Читать книгу Strangers - Rosie Thomas - Страница 6

Martin waited until the kettle boiled and the automatic switch clicked back into the off position. He took the coffee jar out of the cupboard and spooned the granules into a flowered mug, then poured the water in so that the liquid frothed up in black bubbles. He opened the door of the refrigerator and peered in, frowning when he saw that there was no milk. Then it occurred to him that the milkman must have been and gone by now. He went up the steps from the kitchen into the hall and pulled the door open over the scatter of minicab cards and free newsheets that had been pushed in through the letterbox. His frown vanished when he saw that there were four pints of milk beside the doormat in the porch. He was whistling as he scooped them up and carried them back into the kitchen. He left three bottles on the worktop and splashed milk from the fourth into his coffee mug. Then, with his thumb hooked over the end of the spoon still standing in it, he carried his coffee through into the sitting room where the boys were sitting side by side on the rug. They were watching Saturday morning television.

As he came in Thomas jumped up and jabbed the buttons.

‘Nothing on,’ he complained.

Martin saw the news picture of the store with the jagged cleft struck through the middle of it, and he caught the reporter’s words.

‘… this morning just after nine thirty. One body has already been recovered from the wreckage, and the search continues. Police have not yet confirmed …’

The image vanished as Thomas impatiently prodded again. It was replaced by the test card of another channel, then by a commercial for breakfast cereal.

‘I like this one,’ Benjy shouted.

Martin stood for a frozen second, seeing his sons’ heads bobbing up and down, hiding the little square of coloured screen. Then he lunged forward and the hot coffee splashed over his fingers. He stepped between the boys and crouched down in front of the set, fumbling for the channel button.

He heard Thomas protest, ‘Oh, Dad …’ and then the picture flickered and steadied itself again. He saw a reporter standing in a windswept street with a hand microphone held close to his mouth. Behind him Martin could see a corner of the store, its bulk oddly foreshortened. He knew exactly where it was without having to listen to the report. Annie had lived in a poky little flat in one of the little streets behind it in the days before they were married. They had walked past the high façade a hundred times on their way to a pub that they liked, just beyond the tube station. The tube was just opposite the store, away to the news reporter’s right.

‘No survivors have been found as yet, but one body was lifted out a few moments ago …’

What was he saying?

Martin knelt down, pressing closer to the screen as if he could draw a contradiction of the implacable picture from it. He saw the reporter’s cold-pinched face dissolve into its component blips of colour, but the hideously altered shape of the big store never wavered.

‘Hush, Tom,’ he said.

What had Annie told him? He struggled to recall the casual words, seeing her run upstairs towards him as he stood with Benjy in his arms. She hadn’t said exactly where she was going. But it was a direct journey from here by tube. And Annie often shopped there. It was almost ‘her’ store, from the days when she had lived so close to it. As he watched the camera panned away from the newsman to a limited panorama of ambulances and fire engines. There were firemen working in yellow helmets, and policemen hemming them in.

Martin was cold, trembling with it, and the sick certainty that Annie was there. What had the man said?

One body was lifted out a few moments ago …

Martin stood up, almost stumbling, and the coffee splashed again. He put it down on top of the set and in the same moment the report ended. The picture changed to a solemn-faced studio continuity announcer.

‘We will be bringing you more news of that explosion in London’s West End as soon as it reaches us. And now …’

Martin turned away, moving so stiffly that Thomas looked up at him.

‘What’s the matter, Dad?’

He saw Annie’s features printed on the boy’s face and irrational fear gripped him in the stomach.

‘Dad?’

‘I … I’m going out to look for Mummy. I’ll call Audrey and ask her to come and stay with you for a while.’

Even as he said it he knew that he should stay where he was and wait, but he couldn’t suppress his primitive urge to rush to the store and pull at the fallen bricks with his bare hands. He snatched up the telephone and dialled the number. It seemed to take an eternity to explain to Audrey. He stammered over the neutral phrases that wouldn’t frighten the boys yet would bring her, quickly. They stood in front of him, reflecting his anxiety back at him, magnified by their bewilderment.

‘Why?’ Thomas said. ‘She’s only gone shopping, hasn’t she? Why do you have to find her?’

‘I want to bring her home, Tom. I’ll go and get her, you’ll see.’ He had a picture in his mind’s eye of crowded shops with thousands of people milling to and fro, and then the bombed store, silent, as he had seen it on the television. How would he find Annie, in the midst of it all? He made himself smile at the boys. ‘Stay here with Audrey, and we’ll be back soon.’

Benjy’s mouth opened, making a third circle with his round eyes. ‘I want Mummy.’ He was frightened, picking the fear up out of the air. Martin didn’t know how to soothe him while his own anxiety pounded inside him. ‘I want Mummy.’ He began to cry, tears spilling out of his eyes and running down his face.

Martin knelt down and held him. ‘I’m going to get her, Benjy. I told you.’

Through the front window he saw Audrey coming up the path. He straightened up and taking Benjy’s hand he led him to the door. Audrey was wearing an overcoat open over her apron, and Martin saw that she hadn’t stopped to change out of her slippers. They left big, blurred prints in the dusting of powdery snow that lay on the path. Her urgency fanned his fear and he felt his hand tightening over Benjy’s so that the child whimpered and tried to pull away.

Audrey came in, incongruously stamping her slippers on the doormat to knock off the snow.

‘Do you know for sure that she was going down there?’ she asked at once.

‘No. But I think she might have.’

‘You should stay here, you know. Wait for the news. You can’t do anything there.’

‘I know, Audrey, but I can’t sit here. I want to be near, at least.’ She was looking at him, her face creased with sympathy. Martin put on his sheepskin coat, feeling in the pockets for his keys.

‘If … she telephones here,’ Audrey said carefully, ‘I’ll tell her what’s happened and where you’ve gone.’

‘I’ll ring in as soon as I can.’

He was ready now. He hugged the boys in turn, quickly. Benjy had stopped crying and was holding the corner of Audrey’s apron. Tom followed Martin to the door and reached out to him as it opened, the cold air blowing in around them.

‘Is … is Mum in that shop, the one on the TV?’

Martin’s throat felt as if it were closing on the words as he lied, ‘No, she isn’t. But if there are things like that going on today, I think she should come home. Don’t worry.’

He closed the door and left the three of them standing. He ran back over Audrey’s slipper-prints to the gate, and to the car parked in the roadway. Inside was the familiar litter of crumpled papers and discarded toys. Annie used the car mostly, for taking the boys to and fro. The thought came to him: What if she’s dead? and he leant forward over the steering wheel. He heard his own supplication – Please, let her be safe.

Then the engine roared and he swung the wheel sharply, heading the car towards the image of the store that he could see as clearly as he could see the road dipping ahead of him.

The police commander followed his opposite number from the fire brigade down the steps of the control van and across the few yards of pavement to the gaping, shattered windows. In the nearest one, on the corner, a tall Christmas tree made out of some green shiny stuff had been blown sideways. It lay amongst torn screens papered with scarlet satin ribbons. Broken glass lay everywhere, and the commander’s shoes crunched in it as he walked.

