Before I Knew You

by Amanda Brookfield

  Andrew slipped the Brahms score away and took out the in-flight-viewing magazine. A glass of wine, he decided, maybe two. It would be excellent to see Geoff properly after so many years, and to have time to relax, read a few books, even if he did end up barricading himself in under the protection of air-conditioning. In fact, he liked air-conditioning, not just for its power to cool but for its noise, a humming counterpoint to silence; there was music in it, music and rhythm, like there was in most things if one listened hard enough. ‘Four weeks away from the grind,’ he declared out loud, ‘seeing old friends, the girls joining us, sightseeing, money to spend on nice meals, sleeping in a luxurious house, under a different roof, different stars …’ He rubbed his palms together. ‘We’re going to have a good time, I promise you, Sophie, a really good time.’

  Sophie opened her eyes to nod, glad his mood had lifted, managing not to say that, apart from a shift of angle, the stars would be exactly the same.

  When the pilot announced that it was raining in London, Beth and William exchanged looks, laughing. They had discussed this very thing during the course of packing up the previous day, the bedroom blinds lowered against the belting afternoon sun, Dido patrolling the half-filled cases, mewing her suspicions. Never once in his entire life had he landed on a runway in his home country in good weather, William had claimed merrily, tossing clothes onto the bed, which Beth refolded into perfect rectangles and arranged in his suitcase. Hers was already done: a neat patchwork of colours, cordoned in by shoes and all the plastic-wrapped toiletries that, these days, were forbidden safer custody in a carry-on bag. Sweaters, swimsuits, sandals, walking boots – even before the weather conversation she had known that every eventuality had to be catered for. London looked like it was going to warm up, dry out – she had been checking the long-range forecast on her laptop – but they would also be going north to visit William’s parents in Skipton, which enjoyed its very own micro-climate, he had teased, usually the opposite of what was going on anywhere else.

  The British weather! Beth stared happily at the oval of colourless sky next to her seat, delighting that such an international joke – a cliché – was on the verge of becoming real, as important to negotiate as the tiny criss-crossing streets in William’s dog-eared map-book of London and the rather more serious prospect of further encounters with her husband’s family.

  Her husband. Beth stole a glance at William’s profile, wanting to experience again that first objective glimpse in the New York coffee shop around two years before – the sharp, clear pleasure of the initial spontaneous acknowledgement of how good-looking he was. Thick dark hair, traced with grey, cut short but not so short you couldn’t see the waves, the high cheekbones, the sculpted nose with nostrils that flared ever so slightly when he was surprised, the unbelievably perfect mouth, full with-out being feminine, encasing a set of even but faintly crowded teeth. She could have guessed – even before straining her ears hard enough to hear – that he was English: the hint of chaos in his mouth was, of course, a give-away, but so was the suggestion of scruffiness behind the grooming, the suit that was well cut but also a little too well worn, the tie loose, the long-legged body that looked naturally slim rather than rigorously toned by working out in a gym.

  With many years on the dating circuit behind her, Beth had, rather to her own regret, become something of an expert at making such assessments. On the plus side there was the compensatory wisdom of having learnt to recognize the importance of such fine differences and to know therefore that the very carelessness of William’s good looks was what drew her. Dimitri, her most recent ex, had the sleek, too-good-to-be-true appearance of a model: a sculpted physique, manicured nails, a close, slick haircut, all set off by an impeccable wardrobe of suits and leather shoes. No man could have looked better on a girl’s arm. And he was bright too – Princeton, then Yale, followed by a fast trajectory in a top law firm; Beth’s mother, Diane, had been smacking her lips in gleeful anticipation – her difficult thirty-six-year-old daughter, properly hooked up at last to a chisel-faced genius! But no man either could have spent longer in front of mirrors than Dimitri, or looked more disapproving on the rare occasions that Beth blew her own careful regime and tucked into a doughnut or a roll of cookie dough. ‘Beth, baby, is it really worth it?’ he would say, with a tenderness that only made her mad, since it was so obviously about what he wanted rather than her. Eighteen months in and she had begun to feel as if she had acquired a guardian more than a lover, a living embodiment of the hateful never-far-away voice inside her head that told her all the things she didn’t want to hear, the one that was so adept at making her feel wretched rather than happy.

