Leo Sayer territory. It was a perennial hazard: he had next to no interest in matters of the appearance and relied on the women in his life – their mother, Hannah and now Lydia – to tell him when he was getting beyond the pale. Lydia had been workin
g away a lot recently.
‘Hair,’ Hannah said.
‘Really? Already? I had it done . . .’
‘Last year?’
He made an all-right-smart-arse face. ‘No, the thing is, Paul told me yesterday that someone’s pointed the finger at one of the cleaning staff. She’s Indian, I think, maybe Pakistani. Anyway, if it goes on she’ll get fired – I don’t think her English is good enough for her to mount much of a defence, frankly, and—’
‘So you have to say something. And if this guy Luke took the money, if you’re sure you saw him . . .’
‘I’m sure. He knows I did, too. I backed out of there as fast as I could but he saw me. And – God, it’s dreadful – he keeps giving me these pathetically grateful looks, as if he owes me everything.’
‘Well, he kind of does, doesn’t he, if you’re keeping it under your hat?’ Hannah pulled the last tissue-thin strip of damp paper from round the neck of her bottle of Tsingtao. Stolen money, she thought, more stolen money. Taken – she corrected herself.
‘He’s got two kids already, his wife’s pregnant. If he’s fired for pinching the trip money – it was three hundred pounds – what’s he going to do? He’ll never get another teaching job.’
Hannah looked at her brother, the two vertical lines scored between his eyebrows. ‘You have to say something,’ she said. ‘You can’t let an innocent woman take the rap.’
He sighed. ‘I know. And I realise it’s not much of a dilemma. I just feel shitty about it.’
‘Think of it the other way round. She might have kids, too. She might be supporting her whole family.’
‘If no one had suggested it was her, I would have let the thing lie. But you’re right, I can’t now. I’ll talk to the Head on Monday.’
The waiter came to clear their dumpling plates and set their chopsticks on little china rests. With the side of his hand he swept away the curling shreds of Hannah’s label.
Before We Met: A Novel Page 8
