‘There, see? Not easy, is it. People are supposed to be able to talk their way through anything these days,’ Mark murmured, watching her closely.
Leah looked at him, frowning, and considered her answer carefully. ‘I talked about it to all and sundry right after it happened. And yes, he did sleep with somebody else, but it was far, far worse than that simple phrase makes it sound. A while back I couldn’t stop talking about it, as if I could … argue my way out of the situation I was in. But now … now I think there’s not much more to say about it. And when I do say something it … infuriates me,’ she said, struggling to explain. Mark said nothing. Their hands, on the table between them, rested two inches apart; fingers curled. ‘What about you? Have you … talked through what happened to your brother?’ As soon as she spoke, Leah regretted it. At the mention of his brother, Mark recoiled as if she’d slapped him. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said quickly. ‘I shouldn’t have said that. It’s … a completely different thing, I know.’
‘How do you know?’ he said; sadly, not unkindly. ‘How can anybody know about something like that? I had no idea, until I lived through it.’
‘You’re right. I don’t know,’ Leah said in contrition. She gulped her wine uncomfortably.
‘I haven’t talked about it to anyone. Who could I talk to? Dad?’
‘A friend?’
‘They disappeared, a lot of them. It was … too huge,’ he said, pouring more wine. ‘It made them uncomfortable.’ In the pause after he spoke, the candles bobbed in the many draughts creeping into the kitchen, dancing merrily to a private tune.
‘You can … tell me. If you want,’ Leah said.
‘But you know already, don’t you?’ Mark said, abruptly.
‘I know what the papers wrote. I don’t know the truth. I don’t know what it was like.’
‘And do you want to know?’
‘If you want to tell me,’ she said. Mark looked away, at the black window glass and his own dim reflection in it. Leah saw the muscle begin to twitch beneath his eye, and his jaw clench spasmodically. A physical reaction to even the thought of speaking about it. She put out her hand instinctively, and squeezed his arm. Beneath the layers of his clothes, the flesh was hard and unyielding. Skin over sinew and bone, and tension in every fibre of it.
‘You don’t have to,’ she said.
‘I know. But I can’t feel any worse, and maybe I might feel better … I don’t know how much you’ve read in the papers, so I’ll just tell it from the start. My older brother James was my hero when we were kids. He was just the archetypal best big brother. He helped me build my model aeroplanes, taught me how to bowl a cricket ball, how to actually hit something with my air gun. How to chat up girls – very badly, I must say. I suppose the age gap between us was big enough that we didn’t compete for things. We didn’t fight much. He was five years older than me. Anyway. I loved him very much. We stayed close even once we’d grown up and left home. I loved his wife Karen, too, when they got married fifteen years ago. He’d always been a bit of a cad with women, I suppose. He didn’t mean to … he just seemed to attract them, and had a hard time resisting them. He had a long string of girlfriends and sometimes they overlapped more than they ought to have; but Karen was different. She sussed him out straight away, and let him know she wasn’t going to put up with any of his nonsense. She’s Catholic, so they got married before anything else, and I can honestly say he’d never been happier. His job was going great – he was a lawyer, making good money. They were muttering about making him partner. The kids came along, everything was fine. Domestic bliss. I went there every Christmas – Mum and Dad too. He loved it – lording it up, showering us with hospitality.
‘Then he got ill. He started to lose his balance – worse some days than others. He was moody and distracted – which was a sure sign something was wrong. James was always cheerful. Why wouldn’t he be? He led a charmed life.’ Mark paused, turning his glass around in front of him. Slowly, slowly; anticlockwise. The foot of it vibrated against the table top, sending shivers down Leah’s spine. ‘He had unexplained pains, stiff joints. He couldn’t grip things any more. He got clumsy, kept tripping over. He choked a lot on his food, and … sometimes when he wasn’t even eating. Just watching TV … choked on his own saliva. Then his speech started to slur. So eventually he went to the doctor’s. Put it off as long as he could, like a typical man. A man who’d never taken a sick day from work in his life. They sent him for a raft of tests and I was expecting him to come out and say it was an inner ear infection, or something up with his circulation. A nasty, lingering virus at worst. It was motor neurone disease. The diagnosis floored him – floored us all. Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, to be exact. Life expectancy three to five years. James was in a wheelchair within nine months of the diagnosis. This for a guy who won the tennis club tournament four years running, and had three kids under the age of twelve.’ Mark looked up at Leah. She had stopped fiddling with her own wine glass and was listening in mute agony. There was nothing she could say, nothing she could do. She felt like a prisoner at the table, trapped in the inevitability of his story.