Читать книгу Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection: Strangers, Bad Girls Good Women, A Woman of Our Times, All My Sins Remembered - Rosie Thomas - Страница 13

Annie stood at the window of the day room. Three floors below her was a narrow side street lined with parked cars. On the corner was a sandwich bar, and she could see office workers from the surrounding buildings going in and out. They looked a very long way off, as if she were watching them in a film about another place.

The dislocation of time increased her sense of separation from the outside world. She knew that it was lunchtime for all the people passing to and fro in the street, but in the hospital wards their meal had been served and cleared away an hour and a half ago. The tea trolley with its rows of clinking white cups and saucers and big enamel teapot had just circulated. Annie didn’t want tea, but she had taken a cup anyway and carried it into the day room. The nurses encouraged her to walk around now. She moved very slowly, slightly hunched, but every painful step gave her pleasure too. A chain of them linked her to the happiness that she had felt on the day when they brought her down from the intensive care ward, and she knew that she would survive.

Annie put her cup down on the window-sill and looked around the room. There were plastic-covered armchairs and a pair of sofas, low metal-framed tables piled with magazines, and the cream-painted walls were haphazardly hung with institutional posters and prints. The curtains and the carpet and the air itself smelt of cigarette smoke. At the opposite end of the room from Annie’s window two old men were smoking determinedly and staring at the screen of the big television. Annie guessed that they were waiting for the day’s racing coverage to begin. A woman in a flowered housecoat was reading a magazine, and another in the chair beside her was knitting ferociously, a long knotted pink coil.

Yesterday, and the day before, Annie and Steve had met in here.

They hadn’t said anything yesterday, when they stood up to walk back to their wards, about meeting for the third time. They had looked at one another instead, and they had smiled, understanding each other perfectly, at the thought of making a date in such a place.

But before she had left her ward today Annie had looked in the mirror. She had looked at the hollows in her pale face, and she had even thought of lipstick. Then she had imagined how the colour would make a too-vivid gash in the whiteness. She had simply brushed her hair out so that it waved loosely and hid her cheeks, deciding that she must find a pair of scissors to trim the jagged ends.

She was standing with her hand on the window-sill, looking out into the street again, when Steve hobbled in. He saw her against the light, and the brightness of it shining through her cloud of hair gave it a reddish glow.

She turned towards him at once.

‘Did you get your five bob on, Steve, like I told you?’

It was one of the old men in front of the television, calling out to him.

Steve stopped, thinking, She was waiting for me.

‘Merrythought,’ the old man prompted. ‘Two-fifteen, Kempton.’

Steve shook his head. ‘No, Frank, I’m afraid I didn’t.’

The newsvendor clicked his tongue. ‘You’ll be sorry, son. It’s a cert.’ He swivelled back to face the screen.

Annie and Steve looked at each other and felt the laughter rising again. They had laughed yesterday too, like school-children, at almost nothing.

Trying to keep a straight face Annie asked, ‘How’s the leg today?’

‘Itching. Right down inside the plaster.’

The woman with the knitting peered up at him, then held out one of her steel needles. ‘Here. Poke this down inside and have a good scratch with it.’

Steve looked gravely at the implement.

‘I’d have to take my pyjamas down to get at the top of the plaster.’

The woman beamed at him. ‘Feel free, my duck.’

Her friend smothered her laughter behind her magazine.

‘The itching is probably safer,’ Steve murmured. He reached Annie’s side and turned a chair with its back to the room. They sat down in their corner, facing each other.

‘This place,’ he sighed.

‘You could afford to get yourself transferred to a smart private clinic,’ Annie reminded him sharply. ‘Peace and privacy. Menu food and real art on the walls.’

She wondered if Steve knew that she was voicing her fear that he might really go. He was sitting with his hands curled loosely over the arms of his chair, his crutches laid neatly at his feet.

‘No, I couldn’t,’ he said. ‘I want to stay here, because this is where you are.’

Annie felt the tightness of joy and panic knotted together under her ribs. It took her breath away, and the blood beat in her throat. She felt the closeness of his hand on the chair arm, and her own lying in her lap. She would have reached out, but panic suddenly overwhelmed her happiness. She lifted her arms and slotted her hands into the opposite sleeves of her robe, hugging them against her chest, shutting him out.

