Before We Met: A Novel (2 page)

As she came down Quarrendon Street, the last of her hope disappeared. If Mark was ever home before her, she arrived to find lights blazing from every window but tonight the house was as dark as she’d left it.

Lynda, his cleaner –
their cleaner
– had been and the air smelled strongly of furniture polish. In the kitchen Hannah took a bottle of wine from the rack, poured a glass, then sat down with her laptop and checked her email. Occasionally her BlackBerry went through spells where no new messages would arrive for hours and then a glut would come all at once. That wasn’t happening now: the last email on both the phone and the computer was the one from her brother asking how her interview had gone.

She opened a blank message and addressed it to Mark.

Hello Heathrow no-show
, she typed.
I’m guessing you’re either still on a plane or something’s going on with your phone so I’m trying email instead. Let me know what’s happening. Missing you here at Quarrendon Street. House – and bed – empty without you
. . .

She took a sip of wine – delicious: his idea of everyday wine came in a different price bracket from hers – then stood up and carried the glass across to the French windows that opened on to the small paved yard behind the house. When she shielded her eyes to block the light from inside, she could see the stone flags and then, towards the back, the shrubs and ornamental cherry tree. The wind had wreaked havoc. One of the wooden chairs had blown across the yard and lay on top of the stone trough where she had grown tomatoes over the summer, and the paving was strewn with leaves and twigs. It was a mess; if the rain stopped, she’d get out there tomorrow and clear it up.

Overhead, a plane tracked in towards Heathrow, now visible through a break in the clouds, now hidden again. Mark was probably still in the air, she told herself, and she’d wake up in a couple of hours to find him getting into bed next to her, and have a heart attack thinking he was a burglar.

She turned back to face the room and stopped. Occasionally she still had moments like this, when the sheer scale of the house struck her all over again. She’d been stunned when Mark told her he’d bought it in his late twenties; both the houses on the street that had sold since she moved in had gone for over two million. ‘But that’s now,’ he’d said. ‘I’ve had it twelve years, since well before the big boom, and it was a wreck when I got it. I bought it from this old couple who hadn’t done anything to it since the sixties and I had to do a total gut-job – new wiring, new plumbing, the works.’

‘Still . . .’

He’d shrugged. ‘I was lucky – the business was doing well and the price was right. It was a good investment.’

The idea that this was her kitchen now had taken some getting used to. She’d loved the one in her New York apartment with its original exposed-brick walls and industrial units, but viewed in the cold light of reality it had been a seven-foot length of corridor. In order to cook, she’d had to play a game like one of those squares with the moveable tiles that you rearrange to make a picture, continually finding new spots for plates and knives and chopping boards on the patch of counter space, the stove-top, the stool. This room was about ten times the size. In the unlikely event that she would ever want to cook for thirty, she could do it here without ever running out of elbow room.

Everything was big –
everything
; if it hadn’t been done so stylishly, it would have looked ostentatious. The original kitchen wall had been knocked out to extend the room into the side return, adding an extra six feet of width, and it had been twenty feet wide to begin with. The ceiling was high, the near part of it roofed with huge panes of glass for extra light, and the floor was covered in slabs of Welsh slate with heating underneath for the winter. There were steel-topped counters, a restaurant-sized cooker and, at the back, next to the door to the sitting room, an American-style double fridge.

‘I just couldn’t go back to a poxy little one,’ Mark had said. ‘The fridge I had in my apartment in Tribeca was like a wardrobe – it ruined me for anything smaller.’

‘You’re such a spoiled brat.’

‘Can’t deny it.’ He’d grinned at her, the skin at the corners of his eyes crinkling.

Feeling a burst of longing for him, she went back to her laptop and searched again for any news relating to flights from New York, not just JFK now but Newark and La Guardia, too. Nothing. She was being neurotic, she told herself, worrying for no reason at all. There was a simple explanation and he’d be home tomorrow. Everything was fine.