They came to what had once been the big doors, and looked upwards. The grey sky showed overhead through the torn ends of girders and ragged floors. Dust still whirled in the air and it blew up in choking gusts behind the firemen as they inched under the tangle of brick and metal.

A young policeman stepped forward and handed the commander a protective helmet. There were two other men waiting. One, a big man in a waterproof jacket, was the borough engineer. He had been called straight out of bed and, under his waterproofs and sweater, he was still in his pyjamas. The other man was grey-faced and his silver hair stood up in unbrushed wings at the sides of his head. He held a helmet in one hand, and as the senior officers approached he put it on with an awkward, unpractised movement. He was one of the directors of the store, and he had arrived ten minutes ago from his home in Hampstead.

‘Our main problem,’ the fire brigade officer was saying, and he gestured upwards as he spoke, ‘is that this portion of the frontage is almost entirely unsupported. There is a real danger that our work underneath will topple it this way.’ He held his arm up to illustrate, flat-handed as if he was directing traffic, and then swung it graphically downwards. Even as they stood there conferring the crooked edifice above them seemed to creak and sway.

‘It will take hours to bring it down from the top,’ the engineer said. ‘Erecting the scaffolding alone will take time. My works people can do it as quickly as is humanly possible, of course, but …’

The unspoken truth was that if there were any survivors underneath, they couldn’t wait that long.

‘Can you go on down as it is?’ the director asked, ‘whilst the work goes on to secure the frontage?’

The policeman and the fireman glanced at each other before the fireman said, ‘Yes. At some risk.’

There was another pause. The policeman waited, touching the corner of his small, clipped moustache with a fingertip. At length he said, ‘Is that the consensus, gentlemen? To continue the rescue operation and to work to make the façade safe, as far as possible, at the same time?’

The three men nodded. ‘Good,’ the policeman said quietly. ‘Thank you.’

They waited side by side, sheltered from the wind by the threatening frontage. A medical team stood a few yards away, huddled together, not speaking. Everyone was watching the black-coated backs of two firemen who were kneeling side by side to lift chunks of masonry away from the lip of a black hollow.

‘Heat camera pinpointed this one. They can see her now. It’s another young girl.’

The commander glanced across at the medical team.

‘Alive?’

‘I’m afraid not.’

The minutes passed. Overhead a crane was being manoeuvred into position to begin the painstaking process of dismantling the toppling store front, piece by piece. The rescue workers in their helmets passed to and fro underneath it, never looking up. The commander waited until the second body was recovered. The girl’s legs looked pitifully thin and white as they lifted her out and laid her on a stretcher. She followed her friend into an ambulance and then away through the cordons towards the hospital.

The commander ducked his head and walked back through the splinters of glass to the trailer. A preliminary report from the bomb squad was waiting for him. It had been a single bomb, sited on the third floor towards the back of the store, probably in a cloakroom. It appeared now that the possibility of another unexploded bomb hidden elsewhere in the store could be discounted.

‘Thank Christ for that, at least,’ the commander murmured. The explosives experts had been at work for an hour. One of them handed him a second report and he glanced quickly at it. Diagrams showed the probable direction of the blast waves following the explosion, and the sliding masses of rubble.

‘Almost exactly the same as at Brighton, sir,’ one of the officers murmured.

‘Except that by a rare stroke of good fortune the PM hadn’t slipped in there for her Christmas shopping.’

‘No, sir.’

According to the calculations, the most hopeful place for survivors in the centre of the store was the basement, sheltered from the falling wreckage by the reinforced thickness of the ground floor. The commander stared through the trailer window at the tangled mountain resting on top of that floor. He put his finger up to his moustache again.

‘Side access to the basement?’ he asked.

‘Almost entirely blocked, sir. They’re working to clear it from both sides now.’

The commander looked down at his watch. It was eleven fifty-five. If there were any survivors in the basement, they had been buried for two hours and thirteen minutes.

Eleven years ago.

Annie wasn’t cold any more. She felt almost comfortable, as if she was drifting in a small boat on a wide, dark lake. Steve’s hand was her anchor.

She was trying to remember what had happened eleven years ago. It was important for herself, but it was more important still because she wanted to tell Steve. She felt him close to her, listening. The sensation of drifting intensified. They were both of them afloat, a long way from the shore.

‘I chose the easy option,’ she said again.

‘And what was it?’ His voice was as warm as if his mouth was against her ear and his fingers tangled in her hair.

‘I chose what would be safe, and simple. Because it would be … wholesome.’ Annie laughed, a cracked note. ‘That’s a funny notion, isn’t it? As if you can turn your life into wholemeal bread.’

Her memory was clear now, the images as vivid as early-morning dreams.

The day she met Matthew was exactly eight weeks before her wedding day. She came up the stairs to the fifth floor of the mansion block where her friend Louise lived. The green-painted stairwell smelt of carbolic soap and metal polish, just as it always did. The lift was out of order, just as it always was and Annie was panting, the John Lewis carrier bag bumping against her leg, as she reached Louise’s door. She rang the bell and when Louise opened the door Annie held the bag up in triumph.

‘I got it. Ten yards, hideously expensive. You’d better like it.’

‘Hmm.’ Louise had taken the bag and peered into it. ‘Oh, yes. I’ll make you a wedding dress such as has never been made before. Annie, this is Matthew.’

He was sitting on the floor with his back against Louise’s sofa and his legs stretched out in jeans with frayed bottoms. He had fair, almost colourless hair cut too short for his thin face, grey eyes, and his bare chest showed under his half-open shirt. He was in his early twenties, two or three years younger than Annie was.

He looked up at her and the first thing he said to her was ‘Don’t marry him, whoever he is. Marry me.’

Annie laughed, slotting him into her category automatically flirtatious, but Matthew hadn’t even smiled. He had just looked at her, and Louise stood awkwardly behind them with the carrier bag dangling in her hand. They didn’t talk about the dress that day. They had tea instead, sitting in a sunlit circle on Louise’s rug.

Matthew had been living in Mexico for a year, working as a labourer on a peasant farm in exchange for his food and a bed in a lean-to shack. He told them about the long days monotonously working the thin soil, the efforts at summer irrigation using water brought on the backs of donkeys from the trickling river.

‘Why were you there?’ Annie asked. The self-conscious hippiedom would have irritated her in anyone else, but Matthew was perfectly matter-of-fact.

‘I was thinking. I’m very bad at it. Can’t do it when there are any distractions.’

‘And why did you come home?’

He grinned at her. ‘I’d finished thinking.’

They went on talking while the sun moved across the rug. Annie realized that it was herself and Matthew talking. Louise was sitting in silence, watching them. At six o’clock Annie stood up to go. Matthew stood up too, and she saw that he was tall and very thin.

‘I’ll come a little way with you,’ he said.

