Читать книгу Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection: Strangers, Bad Girls Good Women, A Woman of Our Times, All My Sins Remembered - Rosie Thomas - Страница 12

The doors of the accident department swung open ahead of the ambulance. Annie’s stretcher was lifted out and laid on the waiting trolley. Martin ran beside it with the doctor. He felt the brief coldness of the sleet on his face and then the hospital closed around them like a white tunnel.

They were wheeling Annie away out of his reach. He stepped awkwardly forward and saw her face. It was so white, so withdrawn into itself, that he was afraid she was already dead. A little involuntary shudder of fear and grief escaped him.

A sister wearing a blue dress with white cuffs put her hand on his arm. ‘Are you her husband?’

He nodded, unable to speak.

‘Come and sit in my office. I’ll get you something while you’re waiting.’

They put him in a wooden-armed chair in the corner of the little room. The sister brought him tea in a plastic cup, and Martin sipped it without tasting it, grateful for its warmth.

She won’t die, will she? The words kept hammering in his head, but he didn’t speak them yet.

The casualty consultant and his senior registrar were with Annie.

The consultant had been off duty when the hospital put out its special major accident alert to everyone from the pathologists to the porters. He had arrived in his unit thirty minutes later, and he had been at work ever since. With his team he had treated forty-five people, and he had heard from the police that another casualty would soon be on his way. They had just confirmed that he would be the last. There was another man still buried in the wreckage, but he was dead.

‘The last but one,’ he told his colleague. He rubbed his hand quickly over his face and then pulled his gloves on to begin the examination.

Annie’s skin was pale and clammy, and her breath was coming in shallow gasps.

‘Blood pressure?’

‘Seventy over nothing.’

Her pulse was fast. One-forty.

The consultant pulled Annie’s coat open and undid her blood-stained dress. Her stomach was dark with bruising, and it was rigid to the touch. The doctors glanced at each other and then the consultant said quietly, ‘O-neg blood up at once. Urgent cross-match. Theatre immediately.’

He went to the telephone to alert the surgical team who were waiting upstairs.

Five minutes later Annie was on her way to them.

She was already gone by the time they brought Steve’s stretcher in. The pain in his leg was biting through the blur of morphine, but he twisted under the blanket they had covered him with, trying to see where she was. The accident unit looked quiet, almost ominously peaceful. Then suddenly the examination cubicle seemed full of people, their faces looming over him.

‘Annie,’ Steve said distinctly. ‘Where is she?’

They murmured amongst themselves and then someone said, soothingly, ‘She’s in good hands. On her way to theatre. Now, let’s take a look at this leg.’

The pain jabbed into him. Steve stared upwards at the bright circles of the overhead lights. They bled outwards into rainbow wheels and then contracted, hard and sharp again. He bit his teeth together to stop himself from crying out. At last the doctor straightened up and left his leg alone. ‘You’ve got a nasty fracture in the upper bone in your left leg,’ he said smoothly. ‘I think we’ll whip you up to theatre as well and get it pinned for you. We can tidy up one or two other things while you’re under the anaesthetic.’

The pain made Steve helplessly angry. He thought, Why do they always talk like that?

But he was too weary to try to say anything. He closed his eyes, thinking about Annie’s white face under the rescue lights, and waited for them to put him to sleep.

The consultant finished what he had to do to Steve and then went out into the corridor. He was stretching to ease his muscles and thinking longingly of a whisky in the bar across the road from the hospital, but the duty sister was waiting for him. She told him briskly that Annie’s husband was still waiting in her office.

The doctor looked puzzled, glancing backwards to where Steve was lying. ‘I thought he was her husband.’

The sister shook her head. ‘Her husband is sitting in my room. He looks very shocked.’

The doctor sighed. ‘Well. I’d better go and tell him, then.’

When Annie opened her eyes again there was light streaming all round her. The brightness was shapeless at first, but then it began to form itself into long rectangles with dimmer patches separating them. She tried to turn her head and found that she couldn’t. The discovery brought a cold spasm of terror that made her eyes snap wider open, staring into the light. The light was reassuring, but she wanted to see more, to see what was beside her, and she couldn’t. She tried to gather her strength to do it but all she could feel was pain, pain everywhere, as if it had possessed the air surrounding her. Annie felt a moan rise in her throat but it was stifled because there was something blocking its way.

Then someone’s face slid forward, blotting out the rectangles of light. Annie looked carefully at it. It was a man, wearing a white coat with a high collar. Like a barber’s jacket, she thought. The man’s mouth was moving, and she realized that he was talking to her. When he stopped talking he smiled, but his eyes were watching something behind her head.

She tried to ask him what he was doing. Her tongue moved, and then she felt that she would choke. There was a tube going down her throat, and her stomach heaved against it.

The man’s face moved again, and now she could hear what he was saying. ‘Just to help you with your breathing for a little while longer, Annie. You’re doing fine now.’

She was in hospital, then. Steve had said that they would come for them before it was too late. Annie wanted to reach her hand out to touch Steve’s hand again. Her fingers moved, but her hand was too heavy to lift. There were tubes there too. She could feel the rubbery kiss of them against her wrist.

She was very tired. Annie closed her eyes again and the bright rectangles vanished.

‘She won’t die, will she?’

Martin had waited at the hospital all through the evening. It was midnight before they brought Annie out of the operating theatre. The surgeon came to find Martin in the stuffy waiting room where he had sat for hours, staring at the rubber-tiled floor. He told Martin that Annie had crush injuries to the abdomen. They had found that her spleen was ruptured and so they had removed it, and they had repaired a deep tear in her liver. The operation had revealed no other serious internal damage, but there were fractures in her right shoulder and upper arm, and deep cuts and extensive crush bruising on her legs and thighs. She was in the recovery room now, and they hoped that her condition would stabilize.

‘Can I see her?’ Martin had asked.

‘We’ll be taking her along to intensive care shortly,’ the surgeon had answered carefully. ‘I don’t think there’s anything to worry about tonight. We want to try to bring her blood pressure up. Go home and try to get some sleep now, and come in to see her in the morning. Sister will call you at once if there’s any change.’

Martin had gone home.

His mother had arrived to take care of the boys, and she was sitting at the kitchen table waiting for him. Martin shook his head wearily at the familiar sight of everything. Was it only this morning that Annie had been there? He relayed the news that the surgeon had given him, and then he went upstairs to look at the boys. Benjy looked as he always did, curled up with the covers pulled close around his head, but Tom was restless, turning and muttering anxiously in his sleep.

Martin went and lay down on their double bed. He dozed fitfully, waking up constantly because he thought he heard the telephone ringing.

In the morning he went straight back to the hospital. On the telephone before he set out the sister told him that Annie was rather poorly. The doctor was with her now.

Martin’s car was still in the little mews near the wrecked store where he had left it yesterday. He went to the hospital by tube. All the people travelling to work held up their newspapers, and the pictures of the bombed store and the outraged tabloid headlines danced in front of his eyes. Martin turned his head and stared through the black window, thinking, Annie, Annie.

In a bleak little room beside the double doors of the intensive care unit, Martin saw the doctor. Annie’s surgeon had gone home to sleep, and this man introduced himself as a renal specialist.

Martin listened numbly. In the early hours of the morning Annie’s kidneys had begun to fail, and they had put her on a dialysis machine. Her blood pressure had fallen further, but they had stabilized it now.

‘It’s a question of waiting, I’m afraid,’ the doctor said.

‘She won’t die, will she?’ Martin repeated. He saw the muscle twitch under the doctor’s well-shaven cheek, and he thought, He must hear this all the time, people asking, Will my wife die? Will my husband die? Suddenly the enormity of what had happened struck him, and the random horror of it. Why did it have to be Annie?

‘Your wife is young and healthy. I think her chances are good. But we won’t know for a day or two.’

‘Can I see her now?’

‘Sister will take you.’

They gave him a white gown to wear, and plastic covers to pull over his shoes.

Martin followed the sister’s blue dress and starched cap through the double doors. He had a brief impression of a long room, brightly lit, partitioned into cubicles. As he passed he saw, in each bed, an inert shape fed by tubes and guarded by machines. Then the sister stopped. He looked past her and saw Annie. He knew it was Annie because of the colour of her hair on the pillow. But her face seemed to have shrunk, and her cheeks and the skin under her eyes looked bruised. There was a tube in her mouth and another in her nose, there were tubes taped to her wrists and another to her ankle. She was wearing a white cotton hospital gown and through the open front of it Martin could see a line fixed into her chest. Her bed was hemmed in by the square, hostile shapes of machines and a bag of dark red blood hung over her head, trailing its colour down into her arm. Under the gown her shoulder was strapped with white tape, and there was another taped dressing over her stomach. Looking down at her Martin felt how cruel it was that she should be so reduced. Her body looked so dispossessed, as if the machines had taken it and Annie herself had gone away somewhere, a long way off.

