Читать книгу Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection: Strangers, Bad Girls Good Women, A Woman of Our Times, All My Sins Remembered - Rosie Thomas - Страница 11

Annie was thinking about the wedding picture. Not her own and Martin’s this time. Theirs was as bright as a paintbox with the splashed colours of the girls’ dresses and the vivid blue sky behind the church. She was thinking about her parents’, in a big, old-fashioned leather frame, standing on a table to the left of the fireplace in their sitting room. Theirs was black and white with a faint brownish cast that was deepening with age. It was wartime, and her mother was wearing a two-piece costume with square shoulders and a little hat perched on one side of her head. Her hair was in a roll to frame her face. Her father was beaming in his army uniform. His face had hardly changed, except for thinning hair and lines dug beside his mouth and around his eyes. Her mother was barely recognizable. She had had full cheeks then, and her smile was lavishly painted with dark, shiny lipstick.

Annie was very cold.

The drifting sensation was still with her, but it wasn’t like being in a boat on a calm lake any more. She felt that she was floating towards the big, blank mouth of a tunnel. She didn’t want the tunnel to swallow her and so she gripped Steve’s hand as if he were reaching out from the bank to pull her out of the rushing water.

‘It’s so cold,’ she said.

Steve was straining to hear. He had thought for a moment that he caught the clink of metal overhead, a harsh scraping, and the sound of voices not his own or Annie’s.

If they were really coming … If it was soon, they would be all right. Time had lost its meaning now, and Steve cursed the watch irretrievably lost somewhere underneath him. He could hold on himself, but he didn’t know about Annie. He couldn’t hear the noises any more.

‘It won’t be much longer,’ he promised her. ‘Talk to me, if you can.’ He wanted to hear her voice, but he wanted to listen for the other sounds too. He felt himself shaking with the effort of it, his eyes wide open and staring as if he could hear with them in the dark.

‘I was thinking about my father and mother,’ Annie whispered. ‘I didn’t suffer anything when I was a kid, Steve. Not like you. It was all smooth. They made it smooth for me. They always believed in routine, and their lives run like clockwork now. I wonder …’ she breathed in painfully, ‘how happy they’ve been.’

The water stopped rushing forward and seemed to eddy in a wide circle, swinging her round with it, so that all her perspectives changed. She had been thinking about her mother and father as a way of keeping a hold on herself, building them into the bridge of words that linked her to Steve. But now she caught a reflected image of marriages, seeing how hers mirrored theirs, and her parents’ back to her grandparents’, the same coupled conspiracies perpetuating themselves.

What had her mother missed, Annie wondered, that she would never recapture? Not now, when there was nothing to do but wait for the disease to get the better of her. Like me down here, she thought, and the mirror images reflected one another down a long, cold passageway.

She saw her mother’s house, and remembered her totems. Polished parquet floors, and guest towels put neatly beside the basin in the downstairs cloakroom when visitors came. Her store cupboard was always well filled, and there were best tablecloths carefully folded in the drawer underneath the everyday ones. Annie had a faint recollection that there were even certain teatowels kept for best, but the caked blood at the corner of her mouth dried the smile before it began.

The thirties house on the corner of a quiet, sunny street was too big for her parents now, but it still shone from daily polishing and it still smelt of formally-arranged flowers, even though most of the rooms were unused.

Seeing it, Annie felt a sudden, infinite sadness. All her mother’s adult life had been devoted to servicing a house, and when she died her husband would sell up, new people would move in and knock down walls and laugh at the outmoded décor, and there would be nothing left of her. How hollow it was, Annie thought, that her house should be her memorial. It had contained her like a shell and inside it she had waited for her husband’s comings and goings. From the shelter of it she had watched her children until they grew too big and went away.

Annie realized that she had no idea about the marriage that had kept it polished. The house had been its emblem, tidy and clean, and she had assumed that the one stood for the other. Like their house, her parents’ marriage had seemed decent, and respectable. What else?

The sense of how little she knew shocked her.

Martin and me … The same, or different?

The house was no totem, but she loved the things that they had done in it together, and its warmth lapped around the four of them. Yet perhaps she was making the ways of it stand in the place of something else, something once fresh that had faded with middle age. Was it the lost sense of that that had made her think of Matthew?

Annie stirred, turning her face in the sloping space under the door. The smoothness of it felt as cold as a sheet of ice. The reflections had gone and she couldn’t recapture the chilling insight. Everything was confused – her childhood home with the house she shared with Martin, rooms superimposed and faces blurring together. She only knew that she had been happy with Martin. A weak longing for him washed over her like a wave.

Where was he? Wouldn’t he know what had happened, because he knew her well enough to read her thoughts, and so come for her?

She closed her eyes and lay thinking about him. He felt very close, as if his body was part of hers and sharing the same pain. It was his hand holding hers, not Matthew’s, and not the stranger’s.

Man and wife, Annie thought, knitted together by time and habit. The full span of their years seemed to present itself for her recollection, measurable. Annie felt a new throb of terror with the speculation: Is that because it’s finished? The weight above her pressed malevolently downwards. Completed. No, not completed but severed. The image of the plait, blunt ends fraying, came back to her. Yet, she thought sadly, yesterday she had had no sense that she and Martin were constructing anything together, not any more. They had made their marriage and were sure of it. They were busy with the small tasks of maintenance now, not preoccupied by the grand design. It was time that was not fulfilled.

It was to be cheated of the years of calm living in the structure they had created that was bitter, Annie understood. She had taken the promise of years for granted. There would be the boys growing up, Martin and herself moving more slowly together, in harmony. Or there would be nothing. Only death, and the people she loved left behind without her.

She wondered if there would be the same bitterness if she had simply fallen ill like her mother, and been gently told that she had only a little longer. She would have had time, then, to make her goodbyes. To neaten those terrible ends, at the very least. But it would be just the same, she thought. She would feel the same loss and the same fear. Annie had a sudden unbearable longing for life, for all the promises she had never made, let alone never kept, all the conversations unshared, all the bridges of human contact that she had never crossed and never would. The vastness of what she was struggling to confront was ready to crush her. I’m going to die, Annie thought.

The blackness was utterly unmoving but she felt it poised, greedily ready to consume her and to push the tiny coloured pictures out of her head.

I’m sorry. The words swelled, dancing above her, dinning in her ears. Surely they were loud enough? I’m sorry. She wanted Martin to hear them, somehow. She had failed him, and their children, and she knew how much they needed her. ‘I’m afraid,’ Annie said again. ‘I’m afraid to die.’

Steve lay rigid, thinking, I don’t know what to say. He had been absorbed in trying to imagine it as one more thing to get the better of. He felt it facing him, as tense as an animal ready to spring, but it was he who was cornered. I don’t know what to say to her. I’ve always known what to say. I’ve been so bloody sharp. I’ve cut myself. He heard Nan warning him, back in the kitchen three floors up behind Bow High Street. And now. Now there was this.

‘I’m afraid too,’ Steve whispered.

The confession of their fear drew them close, and the spectre of it moved back and let them breathe a little. Steve and Annie couldn’t huddle together and keep it at bay but they felt one another in their fingertips. Their hands became themselves.

‘Thank God you’re here,’ Annie said. And then, after a minute, ‘Steve? If it comes, will you be here with me?’

If death comes, that’s what she means, Steve thought. Will I be with her through it?

‘Yes,’ he promised her. ‘I’ll be here.’

We’ll wait, together.

Annie took the reassurance, and Steve’s admission of his own fear, and built them into her barricades. The terror receded a little further. She used the respite to look at the pictures that whirled in her head like confetti, examining each one and setting it in its place. It became very important to make a logical sequence of them. Annie frowned, gathering the ragged edges of concentration. So many little pieces of confetti.

There was Martin, on the day that they met. That’s right, that one would come first. She looked at the fragment carefully. He was sitting at the next table, in the coffee bar in Old Compton Street favoured by students from St Martin’s. Annie was in her foundation year, and Martin was two years ahead of her. She had seen him before, in the corridors and once across the room at a party, without noticing him in particular. He had long hair and a leather jacket, artfully ripped, like everyone else’s. Today he was drawing on an artists’ pad, his head bent in concentration. She remembered sitting in the warm, steamy atmosphere listening to the hiss of the coffee machines behind the high counter. The boy at the next table had finished his drawing and looked up, smiling at her.