‘I …’

‘I would like to.’

Annie left her bag of wedding dress material on Louise’s floor. When she was standing with Matthew on the pavement outside she remembered that she hadn’t even arranged to come back and look at Louise’s design sketches. She hesitated, wondering whether she should go back upstairs, but a taxi came rumbling down the street and Matthew flagged it down. He opened the door for her and they sat side by side on the slippery seat, looking out at the rush-hour traffic idling in the sun.

‘Where are we going?’

‘To St James’s Park,’ Matthew said. She discovered later that he used his last two pound notes to pay the driver.

It was May, the first day of summer’s warm weather. The grass was dotted with abandoned deckchairs, in secretive pairs and in sociable groups of three or four.

The setting sun slanted obliquely through patterns of curled leaves and glittered on the water. They walked under the trees, talking. It seemed to Annie that this hollow-cheeked boy had simply side-stepped the rituals of acquaintanceship and friendship, and had made her a lover without ever having touched her.

They stopped on the bridge to look down at the ducks drawing fans of ripples in their wake, and their shadows fell superimposed on the water.

Looking at the shape they made, Matthew said, ‘You see? We belong together.’

‘No. I’m going to marry Martin. We’ve known each other for seven years.’

‘That’s no reason for marrying him. Any more than you can dismiss me because you’ve known me for less than seven hours.’

She turned to look at him then, suddenly sombre. He had come to block the wide, smooth road she was walking down and he was pointing his finger down narrow lanes that turned sharply, enticing her. She felt angry with him, and at the same time she wanted to step forward so that their faces could touch.

‘I meant what I said, you know.’ Matthew met her stare. He put his hand out and stroked her hair, their first contact.

‘Do you ask everyone you meet to marry you? Did you ask Louise when she offered to let you sleep on her sofa till you found somewhere else?’

He laughed at her. ‘I’ve never said it before in my life. But when you came into the room, I knew you, Annie. I knew your face, and your walk, and your voice, and I knew what you were going to say.’

She couldn’t contradict him, because she knew it was the truth. Matthew didn’t invent or exaggerate.

‘I don’t know you,’ she said defiantly. ‘I don’t know anything about you.’

He took her arm, drawing it through his and settling it so that her head was against his shoulder. They began to walk again with their backs to the sunset and their shadows pointing ahead of them.

‘I’ll tell you,’ he offered. ‘I’ll tell you whatever you want to know. There isn’t much, so it won’t take too long.’

Matthew was the only son of an industrialist, a self-made tycoon with a newspaper name. The family assumption had always been that Matthew would emulate his dynamic father. But from the day he was old enough to begin to assert himself, Matthew had refused to conform to his father’s requirements. His only interest at school had been woodwork, until he became really good at it – at which point he gave it up for ever. When his school contemporaries were heading for Oxford, Matthew turned his back on them and set out on the hippie trail to Afghanistan. He had supported his travels ever since with menial jobs, working in exchange for food, somewhere to sleep, for enough money to carry him on to the next place.

‘What were you thinking about in Mexico?’ Annie asked him.

‘I was thinking about what I should do. And then I felt the pull to come home, so I came. And here you are.’

‘Don’t you think,’ Annie said, ‘that you might have seized upon me because you think you ought to? That you’re trying to make me someone I’m not, to fill a need in yourself?’

He didn’t hesitate for a second. ‘No. You are the woman I want. You just are. I always knew I would recognize you, and I have. It’s the truth, Annie. You know it too. Admit it.’

‘I suppose you’re going to tell me that we’ve been lovers in some previous life.’

Matthew dropped her arm and stared at her. ‘Certainly not. What d’you think I am? I don’t believe in all that mystical muck.’

They laughed until Annie wiped the tears out of her eyes and rested her forehead against his shoulder, and Matthew put his arms around her, still smiling. It was almost dark, and the cars swished rhythmically along the Mall under the thin glare of the street lights. She waited for him to kiss her. Matthew’s mouth moved against her hair.

‘I’m hungry,’ he said.

So he wasn’t going to kiss her. That made it easier, perhaps.

‘Let’s go and have something to eat.’ Annie moved away a little, regretting the warmth of his arm. ‘There’s a little Italian place in Victoria.’

‘I haven’t got any money,’ Matthew said.

‘My treat,’ she answered lightly.

They began to walk again and he caught her hand. Her ring scraped his fingers and he lifted their clasped hands to peer at it. The stones glinted coldly.

‘Oh dear, diamonds,’ he murmured. ‘I can’t give you any. Will you mind that? Will Martin want this one back?’

She was angry again then, her anger fuelled by a surge of guilt. She pulled her hand out of his and stuffed her clenched fists into the pockets of her jacket.

‘I’m going to marry Martin,’ she repeated. ‘Eight weeks from today. With a ring that matches this one.’

‘Very nice,’ Matthew said icily. They walked over the grass together, silent, both of them angry. But when Matthew spoke again his voice had softened.

‘What are you going to do, Annie?’

She shrugged her shoulders, suddenly bewildered. ‘I don’t know. Some thinking, like you. I just don’t know.’

‘I can wait,’ Matthew told her, and she knew that he would.

It wasn’t a double life, exactly. Half of it was a dream-world, and the other half was briskly real. She went to Louise’s several times, and stood for hours having the dress pinned on her. The invitations came from the printers and she went through the lists with her mother, and then addressed and stamped the dozens of envelopes. She spent weekends with Martin in the flat they had bought, painting the window frames and helping him to put up cupboards in the kitchen. And whenever she could she ran away to be with Matthew.

He drew her into his world, and she discovered with a kind of fascinated fear that Matthew existed without any constraints at all. He didn’t live anywhere. He drifted from a borrowed bedsitter to someone else’s sofa, and from there to an empty room over a shop where he slept on a blanket spread on the floor.

There was plenty of casual work in those days. He washed up in a café, and then spent a week labouring for a builder. He lived in the room over the shop because he was building display cabinets downstairs for the owner.

He never made plans, and he never worried about what might happen to him tomorrow. And so, Annie thought, he could give all his energy to enjoying whatever came. It was the quality of Matthew’s enjoyment that she loved. Afterwards, she thought that the hours she spent with him were the happiest of her life.

When he had money, he spent it without thinking. He loved good food, and he would dig out his one presentable outfit and take her to grand restaurants where he insisted on spending almost a whole week’s wages on a single meal. He derived such pleasure from the plush surroundings and the procession of exotic dishes that Annie couldn’t refuse to go, or even persuade him to let her pay her share.

‘You must know that it’s only any fun,’ Matthew said, ‘if you can’t afford to do it. My father eats lunch in places like this every day of his life, and all he ever wants is grilled sole and mineral water.’

When there was no money, Matthew was endlessly ingenious at finding free pleasures.

