Before We Met(11)

‘I don’t want to do a Justin,’ he had said in the dark behind her as they were making their way back through the dunes, gorse catching at their jeans, ‘but I wondered . . . I’m in New York all next week. Would you like to have dinner one night?’

She hesitated, the muscles in her stomach making a single painful contraction. ‘Yes,’ she said, her voice carrying back through the darkness. ‘That would be good.’





Chapter Three

The wind had caused a surprising amount of damage. Though the yard wasn’t much more than twenty feet square, clearing it up would take a while. It wasn’t just the heaps of fallen leaves and the broken branches on the cherry tree; the wind had carried rubbish into the garden – there were sheets of wet newspaper and a couple of crisp packets, and a white polythene shopping bag was snared in the tree’s upper branches, tattered and flapping. Hannah picked up the wooden chair and set it back on its feet then went back inside to get garden-waste bags and the stiff broom.

It was half past eleven now. She’d rung Tom and arranged to meet him at eight at what had become their usual spot since she’d been back, a little place tucked away off the street in Chinatown that did authentic Szechuan. His friend Zhang An had recommended it and Hannah suspected her brother might count as technically addicted to the Bang Bang chicken.

It would be good, she thought, to see him on her own, without the presence of Mark or Tom’s wife, Lydia, who’d taken her mother away for a long weekend in Harrogate. Evenings with the four of them were fun but it wasn’t the same. She liked Lydia a lot but Mark and Tom were so different that sometimes the conversation dried up. Nothing was wrong; it was just that, apart from her, they had little common ground. Mark, in particular, made a big effort, talking to Tom about cricket in the summer and now rugby league – once when they were due to have dinner together, she’d caught him on the Harlequins website, reading up beforehand – but they were different types of people. Tom taught English at a school in Highbury and Mark ran DataPro; Tom liked Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace and slim volumes written by anxious young men, and, unless she recommended something to him, Mark read non-fiction – biographies of presidents and business leaders, history and economics – or Penguin Classics.

She rolled up her sleeve and plunged her hand into the little water feature, collecting the freezing mulch of dead leaves that was blocking the drainage hole. The thing always made her laugh. Even the term ‘water feature’ was hilarious – infra dig, her mother would say – but this one was particularly dreadful. Mark’s renovation work hadn’t extended as far as the garden, in which he’d done the minimum possible while maintaining a space large enough to sit out with a drink in the evening. She’d assumed responsibility for it over the summer, when she’d moved in properly, and in cutting back the Virginia creeper that he’d allowed to run amok, she’d uncovered a small, cross-looking stone face, set into the right-hand corner of the far wall. Investigating further, she realised it still worked, so that when it was turned on at the covered switch next to the French windows, water dribbled out from between the cherub’s pouting stone lips into the shallow basin beneath its chin.

‘Have you seen this?’ Hannah asked, summoning Mark into the garden.

‘I have,’ he said. ‘Hence the creeper.’

‘Come on, it’s hysterical.’

‘It’s hideous. It looks like it’s at the dentist, spitting into a bowl. Quick, cover it back up before anyone sees it.’

‘No way – it’s funny. And it works.’

Mark had made a face not dissimilar to the carved one, and put his arms around her waist. ‘I like seeing you in the garden,’ he said. ‘It suits you, English Rose.’ He brought his hand up and touched a strand of her hair that had worked its way out of the loose knot she tied it in when she was working. She was naturally blonde, going darker in the winter but quickly brightening up again in the sun, especially around her face. She’d never had her hair highlighted and she knew he liked that, as well as her general laissez-faire approach to her appearance, which he chose to interpret as a deliberate aesthetic. One of the first times they’d been to bed together, he’d brought his head close to hers on the pillow and stroked her cheek. ‘Are you even wearing any make-up?’ he’d asked.

‘A little bit. Powder, some eyeliner and mascara. Honestly, though? I’m not very good at it. I see all these immaculately made-up New Yorkers and I wish I could do it but . . .’