By two o’clock Hanna had eaten her sandwich, taken a shower, and redone her hair. Then she called room service and had her tray removed. Ten minutes later she called again and ordered another pot of tea. This time, when asked if she preferred Chinese tea or Indian, she only just managed to stop herself asking for “Builders’,” her father’s name for strong English Breakfast tea served in a mug with several spoons of sugar. In the Casey family, Builders’ Tea had been the staple comfort in times of stress and now she found herself craving its syrupy texture and the hit of tannin that her mother always declared would take a year’s rust off a kettle.
She had packed an unread Wallander novel in case she’d have time to fill. But concentrating on crime in Ystad proved to be a nonstarter so she sat down with a cup of tea and stared out of the window. Half an hour later, on the dot of three fifteen, the phone on the table rang. She picked it up.
“Hanna?”
“Yes.”
“It’s Malcolm.”
“Yes.”
“I’m in the foyer.”
“Oh. Oh, well, look, do come up.”
“You want me to come up?”
“Well, yes, I mean, it’s quiet . . . I mean it’ll just be us.” Did he think she wanted to discuss money in a hotel foyer with everyone listening? There was a pause while she thought how strange it was that she hadn’t heard his familiar voice in years. Then he just said, “Right,” and hung up.
He hadn’t changed a great deal since Hanna had last seen him, at the funeral of his father, who had died suddenly of a heart attack. She had flown over from Ireland with Jazz, who was a mutinous teenager at the time, and still angry and confused about the abrupt move to Crossarra. As soon as they arrived, Malcolm had carried Jazz off on a wave of Turner relations. Louisa, who seemed shattered, had smiled distantly at Hanna and clung to Malcolm’s arm throughout the funeral. Hanna sat at the back of the idyllic little chapel in which she and Malcolm hadn’t got married, and stared at the back of Jazz’s head. Jazz sat in the front pew with her cheek pressed against Malcolm’s shoulder. The color of their hair was identical. That was four years ago. Now, opening the door of her hotel room, Hanna saw that Malcolm’s hair was cut shorter than it used to be, presumably to deflect attention from the gray streaks at his temples. But otherwise he looked no older. Just a lot more authoritative.
She had decided to say nothing until he spoke first. She, too, had played poker in her day, and, besides, she wasn’t sure that her voice wouldn’t crack or squeak. He walked into the room, turned to face her, and said nothing. This wasn’t in the plan. For a mad moment Hanna had a vision of them standing there forever: the maid would come in to clean the room and new guests would arrive to occupy it, but she and Malcolm would be frozen there like statues while other lives just carried on around them. The vision was so vivid that she nearly laughed. Malcolm looked startled. Then his face relaxed and he held out his hand.
“It’s nice to see your smile again.”
Hanna felt a knot in her stomach uncoil. She took his outstretched hand and he pulled her towards him to kiss her cheek. It was going to be okay after all.
“Would you like tea? I could order another pot.”
He shook his head and went to sit at the table. “No, I’m fine. Let’s not waste time.” But he was sitting back comfortably, apparently relaxed and unpressured. Hanna felt confused. She had hoped to find him approachable but she hadn’t expected it to be easy. As she was about to speak she realized that he was looking at her with a familiar quizzical look that was half caress and half challenge. He raised his eyebrows at her.
“That color always suited you.”
“What?”
“Like rich, tawny port.” He leaned forward, smiling. “I’m glad you rang, Hanna, I knew you would eventually.”
He reached across the table and took her hand. Hanna heard herself begin to gabble. She didn’t have time to work out what he was talking about and she was desperate to keep things on course.
“Well, I’m glad you’re glad. I knew that if we could just see each other and talk you’d be reasonable. I mean, we could be reasonable. Both of us. I’ve got a job, of course I’ve got a job, but I’m living with my mother . . . well, you know my mother. You must see that I can’t spend the rest of my life with her . . . I have to have someplace to myself now that Jazz is grown up and gone. I’m not trying to fleece you, Malcolm, I’m just asking you to be fair.”
Seeing his eyes narrow, she kept going. “Look, I know I said I didn’t want a penny from you and I know it must have sounded aggressive. And I’m sorry. But the whole divorce might have been different if we’d had a chance to talk. I can’t deal with you by letter, Malcolm. You retreat behind legal-speak and I just get angry.”
Taking a deep breath, she tried to focus. “That’s why I’m here. I’m fifty-one, Malcolm. Half my life was invested in our marriage and your career. I project-managed the London house. I found the place in Norfolk. I ran your social life like clockwork, I stocked the freezers, I planned the dinner parties, I cultivated the right people, I wore the right clothes.”
His mouth tightened. Hanna found herself hanging on to his hand. “I helped you build your career and now you’re the one reaping the benefits. You’ll always look after Jazz, I know that. But I’m her mother and I was your wife and it wasn’t me who broke up our marriage. You owe me, Malcolm, and you’ve got to be reasonable.”
Glad that she’d managed to stay relatively cool, she looked at him hopefully. Malcolm recoiled like a snake. Standing up, he crossed the room and swung back to her, as if interrogating a witness.
“Let me get this straight. You invited me here to talk about money?”
“Well, yes. I did. I just thought that we could sit down like reasonable people . . .”
He was looking at her as if she were mad. “In the afternoon? In a hotel bedroom?”
“Yes, well, like I said, it’s private.”
Suddenly the implications of what he had just said dawned on Hanna. “You thought . . .”
“What did you expect me to think?”
“You thought this was some kind of . . . assignation?”
Her jaw dropped but he didn’t seem to notice.
“It’s three in the afternoon, Hanna. It’s Mayfair.” He took a step towards her. “And I imagine it’s been a while for you.”
