Before We Met: A Novel (18 page)

For a moment Mark seemed to hesitate and she’d watched as he circled the dregs of his beer round the bottom of the glass.

‘One. A brother. Nick.’ He’d looked up, expression neutral.

‘Are you close?’

A headshake. ‘We’re not really in touch, even.’

‘Oh.’ Hannah had been surprised: she’d only met Mark a handful of times but he hadn’t struck her as the type to have tempestuous family relationships.

‘There’s no drama,’ he said, ‘we’re just very different people.’

‘Is he older or younger?’

‘Younger but only a year. My mother didn’t know you could get pregnant while you were breastfeeding. That was her story, anyway.’ He’d grinned, the light coming back into his eyes, and reached for Hannah’s empty glass. ‘Same again?’

He’d returned from the bar with a snippet of gossip he’d just overheard and the conversation had taken a different tack. At that point, so soon after meeting him, she hadn’t felt it was right to press him for more information than he wanted to give, but now, the end of November, they’d been together five months and he was coming for Christmas. It wasn’t a flirtation any more, a short-lived fun thing; it was a real relationship. The idea sent a buzz through her: it was good but, she admitted to herself, terrifying too.

She should talk to him about his brother, she decided that morning in the kitchen, find a time over the weekend when he was relaxed and she wouldn’t seem to be putting him under pressure. In the end, she’d bided her time until Sunday evening when they were wandering back along the promenade in Brooklyn Heights from a protracted lunch at Ant and Roisin’s. Mark had stopped and leaned against the railings to look at the shimmering Miramax-logo view of Lower Manhattan across the river, the traffic on the Brooklyn–Queens Expressway pounding along the road tucked out of view beneath their feet. He loved this view, he’d said before, because to him it was the classic image of ambition and scale and achievement. Now he reached across and slid his hand into the back pocket of Hannah’s jeans. She glanced up at him, spent a second appreciating his profile against the lights of the city behind. Remembering his sudden shutdown on Friday night she hesitated then decided she was being ridiculous. What had he said that evening in the Mulberry Street Bar?
There’s no drama. We’re just very different people
.

‘Your brother,’ she’d said, as a truck thundered beneath them, making the pavement shake. ‘What’s he like? What does he do?’

Mark had pulled his hand out of her pocket and shoved it into his jacket instead. He smiled, brown eyes black in the streetlight. ‘Let’s move,’ he said, tipping his head in the direction they were going. ‘It’s too cold to stand around. Shall we walk back across the bridge, burn off some of that roast lamb?’

Had he even heard her? He must have – the truck hadn’t been that loud. He reached for her hand and Hannah gave it to him, but she was puzzled. If he’d heard, why not answer? If there really was no drama, why this weirdness?

‘What time’s your breakfast meeting tomorrow?’ he’d asked.

‘Eight, not horrendous.’ She swerved to avoid a King Charles spaniel that had slipped its leash and was haring down the promenade towards them as if fleeing a forest fire. ‘Mark, look, your brother – do you find it difficult to talk about him?’

This time she knew he’d heard her. For several seconds, however, he said nothing and kept walking. She’d waited, not prepared to talk into the silence and risk provoking him or giving him the opportunity to avoid the question. She’d glanced sideways and saw that his face was shuttered again, his mouth set.

‘It’s not
difficult
for me to talk about him,’ he’d said eventually, and his voice was calm, well modulated. ‘I’d just prefer not to, okay? He lives in London, he’s done a few things, work-wise. There’s nothing much else to say. You have issues with your mother, I don’t particularly get on with my brother; you talk about it, I choose not to. Perhaps it’s a man–woman thing.’

The gender stereotype surprised Hannah, it was so unlike him, but she let it pass in the hope of staying on-topic. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘I just . . .’

‘It’s okay, don’t worry about it,’ he’d said, and his tone had made it clear that for him, the subject was closed.

