‘What about your brother?’ she’d asked that Friday night.
Her head had been on Mark’s shoulder, his skin warm and faintly damp against her cheek from the heat they’d generated in bed and the overzealous steam heating in her old building. She’d felt a tiny tug of suction as he’d turned and dislodged her, a kiss goodbye.
‘What about him?’
Happy that he was coming to Malvern for Christmas and keen to avoid making him sad by probing too deeply into his family when he’d just agreed to be thrust into the centre of hers – whom she still had the luxury of moaning about – Hannah had let the subject drop at the time, but the following morning when she’d been making scrambled eggs in her glamorous corridor of a kitchen, coffee pot balanced precariously on top of the microwave to make space for two plates side by side on the tiny patch of countertop, the White Stripes playing on wfuv with backing vocals from Mark in the shower next door, she’d thought about how his face had changed. His relaxed openness had vanished in a second, replaced by a barrier. When he’d looked at her, his eyes had been hard. What about him?
What had he told her about his brother before that? She’d stirred the eggs and tried to think back. She remembered the conversation very early on, the second time they’d met up deliberately in the city, when he’d told her that he’d lost both his parents when he was in his twenties, his father of complications after a stomach operation, his mother only a year later of breast cancer detected too late. They’d been at the Mulberry Street Bar then, his suggestion because she’d told him she loved Donnie Brasco and he couldn’t believe she didn’t know that scenes of it had been shot there. The temperature had been pushing a hundred all day and they’d sat at one of the high pedestal tables and drank glasses of beer that ran with condensation despite the roaring air con. ‘How about siblings?’ she’d asked him. ‘Do you have any?’
For a moment Mark seemed to hesitate and she’d watched as he circled the dregs of his beer round the bottom of the glass.
‘One. A brother. Nick.’ He’d looked up, expression neutral.
‘Are you close?’
A headshake. ‘We’re not really in touch, even.’
‘Oh.’ Hannah had been surprised: she’d only met Mark a handful of times but he hadn’t struck her as the type to have tempestuous family relationships.
‘There’s no drama,’ he said, ‘we’re just very different people.’
‘Is he older or younger?’
‘Younger but only a year. My mother didn’t know you could get pregnant while you were breastfeeding. That was her story, anyway.’ He’d grinned, the light coming back into his eyes, and reached for Hannah’s empty glass. ‘Same again?’
He’d returned from the bar with a snippet of gossip he’d just overheard and the conversation had taken a different tack. At that point, so soon after meeting him, she hadn’t felt it was right to press him for more information than he wanted to give, but now, the end of November, they’d been together five months and he was coming for Christmas. It wasn’t a flirtation any more, a short-lived fun thing; it was a real relationship. The idea sent a buzz through her: it was good but, she admitted to herself, terrifying too.
She should talk to him about his brother, she decided that morning in the kitchen, find a time over the weekend when he was relaxed and she wouldn’t seem to be putting him under pressure. In the end, she’d bided her time until Sunday evening when they were wandering back along the promenade in Brooklyn Heights from a protracted lunch at Ant and Roisin’s. Mark had stopped and leaned against the railings to look at the shimmering Miramax-logo view of Lower Manhattan across the river, the traffic on the Brooklyn–Queens Expressway pounding along the road tucked out of view beneath their feet. He loved this view, he’d said before, because to him it was the classic image of ambition and scale and achievement. Now he reached across and slid his hand into the back pocket of Hannah’s jeans. She glanced up at him, spent a second appreciating his profile against the lights of the city behind. Remembering his sudden shutdown on Friday night she hesitated then decided she was being ridiculous. What had he said that evening in the Mulberry Street Bar? There’s no drama. We’re just very different people.
‘Your brother,’ she’d said, as a truck thundered beneath them, making the pavement shake. ‘What’s he like? What does he do?’
Mark had pulled his hand out of her pocket and shoved it into his jacket instead. He smiled, brown eyes black in the streetlight. ‘Let’s move,’ he said, tipping his head in the direction they were going. ‘It’s too cold to stand around. Shall we walk back across the bridge, burn off some of that roast lamb?’
Had he even heard her? He must have – the truck hadn’t been that loud. He reached for her hand and Hannah gave it to him, but she was puzzled. If he’d heard, why not answer? If there really was no drama, why this weirdness?
