Before We Met: A Novel (34 page)

After another two or three miles, the houses started to huddle closer together and became more uniform. The brick-built properties on her left were still substantial, but the houses on the other side of the road were smaller and less attractive. Glancing at the screen, she saw that she’d reached the outer edges of Eastbourne. Suburbia.

In two hundred yards, turn right
, said the Sat Nav. She indicated and slowed, and as she made the turn, she caught sight of the street sign: Selmeston Road.
In five hundred yards
, confirmed the voice,
you have reached your destination
.

The first few houses were detached red-bricks with two storeys, but as the street climbed the hill away from the main road there were just bungalows and more bungalows. Over the tiled roofs of those at the far end swelled another hill, grass-covered and patchy with gorse, above which the sky was massing with intent, the cloud darker now and clotted with rain.

Another car had turned off the main road immediately after her and she had no choice but to drive at a reasonable speed. She glanced around, taking in as much as she could at thirty miles an hour. Proximity to the main road was clearly a status indicator. The first bungalows had an unusual semi-detached design and were built split-level into the side of the hill, but here, further on, they were squat and blank-faced, indistinguishable from countless thousands in every other retirement enclave along the south coast.

You have reached your destination
.

Slowing, Hannah saw the number she’d written down painted on a floral plaque attached to a low brick wall. The car behind pipped its horn and, without indicating, she swung into a space at the kerb between a white transit van and a tired blue Ford Fiesta. The other car pipped again and roared past her up the hill.

She turned off the engine and sat back in the seat, the urgency that had propelled her from London gone all of a sudden. In the rear-view mirror she looked at the house. It was separated from the road by the width of the pavement then the low wall, inside which ran a box hedge a foot taller. The front garden was thirty feet square or thereabouts, a burgundy Vauxhall Astra occupying a small area of tarmac, the rest a straight-edged lawn of closely shorn grass edged with privets and three hydrangeas, their crisp brown dead-heads bristling. It wasn’t neat so much as bleak.

The house was the same. A recessed front door separated two windows, one a bay – the sitting room, she guessed – the other smaller and cut higher in the wall: a dining room, or possibly a bedroom. Net curtains veiled both windows like cataracts. The roofs of the houses either side had skylight windows, suggesting the loft space had been converted, but as far as she could tell, the owners of this house hadn’t done the same. The place was extremely neat, clearly the result of hard work, but nothing was modern or renovated or new. If you took away the Astra, she thought, you could believe you’d been teleported back to the seventies.

She rolled down the window. The other car had faded from hearing and the only sound was the blustering wind. There was no one on the pavement or in any of the front gardens, no sound of lawn mowers or DIY, no kids on bikes or skateboards shouting and clattering about. The silence was apocalyptic, as if a killer virus had swept through the place overnight. Had Mark really grown up here, in this house? And if he had, how had he survived? Malvern was hardly a hotbed of teenage excitement but compared to this place it was Times Square.

She looked at her hands on the steering wheel. What was she doing? She shouldn’t be here; she shouldn’t have come. This was wrong – very wrong.
Then why
have
you come?
asked the voice in her head. While she’d had the momentum of the journey she’d been able to keep the answer at bay but now she made herself face it: she was here because she no longer trusted what Mark told her. She closed her eyes as a chasm of loss opened up inside her. What good was a marriage without trust?

When she opened her eyes again, there was movement in the rear-view mirror. The door of the bungalow was open, and as she watched, a man with steel-grey hair came out and pulled it carefully shut again behind him. He was carrying a bucket that he took slowly over to the bay window and put on the ground. Gingerly, his back evidently giving him trouble, he bent over and fished out a sponge.

