Before We Met: A Novel (16 page)

As she closed the front door, silence swallowed her. The house was always quiet – sometimes when she was here during the day she’d put on Radio 4 just for the sound of voices – but this was different. Since she’d left this morning, swinging out of the house at twenty to eight buoyed by sleep and coffee, the silence had taken on weight, and though it was noon now, the house was dark, as if daylight was struggling to penetrate the windows. The stairs climbed away into a soupy gloom, and she had the idea that the place was withdrawing from her, taking sides. She’d be leaving it soon, moving out.

She dumped her coat over the banisters and went through to the kitchen where she sat down at the table and fired up her laptop. She’d put off this moment for more than three hours, first at the café and then in Bishops Park, where she’d walked back and forth along the river path in a daze. She paused for a final few seconds, hands steepled in front of her face, then took a breath and plunged.

‘Hermione Alleyn’ brought up eight pages of results. She scanned the first and at the bottom saw a link to a directory enquiries site. The text below said, ‘We have found 1 person in the UK with the name Hermione Alleyn.’ The name was hyperlinked but when she clicked on it, she was told she’d have to register if she wanted to use the site. The same page came up when she tried the link to the address.

She went back to the list of results. The two entries at the top were for LinkedIn, but when she clicked on them, the page showed no further information. The third, though, was the site of a specialist medical journal on nephrology. Nephrology? Kidneys? Here Hermione Alleyn and Asif Akbar were listed as co-authors of an article describing a refinement to a technique in transplant surgery for patients with post-traumatic kidney failure. The link offered only a stub of the article but at the bottom she found a brief biography of the two authors. Hermione Alleyn, it said, was currently a consultant surgeon in nephrology and hepatology at the Royal London Hospital.

Was she a doctor, this woman? A surgeon? Hannah opened a new window and brought up the Royal London’s site. She clicked on a button at the top titled ‘Our Services’ and scanned down until she found a link to the Renal Centre. Clicking that, she was invited to ‘Meet The Team’. At the top of the list was Hermione Alleyn, Consultant Transplant Surgeon. There was a telephone number – a switchboard or receptionist, apparently: the same number appeared next to three or four other names – and an email address.

Was this her? There was no photograph – this woman, this obviously senior surgeon, could be sixty. Was the directory site right when it said there was only one Hermione Alleyn in the UK? Perhaps it meant there was only one Hermione Alleyn with a landline number or even a number that wasn’t ex-directory. And what was there to say she was in the UK at all? Mark had met her, Hannah, overseas; he might have done the same this time, too.
This time
.

She swallowed the lump in her throat and went back to her first search. There were ten or fifteen different links to articles and papers written by the nephrologist; whoever she was, she was clearly big news in kidneys. At the bottom of the fourth page there was a link to Facebook, but when Hannah clicked it, the page was the blank one for people who took their privacy settings very seriously, all photographs and personal information reserved for friends, the profile picture just the generic outline of a female head. If the nephrologist was sixty, would she have a Facebook page? Why not? Lots of older people did, and they tended to be more careful about privacy than the daft young, who laid it all out there for teachers and employers and university tutors to peruse at their leisure. As a surgeon, too, she’d want to keep her private life private.

Hannah closed Facebook and went back to the list. More articles in various medical publications and then, on the sixth page of hits, a link referring to a nephrology conference in San Diego two years previously at which this Hermione Alleyn had given a paper. Hannah went to the page without any real expectation but when it opened, there was a small photograph of a woman stepping out from behind a lectern. She was young or youngish, not sixty but thirty-five or forty. The picture wouldn’t enlarge so Hannah pulled her computer closer. Light brown hair, a little above shoulder-length, cut into a bob she’d tucked behind her ears. Hannah peered, trying to make out the woman’s face, but the photograph had been taken from a distance and it was impossible to gain much of an impression beyond one of general attractiveness. She was slim and dressed in a black suit, the skirt knee-length and fitted, though even at this remove obviously not quite as well cut as Neesha’s this morning. White shirt, black court shoes.