There was a male nurse in a white coat watching the three monitor screens at the bedhead. Martin looked away from the flickering dots that read Annie’s life out second by second.

The nurse nodded at a chair a little to one side of the bed.

‘Would you like to sit with her for a while?’ he asked cheerfully. He was Irish, Martin noted automatically. The unit was full of quiet, deftly moving people. It seemed strange that they should have individual characteristics like an Irish voice or a dark skin, and yet be part of these machines and their winking eyes.

‘It’s a pity you weren’t a minute earlier. She was awake for a little while, there,’ the nurse told him. ‘She’s dropped off again now.’

Martin sat down beside her. He reached out to take her hand, but he was afraid of dislodging the tubes. He just touched his fingertips to hers.

Martin sat with her for an hour, but Annie didn’t move. He thought of her as she had been at home, moving briskly around the kitchen or running up the garden with the boys whooping ahead of her, and he shifted on the uncomfortable chair to contain his anger. He was angry with the people who had done this to her, and he was shocked to recognize that he was angry with Annie, too, because she had gone away and he couldn’t reach her. Martin looked at the machines as if they were rivals, cutting him off from her.

‘What are they for?’ he asked, nodding at the monitor screens.

‘Pulse, blood pressure and ECG,’ the nurse said. ‘This scale monitors her central venous pressure through the line in her chest. These shunt tubes are for the dialysis machine.’

And so they held her, keeping her alive, a long way away.

After an hour he stood up stiffly and said goodbye to the nurse. Benjy and Tom were waiting at home. Martin went away down the ward without looking left or right.

‘How is she?’ Steve asked.

‘She’s holding her own,’ they told him. ‘Her husband’s with her.’

Steve had been thinking about the hours that they had lived through together. The darkness of them was still almost more real to him than his curtained segment of the bright ward. He could hear the nurses going to and fro beyond the curtains, but he could hear Annie’s whispering voice just as clearly. It was Annie he wanted to see, and talk to, now that the darkness had gone. Annie and he knew each other. In the long hours she had become his friends, his family, and he knew that he had become hers. But Annie was lying upstairs in the intensive care unit, and her husband was waiting beside her.

By the time the evening came Steve had recovered from the anaesthetic. He knew he had, because although the memory of yesterday hadn’t loosened its claw-hold, he could distinguish quite clearly between the memory and the reality of now, in the hospital ward. As if to confirm it a nurse with a little starched frill pinned to the top of her head came and pushed the curtains back, smiling at him.

‘There now. We’ll give you a bit of a view, now that you’ve woken up properly.’

Steve saw four beds opposite, and the occupants peering across at him. The table in the middle of the ward was banked with a great mound of flowers. He lay against the pillows looking at them, hypnotized by the generosity of the colours.

Annie woke up again, and she saw that the bright rectangles overhead had been dimmed. They were lights, she understood, and if they had been turned down it must be night-time now. How many nights had gone? She swallowed on the tube that stuck into her mouth, and felt the nausea rising behind it again.

Another nurse was looking down at her. This one was a woman, and Annie saw with intense clarity the contrast between the black skin of her face and the whiteness of the cap that covered her hair.

‘Hello, dear,’ the nurse said. ‘Your husband has been here all evening, but he’s just gone off home. He told me to tell you that everything is all right. Tom and Benjy send their love, and you’re not to worry about anything. So you won’t, will you?’

The nurse smiled at her, and Annie looked at the warm, reassuring contrast of light and dark again. She tried to say, Martin, but the tube gagged her. She realized all over again that she couldn’t talk or move, and the pain that had attacked her down in the darkness was even more intense here. She knew that she must be safe here under these lights. The nurse’s smile was so wide and white and confident. But still the fear came back and clawed at her. Where had Steve gone? She couldn’t even turn her head to look for him. Steve would understand what was happening. He had been there with her, every minute. She could hear quite clearly what he had said to her. She could even see through his eyes his Nan’s hunched figure shuffling to and fro in her cramped flat, Steve’s own flat with its big, abstract paintings on the white walls. Why wasn’t he here then?

She tried to speak again, this time to call his name as she had done in the terrible darkness. But he didn’t answer now, and the black nurse put her warm hand on Annie’s arm.

‘Lie nice and still, there’s a good girl. You don’t want to upset all my machines, do you?’

Annie tried to think, What machines? The answer hovered somewhere beyond the edge of her understanding, like the outer edge of one of the lights overhead that lay out of her field of vision. Its elusiveness seemed more unbearable than the pain, and Annie felt the tears gather behind her eyes and then roll out at the corners.

The nurse bent over her and dabbed them away.

‘Oh dear, now,’ Annie heard her murmur. ‘There’s no need for this. You’re doing just fine.’

Early in the morning two officers from the anti-terrorist squad came to see Steve. They sat stiffly beside his bed with their notebooks, sympathetic but persistent.

‘I’m sorry,’ Steve said. ‘There was nothing. I just held open the door for the girl, and then the bomb went off. I didn’t see anything, I wasn’t aware of anyone else.’

It happened, he thought wearily. It happened and Annie and I were there, that’s all. Annie and I and the others. The two of us were lucky. We’re still alive. Annie, are you still there?

But he had no sense of luck, yet. He felt numb, and he simply remembered the two of them lying side by side in the darkness, without being able to think any further. The officers had thanked him, folded up their notepads and creaked away again.

Steve’s next visitor was Bob Jefferies.

At the beginning, in the accident unit with the pain fogging everything, they had asked Steve for the name of his next of kin.

Cass? he had thought. No, not Cass.

‘Or just someone we can contact to let them know where you are,’ they had reassured him. In the end he gave them Bob Jefferies’ name, more because Bob was his business partner than because he was a closer friend than any of a dozen others.

And now Bob came down the wards towards him, bulky in his expensive overcoat, carrying one of Steve’s Italian suitcases. He stopped at the end of the bed and looked at the dome of blankets propped over Steve’s leg, at the dressings covering his hands and chest, and then at his face.

‘Jesus, Steve,’ he said at last. ‘Was the prospect of the staff Christmas party as bad as all that?’

Steve let his head rest against his pillows and, with a part of himself, he laughed. But the laughter jarred his bones, and it died quickly.

Bob looked at his grey face. ‘Is it bad?’ he asked.

Steve said, ‘No. Painful, but no lasting damage.’ The orthopaedic surgeon who had come in to see him earlier had told him that the compound fracture of his femur had been pinned. In time, new bone formation would begin, and he should be able to move quite normally. ‘I won’t be able to walk on the leg for a bit. Months, perhaps.’

Bob hoisted the suitcase on to the end of the bed. ‘Mmm. What about getting it over?’

Steve didn’t risk laughter this time.

‘I didn’t ask about that.’

‘No kidding?’

They were uncomfortable together, Steve thought, because Bob’s awkward urge to extend unobtrusive sympathy and his own determination not to need it had shaken their arm’s-length, flippant intimacy out of true.

Bob busied himself with unpacking the suitcase. Steve saw that he had brought in his bathrobe, pyjamas, sponge-bag. It was odd to see Bob handling them.

‘Sorry to land you with this,’ Steve said.

‘Wish there was more I could do.’ Bob wasn’t looking at him now. ‘I couldn’t find your electric razor.’

‘Not much of a next-of-kin, are you? Don’t you know I wet-shave?’

‘You apply that frayed bunch of animal hair that’s crouching in your bathroom cupboard to your chin? Well, don’t worry. I’m sure you can get one of these lovely girls to shave you.’

Suddenly Steve wanted to close his eyes. The effort of trying to be the person that Bob knew was too tiring, and there was nothing else he knew how to reveal to him.

Bob saw the weariness, and rapidly unpacked the last things. There were books, and a bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label.

‘Can I have some of that?’ Steve asked. Bob emptied the water out of the glass on his bedside table and poured two inches of whisky into it. Steve drank some and the familiar, worldly taste of it seemed to link him back to Bob again.

‘That’s better. Thanks.’

Bob stood back a little, holding the empty suitcase.

‘They wouldn’t let anyone in except me, and they’re only allowing me ten minutes. But they all send their love. Everyone, you know.’

Steve knew. He meant all the people they worked with, colleagues, the business. He could imagine how the news would have travelled.

‘And Marian, of course. If there’s anything we can do, Steve …’

Marian was Bob’s wife. Steve nodded.

‘Thanks. Thanks very much.’

‘D’you want me to get in touch with anyone? Anyone in particular?’