In his company Annie discovered tiny parks that she had never known existed, and she saw more pictures and sculptures and Wren churches than she had done in all her time as an art student. It didn’t even matter what they did, particularly. As long as she had an hour or two to spend with him, Matthew was happy. He seemed to want nothing more than her company and their activities, whether they were free or costly, were simply an extra, pleasurable bonus. When she was married and thought back to the benches beside the river and the faintly stuffy smell of the National Gallery, the elaborate dinners and the sudden taxis, she wondered if the times with Matthew were the last in her life when she had felt young.

He made her feel other things, too. They made love for the first time in the room over the shop. Annie had come straight from work. It was a warm evening at the beginning of June and she was wearing a sleeveless blue cotton dress. Her hair crackled with electricity over her shoulders, and when Matthew opened the door he reached out and put his hand underneath the thickness of it, his fingers stroking her neck.

After the first evening in St James’s Park, he had kissed her once or twice, lightly, almost jokingly. She had convinced herself that she was relieved that there was no more to it, and that she wasn’t betraying Martin in any way. But she had also known that Matthew was simply waiting, according to some system of his own, for the right time.

He took her hand and led her across the bare floorboards to the grey blanket with a single sleeping bag spread out on top of it. Annie saw an electric kettle, the neat tin box where Matthew kept his minimal supplies of food, his spare clothes folded tidily in an open suitcase. He stood behind her, lifting her hair and bending down to kiss the nape of her neck. He undid the buttons at the back of her dress and drew her against him, his hands over her breasts.

‘Here?’ Annie asked. She looked at the uncurtained windows with the sun lighting up the coating of grime and throwing elongated golden squares on the floor. She could feel Matthew’s smile curling against her neck.

‘My layers of dust are as effective as your net curtains.’

‘I don’t have net curtains.’

‘I expect your mother does.’

Her dress dropped to the floor and they stepped sideways, away from it, glued together. With the tip of his tongue, Matthew drew a line from the nape of her neck to the hollow at the base of her spine. Then, with his hands on the points of her hips, he turned her round to face him. Annie thought that she could see the sunlight shining straight through the taut skin over his cheekbones. Her hands were shaking but she reached out and unbuttoned his shirt, her movements echoing his. Then she looked at the shape of him, seeing the pale skin reddened from his labouring job, the bones arching at the base of his throat and the hollows behind them. She closed her eyes, and his mouth touched hers.

‘You see? It doesn’t matter where,’ Matthew said. He took her hand and led her to the blanket, and they lay down together.

It was the most perfectly erotic experience she had ever had. Matthew moved unhurriedly, almost dreamily, and he kissed the thin skin between her fingers, and each of her toes, and then the arches of her feet. He was so slow that she felt he was torturing her, but when at last he came inside her it was so quick and powerful that she heard herself cry out, as she had never done before. When at last they lay still, with Matthew’s arms around her and her head on his shoulder, she said softly, ‘I thought it only happened like that in films, and books.’

He smiled at her. ‘I knew objectively that it could probably happen in real life. But I’ve never known it like that before, either. We do belong together, Annie, my love. Listen to me. I love you.’

She felt real pain then, and she crouched in his arms trying to contain it. ‘Matthew, I …’

But he put his hand up to cover her mouth. ‘Be quiet,’ he ordered her.

Martin knew, of course. He turned to her one day, tidily putting his paintbrush down on the tin lid so that it wouldn’t drip gloss paint on to their kitchen floor.

‘Who is he, Annie?’

He was trying to sound casual. Annie knew him so well that she understood exactly why. He would try to make light of the threat for as long as he could. But that didn’t mean that it wasn’t hurting him.

‘You don’t know him. I met him a month ago, at Louise’s.’

They were standing shoulder to shoulder now, looking out into the well of the block of flats with its smudges of pigeon droppings. She couldn’t see his face but she knew he would be frowning, the vertical lines deepening between his eyebrows.

Carefully, he said, ‘Do I need to worry about it?’

There was a long silence. Decide, Annie commanded herself. You must decide.

At last, recognizing her own cowardice and with the sense of a light fading somewhere as she had been afraid it would, she whispered, ‘No.’

Martin’s hand covered hers. There were paint splashes on his fingers. She could feel the set of his shoulders easing with relief.

‘I won’t worry, then.’ He squeezed her hand and let it go, and then picked up his brush to start work again.

‘What is it?’ he asked after a moment. ‘Pre-marital itch?’

‘I suppose so,’ she said dully. She despised herself for reducing Matthew to that, even for Martin’s sake.

The time trickled by. It was the hottest summer for years, and every day that passed seemed burnt into her memory by the blistering heat of the pavements and the hard blue light of the sky. Matthew finished his carpentry work at the shop and he moved out of the grubby little room. He was staying with another friend now, unrolling his sleeping bag on yet another sofa. Annie wouldn’t let him come to her flat because Martin had a key to it too. They met when and where they could, and she was amazed by his ability to make her forget everything else that was happening. He made her feel irresponsibly happy. When she was with him, she knew that this was reality, and the other half of her life, the half that was occupied with shopping for clothes for her honeymoon and choosing flowers for her bouquet, was the dreamworld.

Then, only a week before the wedding, Matthew asked her again.

They were at yet another friend’s home, but the house was empty for the weekend this time and so Matthew automatically made it his own. They were in bed, and Annie was lying with her hair spread out over the pillow. She was thinking exhaustedly, This must be the last time.

‘Annie, will you marry me?’

Traffic noises from the street outside, and evening birds twittering in the trees in the square. She had a taste of her future with Martin as she lay there. There would be evenings like this in a house that was really theirs. Peace, and comfort, cooking smells and simple domestic rhythms, and Martin who she knew, and understood, and loved. She closed her eyes so as not to see Matthew’s face, because what she felt for him went deeper than love.

‘I can’t jilt him,’ she whispered. ‘I can’t marry you.’

‘Those are two quite distinct and separate incapabilities,’ he told her gently. ‘Which is the real one?’

What would it be like to be married to Matthew?

There would be a succession of rented rooms, and Matthew would manage to make her feel that they were palaces. There would be the wild swings from penury to extravagance and back again, and no two days would ever follow each other in the same way. She was sure that they would be happy. Ever since she had known him he had made happiness blaze like fire inside her. What she didn’t know was how long that could last.

She was afraid that a day would come when the discomforts would begin to matter, and pleasure would fade into resentment. The shortcomings were her own. She was cautious and predictable and careful, and Matthew was none of those things. She longed to be like him, to cut herself loose and sail with him, but she couldn’t do it. She would live her life with Martin and it would be tranquil, and sunny, and safe. The peaks of joy would be out of her reach, but she didn’t think that there were troughs of despair waiting for her either.

She made herself meet Matthew’s steady grey stare.

‘I’m a coward,’ she said. ‘I can’t marry you.’

He bent his head. Their fingers were locked together and the knuckles of both hands were white. Then he looked up again.

‘I know why you think you can’t. You believe that married men have mortgages and salaries to meet them, and prospects and some kind of security to offer you. You’re afraid that after a while you’ll begin to resent me because I haven’t. That’s true, isn’t it?’