Scrolling down, however, Hannah found another photograph, this one taken from much closer range. Here Hermione Alleyn was standing next to a large, jovial-looking man in his late fifties, perhaps early sixties, with a thicket of salt-and-pepper beard and a heavy paw on her shoulder. Her face was fully visible. She had widely spaced pale eyes and a straight nose above a mouth with a full lower lip. Her ears, adorned with plain pearl studs, protruded enough to make her look a bit goofy and she was smiling in embarrassment, as if her companion or the photographer had just paid her an extravagant compliment. Glancing down, Hannah saw a caption:
Hermione Alleyn with Geoffrey Landis, Professor of Nephrology at the University of Cambridge. Landis describes Alleyn as his ‘right-hand man’ in his groundbreaking research project at Addenbrooke’s Hospital.

Hannah sat back in her chair and the silence flooded round her again, squeezing the oxygen from the air. Her chest felt tight; she was breathing like her brother did just before he had an asthma attack. For a minute or so she concentrated, forcing herself to exhale slowly, to stop gulping for another breath before she’d emptied her lungs of the one before; then, leaning forward, she opened a new window and typed in ‘Hermione Alleyn’ and ‘St Botolph’s’, the name of Mark’s college at Cambridge.

No results. Deleting Hermione’s name, she typed in ‘Geoffrey Landis’ instead. The first link took her to a page on a college website. As well as being the university’s Professor of Nephrology, she read, he was a fellow and tutor at St Botolph’s.
Bingo
. It was her: it had to be. Even if she wasn’t the only Hermione Alleyn in the UK, the name was unusual enough that the St Botolph’s connection couldn’t be a coincidence. If this man Landis taught there, wasn’t it likely that Hermione had met him as a student and then later, as a high-flyer, been an obvious recruit for his ‘groundbreaking research project’? And she was the right age; if not quite forty like Mark then certainly within two or three years of him, close enough for their years at college to have overlapped.

Hannah stood up abruptly, scraping the chair across the slate floor tiles. Light-headed, hands shaking, she unlocked the French windows and flung them open. In the yard she moved clear of the shadow of the house then tipped her head back and pulled in lungfuls of the bitter air. The sky overhead was the pitiless blue she’d predicted.

If they’d met at Cambridge, they’d known each other twenty years. Was Hermione an old flame, someone he’d been in love with then, now back in the picture? The idea caused Hannah a wash of despair: how could she, some woman who’d known Mark a year and a half, compete with someone who’d known him so long, who’d known his friends then and all the stories and in-jokes, who’d shared one of the formative parts of his life? She, Hannah, hadn’t been to Oxbridge; she didn’t know that world with all its rituals and august ancient customs, its exclusivity.

But how could she compete with someone like Hermione Alleyn at all?
asked the unkind voice in her head. In her job –
when she’d even had one
– all she’d done was think up inventive ways to flog things people didn’t want, concocting adverts that wormed their way into their brains, forced themselves upon them like a randy mongrel when all they wanted was to read a magazine or watch TV. How could that compare with being a surgeon, performing transplants, life-saving surgery? This woman was impressive by anyone’s standards.

But then
, said the voice,
Mark was never going to take up with a bimbo, was he, some over-bleached, half-witted soap addict?
Mark liked bright women; Laura, she’d discovered when she pressed him, had some high-powered job in a government think-tank on defence. He liked the stimulus, the challenge. If he were in love with someone else –
If
? said the voice – or even if he were just sleeping with her, it would be because she intrigued him, made him laugh, made him think. It would be about her brain as much as her face or body though Hermoine wasn’t unattractive, either, far from it. She looked clever, sharp-eyed, self-deprecating.
The kind of person you would like
.

Chapter Ten

It was eighteen stops from Parsons Green, direct, no changes, and in the hour she’d been underground, her face composed into its neutral, big-city, don’t-engage expression, Hannah had been buffeted by anger so powerful it was incredible that no one among the scores of people who’d joined the train and got off again had seemed to feel it.

