In the end, by the second weekend in January, the whole issue had achieved critical mass and Hannah knew she’d have to have it out with him whether he liked it or not. So on Saturday night she’d cooked a complicated pork recipe, plied him with half a bottle of Sancerre and prepared herself for the facial shutdown. Sure enough, it was almost immediate.
‘Nick,’ he said, glaring at her, all the easy warmth of seconds before gone from his eyes. ‘Is he all you think about? You’re obsessed.’
‘Obsessed?’ She’d pulled back from the table, amazed. ‘I’ve asked you about him twice before – twice, Mark. We’re engaged, we’re getting married in April – is it weird that I’m curious about your family? He’ll be my brother-in-law. I’ll be related to—’
‘No,’ he said, standing and dropping his napkin on the table. ‘No, he won’t. He’ll be your brother-in-law in the same way that he’s my brother – technically, legally, whatever. But that’s it, that’s all. I won’t be pushed into having a relationship with him just because you’ve got some idea in your head. There’s nothing there for you, Hannah. I don’t want him in our lives and I don’t want to talk about it any more. Got it?’
She’d watched in amazement as he opened the cupboard by the front door and yanked his coat out, setting off a cacophony of jangling from the empty hangers. ‘Where are you going?’
‘Out. I won’t sit here and be cross-examined.’
‘I’m not cross-examining you. All I wanted was to —’
‘I told you when you asked the last time that I didn’t want to talk about it. Couldn’t you respect that? Couldn’t you do that one thing for me? Was it really too much to ask?’ He’d looked at Hannah as if he were assessing her and finding her wanting then he’d turned and gone, slamming the door behind him.
She’d sat at the table for some time, blood pounding in her ears. They’d snapped at each other once or twice before when one of them or both had been tired and stressed but nothing like this, not even close: they’d never argued; neither of them had ever stormed off. She was shocked – actually, stunned was more accurate. Mark was so self-contained, so in control, and slamming out of the apartment was so . . . teenage. She’d tried to make herself smile at the image, Mark as moody teenager, but the smile died on her lips. He was angry with her, really angry. In her head she reran the conversation, what there had been of it. All she’d said, her carefully rehearsed opening gambit, was: ‘Mark, will you tell me about Nick?’ That was it, all it had taken to trigger this.
Where had he gone? It was cold outside, on the radio earlier there had been talk of snow, and it was ten thirty. Well, she thought, standing and picking up the empty plates that already seemed to belong to a different era, one in which they’d been happy and she hadn’t screwed it all up by prying, there was nothing she could do about it until he came back. She wasn’t going to text him, grovelling, apologising for asking a simple question. If he didn’t get on with his brother, why didn’t he just tell her why rather than turning it into a huge issue? If she was going to marry him, she had to be able to ask questions like this. She couldn’t let herself be intimidated into silence.
She’d slowly washed up the dinner things, tense with listening for the sound of his key in the door. By the time the kitchen was restored to order, though, it was half-eleven and there was no sign of him. She sat in the corner armchair, pulled her legs up under her and tried to focus on the copy of Leaves of Grass that she’d been attempting to get into all week. Again, the attempt was fruitless: the scarcity of punctuation meant she had to read each sentence two or three times before she could even work out which was the main verb, and when she’d done that, the words swum on the page anyway and refused to organise themselves into any thought she could understand.
She put the book down and picked up the previous week’s New York magazine but fared no better. Where was he? Was he holed up in a bar somewhere pounding the Scotch? Was this his way of punishing her? She was exhausted but wired; all she wanted was to get into bed and disappear under the covers but she knew she wouldn’t sleep until he came home or at least let her know that he wasn’t going to. She checked her phone again: nothing. Anyway, she didn’t want to go to bed, not really. She needed to be dressed when he came home, it seemed important. She didn’t want to be in her pyjamas when he had the advantage of proper clothes.
The clock on the cable box read ten past one when she heard footsteps outside in the corridor. At the jangle of keys she sat up straight and quickly arranged herself into an attitude of casual reading, though the fact that she was still up at all made a lie of any pretence of normality.
