What happened when someone was released from prison? Hannah tried to imagine it but all that came into her head were images from old television programmes of the seventies and eighties: a few outdated possessions handed back by a sour-faced guard, a door slamming shut to leave the free man standing lost on a stretch of desolate pavement until a car skidded round the corner to offer a lift back to the old life, one last job. But this wasn’t TV and Nick wasn’t a lovable rogue. What would happen to him? Would he go to a halfway house? Would he have a parole officer or, having served his whole sentence, was he now entirely free to go?
Through the floor came the faint pip of the alarm. It was set for six forty-five, as usual, but she’d been up for over an hour already. When she’d opened her eyes, she’d seen Mark asleep next to her and for a few seconds it was as if the past week had never happened and it was a morning like any other. Then, however, she’d remembered. And now it was Wednesday: Nick got out tomorrow.
Overhead, Mark’s feet hit the floor. Hannah turned away from the window and came back to the counter to fill the Krups machine. Perhaps she shouldn’t have any coffee, though. She’d been agitated and unsettled since she’d woken up and it wasn’t just the worry. She had the feeling that there was something at the corner of her eye, just out of focus, something that didn’t make sense. It was like watching a film and knowing there was something in the plot that didn’t quite add up but not being able to put a finger on it.
The fridge was empty bar a cling-filmed plate of leftover pork, just enough milk for the coffee, and four eggs. She took them out to look for the best-before date and then, at the touch of hands on her waist, nearly dropped them. She managed, thank God, not to shriek with alarm; neither of them had said anything but she knew it was essential to pretend that everything was normal.
‘Old Mother Hubbard,’ she said, turning inside the circle of his arms. ‘The cupboard’s bare. It’s scrambled eggs for breakfast. If we’re lucky and there’s bread in the freezer, there might be toast.’
‘Ideal.’ He gave her a kiss then stood back to look at her, smiling. ‘I’ve missed your morning hair.’
He went back upstairs to shower while the coffee brewed and she made the eggs, watching the sky above the skylight turn from the blue-brown of heavy light pollution through grey to a blank white. Last night when they’d turned out the lights, Mark had come over to her side of the bed and wrapped himself around her. She’d known what he was trying to communicate – don’t worry, I’ll take care of things; we’ll be all right – but she’d felt need in the tightness of his arms, too, a silent search for reassurance.
Over breakfast they read each other snippets of news and he talked about the issues he was going to raise at the weekly meeting with the programmers in the afternoon. She listened, nodding in the appropriate places, all the time feeling pressure building inside her. Eventually, she couldn’t pretend any longer.
‘Mark, when are you going to talk to Nick?’
‘I don’t know.’ He put his coffee cup back in the saucer. ‘He said he’d contact me. It’s more power-play: I’ve been trying to reach him in Wakefield but he’s refusing to talk to me.’
‘Will he ring today?’
‘I’ve no idea, Hannah – I really can’t say.’ There was impatience in his voice and at once Mark looked ashamed of himself. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t sleep very well last night.’ He pressed his eyelids shut then opened them wide. ‘It’s possible he’ll call today, but if I know my brother he’ll be enjoying this, keeping me stewing. Either way, by tomorrow . . .’ She waited for him to go on but instead he pushed back his chair and carried his plate to the dishwasher.
They said goodbye at the front door and she watched him walk up the pavement to his car, straight-backed and broad-shouldered in his black winter coat, his leather laptop case under his arm. The Mercedes beeped once as he unlocked it with the remote fob. His self-possession was impressive. No one who saw him, she thought, would suspect for a minute that anything in his life wasn’t exactly as he’d designed it.
As his car rounded the corner, she felt the day gape open like a chasm in front of her. She went upstairs straight away and changed into her running clothes. She did three laps of the common, one more than usual, but as soon as she got back to the house, the anxiety flooded in again. She showered and dressed quickly then packed her research file into her bag. Today she needed to keep moving.
