Читать книгу Strangers - Rosie Thomas - Страница 5

It was just starting to snow.

Annie stood beside the row of coats hung untidily on the pegs and looked out of the glass panel in the back door. The dark grey specks fell out of a paler sky, and the wind caught them and blew them up into a spiral before letting them drop on the path. They changed from grey to white, and then vanished. In a minute, Annie thought, the flakes would stop melting. The snow would stick. She would need to wear her boots to go shopping. She opened the door of the cupboard under the stairs and rummaged for them, sighing as she always did at the sight of the tangle of family belongings. Then she took her coat off the peg, disentangling it from a red anorak with the sleeves pulled wrong side out.

A boy came down the stairs, two at a time, thumping his feet. He swung around the banister post and vaulted the last four steps down to the lobby. ‘Careful,’ Annie said automatically. ‘You’ll break a leg doing that, one of these days.’

The child looked squarely at her, and she knew that he was wondering how forcibly to contradict her. Then he shrugged. ‘No I won’t.’ He went to the door and pressed his face against the glass. ‘Look, Mum, it’s snowing. Can’t I come out with you?’ She buttoned up her coat and picked up her handbag, flipping through the contents to see if she had everything.

‘Can’t I?’

She smiled quickly at him, then glanced past him into the kitchen to see if her chequebook was on the table. She felt her attention being pulled two ways, fixing nowhere. It was often like that, nowadays.

‘No, you can’t. You hate shopping and you’ll only nag me to come home as soon as we’ve got there. And I’ve got a lot to do today.’

She found her chequebook in her coat pocket, and put it into her bag with her purse. The boy was sitting on the bottom step now, still staring longingly out at the snow. A thought occurred to him and he looked up at her.

‘Buying presents for me? For my stocking?’

His earnest gaze, a perfect replica of his father’s, made her smile.

‘That depends. And Tom, you may have grown out of Father Christmas, but Benjy hasn’t. You won’t spoil it for him, will you?’

Over the boy’s head she saw the snow beyond the window, falling faster now, powdering the garden wall with the faintest rim of white. Perhaps it would be a white Christmas. She breathed in the scent of pine needles, tangerines, log fires. ‘Okay,’ Tom said grudgingly. ‘He’s such a baby.’

Annie gathered up her scarf and gloves. There were a thousand things to be done before Christmas, faithful preparations for the family myth of a perfect holiday. She hugged Thomas and went to the foot of the stairs.

‘Martin? Where are you? I’m off now.’

There was a muffled thud from upstairs, two seconds of silence, and then the sound of a child’s full-throated yelling.

A moment or two later Annie’s husband appeared at the top of the stairs with Benjy in his arms. The little boy’s face was scarlet and crumpled, but he opened his eyes for long enough to make sure that his mother was watching. The crying went on undiminished.

‘He fell off the end of the bed,’ Martin said.

Annie ran up the stairs, already hot in her outdoor clothes. She rubbed Benjy’s head, feeling the round hardness of his skull under the silky hair. How resilient children are, she thought. Tougher sometimes than their parents.

‘Poor old Benjy,’ she said. Martin stood holding him, rocking him slightly, waiting for the noise to abate.

‘You’re going, then? What time will you be back?’

Martin was tall, with the rounded shoulders of someone used to stooping to reach the more general level. Annie was standing on the step below him and she had to stretch up to press her cheek against his. She didn’t see his face, but she noticed that the label was sticking out at the back of his jersey. He patted her with his free hand and Annie turned and ran back down the stairs.

‘What shall I give them for lunch?’ he called after her.

‘I don’t know. Look in the fridge for something, can’t you?’

The little ripple of domestic irritation washed after her all the way to the front door.

‘Or take them to McDonald’s, if you like.’

Thomas appeared in the kitchen doorway. ‘Yeah, McDonald’s. Dad? Are you listening? Mum said McDonald’s.’

Annie turned back to look at the three of them.

It wasn’t like Annie to turn back but today, for some reason, she did.

She saw Martin at the head of the stairs, his face so familiar that the features seemed to have been rubbed smooth, like a pebble by the sea. Benjy sagged in his arms, his head against his father’s shoulder. He had stopped crying, and his thumb was in his mouth for comfort. A few feet below them Thomas swung in an impatient arc from the newel post.

And all around them, like an over-detailed picture, the evidence of family life came crowding in. There was a broken plastic car overturned in the hallway, a dim grey line of handprints all along the shabby paint of the wall, a basket of clothes waiting to be ironed, on the hall table a sheaf of Polaroid snapshots of the boys.

‘What time will you be back?’ Martin repeated mildly. Annie’s irritation was disregarded. Sometimes it increased her annoyance, but she found herself smiling now.

‘I’m not sure. The crowds will be awful, probably. But I want to try and finish the last of the Christmas shopping today. Expect me when you see me.’

Annie opened the front door, and the cold wind blew in.

‘Bye,’ she called cheerfully. ‘See you all later.’

The door closed again. It was quiet outside. Not the muffled silence that came with snow, yet, but the quiet of waiting for it to happen. Annie ducked her head into the biting cold, and walked on down the path. As she opened the gate the Co-op milk float came round the corner, its little electric hum barely reaching her. Annie reckoned up quickly in her head, how many pints, and held up four fingers to the milkman. The snowflakes patted against her face. The milkman gave her a thumbs-up sign as the float stopped. Annie set off towards the station, walking quickly. She knew that it would take her exactly eight minutes. Martin hadn’t offered to drive her, even in the snow. They both knew without having to mention it that it was easier to walk than dress the children in outdoor clothes and persuade them into their car seats for the short drive. Annie was still smiling. That was the kind of telepathy bred by ten years of marriage, she thought, without bitterness.

As she turned the corner into the main road none of the few passers-by even glanced at her. Annie was just what she seemed, unremarkable, a housewife and mother intent on a day’s shopping. It would have taken a close look to reveal that she appeared a little younger than her real age, that her face was smooth even though her expression was preoccupied, and that she had an air of being capable, and content.

It was still early when Annie reached the first big store on her route for the day. The windows along the street blazed their Christmas displays at her. She looked at them for a moment, savouring the sight of satin ribbons and fir branches frosted with dry, sparkling snow. The real thing in the street outside was already grey-brown, spraying in filthy plumes under the wheels of the traffic. Annie pushed gratefully in through the big glass doors and breathed in the warm, perfumed air. She took her knitted hat off and shook her hair out, then turned towards the lift. She would start on the top floor and work her way down. Her list was ready in her coat pocket.

There was no one in the lift. She looked up at the indicator, congratulating herself on having arrived before the crowds. The doors opened at the top floor and she stepped out. A long counter heaped up with coloured balls faced her, red and green and silver and gold, and a pyramid of clear glass ones that held the iridescence of soap bubbles. She was drawn to the display and picked up a clear ball, turning it so that the colours changed in the light. Expensive, she thought regretfully. Nearly a pound each. But she took four, guiltily, putting them carefully into a wire basket. She moved across the department to the waterfalls of tinsel and buried her hands amongst the strands.

