Before We Met(9)

She thought about Mark sitting across a table from Ant and Roisin, and was jealous. She loved those two, the best friends she’d made while she was over there. She’d met Roisin when the company she worked for, Ecopure, had commissioned the agency to do press ads for a new range of all-natural household detergents. Hannah had taken her out to lunch one day early on and had an experience not dissimilar to falling in love in terms of the strength of the connection they’d discovered. They’d talked about their lives, their parents, where they’d grown up. Roisin said she’d moved to New York from San Francisco on her own at nineteen and worked at three jobs until she’d saved enough money to put herself through a marketing degree at NYU. Hannah had loved that story: the image it conjured up of a determined, self-possessed, nineteen-year-old Roisin. The following week, when they’d gone out for drinks on a non-work footing and staggered out of a place somewhere in the East Village long past midnight, Ro had hugged her and told her, somewhat slurrily, that she hadn’t met anyone she liked so much since the day she’d met Ant.

And it had been they who had introduced Hannah to Mark. When Ant scored his big promotion last year, they’d decided that they’d spend the extra money on renting a summer place on Long Island. It was late in the year to start looking but within a couple of weeks they’d found an old, somewhat dilapidated shingle house in Montauk, a few minutes’ walk from the beach. Occasionally they went on their own, but most weekends they invited friends out from the city. They always asked Hannah, and she almost always got one of the two tiny sea-smelling back bedrooms that faced on to the long lagoon behind the house. About six weeks after the rental started, she’d arrived in a cab from the station to find a tall, dark-haired man asleep in the Adirondack chair on the veranda, Roisin’s panama tipped forward over his eyes, long bare feet resting on the wooden crate they used as an outside drinks table, the last inch of a bottle of Sam Adams going warm in his hand. He was so soundly asleep that he hadn’t woken up even when she’d lost her grip on the screen door and it had snapped closed behind her like a jaw.

There’d been a note on the kitchen table to tell her that everyone else had gone to the beach. When she’d got down there and located Ro in the usual spot at the foot of the dunes, Hannah had asked who the man was.

‘Mark. A new friend of Ant’s,’ Roisin had said, leaning forward to retie the straps of her red halter-neck bikini. ‘They met at Harry’s bachelor party a few weeks back and got on like a house on fire. He’s one of yours, actually – a Brit.’

‘Really?’ Hannah rubbed in some factor 25, feeling the tops of her shoulders burning already. The glare was so intense that even through her sunglasses the beach looked stripped of colour. It was the busiest it had been so far that summer, the wide expanse of white sand fully colonised by other groups of people in their twenties and thirties sunbathing or playing volleyball, couples watching small children tearing around or digging busily in the sand. The occasional older couple sat in deckchairs reading paperback thrillers. Down in the water she could see Ant and Laura, an old college friend of theirs, trying to stay upright in the breakers. ‘You haven’t mentioned him before,’ she said.

‘Really? I thought I had.’

‘Oh, like you wouldn’t remember.’

Roisin shrugged, making an innocent face.

‘I hope you’re not scheming.’

‘About what? I know you don’t do relationships – not decent ones.’

‘What’s wrong with indecent ones?’

‘Nothing at all, in my book. And frankly, if I wasn’t married . . .’

‘Does he live here?’

‘Kind of – or he has done. He’s got a software company. They’re based in London but they’ve got an office in Tribeca and he goes back and forth. He used to have an apartment, he was saying last night, but he moves around so much that hotels made better sense.’

‘Hmm.’ Reluctant to ask more in case she aroused suspicion, Hannah changed tack and asked about the latest management intrigue at Ecopure, a subject guaranteed to bring out the best of Roisin’s talent for anecdote.

They’d stayed on the beach all afternoon. At about four thirty, Mark had come down the path through the dunes. He’d changed into a pair of faded blue boardshorts with a dolphin pattern, and Hannah watched from behind her sunglasses as he strode down the beach and waded in. A powerful crawl quickly took him out beyond the rough water near the shore. He swam for twenty minutes or so before coming in and sitting down next to Laura, the water furrowing lines through the hair on his chest and legs as it ran off him. Roisin had introduced Hannah and they’d done the Brits-in-America thing, the usual where-are-you-from, what-do-you-do to establish if they had anything or anyone in common, which they hadn’t. His voice was deep and warm, without any trace of regional accent. He told her that he’d grown up in Sussex. ‘How about you?’ he’d asked.