Before We Met: A Novel

by Lucie Whitehouse

  Wariness dropped over his face like a shutter. ‘Lie? What are you talking about?’

  The rage took over, staining everything crimson. ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, Mark, I don’t care – I don’t care. I don’t care about your bloody phone. I don’t care if you call and leave messages at two o’clock in the morning. I don’t care if you weren’t at your hotel when you said you were – I don’t give a shit.’ She turned away, not wanting to look at him, not wanting him to see her face, which she knew was flushed and twisted with anger. A hard pulse was beating at the base of her throat. Through the door, she caught a momentary glimpse of the yard. The ragged crow was perched on the little table, head cocked to one side. It stared in at her with a single searching eye.

  Behind her Mark was silent, waiting for her to speak. She turned and locked her eyes on his.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me about your brother?’

  Yes. As soon as the words left her mouth, she saw that this was what he’d been afraid of. In a second his wary expression was gone, replaced by a look of shock that he masked almost as quickly.

  ‘What about my brother?’

  Hannah felt a deep bone-tiredness. How much longer could he push it? Was he so desperate that he was prepared to keep trying even now?

  ‘Patty Hendrick,’ she said. ‘What he did.’

  The words seemed to cause Mark physical pain. He closed his eyes and she watched his reaction travel over his face, deepening the vertical line between his eyebrows, thinning his lips. He walked to the table, pulled out a chair and sat down as if his legs would no longer hold him up. As he covered his face with his hands, the fine wool of his coat stretched between his shoulder blades and she remembered him on the beach at Montauk, the way his T-shirt had stretched across his back as he crouched by the fire. It was only seconds before he spoke, ten or fifteen perhaps, but it felt like a long, long time.

  ‘How did you find out?’ he asked between his fingers.

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘To me it does.’

  ‘Hermione.’

  ‘Hermione?’ He turned sharply.

  ‘I thought you were having an affair with her. I went to the hospital and accused her of it.’ She saw him working backwards, or trying to: how had she even known about Hermione? Who’d told her? Hannah remembered her promise to Neesha. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ she said, deflecting him.

  He exhaled shortly through his nose. ‘You can’t imagine why?’

  ‘I’m your wife,’ she said, vibrato. ‘How do you think it feels to find out that the person in the world you’re supposed to be closest to, to have no secrets from, to trust, Mark, has been hiding something like this? It’s so terrible – so huge.’

  Another sharp out-breath. ‘And you’re asking why I didn’t tell you?’

  ‘Did you really think you’d be able to hide it from me for ever? For the rest of our lives?’

  ‘I hoped,’ he said, and the word hung in the air between them. ‘Naive, wasn’t it? But whatever I could have done to stop you finding out, I would have done it.’

  ‘But why? Why not trust me? Or don’t you trust me?’

  ‘Of course I trust you, Hannah.’ His voice was loud, the frustration only just under control. ‘But have you thought about it from my point of view for a second? When should I have told you? At the start? How do you think you – anyone – would’ve reacted? “Hey,” he put on a high, fake voice, “I like you – I really like you – but your brother killed a woman? See ya.” ’

  ‘Come on, that’s not f—’

  ‘It is. It is, and I couldn’t do it – I couldn’t take that risk. I really liked you, right from the first night on the beach, and if I’d told you, you would have run away as fast as your legs could carry you; we would never have had a chance.’

  ‘How do you know I would have run away?’

  ‘Seriously? Be honest with yourself. However tough you think you are, however independent, fair-minded, able to see the big picture, whatever – you meet a man and a few weeks in, he tells you his brother’s in prison for manslaughter and it’s not the right sort of manslaughter, either, good manslaughter: he didn’t cause an accident at work or hit someone in the car when he was drunk; it wasn’t even diminished responsibility – he wasn’t provoked, he didn’t lash out. The only reason it wasn’t murder was because he hadn’t aimed to kill her. What are you going to do, really?’

  Hannah said nothing.

  ‘And then, having not told you straight away, when was the right time? I felt like I’d tricked you, let you start liking me – fall in love with me – under false pretences. I felt like I’d sold you shoddy merchandise, and every time I almost managed to get up the guts to tell you, I bottled it. God, there were so many times. But when was I supposed to do it? When we got engaged? “I love you, please marry me – by the way, my brother killed a girl.” Just before our wedding day? Or afterwards, when it really would look like I’d set out to trick you?’ His breathing was fast and shallow.

