Before We Met(68)

She looked at him, assessing. ‘So will you tell me now? The whole story?’

He looked back, his eyes begging her, don’t make me, but no, she thought, however much he hated it, however hard it was, she wasn’t going to move until he told her.

‘All of it,’ she said. ‘The truth.’

He glanced at the sideboard. ‘Is it too early for a drink?’

‘Yes, but what does that matter?’

With a sort of half-laugh, he pushed himself up. He took off his coat and dropped it over the back of the chair then opened the sideboard and got out a tumbler. He held it towards her, eyebrows raised, but she shook her head. Appearing not to notice how much was gone, he picked up the Armagnac, poured himself an inch and carried the glass back to the table. ‘Are you going to sit down?’

‘No.’ Unconsciously, she pressed back against the edge of the counter as he passed her.

He nodded slightly. ‘So how much do you know?’

‘That doesn’t matter. I want to hear it from you. From the beginning.’

‘The beginning.’ His eyebrows twitched and he took a sip of the brandy. In the yard behind him, the crow left the little table and settled on top of the end wall, turning its back on them.

‘I’ve told you what it was like at home,’ he said, ‘my mother and Nick, their special relationship, but maybe I was too hard on her – no, I was; I know I was. Even now, I find it really difficult not to get caught up in it all and behave like a teenager again.’ He grimaced. ‘Which is another reason I hated telling you about him. I want you to think of me as, I don’t know, competent, successful, in control . . . not some guy who’s still in bits at the age of forty because his mother loved his brother better.’

Hannah felt a surge of frustration. ‘I married you – you, a man, a living, breathing human. You don’t think I can deal with a bit of complexity?’

‘It had nothing to do with that – it was about what I wanted,’ he admitted. Seconds passed. He looked away. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘it wasn’t my mother’s fault – she didn’t make Nick what he was. Is. He was born like it. Her softness just made her an easier target. She was like an injured sheep stuck out on the edge of the flock, waiting to be picked off.’

Another sip. He rested the glass on his knee and stared into it as if he was looking into the embers of a fire. Come on, she thought, cut to the chase and tell me, but at the same time, for a reason she couldn’t identify, she was afraid.

‘Hannah, look,’ he said. ‘I told you the truth about Nick, I did, but it wasn’t . . .’ He sighed in frustration. ‘What I’m struggling to say is that it wasn’t the whole truth.’ He glanced at her then away again. ‘It was worse – is worse – than that. He wasn’t just badly behaved or spoiled or manipulative. Even before . . .’ He paused. ‘Even before Patty, it was evident there was something . . . wrong with him.’

‘Wrong?’ A chill crept over the back of her neck. ‘What do you mean?’

‘He doesn’t see the world like the rest of us do. No, that’s not it. He doesn’t see people. He doesn’t seem to get that they have interior worlds just as valid and real as his. He doesn’t get that other people have feelings.’

She’d never heard more than his name but suddenly Hannah had a mental image of Jim Thomas, their old neighbour in Eastbourne, tears running down his face as he hammered on the Reillys’ front door, a drowned dog in his arms.

‘It’s convenient for Nick because it means he can do exactly what he wants, behave like a monster, and he doesn’t give a shit. Does he care about what happened to Patty? Honestly? No. He cares about what happened to him because of what happened to her.’ Mark gave a short, bitter laugh. ‘He’s probably angry with her – I bet he’s found a way to make it all her fault.’

Through the cotton of her old T-shirt, the edge of the marble counter was hard against Hannah’s lower back, and her feet had started to ache on the cold tiles. She couldn’t sit down, though: taking a seat would mean getting closer to him.

‘Anyway,’ said Mark, ‘my parents knew. They knew something was wrong with him, seriously wrong, but he was still their son. Their response was to close ranks around him – he became this dark thing between us that we had to guard at all costs, try to protect from himself, but we also had to protect ourselves – we had to stop him from blowing up our lives. My parents’ way of doing this,’ he took a long in-breath, ‘was to make me responsible for him.’