Before We Met: A Novel (4 page)

And it had been they who had introduced Hannah to Mark. When Ant scored his big promotion last year, they’d decided that they’d spend the extra money on renting a summer place on Long Island. It was late in the year to start looking but within a couple of weeks they’d found an old, somewhat dilapidated shingle house in Montauk, a few minutes’ walk from the beach. Occasionally they went on their own, but most weekends they invited friends out from the city. They always asked Hannah, and she almost always got one of the two tiny sea-smelling back bedrooms that faced on to the long lagoon behind the house. About six weeks after the rental started, she’d arrived in a cab from the station to find a tall, dark-haired man asleep in the Adirondack chair on the veranda, Roisin’s panama tipped forward over his eyes, long bare feet resting on the wooden crate they used as an outside drinks table, the last inch of a bottle of Sam Adams going warm in his hand. He was so soundly asleep that he hadn’t woken up even when she’d lost her grip on the screen door and it had snapped closed behind her like a jaw.

There’d been a note on the kitchen table to tell her that everyone else had gone to the beach. When she’d got down there and located Ro in the usual spot at the foot of the dunes, Hannah had asked who the man was.

‘Mark. A new friend of Ant’s,’ Roisin had said, leaning forward to retie the straps of her red halter-neck bikini. ‘They met at Harry’s bachelor party a few weeks back and got on like a house on fire. He’s one of yours, actually – a Brit.’

‘Really?’ Hannah rubbed in some factor 25, feeling the tops of her shoulders burning already. The glare was so intense that even through her sunglasses the beach looked stripped of colour. It was the busiest it had been so far that summer, the wide expanse of white sand fully colonised by other groups of people in their twenties and thirties sunbathing or playing volleyball, couples watching small children tearing around or digging busily in the sand. The occasional older couple sat in deckchairs reading paperback thrillers. Down in the water she could see Ant and Laura, an old college friend of theirs, trying to stay upright in the breakers. ‘You haven’t mentioned him before,’ she said.

‘Really? I thought I had.’

‘Oh, like you wouldn’t remember.’

Roisin shrugged, making an innocent face.

‘I hope you’re not scheming.’

‘About what? I know you don’t do relationships – not decent ones.’

‘What’s wrong with indecent ones?’

‘Nothing at all, in my book. And frankly, if I wasn’t married . . .’

‘Does he live here?’

‘Kind of – or he has done. He’s got a software company. They’re based in London but they’ve got an office in Tribeca and he goes back and forth. He used to have an apartment, he was saying last night, but he moves around so much that hotels made better sense.’

‘Hmm.’ Reluctant to ask more in case she aroused suspicion, Hannah changed tack and asked about the latest management intrigue at Ecopure, a subject guaranteed to bring out the best of Roisin’s talent for anecdote.

They’d stayed on the beach all afternoon. At about four thirty, Mark had come down the path through the dunes. He’d changed into a pair of faded blue boardshorts with a dolphin pattern, and Hannah watched from behind her sunglasses as he strode down the beach and waded in. A powerful crawl quickly took him out beyond the rough water near the shore. He swam for twenty minutes or so before coming in and sitting down next to Laura, the water furrowing lines through the hair on his chest and legs as it ran off him. Roisin had introduced Hannah and they’d done the Brits-in-America thing, the usual where-are-you-from, what-do-you-do to establish if they had anything or anyone in common, which they hadn’t. His voice was deep and warm, without any trace of regional accent. He told her that he’d grown up in Sussex. ‘How about you?’ he’d asked.

‘Malvern.’

‘Are they far apart?’ said Roisin.

‘Poles.’ He’d smiled. ‘Light years.’

‘About a hundred and fifty miles, probably,’ Hannah said. ‘Sussex is on the south coast; Malvern’s in the middle.’

‘I thought Malvern was near Scotland.’

Hannah looked at Mark and rolled her eyes. ‘Believe it or not, Roisin and I have been good friends for five years.’ He laughed.