Hannah’s heart started beating faster. He was in his seventies, stooped and very thin: his shoulder blades were sharp through the material of his fawn anorak, and when the wind blew against his trousers, his legs looked skinny enough to snap. Even so, she could see the family likeness: he was the same height as Mark, and the shape of his shoulders and back, even his head, was the same. This man operated at a tenth of the pace but his movements had a precise quality that was utterly familiar to her. Looking at him was like seeing Mark fast-forwarded into the future

He wrung out the sponge and started soaping the window, his arm moving in slow, methodical arcs. The longer she watched him, the more sure Hannah was: this was Mark’s father, and Mark had lied again – he was
still
lying,
now
, when he’d sworn he’d finally told her the truth. More than that, he’d lied to her from the very beginning, from their second date in New York, before he’d even known her at all.

The old man bent to rinse the sponge and Hannah’s eyes filled with tears. If he was Mark’s father –
he was
, said the voice – one of his sons was a killer and the other one, the
good
one, told people –
his own wife
– that he was dead.

The decision took two seconds. Hannah swiped her cuff across her eyes, grabbed her bag and got out of the car. The wind snatched the door from her hand and as it slammed, she saw him turn. At the bottom of the short tarmac drive she stopped.

‘Mr Reilly.’

He dropped the sponge back into the bucket and pulled himself slowly up to full height, as if bracing himself. As she came round the bonnet of the Astra, he glanced up and down the street behind her. When he spoke, he kept his voice low. ‘Has something happened? Have you found him?’

The last shred of Hannah’s doubt evaporated.

‘Your colleagues were here before,’ he said. ‘Only an hour ago. We told them then: we haven’t heard from Nick.’

‘Mr Reilly, I’m not from the police. My name’s Hannah Reilly. I’m Mark’s wife.’

A look of astonishment broke over his face. His eyes widened and his lips parted as if he were about to say something but no words came out. For two or three seconds he was absolutely still but then his face changed again and his expression turned hard. ‘You’re Mark’s wife?’

‘Yes.’

He glanced past her at the street again. ‘Does he know you’re here?’

‘No.’

He considered that then gave a single nod. He looked behind him at the front door. ‘Will you come inside?’ he said.

Hannah hesitated a moment then nodded.

She watched as he took a key from his anorak pocket. His hand shook as he tried to get it in the lock and, after two failed attempts, he brought his other hand up and used both to guide it in. He stood aside, gesturing for her to go first.

A narrow hallway with a dark patterned carpet and an atmosphere pungent with the cooking of older people: some sort of meat and gravy, over-done cabbage. Lunch – it was nearly three o’clock already. On the right were two blank closed doors with cheap metal handles: the bedrooms, or a bedroom and the bathroom. Through the open door immediately to her left, she saw an armchair with a lace-edged antimacassar. A vase of pale fabric flowers sat precisely halfway along a length of windowsill. Behind her, Mr Reilly closed the front door. ‘Please,’ he said. ‘Go and sit down. I’ll just . . .’

She went into the sitting room and a few seconds later she heard a door open at the other end of the hallway. In a cracked voice Mr Reilly said, ‘Lizzie . . .’

Sitting down was the last thing Hannah wanted to do. She needed to run, kick, punch something. Mark had told her his parents were dead, for Christ’s sake. Who did a thing like that? Who’d even think of it? She looked around, trying to distract herself by taking an inventory of the room: the peach floral three-piece suite, the outdated television on its wood-veneer stand, the careful coasters on the two side tables, the dark-wood coffee table where the
Radio Times
was neatly folded to the day’s date. A leather spectacle case with worn corners rested on a copy of the
Eastbourne Herald
. Above the ugly brick fireplace was a print of a Scottish Highland scene, the muscular stag and his wild vista an off-note amid the utter dreary domesticity of the rest of the room. From the top of the bureau in the corner, a carriage clock ticked into the silence.

She hadn’t heard it but Mr Reilly –
her father-in-law
– must have closed whichever door his wife had been behind because their voices, if they were speaking, were inaudible. The only sounds were the clock and the wind as it buffeted the front of the house. A draught stirred the bottom of the net curtain in the bay window.

