Before We Met: A Novel (6 page)

‘God, don’t worry about it. I’m sorry to have called you at all, especially at the weekend. I was just trying to track Mark down but it’s okay, I’ve heard from him now. He called me from New York about an hour ago.’

‘New York?’ Neesha sounded puzzled.

‘Yes, he missed his flight yesterday and I was worried because he hadn’t called, but it turns out he’d just dropped his phone in a cab.’

Neesha said nothing and Hannah felt herself frown. ‘Is everything all right?’ she asked.

Another pause, momentary but perceptible. ‘Fine.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes. I mean, of course.’

Hannah could almost feel the weight of confusion at the other end of the line. ‘What’s up?’ she said.

‘Nothing.’

‘No, come on.’

Neesha hesitated again. ‘Really, it’s nothing,’ she said. ‘It’s just . . . I’ve got my wires crossed again, that’s all. I didn’t think he was in New York.’

‘Where did you think he was?’ Another pause. ‘Neesha?’

‘Look, I . . . I thought you were going to Rome this weekend.’

‘Rome?’ Hannah leaned against the kitchen counter. ‘You? You mean, Mark and me?’

‘I thought he said he was taking you. As a surprise.’ Neesha breathed out heavily. ‘God, Hannah, I’m sorry. I’ve totally ballsed up, haven’t I? I’ve got the wrong weekend, obviously, and now I’ve ruined it all. Shit, Mark’s going to kill me.’

‘No, Neesh . . .’

‘It’s my own fault – I’ve just got so much going on. I love the projects he’s given me and I want to do them well – really well – but I can’t do that and the PA work, too, not properly, especially when I have to leave early to pick up Pierre. This isn’t the first stupid mistake I’ve made. Look, I feel bad for asking but . . . You couldn’t keep this under your hat, could you? I know there’s no reason for you to after I’ve wrecked things for you but if you . . .’

‘Don’t worry about it, it’s fine,’ Hannah said. ‘It’s my fault – I shouldn’t have pressed you. Anyway, I hate surprises so you’ve done me a favour. Our secret.’

Out in the yard Hannah climbed the ladder again but the sense of relaxation she’d had before was gone and in its place was a strange itchy feeling, as if she’d put on a rough wool jumper next to her skin.

What was the matter with her? Everything was fine. Mark was safe, and probably about to sign a new deal that would make a difference to the potential buy-out offer, which itself would mean they’d be able to spend more time together in future. He’d be home on Tuesday and if he could take the afternoon off, they’d do something fun, he’d said. And tonight she was having dinner with Tom, just the two of them, and how long was it since they’d done that? Everything was good – great, actually.

She started pruning small dead branches and ones that had snapped in the wind, dropping them to the ground at the foot of the ladder. Suddenly Neesha’s voice replayed in her ear:
I thought you were going to Rome this weekend. I thought he said he was taking you. As a surprise
. Oh, for God’s sake, Hannah, she told herself, it was just a mistake – hadn’t Neesha said so? Hadn’t she said she’d made others since she’d been juggling her new workload? She was like any other working mother, trying to do it all and occasionally getting things wrong under pressure. She, Hannah, would drive herself mad if she started getting hung up about things like this.

But
, said a quiet voice,
there’s something else, isn’t there?
Early last week – had it been Monday or Tuesday? – Mark had been doing an hour’s work in his study before supper and she’d taken him a gin and tonic. As she’d come up the stairs she’d heard him talking, but when she’d opened the door he’d turned quickly –
jumped
, said the voice;
he’d jumped
– and hung up the call straight away without saying goodbye, at least as far as she’d been able to hear. When she’d asked him who it had been, he’d said David Harris and she’d been surprised: his partner had only joined DataPro a year ago and, from what she’d seen of it, their relationship was quite formal; she wouldn’t have thought they’d just hang up on each other like that.