They walked back to the house as a group, she, Laura and Ro ahead of the men, and once, turning round to say something to Ant, she’d caught Mark looking at her. The same thing had happened when, after hosing down on the patch of rough sea-grass in front of the house, they’d been in the kitchen getting the stuff ready to take back down to the beach for the evening. She’d glanced up from slicing tomatoes to ask Ro whether she should make a vinaigrette and found herself locked in eye contact with him. She’d looked away first, though these days he claimed it was the other way round.

The temperature had been in the high eighties during the day but it had dropped quickly as soon as the sun started to go down, and a surprisingly sharp on-shore breeze had started blowing. Ant and Justin, another one of his old college friends, had dug a shallow pit in the sand while the rest of them had gone along the tideline collecting driftwood and the remnants of logs brought down to the beach for bonfires on 4 July the weekend before. Mark had returned from the dunes with a branch that was seven or eight feet long, carrying it across his shoulders like a yoke.

They’d used it as a bench, sitting in a line drinking beers from the cool-box while the sun disappeared and the fire got hot enough to cook the sausages. After they’d eaten, he had stretched out on the sand, the glow from the fire catching the planes of his face, and told a long, funny story about a time he’d had his wallet stolen in Rio, gone to the police station to report it and almost ended up being arrested for the crime himself. Eyes hidden by the baseball cap she’d borrowed from Ant, Hannah had watched him, feeling a strange, jumping sensation in her stomach.

Roisin and Ant were tired and went back to the house sometime just after the last colour had faded from the sky behind the dunes, and what Hannah had suspected – that Justin was putting the moves on Laura, whether out of genuine interest or just his reflexive womanising – was confirmed when he asked her to go for a walk along the beach with him. To Hannah’s surprise, Laura had got up and dusted the sand off her shorts without hesitating, and she and Mark were left alone. He’d fed the fire another piece of driftwood and settled himself on the sand again. The feeling in her stomach intensified until it felt almost like cramp.

‘Ant told me you’re responsible for that granola ad I see every time I turn on the TV here,’ he said.

‘Cereal killers? Yes, guilty, I’m afraid. It’s a cheap gag but . . .’

‘No, it’s great – funny. It seems like it’s a big success?’

‘Well, the Grain Brothers are pleased – they’re shifting twelve times as much Harvest Bite as usual so . . .’

‘Twelve times? No bloody wonder they’re pleased.’ He picked up a stick and stirred the embers. ‘Is that what you always wanted to do – advertising?’

‘Well, it wasn’t a childhood dream but, yes, since university.’

‘What about living over here?’

‘That
was
a childhood dream.’

‘Really? For me, too. I used to sit in my bedroom at home devising ways I could make it happen.’

‘Now that’s what I call organised,’ she’d laughed. ‘I just hoped it would.’

They’d stayed out talking for hours, wandering round in the dark for more wood whenever the fire burned down and then returning to their exact same positions. By the time they’d crept back into the house, careful not to let the screen door slam behind them, the fold-down numbers on the seventies stove had said 02.42. They needn’t have worried about being quiet: Justin had not been in his designated sleeping spot on the sofa. Down on the beach, they’d talked about everything: serious things – to her surprise, she’d found herself telling him about her parents’ divorce – and ridiculous stuff, tales of horsemeat peddling, university stories, the family tortoise she and Tom had once smuggled with them on a family holiday to the South of France. Aside from Roisin, she couldn’t remember ever meeting anyone who seemed so interested in the details of her life: the books and music she liked, where she’d grown up and been to school, where she’d lived in London before she moved to the US, even her father’s job as an academic at Bristol University.

‘I don’t want to do a Justin,’ he had said in the dark behind her as they were making their way back through the dunes, gorse catching at their jeans, ‘but I wondered . . . I’m in New York all next week. Would you like to have dinner one night?’

She hesitated, the muscles in her stomach making a single painful contraction. ‘Yes,’ she said, her voice carrying back through the darkness. ‘That would be good.’