‘What time’s your breakfast meeting tomorrow?’ he’d asked.
‘Eight, not horrendous.’ She swerved to avoid a King Charles spaniel that had slipped its leash and was haring down the promenade towards them as if fleeing a forest fire. ‘Mark, look, your brother – do you find it difficult to talk about him?’
This time she knew he’d heard her. For several seconds, however, he said nothing and kept walking. She’d waited, not prepared to talk into the silence and risk provoking him or giving him the opportunity to avoid the question. She’d glanced sideways and saw that his face was shuttered again, his mouth set.
‘It’s not difficult for me to talk about him,’ he’d said eventually, and his voice was calm, well modulated. ‘I’d just prefer not to, okay? He lives in London, he’s done a few things, work-wise. There’s nothing much else to say. You have issues with your mother, I don’t particularly get on with my brother; you talk about it, I choose not to. Perhaps it’s a man–woman thing.’
The gender stereotype surprised Hannah, it was so unlike him, but she let it pass in the hope of staying on-topic. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘I just . . .’
‘It’s okay, don’t worry about it,’ he’d said, and his tone had made it clear that for him, the subject was closed.
The walk home to her apartment had taken an hour and a half, and for the whole length of it she’d been aware of a distance yawning between them. They did what they usually did on a long walk, pointed out new restaurants that looked good, interesting buildings or people, but where usually the observations segued into broader conversations or sparked off new thoughts, that night they’d been like pieces of polite conversation traded by people who’d just been introduced. Back at the apartment he’d suggested watching the episode of 60 Minutes he’d recorded while they’d been out, and then he’d brushed his teeth. After the lights had gone off, he’d shifted up behind her in bed and put his arm round her waist, but he hadn’t made any further move and she was glad.
He’d been in London for the two following weekends and by the one after that, after three weeks without seeing each other, the subject of Nick had moved towards the outer edge of her radar. Then had come Christmas, and Mark’s proposal, and every member of her family – her parents and Maggie, even Chessa and Rachel – had asked about his.
‘If you say there’s nothing odd about it, I believe you,’ said Tom, when she’d told him about Nick, how she hadn’t met him and didn’t seem likely to at any point in the foreseeable future.
‘What?’ she said. ‘Don’t say it like that.’
‘Like what? I’m saying I trust your judgement: if you say it’s not odd, it’s not odd.’
‘But it’s only my saying it’s not odd that makes it not odd, that’s what you’re really saying.’
‘Argh!’ Tom clutched his head and squeezed his eyes shut as if in sudden terrible pain. ‘Stop the mind-fucking – I’m a simple creature, I mean no harm.’
Nonetheless, it was patently obvious that he did think it was odd and it rankled with Hannah because privately she agreed with him. Why didn’t she know anything about the only extant member of her fiancé’s family other than that he was a year younger, lived in London, and it sounded like he’d had a few different jobs? Whenever she let herself think about it for longer than a minute or two at a time, she found herself starting down all kinds of lines of paranoid enquiry: was Mark ashamed of his brother for some reason? Or could he be ashamed of her, Hannah? Was that why he didn’t want to introduce them? If it was late at night and she was on her own and she’d had a couple of glasses of wine, she started wondering what kind of person could be so alienated from a brother with whom he claimed just not to get on that they didn’t see each other at all, even when their parents had died quite recently. Unless something actually bad had happened between them, surely they’d see each other for some sort of mutual support or just to feel connected to the memory of their family?
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 waited 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 miracle 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.’
‘So what happened?’
‘She asked me to give him a job at DataPro.’
‘God – and did you?’
‘Though it stuck in my craw, yes. I didn’t want him working for me, obviously – for a start, I knew he wouldn’t work and I’d only been going three years at that point, I didn’t have money to pay someone who wasn’t bringing anything in – but what I was really worried about was that he’d try and sabotage me.’
‘Sabotage?’