Two assistants waited at the nearest cash till.

‘What time d’you finish?’ Annie heard one of them ask.

‘Seven, tonight,’ her friend answered. ‘Makes the day seem endless, doesn’t it?’

The tinsel was coiled in Annie’s basket now, a bright silver serpent. They needed some new stuff, she reassured herself. Theirs was tarnished from too many annual appearances. But she wouldn’t spend any more money on decorations. She would go on down to the kitchen department and look for something for Martin’s mother. Her own mother needed a new dressing gown. She would go on to Selfridge’s for that, later. Annie’s face clouded as if she had remembered something painful, and she turned quickly with her basket towards the cash desk.

Yawning, one of the assistants wrapped up her purchases in green tissue. The other tapped the till keys and the electronic total flashed at Annie. She counted out the notes, picked up her carrier bag and walked towards the stairs at the back of the store. They were nearer than the lifts. She would walk down two floors. Heavy swing doors led to the stairwell. A sign over them announced Emergency Exit.

Annie reached the doors. She was vaguely conscious of someone else heading the same way. It was a man, he had been standing beside her at the cash desk, and now he was right behind her. She half turned her head, and his arm reached past to push the heavy door open for them both to pass through.

‘After you,’ the man said. She didn’t see his face. Nor did she ever say Thank you, although the words had formed in her head.

It was then that the bomb exploded.

It destroyed the staff cloakroom where it had been left overnight. It blew a hole up through the roof of the store, and the blast waves racing downwards into the heart of the structure ripped a great hole into which the floors tilted and fell. The terrible thunder of the explosion shook the surrounding streets and jolted the houses a mile away.

Annie didn’t hear a sound. There was an instant, an instant as long as infinity, when gravity deserted the world. In total silence she saw a blur of red and gold as the counter threw its load of glass balls into the whirling air, and then smashed them into fragments. She felt a silent wind that tore her clothes and flayed her skin and lifted her up only to pitch her forwards, down into a deathly pit where broken beams and chunks of wall boiled around her.

The fierce, white light was abruptly extinguished, and the dark descended.

The noise came then, like thunder receding, and in the wake of it came the roar of falling masonry as the store was sucked inwards on itself, molten, a whirlpool of stone and steel.

Annie fell, and went on falling, into the dark.

The noise had possessed her, but now it abandoned her again, growing fainter. The roaring crash was finished and in its place was the rattle of chunks of stone and plaster falling down on top of her. That grew fainter too, until it was only a whisper of dust, trickling into the crevices and settling as gravity took hold of the world again.

The girls at the cash desk were both dead. So was the cleaner who had been working in the cloakroom and who had lifted the tartan holdall out of its hiding place. Annie didn’t know it yet, but she was alive. She had fallen into the hole, with the heavy fire door half on top of her, like a shield.

Even the dust had stopped whispering now. The silence came again, long seconds, and nothing stirred. Then, up in the light, above the smoking rubble where tinsel and fragments of pretty glass were mixed with torn girders and other, terrible things, and where the snowflakes drifted and settled impartially, the first siren began to wail.

Annie couldn’t hear it. Her head thundered with the echo of the explosion and her eyes burned with the white flash of light. She closed her eyes, opened them again, but the glare was undimmed. Where had the dark gone? Her own, private darkness, how could that have been taken away? Were her eyes open or shut?

She lay without moving for a long time, she didn’t know how long. The roaring in her ears dropped in pitch, became muffled. The white blaze turned egg-yellow with a brassy point at the centre. The first bodily sensation to return was a wave of nausea. Annie tried instinctively to turn her head in order to be sick, but a sharp pain that seemed to be inside her head cut short the movement. She lay still again, staring up into the middle of the yellow glow. Slowly, like a fist unclenching, the nausea released its grip, and the light dwindled to a little point. Her eyes were opening and closing, she was sure of that now. It dawned on her that the light was inside her own head, and she could see nothing else because she was in utter darkness.

Annie’s tongue moved, finding her lips. They were coated with dust, except for one corner that was clogged with sticky moisture. There was the brackish taste of her own blood. She was suddenly possessed by panic, more powerful than the nausea. She tried to roll sideways, to draw her knees up into the foetal position, and found that she could not. She was hurt, badly hurt, and she was trapped in total blackness.

Annie could hear screaming, a scream that went on and on, up and then down again as the sufferer gasped for breath. When it stopped she wondered if the screams could have been her own.

Where was she? What had happened?

Oh God, please help me.

The screams had been hers. She could feel another one, the voice of pure terror, rising inside her. She clenched her teeth, and felt the grit crunch between them. She tried to swallow it, to clear her mouth, focusing on the smallest thing to keep the fear at bay. She could feel it all around her, like a living thing.

Think. Try to work out what had happened.

Slowly this time, she tried to move. Her right side, arm and shoulder right across to her breastbone, and her hip and thigh, wouldn’t do anything. She was pinned down by something smooth, sloping upwards at an angle. She discovered it by feeling cautiously upwards with her left hand. On her left side, higher up, there was something jagged that felt both hard and crumbling at the same time. She gave up her useless search and let her arm drop to her side again. Legs. Where were her legs? She could feel nothing at all in the lower part of them. It was as if her body was clay that had been crumpled up and crudely remodelled, stopping short at the knees.

And her head, the pain in her head. She rolled it, just a little, to one side and then the other. There was perhaps an inch or two of play before the pain gripped her. Suddenly Annie realized that her hair was caught underneath something. She had taken her knitted hat off – how long ago? – inside the doors of the shop. Now something very heavy was resting on her spread-out hair, and the pain she felt was the roots of it tearing her scalp. So even if there had been nothing else touching her she would still be trapped here by her hair, forced to lie staring upwards, into – into what?

There was only the pitch dark, not a sound except the threatening patter of falling fragments when she moved her arm. The fingers of her left hand fluttered, feeling the rough brick, splintered wood.

She was shuddering now, fully conscious, cold to her bones.

What would happen to her?

Annie screamed again as the fear lurched close and threatened to smother her. When the sound of it died away a voice said, very close to her, ‘Stop. Stop screaming.’

It wasn’t her own voice, she knew that. It was a man’s. A stranger’s.

At the sound of it, she remembered. Before the noise came, before even the silent wind and the shock that had spun her round into a rain of splintering glass balls, there had been a man. That was it. When she had still been Annie, walking calmly to the exit with a carrier bag of Christmas tree decorations, a man had come up behind her and pushed open the door. Out of the corner of her eye, in that last instant, she had seen his hand and arm.

Fear moved right inside her now. Where was the man, how close to her? Annie struggled to make her thoughts fit together.

He must have done this, whatever it was. And if he could do something so cataclysmic what else would there be, when he reached her? To stop the shuddering Annie bit her lips, and tasted salt blood again. She must keep still, or he would hear her. She lay with her head turned as far as it would go towards where the voice had come from, staring wildly into the impenetrable dark.

