Before We Met: A Novel (11 page)

‘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 of 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 working 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.

‘You’ll feel better when you’ve done it,’ she said after the waiter had disappeared.

Tom sighed. ‘I doubt it.’ He nodded at the empty bottle. ‘Another one?’

The label gone, she went back to the remains of the prawn cracker, bisecting them with her thumbnail until the pieces became indivisible. There was that thing, wasn’t there, about how often you could fold something in half; was it the same for cutting or did that work differently? She thought about Mark’s hands and how she’d used to watch them at the beginning – still did. They were always moving, always playing with something. Whenever she went out to dinner with him there’d always be some perfectly crafted little thing on the table by the time they finished. Once at the Italian place near her old apartment he’d made a miniature horse from the aluminium round the top of the wine bottle. She’d kept it and put it in her jewellery box. She’d looked at it yesterday.

‘Earth to Hannah. Over. Are you reading me? Over.’

She looked up. Tom was scrutinising her, eyebrows raised. The new bottles of beer were on the table; she hadn’t noticed them arrive. She picked hers up and took a swig.

‘Should I amuse myself for the rest of the evening?’

‘Sorry.’

The waiter returned with their main courses. Hannah drew patterns in the top of the mound of rice while she waited for her skillet to stop its demonic bubbling. Tom engineered a great ball of noodles round the ends of his chopsticks and stretched his mouth almost indecently wide to accommodate it.

‘Hmm,’ he said, as soon as he was able to. ‘I always think this place can’t be as good as I remember, and it always is.’ He took another giant mouthful and chewed. ‘So, are you going to tell me what’s going on?’

‘What?’

‘Something’s on your mind. Is it the job-search?’