‘Another coffee?’ he asked.

He brought two cups over to her table, and she tilted her head to look at the drawing under his arm. Obligingly he held it out and she saw an intricately shaded pencil drawing of the coffee bar with the chrome-banded sweep of the counter, the polished levers of the Gaggia machine and the owner’s brilliantined head bent behind it. At her table, close to the counter, he had drawn in her friends but Annie’s chair was empty.

‘Why haven’t you drawn me?’ she demanded and he answered, ‘Well, that would have been rather obvious of me, wouldn’t it?’

He’s nice, Annie thought.

She felt the intriguing mixture of excitement and anticipation that she recalled years afterwards as the dominant flavour of those days. Everything that happened was an adventure, every corner turned presented an enticing new vista.

‘What’s your name?’ the boy asked her. ‘I’ve seen you at the college, haven’t I?’

‘Anne. Annie,’ she corrected herself. Since leaving school she had discarded sixth-form gawky Anne in favour of Annie, free-wheeling art student with her Sassoon bob and cut-out Courrèges boots.

‘I’m Martin.’

And so they had met, and the strands had been picked out and pulled together in the first tentative knot. Martin had taken a crumpled handbill from his pocket. It was the term’s programme from the college film society.

‘Look. Zéro de Conduite. Have you seen it?’ And then when Annie shook her head, ‘You really should. Would you like to come with me?’

For all their protestations of freedom they had still been very conventional, all that time ago. He had invited her to see a film and she had accepted, and he had taken her for supper afterwards at the Sorrento.

But there was no fragment to illustrate what had happened next. She simply couldn’t remember. All she could see was herself, trudging through the rain in the streets beyond Battersea Park, with Martin’s address burning in her pocket. He must have taken her out once or twice and then moved on to someone else. Was that it?

Perhaps. And perhaps she had been smitten by the anguish that was as much part of those days as the enchantment. She had determined that she wouldn’t let him go, and had boldly gone to the registry to find his address. But she could see her nineteen-year-old self so clearly, in her white plastic mac dotted with shilling-sized black spots, splashing through the puddles wearing her tragic sadness like a black cloak. Just as Jeanne Moreau did, or Catherine Deneuve, or whichever French actress was providing her model for that week. She was going to confront him, beg him to listen to her because she was lost without him. There was a bottle of wine in her carrier bag, and when the time came they were going to drink it together, all barriers down at last.

There, that little piece fitted there.

She had reached his door and rung the bell, her face already composed in its beautiful, sad, brave lines. Martin opened the door, brandishing a kitchen ladle. He beamed at her, and her heart lifted like a kite.

‘Oh, Annie, it’s you. Great. Just the person we need. Come in here.’

She followed him into the kitchen and stared around. It wasn’t what she had planned, not at all.

The room was packed with people, mostly ravenous-looking boys. In the middle of the table, amidst a litter of potato peelings and bottles of beer and cider, there was a slab of roast pork, half carved, with blood still oozing from a round pinky-brown patch in the centre.

‘We were going to have a house feast,’ Martin explained. ‘But the meat looks wrong. What d’you think?’

‘I think it needs about four more hours in the oven,’ Annie retorted. It was hard to maintain her Jeanne Moreau expression confronted with a piece of raw pork and a dozen hungry faces.

Martin shrugged cheerfully. ‘Oh well. Let’s stick it back in the oven and go to the pub.’

They went to the pub, and came back again much later. At some stage they ate the pork, or what was left of it. Somebody else drank Annie’s wine, and later still threw it up again. Annie didn’t care about anything except that she was with Martin. He took her upstairs to his room and put his arms round her, and they looked into each other’s eyes as if at a miracle.

‘Why did you come down here, this evening?’ he asked her and she answered, with daring simplicity, ‘Because I can’t live without you.’

‘You don’t have to,’ Martin said.

It was the truth.

After that, for a long time, all the pieces of confetti that she put into the proper sequence belonged to them both. Slowly, by the same stages that many of their friends were passing through at the same time, Martin and Annie became a couple. They explored each other, awkwardly at first, on the mattress in Martin’s room, then with daring, and then with skill that turned quite quickly into tenderness. In the same way, but even more slowly, their life in the world found its pattern, echoing the private one. The discovery of one another’s likes and pleasures was consolidated by sharing them. They launched themselves into the endless, fascinated talks that convinced them they were identical spirits. They went everywhere and did everything together, exchanging the romantic isolation of adolescence for the luxury of mutual dependence. They became, to all their friends, Martin-and-Annie.

For a while in Martin’s last year they lived together, sharing a chaotically disorganized house with three other students. There were lots of little, disjointed pictures of that time, of faces around the kitchen table and skinny legs sprawling in broken-backed armchairs. Where had all those people gone? Perhaps, Annie thought sadly, they had become Martin. Become him because all the memories of that time were crystallized in him, part of the cement that held them together. In those days, at the age of twenty, Annie had proudly acted out the role of housewife. Here was the image of herself heading for the local launderette with two bulging blue plastic carrier bags. She had cooked meals too, and folded Martin’s shirts for him.

Did I ever, she wondered, see my mother in myself? Was I never afraid that it would be the same for me, too?

No, not that. We thought we were different, so busy making new rules. We thought we had turned the world upside down because Martin used to clank about the house with a mop-up bucket. Because he used to take his turn at cooking dinners that were never ready until midnight, and left every saucepan in the house dirty.

They had been happy … There was a lot of laughter printed on those confetti fragments. Lying numbly in her tiny space with Steve’s hand her only warmth, Annie wished that she could breathe life into them again.

At the end of that time Martin had gone to work in Milan. Here, Annie saw herself with him at the airport, her face crushed against the leather shoulder of his coat as he hugged her. For two years they had separated, because they had grown out of play-acting married life.

Annie remembered the flat that she had taken. It was close to here, above the creaking weight that pinned her like a butterfly to a board. She followed the turns of the streets that would take her there, and up the stairs into her rooms. She saw the colour of the walls – had she really painted them aubergine? – and the fringed Biba lampshades. The flicker under the skin of her face might have been a smile.

At the end of two years Martin had come home from Italy. They had found each other’s company all over again, as comfortably fitting as a winter coat left on a peg all through the summer, and then gratefully put on with the coming of cold weather. Within a year they were engaged. Their parents met and approved, exchanging drinks in their similar houses, pleased that their children had found the way at last. And a year after that, with Matthew’s still face watching from inside her head, Annie was married.

‘I thought that we would be gentle to each other,’ Annie said. ‘And we have been.’

‘You’re very lucky,’ Steve answered her softly.

That made her turn her head to him, as far as it would go.

‘Why do I feel ashamed, then?’

Steve thought, I hardly glimpsed you, walking in front of me towards that door. How long have we been lying here? Talking. I know you now. Better than I knew my own wife. Better than I’ll ever know anyone again, if there is anything beyond this day.

‘You haven’t anything to be ashamed of, Annie.’

‘I made a choice, an easy choice. And now it’s too late to take the other path. I feel that … everything has faded. For Martin, too, do you think? And now it’s too late.’ Annie was too tired to cry any more, but she felt the fine muscles pull at her eyes, the little mechanisms of her body still unbelievably functioning. ‘It’s too late to turn and run and draw it back again, and make the colours shine all over again.’

‘If you and I weren’t lying here, if this thing had never happened, would you have changed anything then?’

Annie said, very quietly, ‘No. I would have gone home with my tree baubles and the toys for my kids, and I would have hidden them and put the boys to bed and Martin and I would have eaten dinner together, just as we did every night …’

Did. More pieces of confetti, fresh and unfaded now, mosaic of a life, a family life. She longed for it, aching where her hurt body was numb.

‘You haven’t anything to be ashamed of, Annie,’ he repeated. ‘You have loved your family, mothered your children. Ordinary, admirable things. You should take hold of those.’

‘Take hold of them,’ Annie echoed. And then, abruptly, ‘Everyone is ashamed.’

Steve felt her closeness, closer in the touch of her cold fingers than he had ever held anyone.

‘I am ashamed too,’ he said. ‘Of a thousand things. Business subterfuges. Social evasions. Lots of lies, so many I couldn’t begin to count. I lied to my Nan, to Cass, Vicky, everyone I’ve known and should have cared about.’

