‘Okay. Good.’
He took another big mouthful of wine and swallowed loudly. He looked down, training his eyes on his reddened fingers as they clutched the stem of the glass. ‘Nick was my mother’s favourite,’ he said. ‘She doted on him and I think she ruined him – literally spoiled him rotten.’ He blew out a quick spurt of air, as if it was funny.
Hannah said nothing and waited for him to go on.
‘It’s pretty easy to see why he was her favourite – I’m sure he would have been mine if I’d been her. I was awkward and self-conscious, I went through phases where I was really uncomfortable in my own skin, but he was one of those children who’s just somehow golden. Do you know what I mean?’
Hannah thought of Chessa’s daughter Sophia who, at seven, was already two years ahead of her peers at school and a gifted tennis player. She’d also been approached twice in London by scouts for children’s modelling agencies.
‘I was quite an anxious child, I think, always trying my best, worried about getting things right, but for Nick, life just seemed to roll out like a red carpet from the moment he arrived. He got everything right without trying, or that’s what it looked like: he slept through the night at two months, walked at nine, made everyone laugh with his little baby faces and games. My mother’s friends loved him, teachers loved him; he made friends without trying. Little girls at junior school actually wrote him love letters. I got all the childhood afflictions going: measles, mumps, whooping cough. For years I was at the doctor’s all the time with terrible psoriasis but I don’t remember anything ever being wrong with Nick.’
He pulled at a loose thread on his shirt cuff, avoiding her eye.
‘With hindsight,’ he said, ‘bits of it are quite funny. There’s this picture of us that encapsulates the whole thing. I’ll show it to you next time we’re in London. We’re on the beach in Devon and I’m seven, probably, so Nick must just have turned six – he was a summer baby, as my mother never grew tired of saying, as if that in itself made him special. He’s wearing these snazzy little boardshort-style trunks while I’m stuffed like a sausage into this hideous nylon Speedo-type thing which, frankly, was an affront to a man’s dignity even at that age.’ He smiled wryly. ‘Anyway, he’s wielding a gigantic ice cream, chocolate flake, the works, and if you look carefully, you can just see my cone in the bottom right-hand corner of the picture, down in the sand. I’d been stung by a wasp and dropped it.’
He smiled again trying to make a joke of it, but Hannah could hear the hurt running just beneath the surface of his voice.
‘Mark . . .’
He shook his head, wanting, now he’d started, to go on, get the whole thing over with on one long breath. ‘The thing is,’ he said, ‘none of this would have mattered, I don’t think, if my mother had been different – if she’d had any self-confidence at all or even just a more positive outlook. As a child I didn’t understand it – your parents are your norm, aren’t they? You only know things the way they show them to you – but as an adult I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it and I realise now that, for most of our childhood, she was pretty seriously depressed.’
‘Really? Was she treated for it?’
‘No. I tried to convince her to try treatment later on but she didn’t believe in pills or therapists; thought they were self-indulgent. It’s a shame. Maybe if . . .’ He shrugged. ‘On the surface you wouldn’t have been able to tell. She was very attractive, my mother, petite and slim and always well put together even though she couldn’t have had much money for clothes. She was bright, too, and funny, but she didn’t see that. The truth is, I think, she went through her life believing she wasn’t worth much and just waiting for people to confirm it. The only thing she was absolutely sure of was my brother, whose general rightness was so obvious that no one could dispute it. She had to be confident of Nick because it would have been blatantly mad not to. He was clever, handsome, funny, charming, you name it, and she was grateful to him because it made her feel like less of a failure. He validated her.’
‘What about your dad in all this? Where was he?’
‘Dad.’ A snort. ‘My dad was not a natural father; let’s just say that. We were too much for him, both of us – too loud, too boisterous, too demanding, too . . . everything. At some point around the time of that holiday, probably, give or take a year, he just checked out, told himself that as long as he was bringing home the bacon, providing, then he was doing his bit. He left everything else to my mother and the truth is, she wasn’t up to the job either so Nick took over.’