  Again Hannah said nothing, not trusting herself to speak.

  ‘I can’t tell you,’ he said, ‘what it’s been like having to live with this – this thing, this boulder on my back. Ever since I met you, I’ve wanted to tell you, and I couldn’t, and all the time I’ve been terrified you’d find out. It’s like I’ve been tottering around with a jar of acid in my hands, full up to the brim, no lid, just waiting for it to slop out.’

  She looked at him, assessing. ‘So will you tell me now? The whole story?’

  He looked back, his eyes begging her, don’t make me, but no, she thought, however much he hated it, however hard it was, she wasn’t going to move until he told her.

  ‘All of it,’ she said. ‘The truth.’

  He glanced at the sideboard. ‘Is it too early for a drink?’

  ‘Yes, but what does that matter?’

  With a sort of half-laugh, he pushed himself up. He took off his coat and dropped it over the back of the chair then opened the sideboard and got out a tumbler. He held it towards her, eyebrows raised, but she shook her head. Appearing not to notice how much was gone, he picked up the Armagnac, poured himself an inch and carried the glass back to the table. ‘Are you going to sit down?’

  ‘No.’ Unconsciously, she pressed back against the edge of the counter as he passed her.

  He nodded slightly. ‘So how much do you know?’

  ‘That doesn’t matter. I want to hear it from you. From the beginning.’

  ‘The beginning.’ His eyebrows twitched and he took a sip of the brandy. In the yard behind him, the crow left the little table and settled on top of the end wall, turning its back on them.

  ‘I’ve told you what it was like at home,’ he said, ‘my mother and Nick, their special relationship, but maybe I was too hard on her – no, I was; I know I was. Even now, I find it really difficult not to get caught up in it all and behave like a teenager again.’ He grimaced. ‘Which is another reason I hated telling you about him. I want you to think of me as, I don’t know, competent, successful, in control . . . not some guy who’s still in bits at the age of forty because his mother loved his brother better.’

  Hannah felt a surge of frustration. ‘I married you – you, a man, a living, breathing human. You don’t think I can deal with a bit of complexity?’

  ‘It had nothing to do with that – it was about what I wanted,’ he admitted. Seconds passed. He looked away. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘it wasn’t my mother’s fault – she didn’t make Nick what he was. Is. He was born like it. Her softness just made her an easier target. She was like an injured sheep stuck out on the edge of the flock, waiting to be picked off.’

  Another sip. He rested the glass on his knee and stared into it as if he was looking into the embers of a fire. Come on, she thought, cut to the chase and tell me, but at the same time, for a reason she couldn’t identify, she was afraid.

  ‘Hannah, look,’ he said. ‘I told you the truth about Nick, I did, but it wasn’t . . .’
He sighed in frustration. ‘What I’m struggling to say is that it wasn’t the whole truth.’ He glanced at her then away again. ‘It was worse – is worse – than that. He wasn’t just badly behaved or spoiled or manipulative. Even before . . .’ He paused. ‘Even before Patty, it was evident there was something . . . wrong with him.’

  ‘Wrong?’ A chill crept over the back of her neck. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘He doesn’t see the world like the rest of us do. No, that’s not it. He doesn’t see people. He doesn’t seem to get that they have interior worlds just as valid and real as his. He doesn’t get that other people have feelings.’

  She’d never heard more than his name but suddenly Hannah had a mental image of Jim Thomas, their old neighbour in Eastbourne, tears running down his face as he hammered on the Reillys’ front door, a drowned dog in his arms.

  ‘It’s convenient for Nick because it means he can do exactly what he wants, behave like a monster, and he doesn’t give a shit. Does he care about what happened to Patty? Honestly? No. He cares about what happened to him because of what happened to her.’ Mark gave a short, bitter laugh. ‘He’s probably angry with her – I bet he’s found a way to make it all her fault.’

  Through the cotton of her old T-shirt, the edge of the marble counter was hard against Hannah’s lower back, and her feet had started to ache on the cold tiles. She couldn’t sit down, though: taking a seat would mean getting closer to him.

