Hannah pulled her legs up and wrapped her arms round her knees. ‘But I still don’t see why you feel guilty. You couldn’t be expected to go on employing him if he was wrecking your business, and it sounds like your parents – definitely your dad – agreed with you about the way he’d treated your mother.’
‘I think they did. That isn’t what I feel bad about. I made it up with them eventually, and my father had a couple of Scotches at Christmas a couple of years after that and said that bringing up Nick had been a nightmare. It was what happened later, when my mother was dying. I told you she died after my dad?’
Hannah nodded.
‘I was with her that morning. Nick got there too late. He was having an affair with a woman in Brighton and her husband was away – too good an opportunity to pass up. He didn’t make it to the hospital till one, by which point Mum was gone. But she asked me that morning – she made me swear – to look after him.’
‘What did she mean by that? Surely you couldn’t . . .’
‘Give him another chance at DataPro. He’d been drifting ever since he left, doing a bit of one thing, getting fired, trying something else, never sticking at anything . . . and I think it worried her all the time she was ill – she couldn’t rest easy when Nick was still so unsettled. Things like that were important to her: she was very old-fashioned. I know it bothered her, for instance, that neither of us was married.’
‘Maternal classic.’
‘Anyway, I promised her. I swore. I swore to her that I would look after him. I wouldn’t give him money but I’d give him a job, and she said, “Thank you, Mark,” and about an hour after that, she died. I think it was the only thing I ever did that really touched her – made a difference.’ His voice cracked and he bent his head. Hannah heard him give a hard swallow and put her hand out to him, but he shook his head.
‘The thing is, after she died, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t let him come in and stuff things up, patronise me, help himself to the bank accounts – I just couldn’t do it. So the promise I made to her, I broke. I lied to my mother on her deathbed.’
The look on his face was so bleak, so full of self-hatred, that Hannah couldn’t stand it. She moved across the sofa now, kneeled upright and put her arms around him, holding him so tightly she could feel his ribcage even through the layers of his shirt and jumper. She pressed her face against the side of his neck and felt his pulse beat against her lips. For two or three minutes she held on to him, saying nothing but communicating, she hoped, that she understood and pitied him and loved him. When finally she pulled away, his cheeks were wet and she kissed them.
‘Where is he now?’ she asked gently.
‘I don’t know,’ he croaked, then cleared his throat. ‘I’m not sure. London, I think. A couple of years ago I bumped into an old friend of my dad’s and he seemed to think Nick was working for an estate agent in Highgate. But that was two years ago so . . .’ He shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’
Chapter Twelve
It had still been light when Hannah had left the hospital but by the time the Tube rattled back above ground at Eel Brook Common the sun, such as it had been, was long gone. Though it wasn’t yet five, the train had become busier and busier as it tracked its way under central London, and from Monument on, she’d been surrounded by a thicket of legs in suits, a changing cast of crotches at eye-level that swayed and lurched towards her as the carriage cornered, their owners gripping the overhead bar with one hand, texting or clutching double-folded copies of the Standard with the other. It was nearly Monday evening suddenly: Mark would be back in the morning.
Prison. The idea was incredible: his brother – her brother-in-law, whatever Mark said – was in prison. As she’d left the hospital, the word had been tolling in her ears: prison, prison. What had Nick done? Pride had stopped her from asking Hermione. She’d already humiliated herself by going there and accosting the woman in the corridor, accusing her of having an affair. Hannah felt blood rush to her face at the memory. She might just as well have come out and said it: our marriage is a sham; I don’t trust Mark not to sleep around, and he doesn’t trust me enough to tell me about his brother. She’d played it off as though she knew all about it – Of course! His brother, of course. Very sorry, crossed wires – but Hermione clearly hadn’t been fooled. Why would she have been? She had half a brain, didn’t she?
Hannah had a momentary mental image of Hermione’s face as she’d left, the lines around her wide eyes. She was very attractive, striking even, but she looked knackered, completely worn out. Actually, what she looked was worn down, as if she’d been tired for a very long time. Maybe it was smoking that had given her that pale, prematurely aged skin, the dark circles and the bony bird-like sternum visible in the vee of her green surgical tunic. Surely not, though: she was in her late thirties, forty-one or -two at most if she was Mark’s direct contemporary; she wasn’t old enough for the kippered smoker’s look. It was stress that made people look like that, years of stress, doubtless in her case the pressure of making it to the top in the male-dominated, big-swinging-dicks world of surgery.