‘Where are you?’ he asked. ‘I don’t think I can reach you, but …’

‘If you come near me …’ Annie had wanted to scream at him, but her words were a gasp. ‘If you come near me, I’ll kill you.’

There was a long moment’s quiet.

Then the man said softly, ‘It’s all right. Listen, can you hear the sirens? They’ll reach us. They’ll get us out.’

A solitary policewoman had been standing on the opposite pavement, checking the number plate of a grey van parked on the double yellow lines. The side of it had sheltered her from the blast, and she crouched in the gutter for an instant with her cheek against the cold metal. She heard screaming, and the traffic skidding wildly in the roadway, and the crash of breaking glass. Slowly, sliding her hand up the van’s side, she stood up. Under a cloud of black smoke she saw the front of the store. The roof had been blown open to the sky and she could see the inside where the floors hung, pathetically exposed, tipping downwards. Chunks of brick were still falling. In the roadway people were running, some of them away from the falling bricks, others towards them. There were other people lying on the pavement.

The policewoman left the shelter of the grey van and made herself walk across the road. The broken glass crunched under her polished black shoes. She held up one black-gloved hand to stop the traffic, as she had been trained to do. Her other hand reached inside her coat for the pocket transmitter, to call for help.

The first squad car came, weaving up the street between the slewed cars and buses, its lights blazing. The policewoman was kneeling beside a man whose blood seeped through the clenched fist pressed to his cheek. There was suddenly an eerie quiet, and she thought how loud the siren sounded.

Two policemen leapt out of the car as it skidded to the kerbside. One of them carried a loudhailer, and he lifted it to his mouth.

‘Get back. Get back and stay back.’

One by one the people who had been milling on the pavement began to move slowly backwards, a step at a time. They were looking up at the ruined façade of the store where the smoke still drifted in black coils.

‘There may be a further explosion. Please leave the area at once.’

They moved a little further, leaving the injured and those who were helping them, bewildered groups on the littered pavement.

Down in the darkness the man’s voice repeated, insistent, ‘Can’t you hear them?’

At last, Annie said, ‘Yes.’

‘I can’t hear you properly,’ the man said louder. ‘Say it louder.’

She repeated, ‘Yes,’ and then, suddenly, ‘What have you done?’

There was quiet again after that, and she heard something moving, close to her. Her skin crept in a cold wave.

‘I didn’t do it.’ The voice sounded even closer now. ‘It must have been a bomb, I think. Perhaps a gas explosion.’

A bomb.

In her mind’s eye, imprinted on the terrifying darkness, the word conjured up flickering images. There were the television news pictures of violent death amongst the rubble, a half-forgotten impression of the reddened dome of St Paul’s still standing amongst the devastation of the Blitz, and then the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima.

A bomb.

The images faded and left her in the dark again. Her eyes stung with the effort of staring into it. She understood that a bomb had gone off, and buried her along with the broken Christmas tree balls, the gaudy strands of tinsel and the heavy door she had been going to push open. It was the same door lying on top of her now, crushing her.

Annie was shivering violently.

‘I’m afraid,’ she said.

She sounded very shocked, the man thought. But she was conscious, and she had stopped screaming. He wondered if there was a chance of manoeuvring himself close enough to help. He eased himself sideways a little, reaching out with his right hand.

‘What are you doing?’ Her voice was sharp with the onset of panic.

‘Trying to reach you. Listen to me, carefully. Where are you hurt?’

He could almost hear her thinking, painfully exploring the inner contours of her body, just as he had done himself.

At last she said, ‘I can’t feel my legs. My side hurts. There’s something heavy on top of me. I think it’s a door.’

‘That’s good. It’s probably like a shield for you.’

‘And my hair’s caught. I can’t move my head.’

She had long, thick fair hair. He remembered seeing it as she walked to the exit in front of him.

‘Can you move any part of you?’ he persisted.

‘My arm. My left arm.’

Gently, he said, ‘Reach out with it, then.’

He heard a tiny clink, perhaps the buckle of her watch against broken masonry, and the soft scraping of her fingers as they moved towards him. He stretched his own arm, further, until the muscles ached, and the splinters scraped his wrist. And then, miraculously, their fingers touched. Their hands gripped, palm to palm, suddenly strong.

Annie thought, Thank God. The hand in the dark was so solid, the feel of it gripping hers almost familiar, as if she already knew the shape of it.

The man heard the sob of relief in her throat. Her hand felt very cold in his.

‘What’s your name?’ he asked into the blackness.

‘Annie.’

‘Annie. I’ve always liked the name Annie. Mine is Steve.’

‘Steve.’

It was a reassurance to repeat the names, an affirmation that they were still there, still themselves after the cataclysm.

Annie felt his thumb move on the back of her hand, a little stroking movement. The fear began to loosen its grip, and her breath came easier. She turned her head towards him, as far as she could. Her hair pulled at her scalp.

‘I thought you did it,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry. I was afraid of you.’

‘I didn’t do it. I was just doing my Christmas shopping, like you.’

Christmas shopping … the translucent glass balls that had been so expensive, the shiny ribbons and fir branches in the shop windows, the snow falling in the wintry streets. And now? To be buried, in this acrid darkness. How far down? She had the impression that she had fallen down and down, into a great pit. What was balanced above them, how many tons of rubble cutting them off from the sky and air?

Annie’s hair tore at the roots as she struggled, involuntarily.

‘Keep still.’ Steve’s fingers tightened over hers.

Annie heard the door creak over her face. Yes, she must keep still.

‘And you?’ she asked. ‘Are you hurt?’

‘I’m cut, here and there. Not badly. My leg’s the worst. I think it’s broken.’

Now Annie’s fingers moved, trying to lace hers between his.

‘Don’t let go,’ Steve said quickly.

‘I won’t. I’m trying to think. How can we get out?’ She was collecting herself now, trying hard to keep her voice level.

‘I … don’t think we can.’ The sound of the sirens came again, multiplying, but a long way off. ‘They’ll come for us, Annie. It won’t be long, if we can just hold on.’

Annie thought, They won’t find us. How can they? No one even knows I’m here. I didn’t tell Martin where I was going.

‘Who is Martin?’

It was only with the question that Annie realized she had been thinking aloud. All her senses were dislocated. She was looking, staring so hard that her eyes stung, but she couldn’t see. There were noises all around her now, not just the sirens but other, rumbling sounds, creaking, and the rattle of falling fragments. Yet she couldn’t tell whether they were real, or replaying themselves inside her head, like her own voice. And suddenly she had the feeling that she wasn’t trapped at all, but falling again, spreadeagled in the blackness. Annie clenched her fists and tilted her face upwards, deliberately, ignoring the pain in her head, until her cheek met the solid, cold, weighty smoothness of the door.