Annie could hear his breathing, shallow gasps as he sucked in the stagnant air. ‘I’m ashamed because I’ve never loved anyone. Never, in all my life. If there isn’t anything after today … I will have lived for nearly forty years without making anyone happy. And you say that you are ashamed.’

The bitterness in his voice cut her as sharply as any of the physical pain.

‘No,’ she said, so loudly that he wondered whether somehow she had managed to bring her face closer to his. ‘I know you. I know that isn’t the truth.’

Out in the street the wind was bringing snow again, tiny flakes of it driven horizontally into the faces of the small groups of watchers. The wind tore at the orange tapes so that they strained and flapped and the policemen guarding them turned their backs into it and moved uneasily to and fro. Martin stood motionless, watching the store front. Along with everyone else, he had been moved so far back that the effort of staring into the distance made his eyes ache, and they watered with the cold blast of wind.

The crane had moved round once, very slowly, and was now stationary again. The fireman had brought their ladders forward in its place, fragile-looking metal probes reaching up against the buckled frontage. Martin could see the yellow helmets swaying at the ladder tips. Everything seemed to move so slowly. What were they doing? Please hurry up. The words beat in his head with the throb of blood. Why so long?

Through the tears that the wind scoured out of his eyes Martin saw a chunk of brick fall from the raw edge of the façade. It plummeted downwards in a shower of smaller fragments and he heard the sharp indrawn breaths of the people pressing around him. Amongst the wreckage the rescue workers scattered and, involuntarily, they turned their faces up to look at the sagging wall and the patch of sky seeming to press down on top of it. Then, when the dust had blown away, they bent to their work again. Painstakingly the chunks of concrete and splintered beams and broken shop fittings were still being lifted away. Part of what had been the ground floor was exposed now, its carpets whitened with thick dust. The tiny flakes of snow settled and vanished, and settled again unnoticed.

In the big control trailer that had joined the line of police vehicles, the police commander was watching the time. It was just after three o’clock, and the light was already fading. The power supply to the store had failed with the explosion, but generators had been brought in and the emergency lights had been hauled into place, ready to be switched on. The work would go on for many hours yet.

3.10 p.m. The commander moved abruptly to the trailer door and looked out at what the bomb had done. He knew with a degree of certainty now where the bomb had been planted, what type it was, how much explosive it had detonated and who had been responsible for it. He didn’t know whether there was a chance of reaching any survivors in time. They had been buried more than five hours.

‘Three,’ he said aloud, without turning away from the door.

The thermal imaging cameras had located three heat sources, human bodies. They were in the basement of the store, lying four storeys directly below the point where the bomb had exploded. Two of them were very close together and the third some yards away. They could have been in the basement at the time of the explosion, or they could have fallen into it as the store collapsed inwards on itself. The policeman put his finger to his moustache, the only sign of anxiety that he ever revealed. It should only be a matter of minutes, an hour at the most, to reach them now.

But the broken façade hung over them, unsupported. It had taken precious time to discover that it couldn’t be knocked outwards to fall harmlessly into the street. There was no time to erect scaffolding and bring it down piece by piece. The only hope was to work faster, to uncover the remaining three bodies before it fell, or the wind brought it down.

For the hundredth time since early morning the commander offered up thanks that the bomb had gone off almost as the store opened. Instead of hundreds of casualties in a store packed with Christmas shoppers, the total so far was eight deaths. In the last hour two people had been brought alive from the wreckage near the main doors. One of them was a store commissionaire and the other a teenage boy, both seriously injured. There were thirty or so further casualties, some of them passers-by who had only been cut by flying glass. And there were three more people, perhaps alive, to be recovered before the teams of rescuers could be pulled back and the frontage knocked down into the tangled mass already lying beneath it.

Unless, the commander thought, the wind does it first.

He went down the trailer steps, settling the protective helmet on his head, and felt the full force of the wind in his face. He walked quickly, with his head bent, past the ruined windows again. The bobbing yellow helmets and the orange fluorescent jackets of the police seemed to be the only spots of colour in a world that had been drained of it.

A screen of tarpaulins had been rigged up and the constables stood aside to let the commander through. Behind the store front, over the spot where they were digging into the basement, they had made a kind of shelter. Lengths of scaffolding had been roughly bolted together and roofed with planks, as makeshift as a child’s play house. Beneath the flimsy protection the rescuers went on burrowing downwards. One of them glanced upwards for an instant, his face coated with grime.

The commander crouched in the dirt and the chunks of debris were prised loose and handed backwards past him. When the bodies were recovered and the site was safe once more, every piece would be examined by the forensic teams.

The commander gestured that he wanted to move forwards and the firemen made way for him to inch forward under the planking. Looking down he could see a coloured edge of carpet in the store’s colours, and the thickness of floor beneath it sliced as neatly as cake. Below him two firemen were working like machines, hauling out the rubble. And beneath them, the commander knew, eight or ten feet down, were two of the three bodies.

The space the rescuers were working in, cramped as close as they could under the hopeful protective umbrella, was tiny. The commander delivered his brief word of praise and encouragement and squirmed backwards again to leave them to their task. His opposite number from the fire service was waiting inside the curtain of tarpaulins.

‘We should reach them within the hour, God willing,’ he said. The policeman nodded and they stood in silence watching the work, the mounting piles of debris as it was feverishly dug out and set aside.

‘From the look of all that …’ the commander murmured, and they both knew that he meant no one could survive under all that. The fire officer’s brief glance upwards revealed his anxiety for his men, working under threat of burial themselves to reach victims who were almost certainly dead. But neither of the senior men spoke again, and the slow process of cutting and lifting went on as the firemen fought their way downwards.

Steve heard it first.

It lasted only a few seconds but it was the unmistakable high whine of a power drill. It was cutting through the darkness. It meant that they really were coming for them, at last.

‘Annie. I can hear them. Listen.’

As if to prove it there was another noise at once, the sharp ring of metal on stone and then the whine of the drill again, dropping in pitch. Steve felt relief and gratitude numb the pain inside him like a powerful drug. When Annie didn’t answer he was furiously angry with her.

‘Can’t you hear?’ he demanded. The darkness swallowed his words and Annie listened for something else, longing to hear. What would rescue sound like, when she had longed for it so much?

Then it came, no more than a tiny metallic scraping, once and then silence, and then again, louder. It sounds like music, she thought wildly. ‘Yes,’ she whispered. ‘I hear it.’

‘Now we can shout,’ Steve exulted. ‘I’ll count three. Then scream as loud as you can.’

He counted, one, two, three, and they screamed together. It sounded so tiny, the only noise that they could make, eaten up by the hateful dark. Annie’s head fell back and she closed her eyes. It was no good. Of course it was no good.

Steve was thinking, a power drill of some kind. That means they’ve brought the power in, cables, floodlights, everything possible. He had an image of the black cables snaking over the rubble, the intent faces of the rescuers with the harsh shadows from the lights across them. There had been silence for so long, since the first wailing sirens, that he had been afraid he had imagined the other noises. He had begun to fear that there was no rescue at all. He had even wondered – he could confront that terror now, now that he knew it was unfounded – whether it had been a different kind of bomb, and there was no one left outside to come to their rescue. Horror prickled at his spine until the sounds started up again.

‘They’re right overhead, Annie. Do you know what that means?’ Still she didn’t answer and he shouted at her, ‘Don’t you know?’

‘Tell me,’ she said. He heard her exhaustion, and knew that she was near to giving up, now, after so long.

‘Annie,’ he begged her. ‘Hold on for just a little while longer. They’re right overhead. It means they must have found where we are. They’ve used heat-seeking cameras, and they can come straight to us. I’d forgotten that’s what they’d do.’ Steve shook his head, weakly surprised by his own stupidity. ‘We must make them hear us,’ he said. ‘I’ll count again. Shout, Annie.’

Again, the thin sound rising and evaporating into the limitless dark.

‘It isn’t any use,’ she whispered, but Steve’s fingers dug into her hand like a claw.

‘Again,’ he commanded, and then, ‘Again.’

One of the firemen held up his hand. He lifted his head to listen and the others froze into stillness. The silence seeped from the torn hole that held them and spread outwards. The next time it came they all heard it. It was a cry, very faint, but a human cry. They stood still for another moment, then heard it once more.

