Before We Met: A Novel (5 page)

On the Sunday afternoon of the weekend in Montauk, just before they’d left to go back to the city, Mark had carried her bag downstairs and asked if she was free for dinner on Friday. She had said yes and they’d made a plan to meet at a bar in Chelsea. As the days had passed, back in New York, however, she’d begun to dread it. The stomach ache she’d had that night on the beach came back whenever she thought about it, stronger and stronger as the week went on, and finally she’d acknowledged to herself that it was caused by anxiety. She knew she was physically attracted to Mark – she’d found herself thinking several times about the way the soft material of his old T-shirt had stretched between his shoulder blades as he’d crouched to stir up their beach-fire – but that in itself wasn’t alarming: she was in her early thirties in New York, she met men, she wasn’t celibate. The problem was that she liked him – really liked him.

In the end, after a night spent tossing in the air-conditioned chill of her bedroom, she’d emailed him first thing on Friday morning and told him that her biggest client had called a last-minute meeting for that evening, followed by dinner with his boss.
I’m so sorry
to have to do this,
she’d written.
Perhaps we’ll bump into each other again up in Montauk at some point over the summer?
She knew he would get the unwritten message –
don’t suggest another day
– and he had. Twenty minutes after she sent her mail, a reply arrived:
Not to worry, I completely understand. See you round the campfire some time.
As she’d read it, what she’d felt was not relief at being off the hook but a powerful sense of loss.

She’d left the office just after seven that evening and, feeling her low mood starting to deepen, she’d cycled down from Midtown to McNally Jackson books in SoHo. She’d discovered the shop when she first moved to New York years earlier and, knowing almost no one then, she’d got into the habit of going there in the evenings, buying a new book and sitting in the café with a glass of wine, sometimes until the shop closed. It was always busy and the clientele was interesting both to watch and to eavesdrop on; she’d seen blind dates that had flopped and one in particular that had gone spectacularly well; people tapping away at screenplays on laptops; parents up in the city to visit children studying at NYU; people discussing business plans for Internet start-ups and holistic therapy centres. She’d also heard some first-rate gossip. Between the books and the busy café, the loneliness she’d sometimes felt at the beginning, uprooted from London, had evaporated.

As she’d chained up her bike outside that evening, the sky above Prince Street had been turning a pale pearly pink. It was mid-July and the city was baking; around her bare ankles she could feel heat rising from the pavement. Inside the shop, she’d spent fifteen minutes choosing a book – the new Alan Hollinghurst, which she’d meant to wait for in paperback, but what the hell? She needed cheering up – and then she ordered a glass of wine at the counter and took it to a window table that was just coming free. The windows were open to the street and she heard snatches of conversation from passers-by and music from cars cruising up to the traffic lights on Lafayette. At the table opposite, a glamorous black woman in her late twenties, Hannah guessed, wearing a silk dress with a red sash, was talking to a member of staff, preparing to go downstairs and give a reading from her new novel.

The wine was dry and cold, and she was soon absorbed in the Hollinghurst. A light breeze had blown up, cutting the humidity and stirring the short hairs at the base of her neck as she sat with her back to the window. Ripples of applause reached up the stairs from the reading.

She was about halfway down the glass when she looked up from the book. Over towards the shop’s main door, browsing the small table of new non-fiction titles, was a man who, from behind at least, looked just like Mark. He was wearing a suit but he’d taken his jacket and tie off. He was the same height as Mark, the same build, and his hair was the same: dark brown, cut short at the back, left longer on the top, where it just started to curl. The man put down the book in his hand and went round the table to the other side, and Hannah’s heart thumped against the back of her ribs. It
was
him – it actually
was
Mark. Shit
– shit
. She thought about her email, the blatant lie.
Oh, shit.
It was one thing to make an excuse and bail out on some guy you’d met in a bar, but lying to your friends’ friends, especially Ant and Roisin’s friends, was not on.