‘My husband,’ she said, willing the words to come out normally. She wasn’t falling any more. ‘Martin is my husband.’

‘Go on,’ Steve said. ‘Talk to me. It doesn’t matter what. Lie still, and just talk.’

Leaving home this morning. There were the three of them, watching her go, little Benjy in Martin’s arms and Tom swinging around the banister post. Before that, she had run to the top of the stairs, reaching up to brush her cheek against Martin’s. A goodbye like a thousand others, hurried, and she hadn’t even seen her husband’s face. It was so familiar, rubbed smooth in her mind’s eye by the years.

Suddenly, Annie felt her solitude. She was going to die, here, alone. But the hand holding hers was blessedly warm. Where had Martin gone, then?

I love you. They repeated the formula often enough, not out of passion but to reassure each other, renewing the pledge. It is true, Annie thought. I do love him.

Yet now, trying to summon it up in pain and fear, she couldn’t see her husband’s face.

In its place she saw the garden behind their house, as vividly as if she was standing in the back doorway. Only a week ago. Martin was stooping with his back to her, his head half-turned, reaching for the hammer he had dropped on the crazy-paving path. She saw his hand, the torn cuff of the old jacket he wore for gardening, and heard the music coming from the kitchen radio.

They were working in the garden together. Martin had at last found time to repair the larchlap fencing that separated them from their neighbour’s voracious Alsatian. The boys had gone to a birthday party and they were alone, a rare two-hour interval of peace.

Annie was standing at the edge of the flower bed. The dead brown stalks of the summer’s anemones poked up beside her, acid with the smell of tomcats, and the earth itself was black and frost-hard. Her arms ached because she was holding up a bowed length of fencing, waiting for Martin to nail it in place. Neither of them spoke. Annie was cold, and Martin was irritable because he was an awkward handyman and the setbacks in the task had brought him close to losing his temper. He picked up the hammer and jabbed it at the nail, and the nail bent sideways. Martin swore and flung the hammer down again.

Annie was thinking back to the days when they had first bought the crumbling Victorian house, long before Tom was born. They had worked endless weekends, painting and hammering, because they couldn’t afford to employ builders or decorators. They would quarrel unrestrainedly then, launching themselves into blazing arguments over the coving that had been mitred wrong, the glaringly mistaken shade of paint, the tiled edge that rippled like waves on a lagoon. And then they would stop, and laugh about it, and they would go upstairs and make love in the bedroom where the last occupants’ purple and orange wallpaper hung down in ragged strips over their heads. Nine, ten years ago.

A similar memory must have touched Martin too. He had kicked the hammer aside and straightened up to look at her.

Annie saw his face now, every line of it. She could have reached up and touched it in the darkness. He looked almost the same as he had when they first met, except for the deeper creases beside his mouth, and his frown.

He had put his arms round her, inside her coat, and kissed her.

‘Let’s ask Audrey to come in tonight, so that we can go and eat at Costa’s.’

They always went to Costa’s. Annie couldn’t remember the last time they had been anywhere else. They shared a plate of hummous, and then they had dolmades and a bottle of retsina. The last time, after their work in the garden a week ago, they had come in late and Martin had taken the babysitter home. Annie had gone on up to bed and she had fallen asleep at once, before he lay down beside her. In the morning Benjy had woken at six, and for the sake of another hour’s peace she had carried him in and put him between them. He had smiled in triumph, with his thumb in his mouth.

Martin had reached out across Benjy to rest his hand regretfully in the hollow of Annie’s waist. They had looked at each other, acknowledging. That was how it was. They were tired, and then there were the children.

Something touched Annie now, colder than the cold that pierced her bones. She was shivering again.

‘We always go to Costa’s,’ she repeated. ‘I don’t know why. Martin likes it.’

‘I know,’ Steve answered her. ‘I know all about that, too.’

‘Why?’ Annie heard herself ask. ‘Are you married?’

The street had been cleared. Out of the first desperate scramble to reach the injured the police had created a kind of order. They had unrolled orange plastic tapes to make a cordon around the store, and inside the circle the rescue workers were at work. The orange fluorescent jackets worn by the police seemed to spill their colour into the grey air, and the firemen’s yellow helmets bobbed up and down as they unloaded their complicated equipment, pulleys and lifting tackle and strange, cumbersome cameras. They moved quickly, with practised efficiency.

Outside the orange line the rescue vehicles were drawn up. The high grey and scarlet walls of the fire engines made a solid wall, and beyond them an ambulance waited, drawn up beside the big white emergency first aid trailer. Another ambulance moved away with the last of the injured from the pavement outside the store. Sixty yards to the south two police constables opened the white tapes of the outer cordon to let it through.

The crowd, swollen with arriving sightseers, had been moved back beyond the fluttering white tapes. One of the uniformed constables at the cordon still carried a loudhailer, to warn back anyone who tried to come closer.

In the centre of a huddle of police cars drawn up between the inner and outer cordons stood an anonymous pale blue van with a domed roof. It was the major incident vehicle from Scotland Yard, and inside it the duty inspector from the local station was handing the direction of the operation over to the commander who had arrived with it. The bomb squad’s equally anonymous control van stood close beside it.

A few yards away, at a special point in the white cordon, the press had already formed a restless knot. The first television news crew had set up, and their reporter was moving along the crowd at the tapes in search of an eye-witness to interview. But he turned away again as a senior police officer and a police press officer emerged from the control van.

‘We don’t have any idea, as yet,’ the policeman told them. ‘The store had only been open for a few minutes, as you know, so the chances are that there were fewer shoppers inside than there would have been later in the morning. We have a list of store personnel and it is being checked now against the survivors we have already reached.’

A dozen more questions were fired at him.

‘No. We do not yet have an accurate figure for the number of casualties, nor will we for some time. The rescue operation has already begun, and it will continue until it is clear that no survivors remain.’

The cold, wet air was alive with the static crackle of police radios.

‘No,’ the officer said. ‘We don’t have any idea yet as to how many people may be buried.’

He turned away with a brusque nod, back towards the control van. At the cordon the press officer read out to the journalists the telephone number of the central casualty bureau set up at Scotland Yard.

Steve knew how it would be. He had been imagining it, using the picture in his mind’s eye to convince himself that they would be rescued. He needed to convince the girl, too, make her believe in the precision of the rescue operation. Her hand was so cold, and he could feel her trembling even in her fingertips.

‘I was married, for a while. Not any more.’

‘Why?’

She wanted him to talk, too. She was reaching out in the same way, wanting to hold on to the sound of his voice. Steve tasted the dust in his throat.

Why? Cass had been waiting for him, that evening. She hadn’t had a booking, and so she had been at home all day. It was very late when he came in, but it was often late. The irony was that that night he really had been working.

‘Had a good time?’ she had asked, without looking up. There was a bottle on the low glass table beside her, almost empty. So she had been drinking. And, as there always was wherever Cass went, there was a litter of other stuff as well. Two or three glossy magazines, a scarlet phial of nail-varnish with a plastic crest to the lid like a stiletto blade, her Sony Walkman with its leads trailing on the floor, a scatter of open cassette packs.