‘My brother doesn’t like me,’ Mark said, frankly. ‘The antipathy’s entirely mutual. He resents me, which doesn’t make a lot of sense all things considered, but there it is. He looks at me and sees the straight As at A-level, Cambridge, then DataPro, and he doesn’t realise that it all comes from work, nothing else. He thinks that I was just given it all, like he was given all the toys and money and abortions and cars and his rent in Borough paid for. Honestly, I think it never occurred to him that I started working like I do in a bid to get a bit of my parents’ attention for a change. The exam results, Cambridge – I was like a dog with a bone, coming home with my tail wagging and dropping it at their feet in the hope of a pat on the head.’
Hannah imagined him as a teenager and felt a burst of pity that hurt her heart.
‘Obviously, I’m grateful for it now because it gave me my work ethic and that’s given me the life I want.’ He reached across and took hold of her hand, rubbed his thumb over the backs of her fingers.
She waited a moment. ‘What happened?’ she said. ‘Did Nick sabotage you?’
‘He tried.’ Mark gave a sort of half-nod. ‘He was clever about it – there was always an alternative explanation for why every potential new client he went to meet decided not to go with us after all – but after a year and a half I just couldn’t put up with it any more. We lost an account for the first time, it had never happened before, and when I investigated, I found out that Nick had hit on the guy’s wife quite aggressively in the corridor of a restaurant while we were out for dinner. Then there was an issue with some missing money, ten thousand, and it turned out he’d “borrowed” it, which he didn’t admit until after I’d given our accountant a rocket and had him resign on me. So I fired him – Nick. I had to.’
‘How did he take it?’
‘He was fine – actually, he laughed – but my mother, both my parents, were furious. I think they thought they’d finally got him sorted and here he was, back on their hands again. They asked me what kind of brother I was, to do that to him, what kind of person I was to fire one of my own family, and I just lost it, told them what I really thought of Nick and the way my mother had let him ride rough-shod over her, probably made him the person he was. They didn’t talk to me for a year afterwards.’
Hannah pulled her legs up and wrapped her arms round her knees. ‘But I still don’t see why you feel guilty. You couldn’t be expected to go on employing him if he was wrecking your business, and it sounds like your parents – definitely your dad – agreed with you about the way he’d treated your mother.’
‘I think they did. That isn’t what I feel bad about. I made it up with them eventually, and my father had a couple of Scotches at Christmas a couple of years after that and said that bringing up Nick had been a nightmare. It was what happened later, when my mother was dying. I told you she died after my dad?’
Hannah nodded.
‘I was with her that morning. Nick got there too late. He was having an affair with a woman in Brighton and her husband was away – too good an opportunity to pass up. He didn’t make it to the hospital till one, by which point Mum was gone. But she asked me that morning – she made me swear – to look after him.’
‘What did she mean by that? Surely you couldn’t . . .’
‘Give him another chance at DataPro. He’d been drifting ever since he left, doing a bit of one thing, getting fired, trying something else, never sticking at anything . . . and I think it worried her all the time she was ill – she couldn’t rest easy when Nick was still so unsettled. Things like that were important to her: she was very old-fashioned. I know it bothered her, for instance, that neither of us was married.’
‘Maternal classic.’
‘Anyway, I promised her. I swore. I swore to her that I would look after him. I wouldn’t give him money but I’d give him a job, and she said, “Thank you, Mark,” and about an hour after that, she died. I think it was the only thing I ever did that really touched her – made a difference.’ His voice cracked and he bent his head. Hannah heard him give a hard swallow and put her hand out to him, but he shook his head.
‘The thing is, after she died, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t let him come in and stuff things up, patronise me, help himself to the bank accounts – I just couldn’t do it. So the promise I made to her, I broke. I lied to my mother on her deathbed.’
The look on his face was so bleak, so full of self-hatred, that Hannah couldn’t stand it. She moved across the sofa now, kneeled upright and put her arms around him, holding him so tightly she could feel his ribcage even through the layers of his shirt and jumper. She pressed her face against the side of his neck and felt his pulse beat against her lips. For two or three minutes she held on to him, saying nothing but communicating, she hoped, that she understood and pitied him and loved him. When finally she pulled away, his cheeks were wet and she kissed them.
‘Where is he now?’ she asked gently.
‘I don’t know,’ he croaked, then cleared his throat. ‘I’m not sure. London, I think. A couple of years ago I bumped into an old friend of my dad’s and he seemed to think Nick was working for an estate agent in Highgate. But that was two years ago so . . .’ He shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’