‘Someone’s alive down there.’

The word was carried backwards like a torch. It reached the senior officers waiting inside the tarpaulin screen, and the medical team waiting with the ambulances.

The commander stepped quickly forward and looked down at the filthy faces ringing the hole. ‘As fast as you can,’ he said quietly, and they stooped to work again.

Martin was chilled to the bone and his face was stiff with being turned into the wind, watching the unchanging scene in the distance. Abruptly he turned his back on it, but the sight of it was still clear in his mind’s eye. He knew that he would never forget the distorted shape of the store against the cold sky. He began to walk northwards, his feet painfully numb in his thin indoor shoes. The nearest tube station was closed, he had seen that when he passed it on the way back from his interview with the police. He would have to walk on to the next one. There would be a telephone there.

He felt a little warmer as he walked, but his feet stung as the circulation started up again. He began to walk faster and faster, imagining how he would pick up the receiver and dial the number. Perhaps Annie would answer it. Perhaps she had come home long ago. He was almost running now, wondering how he could have stood stupidly for so long without telephoning. Perhaps she was waiting for him to call, sitting with the boys and Audrey, comfortable in the warm room.

The blue and red tube station sign drew him on and he ran the last hundred yards, panting and slithering on the greasy pavement. In the ticket hall there were two payphones in malodorous wooden cubicles. He snatched up the receiver in the nearest booth and listened between his gasps for breath to the thick silence of a dead line. In the same instant a fat man wedged himself into the next booth and began leisurely dialling. Martin planted himself in the middle of the man’s field of vision and held up his coin, but the man turned his back and settled himself to talk.

Martin stood counting the seconds off, thinking what he would say to her. Annie? You’re safe? Thank God …

The fat man hung up abruptly and eased himself out of the cubicle. Martin cradled the warm receiver and dialled.

‘Hello?’

It was Audrey’s voice. The pips cut into it and Martin pushed in the coin, but he already knew. Annie hadn’t come home.

‘No,’ Audrey said. ‘There’s been nothing. But she could still be shopping …’

Martin looked out of the square mouth of the tube station entrance. It was getting dark. He could hear music somewhere, a jazzed-up carol. He thought it must be buskers playing at the foot of the escalators. Annie wasn’t still shopping. He knew where she was.

He said, ‘They’ve brought two people out alive so far. Both men. I asked one of the policemen on the cordons. I don’t know anything else. But they’re still working there, dozens of them. They’re still expecting to bring people out.’ Martin looked at the scribbled graffiti over the cubicle walls, names and telephone numbers, phone Susie … Kim & Viv woz ’ere. Millions of people, filling the sprawl of London, moving to and fro. Why should it be Annie, there, today?

‘I don’t know anything else,’ he said again, helplessly. ‘I’ll stay here until they stop looking.’

Audrey’s voice was quiet. He knew that she didn’t want the boys to hear what she was saying.

‘I haven’t had the TV on, Martin, in case they saw … something. But I heard on the kitchen radio. They think there are still three buried.’

‘Alive?’

‘They said it was a possibility. I think it was only the reporter, you know, guessing. There’s been eight killed.’

He knew that, too. He had pushed his way as close as he could get to the control trailer and asked. The officer had been sympathetic, like the ones at the station, but uninformative. Eight bodies had been recovered and identified. None of them was Annie. But he wouldn’t say whether the rescuers were still expecting to find anyone else, however hard Martin had pressed him. The radio reporter, whoever he was, had done rather better, he thought dully.

‘I’ll go back and wait then,’ he said. ‘Can you stay, Audrey?’

‘Of course I can.’

Martin noticed that she didn’t try to say that Annie would be back soon.

He hung up and pushed through the stream of people pressing into the station with their loaded carrier bags. Most of them looked over their shoulders as they plunged into the lighted space. He felt how their buzz of shocked fascination overcame their irritation at being diverted to a different station, and it made him angry. He went out into the icy street and began to walk back. The shape of the store, sideways on against the sky, looked mockingly almost as it always had done.

Martin was pulling his coat around him and wishing that he had wellington boots on his feet when the noise came. It was a vicious gust of wind first, making him duck his head into his collar. He heard the full blast of it funnelling past him down the long street. But then the wind dropped a little, and the noise should have subsided with it.

Instead it was augmented by a different sound, unplaceable at first, but it made the hairs prick at the nape of his neck. It was a low rumble like thunder, but much closer to earth than thunder. After the first crash it became the distant roar of surf breaking and, drowning in the sound of it, Martin heard people shouting. In a terrifying split-second he thought, Another bomb. He was waiting for the blast to hurl him sideways but it never came and he stood, frozen, staring into the sleet-thickened darkness. Surely it was there, before the noise, that the blue and white lights had been reflected under the store front? He couldn’t see them now. A pall of thick, coiling dust hid everything.

Martin began to run.

There had been no warning.

The police commander had been standing with a group of bomb squad officers close to the trailer. He felt the gust of wind and looked up in alarm. As he watched, the broken edge of the façade trembled and swayed inwards. He opened his mouth to shout a command and heard the sharp rain of falling chunks of brick.

‘Back,’ he yelled. ‘Get back.’

There was a scrambling rush of men, scattering away over the pavement to the shelter of the vehicles. He glimpsed a fireman rooted to the spot, and from the tilt of his helmet knew that he was staring upwards.

And then there was a deafening roar as the height of the façade crumpled inwards, seeming to hang unsupported in mid-air for an instant, and then fell into the wrecked centre of the store. The dust billowed outwards, thick with the acrid smell of pulverized brick. Choking, with his hands up to cover his nose and mouth, the commander stared into the clouds of it.

The blue tarpaulins had been torn down. The shelter of planks and scaffolding was buried, and half in and half out of what had once been one of the festive display windows a fireman was lying face-down, his legs twisted beneath him.

In the darkness the noise was another explosion, the first terror renewing itself. It took hold of them, eating them up as it swelled louder so that their bodies shook with the vibration and their lungs filled with the smell of it.

‘Steve.’

He heard Annie scream his name, just once, and then the scream was extinguished and the roaring went on. The sensation was like falling again, but it was more terrible because there was nowhere to fall to. Instead, everything else was falling. Steve turned his head until his neck wrenched, hunching his shoulder as if that could shelter him. There was a pounding rain of red-hot rocks all around him and he knew that he would drown in this solid sea of noise and grinding stone.

There was no pain then, except the agony of terror. On and on.

Still the noise, but muffled now. An angry, diminished roar.

The solid rain was still falling, but it was finer now. It had washed away all the air.

The air.

Steve choked as the filth swept into his lungs. Gasps for breath convulsed his body and he writhed until the pain in his leg swept back again. He would have screamed but there was no breath. There was no breath to cough, no air to breathe.

The blackness grew heavier, pressing its pain all around him.

Steve closed his eyes and then there was nothing, oblivion as sweet and comfortable as a child’s sleep.

He didn’t want them to come back again, the pain and the smell and the air that lay like a mask over his face. But they came anyway, dragging him back into consciousness. Each breath tore his chest and yet wouldn’t fill his lungs.

He lay in the silence, moaning. The silence. The noise was over now. The thing, whatever it was, had come and gone and left him alone again. Then something else pecked at his unwelcome consciousness. He groped after it in the fog of agony and remembered, not alone. He made his mind work outwards, to the limits of his body. His shoulder and arm were still part of him, his arm outstretched. His fingers were still there, and he was still holding the girl’s hand.

‘Annie.’

The word was no more than a croak, but it left him gasping. The hand in his felt limp and cold as ice. He lay for a moment, trying to gather his strength, and then called her name again.

‘Annie.’

The silence was hideous now. There was something different. Steve slid his hand from hers and found her wrist, thin and bare. His fingers moved up her arm, meeting the rough edge of her coat sleeve, and a woollen cuff underneath it.

Something different. What was it?

His fingers moved again, scraping the gritty cloth.

Cloth.

His head hurt so that each thought took a separate, punishing effort. Before, surely, there had been only her hand? His shoulder still ached from stretching out to reach it. Yet now he could feel her arm, all the way up to the elbow, slightly crooked. In the silence Steve could hear his heart’s terrified drumming. He opened his mouth to try to pull more oxygen out of the thickened air.