Steve thought for a numb moment. ‘Well, Cass, I suppose. And Vicky Shaw. Numbers are in the book on my desk, Jenny’ll find them. Tell them I’m all right.’

‘Yeah. Okay. Look, can’t we fix you up with a private room, at least? Somewhere with a TV and a phone?’

Steve looked round at the ward with its half-drawn curtains. He hadn’t spoken to any of the occupants of the other beds, but he liked the feeling of their company. And the glory of the flowers massed in the middle of the room had come to matter as much as anything.

‘I’m fine here. Bob, I was supposed to meet Aaron Jacobs yesterday about the fruit-juice commercials …’

‘Don’t worry about the damned business, Steve. Don’t worry about anything.’

Bob was a kind man, Steve realized. They had worked together for years, spent countless hours and eaten numerous meals together, but the thought had never occurred to him before. He saw him now, fussing with his coat as he got ready to leave, wanting to do something helpful or say something comforting.

‘There is one thing you could do,’ Steve said. Bob turned at once, pleased and relieved.

‘There was a girl. Her name’s Annie. We were down there together, all that time. We talked to one another. We could just touch hands. It would have been … terrible, without her.’

‘Yes. There was a bit about it in the news. Not very much.’

‘She’s here, somewhere. They brought her in before me. I’ve asked, but they won’t tell me anything much. Will you find out how she is? How she really is?’

‘Leave it to me.’

Bob would do as he asked, Steve was sure of that. He only had to wait, now, until he came back with the news of her.

They said goodbye then, and Bob went away and left him to himself again.

Annie was very ill.

After the emergency operation she had developed pneumonia. The surgeons had taken the ventilator tube out of her mouth and cut a hole for it directly into her windpipe. The machine breathed smoothly for her, and they pumped antibiotics into her veins to counter the lung infection. Her kidneys had failed completely, but the dialysis machine at her bedside did their work. For another day she lay inert, knowing nothing. Then, as if her body had no strength left even to start the struggle to heal itself, Annie began to bleed. She bled from her operation wound, from her cuts and grazes, and from the holes where the tubes and drips punctured her skin.

Martin sat by her bedside watching her face. He couldn’t even hold her hand because the lightest touch brought up big purple bruises under her skin. Her face was so dark with bruising that she looked as if she had been beaten over and over again. He sat and waited, almost in despair.

The doctor in charge of the intensive care unit had told him that Annie’s blood had lost all its ability to clot and stop her wounds from oozing. From their battery of tubes and plastic packs they were filling her with all the things that her own blood couldn’t produce. Martin watched the packs emptying themselves into her bruised body. Even her hair seemed to have lost its colour, spreading in grey strands against the flat pillow. Her lips were colourless, and leaden circles like big dark coins hid her eyes.

Steve waited too. Bob’s determined enquiries had led him to Annie’s surgeon, and the surgeon had come down himself to talk to Steve.

‘How is she?’ Steve asked.

The other man had looked at him speculatively, as if he was trying to gauge how much he should be told.

‘I held her hand for six hours,’ Steve said. ‘I want to know what’s happening to her.’

‘She has pneumonia and kidney failure. She is also suffering from disseminated intravascular clotting. That is in addition to the usual post-operative effects and her other, more minor injuries.’

‘Will she live?’ Steve watched the doctor’s face. But he didn’t see any flicker of concealment, and after a moment the man told him, ‘I think her chances are about fifty-fifty. The next two or three days will tell.’

‘Thank you,’ Steve said.

Two days went by.

The third was Christmas Eve, and the hospital hummed with the sad, determined gaiety of all hospitals at Christmas time. The staff nurse on Steve’s ward wore a tinsel circlet over her cap, paper streamers were pinned from corner to corner, and Steve could see a big Christmas tree in the day room that linked the ward to the women’s ward across the corridor.

The double row of beds with their flowered curtains and the narrow view through the doors at the end had become perfectly familiar. It struck Steve that he already knew the other occupants as well as he knew Bob Jefferies or any of his other friends outside the walls of the ward.

On the day of the bombing the eight-bedded ward and its women’s counterpart had been cleared to receive the victims. They had been brought in one by one, and they had found that their experience was a stronger bond than years of acquaintanceship. By unspoken agreement, they almost never mentioned the bombing itself. But there was a wry, grumbling kind of determination to overcome its effects that linked the newspaper seller, whose pitch outside the store had been covered with falling rubble and glass, the teenage store messenger, the five other Christmas shoppers, and Steve himself. In the handful of days that they had been enclosed in the ward, Steve had unwittingly become a kind of hero. It was only partly because he was the most seriously hurt, and because he had been trapped for so long. The real reason was the tide of presents that flowed into the ward for him. Flowers and cards and gifts arrived for all of them, every day. It was Christmas. The world felt guilty sympathy for them, and the loaded table in the middle of the ward clearly showed it.

But Steve’s tributes, from advertising colleague and friends and clients, were set apart by their lavishness. There were complete sides of smoked salmon, champagne and whisky by the case, boxes of chocolate truffles and fruit and flower displays that came in great hooped wicker baskets. Steve had been embarrassed at first by the procession of presents, and he had wanted none of the luxuries except flowers to look at. He gave the rest away, to the other men and the nurses, and then he saw the delighted interest that greeted each new delivery, and he began to enjoy them too.

On Christmas Eve, from Bob Jefferies and some friends in the film industry, a television set and a video recorder arrived. With the machines was a box containing tapes of two dozen of the newest feature films, some not yet even released.

The young messenger-boy shuffled over to Steve’s bed and gaped into the box. ‘I haven’t seen one of these before.’

‘You’ve got plenty of time to see them now, Mitchie.’

That was the accepted level of reference to what had happened to them all. They shied away from anything more. Steve thought of Annie lying somewhere upstairs, and wondered what they would say to one another if she was here, instead of this assortment of strangers precipitated into companionship.

At six o’clock one of the nurses inexpertly opened one of Steve’s bottles of champagne. The cork popped and bounced over the polished linoleum floor and the silvery froth foamed into hospital glasses. The nurses handed the glasses round and the old newsvendor next to Steve sipped at his and smacked his lips.

‘Well,’ he pronounced. ‘I’ve known worse Christmases.’ He looked appreciatively at the staff nurse with the tinsel wound around her cap. ‘But I wish I was your age again, Stevie.’

To be called Stevie, and the way that the old man spoke, reminded Steve of Nan. The thought of her, with the determined paper streamers over his head and the winking fairy lights and his image of the old man’s Christmases, filled him with sadness.

I wish I was your age again.

For what? Steve thought.

He hadn’t cried since he was a little boy, but there were tears in his eyes now. He wanted to get up and walk out of the room, defending himself with solitude as he had always done. But his broken leg and the pain under the blanket cage pinned him down. He felt his own weakness, and the way it exposed him to the need for other people to be tactful. Steve put his champagne glass down on the locker and turned his wet face into the pillows.

The others saw, and looked away again. Steve knew that they were raising the pitch of champagne jollity amongst themselves to shield him, and he felt the strangeness of what was happening more sharply even than the pain.

He lay and waited for the tears to stop forcing themselves out of his eyes, and thought about Annie. He knew Annie now better than he knew anyone else in the world, and he was afraid that she would die.

You mustn’t die, he whispered, as though they were buried again and she could hear him in the dark. You won’t die, will you?

The coldness of his fear for her dried up the weak tears.

Deliberately he turned his head back to face the other beds and reached out for his beaker of champagne.

Later, the hospital medical students came to tour the wards with their portable Christmas pantomime. They put on an extra lively show for the bomb victims. Steve lay and watched the clowning with a smile stretched over his face.

It was later still, when the overhead lights had been dimmed and he could hear the nurses rustling and giggling at the end of the ward, when Steve opened his eyes again and saw a man standing beside his bed.

He had a square, pleasant face with lines of tiredness pulling at his eyes and cheeks. He was tall and stooped a little, and he was looking down from his height at Steve lying in bed, as if he wasn’t sure whether to tiptoe away again.

‘It’s all right,’ Steve said distinctly. ‘I wasn’t asleep.’

The man’s hand rubbed over his face.

‘The sister said I could come in and see you for a minute.’

Steve reached up and clicked on the lamp over his bed. The circle of light enveloped them within the curtained space.

‘I’m Annie’s husband,’ the man said.

She’s dead. You’ve come to tell me that she’s dead.

Steve tried to haul himself upright against his pillows so that he could meet squarely what Martin had come to say.

‘How is she?’ he asked flatly. And then he saw that the lines in her husband’s face were drawn by exhausted relief, and not by defeat at all.

‘She’s going to be all right,’ Martin said. ‘They told me this evening.’

