Before We Met: A Novel (19 page)

His eyes were shining now, as if he were on the verge of tears. She stood up, took his hand and pulled him gently over to the sofa before going to the kitchen and retrieving a new bottle of wine and fresh glasses. When she handed him one, he drank an inch from the top of it in a single swig. As she’d held his hand she’d sniffed surreptitiously for the smell of alcohol but there had been no trace of it and his fingers had been red and ice-cold, the bones like sticks beneath his skin. He must have been walking outside all the time he’d been gone.

‘I’m going to tell you about Nick,’ he said.

‘Only if you want to. It can wait – it’s late. We’re both tired. We can talk about it tomorrow.’

‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘I want to talk about it now. I need to explain.’ He looked at her. ‘Storming out like that won’t be normal practice, I promise.’

‘Okay. Good.’

He took another big mouthful of wine and swallowed loudly. He looked down, training his eyes on his reddened fingers as they clutched the stem of the glass. ‘Nick was my mother’s favourite,’ he said. ‘She doted on him and I think she ruined him – literally spoiled him rotten.’ He blew out a quick spurt of air, as if it was funny.

Hannah said nothing and waited for him to go on.

‘It’s pretty easy to see why he was her favourite – I’m sure he would have been mine if I’d been her. I was awkward and self-conscious, I went through phases where I was really uncomfortable in my own skin, but he was one of those children who’s just somehow golden. Do you know what I mean?’

Hannah thought of Chessa’s daughter Sophia who, at seven, was already two years ahead of her peers at school and a gifted tennis player. She’d also been approached twice in London by scouts for children’s modelling agencies.

‘I was quite an anxious child, I think, always trying my best, worried about getting things right, but for Nick, life just seemed to roll out like a red carpet from the moment he arrived. He got everything right without trying, or that’s what it looked like: he slept through the night at two months, walked at nine, made everyone laugh with his little baby faces and games. My mother’s friends loved him, teachers loved him; he made friends without trying. Little girls at junior school actually wrote him love letters. I got all the childhood afflictions going: measles, mumps, whooping cough. For years I was at the doctor’s all the time with terrible psoriasis but I don’t remember anything ever being wrong with Nick.’

He pulled at a loose thread on his shirt cuff, avoiding her eye.

‘With hindsight,’ he said, ‘bits of it are quite funny. There’s this picture of us that encapsulates the whole thing. I’ll show it to you next time we’re in London. We’re on the beach in Devon and I’m seven, probably, so Nick must just have turned six – he was a summer baby, as my mother never grew tired of saying, as if that in itself made him special. He’s wearing these snazzy little boardshort-style trunks while I’m stuffed like a sausage into this hideous nylon Speedo-type thing which, frankly, was an affront to a man’s dignity even at that age.’ He smiled wryly. ‘Anyway, he’s wielding a gigantic ice cream, chocolate flake, the works, and if you look carefully, you can just see my cone in the bottom right-hand corner of the picture, down in the sand. I’d been stung by a wasp and dropped it.’

He smiled again trying to make a joke of it, but Hannah could hear the hurt running just beneath the surface of his voice.

‘Mark . . .’

He shook his head, wanting, now he’d started, to go on, get the whole thing over with on one long breath. ‘The thing is,’ he said, ‘none of this would have mattered, I don’t think, if my mother had been different – if she’d had any self-confidence at all or even just a more positive outlook. As a child I didn’t understand it – your parents are your norm, aren’t they? You only know things the way they show them to you – but as an adult I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it and I realise now that, for most of our childhood, she was pretty seriously depressed.’

‘Really? Was she treated for it?’

‘No. I tried to convince her to try treatment later on but she didn’t believe in pills or therapists; thought they were self-indulgent. It’s a shame. Maybe if . . .’ He shrugged. ‘On the surface you wouldn’t have been able to tell. She was very attractive, my mother, petite and slim and always well put together even though she couldn’t have had much money for clothes. She was bright, too, and funny, but she didn’t see that. The truth is, I think, she went through her life believing she wasn’t worth much and just waiting for people to confirm it. The only thing she was absolutely sure of was my brother, whose general rightness was so obvious that no one could dispute it. She had to be confident of Nick because it would have been blatantly mad not to. He was clever, handsome, funny, charming, you name it, and she was grateful to him because it made her feel like less of a failure. He validated her.’

