Before We Met(55)

‘She asked me always to look out for him and I haven’t. Didn’t.’

‘What do you mean, look out for him?’

‘My mother was bright, as I said. She had a blind spot when it came to Nick but otherwise she was pretty on the ball. Anyway, when he and I were in our twenties, her blinkers started to come off, at least to some extent. I think she looked at him when he was twenty-three, twenty-four, living in London on money that she was giving him – she’d got a job on the tills at Debenhams so she could fund him. My God, the rows with Dad that set off. He said she was bringing the family down, humiliating him, making it look like he couldn’t afford to keep his wife and had to send her out to work in a shop.’ Mark blew out air. ‘Can I . . .?’ He pointed at the wine and Hannah poured him another glass.

‘Basically, it was hell. Anyway, thank God, somewhere in the middle of that particular shit-storm, I think it began to dawn on her that she was being played. My brother’s really clever, Han, cleverer than me by a long chalk, but he’s lazy, totally and utterly indolent – he’s not even embarrassed about it. The reason he didn’t have a job was that he couldn’t be bothered to get off his arse and take one – probably afraid someone would ask him to get up before eleven. Of course, he was giving Mum the whole bit about how difficult new graduates were finding it to get jobs – I can remember her standing in the kitchen one weekend repeating the statistics back at me – the state of the economy, blah, blah, blah. But finally, finally, she couldn’t quite accept it. I think probably she couldn’t get her head around the fact that no one wanted to employ her wunderkind so she was forced to conclude that something else was going on.’

‘So what happened?’

‘She asked me to give him a job at DataPro.’

‘God – and did you?’

‘Though it stuck in my craw, yes. I didn’t want him working for me, obviously – for a start, I knew he wouldn’t work and I’d only been going three years at that point, I didn’t have money to pay someone who wasn’t bringing anything in – but what I was really worried about was that he’d try and sabotage me.’

‘Sabotage?’

‘My brother doesn’t like me,’ Mark said, frankly. ‘The antipathy’s entirely mutual. He resents me, which doesn’t make a lot of sense all things considered, but there it is. He looks at me and sees the straight As at A-level, Cambridge, then DataPro, and he doesn’t realise that it all comes from work, nothing else. He thinks that I was just given it all, like he was given all the toys and money and abortions and cars and his rent in Borough paid for. Honestly, I think it never occurred to him that I started working like I do in a bid to get a bit of my parents’ attention for a change. The exam results, Cambridge – I was like a dog with a bone, coming home with my tail wagging and dropping it at their feet in the hope of a pat on the head.’

Hannah imagined him as a teenager and felt a burst of pity that hurt her heart.

‘Obviously, I’m grateful for it now because it gave me my work ethic and that’s given me the life I want.’ He reached across and took hold of her hand, rubbed his thumb over the backs of her fingers.

She waited a moment. ‘What happened?’ she said. ‘Did Nick sabotage you?’

‘He tried.’ Mark gave a sort of half-nod. ‘He was clever about it – there was always an alternative explanation for why every potential new client he went to meet decided not to go with us after all – but after a year and a half I just couldn’t put up with it any more. We lost an account for the first time, it had never happened before, and when I investigated, I found out that Nick had hit on the guy’s wife quite aggressively in the corridor of a restaurant while we were out for dinner. Then there was an issue with some missing money, ten thousand, and it turned out he’d “borrowed” it, which he didn’t admit until after I’d given our accountant a rocket and had him resign on me. So I fired him – Nick. I had to.’

‘How did he take it?’

‘He was fine – actually, he laughed – but my mother, both my parents, were furious. I think they thought they’d finally got him sorted and here he was, back on their hands again. They asked me what kind of brother I was, to do that to him, what kind of person I was to fire one of my own family, and I just lost it, told them what I really thought of Nick and the way my mother had let him ride rough-shod over her, probably made him the person he was. They didn’t talk to me for a year afterwards.’