Steve closed his eyes for a minute. He saw Annie as she had been, lying beside him when they shone the rescue lights down on to her face. Then, superimposed on it there was another, suddenly vivid image of her as she must have been before the bombing. She was laughing, with colour in her cheeks and her hair flying around her face. Steve opened his eyes abruptly.

‘Thank God,’ he said.

In his own relief he saw Martin’s exhaustion more clearly. He pointed to the chair beside his bed and Martin flopped down into it.

‘If you look in the locker,’ Steve said softly, ‘you’ll find a bottle of Scotch.’

He took it from Martin and poured a measure into his water glass. Martin wrapped his fingers round the glass and then drank half the whisky at a gulp.

‘Thank you,’ he said.

Steve waited until Annie’s husband looked up again, and then he asked gently, ‘What did they say? The doctors?’

Martin shrugged his shoulders inside his coat, as if he couldn’t believe now that she was indeed going to live in the face of the terrifying list of things that had threatened her.

‘She had pneumonia, but they’re beating that with antibiotics. She’s been on a ventilator machine that has been breathing for her, through a hole cut in her windpipe, but they say now that they’ll be able to take her off that in a couple of days. And her kidneys are starting to work again. They showed me. It’s all shown on the screen and marked on the charts at the end of her bed. Her blood wouldn’t clot, you know. She had bled so much that it couldn’t do what it was supposed to do any more. They filled her up with plasma, and all kinds of other things, and now it’s functioning for itself again. The wound from her operation will start to heal now. She’ll get better quite quickly from now on, they think.’ Martin’s hands rested on the sheet, with the glass held loosely in them. ‘It was so terrible to see her, in there with the monitors and machines all around her as if she belonged to them and not to me. I couldn’t even touch her hand, because it bruised her poor skin.’

Martin’s head was bent, and Steve waited again. The image of Annie was too clear and pitiful. But then Martin looked up, and Steve saw that he was smiling. He shrugged his shoulders once more.

‘But now she’s going to get better. She was awake, tonight. She can’t talk, because of the ventilator. But she smiled at me.’

Steve had to look away to conceal the stroke of jealousy.

He made himself think, Her husband, and then to remember that Martin had waited all through the day and the night of the bombing, and all through the days ever since. But even his understanding of that, and his sympathy, didn’t lessen the shock of his jealousy.

Unseeing, Martin drank the rest of his whisky. The relief was so profound that he wanted to share it. He could have stood up and announced it to the curtained ward, and to the nurses squeezed hilariously into the sister’s office at the far end. He felt a wide, stupid smile breaking through the stiffness of his face, and the whisky burned cheerfully in his head and stomach.

‘She must have wanted to live, you know,’ he murmured. ‘She must want it so much.’

Steve remembered. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘She did. She was very courageous, down there.’

Martin’s hand moved a little, as if he had been going to hold it out to Steve and then found that he couldn’t.

‘I wanted to tell you that she’s getting better, of course.’ The smile, again. ‘And I wanted to … thank you. For helping her.’

Through the glow of relief that had bathed the hospital corridors as he made his way down to the stranger’s bedside, Martin found himself watching Steve. He saw the bomb site again too, and himself peering down into the tiny space where the two of them had been lying together all the fearful hours.

It was smaller than a bed. It was like a grave, he thought, and he remembered a medieval tombstone that Annie and he had seen in a cathedral somewhere. They had been on holiday. Long ago, before the boys were born. The stone lord and his lady lay shoulder to shoulder on their stone slab, with a stone replica of their favourite lapdog asleep at their feet. Annie and Martin had deciphered the Latin lettering on the slab together. In death they were not separated.

Annie had sighed and said it was very romantic, but Martin had been struck by the intimacy of the narrow place beneath the slab for them to lie in.

They had both shivered a little and then laughed, and had gone on down the side aisle, hand in hand, to look at the stained glass windows.

The image of the same terrible intimacy came back to Martin now.

‘I’m so glad she’s getting better,’ Steve said.

The lame words didn’t begin to express the knot of his real feelings, and that was good. ‘I’ve been thinking about her a lot. Wondering. There’s no need to thank me, you know. We helped each other. Taking it in turns, one to be afraid and the other to pretend that there was no need. I know that I couldn’t have … couldn’t have held on as long, without Annie.’

It was very quiet on the ward, Steve noticed. Annie’s husband was looking at him. In ordinary times he would have a relaxed, humorous expression, and his eyes would be friendly. A nice man. Almost certainly a good man.

Quickly, Steve said, ‘What about your children? Benjy, and Tom? They must be … missing her.’

‘Yes,’ Martin said. ‘They are.’

Steve said quietly, ‘We talked, you know. For a long time, before the wall collapsed. We talked about all kinds of things. She told me about you, and the children, and your house. About how she didn’t want to die, and leave you all.’

Martin put his hand up to his eyes and then rubbed them, digging into them with his fingers. He was stupid with exhaustion and relief, wasn’t he? ‘I know she would say that. Annie wouldn’t give up. She wouldn’t give up up there, either. In that room with all the machines.’

‘I’m glad.’ Lame words, again.

Martin stood up. ‘The boys are all right. It’s harder for Tom, because he knows she’s ill, and he can’t see her. They won’t let anyone go up there, except me.’

Steve felt the movement of jealousy again. He wanted Martin to go now, but he still hovered at the bedside.

‘What about you?’

Steve shrugged. ‘Broken leg and cuts and bruises. Nothing much.’

Martin was looking at the dimly-lit ward. ‘It isn’t much of a Christmas for you, either, is it? What about your family?’

‘I’m not married. It isn’t exactly my favourite time of year, in any case.’

Martin nodded. ‘Annie loves Christmas,’ he said. He did hold out his hand then. Steve took it and they shook hands.

Martin smiled. ‘I’d better go. The kids will be awake at five a.m.’

‘Go and get some sleep.’

‘Yes,’ Martin said. ‘I’ll be able to do that now.’

After he had gone Steve lay awake for a long time. He took the fact that Annie would recover and held it close to him like a talisman. He didn’t think beyond that.

The house was quiet when Martin reached it. His parents had already gone to bed, so he sat in the kitchen and drank another whisky. He thought about the other Christmases he had shared with Annie, and her pleasure in the rituals that must be observed every year. It was Annie who had sewn the big red felt stockings for the boys to hang up, and Martin knew that when he went upstairs he would find them draped expectantly over the ends of their beds.

If she had died …

The terror of it struck him all over again and he clenched his fist around the whisky glass.

But Annie wasn’t going to die. He was still afraid of her injuries, but he was sure that she was going to live.

He felt a moment of simple happiness. It was Christmas, and their children were asleep upstairs, and Annie was going to live.

He put his empty glass down and went to the boys’ rooms. He collected the red stockings, turning the covers back for an instant to look at the sleeping faces. Then he went into their own bedroom where Annie had stacked the presents neatly at the back of their big wardrobe. He took them out one by one and filled the stockings. He was touched and impressed by the care she had given to choosing even the smallest toys. It was so obvious which of the boys each of the things was intended for. He recognized how smoothly and lovingly Annie had orchestrated their simple, domestic affairs. Why had he never told her, or even really noticed it?

When he had finished he laid the bulging red shapes back on the beds. Then he carried their big presents downstairs and put them with the others under the tree.

The fairy lights made a glowing coloured pyramid in the dim room. Martin saw that on the hearth the boys had left a glass of whisky and a mince pie for Father Christmas, and a carrot, neatly peeled, for the reindeer.

That was always at Annie’s insistence. ‘Why shouldn’t the poor old reindeer get something?’ he heard her demanding.

It must have been Thomas who had reminded his grandmother to arrange the little offering tonight.

Martin was smiling as he poured the whisky back into the bottle. He ate the carrot and the mince pie, suddenly ravenous. He realized that he had eaten almost nothing since the bombing.

‘Come on, Father Christmas,’ Annie would have said now. ‘Let’s go to bed.’ He missed the warmth of her hand taking his, and the sweetness and familiarity of lying down beside her.

Martin turned off the tree lights and went upstairs. He would make this Christmas a happy one for the boys, however little he felt like it himself. For Annie’s sake.

The boys woke up very early in the morning, as Martin had known they would. First Benjy and then Thomas came creeping into his bed, the stockings bumping behind them.

‘Look!’ cried Benjy. ‘He’s been.’

‘Is it all right?’ Thomas whispered.

Martin lifted the covers and the two of them scrambled in beside him, a wriggling mass of sharp elbows.

‘Shh. Don’t wake your grandparents. Yes, Tom, it’s all right. Everything’s all right.’

‘Hey, Dad. Happy Christmas.’