She nodded miserably. There was more than that, but that was the stupid, pedestrian nub of it.

‘Well. I went to see my father today. I asked him for a job in the company. There was a long lecture about having to start at the bottom like everyone else. Learn the business. Not expect any quarter just because I’m the boss’s son. Work hard and prove my worth.’ Matthew’s face was a picture of resigned boredom. It made her laugh in the midst of everything, and he beamed back at her. ‘I nearly threw one of his onyx inlaid executive toys at him, but I restrained myself for your sake. After the lecture he told me that he was glad I’d decided to pull myself up by my boot-straps … boot-straps, I promise you … and I could certainly have some simple tasks allotted to me within the corporate structure. So there, now.’ His smile was dazzling. ‘I’ll be so exactly like everyone else that only experts like you will be able to tell the difference. I’ll be able to buy you a diamond ring, and a three-piece suite and a Kenwood Chef, if that’s what you really want.’

He was trying to make her laugh because he didn’t want her to guess the magnitude of what he was really offering. He was holding out everything he valued, his freedom and his independence, for her to take and dispose of. Annie felt the tears like needles behind her eyes.

‘I don’t want you to do anything for my sake. I don’t want to see you go off every morning in a suit. Thank you for offering to do it, but I’m not worth it.’

She hadn’t meant to let him see her crying, but the tears came anyway. Matthew made a little, bitter noise.

‘I can’t win, can I? You won’t marry me when I have no prospects. You won’t marry me when I do, because Matthew with prospects isn’t Matthew.’

A space had opened between them, mocking their physical closeness, and Annie knew that they would never bridge it again.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said hopelessly. She felt smaller, and more selfish and more ashamed, than she had ever done in her life.

‘Tell me one thing,’ he said. ‘Tell me that it isn’t just because you haven’t the guts to cancel your wedding and send back the horrible presents and shock all your mother’s friends.’

Annie lifted her chin to look straight at him. ‘If I was courageous enough to marry you, I would be courageous enough to do all that.’

Matthew let go of her hand. He slid away from her across the bed and lay looking through the window into the trees in the square.

‘All the time,’ he said softly, almost to himself, ‘all the time until tonight I was sure that I could win.’

There was nothing else to say. Heavy with the knowledge that she had disappointed him Annie slid out of bed and put her clothes on. When she was dressed she went to the bedroom door and stood for a moment looking at him, but Matthew never turned his gaze from the trees outside the window. She closed the bedroom door and went downstairs, and out into the square where the day’s heat still hung lifelessly over the paving stones.

She never saw Matthew again.

She went home to her flat, and found Martin sitting at the kitchen table waiting for her.

‘I’m back,’ she said simply. Her face still felt stiff with dried tears.

Martin stood up and came across the room to her, then put his arms around her and held her against him.

‘I’m glad, Annie.’

They were married a week later on a brilliantly bright July day. Their approving families were there, and the dozens of friends they had accumulated over the years of knowing one another, and they had walked out under the rainbow hail of confetti to smile at the photographer who was waiting to capture their memories for them. The photograph stood in a silver frame on the bow-fronted mahogany chest in their bedroom. Eleven years later, when she picked the photograph up to dust it and glanced down into her own face, Annie had forgotten how painful that smile had been.

‘I had forgotten,’ she said. ‘But it’s so vivid now. I can see his face so clearly.’

The boat was rocking gently on the dark water, and in that movement Steve’s hand had become Matthew’s, holding hers, pulling her back. His voice was different but she knew his face, and the way he moved, and she could remember every hour that they had spent together as if she was reliving them.

For an instant she was suffused with happiness. It isn’t too late, she thought. Why was I so sure that it was?

She smiled, and then felt the stinging pain at the corner of her mouth where the blood had dried.

Not Matthew’s hand. This man was Steve, a stranger, and now more important to her than anyone. She felt another pain, not physical now but as quick and sharp as a razor slash. It was the pain of longing and regret.

‘I wish I could reach you,’ she said. ‘I wish we could hold on to each other.’

Tears began to run out of the corners of her eyes and she felt them running backwards into her knotted hair.

‘We are holding each other,’ Steve said. ‘Here.’

The pressure of his hand came again, but Annie ached to turn and find the warmth of him, pressing her face against his human shelter. She was afraid that the weeping would take possession of her. It pulled at her face with its fingers, distorting her mouth into a gaping square and the blood began to run again from the corner of it.

‘It’s too late,’ she cried out, ‘too late for everything.’

This was the end, here in their tomb of wreckage. The tidy plait of her life stretched behind her, the stridently glittering threads of the past softened by time into muted harmonies of colour. Martin and she had woven it together. She thought of her husband and of Thomas and Benjamin left to look at the brutally severed plait, the raw ends uselessly fraying. Sobs pulled at her shoulders, and her hair tore at her scalp.

‘Don’t cry,’ Steve said. ‘Please, Annie, darling, don’t cry. It isn’t too late.’ If they only could hold each other, he thought, they could draw the shared warmth around them like armour. He tried to move again, and knew that he couldn’t pull his crushed leg with him.

‘My mother’s ill,’ Annie said abruptly. ‘She’s got cancer, they’ve just told her. It must be just the same.’

Steve could follow her thoughts, unconfined, flickering to and fro. The extra dimension of understanding was eerie but he took it gratefully. ‘No,’ he contradicted her. ‘Not the same sense of loss. No waste. Your mother has seen you grow up, marry. Seen her grandchildren. Illness isn’t the same as … violence.’

He wouldn’t say violent death, but he sensed Annie’s telepathic hearing as clear as his own.

‘Perhaps … perhaps everyone’s death is violent, when it comes.’

They were silent then, but they were unified by fear and they could hear one another’s thoughts, whispered in childlike voices quite unlike their own.

‘If they come for us in time,’ Annie said, ‘and there is any life left for us that isn’t just lying here, I won’t let any more of the days go. I’ll count each one. I’ll make it live. I’ve shrugged so many days off without a single memory. Dull days. Resigned days. Just one of them would be so precious now. Do you understand, Steve?’

‘Oh yes,’ he answered. ‘I understand. Annie, when we’re free we can do whatever we like.’

Steve tried to think about how it would be, and nothing would come except confused images of Vicky, and of unimportant restaurants where he had sat over lunches, and of preview theatres where he waited in the dark for clients to watch their fifteen-or thirty-second loop of commercial over and over again. ‘Run it through a couple more times, David, will you?’ His own voice. ‘Did you learn all that at LMH?’ The self he had been. Work and play, alternating, undifferentiated, spooling backwards. And now the tape snapped, and the film he had only been half-watching might never start up again.

Steve opened his eyes on the real darkness. He seemed to have been groping backwards for hours, failing to find an image that he could hold on to amongst so many that flickered and vanished.

‘Annie?’ he called out, seized with sudden panic. ‘Are you still there?’

‘Yes.’

She sounded drowsy, too far away from him.

‘Annie?’