Chapter Two

When Hannah woke up, light was edging round the curtains. The other side of the bed was empty but she quite often woke up alone when Mark was travelling so it was a moment before she remembered that today she wasn’t supposed to. She propped herself on her elbow and reached for her BlackBerry. No new messages.

She lay back down for a minute, thinking, then threw off the sheets and got out. Mark’s favourite grey cashmere jumper was on the back of the chair and she put it on over her pyjamas. Downstairs the post was on the doormat: just an electricity bill, a statement from Coutts for Mark and yet another mail-shot letter from Savills fishing to see if they had any plans to sell the house. She left the bill and the statement on the hall table with the previous days’ post and went through to the kitchen.

While she waited for the kettle to boil she checked her email on her laptop, just in case, but the only messages were junk. Still nothing from Penrose Price either, she thought, and the interview there had been over a week ago now. That job was the one she really wanted, too; AVT yesterday wasn’t in the same league. If they were going to let her know by email, though, it wouldn’t be on a Saturday, and they would send a proper letter; they were that kind of company. Anyway, it was only a matter of time before the rejection arrived, in whatever form; if it were good news, she would have heard it by now.

She drank her coffee and thought about what to do. Perhaps Mark had caught a red-eye and was just getting into Heathrow now. She picked up her phone and pressed redial. Voicemail again. This time she didn’t leave a message; she’d left one last night and emailed as well, and he would know she was wondering what was going on. She felt a stab of annoyance with him for being so inconsiderate – how hard could it be to call and leave a twenty-second message? – but it was quickly followed by a wave of anxiety. Something was wrong. This was so unlike him – he’d never not come home when he said he would without getting in touch.

It was five to nine, still a bit early for a Saturday, but Neesha had a three-year-old, she’d probably been up for hours already. Hannah scrolled through her contacts list until she found her mobile number.

Mark’s assistant was a beautiful half-French, half-Indian woman who’d been brought up in South Africa but educated at the London School of Economics, where she’d met and married her husband, Steven. She was twenty-seven and Mark had recently started letting her manage her own small projects, afraid that she would leave unless she was promoted quickly. Pierre, her son, had arrived about ten years earlier than she’d planned to have him, she’d told Hannah at DataPro’s summer drinks party, but she was as ambitious as she’d always been. Mark had said that if she was as efficient a project manager as she was an assistant, he expected her to be one of the most senior on the team within five years.

The phone rang. After six or seven rings, however, the answering service clicked in and Neesha’s voice asked the caller to leave a message.

Hannah coughed, her throat suddenly dry. ‘Hi, Neesha,’ she said. ‘It’s Hannah Reilly. I’m sorry to call you at the weekend but I wonder if you could give me a ring when you get this?’

After a couple of slices of toast and a skim of the news online, she went upstairs and put on her running kit. She didn’t particularly like running –
Oh, be honest, Hannah
, said her internal voice,
you hate it
– but over the past three or four months, she had made it part of what she thought of privately as her sanity routine. She had a frightening awareness of how easy it would be to become depressed about her situation without a structure to her days that involved some form of discipline and physical exercise. Not her life with Mark, obviously – when she’d talked to him about it, he’d asked if she was unhappy with him and she’d looked at him as if he was nuts – but work, or her lack of it.

Though they’d been married for nearly eight months now, she’d stayed on in New York for three months after their wedding. Mark had increased the amount of time he spent working in DataPro’s American office and they’d talked about him making it his base full-time, flying over to visit the London office instead. His new partner, David, would take over from him there. After a month or so, however, talk of the move had become less and less frequent, and then Mark arrived one Friday evening looking guilty. He’d made her one of his custom martinis – vodka, with cranberry bitters – and told her that the consultants they’d hired to advise them on streamlining overheads during the turndown had strongly recommended closing the US office. He’d gone over the figures again and again, Mark said, and he knew it made sense.

‘Are you sure?’ she’d asked, feeling her heart plummet.