Steve had draped his jacket over the back of a chair and gone into the kitchen to make a cup of coffee.

‘Had a good time?’ she called after him. He had ground the coffee very fine, almost relishing the noise, and then he had gone to the kitchen doorway to look at her.

Cass was a model. She wasn’t quite the youngest in the business now, but she was still successful. Cass’s real name was Jennifer Cassady, but her agency had agreed when they took her on the books that her given name wasn’t quite right. So they had opted simply for ‘Cass’. There was the name, in the agency’s folder, in her portfolio, on her cards. ‘Cass. Hair, brown. Eyes, green. 5ft 10in. 35–24–34.’ And all the rest of the information – her shoe and glove sizes, her particular modelling expertise, her willingness to ‘do’ underwear ads.

Like most of her model friends, Cass rarely wore make-up when she wasn’t working. Her pale, triangular face turned towards Steve, expressionless under its straight-cut fringe of hair. Steve had often thought that with her wide-set eyes and her pointed chin, she looked like a Persian cat. She moved like a cat, too.

‘Not particularly.’ Steve answered her question deliberately slowly. ‘I’ve been doing a reshoot for Fawcetts. I’ve had Phil Day on my back all evening.’

‘That must make a change,’ Cass said, carefully, not wanting to muff her line now that it had been presented to her, ‘from having Vicky on hers.’

Steve hadn’t said anything. There wasn’t any point in saying anything, both of them understood that. He had gone back into the kitchen and rummaged in the drawers for the coffee strainer. He had poured himself a mugful of coffee and leant against the grey-painted cupboard, staring blankly at the newspaper, while he drank it.

When he went back into the living room, Cass wasn’t there. He turned off the lights, went through into the bedroom, and found her.

She had made up her face, and changed out of her sweatshirt and track pants. Steve was used to her chameleon transformations, but now he stood still and stared at her. Later he remembered a black lace bra, French knickers slit high at the sides, suspenders and black stockings. Cass had painted pouting red lips over her own, but her black-rimmed eyes belied them. They met his, full of bewildered resentment. But she faced him squarely with one hand on her hip, posing.

‘I’m sorry you didn’t have a good time tonight. Shall I give you one now?’

‘Cass, for God’s sake …’

She came swaying towards him, reaching up to the catch of her bra but holding it over her breasts, sliding the straps off her smooth brown shoulders.

She was very pretty, tall and a little too thin, with hip-bones that jutted on either side of the soft concavity of her stomach. Against his will, knowing that she was manipulating him, Steve put out his hand to touch her. Her skin was warm, and he knew the intimate scent of it.

‘Cass,’ he whispered. ‘What are you doing?’

‘I am your wife, aren’t I?’

‘You are.’

He drew her to him and her half-naked body fitted against his. He kissed her, smudging the scarlet mouth, and she began to undo the buttons of his shirt. Steve tilted her sideways, down on to the bed. For a moment she lay looking up at him, then she rolled over so that she was on top. She undid the last button and her fingers moved to the buckle of his belt. She bent her head to kiss him and then looked downwards, dreamily, the soft ends of her hair trailing over his bare chest. For the moment Steve had forgotten the complicated sequence of their long-running battle. His fingers found the lace-trimmed edge of the provocative knickers. He slid them inside, reaching for her.

Cass pushed him away. She rolled out his arms and stood up. Without a glance back at him she went to her wardrobe, took out a coat and put it on over the black lace underthings. Then she lifted down a suitcase, opened a drawer and began to stuff clothes into it.

‘What in God’s name are you doing?’ Steve felt the heat of his anger fuelled by desire.

Cass didn’t look round. She put an armful of clothes on hangers into the case and slammed it shut.

‘I’m leaving you,’ she said flatly. ‘I hate you. You disgust me.’

‘Don’t be so bloody stupid.’

He had lifted himself up on to his elbows to look at her, and he felt his awkward heat, the frustrated redness of his face. His anger intensified. Cass put her feet into a pair of suede boots. She swept a clutter of things, keys and her chequebook and her precious Filofax, off the bedside table and into her bag.

She went to the door and then, finally, turned back to look at him.

‘Goodbye, Steve,’ she said. She hadn’t been able to resist the final pose.

‘Where the hell are you going?’

‘Nowhere that concerns you.’

His wife walked out, closing the door behind her.

Steve lay motionless for a moment, and then he flung himself off the bed and went to the window. He tucked his shirt back into his trousers and opened the curtain. He saw Cass come out into the street and put her suitcase into her car. It was a little gold-coloured Renault 5, and Steve remembered that he had booked it in for a service later in the week. Cass revved the engine, backed the car up and then shot forwards. He stood at the window watching the street for a long time after the Renault had vanished.

She’ll be back, he told himself. It won’t last more than a couple of days. But she had never come back.

‘I’ve never told anyone exactly what happened,’ Steve said. ‘I just said we’d split up. Out of shame, I suppose. But I’m telling you, now.’

‘I don’t think shame matters very much,’ the girl said quietly, ‘if you’re going to die.’

Annie heard his quick movement, and then his breath catch as pain gripped him somewhere.

‘We aren’t going to die,’ he said. ‘Do you hear?’ And then, when there was no answer, ‘Say something, Annie. We aren’t going to die. They’ll dig us out of here. I know they will.’

‘They’ll dig us out,’ she echoed him, at last. They lay still, their hands clasped.

Annie hated the quiet seeping around them. It seemed to be only a superficial quiet, masking all kind of noises, perhaps the first rumble of the avalanche that would bring the weight of rubble down to crush their precarious shelter.

‘Do you want her to come back?’ she asked quickly.

‘I don’t know. No, I don’t think so.’

Not any more. He still saw Vicky, and one or two others just like her. He worked very hard – it was his own production company, and he had to – and when there was no Vicky or anyone else he came home to the empty flat.

‘You sound sorry for yourself.’

Her words made him look into the blank darkness, wishing he could see her. He had had only the vaguest impression of her turning away from the counter and walking ahead of him towards the door. She had a pleasant, preoccupied face. Ordinary.

‘And you sound like a schoolmistress.’

She did. There was a faint bossiness, a moral certainty. No, it wasn’t a schoolmistress – it was a mother, used to delivering crisp reprimands. Steve heard something that might almost have been a low, painful laugh.

‘Don’t you think it’s odd that we’re buried here, holding hands and insulting each other?’ the girl asked.

His answering smile flickered automatically before the pain in his leg made him wince again.

‘I like the spirit, Annie,’ he said. ‘Nothing’s odd, down here, is it? Say what you like. Talk to me some more. Tell me, are you happily married?’

What was the cold hand that had touched her, when she remembered the day in the garden? It came again now, tightening its hold, and she was already so cold. The shivering took hold of her and she went stiff, trying to stop it because it shook the pain deeper into her side, like a knife stabbing her.