Steve saw the gesture and read its implication. She knew, and regretted it at once. She saw his handsome, haggard face and the grey showing in his dark hair. Steve was more than a man sitting in a hospital day room. He had been her friend and her comforter, her family and her lifeline all through the hours that still came back, renewing their terror, almost every time she slept. The memory and the fear were still potent, and Steve belonged with them, inextricably.

But he meant much more than that, because he was the man he was. Nothing to do with the bombing.

Annie was certain that it would be wrong to add fear of what Steve might demand from her to the pantheon of all the rest.

He was, and would be, her friend.

She slid her hands out of her sleeves again. She couldn’t reach out to him now, and she made an awkward little gesture instead.

‘I am here,’ she said simply. ‘Don’t go to a clinic.’

Over Steve’s shoulder she saw the woman with the knitting look up, curious. And with the intuitive quickness that seemed to link them now whether they wished it or not, Steve intercepted and understood Annie’s glance.

‘When did they unstrap your arm?’ he asked casually, nodding at it.

She took the opening gratefully. The progress of their injuries and illnesses was the common currency of ward conversation. Annie and the other women exchanged their latest details first thing in the morning and last thing at night, after the doctors’ rounds, and in between times when the nurses brought round the drugs trolley and the dressings packs.

‘This morning,’ she told him. ‘When the physio came round. It’s still strapped at the shoulder, but at least I can use the hand and elbow.’ Annie held out her arm, turning it stiffly. The woman looked down at her knitting again, uninterested. She had heard the details already.

‘That’s good news,’ Steve said. ‘They took me down to the physiotherapy room this morning. They had me pulling weights to and fro for hours, to get my arms and shoulders working.’

And he went on, talking blandly about his treatment.

But Annie knew that he wasn’t thinking what he was saying any more than she was listening. He had taken her hand as she held it out. He turned it over in his, looking at each of her fingers and at the shape of her nails. He touched his fingertips to the marks that the needles and tubes had left in her wrist. She felt the light touch as if it had been his mouth against her throat. She knew that he was looking at her, but she couldn’t raise her head to meet his eyes.

‘It’s very clever, they make the muscles work against one another, you know …’ Annie felt afraid to move in case he came closer, or let her hand drop.

Stupid, she thought dimly, don’t you know what you want?

There were half-healed cuts on Steve’s hands too. She could remember the length and shape of his fingers so clearly. Was the tactile memory so much stronger than the visual, then?

‘It’s very important. Otherwise they just fade away from lack of use …’

Annie made herself look up. She met his eyes and saw the question in them, but she couldn’t even have begun to frame an answer. Behind them the two women had left their seats. The younger one with the magazine was holding the door open for the knitter. They went out together, and the door swung to with its gust of medicinal tasting air.

‘They’ve gone,’ Annie said.

The two old men sat with their backs turned, intent on the racing. It occurred to Annie that she was alone with Steve for the first time since the bombing and the blackness. The first time that they had been effectively out of sight and out of earshot of the nurses or the other patients.

Together the two of them seemed infinitely isolated, even within the tiny, cut-off world of the two hospital wards. For a moment Annie could have believed that reality extended no further than the stuffy air enclosed in the day room. She looked down again at their linked hands.

‘It’s very strange,’ she whispered.

‘What’s strange, Annie?’

‘This.’

Her hand moved in his, no more than a faint tensing of the muscles. Steve was wishing that she could have brought herself to say, You and me, or Us, here. He remembered her telling him about Matthew. I chose the easy option. The safe option. That’s what she had said. He looked at her, trying to take the measure of her courage. But Annie had infinite courage. He knew that.

‘I want to ask you such a lot of things,’ Annie said. The words tumbled out in a rush. ‘All sorts of things. Ends, to tie up everything you told me when we were buried. I think about them instead of going to sleep. Cowardly, because I’m afraid of the nightmares.’

‘Ask me,’ Steve said.

Annie smiled. ‘I wanted to ask you if you felt angry,’ she said. ‘About what they did to us. Whoever they are.’

He had been looking at her eyes. The blue was intensified by the dark shadows around them.