He held them for the minute that they allowed him, and they listened breathlessly to the crackle and rustle inside the stockings.

‘Well, then,’ Martin said. ‘Aren’t you going to look and see what he’s brought you?’

They dived in in unison.

Martin watched, and then, even though he had done the filling what felt like less than an hour ago, their delight drew him into the excitement of unwrapping. For Benjy, who loved to draw and paint and make things, there were fat round fibre pens in fluorescent colours that fitted into his awkward fist, and scribbling pads with orange and black and purple pages, and colouring books. There were building bricks that snapped together with a satisfying click, and puzzles to colour and cut out himself.

For Thomas, quick-witted and pugnacious, there were pocket quiz games and a miniature robot. There were toys that could be changed into other toys by turning and flipping the right parts, and there was a model aeroplane to slot together that twisted unerringly back to the sender’s hand. For both of the boys there were the space-age death weapons that they coveted, and Martin heartily disapproved of. But he was too absorbed in the burrowing discoveries even to smile at the evidence of Annie’s principles succumbing to her soft heart.

At last the three of them sat back in a drift of discarded paper and packaging, glowing with pleasure.

‘How brilliant,’ Thomas observed, sitting back with a sigh of satisfaction. Then he remembered, and a shadow crossed his face. ‘I wish Mum was here.’

Martin put his arm around him. ‘She will be,’ he promised him, ‘before long. She was much better last night. I’ll be able to take you to see her soon.’

The shadow lifted.

‘And then I’ll be able to zap her with my new gamma gun.’

‘And I will,’ Benjy chipped in.

‘Go on,’ Martin said. ‘Zap into your own rooms. I’m going to make a cup of tea for Granny and Grandpa, and tell them about Mummy.’

He waded through the debris with the boys hopping and firing around him.

It’s all right, he reminded himself. It’s going to be all right.

He opened the curtains, and saw that the light was just breaking on Christmas morning.

Christmas Day was exactly as Steve had imagined it would be. The women from the opposite ward who were well enough to walk came in in their pink and turquoise housecoats and wished each of them a merry Christmas. They were followed by flurries of other visitors, from the hospital padre who came with the hospital choir to sing carols, to the consultants, some of them with their wives and children. The smaller children were obviously bored and ran up and down the ward, sliding on the polished floor. After the doctors came a television crew, to film the bomb victims’ Christmas celebrations.

At what felt to Steve like just after breakfast, but was in fact the dot of noon, the Christmas dinner was wheeled in. The accident unit consultant carved the turkey from a trolley in the middle of the ward and the nurses swished to and fro with plates. They brought wine too, from Steve’s impromptu cellar, to add to the glow from the morning’s surreptitious consumption. After his dinner the old newsvendor lay back against his pillows with a smile of beatific contentment and fell noisily asleep.

At the start of the afternoon visiting the families came trooping in one after the other, wives and children and grandparents, to make a rowdy circle round each of the beds.

When he heard the click, click of very high heels Steve knew who it was before he looked up.

Cass was wearing the fur coat she had bought on an assignment in Rome. The pelts had been shaved and clipped and dyed until they looked nothing like fur at all, and they were only reminiscent of animals because of the tails that swung like tassels at the shoulders. A fur hat was tilted down over her eyes so that almost nothing was visible of her face except her scarlet lipstick. Cass had adopted her dressed-up look, as striking and as unreal as a magazine cover. Her entrance had an electrifying effect. The family parties turned round to stare for a long minute. Cass stood beside Steve’s bed and looked down at him.

‘Hello.’

‘Cass,’ he said. ‘And on Christmas Day, too.’ He was trying to remember the last time he had seen her, but he couldn’t. Months ago, now. How many months?

Cass shrugged off her furs. She was wearing a tube of cream-coloured cashmere underneath it. It looked as smooth and silky as the pelt of a Siamese cat, emphasizing her resemblance to one. Steve knew that her eyes had the same intriguing smoky depth as a cat’s because Cass was short-sighted, and too vain to wear spectacles.

‘You look well,’ he said, and caught himself smiling inwardly at the bathetic understatement. Cass was, as always, perfectly beautiful.

‘That’s more than I can say for you.’

‘Thanks.’

She swayed forward and sat on the edge of the bed. Her legs under the short knitted hemline were very long and smooth in pale stockings.

‘Oh, darling, I didn’t mean that. I meant that it looks as though it was grim.’

‘It’s all right. I know what you meant.’

There it was, confronting them already, Steve thought. Their almost deliberate inability to understand the first thing about each other. It was hard to believe that this pretty girl with her wide, unfocused eyes had ever been his wife.

She looked around now, and shivered a little. ‘Ugh. I hate hospitals. How are you bearing it?’

‘Oh, I can bear it. I lie here and listen to people talking. Watch the nurses. There’s one very watchable redhead. I think, and sleep. There are worse things.’

Cass laughed and re-crossed her legs. ‘I can’t think of very many. Poor love.’

Steve was thinking that he found her just as attractive in just the same way as when he had first met her. If she was lying down beside him he would run his hand from the hollow of her waist over the satiny hummock of her hips. He knew how she would sigh with satisfaction, her wide-set eyes fixed dreamily on his.

Steve shifted uncomfortably under the bedclothes, feeling the heavy weight of the plaster encasing his leg.

‘Is your leg hurting?’ Cass asked innocently.

‘No. Not my leg.’ She heard the note in his voice and she laughed, pleased with the effect she created. Yet he had hardly known her, Steve reflected. Any more than Cass had known him. Annie and he knew one another intimately, and he had done no more than hold her hand and cradle her head to try to comfort her.

Watching him, Cass asked sharply, ‘Has Vicky been in to see you?’

‘Vicky? Yes, she came the day before yesterday. When they lifted the next-of-kin-only restriction. She’s gone home to Norfolk for Christmas now.’

Cass pouted a little. ‘Why did you have to name Bob Jefferies as your next of kin? It made it look as if you didn’t have anyone else.’

Steve sighed. ‘I couldn’t have named you, my love, could I? We haven’t seen each other for months. I didn’t even know if you were in the country.’

‘I was here. I would have come right away.’ Cass picked up his hand and bent her head, looking at their laced fingers. ‘Didn’t you know that?’

After a moment Steve said, ‘No, I didn’t know. You were the one who left, remember?’

Cass turned her head further, so that a wing of creamy-blonde hair fell and hid her face. Further down the ward someone had turned on the radio. It was a recording of the Nine Lessons and Carols, and they heard the achingly high notes of a boy soprano.

‘Steve, I …’

He moved quickly, knowing that he couldn’t listen. He opened his hand and let her fingers fall back on to the bedcover.

‘Bob came. Bod did everything that was necessary, which wasn’t a lot.’

Cass turned her face squarely to him then, and he read the mixture of hurt and irritation in it. Just as there had always been, almost from the very beginning. ‘It’s no good, is it?’ she asked. He wanted to reach out and touch her then, but he knew that he shouldn’t do that either. There was no point in beginning again, because there was nowhere that he and Cass could go together.

‘No,’ Steve said at last, and the word fell into the stillness between them.

After a moment Cass looked up brightly. ‘Well. I’m not going to dash off at once, having come all the way in here. Let’s talk. What shall we talk about?’

‘Tell me what you’ve been doing.’

She launched into a spirited listing of her bookings and her travels to assignments. She had been to New York for six weeks, to Singapore, and to Rome and Sicily. She was busy and successful, and she was still moving in the same fashionable world that she and Steve had once moved in together. At last, however, she ran out of bright anecdotes and they looked at one another again in silence.

In a different voice Cass said abruptly, ‘You look so wretched. Why don’t you talk about what happened?’

‘It happened. I don’t remember all that much about it. Except that it hurt, and it was very dark.’

He longed to talk to Annie about it. No one else.

‘I saw the news pictures on television.’ Cass shuddered. ‘Before I knew you were there. There was someone trapped with you, wasn’t there?’

‘Yes. A woman. We talked, to keep each other company. It made it easier.’

It was impossible to say any more. Somehow Cass understood that.

‘I’m sorry,’ Steve said. ‘I’m very tired.’

She stood up at once and slung her fur coat over her shoulder so that the animals’ tails swished to and fro.

‘I know. I’ll go now. I didn’t even bring you a present, did I?’

Steve grinned crookedly at that. ‘No need. Everyone in the business has sent things. Half the stock of Harrods.’

Cass laughed. ‘I can imagine.’ It was the first completely natural note that they had struck between them, and they smiled at each other. Suddenly Cass leaned forward and kissed him, her hair falling against his cheek. Steve was reminded vividly of the night she left him. Cass in her black lace bra and French knickers. He put his hand up to hold her head down to his and kissed her in return. It was Cass who eased herself away in the end.