He shut the door quietly behind him, took off his coat and dropped it gently over the arm of the sofa. ‘Hi.’
‘Hi,’ she replied in the same neutral tone, waiting to see what his move would be, what his mood was now.
He looked at her, his expression still neutral, then he crossed the room until he was standing a couple of feet away. He crouched in front of her and looked up into her face. ‘Han, I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m really, really sorry.’
To her shame, she was flooded with relief. As the time had stretched, the scenarios she’d envisaged had grown darker and darker: maybe it was ruined; maybe he’d decided that he couldn’t live with her, that it was over, their engagement was off. By the end, she’d been battling to keep her thinking straight, to remember that she hadn’t done anything wrong. Now she waited for Mark to go on.
‘I’m sorry for flying off the handle like that – for being over-sensitive,’ he said. ‘I owe you an apology, I know, but also an explanation.’
‘Look, it’s okay . . .’ she started but he cut her off.
‘No, it isn’t. It isn’t. My brother and I – this is why I don’t see Nick, why I hate even talking about him. It’s like every time anyone mentions his name, something happens to me and I go from being a reasonable, semi-decent person to someone I don’t recognise. I hate it – I hate myself for it – and yet I don’t seem to be able to stop it.’ His face was anguished now.
‘Mark, I’m so sorry. I didn’t want to upset you. I—’
‘No, don’t apologise; you’ve done nothing wrong. It’s totally reasonable to ask about him. Why shouldn’t you? If you marry me’ – he made it sound as if she might really have changed her mind, and the idea made her chest ache – ‘if you marry me, you deserve to know everything about me, even the things I’d keep hidden from you given half a chance, the stuff I’m not proud of. I only want you to see the good things, the light-hearted, fun, successful Mark, not the one who can’t handle his brother and let his mother down. I let my own mother down,’ he said, ‘and she’s dead and I can never make it right. I’ll never be able to forgive myself.’
His eyes were shining now, as if he were on the verge of tears. She stood up, took his hand and pulled him gently over to the sofa before going to the kitchen and retrieving a new bottle of wine and fresh glasses. When she handed him one, he drank an inch from the top of it in a single swig. As she’d held his hand she’d sniffed surreptitiously for the smell of alcohol but there had been no trace of it and his fingers had been red and ice-cold, the bones like sticks beneath his skin. He must have been walking outside all the time he’d been gone.
‘I’m going to tell you about Nick,’ he said.
‘Only if you want to. It can wait – it’s late. We’re both tired. We can talk about it tomorrow.’
‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘I want to talk about it now. I need to explain.’ He looked at her. ‘Storming out like that won’t be normal practice, I promise.’
‘Okay. Good.’
He took another big mouthful of wine and swallowed loudly. He looked down, training his eyes on his reddened fingers as they clutched the stem of the glass. ‘Nick was my mother’s favourite,’ he said. ‘She doted on him and I think she ruined him – literally spoiled him rotten.’ He blew out a quick spurt of air, as if it was funny.
Hannah said nothing and wa
ited for him to go on.
‘It’s pretty easy to see why he was her favourite – I’m sure he would have been mine if I’d been her. I was awkward and self-conscious, I went through phases where I was really uncomfortable in my own skin, but he was one of those children who’s just somehow golden. Do you know what I mean?’
Hannah thought of Chessa’s daughter Sophia who, at seven, was already two years ahead of her peers at school and a gifted tennis player. She’d also been approached twice in London by scouts for children’s modelling agencies.
‘I was quite an anxious child, I think, always trying my best, worried about getting things right, but for Nick, life just seemed to roll out like a red carpet from the moment he arrived. He got everything right without trying, or that’s what it looked like: he slept through the night at two months, walked at nine, made everyone laugh with his little baby faces and games. My mother’s friends loved him, teachers loved him; he made friends without trying. Little girls at junior school actually wrote him love letters. I got all the childhood afflictions going: measles, mumps, whooping cough. For years I was at the doctor’s all the time with terrible psoriasis but I don’t remember anything ever being wrong with Nick.’