  In the coffee shop that January lunchtime, William had been eating carelessly, spilling forkfuls of chocolate cake and drinking a cappuccino, between enjoying some quick-fire conversation with another man in a suit – a squat American with the wide neck of an ex-football player. Beth, knowing better than to hanker after things she could not have (beautiful, English – a veritable Hugh Grant on the outside – but married, no doubt, or gay, or screwed up), had drained her own skinny latte, settled the check and been on her way to the door when she was accosted by an ‘Excuse me’ and a very British clearing of the throat. The squat American had gone and William, with his overcoat over his arm, was clearly preparing to leave as well. ‘I don’t suppose you have the time on you, do you?’ he had asked, with the accent that was so enticingly English, a glint of humour flashing in his dark brown eyes.

  Beth had scrabbled at her coat sleeve, her cardigan sleeve, her blouse sleeve – layers and layers of sleeves, it seemed, her purse tumbling into the mêlée from her shoulder – before she was able to deliver the answer displayed by her wristwatch. Whereupon William had remarked what a pretty watch it was and where had she got it? Beth replied that it had been a twenty-first birthday gift from her mother and then added the further, unnecessary, faintly intimate, disclosure that since her mother was generally lousy at picking gifts it was an item of which she was especially fond. To which William had replied, how lovely, and wasn’t gift-giving a fiendish minefield of raised and dashed hopes, suppositions and misconceptions and did she want another coffee?

  In truth that was the last thing Beth had wanted. Thanks to a dull morning in the HR department of the bank that employed her, she had already had more than her quota of caffeine for the day, and could feel the start of a throbbing headache to prove it. But with her antennae telling her that this might be a special moment – a moment only a fool or a coward would turn her back on – she said another coffee was a fine idea, parked her purse under the table-top and clambered with as much elegance as she could manage onto the stool that had been vacated by the wide-necked American.

  ‘I’ll lose my job,’ she had gasped, staring in disbelief at the same treasured watch an hour later, headache quite forgotten, and then falling silent as William gently took hold of her wrist on the pretext of examining its gold bangle of a strap more closely. He had wide, strong fingers, with clean unfussy nails and a thick gold signet ring, engraved with something she couldn’t quite make out … a bird or some kind of old-fashioned lion. In a minute or two she would ask about it, Beth had decided, when she could trust her voice, when her arm had recovered from the electric shock of his touch. Glancing through the glass pane next to them into the street, it had struck her as incredible that New Yorkers were still hurrying about their dull lives, faces down, cell phones pressed to their ears, as if the world was something to be kept at bay rather than dived into and embraced for the miracle it truly was.

  Beth smiled to herself, feeling through her cardigan for the familiar shape of the watch-strap. The plane was descending steadily now, bringing the English country-side into fuller focus – as green as everybody had promised, in spite of the steely canopy of rain. The cabin crew were trawling the aisle for unfastened seatbelts and last items of rubbish. Beside her, William was popping out a square of gum – the nicotine stuff, she noticed, although she ha
d been doing her best to encourage him to switch to peppermint. ‘Sure you don’t want some of this instead, honey?’ she asked, offering a piece of the sugar-free brand she was already chewing to counter the tightening in her eardrums.

  William shook his head, nuzzling the side of her face. ‘You know I’ll love you till my dying day for this alone, don’t you?’

  ‘For what, dummy?’

  ‘Agreeing to spend a month in my rainy homeland with not much prospect of company beyond my three devilish sons and ageing parents.’

  Beth laughed. ‘They’re not devilish, they’re cute, your parents too.’

  ‘Cute? What – even Harry?’

  ‘Especially Harry. He looks the most like you.’

  ‘They think you’re really cool, you know that, don’t you?’