What should she do? She either had to stay put and hope he wouldn’t see her or get up and go straight away, before he did. But just as she had a perfect view of him now, the distance between them not more than ten or twelve feet, so he, if he raised his head, would have a perfect view of her. If she stayed put and buried her head in her book, maybe she could get away with it. If she stood up to leave, she’d be more likely to draw his attention.

For two or three minutes she watched him surreptitiously from over the top of the book, wishing her hair was down so she could let it fall across her face. Evidently he was looking seriously for something to read; he picked up a book, read the back or the inside flap or even, twice, the first page or two before putting it back and reaching for another. It was agonising – when was he going to choose something and just
go
, for Christ’s sake? Her stomach was aching again but this time from the sheer fear of discovery.

At last, after perhaps five or six minutes, he chose a book and took it to the counter at the opposite side of the shop. Hannah let out a long silent breath and took a large gulp of wine. The counter was right by the main doors: he’d leave without seeing her; she’d got away with it. Breathing easier but still being careful, she buried her head in the book again, glancing over just one more time to see him pocketing his change and tucking his new purchase under his arm.

A minute later, though, the light to her right was blocked and she was conscious of someone standing by her table. She looked up slowly. Charcoal suit trousers. A crisp white shirt with a fine stripe in the weave, clearly expensive.

‘Hello,’ he said. ‘I thought it was you.’

‘God, Mark – wow! Hello. Hi.’ Hannah felt the blood rush to her face.

He smiled. ‘Great minds.’ He nodded at her glass, now nearly empty. ‘I’d just come in to do the same thing.’

‘Really? Right, yes, it’s fantastic here, isn’t it? I love this place.’

‘Me, too. Any good?’ He indicated her book.

‘Well, I’ve only just started but, yes, I think so. He’s one of my favourites.’

‘I read the one that won the Booker but I’m not much of a fiction reader, I’m ashamed to say. I enjoyed that, though.’ He adjusted the position of the bag under his arm, holding it more securely, and glanced over at the counter. ‘I’m going to get a glass of wine – can I get you another?’

Hannah hesitated, mortified. He would be within his rights to be severely pissed off with her but, despite the blatancy of her lie, he didn’t appear to be bearing any kind of grudge. The least she could do was to return the civility. ‘Well, if you’re sure?’

‘Of course.’

She watched him as he waited. He looked totally relaxed, saying something to the bearded guy behind the counter that made him laugh as he filled their glasses. Mark carried them back to the table and carefully put one of them down.

‘Thank you,’ she said, ‘that’s very kind. Look, don’t feel . . . I mean, if you’ve come to get some peace, and read . . . but if you’d like to . . .’ She indicated the spare chair.

‘Only if you’re sure I’m not interrupting
you
?’

‘No, not at all.’ She shook her head. As he pulled out the chair, she took the opportunity to come out with it. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘I’m so sorry about this evening – it was just a mess, the whole thing. Having demanded that last-minute meeting, the client then called at lunchtime to cancel the whole thing. Apparently, the big boss’s wife developed a dental abscess all of a sudden and he wanted to stay with her in Boston.’
God, Hannah, where is this stuff coming from? Dental abscess?

‘Don’t worry about it.’ Mark waved his hand. ‘Stuff like that happens to me all the time. Sometimes I feel like it’s impossible to organise any kind of normal social life. A couple of my friends in London get really hacked off with me for being a flake.’

‘I know that feeling.’

He took a large sip. ‘So you’re not going out to Montauk this weekend? You normally do, don’t you?’

‘Normally – I love the beach – but I’ve got something on tomorrow night, so I couldn’t.’ She smiled. ‘My assistant’s in a band, he’s the drummer, and they’ve got a gig over in Williamsburg. I promised him I’d go, be a groupie for the night.’

He took another sip of wine and she noticed the way his long straight fingers curled round the delicate stem. ‘That sounds fun.’

