‘Old Mother Hubbard,’ she said, turning inside the circle of his arms. ‘The cupboard’s bare. It’s scrambled eggs for breakfast. If we’re lucky and there’s bread in the freezer, there might be toast.’
‘Ideal.’ He gave her a kiss then stood back to look at her, smiling. ‘I’ve missed your morning hair.’
He went back upstairs to shower while the coffee brewed and she made the eggs, watching the sky above the skylight turn from the blue-brown of heavy light pollution through grey to a blank white. Last night when they’d turned out the lights, Mark had come over to her side of the bed and wrapped himself around her. She’d known what he was trying to communicate – don’t worry, I’ll take care of things; we’ll be all right – but she’d felt need in the tightness of his arms, too, a silent search for reassurance.
Over breakfast they read each other snippets of news and he talked about the issues he was going to raise at the weekly meeting with the programmers in the afternoon. She listened, nodding in the appropriate places, all the time feeling pressure building inside her. Eventually, she couldn’t pretend any longer.
‘Mark, when are you going to talk to Nick?’
‘I don’t know.’ He put his coffee cup back in the saucer. ‘He said he’d contact me. It’s more power-play: I’ve been trying to reach him in Wakefield but he’s refusing to talk to me.’
‘Will he ring today?’
‘I’ve no idea, Hannah – I really can’t say.’ There was impatience in his voice and at once Mark looked ashamed of himself. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t sleep very well last night.’ He pressed his eyelids shut then opened them wide. ‘It’s possible he’ll call today, but if I know my brother he’ll be enjoying this, keeping me stewing. Either way, by tomorrow . . .’ She waited for him to go on but instead he pushed back his chair and carried his plate to the dishwasher.
They said goodbye at the front door and she watched him walk up the pavement to his car, straight-backed and broad-shouldered in his black winter coat, his leather laptop case under his arm. The Mercedes beeped once as he unlocked it with the remote fob. His self-possession was impressive. No one who saw him, she thought, would suspect for a minute that anything in his life wasn’t exactly as he’d designed it.
As his car rounded the corner, she felt the day gape open like a chasm in front of her. She went upstairs straight away and changed into her running clothes. She did three laps of the common, one more than usual, but as soon as she got back to the house, the anxiety flooded in again. She showered and dressed quickly then packed her research file into her bag. Today she needed to keep moving.
The Starbucks on the corner of Parsons Green was busy with the school drop-off crowd so she walked to Caffè Nero instead and set up shop at an empty table at the back. The file was proof in itself that she’d had too much time on her hands in the past few months, she thought. After some days away from it, she was struck by how madly detailed and over-organised it was, the sheer volume of information on successful recent campaigns collected at the front, filed alphabetically by name of the product, and then the agencies at the back. Each one had a full list of key personnel and an in-depth history including the partners’ previous backgrounds, industry awards won in the past five years and the names of all the clients her exhaustive research had uncovered.
She turned to the section on Penrose Price. There were a couple of pages of notes she’d made after her first interview, and after that a chunk – forty or fifty pages – of the material that she’d gathered beforehand: print-outs of articles from Campaign and Brand Republic, a helpful potted history of the agency – not nearly as detailed as her own – and interviews with both Roger Penrose and the hotshot Lewis Marant, his hire of three years ago, who was now talked about as one of the leading lights, if not the leading light, of the new generation of creatives.
Hannah flicked to the full-page interview with Marant she’d found in the Guardian. In the photograph, he was wearing an outfit identical to the one he’d had on at her second-round interview: a faded denim shirt open at the neck, sleeves rolled to the elbow, and a pair of heavy-rimmed tortoiseshell glasses that wouldn’t look out of place on a Williamsburg hipster or, more specifically, Flynn, her old assistant.
She’d read reams about him before they’d met and she hadn’t expected to warm to him. His press was almost too much; the online raving about his campaign for a new smartphone bordered on fan-boy adulation. In person, however, she’d liked Marant immediately. There’d been no pretension or cooler-than-thou cultural references; instead he’d known almost as much about her work as she did about his, and he’d told her that his five-year-old son sat at the tea-table banging his knife and fork and chanting her slogan for Happy Mouth ice cream. He’d also been refreshingly frank, centring their discussion on a campaign of his that hadn’t worked very well, asking what she would have done differently.