The walk home to her apartment had taken an hour and a half, and for the whole length of it she’d been aware of a distance yawning between them. They did what they usually did on a long walk, pointed out new restaurants that looked good, interesting buildings or people, but where usually the observations segued into broader conversations or sparked off new thoughts, that night they’d been like pieces of polite conversation traded by people who’d just been introduced. Back at the apartment he’d suggested watching the episode of
60 Minutes
he’d recorded while they’d been out, and then he’d brushed his teeth. After the lights had gone off, he’d shifted up behind her in bed and put his arm round her waist, but he hadn’t made any further move and she was glad.

He’d been in London for the two following weekends and by the one after that, after three weeks without seeing each other, the subject of Nick had moved towards the outer edge of her radar. Then had come Christmas, and Mark’s proposal, and every member of her family – her parents and Maggie, even Chessa and Rachel – had asked about his.

‘If you say there’s nothing odd about it, I believe you,’ said Tom, when she’d told him about Nick, how she hadn’t met him and didn’t seem likely to at any point in the foreseeable future.

‘What?’ she said. ‘Don’t say it like that.’

‘Like what? I’m saying I trust your judgement: if you say it’s not odd, it’s not odd.’

‘But it’s only my saying it’s not odd that makes it not odd, that’s what you’re really saying.’

‘Argh!’ Tom clutched his head and squeezed his eyes shut as if in sudden terrible pain. ‘Stop the mind-fucking – I’m a simple creature, I mean no harm.’

Nonetheless, it was patently obvious that he did think it was odd and it rankled with Hannah because privately she agreed with him. Why didn’t she know anything about the only extant member of her fiancé’s family other than that he was a year younger, lived in London, and it sounded like he’d had a few different jobs? Whenever she let herself think about it for longer than a minute or two at a time, she found herself starting down all kinds of lines of paranoid enquiry: was Mark ashamed of his brother for some reason? Or could he be ashamed of her, Hannah? Was that why he didn’t want to introduce them? If it was late at night and she was on her own and she’d had a couple of glasses of wine, she started wondering what kind of person could be so alienated from a brother with whom he claimed just not to get on that they didn’t see each other at all, even when their parents had died quite recently. Unless something actually bad had happened between them, surely they’d see each other for some sort of mutual support or just to feel connected to the memory of their family?

In the end, by the second weekend in January, the whole issue had achieved critical mass and Hannah knew she’d have to have it out with him whether he liked it or not. So on Saturday night she’d cooked a complicated pork recipe, plied him with half a bottle of Sancerre and prepared herself for the facial shutdown. Sure enough, it was almost immediate.

‘Nick,’ he said, glaring at her, all the easy warmth of seconds before gone from his eyes. ‘Is he all you think about? You’re obsessed.’

‘Obsessed?’ She’d pulled back from the table, amazed. ‘I’ve asked you about him twice before –
twice
, Mark. We’re engaged, we’re getting married in April – is it weird that I’m curious about your family? He’ll be my brother-in-law. I’ll be related to—’

‘No,’ he said, standing and dropping his napkin on the table. ‘No, he won’t. He’ll be your brother-in-law in the same way that he’s my brother – technically, legally, whatever. But that’s it, that’s all. I won’t be pushed into having a relationship with him just because you’ve got some idea in your head. There’s nothing there for you, Hannah. I don’t want him in our lives and I don’t want to talk about it any more. Got it?’

She’d watched in amazement as he opened the cupboard by the front door and yanked his coat out, setting off a cacophony of jangling from the empty hangers. ‘Where are you going?’

‘Out. I won’t sit here and be cross-examined.’

‘I’m not cross-examining you. All I wanted was to —’

‘I told you when you asked the last time that I didn’t want to talk about it. Couldn’t you respect that? Couldn’t you do that one thing for me? Was it really too much to ask?’ He’d looked at Hannah as if he were assessing her and finding her wanting then he’d turned and gone, slamming the door behind him.

