Before We Met(96)

The traffic on the roads out of town had been so heavy that twice she’d had no choice but to put the car in neutral and sit and watch as the minutes added themselves to the journey time one after another. When she saw the first signs for Eastbourne, she’d been driving for more than two and a half hours. Thirty or forty miles back, the urban outer reaches of London had given way to fields and scrubby verges covered in the dark gorse she associated with the south coast but now she could feel the influence of the sea itself. The sky was turning dark, the cloud curdling overhead, but around her, everything appeared with the particular clarity of coastal light, as if the whole landscape had been brushed with glaze. She passed through somewhere called Polegate, where the architecture – detached houses, a Harvester chain pub – had the thirties and forties look that she knew from other seaside places, Bournemouth and Poole. On her right rose gentle green hills, the tail end of the South Downs.

After another two or three miles, the houses started to huddle closer together and became more uniform. The brick-built properties on her left were still substantial, but the houses on the other side of the road were smaller and less attractive. Glancing at the screen, she saw that she’d reached the outer edges of Eastbourne. Suburbia.

In two hundred yards, turn right, said the Sat Nav. She indicated and slowed, and as she made the turn, she caught sight of the street sign: Selmeston Road. In five hundred yards, confirmed the voice, you have reached your destination.

The first few houses were detached red-bricks with two storeys, but as the street climbed the hill away from the main road there were just bungalows and more bungalows. Over the tiled roofs of those at the far end swelled another hill, grass-covered and patchy with gorse, above which the sky was massing with intent, the cloud darker now and clotted with rain.

Another car had turned off the main road immediately after her and she had no choice but to drive at a reasonable speed. She glanced around, taking in as much as she could at thirty miles an hour. Proximity to the main road was clearly a status indicator. The first bungalows had an unusual semi-detached design and were built split-level into the side of the hill, but here, further on, they were squat and blank-faced, indistinguishable from countless thousands in every other retirement enclave along the south coast.

You have reached your destination.

Slowing, Hannah saw the number she’d written down painted on a floral plaque attached to a low brick wall. The car behind pipped its horn and, without indicating, she swung into a space at the kerb between a white transit van and a tired blue Ford Fiesta. The other car pipped again and roared past her up the hill.

She turned off the engine and sat back in the seat, the urgency that had propelled her from London gone all of a sudden. In the rear-view mirror she looked at the house. It was separated from the road by the width of the pavement then the low wall, inside which ran a box hedge a foot taller. The front garden was thirty feet square or thereabouts, a burgundy Vauxhall Astra occupying a small area of tarmac, the rest a straight-edged lawn of closely shorn grass edged with privets and three hydrangeas, their crisp brown dead-heads bristling. It wasn’t neat so much as bleak.

The house was the same. A recessed front door separated two windows, one a bay – the sitting room, she guessed – the other smaller and cut higher in the wall: a dining room, or possibly a bedroom. Net curtains veiled both windows like cataracts. The roofs of the houses either side had skylight windows, suggesting the loft space had been converted, but as far as she could tell, the owners of this house hadn’t done the same. The place was extremely neat, clearly the result of hard work, but nothing was modern or renovated or new. If you took away the Astra, she thought, you could believe you’d been teleported back to the seventies.

She rolled down the window. The other car had faded from hearing and the only sound was the blustering wind. There was no one on the pavement or in any of the front gardens, no sound of lawn mowers or DIY, no kids on bikes or skateboards shouting and clattering about. The silence was apocalyptic, as if a killer virus had swept through the place overnight. Had Mark really grown up here, in this house? And if he had, how had he survived? Malvern was hardly a hotbed of teenage excitement but compared to this place it was Times Square.

She looked at her hands on the steering wheel. What was she doing? She shouldn’t be here; she shouldn’t have come. This was wrong – very wrong. Then why have you come? asked the voice in her head. While she’d had the momentum of the journey she’d been able to keep the answer at bay but now she made herself face it: she was here because she no longer trusted what Mark told her. She closed her eyes as a chasm of loss opened up inside her. What good was a marriage without trust?