Before We Met(5)
‘Are you sure?’ she’d asked, feeling her heart plummet.
‘It was their number one recommendation – the only one that would make any real difference to our operating costs, actually. I hate it, too – having a New York office was always a goal of mine, as you know – but really, we can handle the US business from London. We don’t need a physical presence here. I’m so sorry, Han.’
His salary was bigger than hers by a factor of about five, and she was just an employee, not the owner of a company like he was. There was also the question of visas – they were both British so living in London was by far the easiest option – and while her apartment in the West Village had been rented, he’d already owned this house. She knew before he said it that if they were going to live together, everything argued that she should make the move. So, after some fruitless efforts to convince Leon, her old boss, that she should open a London office for him, Hannah resigned from her job and, five months ago, had packed up her apartment and shipped her belongings back here, her seven years of living and working in New York finished. Until she’d met Mark, she’d thought she’d live there for the rest of her life.
Quite apart from how much she wanted to be with him, though, she was surprised by how much she was enjoying being back in London. Even before she’d met Mark, she’d come back quite frequently to see her brother and her parents and to keep in touch with friends, but after two or three years she’d begun to feel like a tourist, someone who saw all the nice things – restaurants, galleries, the new bars her friends took her to – but had no real connection to the place, no day-to-day relationship with it.
That feeling had nearly evaporated now, and it was lovely to regain some of the British traditions she’d used to miss. Last week, she and Mark had walked over to Bishops Park to watch the fireworks on Bonfire Night. Impressive as the Macy’s 4 July fireworks were, for her they didn’t have the same emotional resonance, the layered memories of all the local fireworks she’d gone to with her parents when she and Tom were children, with toffee apples and the lighting of the huge bonfire that they’d watched burgeon with garden waste and broken pallets and lengths of rotten fencing in the weeks beforehand until it reached fifteen or twenty feet high. Bishops Park wasn’t the same, of course – no bonfire, for one thing, because of city fire regulations – but damp November grass smelled the same here as in Worcestershire, and she’d loved watching the Thames at the park’s edge as it slipped silently past them in the dark, its surface catching glints of blue and green and red from the explosions overhead.
Down in the hall again, she sat at the bottom of the stairs to put her trainers on then let herself out of the house, zipping the door key into her jacket pocket. The low hedge behind the front wall was wet with the rain that had fallen overnight and a perfect cobweb on the gatepost was strung with drops like glass beads. She opened the gate carefully so as not to disturb it.
She walked up Quarrendon Street, taking long strides to stretch her legs. She was getting to know some of the neighbours now, at least by sight, and nodded to the man from number twenty-three who was coming down the pavement with the Telegraph and a bag of what she guessed were croissants from the delicatessen tucked under his arm. With his quizzical expression and the grey hair that touched the velvet collar of his three-quarter-length camel coat, he reminded her of Bill Nighy. He was typical of the residents here: either wealthy families, who walked their children, in immaculate uniforms and straw boaters, to the nearby private preparatory school each morning, or well-preserved empty-nesters. It was an unusual place for a bachelor in his twenties to have bought a house – there were far hipper areas than Fulham – and while it was very expensive, it wasn’t flash at all. Mark could have chosen some vast renovated loft in Docklands or the East End, all glass and chrome and huge leather sofas, but instead he’d gone for a traditional Victorian family house. She loved him for it.
She crossed New King’s Road and started jogging gently along the pavement. The trees that shielded the wedding-cake Regency houses from the road here were dripping heavily, the water pattering on to the fallen leaves plastered over the ground in a soaked homogenous layer.
Hannah had known it would be difficult to get another job, especially one like the one she’d had in New York, but she’d wildly underestimated how difficult. She’d thought that with her American experience and a reputation for coming up with campaigns that had done well on both sides of the Atlantic, she’d be able to find a new position within three to four months, even with the economic climate as it was. ‘People will always hire the best candidates,’ Mark had said the first time they’d discussed it. ‘It might take a little while for something you want to open up, but don’t worry about not getting a job. People are going to want to hire you – they’ll be fighting to do it.’