He was capable of only one thought, and it gripped him for long, shivering seconds. He was holding her arm, but it was no longer part of her. Something had severed it. Fear and nausea swelled inside him and he crouched within a shell of pain, longing for unconsciousness again. But his head defied him and the thought clarified, until it was certainty, and he knew that he must confront it.

He took his lower lip between his teeth and bit into it, to stop himself screaming when the discovery came. Then he slid his hand down once more to clasp the fingers in his. Slowly, he pulled their linked hands towards him.

The arm moved, not easily because the coat sleeve snagged on the roughness beneath it. But it moved, and he drew it closer until his fingers could crawl up again to the elbow and beyond, inch by inch, his lip held beneath his teeth to help him to bear the discovery of sticky flesh and bone.

But there was only the reassuring weave of the cloth, and then the rounded hump of the shoulder.

Suddenly, as though his consciousness could only dole out one at a time, another thought came to him. Her pulse. He could feel for her pulse. His fingers slid back again and fumbled under the woollen cuff. He turned her hand so that it lay wrist upwards and touched his forefinger to the vulnerable skin. Nothing, and nothing, and then he found the place. A little beat quivered, tick, tick.

Steve breathed out, a long sigh that stirred the stench of brick dust again. She was still alive. This was Annie’s arm, her hand still touching his. He held on to it like a lifeline.

Think again, then. What had happened? He must work it out, establish a thread of hope for Annie again …

He tried to remember the noise and then the avalanche that had followed it. They hadn’t fallen, but everything else had fallen around them. Steve had the sudden conviction that the limits of their black world had redefined themselves. As the weight fell something had shifted.

He had heard Annie scream his name, and then what? Had one of them rolled sideways, involuntarily, to escape the avalanche? If that had happened, something had moved to release one of them from the weight that had pinned them down. Steve tried to move now, willing his leg to follow the jerky spasm of his other muscles. The pain intensified, shooting across his stomach, but he found that he could lift his hips and drag himself to the right by an inch or two. His left leg slithered uselessly with him. He could reach out and touch Annie’s side now. His fingers explored the folds of her coat and then moved upwards, vertically. He found a button, and then another alongside it, and he knew that he was right. The discovery comforted him like a shot of painkiller.

Annie had rolled towards him as the falling began. She had been lying on her back before, with her hair pinning her down. Now she was on her side, much closer to him, still with her arm stretched out towards him. She had rolled with all her remaining strength, and she must have torn her hair free.

She had been trapped by the heavy, fireproofed door. That’s what she had said. He remembered – how long ago? – trying to push it open for her. It had been lying at an angle on top of her, pinioning her right side. Now he reached upwards as far as his arm could stretch, but he couldn’t feel even the edge of it. So whatever it was that had fallen had tipped the door further and freed her. But the door had been a shield as well as a pinion. What was protecting them now? Steve looked into the unyielding darkness. If it fell again, he thought wearily, it would extinguish them too.

For the first time Steve thought that he could reach out gratefully for that extinction.

And then, like a feeble blue flame, came the determination: No.

His fingers moved to Annie’s wrist again and felt the little slow ticking of her pulse.

Martin ran faster, his legs pumping up and down.

The cloud of dust swirled outwards, the colour of its underbelly in the lights fading as it drifted away.

The spectators at the cordons had thinned out as darkness fell and the cold intensified, but Martin could see people turning, running back to see as the echoes of the crash died away.

He ran without thinking and reached the line of people, standing with their faces upturned and staring at the blue and orange smoke reflections where the façade had been … He looked each way and then pushed through them. He scrambled through the barriers and ran again, down the length of the store front. The space was full of other people running and the sound of their boots crunching on brick and glass. Two men with a stretcher passed in front of him and Martin saw a group of others bent around a fireman lying on the ground. As the stretcher was unfolded and they lifted him up his heavy helmet fell and rolled unnoticed in the debris. Martin looked past it into the centre of the store and saw a smoking mountain of stone and planks and scaffolding. A blue tarpaulin was draped like a cloak around its base.

Martin stumbled forward with his hands outstretched.

Annie was under there. He would launch himself at it and dig until he reached her. There were uniforms all around him, police in helmets, and firemen with their brave silver buttons. He went forward with the surge of them, through the gaping hole where the busy doors had stood, and into the thick dust and the blizzard of fragments that the wind blew off the broken walls.

They were already working at the wreckage, with shovels and picks and their bare hands, to clear a space. He pushed further forward, and the broad blue back in front of him turned and heaved a chunk of stone into his hands. Martin never felt the weight. He swung round and passed it on to the next link in the chain and then reached out for the next. His lips drew back from his teeth in concentrated effort and he felt the tension of the day’s idleness evaporating.

He was helping her now, working with his strength to reach her.

Hold out, brace for the weight, swing with it, let go and reach again.

I won’t let her go. I won’t let it take her. The words beat in his head, synchronizing into a desperate chorus with every heave and stretch of his body. Instead of the rubble at his feet and the legs of the men struggling in front of him, he saw Annie.

He saw her at home, waiting for him to come in at the end of the day, and the way that her face softened with pleasure at the sight of him. He saw her frowning, with her head tilted a little to one side as she sat reading with Thomas, and then laughing, with Benjy as a fat, tow-headed baby slung on one hip.

He thought of the warmth of her beside him in their bed, the softness and familiarity of her curled against him. The warmth seemed to spread around him, insulating him for an instant from the desperate rescuers.

He could feel Annie’s generosity and strength, and the reality of her love for the three of them, like a living thing fighting beside him. If she was dead, and all her warmth and life had bled away, how could he bear it? And if she wasn’t dead, but buried, injured, what must she be suffering? Her pain stabbed into him, becoming his own, and he doubled over it. Like an automaton he took the next chunk of masonry that was thrust backwards at him.

If it could be me down there, instead of you, Annie. I love you. Did you know that? I wish I’d told you. I wish I’d let you know how much.

He knew that he could have worked for ever and he found himself trembling with impatience, sweat glueing his hair to his face as he waited for the next load. But there were more uniforms pushing past him now. He dimly heard the blare of sirens. Martin let his arms drop to his sides and he ducked sideways, into a corner of shadow. The lights carved out a pallid room inside the skeleton store and the rescuers milled within the room. Martin tried to slip out beyond the walls of it. He went down on his hands and knees and tried to pull at a piece of plank that stuck up at an angle. The illusion of superhuman strength had deserted him and he wrestled feebly with his piece of wood. The sweat dried icily on his face.

Then he felt a hand on his shoulder.

‘Who are you?’

It was a policeman, of course, in a greatcoat and peaked cap.

‘My wife is under there,’ Martin said. He looked at the policeman and saw the official expression fading for a moment, and sympathy peering out at him. He was very young, Martin thought irrelevantly, the old cliché. Not more than twenty, surely? A year or so older than Annie and he had been, back at the very beginning.

‘Will you come this way, sir?’

Martin nodded, helpless now, although his torn hands still twitched involuntarily, reaching out for more stones. He followed the policeman to the steps of the parked trailer. Inside it he saw telephones on a bench, a little group of men waiting. It was very warm and stuffy after the cold outside.

‘My wife,’ he explained to them. ‘I want to help to get her out.’

‘Do you know for sure that she is down there?’

Martin shook her head, but then he babbled, ‘Yes. Yes, I’m sure she is. There’s nowhere else she could be, not after all this time …’ The words petered out as they looked at him.

‘The façade is unsafe still,’ the senior man said gently. ‘I can’t allow anyone except rescue personnel anywhere near it. The most helpful thing you can do for your wife is to leave her recovery to those trained for the job. If she’s there, of course.’

‘I want to help,’ Martin repeated.

‘I know. But what will happen if I let you go in there and a chunk of rubble falls on you?’

The policeman pinched the bridge of his nose between his fingers. Martin could see that they wanted to be considerate, but they were also irritated by his persistence.

‘If you would like to go down the road to the local station,’ the other one suggested, ‘you can have a cup of tea in the warm. I’ll send a WPC to keep you company, and we can contact you as soon as we know anything at all.’ He tapped one of the telephones with his fingertip.

‘I’d rather be here, as close as possible,’ Martin insisted.

‘I’m afraid, then, it will be a case of asking you to wait at the cordon. The inner one, at the point closest to here.’ The commander gestured backwards over his shoulder. ‘Would you like a constable to come with you?’