‘Angry?’ Steve thought for a moment. ‘No. Sad, for the other people. Not angry for myself. How could I be?’ That movement of her hand in his again. ‘It happened and we were there. That’s all. It’s hard to direct anger into a vacuum. I think what I feel most, now, is happy. I caught that from you, the other day. Do you feel angry, Annie?’

‘No. Not for myself. Sad for the others, like you. I feel angry for the boys’ sake, for Benjy, because he needs me. And for Martin. It was worse for him.’ Annie looked back at Steve. ‘I can’t imagine what I would have felt, or whether I would have been able to bear it. Waiting to know if Martin was alive. Waiting afterwards to find out if they could keep him alive.’

Her blue stare was level now, holding his.

‘I think you would have borne it with great courage,’ Steve said after a long moment. ‘I know how brave you are.’

‘You helped me to be brave down there.’

There was a pendulum swinging between them. It swooped from its high point, down and then up again, stirring the close air with its arcs. The bombing and their hours in the dark had set it swinging, Steve thought. Time would slow it down, and in the end it would stand still. Then they would know. He couldn’t ask her for anything while the pendulum still swung.

They sat facing each other, their hands still linked.

‘Did you think we were going to die?’ Annie asked him.

‘I was afraid, at the end, that they might not come in time.’

‘Yes. I can’t remember the end. Only you talking. You were telling me about your Nan, and when you were a little boy. You all got mixed up together, you and Thomas and Benjy. I could see you running away from me, the three of you, and I was afraid that I would never catch up with you again.’

‘And now you have,’ Steve said softly.

‘Now I have,’ she echoed.

Annie held out her other hand and he took it, folding both of hers between his own. Annie had the sense that she had been afraid of choices, and also that there was no choice now. The hours underground had changed all the neat, straight lines of her life, and the perspectives would never be the same again.

‘If we hadn’t been afraid that we would die,’ Annie said, ‘we wouldn’t have told each other all the things we did.’

‘Do you regret them?’

She looked up at him then. For a moment she saw a stranger’s face, a face as she would have seen it if she had glanced round in the doorway of the store. If nothing had happened then she would have gone on down the stairs.

But then. There had been the wind, and the thunderous noise, and the pain that held her in its fists. They had escaped from that. Relief renewed itself inside her and she felt the weightless brilliance of happiness again. It made her smile and she read the answering smile in Steve’s eyes.

He knew her thoughts. He was as close to her as her family; he was a part of herself. Not a stranger.

‘No,’ she told him. ‘I don’t regret anything.’

His hands moved over hers, warming them. Annie wanted him to reach forward and put his arms around her. He had held her in the dark, and she wanted to feel his touch again. She saw their joined hands, and the blue woollen weave of her dressing gown over her knees. She was clearly conscious of the whole of her body, patched and stitched as it was, and the slow movement of blood inside it. She felt her scars, and the new skin rawly pink at the margins. She was regenerating herself. She was suddenly almost drunk with the giddy pleasure of it, and the glow of it spread through her fingers to Steve’s.

‘Annie,’ he whispered.

They looked at each other still, motionless, silenced by the sudden need that drew them closer.

Another hermetic world, Annie thought wildly. The hospital enclosed them, just as the tangled girders and broken walls and floors had done. Did that make it all right, then?

Her skin prickled. Steve’s face was very close to hers. She looked in his eyes and saw the dark grey irises, flecked with gold.

Annie’s awareness of her body’s workings made her feel naked. The colour flooded into her cheeks and she looked down to hide the heat of it. Steve moved too and their heads bent. For a moment their foreheads touched.

At the opposite end of the room one of the old men levered himself out of his chair. There had been a muted, distantly hysterical racing commentator’s voice in the day room background, but a control button clicked on the television now and there was silence.

Steve raised his head. The circuit broke and Annie thought, No, don’t do that.

But at the same time she felt relief wash through her, cooling her skin.

‘Did your horse come in, Frank?’ Steve called. He squeezed Annie’s hands in his and then let them go. She folded them in her lap, empty.

‘Nah,’ Frank grumbled. ‘The bugger ran like a one-legged ostrich.’

He shuffled across the room towards them, peering at the clock on the window wall.