He could hear the effort, but she responded at last. ‘Yes. I’m still here.’

‘Talk to me again. About your mother. Anything, just go on talking.’

‘I …’ she sighed, a faint expiry of breath and he knew that he was only imagining the brush of it on his cheek. ‘I can’t talk any more. You talk, Steve. I like to hear your voice.’

When was the last time? That was what he wanted to catch hold of before it was too late, the last time he had felt the rawness of wanting something very much. The last time he had wanted something in the way that he wanted to live now, because he wouldn’t be defeated by a maniac’s bomb. Was that the key to it? Because he wouldn’t be defeated …

Steve felt his head thickening, the thoughts and memories beginning to short-circuit. He forced his eyes open wide, willing himself to hold on to consciousness, and he began to talk.

‘A long time ago. So long I’d forgotten how important it was. I wanted to get away, that was it. My Nan’s flat, Bow High Street, three floors up. From the moment I went to live there, I wanted to get away.’

It had taken long enough, but he’d made it in the end. When the day came he went into the little room that led off Nan’s kitchen and stuffed jerseys and shirts into his blue duffel bag. Nan was sitting in the kitchen watching the television. He could see her bulk past the half-open door, and the tablecloth half-folded back over the Formica-topped table, and the brown teapot and milk bottle, and her cup and saucer waiting to be refilled with thick brown tea.

‘Off again, are you?’ she shouted over the din of the television.

There had been trial getaways before this. Plenty of Saturday-night stopovers in overcrowded flats when those who were left behind after the part petered out had just fallen asleep wherever they fell down. There had even been a week, not long ago, when he had stayed with a girl up near Victoria Park. That had been too good to last, of course. She’d seen through his assumed adult suavity all too quickly.

‘Sixteen? Is that how bloody old you are? Sixteen? Go on, get back to your mother before they come and lock me up for corrupting infants.’

Nan had welcomed him back, and the sharpness of her tongue didn’t disguise her relief. ‘Where the hell d’you think you’ve been? Not a word from you for a week. Didn’t you know I’d be worried stiff? You’ll end up like your Dad, Stevie, after all I’ve done.’

He put his arms around her. She was fat, but she was also frail and she could only move stiffly across the poky kitchen.

‘I will not end up like my Dad. You know that.’

Nan had shifted her dental plate with the tip of her tongue and said acidly, ‘Perhaps not. But there’s plenty of other ways of going to the bad. I daresay you’ll manage to find one that suits you.’

There had been calm after that for several months.

Now, as he closed the empty drawers in his bedroom one by one, he tried calling out, ‘Nan? Nan, I’m going to live up West …’

She couldn’t hear him, of course. The television obliterated everything. So he had finished his methodical packing, even taking down his childhood posters of West Ham United and Buddy Holly and folding them up. Then he went into the kitchen and put his assortment of bags down on the cracked lino floor. He crossed to the vast television set and turned the volume knob, and silence descended.

‘Eh? I was watching that, Stevie. Don’t play about, there’s a good boy.’

‘Nan, I want to talk to you. I’m going to live up West. I’ve got a room and everything. I’ll be all right.’

He had been so callous in those days. Nan had just sat and stared at him, with her big pale fingers twisting in her lap.

‘Eh? Live up there? What for? You live here, love. Ever since you were that high.’

She held her palm out, a couple of feet off the lino, and Steve thought, Yes, I do remember. And ever since I’ve wanted to get out. ‘I can’t live here for ever, Nan. I want to get on. I’ll come and see you weekends, I promise.’

Her face went sullen then. ‘After all I’ve done,’ she murmured.

She had done everything, of course. Mothered him and fended for him, and bought his food and clothes for ten years. He couldn’t pay her back for her devotion, he knew that with chilly sixteen-year-old detachment.

‘I’ll come and see you often,’ he repeated. ‘And as soon as I’ve made it I’ll buy you a better place, up near me or here, whichever you like.’

‘Make it?’ she snapped at him. ‘How are you going to do that? What about school? You could go to college. Mr Grover told me himself.’

Patiently he had tried to explain it to her. ‘I don’t need to go to college. It’s a waste of time, all that. I’ve got a job, Nan. I’m not going back to school.’

She was too angry to listen to him. So he had hugged her unyielding bulk, picked up his belongings, and marched out.

All he felt was relief as he left the Peabody Buildings. He bumped past each pair of heavily-curled brown-painted balcony railings, down the tight spiral of stone steps to the road. He walked briskly up the street to the bus stop and then stood peering eastwards into the traffic for the first sight of the bus that would take him up West for good.

The job was as a messenger for an advertising agency, and his home was a second-floor bedsitter with a restricted view straight down into the Earl’s Court Road. As soon as he arrived, Steve knew that he would never look back. After eighteen months as the Thompson, Wright, Rivington messenger boy he was offered the humblest of jobs in the media buying department. That job led to another and then another, and then to the huge leap upstairs to the circus of the creative floor. From Thompson, Wright, Rivington he was headhunted by another agency, and he began to enjoy money for the first time in his life.

Then, Steve remembered, I wanted everything. I was so busy making sure I got it that I never thought about anything else.

There were plenty of other people like him, and the time was ripe for all of them. His agency career began with the first shy appearances of pink shirts at client meetings, and it blossomed all through the sixties and into the seventies between lunches at the Terrazza and afternoons at the Colony Club, punctuated by parties swaying with girls in miniskirts and location shoots in exotic places and creative crises when somebody, usually Steve himself, managed to come up with a headline in the nick of time. Perhaps it hadn’t really been like that at all. It felt too far back to remember. But it had seemed easy and so congenial that for a long, long time he had gobbled up everything that came his way.

Some time during those years, Nan had died. Steve had been in Cannes at the time of the funeral, doing business, and he couldn’t fly back home for it. But he had paid for everything to be done properly. And he had sent a wreath, which was more than Nan’s only daughter, Steve’s mother, had bothered to do. If she even knew that her mother was dead. Steve himself had hardly seen her since she had taken him, at the age of six, to live with his grandmother.

‘Poor Nan,’ he said softly. And then, is remembering always feeling ashamed?

No, it wasn’t so for Annie. Annie had fulfilled all kinds of promises that he had broken himself. Steve felt the slash of regret and telepathically she whispered, ‘It isn’t too late.’

His reaction to the pain was anger instead of fear now. He heard himself shouting, ‘Where are they then? Why don’t they come for us, before it is too late?’

The mass hanging over them swallowed the sound and gave nothing back. They couldn’t hear anything at all.

‘Oh, Jesus,’ Steve said.

‘It’s all right.’ Annie soothed him as if he were Benjy. ‘You believe that they’ll reach us in time. You made me believe, too. They’ll come. We must just hold on … What are you doing?’

Steve was disentangling his hand from hers.

‘I want to find out how long it’s been.’ His fingers felt swollen and hooked with cramp as he fumbled painfully for the watch.

‘We must hold on,’ Annie repeated, as if she was obediently reciting a rote lesson, ‘until they come for us.’