‘What about your dad in all this? Where was he?’

‘Dad.’ A snort. ‘My dad was not a natural father; let’s just say that. We were too much for him, both of us – too loud, too boisterous, too demanding, too . . . everything. At some point around the time of that holiday, probably, give or take a year, he just checked out, told himself that as long as he was bringing home the bacon,
providing
, then he was doing his bit. He left everything else to my mother and the truth is, she wasn’t up to the job either so Nick took over.’

‘What do you mean?’ Hannah felt herself frown.

‘He’s manipulative. No, that doesn’t cover it – doesn’t even touch the sides. He’s brilliant, actually, an absolute genius at playing people to get what he wants from them. My mother was his masterstroke, though. When he was nine or ten, he realised what was going on, the power he had over her because she derived what little self-esteem she had from being the mother of this perfect being, and he started – quite consciously, you could see it – to use that.’

Hannah felt a frisson of revulsion. ‘How?’

Mark gave a small shrug. ‘It started innocently enough. I think one day it just dawned on him that she needed him so badly, needed his approval and general good feeling towards her so much, that it was impossible for her to say no to him – she just couldn’t risk it. Once he’d realised that, it was Pandora’s Box with the lid off. When you’re nine and ten, it’s all about sweets and crisps and getting around your bedtime, kid stuff, but even within a few months it got more serious. He wanted things – I mean, I know children these days are supposed to be the most materialistic they’ve ever been, fed all these pernicious adverts on TV’ – he made a face at her – ‘but, frankly, my brother would have taken some beating. Scaletrix, walkie-talkies, Nintendo games, a sega – the demands got bigger and bigger and more expensive, and she just kept saying yes.’

‘Could they afford it? You said that—’

‘No, and that was a big problem, because Dad used to see all the stuff and freak out, scream at Mum, and she took it as further evidence that she was a failure, there was something fundamentally just second-rate and
wrong
with her. Then Nick would creep in and put his arms round her and tell her that everything was all right and he loved her, all the time mentally compiling his next set of demands, and the cycle repeated itself.’

‘God.’

Mark shrugged again. ‘By the time he was fourteen or fifteen, he was doing pretty much whatever he wanted: not turning up at school more than two or three days a week, smoking weed, having sex. My parents got home from a memorial service for a friend of theirs one afternoon and found him in their bed with Dad’s boss’s daughter. Actually
in flagrante
, apparently. Becca, the bloody idiot, let him take Polaroids and he showed them round the whole sixth form. It very, very nearly lost my dad his job. God, Nick would have loved that – until the money dried up, anyway.’ Mark rolled his eyes.

‘Your poor parents.’

‘At least Becca wasn’t the one he got pregnant – that was the English teacher’s daughter. My mother stumped up for the abortion, of course, and didn’t say a word to Mr or Mrs Stevens. They kept it a secret from Dad, too. Oh, Nick did it all, every last bit of teenage miscreancy you can imagine – drugs, shoplifting. That was purely for the thrill, by the way – there was no need for him to nick anything because Mum would just give him whatever money he asked for.’

Mark took a final slug of wine and emptied the glass. When he started talking again, the hurt was back in his voice, even less successfully masked now.

‘I didn’t get a car when I turned seventeen,’ he said, ‘but a year later Nick did, a vintage Triumph Spitfire that he’d campaigned and campaigned for, and which arrived outside the house on the morning of his birthday with a big clichéd red sash that Mum had tied round the middle. He wrote it off drink-driving a month after he passed his test, but as soon as he got his licence back she bought him another one exactly the same because she knew how much he loved it.’

‘How could someone behave like that? And how did your mum afford it? Two cars . . .’

