Before We Met(54)

‘What do you mean?’ Hannah felt herself frown.

‘He’s manipulative. No, that doesn’t cover it – doesn’t even touch the sides. He’s brilliant, actually, an absolute genius at playing people to get what he wants from them. My mother was his masterstroke, though. When he was nine or ten, he realised what was going on, the power he had over her because she derived what little self-esteem she had from being the mother of this perfect being, and he started – quite consciously, you could see it – to use that.’

Hannah felt a frisson of revulsion. ‘How?’

Mark gave a small shrug. ‘It started innocently enough. I think one day it just dawned on him that she needed him so badly, needed his approval and general good feeling towards her so much, that it was impossible for her to say no to him – she just couldn’t risk it. Once he’d realised that, it was Pandora’s Box with the lid off. When you’re nine and ten, it’s all about sweets and crisps and getting around your bedtime, kid stuff, but even within a few months it got more serious. He wanted things – I mean, I know children these days are supposed to be the most materialistic they’ve ever been, fed all these pernicious adverts on TV’ – he made a face at her – ‘but, frankly, my brother would have taken some beating. Scaletrix, walkie-talkies, Nintendo games, a sega – the demands got bigger and bigger and more expensive, and she just kept saying yes.’

‘Could they afford it? You said that—’

‘No, and that was a big problem, because Dad used to see all the stuff and freak out, scream at Mum, and she took it as further evidence that she was a failure, there was something fundamentally just second-rate and wrong with her. Then Nick would creep in and put his arms round her and tell her that everything was all right and he loved her, all the time mentally compiling his next set of demands, and the cycle repeated itself.’

‘God.’

Mark shrugged again. ‘By the time he was fourteen or fifteen, he was doing pretty much whatever he wanted: not turning up at school more than two or three days a week, smoking weed, having sex. My parents got home from a memorial service for a friend of theirs one afternoon and found him in their bed with Dad’s boss’s daughter. Actually in flagrante, apparently. Becca, the bloody idiot, let him take Polaroids and he showed them round the whole sixth form. It very, very nearly lost my dad his job. God, Nick would have loved that – until the money dried up, anyway.’ Mark rolled his eyes.

‘Your poor parents.’

‘At least Becca wasn’t the one he got pregnant – that was the English teacher’s daughter. My mother stumped up for the abortion, of course, and didn’t say a word to Mr or Mrs Stevens. They kept it a secret from Dad, too. Oh, Nick did it all, every last bit of teenage miscreancy you can imagine – drugs, shoplifting. That was purely for the thrill, by the way – there was no need for him to nick anything because Mum would just give him whatever money he asked for.’

Mark took a final slug of wine and emptied the glass. When he started talking again, the hurt was back in his voice, even less successfully masked now.

‘I didn’t get a car when I turned seventeen,’ he said, ‘but a year later Nick did, a vintage Triumph Spitfire that he’d campaigned and campaigned for, and which arrived outside the house on the morning of his birthday with a big clichéd red sash that Mum had tied round the middle. He wrote it off drink-driving a month after he passed his test, but as soon as he got his licence back she bought him another one exactly the same because she knew how much he loved it.’

‘How could someone behave like that? And how did your mum afford it? Two cars . . .’

‘My grandmother died – Mum’s mother. She didn’t have a lot but she did have some equity in her house and Mum, the only child, inherited it – which meant Nick did, by proxy. By the time he graduated from university – which was something of a miracle in itself – he’d run through the lot. Mum had nothing left. The rows about that – I wasn’t at home by that stage but she told me about them. It nearly ended my parents’ marriage.’

Hannah reached for the cardigan that she’d taken off while she was cooking. It was half past one and the heating in the building had long gone off for the night but the cold felt like more than that, a chill in her bones. ‘Frankly,’ she said, ‘he sounds like a total bastard.’

‘He became one.’

‘But what I don’t understand is, why do you feel bad about any of this? Why do you think you let your mother down?’