She’d slowly washed up the dinner things, tense with listening for the sound of his key in the door. By the time the kitchen was restored to order, though, it was half-eleven and there was no sign of him. She sat in the corner armchair, pulled her legs up under her and tried to focus on the copy of Leaves of Grass that she’d been attempting to get into all week. Again, the attempt was fruitless: the scarcity of punctuation meant she had to read each sentence two or three times before she could even work out which was the main verb, and when she’d done that, the words swum on the page anyway and refused to organise themselves into any thought she could understand.
She put the book down and picked up the previous week’s New York magazine but fared no better. Where was he? Was he holed up in a bar somewhere pounding the Scotch? Was this his way of punishing her? She was exhausted but wired; all she wanted was to get into bed and disappear under the covers but she knew she wouldn’t sleep until he came home or at least let her know that he wasn’t going to. She checked her phone again: nothing. Anyway, she didn’t want to go to bed, not really. She needed to be dressed when he came home, it seemed important. She didn’t want to be in her pyjamas when he had the advantage of proper clothes.
The clock on the cable box read ten past one when she heard footsteps outside in the corridor. At the jangle of keys she sat up straight and quickly arranged herself into an attitude of casual reading, though the fact that she was still up at all made a lie of any pretence of normality.
He shut the door quietly behind him, took off his coat and dropped it gently over the arm of the sofa. ‘Hi.’
‘Hi,’ she replied in the same neutral tone, waiting to see what his move would be, what his mood was now.
He looked at her, his expression still neutral, then he crossed the room until he was standing a couple of feet away. He crouched in front of her and looked up into her face. ‘Han, I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m really, really sorry.’
To her shame, she was flooded with relief. As the time had stretched, the scenarios she’d envisaged had grown darker and darker: maybe it was ruined; maybe he’d decided that he couldn’t live with her, that it was over, their engagement was off. By the end, she’d been battling to keep her thinking straight, to remember that she hadn’t done anything wrong. Now she waited for Mark to go on.
‘I’m sorry for flying off the handle like that – for being over-sensitive,’ he said. ‘I owe you an apology, I know, but also an explanation.’
‘Look, it’s okay . . .’ she started but he cut her off.
‘No, it isn’t. It isn’t. My brother and I – this is why I don’t see Nick, why I hate even talking about him. It’s like every time anyone mentions his name, something happens to me and I go from being a reasonable, semi-decent person to someone I don’t recognise. I hate it – I hate myself for it – and yet I don’t seem to be able to stop it.’ His face was anguished now.
‘Mark, I’m so sorry. I didn’t want to upset you. I—’
‘No, don’t apologise; you’ve done nothing wrong. It’s totally reasonable to ask about him. Why shouldn’t you? If you marry me’ – he made it sound as if she might really have changed her mind, and the idea made her chest ache – ‘if you marry me, you deserve to know everything about me, even the things I’d keep hidden from you given half a chance, the stuff I’m not proud of. I only want you to see the good things, the light-hearted, fun, successful Mark, not the one who can’t handle his brother and let his mother down. I let my own mother down,’ he said, ‘and she’s dead and I can never make it right. I’ll never be able to forgive myself.’
His eyes were shining now, as if he were on the verge of tears. She stood up, took his hand and pulled him gently over to the sofa before going to the kitchen and retrieving a new bottle of wine and fresh glasses. When she handed him one, he drank an inch from the top of it in a single swig. As she’d held his hand she’d sniffed surreptitiously for the smell of alcohol but there had been no trace of it and his fingers had been red and ice-cold, the bones like sticks beneath his skin. He must have been walking outside all the time he’d been gone.
‘I’m going to tell you about Nick,’ he said.
‘Only if you want to. It can wait – it’s late. We’re both tired. We can talk about it tomorrow.’
‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘I want to talk about it now. I need to explain.’ He looked at her. ‘Storming out like that won’t be normal practice, I promise.’