‘My grandmother died – Mum’s mother. She didn’t have a lot but she did have some equity in her house and Mum, the only child, inherited it – which meant Nick did, by proxy. By the time he graduated from university – which was something of a miracle in itself – he’d run through the lot. Mum had nothing left. The rows about that – I wasn’t at home by that stage but she told me about them. It nearly ended my parents’ marriage.’

Hannah reached for the cardigan that she’d taken off while she was cooking. It was half past one and the heating in the building had long gone off for the night but the cold felt like more than that, a chill in her bones. ‘Frankly,’ she said, ‘he sounds like a total bastard.’

‘He became one.’

‘But what I don’t understand is, why do
you
feel bad about any of this? Why do you think
you
let your mother down?’

‘She asked me always to look out for him and I haven’t. Didn’t.’

‘What do you mean, look out for him?’

‘My mother was bright, as I said. She had a blind spot when it came to Nick but otherwise she was pretty on the ball. Anyway, when he and I were in our twenties, her blinkers started to come off, at least to some extent. I think she looked at him when he was twenty-three, twenty-four, living in London on money that she was giving him – she’d got a job on the tills at Debenhams so she could fund him. My God, the rows with Dad that set off. He said she was bringing the family down, humiliating him, making it look like he couldn’t afford to keep his wife and had to send her out to work in a shop.’ Mark blew out air. ‘Can I . . .?’ He pointed at the wine and Hannah poured him another glass.

‘Basically, it was hell. Anyway, thank God, somewhere in the middle of that particular shit-storm, I think it began to dawn on her that she was being played. My brother’s really clever, Han, cleverer than me by a long chalk, but he’s lazy, totally and utterly indolent – he’s not even embarrassed about it. The reason he didn’t have a job was that he couldn’t be bothered to get off his arse and take one – probably afraid someone would ask him to get up before eleven. Of course, he was giving Mum the whole bit about how difficult new graduates were finding it to get jobs – I can remember her standing in the kitchen one weekend repeating the statistics back at me – the state of the economy, blah, blah, blah. But finally,
finally
, she couldn’t quite accept it. I think probably she couldn’t get her head around the fact that no one wanted to employ her
wunderkind
so she was forced to conclude that something else was going on.’

‘So what happened?’

‘She asked me to give him a job at DataPro.’

‘God – and did you?’

‘Though it stuck in my craw, yes. I didn’t want him working for me, obviously – for a start, I knew he
wouldn’t
work and I’d only been going three years at that point, I didn’t have money to pay someone who wasn’t bringing anything in – but what I was really worried about was that he’d try and sabotage me.’

‘Sabotage?’

‘My brother doesn’t like me,’ Mark said, frankly. ‘The antipathy’s entirely mutual. He resents me, which doesn’t make a lot of sense all things considered, but there it is. He looks at me and sees the straight As at A-level, Cambridge, then DataPro, and he doesn’t realise that it all comes from work, nothing else. He thinks that I was just given it all, like he was given all the toys and money and abortions and cars and his rent in Borough paid for. Honestly, I think it never occurred to him that I started working like I do in a bid to get a bit of my parents’ attention for a change. The exam results, Cambridge – I was like a dog with a bone, coming home with my tail wagging and dropping it at their feet in the hope of a pat on the head.’

Hannah imagined him as a teenager and felt a burst of pity that hurt her heart.

‘Obviously, I’m grateful for it now because it gave me my work ethic and that’s given me the life I want.’ He reached across and took hold of her hand, rubbed his thumb over the backs of her fingers.

She waited a moment. ‘What happened?’ she said. ‘Did Nick sabotage you?’

‘He tried.’ Mark gave a sort of half-nod. ‘He was clever about it – there was always an alternative explanation for why every potential new client he went to meet decided not to go with us after all – but after a year and a half I just couldn’t put up with it any more. We lost an account for the first time, it had never happened before, and when I investigated, I found out that Nick had hit on the guy’s wife quite aggressively in the corridor of a restaurant while we were out for dinner. Then there was an issue with some missing money, ten thousand, and it turned out he’d “borrowed” it, which he didn’t admit until after I’d given our accountant a rocket and had him resign on me. So I fired him – Nick. I had to.’