At the time, she hadn’t dwelt on it too much. They could easily just have said goodbye when she turned the handle: the door had been closed and she hadn’t been able to make out Mark’s words clearly. And he’d jumped because she’d startled him: he hadn’t been expecting her to come in. Anyway, what did she really know about how he and David talked on the phone? They talked to each other all the time – things were bound to have relaxed between them.

More to the point, though, she trusted Mark. There was no reason not to – he’d never given her the slightest reason to think he might be interested in anyone else or even registered other women as attractive. In the year and a half since that day on the beach in Montauk, she’d never once seen him do a double take at a pretty woman coming into a restaurant or passing them on the street. Even in Greece over the summer, he’d seemed oblivious to the beautiful tanned Italians and Swedes wandering down to the water in their tiny string bikinis.

She felt absolutely secure with him; it was one of the reasons she’d known their relationship was right – that she’d even allowed herself to get into a relationship with him in the first place. He wasn’t perfect, obviously. Who was? There were times when he was tired and uncommunicative, which annoyed her if she’d spent the day on her own and wanted to talk, and a couple of months ago he’d stayed out late drinking with his old college friend Dan Kwiatkowski when she was at home with a stomach bug, which she’d thought was a bit much, but that was all minor stuff, petty. She was absolutely sure he loved her. He did the easy things – complimented her on new clothes, told her she was beautiful – but showed his love most in practical ways. Just before Christmas last year, when there had been a huge snowstorm in New York, she’d arrived home from work to find him on his knees on the sidewalk fitting chains to the wheels of her car. ‘Oh-ho,’ Roisin said when Hannah told her, ‘you’ve got him. These women who want perfume and designer handbags for Christmas – it’s when you’re unwrapping anti-freeze and smoke alarms that you know. When a man starts worrying about something happening to you,
that’s
when he really loves you.’

How to describe the way Mark treated her? He was just . . . on her side. It was hard to imagine anyone being more supportive of her efforts to get a new job, for example. He’d listened for hours as she’d discussed ideas and opportunities with him and, recently, her worries. ‘Keep the faith’ – he’d said it again on the phone this morning. She’d started to feel the first sickening waves of depression about it all, but his confidence hadn’t wavered.

Hannah shook her head as if that would rid her of the itchy feeling. She was being ridiculous: they loved each other. And what good was a marriage without trust? She felt a surge of something close to anger: she refused – she point-blank refused – to be like her mother, to let insecurity gnaw and gnaw away at her marriage until it collapsed around her ears, completely undermined.

She finished the pruning, came back down the ladder and stuffed the dead wood into a rubbish bag. She collected the crisp packets and soggy sheets of newspaper from the corners of the yard then started sweeping, scratching the broom across the stones to get up the clinging wet leaves.

I thought you were going to Rome this weekend. I thought he said he was taking you. As a surprise
.

Now the voice in her head piped up again:
what if, when you went up to his study last week, you caught him making plans to go to Rome? Everything he said this morning – missing the flight, losing his phone, falling asleep – what if it was all lies? There were a lot of convenient reasons, weren’t there, why he hadn’t been able to contact you?

Shut up, she told the voice. Shut up with your vile, disloyal insinuations.

Rome
, it said again.
A surprise
.

A surprise: despite her resistance, her mind snagged on the word. Had Mark really been planning a surprise weekend away? He often arranged lovely things for them to do – lately he’d got almost as into theatre as she was, and only last week he’d bought them tickets for
La Bohème
at Covent Garden – but he never did it without asking her first. She liked that about him: she’d always thought there was something a bit presumptuous about people who sprang surprises on their partners, expecting them just to drop what they were doing at a moment’s notice. And they’d talked about that – he’d agreed with her.