Martin thought of the young faces he had seen today, blotched with cold under their helmets.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Thank you. I’ll be all right on my own.’

They nodded, waiting for him to go and leave them to their work.

‘It said … it said on the radio that there are still three people in there. Is that true?’

The officer hesitated for a moment and then he said, ‘Yes. Before the collapse at least one of them was alive. We heard a shout. There’s still hope, of a sort.’

Martin stood up, painfully, like an old man.

Annie, was it you, screaming down there?

They escorted him back to the cordon. Martin walked to the place closest to the control trailer and stood once more to watch as he had watched since midday.

There was a disturbance behind him but he didn’t hear it. It took a tap on his shoulder to make him half turn his head, never taking his eyes off the store.

‘Hello. Mike Bartholomew from the BBC.’ It was a man with a microphone, a camera crew trailing behind him. ‘I saw you come out of the control trailer back there. Is there anything you can tell us?’

Martin whirled round and struck out, almost knocking the mike out of the man’s hand.

Annie, was it you, screaming down there?

‘No,’ he shouted. ‘I can’t bloody tell you anything.’

And he turned his back on them, staring helplessly at the circle of lights around the store front, tears blurring his eyes.

Steve lifted his shoulders, gathering what was left of his strength, and then dragged himself another inch to the right. He had to rest afterwards, lying with his lip still drawn between his teeth until the claw of pain released a little. Then he tensed his muscles again for another effort.

If he could get close enough to her, he thought, he might be able to do something to help her. Annie lay very still and silent, and the beat of her pulse seemed frighteningly weak.

To move across the last few inches separating them took everything Steve had. His head flopped down and his ears filled with the sound of his own gasps for breath.

At last he had done it. He was still holding on to her hand, and he clung to it while he fixed all his will on the next breath, and then the next. He had kept the worst fear at bay while he struggled to reach her – the fear that the airflow, wherever it had come from, had been blocked off by the fall. But now that he could think about it he realized that the clogged air was settling. Each breath came easier, and although the dust still choked him there was oxygen filling his lungs. He even had the impression that a draught of clean, cold air touched his face.

He lay on his side facing Annie. He could feel her close to him, and he had the sudden sense that they were like lovers in the dark. Gently he disentangled his fingers from hers and felt for her pulse. The little beat was still there. He laid her hand down and then reached out to touch her face.

With his fingertips he followed the contours of it, trying to see her through his hands. Her hair was tangled over her cheek and he stroked it back. Her forehead was cold, but he knew that she was alive. When he touched her upper lip and traced the line of it through a crusted patch at the corner, her mouth opened and he felt the faint exhalation of breath on the palm of his hand.

His fingers moved again, over her chin and then to cup the point of her jaw. Except for the dried blood at the corner of her mouth her face was untouched.

He rested for a moment. Steve was thinking, his confused mind still only admitting one thought at a time, What happened?

He tried to recall the exact quality of the noise. It had been a long, diminishing roar. Not an explosion, but a collapse. It must be that more of the store had fallen in overhead. Perhaps the rescue work had undermined it. Perhaps the rescuers themselves were pinioned, somewhere in the weight above …

Steve headed off the thought. They would come in the end, but how much longer could it be? He thought of the watch again and knew that it was gone for good. They had both moved, and he had lost his bearings.

Annie’s cheek had grown a little warmer under his hand. He began his slow exploration again. Her hair was matted with dust, but that was all. He combed his fingers through the ragged length of it, but he could find no trace of blood. Very slowly, as gently as he could, he lifted her heavy head and slid his right arm under it. Her skull felt hard and round. There were no soft places, nothing sticky. Steve felt the first flicker of real hope. No head injuries. He settled her head once more so that it was pillowed on his arm. Then, with his free hand, he stroked her hair.

As if to reward him Annie stirred a little, and then murmured something. Thillren? He strained to hear, and then to make sense of it. Children, was that it?

‘Annie?’

He whispered her name at first, then repeated it, louder and more insistent. There was no response, and she didn’t move again.

Doggedly Steve slid his hand down from her head to her throat, and then over the crumpled stuff of her coat.

At the level of her breastbone his fingers stopped moving. There was a stiffness at first, a difference in the texture of the cloth. He reached further, and then met the stickiness he had dreaded. Blood, here, a patch that had soaked right through her clothes. It was warm on the side she was lying on, and he couldn’t stretch far enough beyond her waist to discover how far the blood had seeped. He trailed his fingers downwards to touch the rubble underneath her and there was blood there too, mixed with the grit and dust. He lifted his hand and put it to his own mouth. There was the taste of blood in the dirt, and when he put his hand down to feel it again the patch seemed bigger.

In despair, Steve let his head drop back. A shower of powdery dust fell on his face and he thought of the earth scattered on a coffin lid. Annie was bleeding, and she would bleed to death in his arms.

He opened his mouth and shouted upwards into the black firmament. ‘Why don’t you come, you bastards? Why don’t you come for us?’

The shout was no more than a croak, and he felt the dry ache of thirst in his throat.

There was no point in shouting. ‘Annie,’ he murmured. He turned his head again so that they lay face to face, their foreheads almost touching.

‘I’m here,’ he told her.

Suddenly he felt weak, languid and almost comfortable in his exhaustion. The thick air was like a blanket. It if wasn’t for the thirst, he thought, he could fall asleep. Like a lover, with Annie in his arms. If he just inclined his head a little he could kiss her cheek …

Annie. Not Cass, or Vicky. A stranger, but he knew her face now.

Steve forced his eyes open again.

Not fall asleep. Not.

He made himself think, remember, anything, just to keep his consciousness flickering on.

Overhead the lights made a harsh ellipse in the dark cave of the store. There were more of them now, and the work in the light was faster, and fiercer. The collapse had come, injuring two men, but the danger was past. Even the injured were forgotten, now that they had been taken away to safety. The rescuers worked on, grimly, digging from the point where the scaffolding shelter had been. The tarpaulins had been rigged up once more, providing a rough screen against the wind and sleet, and from inside them the police guarding the store front could hear the multiplying bite of picks and the juddering whine of the drills.

It was ten past five. Forty-two minutes since the frontage had collapsed. Already, seemingly incredibly, the ground floor had been exposed all over again. They were working downwards, once more, into the basement.

Annie lay with her head in her mother’s lap. It was a warm day, and she had been playing in the garden. She knew that, because she could still smell the scent of crushed grass where the rug had been spread out, and the musty geranium leaf smell from the window boxes. Then she had hurt herself, somehow. Perhaps she had fallen on the path and cut her knees, or perhaps she had bumped her head on the kitchen door as it swung outwards in the breeze.

She had run in tears to find her mother, and her mother had bathed her cuts and dried her face. Then they had gone together into the cool sitting room. There were photographs on the piano and on the low table by the fireplace, Mummy and Daddy when they were young, Annie herself and her brother on seaside holidays. It was very tidy, very quiet. Annie was lying on the sofa. She was wearing sandals with a rising sun pattern punched in the toes and white ankle socks, a green cotton dress and hair ribbons. Once or twice her mother stroked her hair back from her cheek.

Annie smiled contentedly. As she lay there she had a huge, luminous sense of something that was puzzling, because it felt so strange and important, but yet was also utterly comforting and warm and safe. For a brief moment she held the whole of childhood, the summer afternoons and birthdays and holidays and winter bedtimes, all distilled in the recollection of one single day. She turned her head a little, feeling the touch of her mother’s fingers, afraid that the vision would evade her. She wanted to hold it, but she knew that it would burst like a bubble as soon as she touched it.

It stayed with her for a moment longer, and then she felt her smile of joy fading. So complete, so perfect a vision of childhood could never visit a child. A child’s view of its own life was a mass of fragments, frustrations and fleeting pleasures and unexplained loose ends.

She was cold, not pleasantly cool any more. She wasn’t a child, and the precious, glowing vision had vanished. From a distance, Annie saw herself sit up and swing her legs down off the sofa. She ran to the door, with the hair ribbons fluttering like white butterflies. Her mother sat with her hands in her lap, watching her go, and her face was sad.