  Beth giggled, luxuriating in the praise. That she had no intention of interfering with how William brought up his three teenage sons was something she had made as clear as possible from the start. She had met them on only two occasions, the first during the course of a half-term visit when William had still been living on his own downtown, and she had been able to dip in and out, joining in for treats to pizza parlours and the movies and the park; and the second, rather more briefly, when they had flown over for the wedding. That was when she had met the parents for the first time, two wiry, robust, white-haired creatures – more like twins than a married couple – who came not only in support of William but to look after their grandsons. Given the potential for awkwardness – officially graduating to the status of stepmother when, with William’s concurrence, she had confessed to never wanting kids of her own, not to mention becoming a daughter-in-law to people whom her husband had clearly grown accustomed to keeping at arms’ length – the whole event had gone tremendously well. Politeness, effort, cheerfulness: everyone had behaved impeccably, including Diane, her own, tricky, far from arms’-length mother, who, thanks to being almost more in love with William than Beth herself, had fussed between his parents and progeny like a bee between flowers.

  ‘We’re getting a taxi, right? A black cab. Heathrow to Richmond.’

  ‘Yes. Except the Chapmans’ house is more Barnes … Richmond is where Susan and the boys are.’ William sat back, tightening his seatbelt as the plane bucked into its final descent.

  ‘And the neighbours have all the keys – doors, car and so on,’ persisted Beth who, after almost four decades of being admirably on top of every minor detail in her own life, still sometimes found it hard to accommodate the often slack attitude of her husband to overseeing the logistics of his.

  ‘Neighbour,’ William corrected her. ‘A Mrs Hemmel. I’ve got her phone number in case of a hitch.’

  Beth pressed her palms together as a fresh wave of excitement rolled through her. ‘Oh, London, William, I can’t believe it, I just can’t.’

  ‘Personally, I’d prefer Bermuda,’ William remarked drily, by way of a reference to their idyllic two-week honeymoon at the start of the year. Silky pink sands, excellent food, the peace of unwinding with Beth, away from share prices and markets, the luxury of time – for each other, for reading, for conversation. Not even the crippling impact on his bank account had yet diminished the glow. In fifteen years of marriage he and Susan had never managed anything half as heavenly, not even during the early times. They had been broke for one thing and Susan hated beaches – or anywhere that required sitting still. And then Harry and his brothers had arrived, disturbing their already chaotic domestic world with the unrelenting demands and drama of parenthood.

  As the plane made contact with the runway William picked Beth’s hand out of her lap, squeezing it firmly until the slight bouncing was over and the brakes had kicked in. Her excitement about the trip delighted him. It was understandable, of course, that she should be thrilled at the prospect of seeing London (she had spent most of her adult life, she claimed, not quite getting round to a trip to the UK), but all the less thrilling things, like having to do her bit with the boys, of staying in a decidedly inferior home compared to their own, of having to postpone their next holiday à deux until the new year – none of that had received so much as an eyebrow twitch of a complaint. One of Susan’s more insidious tricks had been to agree to things she didn’t want and then sulk in carrying them out. William still could not quite believe that he had found a woman who was so contrastingly – so wonderfully – positive, so actively determined to see the proverbial glass as almost overflowing, and place priority on his happiness into the bargain. Even losing her job the previous autumn, thanks to a knock-on effect of the sub-prime mortgage crisis, Beth had refused to regard as a setback. Other HR departments would just have to wait until she was ready to run them, she had joked; in the meantime she had a wedding to organize, a new home to decorate and a fiancé to look after. Arriving home from work in recent months, parking under the glossy rivulets of trailing ivy that swarmed over the lemon walls of their beautiful home, being greeted by the faint smell of Beth’s delicious cooking and the mews of Dido, her beloved Persian, basking in a last patch of sunshine by the front door, William almost had to pinch himself that he wasn’t immersed in some elaborate dream, conjured from many haphazard years of groping his way down a series of blind alleys.