For another ten minutes more she carried on working, trying to distract herself, but the interior voice refused to be quiet. Finally she gave up and went inside to the kitchen. Stalling, she drank a glass of tap water then sat at the table and did a Google search for the number of the W Downtown, the hotel Mark always used when he was in New York. She entered the number into the phone and looked at it for a few seconds. Should she? She couldn’t – it would make her as bad as her mother, sneaking round, checking up on things. But she wasn’t sneaking round, was she? She was calling her husband at a hotel, where she’d ask to be put through to his room so she could talk to him. She was doing this to silence the nagging voice in her head; that was all. She was doing it to prove what she already knew: she had nothing to worry about.

She pressed the button and heard the number dial. Two or three seconds passed and then it started ringing. After a few seconds of cheesy lounge music, an automated voice told her that an ‘associate’ would be ready to ‘grant her wishes’ shortly. More dreadful music, and then the call was answered. She’d come through to the reservations line but explained what she wanted and the associate put her through to the hotel’s front desk.

‘Mark Reilly?’ said the receptionist. ‘Please hold.’

Hannah waited, already feeling better. She’d talk to him quickly, tell him she loved him, then get back outside with her mind at rest.

‘Hello?’

‘Hi, yes.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said the receptionist, ‘but we don’t have a guest of that name staying with us currently.’

‘Oh.’ For a moment, Hannah was completely taken aback.

The silence stretched. ‘Is there anything else I can help you with today?’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘but would you mind just checking again? I was sure my husband was staying with you this weekend – I spoke to him this morning.’

There was another momentary pause, the click of computer keys. ‘No, I’m sorry,’ the woman said, ‘I’m certain we don’t have a Mr Reilly here. Perhaps he’s at one of our other locations, uptown?’

‘Right, yes, of course. I’ll try them. Thanks.’

She hit ‘End’ and put the phone on the table. She could feel her heart thumping. Mark always used the branch downtown because it was closest to Wall Street, where most of DataPro’s clients were based, and anyway, there was no way he’d stay in Midtown because he hated it there, all the busyness and the tourists. But what if he’d had to? argued a different part of her brain. What if he’d tried to check back in downtown after he’d missed his flight and they’d been fully booked?

Feeling slightly more positive, she opened her laptop again and found the numbers for the other Ws. There were three of them now, at Union Square, Times Square and on Lexington. One by one, working her way uptown, she called them all, but every receptionist gave her the same response: no current guest of that name.

Mark called the study his eyrie. He’d had it converted from the old loft space, and the roof sloped steeply on both sides, making it feel like a tent or a tree house. The stairs to it were steep, and its windows looked out over a landscape of chimneys and aerials and old satellite dishes to the spire of the church on Studdridge Street and the tower blocks to the south on the other side of the river. He’d kept the furniture simple: a Lloyd Loom wicker chair that he sat in to read, an antique Turkish rug and his beautiful Georgian desk with its original tooled-leather top.

She yanked open the long drawer that ran above the knee-well, trying not to think about what she was doing. Without any idea what she was looking for, she sifted through the contents: staples, pens, half a roll of Extra Strong Mints with the curl of torn wrapper still attached, a paper poppy from Remembrance Sunday, and then, in a Swan Vesta matchbox, the brittle remains of a four-leafed clover she’d found and given to him for good luck. There was his pass from Ladies’ Day at Royal Ascot in June, where he’d taken some clients on a corporate jaunt; an old cassette,
Hendrix
written in felt-tip pen on the label; a few Euros in coins, and an anatomically challenged blue dog made in Fimo clay by Dan and Pippa’s son Charlie, baked in the oven and given to Mark a few weeks ago by way of godson tribute.

Bending, she went through the rest of the drawers one by one. Three of them were empty, one had a cigar box full of bulldog clips and Bic biros, and another contained back issues of
Prospect
and the
Economist
. She ran her hands round the back of the drawers and into their corners but there was nothing to suggest an illicit affair, no photographs tucked away or handwritten notes, no business cards from hotels she didn’t know he’d been to. In fact, there was nothing suspicious or unsavoury at all, not so much as a furtive copy of
Hot Babes
. Relieved, she laughed at the idea. She couldn’t imagine Mark buying porn – much too uncouth.