  ‘Anyway,’ said Mark, ‘my parents knew. They knew something was wrong with him, seriously wrong, but he was still their son. Their response was to close ranks around him – he became this dark thing between us that we had to guard at all costs, try to protect from himself, but we also had to protect ourselves – we had to stop him from blowing up our lives. My parents’ way of doing this,’ he took a long in-breath, ‘was to make me responsible for him.’

  ‘What? That’s ridiculous.’

  ‘You think so? It started at school, years before they asked me to give him a job. Nick started going off the rails – he was bunking off and stealing booze from the Spar shop to take down to the beach, then turning up at home after dark half-cut or stoned out of his nut – and that was my fault.’

  ‘How?’ Again Hannah heard her scepticism.

  ‘Because I hadn’t checked at break that he was still at school, I hadn’t tipped anyone off that he was missing. You’re the older brother; you have to watch out for him. You have to look after him.’ Mark’s face changed, became sharp and hectoring as he imitated whoever had said it to him. His father? ‘Look after him?’ Mark snorted. ‘Christ, I was the one who needed bloody protecting.’

  He turned to look at her, seeking eye contact, and she felt another wave of trepidation. Why was she frightened? She already knew what he was going to say, didn’t she?

  When he spoke again, Mark’s voice was quiet. ‘Nick’s cruel, Han – really cruel. We had this neighbour, an old guy, he was a widower, probably in his late seventies, and Nick got a kick out of tormenting him, jumping into his garden at night and creeping round outside his windows. He used to smoke weed in the guy’s shed – totally needless: he always had some grovelling supplicant, male or female, to offer their bedroom for the purpose. Anyway, Jim Thomas, this neighbour, had another shed on his allotment and one night Nick doused the place in petrol and burned it down.’ He shook his head, the memory clearly shocking to him even all these years later.

  ‘How could I be responsible when stuff like that was going on?’ he said. ‘Stuff that was actually criminal. I was asleep in bed, for God’s sake, getting ready for school in the morning like the good little swot I was. That wasn’t the end of it, either. Jim went to the police, of course, and so my brother killed his dog.’

  ‘I read about it,’ she admitted.

  His eyebrows lifted. ‘Jesus, they really got everything, didn’t they?’

  ‘There was a lot to get, clearly.’

  ‘Well, they wouldn’t have had to look very hard, put it that way.’ Mark drained his glass and pushed it away.

  ‘This is going to sound selfish,’ he said, ‘but after a while, I started thinking, what about me? Who cares about me? Do I exist only to be responsible for Nick? Is that all I am, the boy with his finger in the dam, the bulwark between him and whatever disaster he’s inevitably going to cause? My parents tried to put a spin on it, sell it to me as a good thing, I was the clever, sorted one, noblesse oblige, but it was bullshit and we all knew it. I told you before: Nick’s every bit as clever as me and a lot more cunning.’ He ran the back of his hand across his mouth. ‘I’m just glad that when it happened, the really bad thing we’d been waiting for all those years, my parents were already gone.’

  Hannah wrapped her arms around herself, feeling cold to the bone. ‘Tell me about the night it happened.’

  ‘The bit I’m really ashamed of?’ He exhaled – a quick, resigned sigh. ‘Hannah, all I can say in my defence is, I worked like a slave in my early twenties, at Cambridge then raising the money to start DataPro, getting it off the ground. I didn’t have a life or do anything that normal people do: go to the pub or take holidays. I never had girlfriends – I never met anyone. Even the friends I’d made at university got frustrated at never seeing me and gradually faded into the woodwork.’

  Hannah thought of Pippa, how she and Dan hadn’t been friends with Mark at Cambridge but met him later when DataPro worked with Dan’s bank. She’d just assumed they’d been there together.

  ‘I was twenty-seven when Nick came to work for me and I was ready for a break. Not from work, DataPro was my life, but from the total focus, the non-stop application, the crazy hours. Things were going well, we’d started to make a name for ourselves, I could afford to take it just a bit easier and behave like I wasn’t already fifty. Nick came to work for me – enter the dragon – and you know what? I just thought, fuck it: he’s here earning a great salary in the company that I created, having this luxurious lifestyle for very little effort on his part, plus ça change, so I’m going to have some of what he’s having – some of his kind of fun. Payback time.’

