Mark takes my hand and we walk out toward the shore. At the water’s edge we squeeze off our boots and slip into the icy North Sea, jeans pushed up to our knees.
His smile. His eyes. His hot hand tightly gripping mine. The sharp taut feeling of the icy water on my feet, bursting into a fluid white heat up my legs. Burning cold. We’d timed it exactly right. The sky starts to lighten. We laugh. Mark counts down to 5:05 on his wristwatch and we look patiently east across the water.
The entire sky lightens to twilight before the sun crests the silver water. Yellow streaks the horizon and ombrés out to peaches and pinks as it hits the lowest clouds, and beyond—the whole sky blazes blue. Azure blue. Ha. It’s so beautiful. So beautiful I feel nauseous.
When we can’t stand the cold anymore, I wade back to shore, bending to clean the sand off my feet in the shallows before I put my boots back on. My engagement ring catches the full glare of the sun refracting through the crystal water. The early morning mist is gone, the air full of moisture, salty and crisp. So bright. So clear. The sky in high-definition blue. The best day of the year. Always. So much hope, every year.
Mark asked me to marry him last October, after his thirty-fifth birthday. Although we’d been together for years, it had still been a surprise, somehow. I sometimes wonder if things pass me by more than other people. Maybe I don’t pay enough attention, or maybe I’m just not that good at picking stuff up. Things often surprise me. I’m always surprised to find out from Mark that so-and-so didn’t like so-and-so, or somebody was attracted to me or had some other strong reaction. I never notice. I suppose that’s probably for the best. What you don’t know can’t hurt you.
Mark notices things. He’s very good with people. People light up when they see him coming. They love him. People often ask me, on the rare occasions that we do anything separately, “Isn’t Mark coming?” with a tone of bemused disappointment. I don’t take it personally, because that’s how I feel too. Mark makes all situations better. He listens, really listens. He holds eye contact. Not aggressively but in a way that reassures people—his look says: I’m here, and that’s enough for me. He’s interested in people. Mark’s look has no angle; he’s just there, with you.
* * *
—
We sit high on a dune, looking out across the wide flat expanse of sky and sea. It’s windier up here. The air howls in our ears. I’m glad of the thick sweaters. The coarse Irish wool gives off the scent of animal as it warms. The conversation turns to the future. Our plans. We’ve always made plans on this day. Like resolutions, I suppose, mid-year resolutions. I’ve always enjoyed planning ahead, since I was a child. I like to plan. I like to take stock. Mark had never really done resolutions before we met, but he took to it instantly—it suited him, the progressive futurist nature of it.
My mid-year resolutions aren’t out of the ordinary. The usual: read more, watch TV less, work smarter, spend more time with loved ones, eat better, drink less, be happy. And then Mark says he wants to focus on work more.
Mark works in banking. I know, yes, boo hiss. But all I can say is: he’s not an arsehole. You’ll have to trust me on that. He’s definitely no Eton, drinking-club, polo-team alumnus. He’s a Yorkshire lad made good. Granted, his dad wasn’t exactly a coal miner or anything. Mr. Roberts, now retired, had been a pensions adviser for Prudential in East Riding.
Mark moved forward fast in the City, passed his regulation exams, became a trader, specialized in sovereigns, got poached, got promoted, and then it happened. The financial crash.
The bottom fell out of the financial industry. Everyone who understood was terrified from the first day. They could see it all spooling out ahead of them. Technically, Mark was fine. His job was safe—if anything, it was safer than before because he specialized in the exact thing that everyone needed help with after the crash, sovereign debt. But bonuses plummeted for everyone. Which was fine, we weren’t exactly on the breadline, but a lot of his friends got laid off, which was terrifying. It scared me at the time, watching grown adults failing; they had kids in schools, and mortgages they couldn’t afford anymore. The wives hadn’t worked since pregnancy. No one had a backup plan. That year was the year that people came to dinner and cried. They’d leave our house apologizing, smiling bravely, and promising to see us once they’d moved back to their hometowns and got their lives back on track. We never heard from a lot of them again. We’d hear that they’d moved back in with their parents in Berkshire or moved to work in Australia, or divorced.
Mark switched banks; all his colleagues had been let go where he was and he’d been left doing five people’s jobs, so he took a chance and went somewhere else.
The new bank, I don’t like. It’s not quite right. The men there manage to be fat and yet sinewy at the same time. They’re out of shape, and they smoke, which I didn’t used to mind at all, but now it has that air of nervous desperation. That worries me. It smells of bile and broken dreams. Mark’s colleagues sometimes come out with us for drinks and sneer and bitch about their wives and kids, as if I weren’t there. As if were it not for those women they’d be on some beach somewhere.
Mark isn’t like them; he looks after himself. He runs, he swims, he plays tennis, he keeps himself healthy, and now he sits in a room for eleven hours a day with these men. I know he’s strong-minded but I can see it’s wearing him down. And now, on this day of all days, on our anniversary, he announces he wants to focus on work more.
Focus means I’ll see him less. He already works too hard. He gets up at 6 A.M. every weekday, leaves the house at 6:30, has lunch at his desk and gets home to me totally exhausted at 7:30 at night. We have dinner and talk, maybe watch a film, and he’s in bed with the lights out at 10:00 to do it all again.
“That’s what I want to change, though,” he says. “I’ve been working there for a year now. When I moved there they promised I’d only be in this position initially, until we restructured the department. But they won’t let me do that. They won’t let me restructure. So I’m not actually doing what they hired me to do.” He sighs. Rubs his hand up and down his face. “Which is fine. But I need to have a proper conversation with Lawrence. We need to talk about my end-of-year bonus, or changing the team, because some of these jokers have no idea what they’re doing.” He pauses, then looks at me. “I’m serious, Erin. I wasn’t going to tell you this, but after that deal went through on Monday, Hector rang me crying.”
“Why was he crying?” I ask, surprised. Hector has worked alongside Mark for years now. When Mark left the other bank, when everything was going wrong, Mark promised Hector he’d find him a position if he moved. And he kept his promise. Mark made Hector part of his deal when he moved. They came as a pair or not at all.
“You know we were waiting for the figures the other day to sign off on the deal?” He looks at me searchingly.
“Yeah, you took the call in the car park,” I say, nodding him on. He’d slipped out of our pub lunch yesterday and spent an hour pacing the gravel while his food went cold. I’d read my book. I’m self-employed, so I know the “phone wander” well.
“Yeah, he told me he’d got the figures. The guys on the trading desk had been really hard to even get in the office over the holidays and they’d made it pretty difficult for him. They’ve called a meeting once we’re back to discuss overtime hours and fair practice. It’s ridiculous. Anyway. Hector spoke to New York, tried to explain that no one was in and why the figures were late and they went fucking mental. Andrew…You remember Andrew in New York, right? I told you about the—”