She’d sat at the table for some time, blood pounding in her ears. They’d snapped at each other once or twice before when one of them or both had been tired and stressed but nothing like this, not even close: they’d never argued; neither of them had ever stormed off. She was shocked – actually, stunned was more accurate. Mark was so self-contained, so in control, and slamming out of the apartment was so . . . teenage. She’d tried to make herself smile at the image, Mark as moody teenager, but the smile died on her lips. He was angry with her, really angry. In her head she reran the conversation, what there had been of it. All she’d said, her carefully rehearsed opening gambit, was: ‘Mark, will you tell me about Nick?’ That was it, all it had taken to trigger this.

Where had he gone? It was cold outside, on the radio earlier there had been talk of snow, and it was ten thirty. Well, she thought, standing and picking up the empty plates that already seemed to belong to a different era, one in which they’d been happy and she hadn’t screwed it all up by prying, there was nothing she could do about it until he came back. She wasn’t going to text him, grovelling, apologising for asking a simple question. If he didn’t get on with his brother, why didn’t he just tell her why rather than turning it into a huge issue? If she was going to marry him, she had to be able to ask questions like this. She couldn’t let herself be intimidated into silence.

She’d slowly washed up the dinner things, tense with listening for the sound of his key in the door. By the time the kitchen was restored to order, though, it was half-eleven and there was no sign of him. She sat in the corner armchair, pulled her legs up under her and tried to focus on the copy of
Leaves of Grass
that she’d been attempting to get into all week. Again, the attempt was fruitless: the scarcity of punctuation meant she had to read each sentence two or three times before she could even work out which was the main verb, and when she’d done that, the words swum on the page anyway and refused to organise themselves into any thought she could understand.

She put the book down and picked up the previous week’s
New York
magazine but fared no better. Where was he? Was he holed up in a bar somewhere pounding the Scotch? Was this his way of punishing her? She was exhausted but wired; all she wanted was to get into bed and disappear under the covers but she knew she wouldn’t sleep until he came home or at least let her know that he wasn’t going to. She checked her phone again: nothing. Anyway, she didn’t want to go to bed, not really. She needed to be dressed when he came home, it seemed important. She didn’t want to be in her pyjamas when he had the advantage of proper clothes.

The clock on the cable box read ten past one when she heard footsteps outside in the corridor. At the jangle of keys she sat up straight and quickly arranged herself into an attitude of casual reading, though the fact that she was still up at all made a lie of any pretence of normality.

He shut the door quietly behind him, took off his coat and dropped it gently over the arm of the sofa. ‘Hi.’

‘Hi,’ she replied in the same neutral tone, waiting to see what his move would be, what his mood was now.

He looked at her, his expression still neutral, then he crossed the room until he was standing a couple of feet away. He crouched in front of her and looked up into her face. ‘Han, I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m really, really sorry.’

To her shame, she was flooded with relief. As the time had stretched, the scenarios she’d envisaged had grown darker and darker: maybe it was ruined; maybe he’d decided that he couldn’t live with her, that it was over, their engagement was off. By the end, she’d been battling to keep her thinking straight, to remember that she hadn’t done anything wrong. Now she waited for Mark to go on.

‘I’m sorry for flying off the handle like that – for being over-sensitive,’ he said. ‘I owe you an apology, I know, but also an explanation.’

‘Look, it’s okay . . .’ she started but he cut her off.

‘No, it isn’t. It isn’t. My brother and I – this is why I don’t see Nick, why I hate even talking about him. It’s like every time anyone mentions his name, something happens to me and I go from being a reasonable, semi-decent person to someone I don’t recognise. I hate it – I hate myself for it – and yet I don’t seem to be able to stop it.’ His face was anguished now.

‘Mark, I’m so sorry. I didn’t want to upset you. I—’

‘No, don’t apologise; you’ve done nothing wrong. It’s totally reasonable to ask about him. Why shouldn’t you? If you marry me’ – he made it sound as if she might really have changed her mind, and the idea made her chest ache – ‘if you marry me, you deserve to know everything about me, even the things I’d keep hidden from you given half a chance, the stuff I’m not proud of. I only want you to see the good things, the light-hearted, fun, successful Mark, not the one who can’t handle his brother and let his mother down. I let my own mother down,’ he said, ‘and she’s dead and I can never make it right. I’ll never be able to forgive myself.’