Steve realized how much of her strength she was drawing from his reassurance, and wondered how long that could last. He felt much weaker now, and the pain from his leg clawed across his hip and stomach. He drew the watch out and laid it face upwards on his chest. Again he traced over the tiny hands with his fingertip. Suddenly dizziness enveloped him as he struggled to make sense of what he could feel. The hands were almost vertical, opposite to one another, and he touched the winder button to make sure.

Six o’clock … it could be six o’clock. If it was six o’clock it would be dark outside too. How could they search in the dark? Lights. Of course, they would bring emergency generators. They wouldn’t stop looking until they had found the two of them. Steve struggled to draw sense out of the tiny, baffling circle and suddenly realized with a wave of relief, not six o’clock … It was half past twelve. Saturday lunchtime. Out there people would be cooking meals, telephoning one another, driving past twinkling shop windows on the way to warmth, doors closing against the wind, the sound of voices. The dizziness disorientated him, and he was shivering.

‘Annie …’ He moved involuntarily, too quickly, and the watch dropped out of his grasp. He heard it rattling and then clinking to rest somewhere beneath him. It was gone.

‘I’m here,’ she said. ‘Go on talking.’

‘I’m very thirsty,’ Steve answered. He was sleepy too, but he wouldn’t let that take hold of him. He began to talk again. His voice sounded slurred and he breathed deeper to control it.

What had happened? Some time during those agency years, without Steve ever having time to recognize it, he had stopped wanting anything. He had stopped feeling hungry. He almost laughed at the obviousness of it now. But the pleasure of being in the thick of such a business, where huge sums of money were treated so anarchically and still successfully, had faded too. It wasn’t just his own appetite that had gone.

By the mid-seventies most of the parties were long over. Budgets were being cut back and unprofitable companies were toppling everywhere. The lunch-tables were ordered by a new breed of accountants, and to describe something as ‘Mickey Mouse’ was no longer a kind of inverted, admiring compliment. Steve’s job was never threatened, he was too good at it for that, but most of what he had liked about it was gone. Holding-company decisions and corporate images and long-term business projections bored him. He liked making commercials, and his freedom to do so was increasingly restricted.

He had known Bob Jefferies for two or three years before Bob suggested that they might set up on their own together. Bob was shrewd enough, and he was also unusually clever. He had been at the LSE while Steve was riding his Thompson, Wright, Rivington scooter around the West End delivering packages of artwork. And Bob’s proposal came at the tail end of a particularly dreary week.

Steve looked at him across the table in Zanzibar and shrugged. ‘Yes, I’ll come in with you. Why not?’

Bob exhaled sharply, irritated. ‘Christ, Steve, don’t you ever think anything out?’

Steve grinned at him. ‘You do that. I’ll make the commercials.’

That was how they had arranged it, and it had worked.

At the beginning, when there were just the two of them and an assistant and a girl to answer the telephones, it had even felt important. Not as exciting as the old Earl’s Court days, because Steve knew exactly what success would buy him if it came. But interesting enough to absorb his attention and energies for a while. Then the studio diaries filled up, and they took on new staff, and moved to the offices in Ingestre Place.

After that the images slid together again. There was Cass’s face looking down at him from the hoardings, and Vicky in her thick jersey and unflattering spectacles, his office with half a dozen people sitting around the table, and nothing that he could pick out and hold on to while the dizziness swooped down around him.

Annie’s voice came out of the darkness. ‘You sound important.’

She sounded stronger than he did now, and he took hold of that gratefully.

‘No. There are plenty of companies like ours. I made some money, if you think that’s important.’

‘Steve?’

‘I’m listening.’

‘When all this is over, will you give me a job?’

A job? He turned his face towards the sound of her, caught short in his disjointed recollections by the recognition of her casual courage. For a moment the dizziness lifted and his head was as clear as a bell again.

‘I don’t think I’ve got a card with me. But I’ll give you my number …’

‘And I can leave my name with your secretary …’

‘I’ll get back to you if there’s anything suitable on the books …’

They laughed in unison, crazy-sounding but it was real laughter, and it set the dust billowing in invisible clouds around them.

The traffic stood motionless in every direction. Martin peered ahead down the long line of cars and buses, and then over his shoulder at the blank faces waiting in the vehicles crammed behind him. In his panicky rush he hadn’t stopped to think that the streets surrounding the bombed store would be thrown into chaos. He sat with his hands rigid on the steering wheel, trying to decide what to do. The news bulletins on the car radio told him hardly anything more than he already knew, yet his conviction that Annie was there deepened with every minute.

The press of cars moved forward a few yards and then stopped again. Martin could see the junction a hundred yards ahead of him now, where a solitary policewoman was diverting the traffic northwards, the wrong way, and he was still nearly a mile from Annie’s store. He looked quickly from side to side, searching for a way out of the dense, immobile mass. He saw a narrow turning twenty yards ahead, on the wrong side of the road across three jammed lanes, but as soon as the next inching forwards began Martin turned on his headlights, rammed his finger on the horn and swung the car sideways. Oblivious to the storm of hooting that rose up around him he forced his way through the maze and shot down into the mews. He abandoned his car against a garage door and began to run.

The network of little streets at the back of the store were eerily quiet with the usual press of traffic. Once, ahead of him, Martin saw a patrolling police car nose across a junction. Instinctively he ducked sideways down another turning, and ran on until a stitch stabbed viciously into his side.

His feet seemed to drum out Annie, Annie, as they pounded along, but it was a relief to be moving, coming closer to her.

The streets nearest to the store had been cleared once by the police but there were still people passing quietly, in twos and threes. They turned to stare at Martin but he didn’t see them. At last, with the blood pounding in his ears, he turned the last corner and saw what was left of Annie’s store. He pushed through the people who still stood gaping outside the police cordons, and stared upwards. Terrified fear for her froze him motionless.

Some of the giant letters spelling out the shop’s name that hadn’t been blown away hung at crazy angles. One of them swung outwards, buffeted by the wind. On either side of the name Christmas trees hung with golden lights had stood on ledges. There were a few tattered shreds of green left now, and the lights had been blown out with all the others. High above the remains of the trees the shop was open to the sky, because the roof had gone. The front of it looked as if a giant fist had smashed downwards, ripping through the floors like tissue paper, and as he looked at it a jagged column of masonry seemed to sway, ready to topple inwards.

On either side, away from its ruined centre, the façade was a blinded expanse of broken windows. Decorations had spilled out of the windows and they lay ruined in the street on top of the shattered glass. Everywhere, beneath the buckled walls and in and out of the smashed windows, rescue workers swarmed to and fro, pathetically small, like busy ants over some huge carcass.

Martin stared at the torn-out heart of the shop. It was impossible to imagine that anyone could be alive in there.

He heard the words of the radio announcer repeating themselves endlessly inside his skull. A second body has been recovered from the store in London’s West End, severely damaged by a bomb explosion this morning.