‘Yes. Yes, we’re happy together. I am. I think Martin is.’ She could hear herself gabbling and she made herself talk more slowly, shaping the words in her mouth before she uttered them.

Years, succeeding one another. Changing their texture a little, the colours fading from bright to dim, but all woven in the same, even way.

‘I’m just a housewife. I’ve got two children, boys, eight and three.’

Oh, Thomas, Benjy, I love you so much. Don’t let me die here without seeing you.

‘My husband’s a designer, interiors. His company does shops, that kind of thing. I used to do similar work, before Tom was born. Now I look after the children and Martin, and the house. I’m happy doing it. You can’t imagine what it would be like, can you?’

I know you now, Steve thought. I’ve seen you, all of you, in the park with your kids, or struggling to get off the tube with one in a buggy and the other hanging on to your coat.

‘Cass wanted to be like that, I think. For all her wild outfits and dotty behaviour. I think she really wanted to have dinner ready every evening at eight o’clock, get the holiday brochures in January and make plans for July, have a regular night out together every week.’

‘And you didn’t?

‘No, I didn’t. It was the routine of being married that I couldn’t bear.’

‘Like always going to Costa’s,’ Annie said.

‘I don’t always want dolmades. I like to see different things on the menu. I like to eat in different restaurants.’

She listened carefully to the sound of his words, and felt his hand holding hers. His hand was large, and still quite warm. Annie felt suddenly irrationally angry. ‘I think you sound a bit of a pig.’

Steve did laugh this time, a spluttering cough of laughter. ‘But I’m a pig who survives. And you’ll survive too, my love. I’ll make you.’

Annie’s anger went away as quickly as it had come. Hearing his conviction, a man she had never seen, she believed him. It was important to believe, she understood that too.

‘How long have we been here?’ Her voice sounded childlike now. ‘How long will it be before they come?’

‘We might have been here an hour. Perhaps not even as long as that. Does your watch have hands?’

‘Hands?’ Annie could only think of their own, linked together.

‘Mine’s digital. But if yours has hands, and it isn’t broken, we should be able to feel the time. We can keep track, then. It will help.’

He was practical, seemingly neither afraid nor disorientated. Annie closed her eyes. The pain in her head and her side made it difficult to think. All kinds of other impressions, memories that were more vivid than reality, came crowding in on her, but the simplest coherent thought slipped out of her grasp.

With an effort she said, ‘My watch is on this arm.’ She lifted her hand a little in his. At once the warmth of his hand let go. She felt him reach for her wrist, searching for the watch strap. It was a tiny buckle, and she heard the effort that the little, fumbling movements cost him. At last the strap loosened and the watch slid off her wrist. It dropped through Steve’s fingers and there was a faint chink as it fell somewhere beneath their hands. It was as if a lifeline had been thrown at them, only to drift out of reach.

Steve gathered his strength and hunched his shoulders, trying to edge sideways, reaching down another inch. With his fingertips he explored the rubble, to and fro, probing between the splintered wood and chunks of plaster.

Annie was silent, waiting. Then, miraculously, Steve’s fingers found the leather strap again, still warm from her wrist. He lifted it and touched the smooth, convex watch face. The glass wasn’t even broken.

Very gently he tapped it against a sharp edge of brick, then harder, and then harder still. The little circle of glass refused to break and he felt sweat gather under his hairline until a drop of it rolled down his forehead. It had suddenly become more important to know the time than anything had ever been. If he could find out what the time was they could hang on, counting the minutes together.

Trying to control his strength, he rapped the watch against the brick again. Then he felt the face again with the tip of his finger. The glass was shattered. He put the watch on his chest and picked the fragments of glass away. He touched the winder button and then felt for the hands. They felt tiny, like hairs, under his fingers. The second hand, moving against his skin, was like the touch of an insect on a summer afternoon. The watch was still going, then. He lifted his fingertip quickly.

‘It’s half past ten,’ he said.

He had come into the store as it opened, only an hour ago. They had been lying here for only three-quarters of an hour, perhaps not even as long as that. He moved a little, as if trying to gauge how far down they were. It would take a long time, that was all he knew.

‘Annie?’

‘Hold my hand again,’ she begged him.

He tucked the watch inside the fold of his coat and stretched out his hand. Their fingers touched at once, and they clasped hands.

‘That’s better,’ she said. Steve wanted to take her hand and rub it between his own, chafing the warmth back into it, and his powerlessness struck home to him. She was badly hurt, and if she were to deteriorate before they came, he could do nothing to help her. At the same moment he realized how important it was that she was there. If he were alone, would he want to fight so hard?

‘Tell me what you’re thinking about,’ he ordered her.

‘Not thinking. I keep seeing and hearing things. So vivid.’ Her voice sounded dreamy and distant now. ‘All the old things. They say that happens, don’t they?’

‘No. What things, Annie?’

She had been seeing last Christmas, and the decorated tree in the front window.

Benjy was just two, sitting on the floor with his eyes and mouth wide open, reaching out for the shimmer of it.

‘The boys. I was just seeing the boys. They grow up, and change all the time, but they still stay the same, themselves. If you haven’t got children yourself you can’t know what it’s like. I don’t think that even fathers have the same feeling.’

That was better, Steve thought, not really hearing what she said. Her voice was firmer now.

‘I never thought about it before they came. Even when we decided to have a baby, when I was pregnant, I never understood what it would be like.’

They had driven to the hospital together, Annie and Martin, when she went into labour. That was the last time, she understood afterwards, that little drive through the night, when they were just themselves.

Thomas had been born, a mass of black hair and a red, angry face. He had opened his eyes and looked at her.

In the days afterwards the weight of responsibility had been like a millstone, and at the same time the love had buoyed her up so that she felt she was floating. Whenever the baby cried she felt it inside her like a knife, and his hours of contentment filled her with a satisfaction she had never known.

Steve was listening now, compelled by the tenderness in her voice. Yet with half of himself he thought, Yes, I do know you. She was the kind of woman who undid the front of her dress at dinner parties, and serenely breast-fed a milky-smelling bundle of baby. She almost certainly went to classes to learn how to have her babies in the approved way, and demonstrated her success afterwards to an admiring circle of women around the table. She talked about children all the time. She was talking about them now, and the note in her voice held him. Yet she surprised him when she broke off and asked, ‘Sounds desperate, does it?’

He almost smiled. She was quick, and that was good.

‘Not desperate. I don’t understand, that’s all.’

‘Cass wanted a baby, did she?’

Quick again.

‘Yes, Cass wanted a baby. We talked about it, from time to time. Not much, in those last months, now I come to think of it. I was probably afraid that she might feel the same as you. No … I’m sorry, that didn’t come out quite right. I didn’t want to share her, perhaps. I wanted her to go on being Cass, not somebody’s mother.’

‘Somebody’s mother,’ Annie echoed softly.