‘Behave yourself.’

‘No option, in this plaster.’

Cass sketched a model’s little pouting gesture of mock-disappointment. It was all right, Steve thought. They had steered themselves safely through the visit. Cass pulled the fur cloud of her hat down over her forehead.

‘Goodbye, my love.’

‘Goodbye, Cass.’

Her confident, graceful walk set the tails swinging around her. She didn’t look back from the doors.

The old newsvendor leant forward as soon as they had closed behind her.

‘Who was that, son?’

‘My ex-wife.’

He chuckled throatily. ‘Didn’t look all that ex to me.’

Steve laughed. ‘Appearances can be deceptive, Frankie. Especially with Cass.’

‘Well.’ The old man settled himself down gain. ‘I wouldn’t say no myself, I can tell you that much.’

Steve looked around the ward. It had the appearance of the end of a party, with empty chairs abandoned at odd angles, strewn wrapping paper, one or two lingering guests. The smell of cigar smoke drifted in from the day room. Steve was smiling when he closed his eyes. He fell asleep at once.

The lights overhead were clear now. Annie could see the line of rectangles with the neon tubes more brightly defined behind the opaque glass. She knew the faces of each of her nurses, and the eight-hour cycles that governed their appearances made sense because she could see a big, white-faced clock on the wall opposite her bed. The Irish male nurse called Brendan was on duty now. Annie liked him best, because his touch was light and he never hurt her when he changed her dressings or slid a needle into her skin. She watched him in his white jacket as he took a reading from a scale beside her and wrote a figure on one of his charts at the foot of her bed. Behind him Annie could see the senior nurse sitting at her desk on the raised platform in the middle of the room.

Brendan finished what he was doing and leant over her. ‘There you are, my love,’ he said. ‘That’s that for another hour. Are you comfortable?’

She could move her head just enough to make a little nod. She tried to smile at him too, feeling the quivering in her swollen lips.

‘That’s my girl,’ Brendan said. He stood still for a moment with his head to one side. Then he said, ‘Listen, can you hear?’

It was a long way off, but she could hear it. It was people singing, a warm and familiar sound. It was a Christmas carol. Hark, the Herald Angels Sing. The sound of Christmas Day.

‘Ah, that’s beautiful,’ Brendan sighed. ‘Our hospital choir, it is. As good as anything you hear on the radio.’

Annie wished that Martin were there to hear it too. He had been sitting beside her bed earlier, but he had leant over to kiss her and then he had gone away. She liked it when he was there. Sometimes he talked, telling her little, ordinary things about the boys and the house. At other times he sat in companionable silence, and that was comforting because it was tiring to listen. It was only when he held her hand that Annie felt uncomfortable. She wanted the other man to be there, then. Steve. The man who had held her hand in the dark. The thought puzzled her, and she turned herself away from it.

Annie lay and listened to the singing until she couldn’t hear it any more. Then she let the warm wave of drowsiness take hold of her again. Sleep was so safe, except when the dreams came.

A week later, in the absurdly early hospital morning, Steve was sitting in the armchair beside his bed. He had been up for several days now.

They had hauled him out of bed and given him crutches that fitted under his elbows, then helped him to stand upright. There was a little knob embedded in the heel of his leg plaster. When he was ready to take the first awkward, swaying steps with the crutches, he was allowed to rest it on the floor to balance himself. Never to put any weight on it. For several days one of the nurses and a physiotherapist had made him walk up and down, a little further every time.

Frank and Mitchie and the other men cheered and called out as he struggled to and fro.

He was resting in his armchair now while the nurses made his bed. One of them looked backwards over her shoulder at him as she worked.

‘I’ve got some news for you, Steve. One of my friends works in the ICU. She told me when she came off last night that they’re bringing your friend down today. There’s a bed for her in there.’ She nodded across the room to the door that linked the day room to the women’s ward. ‘So you’ll be able to see each other.’

‘Aw,’ the other nurse said, ‘isn’t that nice?’

Steve looked at the door, and at the reflections of light from the windows on the floor separating him from it. His fingers moved on the metal shaft of the crutches propped against his chair.

‘When?’ he asked. ‘When will they bring her down?’

The nurses looked at each other. ‘After rounds, I should think.’

Now that the time had come, Steve was afraid. He could feel the flutter of fear in his stomach. Annie was so important. She was important because she was herself, but also because it was only through Annie that he could learn to come to terms with what had been done to them both.

He was waiting to see her, waiting to begin it together.

Yet he was afraid. What if Annie looked at him with the blank, polite face of a stranger?

She mustn’t do that.

Steve curled his hands deliberately round the crutches and held them tight while he sat looking at the door of the ward.

Brendan and another nurse helped Annie up from her bed. They had put one of her own nightdresses on her, and she looked down at her legs under the frilled hem of it. They looked unfamiliar, very thin, their whiteness veined and mottled with blue, as though they belonged to someone else. Brendan brought her blue wool dressing gown and helped her left arm into the sleeve. Her right arm was strapped up and so he draped the dressing gown over it and tied the sash around her waist.

A wheelchair was waiting beside the bed. They lowered her into it, then put her slippers on her feet.

‘There you are, now,’ Brendan beamed at her.

A person again, Annie completed for him.

For a week, since she had heard the carol singers on Christmas Day, her body had been reassembling itself. It was defined now, within its own skin. It no longer blurred at the edges through tubes into incomprehensible machines. She had become an individual again, dressed in her own clothes, colours and materials she had chosen for herself. She was well enough to be taken out of this quiet, humming room with its bright lights and immobile bodies.

Brendan took the handles of her chair and pushed.

Annie was suddenly frightened. She was used to the room. She had given herself up to it, and the nurses and doctors and their machines had done everything for her. Now they were thrusting the responsibility back at her. The doors came closer, and she was afraid of what lay beyond them. Annie’s hand clenched in her lap, and she felt the weakness of her grip.

The nurses in their white coveralls came to the door to see her off. Even the sister left her observation platform for a moment.

‘Good luck!’ they said.

‘Be good, downstairs where we can’t keep an eye on you!’

‘What does she want to be good for?’ Brendan pouted.

The doors opened.

Annie took a deep breath. She had come this far, and to stop was unthinkable. This afternoon, she told herself, she would be able to see Thomas and Benjy.

Annie turned round to smile at the circle of nurses.

‘Thank you,’ she said. They waved, and the doors closed behind her wheelchair.

Annie faced the hospital corridor as they rolled along. Brendan was whistling behind her. She saw the little cream-painted curve where the wall met the maroon vinyl floor, and the scuff marks in the paintwork. A porter passed them and she noticed a tiny three-cornered tear near the hem of his overall coat. A group of student nurses in pink uniform dresses were as bright as figures in a primitive painting. It was as if the light were brighter than she had seen it before, or as if a thin veil of mist had lifted to define sharper contours and strengthen the colours that sizzled around her. It was a grey, lowering day outside the windows but Annie thought that the utilitarian corridor had been illuminated by bright sunshine. She could hear with perfect clarity, too, the separate sharp notes of Brendan’s whistled tune, the clash of a trolley, footsteps and voices, traffic, even distinguishing the diesel sputter of a taxi in the street outside.

At the lift doors she watched mesmerized as the light flicked upwards over the indicator buttons. The doors opened with their pneumatic hiss and inside the green-painted box the musty, metallic smell was so strong that Annie looked round to see if it affected Brendan too.

He smiled at her. ‘Okay, my love?’

He pressed the button. As they swooped down the sensation was so intense that Annie was briefly afraid that she might faint. But now, with bewildering speed, the falling stopped and the doors hissed open again. Annie blinked in the shafts of light that fell around them and they swung along another echoing corridor. At the end of it she saw a ward. They were moving so fast that she wondered if Brendan was running.

The doorway yawned and they swept inside. Annie gasped at the jungle of flowers and flower-printed curtains, the scents and the profusion of colour, and the light and dark shadows dappled over the vivid red floor. It was as if there had been only the terrifying darkness, and then a world bled of all its colour, and now the light and vividness of it had all come flooding back at once.

‘It’s beautiful,’ she whispered.

Brendan laughed. ‘Ward Two’s been called a lot of things. Never beautiful.’

A bed was waiting for her. The sheets were as white as a hillside under thick snow. Brendan was talking to the ward nurses. Annie could distinguish the separate cadences of all their voices but the impressions were crowding in too thickly for her to be able to hear what they were saying. Through the window behind her bed she saw a vista of red-brick walls, more windows, drainpipes, and pigeons sitting on a ledge, an intricate network, each part of it defined with spotlit clarity.

