Before We Met(38)

‘Good. That’s good.’ Again, her mother sounded relieved. Sometimes, Hannah thought, her mother seemed to interpret Mark’s business travel as a sign of reluctance to be at home rather than a necessary part of running an international firm. Who knows, though? Maybe that was right.

For a mad moment, she thought about telling her mother everything, just laying it all out and throwing herself on her mercy. She wanted her support and sympathy; she wanted advice, to be told what to do. As quickly as it had come, though, the impulse was gone. It was impossible: there was no way she could reveal any of this. As soon as she let on even part of it, her mother would be proved right: she, Hannah, couldn’t do it; she wasn’t the sort of person who could hold down a relationship. She was too independent, too preoccupied with her career, too selfish. Somewhere deep in her psyche, unidentified but definitely real, something was wrong with her. Look at what had happened with Bruce; look at the disaster of the years after him. And now look at things with Mark: their marriage on the rocks in less than a year – barely more than half that.

And her mother loved Mark, absolutely loved him. Even beyond the gratitude she would have felt towards anyone who’d taken her spinster daughter off the shelf, Sandy adored him.

She’d met him for the first time at Christmas last year. Hannah had flown back from New York on the twentieth to spend a couple of days in London before going up to Malvern. Not wanting to leave all the preparation to her mother, she’d planned to take the train up a couple of days early; Mark would drive up on Christmas Eve. He, however, had got back from the office in the evening of the twenty-first and announced he’d closed DataPro early and would drive up with Hannah the next day.

If she was honest, she’d imagined his idea of helping would be to open bottles and distract them, but almost as soon as they’d arrived, he’d taken on the mantle of man about the house. While she was talking to her mother, he’d slipped outside without a word and stacked the load of logs that the log-man, finding her mother out when he came to deliver, had dumped directly in front of the garage door, blocking her car in.

The house was small – splitting the family finances had left both of their parents pretty broke – but Hannah’s mother had four or five lovely pieces of furniture that had come down through her family, and a talent for finding gems in poky old junk shops. Mark had made her take him round the house and tell him the story behind everything, the details of its period and style, where it had come from. He was particularly effusive about the Georgian card table she’d inherited from her grandmother and asked Sandy if she would keep an eye out for something similar for the house in Quarrendon Street.

Afterwards he’d lit the fire, hung the mistletoe, poured Sandy a glass of wine, then perched on the fireguard and chatted to her for over an hour while Hannah cooked supper. The house had felt different, more alive, and her mother, fluttery and nervous for the first couple of hours of their being there, had become animated, even mildly flirtatious, telling self-deprecatory stories and tales of Hannah’s childhood. ‘He’s lovely, Hannah,’ she’d whispered as they carried the dishes back into the kitchen after dinner. She’d put the stack of plates on the draining board and squeezed her daughter’s arm with excitement. ‘Really lovely.’

And then there had been Boxing Day. After breakfast Mark had suggested a walk. Hannah had tried to convince her mother to come but she’d refused with a vigour that was quite uncharacteristic. They’d spent a few minutes trying on wellies from the collection in the hall cupboard then set off for British Camp, her mother waving to them, bright-eyed, from the step.

When they’d parked the car, they’d taken the upper footpath to the Iron Age fort at the top of the beacon, the cold air and the steepness of the climb taking Hannah’s breath away. ‘I blame the pudding,’ she said after five or six minutes, trying to disguise the undignified heaving in her chest. ‘And the mince pies. And the roast potatoes. I feel like I’ve put on half a stone since yesterday.’

‘You’re still gorgeous, swede-heart. I’d take on a fortful of pagans for you.’

‘I think I’m only just beginning to understand the full extent of your power to charm,’ she said, looking at him sidelong. ‘You’ve got my mother under some sort of bewitchment.’

‘Bewizardment.’ The path flattened for a hundred yards or so and he paused to look at Herefordshire spread out in front of them, a view, Hannah always thought, that notwithstanding the occasional telephone mast and the glint of tiny cars here and there on the cotton-threads of roads across it, might not have changed in two hundred years. ‘Or bewarlockment?’ he said. ‘Which do you reckon?’