He pulled at a loose thread on his shirt cuff, avoiding her eye.
‘With hindsight,’ he said, ‘bits of it are quite funny. There’s this picture of us that encapsulates the whole thing. I’ll show it to you next time we’re in London. We’re on the beach in Devon and I’m seven, probably, so Nick must just have turned six – he was a summer baby, as my mother never grew tired of saying, as if that in itself made him special. He’s wearing these snazzy little boardshort-style trunks while I’m stuffed like a sausage into this hideous nylon Speedo-type thing which, frankly, was an affront to a man’s dignity even at that age.’ He smiled wryly. ‘Anyway, he’s wielding a gigantic ice cream, chocolate flake, the works, and if you look carefully, you can just see my cone in the bottom right-hand corner of the picture, down in the sand. I’d been stung by a wasp and dropped it.’
He smiled again trying to make a joke of it, but Hannah could hear the hurt running just beneath the surface of his voice.
‘Mark . . .’
He shook his head, wanting, now he’d started, to go on, get the whole thing over with on one long breath. ‘The thing is,’ he said, ‘none of this would have mattered, I don’t think, if my mother had been different – if she’d had any self-confidence at all or even just a more positive outlook. As a child I didn’t understand it – your parents are your norm, aren’t they? You only know things the way they show them to you – but as an adult I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it and I realise now that, for most of our childhood, she was pretty seriously depressed.’
‘Really? Was she treated for it?’
‘No. I tried to convince her to try treatment later on but she didn’t believe in pills or therapists; thought they were self-indulgent. It’s a shame. Maybe if . . .’ He shrugged. ‘On the surface you wouldn’t have been able to tell. She was very attractive, my mother, petite and slim and always well put together even though she couldn’t have had much money for clothes. She was bright, too, and funny, but she didn’t see that. The truth is, I think, she went through her life believing she wasn’t worth much and just waiting for people to confirm it. The only thing she was absolutely sure of was my brother, whose general rightness was so obvious that no one could dispute it. She had to be confident of Nick because it would have been blatantly mad not to. He was clever, handsome, funny, charming, you name it, and she was grateful to him because it made her feel like less of a failure. He validated her.’
‘What about your dad in all this? Where was he?’
‘Dad.’ A snort. ‘My dad was not a natural father; let’s just say that. We were too much for him, both of us – too loud, too boisterous, too demanding, too . . . everything. At some point around the time of that holiday, probably, give or take a year, he just checked out, told himself that as long as he was bringing home the bacon, providing, then he was doing his bit. He left everything else to my mother and the truth is, she wasn’t up to the job either so Nick took over.’
‘What do you mean?’ Hannah felt herself frown.
‘He’s manipulative. No, that doesn’t cover it – doesn’t even touch the sides. He’s brilliant, actually, an absolute genius at playing people to get what he wants from them. My mother was his masterstroke, though. When he was nine or ten, he realised what was going on, the power he had over her because she derived what little self-esteem she had from being the mother of this perfect being, and he started – quite consciously, you could see it – to use that.’
Hannah felt a frisson of revulsion. ‘How?’
Mark gave a small shrug. ‘It started innocently enough. I think one day it just dawned on him that she needed him so badly, needed his approval and general good feeling towards her so much, that it was impossible for her to say no to him – she just couldn’t risk it. Once he’d realised that, it was Pandora’s Box with the lid off. When you’re nine and ten, it’s all about sweets and crisps and getting around your bedtime, kid stuff, but even within a few months it got more serious. He wanted things – I mean, I know children these days are supposed to be the most materialistic they’ve ever been, fed all these pernicious adverts on TV’ – he made a face at her – ‘but, frankly, my brother would have taken some beating. Scaletrix, walkie-talkies, Nintendo games, a sega – the demands got bigger and bigger and more expensive, and she just kept saying yes.’
