Before We Met(20)

Her eyes rested for a few seconds on the framed photograph that Mark kept on his desktop, just to the right of his computer. Neither of them had wanted an official photographer – in the context of the rest of their wedding, it would have seemed too fussy and formal – but Ant had insisted they’d want some pictures and had taken on the role himself. Hannah picked up the photo and looked at it. There they were on the steps of Chelsea Town Hall, Mark in his gorgeous navy suit, grinning and squinting into the sharp April sun, one hand curled firmly round the waist of her oyster silk shift dress. She had a hand up too, shielding her eyes from the storm of confetti that Pippa and Roisin had just unleashed over their heads. Mark’s smile – being the focus of it was like standing in front of a large plate-glass window and feeling the sun stream through, light and warmth together.

Just after the picture had been taken he’d turned to kiss her, confetti still scattered on the shoulders of his jacket. ‘Look at you,’ he said. ‘You’re everything I’ve ever wanted.’

About a hundred times that day, during the wildly extravagant lunch at Claridge’s, the champagne afterwards and the cab ride out to Heathrow for the flight to Capri, she’d looked at him and thought, My husband, and had hardly been able to believe it. Now, just eight months later, here she was sneaking about in his office on a Saturday afternoon. She felt a wash of intense revulsion at herself. Come on then, she thought; just look for the file and go.

The drawers opened effortlessly, as if cushioned by air. She went through them one by one, not letting herself be distracted by anything else, just looking for the grey marbled cardboard of the box-file. By the time she reached the last two, she’d convinced herself it wasn’t going to be there, but as she opened the lowest of the three drawers on the right-hand side, the spot corresponding to the one the file occupied in his desk at home, she saw it. She lifted it out on to the desktop and pressed the round plastic button at the side to release the lid.

Inside was a pile of paperwork an inch or so thick, a statement from Mark’s Coutts current account on the top. She scanned quickly down the list of recent transactions but there was nothing that caught her eye, no large amounts of money going out to Tiffany, the Waldorf-Astoria, or even – as far as she could tell – some high-end florist. She sprang the clip that held the papers in place and took the statement out but, as she was turning to the second page, she saw what was next in the file, a letter from the building society, and her eyes homed in on a number. £130,000. She picked the letter up and read the full sentence. ‘Following our recent meeting, I am pleased to be able to confirm an extension to your mortgage of £130,000, as requested.’ She skimmed the rest and then turned to the sheet attached, a revised schedule of payments. Almost without thinking, she put out her hand, pulled up Mark’s chair and sat down.

If the schedule was correct, they owed just shy of £700,000. ‘Seven hundred thousand’ – she murmured the words aloud, shocked. She’d had no idea their mortgage was so huge – it was an incredible amount. Even when she’d had a job, there was no way her salary could ever have supported a loan of that size. It was in Mark’s name, of course, and any salary she had was irrelevant, but he’d told her he didn’t have much of a mortgage left at all; that having owned the house for over a decade, he’d paid off several large chunks as well as making the regular payments. It was the main reason she’d agreed, after several heated discussions, to let him go on paying it as he always had, without any contribution from her, until she found a new job.

But extending the mortgage like this, without talking to her about it, that was something else. How could he do it? Weren’t they married? Weren’t they supposed to talk about things like this, make decisions together? Perhaps, she thought, Mark would argue that he hadn’t wanted to worry her about it while she didn’t have a job – and her not having a job was because of him, since she’d had to resign hers to move back to London – or perhaps, because he’d owned the house for so many years before they met, he still thought of it as in some way his, or at least his responsibility.

But however he was justifying it to himself – if he even felt he had to justify it – Hannah was angry. How could he? Following our recent meeting: he’d had an appointment at the building society, been in to discuss this with someone without even mentioning it to her. Which meant he’d come home one day in the not-too-distant past and lied about what he’d been doing. She turned the page back over and glanced at the date. 29 October – less than a fortnight ago. God.