On the bedside locker there was a poinsettia in a pot. Annie had always disliked the assertive red flowers. Now she thought she had never seen anything as lovely as the flaring scarlet bracts with their ruff of jagged bright green leaves beneath. She wanted to touch their sappy coolness with the tips of her fingers. There were more flowers waiting in a great cellophane-wrapped spray on the bed. One of the nurses held the bouquet out for Annie to see. The flowers were chrysanthemums, every shade from pure white to deepest russet bronze. The curling yellow satin ribbon bows crackled with the shiny cellophane. They held out the card to her too, and Annie read the florist’s unformed handwriting.

With love and best wishes for a speedy recovery, from everyone at Rusholme.

Rusholme was Thomas’s school.

Without any warning, the kindness of the gesture made her cry. The rush of sensation seemed to have peeled away a protective layer of her skin, and Annie felt how vulnerable she had become. She sat in her wheelchair with tears running down her cheeks.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I don’t know why flowers should make me cry.’

‘Don’t you worry,’ Brendan told her.

Another of the nurses took the flowers. ‘I’ll put them in water, shall I? Mind you, I’m no flower arranger.’

They helped her into bed. The sheets felt crisp and smooth under her feet, and the pillows were soft behind her head. The tears were drying stiffly on her face and Annie sniffed a little.

‘That’s more like it,’ Brendan said. When they had made her comfortable he kissed her on the cheek and waved at her as he left.

‘You’ve done well. We’re proud of you, upstairs.’

‘That Brendan,’ the other nurse exclaimed when she brought back the chrysanthemums in a tall vase. She pulled the curtains tight around Annie’s bed. ‘Shall I leave you to get your breath back now?’

Annie lay in her quiet space. She looked around it, examining each detail as though she had never seen anything like it before. The light from her window lay thickly on the white covers and the cream-painted curve of the bed-frame, and on the flowers in their place on the locker.

Very slowly, Annie put out her hand. With the tip of her finger she traced the waxy curve of a chrysanthemum petal. The intense yellow of the flower seemed to trap the light, and then to beam it out again, as rich and buttery-warm as burnished gold.

In that instant Annie felt a beat of pure happiness. The charge of it diffused all through her body, warming it and weakening it with its glow until her hand dropped to her side and she lay back helplessly against her pillows.

The world had never seemed so beautiful or so simple. She understood not only that she was going to live, but how precious life was. Gratitude for it took hold of her. It swelled in her chest and throat until she could hardly breathe, it danced in the light and dazzled her eyes, and it sang in her ears and blocked out the mundane clatter of the hospital ward.

Annie was smiling. She was awed by the munificent beauty of the gift that had been presented to her, and the reflected glow of it bathed and transformed everything around her. Even her own hands were beautiful, stretched out on the sheet in front of her. Her vision was so penetrating that in her mind’s eye she could see the tiny threads of capillaries as they branched away, full of resourceful life, under the bruised and discoloured skin.

Annie was weak, but she was also unshakably strong again. I am alive, she told herself. I won’t be afraid any more.

Annie was still smiling when the curtains parted a little at the foot of her bed. She had heard murmuring voices beyond them, and now a nurse’s cheerful invitation, ‘Go ahead. She’s quite decent.’

The curtains opened wider and a man came through them. He was moving awkwardly, on crutches, and one of the flowered hangings caught over his shoulder. The man shrugged it off without taking his eyes from Annie’s face.

Annie saw his slight frown of concern or concentration. His eyebrows were very dark, darker than his hair, and they drew close together over his eyes. There were deep lines beside his mouth and she saw that his hands were clenched too tightly on the arms of his crutches.

She had never seen his face, but she knew him as well as she would ever know anyone.

‘Steve,’ she said softly.

His frown disappeared then.

Annie put her hand up to her bruised face and then, with the recollection that she had nothing to hide from Steve, she let it drop again.

At last, still looking at her, he said, ‘You look so happy.’

‘I am,’ she answered. She held out her free hand, the same hand that had held on to his all through their hours together. Steve balanced upright as he put his crutches aside and then, holding on to the edge of the bed for support, he swung himself slowly along until he could take her hand.

The memory that the touch brought back caught them and held them. It was a long moment before either of them could move.

Then Steve came closer, perching on the bed beside her. He lifted his other hand and reached under the torn ends of her hair to touch his fingers to the nape of her neck. Then, quickly and quite naturally, he leant forward and kissed her cheek.

Annie felt the colour rising into her face as if she was a girl again.

‘You look so happy,’ he repeated and Annie found herself laughing.

‘I look dreadful.’

‘No, Annie, you don’t.’

Steve didn’t see the bruises, or the unhealthy pallor of the rest of her skin, or the half-healed graze blurring the corner of her mouth. He saw the Annie he had imagined when her husband told him that she was going to live. Laughing, as she had been a moment ago, with her fair hair loose around her face. She had blue eyes and warmly coloured skin. She wasn’t beautiful, or even particularly striking, but she was full of life.

‘Look,’ Annie said.

She held out their linked hands to touch the tightly furled petals of the yellow chrysanthemum.

They looked at the flowers, and then at the simple things all around them, a plastic water jug and a glass, the chipped wooden locker, the curtains and the dingy view from the window. They were both thinking about the pain in the darkness, and their fear that they would never see anything so ordinary and beautiful again. Annie felt her happiness rising once more, rippling and ballooning outwards until she could have floated with it. She looked at Steve’s face and saw from the light in it that he felt it too.

They smiled at each other in their triumphant pride that they had survived. Steve lifted her hand and touched his mouth to her knuckles. For a moment there was nothing to say. They knew everything already, yet they had to begin all over again, here in the warm daylight.

When they did speak again the questions came spilling out together and they broke off together too, half embarrassed and half laughing, like adolescents.

‘Go on.’

‘No, you go on,’ Steve said.

‘I was just going to ask how you are. Is your leg bad?’

He told her briefly, shrugging it off. As he talked Annie listened to the familiar sound of his voice, trying to piece it together with his face and the shape of his head. His attractiveness surprised her. In her mind’s eye, down in the darkness, he had been a bigger, bulkier man with blunt, assured features. But this Steve was lean, and she guessed that before the accident he must have been very fit. His dark hair was cut short over his forehead, which made him look younger than the age she knew he was. There were marked frown lines between his dark eyebrows and more lines beside his mouth, but the mouth itself curled humorously. When he smiled, she found herself smiling back.

‘I know how you are,’ Steve told her.

‘How come?’

‘I’ve had regular bulletins. Mostly from the nurses, once from your surgeon. And your husband came to see me on Christmas Eve.’

‘Martin did?’ Annie was startled.

‘He told me that you were going to be all right. He said that you smiled at him.’

‘I don’t remember.’ Annie was thinking about the blur of the overhead lights and Brendan’s face looming over hers, the possessive pain. ‘I remember hearing the carol singers. My nurse told me afterwards that it was Christmas. What else did Martin say?’

‘He wanted to thank me for helping you through.’ There was an expression in Steve’s eyes that Annie couldn’t fathom. ‘I told him it wasn’t necessary, because we helped each other.’

‘Yes,’ Annie said.

The raw recollections gathered around them. Annie knew how badly she needed to talk to Steve. Not to Martin, because to tell him how it had been in the darkness would be to start at the beginning. It was only Steve who could exorcise it.

‘Are you still afraid?’ he asked, his voice gentle.

Annie looked around again, at the flowers on the locker and the curtains’ pattern. The radiance of the light had faded.

‘No, I’m not afraid. We’re safe in hospital, aren’t we? You said all along that we would be. Do you know what? The first thing I remember thinking, when I came round afterwards, with a tube in my throat, was, Steve said that they would come for us in time. I tried to reach out for your hand again, but I couldn’t move. I was afraid then. There were more tubes in my wrist. I could feel them touching my skin.’ Annie put her fingers up to touch the corner of her mouth. ‘I’m only afraid now when I dream. I dream that we’re buried again, and that we won’t be rescued. And that there’s no air, so we can’t breathe. I wake up choking, then. The worst dreams, nightmares, are the ones where I’m alone. You aren’t there.’

Steve took her hand and held it. He fitted his fingers between hers and clasped them to hold their palms together.

‘Remember?’ he demanded. ‘I was there. I’m here now.’ And then, as if she might reject the intimacy that that implied, he said quickly, ‘The dreams are only dreams. They’ll go away.’

‘Will you stay?’ Annie asked suddenly. ‘To talk?’ They had already talked so much. ‘Not now, I mean. But some time?’

‘Yes,’ he promised her. ‘I need that, too.’