‘Could they afford it? You said that—’
‘No, and that was a big problem, because Dad used to see all the stuff and freak out, scream at Mum, and she took it as further evidence that she was a failure, there was something fundamentally just second-rate and wrong with her. Then Nick would creep in and put his arms round her and tell her that everything was all right and he loved her, all the time mentally compiling his next set of demands, and the cycle repeated itself.’
‘God.’
Mark shrugged again. ‘By the time he was fourteen or fifteen, he was doing pretty much whatever he wanted: not turning up at school more than two or three days a week, smoking weed, having sex. My parents got home from a memorial service for a friend of theirs one afternoon and found him in their bed with Dad’s boss’s daughter. Actually in flagrante, apparently. Becca, the bloody idiot, let him take Polaroids and he showed them round the whole sixth form. It very, very nearly lost my dad his job. God, Nick would have loved that – until the money dried up, anyway.’ Mark rolled his eyes.
‘Your poor parents.’
‘At least Becca wasn’t the one he got pregnant – that was the English teacher’s daughter. My mother stumped up for the abortion, of course, and didn’t say a word to Mr or Mrs Stevens. They kept it a secret from Dad, too. Oh, Nick did it all, every last bit of teenage miscreancy you can imagine – drugs, shoplifting. That was purely for the thrill, by the way – there was no need for him to nick anything because Mum would just give him whatever money he asked for.’
Mark took a final slug of wine and emptied the glass. When he started talking again, the hurt was back in his voice, even less successfully masked now.
‘I didn’t get a car when I turned seventeen,’ he said, ‘but a year later Nick did, a vintage Triumph Spitfire that he’d campaigned and campaigned for, and which arrived outside the house on the morning of his birthday with a big clichéd red sash that Mum had tied round the middle. He wrote it off drink-driving a month after he passed his test, but as soon as he got his licence back she bought him another one exactly the same because she knew how much he loved it.’
‘How could someone behave like that? And how did your mum afford it? Two cars . . .’
‘My grandmother died – Mum’s mother. She didn’t have a lot but she did have some equity in her house and Mum, the only child, inherited it – which meant Nick did, by proxy. By the time he graduated from university – which was something of a miracl
e in itself – he’d run through the lot. Mum had nothing left. The rows about that – I wasn’t at home by that stage but she told me about them. It nearly ended my parents’ marriage.’
Hannah reached for the cardigan that she’d taken off while she was cooking. It was half past one and the heating in the building had long gone off for the night but the cold felt like more than that, a chill in her bones. ‘Frankly,’ she said, ‘he sounds like a total bastard.’
‘He became one.’
‘But what I don’t understand is, why do you feel bad about any of this? Why do you think you let your mother down?’
‘She asked me always to look out for him and I haven’t. Didn’t.’
‘What do you mean, look out for him?’
‘My mother was bright, as I said. She had a blind spot when it came to Nick but otherwise she was pretty on the ball. Anyway, when he and I were in our twenties, her blinkers started to come off, at least to some extent. I think she looked at him when he was twenty-three, twenty-four, living in London on money that she was giving him – she’d got a job on the tills at Debenhams so she could fund him. My God, the rows with Dad that set off. He said she was bringing the family down, humiliating him, making it look like he couldn’t afford to keep his wife and had to send her out to work in a shop.’ Mark blew out air. ‘Can I . . .?’ He pointed at the wine and Hannah poured him another glass.
‘Basically, it was hell. Anyway, thank God, somewhere in the middle of that particular shit-storm, I think it began to dawn on her that she was being played. My brother’s really clever, Han, cleverer than me by a long chalk, but he’s lazy, totally and utterly indolent – he’s not even embarrassed about it. The reason he didn’t have a job was that he couldn’t be bothered to get off his arse and take one – probably afraid someone would ask him to get up before eleven. Of course, he was giving Mum the whole bit about how difficult new graduates were finding it to get jobs – I can remember her standing in the kitchen one weekend repeating the statistics back at me – the state of the economy, blah, blah, blah. But finally, finally, she couldn’t quite accept it. I think probably she couldn’t get her head around the fact that no one wanted to employ her wunderkind so she was forced to conclude that something else was going on.’
Before We Met: A Novel Page 14