It wasn’t her mother, then, but Annie herself and she was watching the open door and the sunlight making long squares on the parquet floor of the hall. Pain was stabbing into her side, and there were tears behind her eyes that hurt in a different way. She heard children’s voices in the garden. Somehow she got up and went to the window. It wasn’t the little girl with the hair ribbons playing out there. It was Thomas and Benjamin, Benjamin in his pedal car and Tom clambering up into the branches of the pear tree. They were calling her and she couldn’t run, or even answer them.

‘Children,’ Annie managed to say.

Someone was listening to her, she knew that. It was comforting not to be alone in the dark, with the pain. He was very close to her, and she heard him say, ‘I’m here.’

Annie wanted to ask him, ‘Come outside and see the children,’ but she couldn’t. She watched them herself, instead, knowing that he was close enough to see whatever she saw.

They were absorbed in their play. Benjy came hurtling down the path, his face a concentrated frown. Tom hung out of the tree, his legs dangling as he pretended to fall, just to frighten her. She waved to them, but they didn’t wave back. Watching, she knew that she should have felt the same calm sweetness as when she had recaptured her own childhood. But it was cold in this garden. The trees were bare of leaves and it had been trying to snow. There was a white powdering of it on top of the walls, and the wind was like a knifeblade. The boys were on their own, out there.

Annie knew why she felt so cold and sad. She was afraid of leaving them. She felt her weakness, and the sure sense that she was failing them. Her love for them took in every minute of their lives, interwoven with her own for eight years, unshakable. It couldn’t end, could it, cut off in the darkness?

Annie left the garden window and walked through the house, touching the memories accumulated in the rooms. In the playroom they crouched beside the model train layout, their heads almost touching. In her bedroom Annie saw the wicker crib that he had put Tom into when she brought him home as a baby. He lay under the white covers, a tiny, warm bundle. Their faces turned up to her from the kitchen table, Benjy’s mouth rimmed with jam. The sounds of their voices drifted up the stairs, and she heard running footsteps overhead.

There was nothing of herself left in the house. She wanted to be there, but something terrible had happened to stop her going back. She felt her sons’ love, and their need, and the brutally snapped edges of the circle that had held them together. The dream she had had of her own childhood had contained another circle, unbroken. She had wanted so much to duplicate that circle and to set others moving outwards, ripples on a pool.

The loss hurt unbearably. Annie moaned, and at once the arm holding her tightened.

‘Tom,’ she said, ‘Benjy.’

‘Annie,’ the man’s voice said, very gently, like a lover’s in the most secret darkness. ‘Hold on. They’re coming for us. I can hear them.’

Annie didn’t know what he meant. She had been in the garden, watching her children play.

Steve had been listening. The ring of spades and drills was louder now, and he felt himself shrink from the sharp metal biting over his head. But he was frightened by how quickly Annie seemed to be slipping away from him.

‘Go on thinking about your children,’ he said. ‘You’ll be with them soon. I wish I had children. I’ve never felt that before, but I do now.’ Now it’s too late.

The scraping overhead was much closer, but he felt himself at a distance from it, further with every minute. Another irony. Steve found himself smiling, but couldn’t remember why. He put his hand out to touch Annie’s cheek, strengthening their contact.

‘If I had children,’ he rambled, ‘I’d make it different. Not like for me. It would be so different. I’d make sure of that. Perhaps that was why I didn’t want any with Cass. I never thought of that.’

Annie turned her head a little, perhaps to hear better, perhaps reaching for the touch of his fingers again. He cupped her cheek in his hand.

‘Shall I tell you? I’ve told you everything else. There isn’t much, anyway.’

He began to talk and Annie listened, dimly confusing the little boy he was describing with her own sons, so that Steve and Tom and Benjy ran together down the paths ahead of her and their voices were carried back to her on the wind.

He had been to that flat before, of course. He knew it, on the day that his mother took him there with his suitcase, almost as well as his own home. Three floors, up the hollowed stone steps that had mysterious twinkly fragments embedded in them. Into the living room, where his Nan was waiting for them. Beyond was the kitchen, with the cracked lino floor. There was a grey enamel stove on legs in there, with a little ruff of grease around each of its feet, and the sight of the hairs caught in the grease made him feel sick in the back of his throat.

‘Here we are then, Mum,’ his mother had said, in the too-cheerful voice that always told him she was about to do something he wouldn’t like.

His Nan had simply jerked her chin and muttered, ‘I can see that.’

He had stayed with Nan before. He didn’t like sleeping in the little room beyond the kitchen because there was no window in it, and it was dark in the mornings when he woke up even when the sun was shining down on the High Street.

His mother had taken his case through into the room. He had seen her putting his things into it; too many, surely, for just one or two nights?

Nan had put the kettle on and made a pot of tea and his mother had drunk hers standing up by the kitchen window, smoking and looking out of the window. She wouldn’t look at him, and that made him afraid.

Then, when she had finished her tea she had come across the room to him and hugged him. She said, ‘Steve, are you listening to me? I’ve got to go away for a bit. Will you stay here and be a good boy for your Nan, and then I’ll come soon and take you home again?’

He had nodded, miserably, knowing that it was pointless to argue. And so his mother had gone and left him with his Nan, and he had gone into his bedroom and taken his toy cars out of his suitcase. He made a line of them on the kitchen lino, taking care not to look at the grease around the feet of the stove.

His mother had come back from time to time, less and less frequently. At first she had brought money, and Nan liked that.

‘Perhaps next week,’ she always said, when Steve asked her when she was going to take him back home. Then she began coming without money, and that made Nan angry.

In the end she didn’t come at all.

In the dark Steve lay holding Annie and trying to remember what it had been like, then.

It was hard, because it had been so featureless. There had been a long, long time when everything stayed exactly the same except that he grew bigger. He would recall the places clearly enough. Outside the flat there was the high, grey-brick school surrounded by a fenced yard. After school he had played between the lines of prefabs at the end of the street, and on the bombsites where the willowherb sprouted cheerfully. It had been the same for him, more or less, as for his friends. And if he had felt anything much, he had forgotten it.

Once, when Nan was angry with him for some reason, he had shouted at her, ‘I’m going away from here. I’m going to find my Dad, and tell him.’

All Nan had said was, ‘That’ll take a better detective than you are, my lad.’

At about the same time, he had learned that his mother had gone to live in Canada, with a friend.

Perhaps a year later, after months of silence, she had sent Nan some money in an envelope. There had been a letter with it, and in the letter his mother had said that part of the money was for a Christmas treat for Steve. Nan was to take him up to the West End, to Selfridges – she had stressed that, Selfridges, underlined – to see Father Christmas.

‘I was eight, or nine perhaps. Too old for Father Christmas. My mother had forgotten I was growing up. She must have thought I was still six. But we went, anyway. All the way, on the bus. I remember everything about it.’

He hadn’t been very interested in Father Christmas. An old boy with cotton wool stuck all over his chin. But the rest of it had been like a vision of Paradise. They had ridden on the escalators past mirrored pillars that reflected the stately lines of shoppers gliding upwards. He could look down at the floors below him, acres of things spread out for him to admire, lit and scented and brilliantly coloured. No one else, even Nan, had seemed to be surprised by it.

‘It’s all right for some,’ was all Nan had said.

But he could have stayed there all day, just wandering about, looking at things. And at the people, all brushed and glossy and furred. When Nan dragged him away at last they had walked along Oxford Street, looking into every glittering window. They had tea in Lyons’, and he sat at a table in the corner by the door so that he could look out at the taxis and big cars.

It was then, on that day, that Steve decided where he would live. And how he would live.

‘I can remember, when we got back to Nan’s, how grey it looked. Grey and bare.’

After that, it was just a matter of how long it took to get away.

Annie was so quiet. He stroked her hair again and whispered, ‘Did you hear all that, Annie? Are you still here?’

She had heard it, and she could see the children ahead of her. They stopped running to look in at a shop window. There was a Christmas tree in the window, hung with clear glass balls that captured the colours of the rainbow. There were presents all around the tree, wrapped in shiny scarlet paper and tied with scarlet satin ribbons.

She couldn’t see their faces, but the children looked so small and vulnerable, silhouetted against the bright, white lights. She wanted to reach out and draw them into her arms, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t even put her arms around the man in return for his warmth and the comfort of his voice. She turned her head a little and felt him tense, listening to her.

‘Children,’ she said again.

Steve nodded in the darkness, exhausted.