Cass had sat cross-legged on the leather sofa, looking at him. She was wearing an armful of ivory and brass bangles and she turned them round and round, rattling them together.

‘What about your work?’ Steve had asked in exasperation.

‘Other women manage, don’t they? Quite a few of the girls I know do. We can always get a nanny to look after it while I’m working.’

‘Why bother to have a baby at all, then?’

She had looked at him with her green eyes wide open and the bangles rattled and clicked under her fingers.

‘Because I want one,’ she answered at last.

‘I don’t.’

Once there was a baby, the responsibility shifted. Steve knew that; he understood that much of what Annie said. And not wanting to share Cass, was that the truth? He lay still, feeling the pain in his leg pushing its fingers up into his groin, and tasted the deception in his mouth. It was Cass who had had to share him, unwittingly at first, and then with increasing bitterness.

On the day that he had announced to his partner that he was going to marry her, Bob had rocked back in his desk chair and stared at him in disbelief.

‘Married? You?’

‘Why not? You’re married, Phil is married, and so are most of my friends and all of our clients.’

‘Yeah. Not you, though.’

‘Perhaps I’m feeling the cold winds of solitude blowing around me.’

Bob had snorted with laughter. ‘Wrap it round yourself for warmth, then. Should be long enough – you’ve given it plenty of exercise.’

‘Fuck you, Jefferies.’

But Bob had only laughed even harder. ‘What, me as well?’

Steve had married Jennifer Cassady two weeks later. He was thirty-six, moving easily along the business track that ran from comfortably off to rich. He was amused at the prospect of having a wife, and captivated by Cass’s looks and abilities. They came from the same background and they were both busy climbing out of it. He thought they understood each other.

Cass was twenty-three and her career was blossoming. On the day that they were married, her face looked out across London from a hundred giant poster boards. It was suntan cream, that ad, Steve remembered. He had taken her out to dinner on the evening after she had been sent to the ad agency on a look-see for the same campaign.

On the day that they were married the party started at eleven o’clock sharp in the company’s offices in Ingestre Place. Bob had masked his cynicism with an ad-man’s enthusiasm, and had had every corner decorated with pink and white flowers. The bath in the directors’ bathroom was full of ice and three cases of Bollinger.

‘For starters,’ Bob had said.

The bride and groom had planned to walk the two or three Soho streets to the restaurant they were to take over for their lunch party. But when they came out of their offices an open-topped vintage bus fluttering with pink and white ribbons was blocking the roadway. The bus was crammed with a cheering crowd of friends and clients, except for two empty front top seats. One of the videotape editors was driving, and the creative director of a medium-sized agency was dressed up as the conductor, complete with a polished brass ticket machine.

Steve had stopped dead on the pavement, but Cass had pulled him on.

‘It’s perfect,’ she had breathed, half laughing and half crying. ‘Did you ever see anything so perfect?’

The lunch went on all day and well into the night. Steve remembered it in hazy patches. He remembered the strippergram, and he remembered Cass looking at him, proud and proprietorial, down the long table.

The marriage had lasted for two years and eight months.

Quite soon after the wedding a day came when he had had lunch with a pretty girl, and he had bought her brandy afterwards. They had leant back against the green, velvet-padded walls of the restaurant booth to look at one another, and Steve had suddenly realized that they were sizing one another up in the old way. Afterwards they had walked along a sun-warmed street and the girl had looked sideways at him and said, ‘Shall we go home for an hour?’

He had gone, almost without thinking, and he had enjoyed their rapid love-making more than he had done for months with Cass.

That hadn’t been Vicky. Vicky had come along months later, when Cass already knew what he was doing. For a time there had been the two of them, and the tissue of deceptions and faked meetings and unnecessary business trips that went with it. And then, two years and eight months after the pink and white wedding, Cass had left him.

‘I don’t blame her,’ the girl said.

The sound of her voice jolted Steve. For a moment, he hadn’t been buried at all. He had been back at home, in the flat that Cass had had redecorated after their marriage. Then the darkness closed around him again, and he remembered whose hand he was holding.

‘Feminine solidarity, is that it?’ he asked.

‘Partly.’ Her voice was crisp.

It occurred to Steve that this girl wasn’t so vulnerable. Then she added, ‘Personal sympathy, mostly. Thinking how I’d feel if Martin did it.’

‘And he doesn’t?’

Almost to her surprise, Annie understood that it wasn’t a taunt. He was asking a simple question.

‘No, I don’t think so.’

Martin came home between six and seven o’clock every evening. She was always glad to hear his bag thud on to the step as he dropped it to search in his pockets for the key. Tom would look up from his drawing, or the Lego, or the television, and say, ‘Dad’s home.’ And if Benjy was still up he would slither in his pyjamas to the front door to meet him.

Seeing herself waiting with the boys, and a glass of wine, and the dinner simmering, Annie sometimes thought bleakly that they were like a family in a television commercial. Just as predictable. Almost as bland. Yet Martin did come home every night, to hug them in turn and to listen to the boys’ recital of the day’s events. After the boys had gone to bed they would sit down to dinner together, adding up in their talk the small change of another day. Annie knew the hours and the demands of Martin’s job because he told her. She knew that there was no room in his life, between his work and the three of them waiting for him at home, for anyone else. She was glad of that.

And when the monotony of domestic life bored her, or the boys were awkward, or she was simply afraid that life was slipping past her in a succession of featureless days, she reminded herself carefully that her life was her own choice. She had chosen the smooth path that led round and round her family and her home.

Suddenly, with the pain like a hot band around her, Annie felt a longing for her life that hurt more than the pain of her body. It came back to her in every detail, the intimate pattern of their daily life. She smelt the freshness of clean sheets as she smoothed them out over the double mattress, heard the ping of the alarm clock on Martin’s side of the bed, and saw the house glow in all its worn, crowded, family-rubbed, patinated richness.

‘I don’t want to die,’ she said.

Only a few days ago, she had sat over dinner with Martin and talked about what she hoped to do when Benjy went to full-day nursery. She would start work again, perhaps, just for a few hours a week. She had had the sense of wider avenues opening, giving new perspectives that would still let her stay in the places she loved. She had sensed her own good fortune like a jewel hanging round her neck.

‘I can’t bear to leave it.’

The man’s hand holding hers was gentle.

‘You aren’t going to die.’

Out in the daylight it had stopped snowing, and it was growing steadily colder. The policemen manning the cordons moved to and fro across the strip of roadway to keep their feet warm, and their breath hung in front of them in grey clouds. The television crews, with the sightseers beyond them at a distance, huddled in their overcoats and waited as the minutes passed.

