Before We Met
Chapter One
The rain was beating down, and out here, where the carriageway was exposed, the wind buffeted Hannah’s old VW as if it were trying to push it off the road. Usually on a Heathrow run she watched the planes dip down into the airport one after another, barely a minute between them, but tonight the rhythm was broken and it was two minutes, now three, before a new set of lights struggled through the roiling cloud. She tightened her grip again, checked the mirror and pulled out into the fast lane.
The Holiday Inn loomed up on the left, an ugly concrete tooth in silhouette against the sky, the light from its green neon sign leaching into the wet air. She took the exit for Terminal Three, the buzz in her stomach intensifying. Though they were married now, the trip to the airport was still exciting. She didn’t need to come and meet him; in fact, it would probably be quicker if Mark caught a cab into town, especially on a night like this, but the drive, arrivals, the crush at the barrier – it all reminded them of the time before they got married, when JFK and Heathrow were the poles around which so many of their weekends revolved.
As usual, the first two levels of the car park were full. Reluctantly, she took the ramp up to level three and found a spot by the lobby with the ticket machines. After a quick look in the mirror, she got out of the car and headed for the lifts.
The arrivals hall was busy, even for a Friday night. Beneath the low suspended ceiling, their faces bleached by the harsh strip lighting, hundreds of people were waiting. Three or four deep at the barrier, they clustered around the centre of the hall and outside the row of small concessions: the usual collection of drivers with name cards, a group of backpackers in shorts and T-shirts they would curse the moment they stepped outside, and an entire extended family, twenty-five or thirty people, all wearing traditional African dress, a blaze of colour and pattern.
She wove a path to the overhead monitors where she saw that Mark’s plane had just landed. It would be fifteen or twenty minutes before he came through the doors so she bought a sandwich from the little Marks and Spencer and sat on one of the benches on the other side of the hall. Earlier in the day, she’d been to the delicatessen and bought some French bread and a piece of really good Roquefort, which, with a glass of wine, was all Mark ever wanted after an evening flight, but she was too hungry to wait until then. She’d had nothing to eat since lunchtime: the interview with AVT this afternoon had run on much later than she’d expected, and it had been past seven o’clock by the time she’d got off the Tube at Parsons Green.
From the bench she watched the mechanised doors emit an irregular dribble of people. On the monitor there was a long list of flights with substantial delays. The passengers coming through now were on the plane that had come in from Freetown, she guessed, two before Mark’s; they were an hour and a half late. She watched a lanky, deeply suntanned man in jeans and a khaki shirt emerge and start scanning the crowd. From behind the barrier opposite, a young woman pushed her way forward, her face a picture of joy, and ran into his arms, giving him a kiss that drew a snort of disapproval from an elderly man further along the bench. Hannah felt another buzz in the pit of her stomach. Come on, Mark.
She remembered waiting for him on the other side of the Atlantic, before she moved back to London. Terminal Seven at JFK, the one American Airlines used, was stark; no cafés or shops to kill time in, just a newsstand, a coffee concession and a few rows of hard plastic chairs. She’d always used to take her laptop in case he was late but it had been impossible to work when her head snapped up every time someone came round the barrier. She’d never wanted to miss the moment when Mark first caught sight of her and the smile spread across his face. The first few times, the smile had given way to an exaggerated comic grin, as if he was trying to cover his embarrassment at having revealed himself, but that soon stopped and the regular sequence of events was established: he’d squeeze her until she was afraid he’d crack her ribs then they’d get a cab and go straight to her apartment and bed. Afterwards, they’d get dressed again and walk round to Westville on 10th Street for hotdogs.
The doors were opening more regularly now, releasing a steadier stream of people. A number of the voices had American accents, which suggested they’d been on Mark’s flight; the ones before and after his had come from Egypt and Morocco. She stood up and went to look. A few men in suits with lightweight cases; two couples; a family struggling with a precarious tower of luggage on a trolley whose front wheels wouldn’t cooperate. Spotting his father before his mother did, a toddler slipped out of her grasp and made a fat-legged beeline for him under the barrier, sending a ripple of laughter through the crowd.