‘That’s right, Annie. Hold on to them. They’re coming for us. Can’t you hear?’

She could see them, still looking at the Christmas tree, but she couldn’t hear their voices. There were other noises, scraping and rattling, drowning them out. But she said, summoning up her strength, ‘Yes.’

They were working in silence now. They bent in a circle under the glare of the lights. Every minute or two they stopped work and listened, and when the silence settled around them, unbroken, they began again, burrowing downwards. In his trailer the police commander waited with his finger touching the corner of his moustache. Martin waited at his point on the barricade, never taking his eyes off the tarpaulin screen.

Children, Steve was thinking. If I had a daughter.

His face was wet, and he thought how stupid it was to cry for her because she had never been born.

I’d buy her a pony, he thought. And ballet lessons, and white satin shoes with ribbons to go dancing in. And when she’s seventeen I’ll buy her a car, and take her downstairs on the morning of her birthday to see it parked outside the house. I’ll open the front door, he thought, and say, There it is …

As the door opened inside Steve’s head, he saw a beam of light.

It shone straight down on to his face and the brightness of it was as sharp as pain. He closed his eyes because the light hurt so much and he saw the dazzle of it inside his eyelids. When it had faded a little he opened his eyes again, and the patch of light was bigger, and still brighter.

He opened his mouth and through the dust caked in his throat he shouted, ‘Here. Down here.’

The light blinked and went out and he felt a second’s terrible disappointment, but then he understood that it was a head, blocking the light to look down at them.

‘Down here,’ he said again. And then, ‘Please. Come quickly.’

‘You’re all right,’ a voice came back to him. ‘We’ll have you out in no time.’

‘Come quickly,’ he begged. ‘She’s bleeding.’

He turned his head to look at Annie. Her eyes were closed and she looked as if she was deeply asleep. Her eyelashes showed dark against the dust that masked her face.

‘Annie,’ he whispered to her, ‘we’re all right. They’re here now.’

She didn’t answer but he held her tighter and with his free hand he tried to brush the coating of filth off her face.

The ragged circle of light grew wider. He could hear people talking, giving orders, and the quick movements and the clink of their tools as they worked. The girl in his arms looked so defeated. He was afraid that now, after all, it was too late.

‘Please hurry,’ he begged them.

They wanted him to talk, and now that it was over he was too weary to speak. The questions came one after another as the men came closer. Steve saw the light glinting on their helmets and their shiny boots.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Is she your wife?’

‘Do you know the woman’s name?’

‘I’m thirsty,’ Steve said.

A moment later they lowered a little bottle of water down to him. He reached up with his free hand and then lifted his head just enough to tip the bottle to his mouth. It ran out between his lips and down his chin, clear and cool. He let his head fall back again.

He told them his name. ‘Her name is Annie. I think she’s badly hurt. When the collapse came.’

‘That’s all right, don’t worry.’ They were trying to soothe him, he knew that. ‘We’re going to try to put a doctor in beside you.’

A moment later someone came sliding downwards and the dust rose chokingly. Steve braced himself, waiting for the extra shock of pain from being touched. Since the light had come, the pain had intensified. He wondered if he could bear it without screaming out.

The doctor crawled into their tiny space.

‘I’m Tim,’ he said, and Steve thought it was just like at a party. He would have laughed, but for the pain in his leg. ‘And there’s Dave, and Tony, and Roger and Terry up there. They’re all wonderful diggers. They’ll soon get you out.’

They lowered a bag down to the doctor. He had a torch, too, and the light burned into Steve’s eyes. It was so bright that he couldn’t see Annie’s face any more, and he didn’t see the flash of the hypodermic either as the doctor slid the needle into his arm.

The pain receded after that. Steve lay and watched the doctor’s black shape hunched between them. He bent over Annie, touching her, and the sticky patch in her coat. Steve heard him rummage in his bag and the tiny, metallic clink of his instruments.

‘She won’t die, will she?’

After a moment the doctor said quietly, ‘I don’t know yet.’

Hurry up, damn you all. Why does it take so long?

‘Okay, Steve,’ someone called out to him. ‘Hold on just a few minutes longer.’

The police commander crouched at the lip of the hole. Under the lights he could see the colour of the woman’s coat. It was blue, and she was wearing black boots.

‘The descriptions tally, sir.’ One of his men had checked the computer-stored descriptions of people reported missing through the long day. ‘And the man is conscious. He says her name is Annie.’

The commander nodded. For a moment he had been thinking of his own wife, and seeing her crumpled amongst the debris.

‘How long?’ he asked the fire chief.

‘Ten, fifteen minutes.’

The men were working in frantic silence now. There was a girder to be lifted and hoisted away before the smaller chunks of rubble could be moved. Once that was done the victims could be lifted out on to stretchers.

The commander looked down at the doctor’s head, and then glanced at the stretcher party, waiting. The ambulances were drawn up beyond the tarpaulins.

‘Her husband’s waiting at the barrier,’ he said. One of his men was already moving, but the commander said, ‘Wait. Leave it for another five minutes, until they’re ready to bring her up. He’ll be in the way here, and if she’s unconscious he can’t help her. Take him into the trailer and tell him, will you?’

Steve didn’t know how long it took, in the end.

The doctor waited beside him, holding up a bag and tubes that ran into Annie’s arm.

The firemen tried to joke as they came closer.

‘You’ll be tucked up in bed with a nice nurse in good time for Match of the Day, mate.’

‘What time is it?’ he asked them.

‘Ten past six. You’ll have to leave now, the store’s closing.’

He was laughing now, weak laughter that didn’t begin to express his happiness. He loved all the firemen, and the doctor. It wasn’t all ending. There were still chances.

When the men in their boots and helmets were almost beside them, Steve turned his head to look at Annie again. Her eyes were open, fixed on his face.

‘You see?’ he said, and smiled at her. ‘I knew we’d be all right.’

He saw her look at the doctor and the fireman and the whites of her eyes showed startlingly in her dirt-blackened face. Then she came back to Steve again. Her lips moved and he heard her say his name, just once.

‘Ready?’ the fireman asked. The doctor nodded, his mouth tight with anxiety.

‘We’re taking Annie out first,’ they said to Steve. ‘You’re fit enough to wait another minute or two.’

It must be hurting her. Steve clenched his fists, futilely trying to absorb some of her pain as they slid the harness under her body. He wanted to hold her hand, but the doctor’s fingers were at her wrist. They began to winch her upwards and he saw the dark, ugly mark where she had been lying. Her eyes were closed again. She swung for an instant before the doctor and the firemen steadied her and the tubes dangled at her side.

Her hair fell back and he remembered how he had seen it brushed back over her shoulders, so long ago, when he had reached to open the door. It was grey with dust and ragged where she had torn it free.

Everything was dark again, and he had an instant’s recall of the hours they had clung together.

They were taking her away now.

Steve blinked up into the painful brightness of the lights.

‘Annie,’ he said. ‘I love you.’

Martin followed the policeman down the trailer steps.

He knew, now. She was here, and she was alive. Just.

His fists clenched in his pockets so that his fingernails dug into the palms of his hands. The blue tarpaulins made a blur in front of him. They held the stiff curtain aside and he ducked between them. There were cold, bright lights here and people intently watching a knot of men clustered around something that came up into the light. Martin stumbled forward and saw Annie on a stretcher. There was a doctor supporting her head and her arm lay pale and bare where they had cut her coat sleeve away.

Martin looked down past her and saw a man lying on his side. The space where she had been was tiny. The man’s hand clenched and unclenched, on emptiness.

They were carrying Annie out of the terrible place. Martin ran to the other side of the stretcher and walked beside them, his heart thumping out wordless prayers.

Please. Let her live. Let her live. Please.

Back through the blue screen.

As they came out of the ruined store front Martin was assailed by different lights. These were the cameras, flashing after them. He felt the upsurge of anger but there was no time for it. They were into the ambulance and the double doors thudded shut. He saw the reflection of the blue light beginning to turn over their heads as they slid away.

They were working on her already, two nurses and a second doctor, but Martin found a place at her side.

Annie opened her eyes again. They were glazed with pain, but they moved and then settled on Martin’s face. He saw the flicker of bewildered disappointment. It was as if she had expected to see someone else.

He took her hand and held it, but it lay limp and cold in his.