The Starbucks on the corner of Parsons Green was busy with the school drop-off crowd so she walked to Caffè Nero instead and set up shop at an empty table at the back. The file was proof in itself that she’d had too much time on her hands in the past few months, she thought. After some days away from it, she was struck by how madly detailed and over-organised it was, the sheer volume of information on successful recent campaigns collected at the front, filed alphabetically by name of the product, and then the agencies at the back. Each one had a full list of key personnel and an in-depth history including the partners’ previous backgrounds, industry awards won in the past five years and the names of all the clients her exhaustive research had uncovered.
She turned to the section on Penrose Price. There were a couple of pages of notes she’d made after her first interview, and after that a chunk – forty or fifty pages – of the material that she’d gathered beforehand: print-outs of articles from Campaign and Brand Republic, a helpful potted history of the agency – not nearly as detailed as her own – and interviews with both Roger Penrose and the hotshot Lewis Marant, his hire of three years ago, who was now talked about as one of the leading lights, if not the leading light, of the new generation of creatives.
Hannah flicked to the full-page interview with Marant she’d found in the Guardian. In the photograph, he was wearing an outfit identical to the one he’d had on at her second-round interview: a faded denim shirt open at the neck, sleeves rolled to the elbow, and a pair of heavy-rimmed tortoiseshell glasses that wouldn’t look out of place on a Williamsburg hipster or, more specifically, Flynn, her old assistant.
She’d read reams about him before they’d met and she hadn’t expected to warm to him. His press was almost too much; the online raving about his campaign for a new smartphone bordered on fan-boy adulation. In person, however, she’d liked Marant immediately. There’d been no pretension or cooler-than-thou cultural references; instead he’d known almost as much about her work as she did about his, and he’d told her that his five-year-old son sat at the tea-table banging his knife and fork and chanting her slogan for Happy Mouth ice cream. He’d also been refreshingly frank, centring their discussion on a campaign of his that hadn’t worked very well, asking what she would have done differently.
He’d left to go to another meeting and Roger Penrose had told her then that, with the new hire, he was looking for a counterpart to Marant, someone who would grow alongside him within the agency so that, after Penrose’s own retirement, the two of them would head it up together. After five months of unemployment, the idea was so exciting that she’d felt almost drunk on it when she stepped out on to the pavement afterwards. She had to get this job.
Hannah pulled the file closer now and tried to read, but within a few seconds her eyes stopped seeing the words and her mind turned to Nick. With a rush of alarm she remembered what Mark had said about his brother blaming him, resenting his freedom. What if Nick attacked Mark, hurt him? She felt a wave of fear that she pushed down as quickly as she could. Come on, she told herself, concentrate, but she managed only a couple of sentences before she heard Mark’s voice again. ‘He’s been sitting up there stewing . . . He’s convinced himself it was my fault.’
For more than an hour she struggled but in the end she conceded defeat, closed the file and shoved it back in her bag. She left the café and headed up the Fulham Road in the opposite direction to Quarrendon Street, no real purpose in mind except putting off the moment when she went back to the empty house. Whatever she tried to do today, she knew she wouldn’t be able to stop herself thinking about Nick or shake the odd nagging sense that there was something she was missing.
When Mark arrived home at seven, he looked exhausted and his eyes were small and strained from screen-work. ‘Shall we go to Mao Tai for supper?’ he said. ‘Let’s not cook tonight.’
‘Have you heard from him?’ she asked.
He shook his head.
The restaurant was five minutes’ walk away. As they crossed the road at the corner of Parsons Green, Mark took her hand and held it tightly. They sat at the bar, ordered martinis and drank them like medicine. Mark ordered a second round and when they moved to their table he asked for the wine list. She’d never seen him drink like this on a Wednesday night. But then, she thought, it didn’t feel like a Wednesday.
As they finished their starters, she glanced up and saw that the woman at the next table was looking at him; a couple of minutes later it happened again. For a moment, paranoid, Hannah thought something was wrong, but then she realised: the woman was looking at Mark because he looked so handsome. The martinis had smoothed the strain from his face and his eyes were dark and shiny in the candlelight. He’d left his tie at home and undone his collar, and in his tailor-made suit jacket he looked well made and urbane. His hands rested on the table, strong and straight-fingered, their backs dusted with hair. For a moment Hannah saw him as if she were a stranger and felt a burst of pride: he was hers. Then she remembered the description in the newspaper article of his parents’ small grey pebbledashed bungalow. Yes, it must have an incongruous place for Nick to have spent his childhood but it couldn’t have suited Mark either, the boy who’d grown up to become this sophisticated man.