Not Annie, please, not Annie. If she is in there …

Martin’s limbs began to work again. He stumbled forwards, elbowing his way brutally until he came up against the cordons. He clambered through them, thinking blindly that he would run forward to stand beneath the twisted letters and call out her name.

A police constable moved quickly to intercept him, putting his black-leather hand on his arm.

‘Would you move back behind the barricade, sir. This way.’

‘I’m looking for my wife. She’s in there somewhere.’

The policeman hesitated for a moment in propelling Martin backwards. Martin saw the young face twitch with sympathy under the helmet.

‘Do you know for sure that your wife was in there, sir?’

Martin thought, he didn’t know anything. Annie could be anywhere in London. But yet he was sure, with sick, intuitive certainty, that she was here.

‘Not for certain. But she could be.’

The policeman’s brisk manner reasserted itself. There was a procedure to follow. He guided Martin back across the tapes, and they faced each other over them. The officer pointed away down the displaced street.

‘If you will go to the local station, sir, down there on the left …’

He knew where it was. Once, when he and Annie had been out shopping, they had found a gold earring on the pavement. She had insisted on taking it to the police station, and he had waited impatiently beside her while the desk sergeant wrote everything in the lost property file.

‘… they will take down your wife’s details. And there is a number you can ring at Scotland Yard. They’ll give you more information there.’

I want to help her. Over the man’s shoulder Martin looked at the devastation again, and felt his own impotence. His fists clenched involuntarily, aching to reach out and pull at the rubble, to uncover her and set her free.

He shrugged uncertainly and turned away from the barrier. The watchers stood aside to let him through, and he walked down the road to the police station.

They showed him to a corridor lined with hard chairs. There was an office at the far end with a frosted glass panel in the closed door. Two or three people were sitting in a row, waiting, not looking at one another, and the stagnant air smelt of their anxiety.

Martin sat down in the empty chair at the end of the line.

The minutes ticked by and he thought about Annie and the boys. Whenever the question What would we do, without her? reared up he tried to make himself face it, but there was nothing he could see beyond it. It was impossible to envisage. He couldn’t think beyond the diminished figures of the firemen that he had seen, working away up the road. He thought about them instead, willing them to uncover her, as if the intensity of his longing would spur them on.

The door at the end of the corridor opened and a woman came out. Someone else from the silent line went in in her place, and the rest of them went on helplessly waiting. A fat woman in a checked overall came past and asked if anyone wanted a cup of tea from the canteen. Martin shook his head numbly.

At last, after what seemed like hours, it was his turn. The office was cramped, lined with steel filing cabinets. A police sergeant sat behind the desk with a young WPC beside him. They nodded reassuringly at Martin, and the sergeant asked him to sit down.

As Martin answered their questions, the girl filled in a sheet of paper. He gave Annie’s name and age, her general description. They asked him why he thought she had been in the shop and he answered, unable to convey his fearful conviction, simply that it seemed likely.

‘I’ve got a photograph of her here,’ he said.

Martin took out his wallet. In a pocket at the back there was a snapshot of Annie playing in the garden with the boys. She was laughing, and Benjy was standing between her knees, twisting the hem of her skirt. He pushed the photograph across the desk to the sergeant and then demanded, ‘Do you know anything? Can’t you tell me anything at all?’

The policewoman turned her pen over and over in her fingers while her colleague spoke.

‘As you must know, everything is being done that can be done to explore the shop for possible survivors, and the operation will continue until it is quite certain that no one is left inside. One survivor has been located in the last hour, using thermal imaging equipment, and they should reach him very soon.’

The wild, hopeful flicker was extinguished almost as soon as it had shone out.

‘Him?’

‘Yes. It’s a man, apparently not badly hurt.’

So it was possible, then, for someone to survive under that landslide of rubble. The hope it gave him helped Martin to confront the next question.

‘And the two … bodies that have already been recovered?’

‘Both have been positively identified. They were store employees.’

He wanted to put his hands up to cover his face, letting it sag with relief, but he sat still, ashamed to feel so grateful for the news of someone else’s death.

‘I would go home, sir, and wait there. We’ll contact you immediately if there is any news of your wife.’

The interview was over. Martin got up reluctantly and then stood holding on to the chair back.

‘Or you could wait here,’ the WPC said. It was the first time she had spoken and she glanced nervously at her companion. He nodded, and looked past Martin at the door.

‘Thank you,’ Martin said. He had never intended to go home while Annie might need him here.

‘When your wife does come home, sir,’ the sergeant called after him, ‘would you be kind enough to let us know at once?’

Martin nodded and went out into the stale, chilly air of the corridor again. Instead of sitting down he found his way by the scent of fried food down the stairs to the canteen in the basement. There was a public telephone under a blue plastic hood beside the swing doors. He dialled the familiar number and counted the rings. One … two … Audrey answered before the second one was complete. She sounded breathless, as if she had run to do it.

‘It’s Martin. Have you heard from her?’

In the background he could hear Tom’s voice calling out, ‘Is it Mummy?’ Martin closed his eyes and hunched his shoulders, as if he were waiting for someone to hit him.

‘No,’ Audrey said.

Martin looked at his watch. It was ten to one. Wouldn’t Annie have telephoned, by now, to make sure that everything was all right? He knew there was no particular reason why she should, but the knowledge that she hadn’t reinforced his conviction. She was in the store. Every minute that passed made it more certain.

‘I’m at the police station,’ he said. ‘They can’t tell me much. None of the … ones they have found is Annie. They don’t know any more than that. I’m going to stay here and wait.’

‘Yes,’ Audrey answered, ‘you’d best stay there. We’ll be all right here …’ The dialling tone cut her short. Martin had already hung up and gone. He ran up the stairs again, and walked out of the police station into the street. In front of the store the yellow latticework of a crane stood idle. He walked towards it, into the wind, shivering. He passed the enclave of television cameras and waiting pressmen and thought, with unreasoning savagery, that they were like vultures hovering before the kill. He walked on around the outer edge of the barriers until he came to the point where the policeman had blocked his way. He looked up, over the heads of the crowd. It seemed impossible that the crumpled front of the store could remain standing. As he watched it seemed to sway, curling inwards with a shower of falling fragments that drew clouds of whitish dust down with them.

Martin shivered, and he realized that the wind was strengthening. It swept across the street, lifting a torn paper wrapper into the air before pasting it to the wet roadway again. Even above the noise of the wind, Martin thought he could hear the creak of broken girders as the concrete weight shifted and then settled itself for another moment or two, before the next gust came.

A police van inched along the inside of the cordon. Behind it the police were moving the watchers back, all the way back up the road. More steel barriers were lifted out of the van and pushed into place. Looking backwards, as he was ushered out of range with everyone else, Martin saw a group of men in protective helmets moving under the threatening frontage. The crane swung slowly round. He understood that they were going to try to push the wall outwards so that it collapsed into the street.

They would have to do it quickly, before it fell of its own accord the other way.