Before We Met(16)

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.