Halfway down her second glass of wine, after the waitress had taken away the plates from the duck, Hannah stood up to go to the loo and realised how smashed she was. Before the starters, she’d had nothing to eat since breakfast, and the alcohol was coursing through her bloodstream. She held the handrail tightly on the steep front stairs.
As she washed her hands, her body felt like a piece of machinery she was operating from the outside. She leaned towards the mirror to wipe away a smudge of mascara and saw herself up close by the light of the line of little candles along the back of the vanity unit. Wasn’t candlelight supposed to be flattering? It was doing nothing for her: she looked old – old and exhausted.
Suddenly she saw it, the thing that had been nagging at her, hovering at the edge of her field of vision all day: it was Hermione’s expression when Hannah had said who she was, the fleeting but unmistakable look of horror. Why would she have been horrified? If she was Mark’s friend, however off the radar, why had she looked so alarmed to meet his wife?
Hannah splashed her face with cold water, angry with herself for having so much to drink: if there was ever a time she needed to have her wits about her, it was now. She dried her face and hands and made her way carefully downstairs again, gripping the banister. Back at the table, she dropped heavily into her chair. Mark reached for her hand. He’d topped up their glasses again.
‘Hermione,’ she said, and her voice was too loud even against the background hum. She saw him snap to attention. ‘When I went to see her at the hospital, I told her who I was – your wife – and she looked scared. Why?’
Mark pulled her closer to the table. ‘Han,’ he said quietly, ‘can we talk about this at home? Not here. I don’t want to . . .’
‘No, Mark, I need to know now. Tell me. Why did she look frightened? She covered it up really fast but it was in her eyes, I saw it.’
He looked at her for a moment then leaned in again, reducing the gap between them to a few inches. ‘She was Nick’s girlfriend.’
Through the fug of booze, it was a second or two before Hannah realised what he was telling her. ‘You mean – at the time?’
He nodded.
‘My God.’ She put her hand over her mouth. ‘I thought she was a friend of yours from Cambridge. I didn’t . . .’
‘She is. That’s how they met, through me. She liked him from day one, of course, though Nick wasn’t so bothered, but after a while he realised that other people thought she was a bit of a prize – super-bright, lovely-looking – and he made a move. They’d been going out for about six months.’
‘Was she there?’
‘At the club? No. She was on nights at the hospital; she didn’t find out till the next day when one of the girls phoned her. God, poor Herm. I’d tried to warn her but she said she could handle him. I should have tried harder. It wasn’t even the first time he’d cheated on her. He’d been shagging around for weeks – another alarm bell I should have heard.’
‘That look when I told her who I was – why would she be frightened? It’s been ten years. Surely after all this time . . .’
Mark glanced towards the next table and lowered his voice again. ‘She testified against him.’
‘What? In court?’ Hannah said stupidly.
‘She gave evidence about Nick’s . . . tastes.’ Mark was speaking so quietly now that Hannah had to lean across the table to hear him. ‘How he liked to restrain her, that he was into control. How, a couple of times, he’d gone too far, hurt her, and then wouldn’t stop, even when she begged him. She had a really rough time in the box, his defence went to town on her, but she did it. Some of the things she said . . . It was hard to listen to – literally sickening. The women on the jury – I think for them, in particular, it brought it all into focus, having someone like Hermione, who’s so articulate and together, painting this picture of . . .’
Remembering how she’d confronted the woman in the corridor at work, how aggressive she’d been, Hannah was filled with remorse.
‘Nick was livid – he could see how it was going down. I watched him. He had this expression on, all regretful denial, shock that anyone could say those things about him, but I know him, I knew what he was thinking.’ Mark swigged his wine. ‘He wouldn’t forget that in a lifetime, let alone ten years. And now he’s contacted her from prison, making threats.’
‘What kind of threats?’
‘Apparently he’s told her it’s payback time.’