He could hear someone walking down the ward. Not too long, the staff nurse had warned him when she showed him in. Steve let go of her hand. He tapped at the solid leg plaster under the folds of his bathrobe.

‘I’m going to be here for weeks,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Long after they’ve sent you back to the real world. I should think we’ll have plenty of time for conversation.’ He nodded past the curtains. ‘I’m in the next door ward. It links to this one via a charming day room. There are a great many vintage magazines and a dozen or so videotapes of bloodthirsty films. I can’t wait to show you round.’

Annie smiled at him. ‘I’ll look forward to that.’

The staff nurse came and began briskly pulling aside the curtains. Annie saw other beds across the ward, women looking over at her, more flowers.

‘Don’t tire her out, will you?’ the staff said. She looked pointedly at Steve and added, ‘Wouldn’t you be more comfortable in the chair?’ Meaning, Annie translated silently, ‘Don’t sit on the bed.’ She sensed Steve’s amusement answering her own.

‘I would,’ Steve said regretfully. ‘But I couldn’t lower myself into it. I’m going to hobble back now and leave Annie in peace. Will you help me?’

Annie recognized his charm. The nurse moved happily to take his arm.

‘I’ll be back as soon as they let me,’ he promised Annie. They began to shuffle slowly away. Without knowing why she did it, Annie told him, ‘Benjy and Tom are coming this afternoon. I haven’t seen them since it happened.’

Steve paused, looking back at her.

‘I’m glad they’re coming,’ he said gravely. Then the nurse led him away through the day room doors.

There were three hours to wait until afternoon visiting time. Annie made herself be patient.

One by one the women in the ward came over to talk to her. Two of them had been injured in the bombing. Others had already been discharged, and new patients unconnected with it had taken their places. Annie had the sense of other tragedies and losses, piling up within the hospital walls, each one obscured in its turn by the next.

She remembered that she had wanted to ask Steve if he felt angry. She looked towards the door, thinking about him. He had said that he would come back. The knowledge was a firm, steady point in the thoughts that moved like fish, directionless, inside her head.

At two-thirty exactly, Martin and the boys came in. They must have been waiting outside for visiting time to begin. Annie saw them immediately. They stood at the end of the new ward, looking around for her, Martin stooping protectively behind the children. Tom’s face was anxious and serious, but Benjy was swinging Martin’s hand and staring along the beds. Suddenly he pointed and called out.

‘There’s Mummy. There she is.’

Annie’s happiness swelled up again. She held out her free arm.

Tom came first. He ran to her and then stopped just short of the bed.

‘Are you all right?’ he asked, looking at her face.

‘Yes, Tommy, I’m fine.’ The sound of her voice reassured him. He put his arms around her and she hugged him, rubbing her cheek against his hair. She kissed the top of his head, smiling, with the heat of tears in her eyes.

‘I’m so glad you’re better,’ he murmured against her shoulder. ‘Christmas wasn’t nearly so much fun without you.’

‘I know,’ Annie whispered. ‘There’ll be next year, you know. Lots and lots of Christmases to come.’

Benjy was hanging back with his head against Martin’s leg. He was watching her, half-eager and yet reluctant. Annie had never been away from him for more than a day of his life before, and she knew that he was distrustful of her now.

‘Come on, Ben,’ she said gently.

Martin lifted him on to the bed beside her and Annie took his hand. She wanted to squeeze it in hers and then kiss his round face, pulling him to her so that no one could ever take him away. But she made herself suppress the intensity of feeling in case it frightened him. She smiled and hugged him, and said cheerfully, ‘I’m sorry you couldn’t come to see me in the other ward. The doctors were very strict. It’s much better in here, you can come whenever you like.’

‘I want you to come home,’ Benjy said. ‘Straight now.’

They laughed and the little boy squirmed closer to her, reaching out to touch the marks on her face.

‘Is that a bad hurt?’ he asked and Annie said, ‘Not very bad. Benjy, I’ll come home just as soon as I can. I promise I will.’

Over the boys’ heads she looked at Martin.

‘You look much better,’ he said.

‘I know.’

Annie wanted to share the glistening happiness she had felt. She wondered for a moment how to express it, and then gave up the attempt to make it sound rational. She let the words come spilling out. ‘When they brought me downstairs this morning it was like waking up after a long, disturbed night. Or like recovering my sight after being blind. I could see everything so clearly, colours and shapes and people’s faces.’

Steve’s face, she remembered.

‘I felt so happy. As though there were no flaws, no ugliness or misery anywhere. Just for a minute. I’ll never forget.’

She thought that Martin didn’t understand what she was saying. He was listening, but not responding, and so she couldn’t share the miraculous delight with him. If joy in the simple rhythm of the ordinary world didn’t touch him, then it must be her words that were inadequate. Regret and guilt touched her briefly with their light fingers.

‘Do you see?’ she asked humbly.

‘It’s natural relief,’ Martin answered. ‘After what’s happened. Don’t take it too fast, Annie, will you? Don’t expect too much of yourself too quickly.’

So cautious. Not to seize on the happiness? Annie thought. Why not?

‘I won’t ever forget,’ she murmured, almost to herself. Then she made her attention direct itself outwards, beyond her own selfish concerns.

‘How is it at home?’ she asked. She felt the house, too, so clearly.

‘Oh,’ Martin shrugged with a touch of weariness, ‘we’re managing. Aren’t we, Tom?’

He told her that his mother was helping wherever she could, and Audrey was coming in every day. But Annie knew that the responsibility for the boys’ daily life, always hers in the past, would weigh heavily on Martin. He had less patience, and in two days’ time he would have to go back to work after the Christmas break.

‘McDonald’s every day?’ she asked Tom, and he grinned at her.

‘Just about.’

Benjy was lying quietly with his head against her good shoulder, his thumb in his mouth. Annie was still thinking about the house. It was so much part of her, she realized, that it was like an extension of her body. She could see the tiles in the kitchen, two or three of them cracked, the patches on the walls, the ironing basket overflowing next to the washing machine.

‘Can we get someone in? A temporary mother’s help?’

‘Very expensive,’ Martin said stubbornly. ‘Don’t worry. We’ll muddle through.’

Annie felt the ties of responsibility beginning to pull at her. She felt both guilty and relieved that she couldn’t respond to them yet. The hospital felt, momentarily, like a haven of peace and she remembered the brilliance of light that had illuminated it. It was a sanctuary from the demands that had followed her since the boys were babies. She loved them, all of them, but she couldn’t respond to their needs. Not yet.

‘What about my Mum?’ she asked. ‘How is she?’

‘Um. About the same. She wants to come in and see you. Are you up to it?’

Annie picked at a thread in the bed sheet.

‘Tell her to come. Whenever she can.’

They talked, the four of them, for a few more minutes. The boys told her about Christmas, shouting one another down as they listed their presents.

‘How marvellous,’ Annie said. ‘I wish I’d been there.’

Family. Gathered around her, needing her to pick up the threads again. It was hard to be all things, she thought, even some of the time.

Her head and back ached overwhelmingly now.

Martin stood up at last. Reluctantly she let the boys scramble away from the warmth of her hug.

‘Come back soon. Tomorrow?’

Martin kissed her, and she put her hand up to touch his cheek. ‘Thank you for being here.’

‘Where else could I be?’ he whispered.

They held hands for a long minute. Then, remembering something, Martin reached for a bag he had put down at the foot of the bed.

‘I brought you these. Essentials of life.’

Annie peered into the plastic carrier. There was a jar of Marmite and another of anchovy paste, both of which she loved. There was a big box of Bendick’s Bittermints. They always gave one another the dark, bitter mints as a consolation or a gesture of reconciliation. There was the latest copy of her gardening magazine, and the plant encyclopaedia that Annie often sat poring over on winter evenings. Every winter she drew up lists of the plants she would stock her garden with; every spring she failed to put her elaborate plans into force.

The little things were an expression of how well they knew one another, of how their lives had woven a pattern together.

What else? Annie wondered. The question pricked her, disturbing.

‘I love you,’ she said deliberately.

‘I know. Me too.’ He was gathering up the boys’ anoraks, helping Benjy into his. ‘Come on, you kids.’

‘See you tomorrow. See you tomorrow,’ they called to her. Annie waved to them. Martin took Benjy’s hand and with Tom scuffling beside them they went out in the tide of departing visitors.

Annie lay stiffly against her pillows.

She was wondering why she hadn’t mentioned Steve. She should have told Martin that they had met and talked.

But then, answering herself, she thought, No. That was separate. The thing had happened to them together, and it didn’t touch on her family. It was important that it didn’t because of the fear, and also because of the other things that she had felt with Steve today.

When it was over, when the dreams had stopped and she was well again, he would be a stranger again too.