Before We Met(101)

‘You see?’ said Mrs Reilly. ‘And look – here.’ She flicked forward several pages to a picture of Mark in uniform, grey trousers and a grey V-neck sweater with a maroon stripe at the collar and cuffs, a rucksack at his feet. Another picture taken under duress: in this one, Mark’s anxiety to get away was palpable. He was at an angle to the camera, his shoulder already turned, his weight on the back foot. Again his face was blank, closed, but this time there was something else, almost masked but definitely there: disdain.

‘His first day at senior school,’ his mother said. ‘I just wanted one picture, a record, but—’

‘That’s enough,’ snapped Mr Reilly. ‘The woman hasn’t come here to sit and maunder over old photographs.’

Hannah felt an urge to protect his wife, shield her from his corrosive anger. ‘It’s fine,’ she said. ‘Nice, I mean. I’ve only ever seen a couple of pictures of him when he was young. It’s good to . . .’

‘I’m amazed he has any at all. Or perhaps he likes them – maybe they’re part of his creation myth: look at what he had to overcome to get to where he is today,’ scoffed Mr Reilly.

Next to Hannah, Mrs Reilly gave a quiet sob.

Outside, there was a gust of wind and then a sudden sharp cracking sound as if someone had thrown a handful of gravel against the bay window. Hail – the clouds that had been gathering all afternoon had finally reached critical mass. In seconds the room was dark.

Mark’s mother closed the album and returned it to the bureau, stashing it back beneath the papers in the bottom drawer. When she turned around, she looked at Hannah, avoiding her husband’s eye. ‘Would you like to see his room?’

From deep in Mr Reilly’s throat came a sound of disgusted resignation.

Outside in the hall, his wife gave Hannah a look that mixed gratitude with a hint of conspiracy and led her to the back of the house. Through a half-open door Hannah caught a glimpse of a small, neat kitchen with units so dated they had to be from the sixties. Outside the last door Mrs Reilly paused, her hand on the cheap handle. ‘I haven’t changed it,’ she said. ‘It’s exactly how it used to be.’ She lowered her voice until it was almost a whisper. ‘Gordon doesn’t like it, it makes him angry, but I won’t let him touch it.’ There was unexpected fire in her eyes as she pressed down the handle and ushered Hannah inside.

For a second or two she was confused. The room was schizophrenic. One half of it had clearly been a teenage boy’s: there was a huge, obsolete black stereo with a stack of CDs; a punch-ball on a stand; and, beneath a behemoth of a television with a back about two feet deep, some sort of games console in a nest of cables. On the shelf above an ugly veneered desk, piles of GCSE Letts Revise guides and graffiti-covered exercise books kept company with a foot-long red model Ferrari and a stack of Loaded magazines.

The other half of the room was immaculate and almost empty. Both sides had single beds but where the first had a duvet in a charcoal-grey cover, this one had been made up with starched white sheets. This bedside table held a lamp with a wooden base and plain cloth shade, not an Anglepoise, and where the other half had posters of Bob Marley and generously endowed women in impractical swimwear – how Mrs Reilly must love those, Hannah thought – here the walls were bare. The shelf above an identical ugly desk was empty apart from a box-file like the one Mark used for his financial papers.

‘They had to share,’ Mrs Reilly said. ‘We’ve only got two bedrooms.’

‘Mark’s side?’ Hannah indicated the cluttered half, thinking that his mother must have cleared Nick’s in horror after he went to prison, but Mrs Reilly shook her head.

‘No,’ she said, ‘this is Mark’s.’

‘I thought you hadn’t changed it?’ Hannah frowned.

Again Mrs Reilly shook her head. ‘I haven’t. He took his clothes and books when he went up to Cambridge, but otherwise this is how he kept it.’

‘It’s very . . . tidy,’ Hannah said, as the word ‘monastic’ came into her mind. That wasn’t right either, though. That implied asceticism, but the white sheets and plain lamp suggested a deliberate aesthetic, a less-is-more minimalism.

‘He left this,’ said Mrs Reilly. Turning, Hannah saw that she’d taken the box-file down from the shelf. ‘I found it pushed right back underneath the chest of drawers just after he went to college. He wrote to me, actually, asking me to send it on to him, but I said no, he could come and collect it himself if he wanted it so badly.’ She gave a small smile, embarrassed by her show of toughness but proud of it, too. ‘It was a lure – I knew he wouldn’t visit otherwise.’ She gave a small shrug. ‘It didn’t work, obviously.’