  He ached to see his sons sometimes, of course. But Beth understood that too and he was careful never to rub her nose in it, wanting, as much as she did, to keep in sharp relief the new clean path of their life together, stretching ahead, different and better from all that had gone before. At thirteen, fifteen and seventeen, the boys were now happily close to a level of independence that William hoped would allow them to step on and off that path, consolidating things with him and, in time, building up a decent relationship with his new wife.

  They were good kids, easy to like, especially little Alfie, with his specs and earnestness and endearingly boyish wiry body, as eager still to pursue old-fashioned innocent activities, like chasing balls and climbing trees, as the more sedentary pleasures offered by a computer screen. George, the middle one, presented rather more of a challenge, having always been – even before his current state of full-blown simian adolescence – inclined to surliness and silences. Harry, the eldest, was, as Beth had remarked, the most obviously like him, not just in being well over six foot and dark-haired but also in having an easy confidence in his approach to life, not to mention a quick, enquiring intelligence that often left his middle sibling in the shade. August meant exam results for both older boys and William was looking forward to being around for the follow-through – giving George the usual pep-talk and helping Harry prepare for the Oxford college that had offered him a place.

  ‘Oh, I loved Bermuda,’ Beth exclaimed, once the plane had touched down safely and they were taxiing to a bay. ‘It was the best, but I’m not sure I’d want to go back there. I mean, going back anywhere is usually a bad idea, don’t you think? And, anyway, Bermuda doesn’t have Big Ben, does it? Or the National Gallery, or Trafalgar Square, or Kew Gardens, or the London Eye, the Dome … Oh, honey, I’m going to be such a tourist, I hope you don’t mind.’

  William kissed her cheek, said he didn’t mind a bit, but that he might pass when it came to the Dome: it had been a famous waste of money and there was nothing to see now except a space that hosted pop concerts. What he elected not to mention was that it was also the place where, on a humid day, lost among the tacky, over-hyped millennium displays, the children rowdy and miserable and Susan slinging insults about his failings as a husband and father, he had first made a private vow to walk away. It had taken five years, as things turned out, manoeuvring for one of the New York jobs, hanging on in there for Alfie who at seven and eight and nine had seemed too young to leave; but it was no coincidence that the week following that hateful visit had seen the initiation of his first affair – with his secretary, which was lowly and corny and obviously doomed, but it had put the spring back in his step, the one he had been missing. And, as William had recognized even at the time, the business of lea
ving Susan, as with all new journeys, had had to start somewhere.

  2

  The house was so much more striking than even the Stapletons’ excellent emailed images had suggested, that the moment they pulled up in front of the double garage Sophie got out of the car to gawp, leaving Andrew rummaging in his bulky file of correspondence for the house keys and alarm code. A colonial residence, there was no other word for it: not just ‘detached’, but a good twenty yards from its only neighbour (a glimpse of white through the trees), nestling among draping maples and ebullient shrubs like the central bud of some luxuriant flower. It looked somehow fresh and cool too, Sophie marvelled, shielding her eyes from the glare of the sun as she studied the house’s attractively ivied pale yellow walls and white window shutters, each as serene as a pair of closed eyelids.

  The heat was extraordinary, throbbing out of the tarmac and up, under the hem of her skirt. And yet it felt fantastic to be out of the car, separating herself from all the predictable tension of the final leg of the journey – not being able to locate the car, or its keys, or Interstate 95, or, more crucially, Darien itself, buried, as everything in the area seemed to be, by oceans of trees.

  ‘It’s three eight four zero,’ said Andrew, starting to pull bags from the boot. ‘Then the green button.’

  As Sophie turned to help him, a man in shorts and a Hawaiian shirt, hanging loosely over the visible bulge of his stomach, appeared from among the section of forest shrouding the white house. He looked in his late fifties, with skin like tanned leather, apart from the smooth, bald dome of his head. ‘Carter Riley.’ He offered an outstretched arm well in advance of arrival. ‘How are you folks doing? My wife Nancy and I are your neighbours. Welcome to Darien. Here, let me get some of those bags …’