A few minutes before she’d left the house, she’d called Mark’s mobile. She hadn’t really expected an answer, of course, but the sound of the calm but firm female voice telling her that the person she was calling was not available enraged her. The last traces of protective shock had burned away in a surge of fury so strong she’d felt dizzy, and she’d had to sit down until the pounding in her head started to subside. Then she’d stood up again and paced the kitchen, her hands shaking, itching to do violence. The milk jug had been on the draining board, and before she could stop herself, her arm had reached out and swept it to the floor. The smash had satisfied the rage for a moment but within seconds it was rising up inside her again.

She’d been duped – he’d played her. He’d lied to her and left her to sit around waiting for him like some stupid sap while he was off somewhere with
her
, Hermione Alleyn, life-saving surgeon, Cambridge graduate, key researcher, speaker at international conferences.
Success
. What was she, Hannah? A cheated-on wife, a deluded fool, an unemployed, powerless idiot. The handle of the jug lay on the floor, still attached to a circle of china. She lifted her foot and stamped on it, reducing it to powder.

Then she’d grabbed her bag and coat, slammed the door behind her and run up the street. She couldn’t stay in the house – his house – with its oppressive, oxygen-sucking silence. She needed to get out, be somewhere she could
breathe
.

She’d crossed New King’s Road, passed the deli and the off-licence, the hairdresser’s with its tableau of swaddled, tin-foiled ladies sipping coffee and reading magazines, and taken the pavement that ran parallel to the edge of Parsons Green. A Dalmatian tore across the muddy autumn grass after a stick, and his pure, uncomplicated enjoyment as he snatched it from the air and carried it back to his mistress, tail a blur, brought sudden tears to Hannah’s eyes. Biting the inside of her cheek, she’d hurried on past the pub to the Tube station.

Long as the journey had been, south-west London all the way across to the east, it had passed in what felt like minutes, the consuming rage bending time so that she looked up seemingly seconds after the doors had closed at Gloucester Road to find they were at Embankment; Mansion House; Cannon Street. The anger ebbed and flowed, and when it retreated, she felt the stab of disbelief again, the ache in her stomach that said,
Really? Mark?

Now, as she emerged from the Underground at Whitechapel, the hospital was right in front of her. The suddenness of it took her aback. On the way across London the idea of coming here had been reinforced by her anger and the momentum of the train itself, ticking off the stations one by one, but looking at the hospital now she asked herself what the hell she was doing. What had she hoped to achieve? She’d needed to get out of the house, she told herself, before she smashed the entire place up, but that was only part of it. She could have gone anywhere. The truth was, she’d wanted to see this place, to have a picture of where this woman worked, what her life might be like.

It had been hot underground, all the train’s heaters on, but here a biting wind drove the litter along the pavement and caused the awning outside the discount store two doors down to billow and flap like a loose sail. She pulled her coat tightly round her and shoved her hands in her pockets. When the traffic stopped at the pedestrian crossing, she dashed across the road.

There had been major building work going on at the hospital, that was evident: from behind the dour yellow-brick façade of the old buildings soared a new complex that seemed to belong to a different world, let alone a different age. The impression was of a three-dimensional Tetris game in which the blocks were made of highly reflective glass in varying shades of petrol blue, punctuated here and there by a tessellation in pale grey concrete. It was as if the entire thing had been snatched from the City, where it would have kept good company with the Gherkin and the Cheese Grater, and dropped down here just to highlight how tired and snaggle-toothed the rest of Whitechapel Road was, with its jumble of rooflines and dusty shop-fronts, the bookies and Poundbuster, importers and immigration lawyers’ offices, the pub on the corner painted in orange tiger-skin pattern. This was a very different London from Mark’s and even from Kilburn, where Hannah had lived before she moved to New York.

The work looked almost finished now but the front of the old building was still surrounded with wooden siding. A sign on it advised that the hospital had moved and directed visitors around the corner. Hannah followed the arrows and found herself standing outside the new main entrance, sliding glass doors set into a Tetris block made of red brick, a sheer cliff of blue glass rearing overhead. The doors opened to admit a man in his sixties carrying a bouquet of ox-eye daisies wrapped in cellophane, and she stepped in after him.