After some minutes, there was movement in the corridor. Hannah turned and in the doorway behind her she saw a woman of seventy or so, her hands clasped together in front of her chest as if she were praying. Her face was heavily lined but Hannah could see that at least one thing Mark had told her was true: his mother had been beautiful. Her eyes were large and gentle, still a lovely deep blue behind her glasses, and her lips were soft and full. She was wearing pale pink lipstick – did she always wear it at home or had she just put it on? Her eyes were wet and Mr Reilly put a steadying hand on her shoulder.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘We’re pleased to meet you but it’s . . . well, it’s a shock for us.’

‘No, I understand. For me, too – I didn’t know you were . . . here.’

‘This is my wife, Elizabeth. I’m Gordon.’

‘Hannah,’ she said to Mrs Reilly, who was looking at her with unabashed curiosity, taking her in, detail by detail.

‘How long have you been married?’ she asked. Her voice was quiet, with a hasty, furtive quality, as if she were worried about drawing attention to herself and only dared speak quickly.

‘Since April. Not long.’

‘We didn’t even know.’

Hannah felt ashamed, as if she were to blame, but before she could say anything, the woman shook herself, said, ‘Tea,’ and whisked away like the White Rabbit.

Mark’s father came awkwardly into the room and gestured to the higher-backed of the armchairs. ‘Please sit down. I’ll put the fire on. We normally wait until the evening, the price of electricity these days, but it’s cold this afternoon. We’re quite exposed to the wind, here on the hill.’ At the far side of the fireplace, he hitched his trousers at the knee and bent slowly. The snap of a switch and then he straightened, came round to the front and pressed the button on the outdated two-bar electric heater set into the grate. He stood back and watched, as if he’d laid a real fire and wanted to make sure it would go. ‘There,’ he said with satisfaction when the ends of the coils started to redden.

A fussy chintz pelmet hid the bottom of the armchair and it wasn’t until she’d sat down and it lurched alarmingly that Hannah realised it was some sort of rocker.

‘Sorry, I should have said. That’s Elizabeth’s chair – I forget it does that.’

‘I shouldn’t take it if it’s her’s. Here, let me . . .’

‘No, no.’ He motioned her back down. ‘It’s the best one – she won’t be happy unless you have it.’ He took a seat himself on the far end of the sofa, smoothed his trousers and looked at her. Hannah smiled at him and he smiled back, Mark at seventy. Struggling for something to say, she felt a dizzying sense of vertigo. Why had she come in? She’d found out what she’d wanted to know: they were alive. Wasn’t that enough?

The clock ticked on, measuring the silence.

‘Have you come from London?’ he said.

‘Yes, just now. The roads were terrible – the traffic, I mean.’
Traffic
? She stopped before she could say anything even more inane.

From the hallway came the rattle of china and Mrs Reilly entered with a tray that she lowered gingerly on to the copy of the
Herald
. ‘Oh, I should have asked, shouldn’t I?’ she said, face a picture of dismay. ‘Perhaps you’d prefer coffee?’

‘Tea’s fine – perfect. Thank you.’

She smiled gratefully. ‘How do you take it?’

Mr Reilly watched his wife as she poured milk into the bottom of a cup and topped it up with a weak stream of tea from a pot in a crocheted cosy. Hannah tried to imagine Mark in this room and failed. It was a struggle to imagine his world and this one even co-existing. She remembered him in Montauk, his almost animal energy as he’d jogged up the beach from the sea, the water furrowing his chest hair as he’d lowered himself down on to the sand.

The cup tottered on the saucer as his mother handed Hannah her tea. Elizabeth poured some for her husband and herself then sat next to him on the sofa, straightening her navy polyester skirt as if preparing to be interviewed or told off by the headmistress. Hannah searched for something to say but Mrs Reilly spoke first.

‘How did you meet, you and Mark?’ she said. ‘I’m sorry – do you mind me asking?’