The slow, painstaking process of lifting the girders and rubble out of the hole had begun an hour ago. Now there was a flurry of movement amongst the firemen working under the tilted, ragged floors of the store. A broken beam was winched up and swung away to the side and one of the waiting ambulances started up and inched forward. A stretcher was carried across to where the firemen and doctors crouched in a circle, looking down. Then one of the doctors stood up and stepped backwards, over the heaps of wreckage. The firemen worked on until the watchers saw a flutter of something pale as another chunk of masonry was pulled away. A moment later a woman was lifted out of the hole. They laid her on the stretcher, and covered her face with a blanket.

The only sound was the crowd’s sigh, as if it came from a single throat.

The cameramen swung their long black lenses with the stretcher as it was carried, swaying and bumping, over to the ambulance. It was lifted inside and the heavy doors slammed. A moment later the ambulance nosed slowly away down the street.

‘Fight for it, if you want it so much.’

Annie only half heard him. The sense of what she would lose had taken such a powerful hold of her. Her life seemed her own creation, not passionate or original, but warm, and sweet, and infinitely valuable. The threatening darkness, looming and shivering over her head, was unbearable. She wanted to move, throwing her limbs convulsively to fight her way out of it, and yet she couldn’t. Her body hurt, and where it didn’t hurt it didn’t seem to exist any longer. Claustrophobia took hold of her and she felt a scream of terror rising again in her throat.

Annie opened her mouth and the scream came, and she heard the invisible mass around her swallow it up like a whisper.

‘Don’t,’ Steve said harshly. ‘Save that for when they might be able to hear us.’

Could they hear? Where were they? He felt the darkness as a weight now, too, heavy all around them. He strained his ears for a sound of the rescue that his reason told him must be under way, but he could hear nothing except the multiplying echoes of Annie’s scream.

‘Wait,’ he whispered. He let go of her hand and moved his arm across his chest to feel for the watch. His fingers felt numb, but he stroked the face of it, trying to make sense of the tiny hands. He thought it might be half past eleven, and so a whole hour had passed, but then he realized that the hands might just be in the same position as last time. Perhaps he had misread them then, and the watch was broken after all. The dislocation frightened him. He had relied on being able to monitor the time passing, thinking that he could gauge how their strength was holding out. Then he felt the second hand brush against his fingertip again. He slipped the watch back into its place, reassured, and reached out for Annie’s hand again.

‘It’s half past eleven. A whole hour has gone. We’re doing all right.’

The relief in his voice and the touch of his hand pushed Annie’s fear back again.

Fight, he had said, if you want it so much. To live. She moved her head and felt the door tilted against her cheek.

‘You want to fight,’ she said. ‘It’s precious for you, too, isn’t it?’

Precious?

Steve tasted the word, trying it out against his memories of the last months. He began to understand it for Annie, listening to her talk about her children. The need to see them growing up, the fierce determination to protect them that he had glimpsed fleetingly in other women, that was part of her. He had nothing like that. Steve thought often, without much surprise or regret, that he was living at one step removed from life.

How long then, since the sharp edge of pleasure had gone? Not just pleasure, but anticipation, need, fear, even?

He thought backwards, a long tunnel of days and nights.

Before Vicky. He had wanted Vicky, but he had also been quite sure of getting her.

He had met her at a party, a party for a book that Cass had done some modelling for. Vicky worked for the publishing company. She looked frumpy, in a corduroy skirt and a thick, knitted jersey. They had been introduced and Steve had asked some polite questions and then looked past her, to see where Cass had gone. But Vicky had moved to stand squarely in front of him again. Then he had noticed that she had unusual dark eyes in a clever, challenging face, and that something was amusing her. He suddenly realized that he wanted to find out what it was, and at the same moment Vicky had shifted her weight, resting it on one leg with the other knee bent. She had tilted her head to one side, still looking at him, and he had imagined the line of her body under the thick clothes. They had talked for a moment or two more and then Vicky had licked the corner of her mouth, quickly, like a cat. She had put her hand up to cover it, like a schoolgirl trying out a kiss in the mirror. They had both laughed, then.

Steve had taken her to bed two days later. Her inventiveness, her energy and her exotic tastes had surprised him.

‘Did you learn that at LMH?’ he had asked.

‘Some of it,’ she grinned at him.

Yet even then he had been moving with the sense of inevitability, and their affair had unfolded in front of him as though he were watching it on screen.

Was he so used to the distance, then, that he couldn’t remember when it had opened up? Steve lay still, feeling the cramp in his outstretched arm and listening to the painful, irregular indrawn breaths of the girl beside him. The girl was real, he felt her as close as if he were holding her in his arms. He was waiting for each of her breaths, willing her to draw the next, and the next. The blackness was real, and so was the dust that coated his mouth and stung in his eyes, and the pain was real too.

Steve felt a sudden frightening desire to laugh at the fact that it should take this to stir him. He understood the fragility of his life and the possibility of survival, the need for it, reared in front of him like a wall. He was afraid, as frightened as Annie was, but he forced himself to shake off the clutch of it with a determination that was almost pleasurable.

Precious, she had said. No, his life wasn’t that. It was hollow and mechanical and faintly shameful. The need to laugh faded, and Steve saw as clearly as if a bright light had been turned on overhead that what was precious was the need to fight, and he had lost that long ago.

‘I always wanted to be rich,’ he said.

‘And are you?’

He thought for a moment. ‘It’s a long time since I’ve had to live without something I wanted because I didn’t have the money to buy it.’ There was a pause before he added, ‘The natural result is that you find yourself not wanting anything anyway. I’ve got a handsome, rather unlived-in flat and several quite good modern paintings. I’ve got a little house in the hills behind Draguignan that I hardly ever go to. I’ve got a BMW, more suits than I can get around to wearing, all sorts of things. What else is there?’

Annie listened, trying to picture what he looked like from the sound of his voice and the warmth of his hand. Something in what he said touched her. She knew that he had never said it before.

‘Is that what you wanted?’ she asked.

Steve didn’t answer. To have answered would have been to peer into an abyss, gaping darker than the real darkness where they lay. It was suddenly so very far from what he wanted that he had completely lost his bearings. Wasn’t there anything, then, waiting, if this weight was ever lifted off the two of them?

He lifted his head an inch or two, straining his neck muscles, as if the hopeless movement could push the wreckage and let the daylight come flooding down.

Was it still snowing? What were they doing up there, so long?

‘I want to stay alive, like you,’ he whispered. He did, and he wouldn’t let himself ask, For what?

‘We will be saved,’ she whispered back to him. ‘I know we will.’

Steve wanted to reach out and take her in his arms. It was the first flicker of her own determination, not cajoled from her by his own will. He felt the warmth of gratitude and it was like weakness because his eyes suddenly filled with tears.

No. Don’t do that. It was important not to be weak. He must keep on holding her hand, listening to her breathing.

‘And you, Annie? Have you got what you want?’

She was vividly aware of the truth that he had offered her. She could feel the intimacy uncoiling between them, incongruous, yet as important as the need to contain the pain, as important as holding on to her wavering consciousness.

She would offer him the truth in return.

Very quietly, so that he had to strain to catch the words, she said, ‘I chose the easy option.’