Chapter Three

The wind had caused a surprising amount of damage. Though the yard wasn’t much more than twenty feet square, clearing it up would take a while. It wasn’t just the heaps of fallen leaves and the broken branches on the cherry tree; the wind had carried rubbish into the garden – there were sheets of wet newspaper and a couple of crisp packets, and a white polythene shopping bag was snared in the tree’s upper branches, tattered and flapping. Hannah picked up the wooden chair and set it back on its feet then went back inside to get garden-waste bags and the stiff broom.

It was half past eleven now. She’d rung Tom and arranged to meet him at eight at what had become their usual spot since she’d been back, a little place tucked away off the street in Chinatown that did authentic Szechuan. His friend Zhang An had recommended it and Hannah suspected her brother might count as technically addicted to the Bang Bang chicken.

It would be good, she thought, to see him on her own, without the presence of Mark or Tom’s wife, Lydia, who’d taken her mother away for a long weekend in Harrogate. Evenings with the four of them were fun but it wasn’t the same. She liked Lydia a lot but Mark and Tom were so different that sometimes the conversation dried up. Nothing was wrong; it was just that, apart from her, they had little common ground. Mark, in particular, made a big effort, talking to Tom about cricket in the summer and now rugby league – once when they were due to have dinner together, she’d caught him on the Harlequins website, reading up beforehand – but they were different types of people. Tom taught English at a school in Highbury and Mark ran DataPro; Tom liked Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace and slim volumes written by anxious young men, and, unless she recommended something to him, Mark read non-fiction – biographies of presidents and business leaders, history and economics – or Penguin Classics.

She rolled up her sleeve and plunged her hand into the little water feature, collecting the freezing mulch of dead leaves that was blocking the drainage hole. The thing always made her laugh. Even the term ‘water feature’ was hilarious –
infra dig
, her mother would say – but this one was particularly dreadful. Mark’s renovation work hadn’t extended as far as the garden, in which he’d done the minimum possible while maintaining a space large enough to sit out with a drink in the evening. She’d assumed responsibility for it over the summer, when she’d moved in properly, and in cutting back the Virginia creeper that he’d allowed to run amok, she’d uncovered a small, cross-looking stone face, set into the right-hand corner of the far wall. Investigating further, she realised it still worked, so that when it was turned on at the covered switch next to the French windows, water dribbled out from between the cherub’s pouting stone lips into the shallow basin beneath its chin.

‘Have you seen this?’ Hannah asked, summoning Mark into the garden.

‘I have,’ he said. ‘Hence the creeper.’

‘Come on, it’s hysterical.’

‘It’s hideous. It looks like it’s at the dentist, spitting into a bowl. Quick, cover it back up before anyone sees it.’

‘No way – it’s funny. And it works.’

Mark had made a face not dissimilar to the carved one, and put his arms around her waist. ‘I like seeing you in the garden,’ he said. ‘It suits you, English Rose.’ He brought his hand up and touched a strand of her hair that had worked its way out of the loose knot she tied it in when she was working. She was naturally blonde, going darker in the winter but quickly brightening up again in the sun, especially around her face. She’d never had her hair highlighted and she knew he liked that, as well as her general
laissez-faire
approach to her appearance, which he chose to interpret as a deliberate aesthetic. One of the first times they’d been to bed together, he’d brought his head close to hers on the pillow and stroked her cheek. ‘Are you even wearing any make-up?’ he’d asked.

‘A little bit. Powder, some eyeliner and mascara. Honestly, though? I’m not very good at it. I see all these immaculately made-up New Yorkers and I wish I could do it but . . .’

‘Why?’ he asked. ‘You’re classic-looking, timeless – you don’t need to look fashionable.’

Now, flicking her hand inside the rubbish bag until the wet leaves came off it, she thought about how domesticated she would appear to anyone who saw her at work out here and didn’t know better. It was amazing that, in a matter of months, she’d gone from being a New Yorker with a string of orchid deaths on her conscience, to a Londoner in charge of a whole garden, however small. When she thought about how easily it might not have happened, too, the change seemed particularly startling.