  Hannah looked at her husband. His face was so transformed by bitterness that for a moment she didn’t recognise him.

  ‘So, for a change,’ he said, voice hard, ‘I piggybacked on Nick. I went to his parties and clubs, took his coke, messed around with the sort of girls he hung out with, bought a TVR and drove it through Chelsea late at night smashed off my face like any one of a hundred other wankers. And, I have to say, after five years of living like a monk, I loved it. Apart from some of the more extreme hangovers, it was fun. You know, actually, it was a relief: I was sick of being dedicated and responsible: I wanted to be wild and reckless. Why did I have to be cast in the role of boring bastard all the time? It was my turn.’

  His hands were balled into fists on the table. Who was he talking to now, she wondered, trying to justify himself? His father? His mother? Or Nick?

  ‘My brother was amazed when he saw that side of me. In his mind, I was a loser: a worker, an effort-maker, a drone. I loved showing him that he was wrong, that I wasn’t boring – I think it encouraged me. I loved showing him that women found me attractive, too, that he wasn’t the only one who could go into a club, flirt with a pretty girl and take her home. Of course,’ Mark said, dryly, ‘as it transpired, our style of taking girls home was somewhat different.’

  He turned his head and looked at her. ‘I’m sorry, Hannah, I feel like a shit telling you this. I feel like I’m disrespecting you – us, our marriage – but now we’re talking about it, I want you to know everything, the whole thing. I need to get it over with once and for all. I wasn’t a saint, I’d be lying if I let you think that.’

  ‘I’m an adult. I can handle it.’

  He gave a single nod. ‘Okay, but it wasn’t just a flash in the pan. My . . . behaviour had been going on for a couple of years by the time I met Patty. We met in France, skiing – Nick had got into the habit of renting a chalet for thr
ee or four weeks a season and I went over there now and again.’

  ‘That was in the papers, too.’

  ‘Of course – no stone left unturned.’ He reached out and ran his fingertip around the rim of the empty glass. ‘Patty was lovely, Han – sweet. That was why I liked her. Yes, she wasn’t the sharpest tool in the box and we were never going to be serious but, despite the party-girl behaviour you’ve no doubt read about, there was something sort of . . . innocent about her.’

  Remembering the photographs she’d seen, the puppy-fat curves, Hannah felt a stab of pain.

  ‘She was a decent person,’ he said, ‘just young and a bit lost. But she was lovely-looking, too, and of course Nick noticed. The added bonus, as far as he was concerned, was that I was fond of her – not in love with her, not even close, but I liked her. It stuck in his craw having to do what I told him at work – he hated me having that power. A pretty girl and an opportunity to show me who was still top dog? Two birds with one stone.’

  Mark reached for the bottle and poured himself another half-inch of Armagnac, most of which disappeared in the first swig. When he started talking again, his voice was harder. ‘I can’t stand thinking about that night,’ he said. ‘It was all so . . . sordid. Not just Nick, what happened to Patty, but my part in it, too.’

  ‘Tell me,’ she said calmly, but inside she was begging: Please. Please don’t let there be anything else.

  ‘A friend of Nick’s had just bought this club in Shoreditch and so we all piled over there. We were wasted before we even arrived – we’d had cocktails first and, of course, every time you went out with Nick there were drugs. Coke, mostly, but he was into E as well and speed now and again. Patty and I had had some charlie and . . . I should have recognised the signs. Why didn’t I recognise the bloody signs?’

  He looked up at her as if he expected an answer. Hannah stayed silent.

  ‘He’d been flirting with Patty from the moment she arrived at the bar, but that was nothing unusual. It was this look he gave me. We were in a stall in the toilets, doing a last couple of lines before we went on to the club, and Nick looked up at me with this look on his face. I’ll never forget it – I actually dream about it sometimes. It was like . . . this sounds crazy but it was like a carnival mask, one of those ones with the exaggerated, leering features, all nose and eyes and this horrible, curling mouth showing his teeth.’ Mark shuddered.