“What?”
The look on her face made Malcolm step back again. “Okay, maybe it hasn’t. Maybe you’ve been falling into bed with rugged Irish fishermen. I don’t know.” He glowered at her, sounding peevish. “You invited me up saying you wanted it to be just us. Maybe I got the wrong message.”
Hanna’s disbelief changed to anger. “Oh no, you got the exactly right message. I told that po-faced secretary of yours that I wanted to see you here and I did. And I wanted it to be just us because I’m sick to death of the way you use your huge staff and your huge self-importance to keep me at arm’s length.”
He opened his mouth but she stood up, shoving the table away and jabbing her finger at him.
“No, shut up, Malcolm, this is happening on my time. And on my credit card. I paid to fly over here, I paid for this room, and in my terms it cost a fortune. You probably swan off to afternoon assignations in foreign hotel rooms all the time—’ She stopped abruptly, her eyes widening. Malcolm had only looked guilty for a second but it was long enough. “Oh my God, you probably do.” Hanna gaped at him, her anger turning to outrage. “You really are a piece of work, Malcolm, you know that? What about poor Tessa? Did she know what you do with your afternoons? Or did you spare her, too, just like you spared me? Do you still tell yourself it’s fine so long as it’s discreet?”
That was what he’d said five years ago, the day after she arrived home unexpectedly and found him in bed with their friend Tessa Carmichael, a colleague in his law firm. It was a ghastly phone conversation, held the morning after she had packed her bags and taken Jazz to Ireland. All too aware that Mary Casey was listening to every word, Hanna had hissed furiously into the telephone in the hallway in Crossarra while Malcolm shouted at her from London. Somewhere in the midst of his aggression and her recriminations, the truth about the timing of his affair had emerged. For Hanna, the shock of finding them together in the bedroom of the London house she had designed and looked after so lovingly had been nothing to the discovery that he had started sleeping with Tessa long before Jazz was born.
Now his guilty expression turned to bullishness. “I never said—”
“Oh yes you did, you prided yourself on your discretion. Thoughtful, considerate Malcolm, so eager to keep everybody happy!”
“Damn right, I was. I did my best!”
“You did your best?”
“I told you before, Hanna. I didn’t want to fall in love. It happened. And when it did happen I behaved responsibly. I put my family first.”
“You were married to me! You were sleeping with another woman! How do those two facts add up to putting your family first?”
“You were my wife. I stayed with you. I was showing you respect. If you can’t see that, I can’t help it.”
Hanna took a deep breath. None of this was going to plan. It was supposed to have been so calm and rational and instead they were having a shouting match. She tried to refocus her thoughts. But it was too late. Furious that he had been wrong-footed about the reason for their meeting and defensive after his inadvertent flicker of guilt, Malcolm was on a roll.
“You were the one who tore the family apart, Hanna. And that, in case you’ve forgotten, involved dragging our sixteen-year-old daughter away from everything and everyone she knew and sacrificing her happiness on the altar of your wounded pride.”
This was so close to what Hanna had repeatedly told herself on sleepless nights in Mary Casey’s back bedroom that her eyes filled with tears. Immediately Malcolm pressed his advantage.
“A little discretion. A sense of responsibility. A willingness to look beyond your personal agenda. That’s not a lot to ask, Hanna. Not of someone who claims to be a loving mother.”
It wasn’t fair. But maybe it was true. Hanna blinked, determined not to cry. She couldn’t trust her voice but her mind was screaming at him. How could he stand there looking supercilious? It was he who had wanted them to marry when she’d found out that she was pregnant that first time, so soon after they’d met. Then, when she lost that baby and wondered if the marriage had been a mistake, it was he who had persuaded her that things could still work out for them. She remembered sitting up in bed in the flat near Sloane Square, dumb with misery, having had the miscarriage. Malcolm had sat beside her, hugging her and insisting that they could get through this. He couldn’t bear to lose his marriage, he said, as well as losing their baby. They’d find a house, he said, somewhere beautiful that would be theirs, not just a place that he rented from his cousin. It would be Hanna’s project. She would create a wonderful home, and, in time, there’d be other babies. But even if there weren’t it didn’t matter, he’d told her. He loved her for herself.
And Hanna had believed him. She could have left him then, gone back to her college course, and picked up her career plan. Instead, though she’d walked like a zombie through those first weeks after her miscarriage, she had thrown herself into his project believing it to be an expression of their love. But there was no point in revisiting all that now. Taking another deep breath she tried to keep her voice steady. “I’m sorry, you’re right, maybe it was stupid of me to ask you to come here. I just wanted privacy, Malcolm, because I thought that if we could sit down on our own we could solve the problem.”
“I see no problem.”
“Well, that’s the problem.” She could see his hackles rising again, so she kept talking. “Look, it’s about practicality, not perception. I’m not asking for a fortune. I just think I deserve some settlement after all those years. And I’m not saying they weren’t happy years. They were. Well, at least, I thought they were. Anyway, that’s not the point and I’m sorry for dragging up the past. The point is that you’re not being fair.”
But having brought her to a state of apology, Malcolm clearly felt that his work was done. He picked up his briefcase.
“Let’s not discuss fairness, Hanna. Or what I owe the woman who destroyed my child’s life.”
“How can you say that? Jazz is happy! But she’s grown up now and off chasing her dreams and I’m stuck living alone with my mother.”
“Jazz is serving plastic meals on budget flights to Malaga. Not what I’d call a dream, Hanna. More like what you’ve reduced her to.”
Malcolm walked to the door and then turned back abruptly. “You’re absolutely right. I will always look after my daughter. But you made your choice, Hanna. You’ll get nothing more from me.”