Hanging up, she thought about whom she could call. Neesha, his assistant? No: it was almost half past eleven. And if Neesha knew there was a problem, she would have been in touch. The same went for David, his business partner. Mark had gone to America on his own this time so there was no one to cross-check with. If she didn’t hear from him tonight, she’d have to wait until the morning before she could start calling around.
Upstairs in the short-stay car park she narrowly mastered an urge to kick the ticket machine. ‘Twelve pounds for two crappy hours?’ Her voice echoed off the walls of the empty ticket-lobby.
The M4 back into London had gone quiet, too, and the streetlamps cast isolated pools of light on the carriageway ahead of her. On the raised section of road above Brentford she looked into offices vacated until Monday, seeing the ghostly shapes of desks and chairs and computers, and she had the sudden alarming idea that she was looking at a vision of her own career – distant, fading and locked away behind glass through which she could see it but no longer reach.
As she came down Quarrendon Street, the last of her hope disappeared. If Mark was ever home before her, she arrived to find lights blazing from every window but tonight the house was as dark as she’d left it.
Lynda, his cleaner – their cleaner – had been and the air smelled strongly of furniture polish. In the kitchen Hannah took a bottle of wine from the rack, poured a glass, then sat down with her laptop and checked her email. Occasionally her BlackBerry went through spells where no new messages would arrive for hours and then a glut would come all at once. That wasn’t happening now: the last email on both the phone and the computer was the one from her brother asking how her interview had gone.
She opened a blank message and addressed it to Mark.
Hello Heathrow no-show, she typed. I’m guessing you’re either still on a plane or something’s going on with your phone so I’m trying email instead. Let me know what’s happening. Missing you here at Quarrendon Street. House – and bed – empty without you . . .
She took a sip of wine – delicious: his idea of everyday wine came in a different price bracket from hers – then stood up and carried the glass across to the French windows that opened on to the small paved yard behind the house. When she shielded her eyes to block the light from inside, she could see the stone flags and then, towards the back, the shrubs and ornamental cherry tree. The wind had wreaked havoc. One of the wooden chairs had blown across the yard and lay on top of the stone trough where she had grown tomatoes over the summer, and the paving was strewn with leaves and twigs. It was a mess; if the rain stopped, she’d get out there tomorrow and clear it up.
Overhead, a plane tracked in towards Heathrow, now visible through a break in the clouds, now hidden again. Mark was probably still in the air, she told herself, and she’d wake up in a couple of hours to find him getting into bed next to her, and have a heart attack thinking he was a burglar.
She turned back to face the room and stopped. Occasionally she still had moments like this, when the sheer scale of the house struck her all over again. She’d been stunned when Mark told her he’d bought it in his late twenties; both the houses on the street that had sold since she moved in had gone for over two million. ‘But that’s now,’ he’d said. ‘I’ve had it twelve years, since well before the big boom, and it was a wreck when I got it. I bought it from this old couple who hadn’t done anything to it since the sixties and I had to do a total gut-job – new wiring, new plumbing, the works.’
‘Still . . .’
He’d shrugged. ‘I was lucky – the business was doing well and the price was right. It was a good investment.’
The idea that this was her kitchen now had taken some getting used to. She’d loved the one in her New York apartment with its original exposed-brick walls and industrial units, but viewed in the cold light of reality it had been a seven-foot length of corridor. In order to cook, she’d had to play a game like one of those squares with the moveable tiles that you rearrange to make a picture, continually finding new spots for plates and knives and chopping boards on the patch of counter space, the stove-top, the stool. This room was about ten times the size. In the unlikely event that she would ever want to cook for thirty, she could do it here without ever running out of elbow room.
Everything was big – everything; if it hadn’t been done so stylishly, it would have looked ostentatious. The original kitchen wall had been knocked out to extend the room into the side return, adding an extra six feet of width, and it had been twenty feet wide to begin with. The ceiling was high, the near part of it roofed with huge panes of glass for extra light, and the floor was covered in slabs of Welsh slate with heating underneath for the winter. There were steel-topped counters, a restaurant-sized cooker and, at the back, next to the door to the sitting room, an American-style double fridge.