‘Well, they’ve just formed, hence needing the support, but my sources in the office tell me they’re pretty good.’

The reading finished downstairs and a new influx of people flooded the café, taking the last few spare seats. The woman who’d been reading stood nearby, besieged by men with tattoos and ironic T-shirts vying to impress her with earnest, reverential questions.

‘You know, when we first opened our New York office and I was living here full-time, not just flying back and forth,’ Mark said, ‘I used to come in here a lot. I enjoyed sitting and having a bite to eat and a glass of wine – it was much better than staying at home alone in my apartment.’

‘We probably shared a table,’ she said, though she knew she would have remembered if they had. ‘I used to do exactly the same. I still do sometimes, if I’m at a loose end unexpectedly. Like tonight.’

‘Me, too. Like tonight.’

‘Sorry.’ She grimaced.

He rolled his eyes. ‘Please.’ He tipped his head in the direction of the writer and her tattooed acolytes. ‘What do you reckon? Any of them in with a chance?’

He was such easy company, the conversation as natural and unforced as it had been on the beach in the dark. Again, he focused almost entirely on her, asking about her job, her family. They finished their wine and Hannah bought another round. Nearing the bottom of the glass again, she began to feel pleasantly buzzed and she realised that she was enjoying herself more than she had with anyone who wasn’t a friend or her brother in the past seven years. She diverted her thoughts away quickly from the time before that.

‘Do you fancy getting a bite to eat?’ Mark had said as the street outside filled with the peculiar hyper-real Manhattan twilight that made everything seem sharper and brighter. ‘I didn’t have much lunch and if I have another one of these on an empty stomach, I’m going to start talking complete bollocks.’

Outside, he waited while she undid the chain on her bike – he was impressed, he said, that she cycled in Manhattan – and they walked round the corner to Mulberry Street, the bike ticking an accompaniment alongside. They went to a diner-style Italian place which he’d mentioned had got a great review in
New York
magazine, took the two stools on the short side of the counter near the front and ordered chicken-parm sandwiches approximately twice the size of any sandwich Hannah had ever seen. ‘Which,’ she told him, ‘these days, is saying something.’ They discussed the campaign she was working on for a new manufacturer of healthy snacks, and she asked him about how and when he’d set up his company. After that, she couldn’t really remember what they talked about beyond a general sense that they’d talked like people who’d known each other for twenty years without ever having heard the other’s best stories. The tension came back into her stomach but it wasn’t anxiety or embarrassment now but a reaction to being near him, sitting so close on the pedestal stools, their knees almost touching. She’d watched his hands as they held the sandwich or flipped the cap of his beer on the Formica counter-top, and she’d yearned – it was an actual, physical sensation – to reach out and touch him.

The clock behind the bar read half-midnight by the time he turned to her and fixed her with a serious look. ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘that stuff about the late meeting was a line, wasn’t it, to give me the brush-off?’

She’d bitten the inside of her cheek, trying not to laugh, and looked him directly in the eye. ‘Yes,’ she said.

He shook his head. ‘No remorse, even. That bit about the dental abscess was a nice touch, by the way.’

Hannah burst out laughing. ‘Perhaps I can make it up to you,’ she said, reaching for her glass, ‘by inviting you to a gig in Williamsburg tomorrow night? I hear the band is excellent.’

Chapter Four

The wind had torn the polythene bag into a hundred tattered pieces, making it look like a leftover Hallowe’en ghoul trapped among the branches of the cherry tree. Hannah was on the top rung of the stepladder cutting it out with the kitchen scissors when she heard her mobile ring on the table inside. She considered leaving it but then thought that it might be Mark again and climbed quickly down to get it.

When she picked up, however, it wasn’t Mark but Neesha. ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘How are you? Sorry it’s taken me so long to ring back – I’ve only just checked my phone. We took Pierre swimming this morning and then came straight on to Steven’s parents. You must have called while we were at the pool.’