‘It was their number one recommendation – the only one that would make any real difference to our operating costs, actually. I hate it, too – having a New York office was always a goal of mine, as you know – but really, we can handle the US business from London. We don’t need a physical presence here. I’m so sorry, Han.’

His salary was bigger than hers by a factor of about five, and she was just an employee, not the owner of a company like he was. There was also the question of visas – they were both British so living in London was by far the easiest option – and while her apartment in the West Village had been rented, he’d already owned this house. She knew before he said it that if they were going to live together, everything argued that she should make the move. So, after some fruitless efforts to convince Leon, her old boss, that she should open a London office for him, Hannah resigned from her job and, five months ago, had packed up her apartment and shipped her belongings back here, her seven years of living and working in New York finished. Until she’d met Mark, she’d thought she’d live there for the rest of her life.

Quite apart from how much she wanted to be with him, though, she was surprised by how much she was enjoying being back in London. Even before she’d met Mark, she’d come back quite frequently to see her brother and her parents and to keep in touch with friends, but after two or three years she’d begun to feel like a tourist, someone who saw all the nice things – restaurants, galleries, the new bars her friends took her to – but had no real connection to the place, no day-to-day relationship with it.

That feeling had nearly evaporated now, and it was lovely to regain some of the British traditions she’d used to miss. Last week, she and Mark had walked over to Bishops Park to watch the fireworks on Bonfire Night. Impressive as the Macy’s 4 July fireworks were, for her they didn’t have the same emotional resonance, the layered memories of all the local fireworks she’d gone to with her parents when she and Tom were children, with toffee apples and the lighting of the huge bonfire that they’d watched burgeon with garden waste and broken pallets and lengths of rotten fencing in the weeks beforehand until it reached fifteen or twenty feet high. Bishops Park wasn’t the same, of course – no bonfire, for one thing, because of city fire regulations – but damp November grass smelled the same here as in Worcestershire, and she’d loved watching the Thames at the park’s edge as it slipped silently past them in the dark, its surface catching glints of blue and green and red from the explosions overhead.

Down in the hall again, she sat at the bottom of the stairs to put her trainers on then let herself out of the house, zipping the door key into her jacket pocket. The low hedge behind the front wall was wet with the rain that had fallen overnight and a perfect cobweb on the gatepost was strung with drops like glass beads. She opened the gate carefully so as not to disturb it.

She walked up Quarrendon Street, taking long strides to stretch her legs. She was getting to know some of the neighbours now, at least by sight, and nodded to the man from number twenty-three who was coming down the pavement with the
Telegraph
and a bag of what she guessed were croissants from the delicatessen tucked under his arm. With his quizzical expression and the grey hair that touched the velvet collar of his three-quarter-length camel coat, he reminded her of Bill Nighy. He was typical of the residents here: either wealthy families, who walked their children, in immaculate uniforms and straw boaters, to the nearby private preparatory school each morning, or well-preserved empty-nesters. It was an unusual place for a bachelor in his twenties to have bought a house – there were far hipper areas than Fulham – and while it was very expensive, it wasn’t flash at all. Mark could have chosen some vast renovated loft in Docklands or the East End, all glass and chrome and huge leather sofas, but instead he’d gone for a traditional Victorian family house. She loved him for it.

She crossed New King’s Road and started jogging gently along the pavement. The trees that shielded the wedding-cake Regency houses from the road here were dripping heavily, the water pattering on to the fallen leaves plastered over the ground in a soaked homogenous layer.

Hannah had known it would be difficult to get another job, especially one like the one she’d had in New York, but she’d wildly underestimated how difficult. She’d thought that with her American experience and a reputation for coming up with campaigns that had done well on both sides of the Atlantic, she’d be able to find a new position within three to four months, even with the economic climate as it was. ‘People will always hire the best candidates,’ Mark had said the first time they’d discussed it. ‘It might take a little while for something you
want
to open up, but don’t worry about not getting a job. People are going to want to hire you – they’ll be fighting to do it.’