‘Five to visiting time. They’ll all be pouring in here with their talk, talk. I wish meself that they’d leave me in peace with the racing. Still,’ he winked across at Annie, ‘I wouldn’t miss the sight of Steve’s visitors. You should see ’em.’ His hands outlined explicitly in the air before he stumped off towards his ward.

Annie and Steve were laughing. Their laughter was another link, almost a safety valve.

‘He has me cast,’ Steve explained, ‘as a kind of hybrid between Warren Beatty and Frank Harris. Nothing could be further from the truth, I promise.’

‘Who’s coming to see you today?’

‘Vicky.’

‘Hm.’

Acknowledgement flickered between them, humorous, unexpressed. As if they were partners, Annie thought. It was easy to laugh with Steve. The warmth of it was comfortable.

‘And you?’

‘Martin’s mother, bringing Tom and Benjy.’

Steve reached awkwardly for his crutches. Annie could move more freely so she bent down and retrieved them, holding them upright while he fitted his elbows into the padded cups and then let the metal legs take his weight.

‘Thank you.’ He half turned, then looked back at her. ‘Doesn’t this strike you as absurd? Crutches. Bandages. All the rest of it? A pair of battered bodies …’

‘It will pass,’ Annie interrupted him.

‘Soon, I hope.’

Annie let his challenge lie. Infirmity was a protective shield, and with her old caution she shrank from confronting what lay beyond it.

They moved slowly away towards the opposite doors. Annie imagined the outside world, reaching its long fingers into theirs to draw them apart. The image disturbed her but she still stopped in the doorway.

‘Tomorrow?’ she asked.

Steve nodded gravely. ‘Naturally.’

But then his face split into a smile, a smile that brought the fierce colour into her face again because it was as intimate as if they already lay in one another’s arms. Annie drew her blue robe around her and pushed through the door into the women’s ward.

Martin’s mother and the two little boys came down the length of it towards her.

‘Mummy!’

Somebody’s mother, Annie remembered. Steve had said that about his wife wanting a baby. Just somebody’s mother. The recollection made her angry and she was grateful for it. He was arrogant, and he possessed all the male characteristics that she had turned her back on long ago, when she married Martin. Annie bent down to hug her children, drawing them close to her.

When she stood up again her mother-in-law kissed her and then stood back to look at her, exclaiming, ‘Annie! Darling, you look so much better. You’ve got pink cheeks again.’

‘I am better, Barbara,’ Annie said deliberately. ‘I’m working really hard at it. I want to get home just as soon as I can.’

‘I wish you would come home. Dad won’t let us do anything,’ Thomas complained. ‘Life’s very hard, right now.’

‘Poor boy.’ Annie put her arm round him. ‘Poor Dad, too. When does term start again?’

Thomas stared at her. ‘Monday. You know that.’

‘Of course I do. I’m sorry.’ She had forgotten. The slip of her memory made her aware again of the two worlds, one trying to draw her back and the other enclosing her here.

School terms. The neat pattern of days, the boys needing to be driven to and fro, her own routines of cooking and shopping and attending to them, and the quiet evenings when she sat with Martin opposite her at the table, exchanging the small snippets of news. And here, the high white beds in their curtained boxes, the terrifying fingers of her dreams, the peaks and troughs of pain. And Steve. Annie put her hand up to the corner of her mouth. The cut there had almost healed. Her body renewing itself. She felt the life in it.

‘Mum, are you listening?’

‘Yes, love, of course I am.’

They settled themselves around her bed. Benjy had brought her a series of drawings, and he wanted her to guess what every crayoned shape represented. Thomas wanted her to read a new book with him. She listened carefully to what they had to say, trying to share her attention between them with scrupulous fairness, suggesting and reassuring.

Barbara wanted to talk, too. She was an indefatigable talker, a friendly, outgoing, ordinary woman to whom Annie had never been particularly close. The bond with her own mother was too strong.

Annie struggled to spare some attention and make the right responses to Barbara’s recitals of how Martin was coping, what the neighbours in her street had said and thought, how the boys were behaving for her, the emergency domestic arrangements. She wished that her own mother were well, and that she were here instead of Barbara.

She remembered how she had imagined that she was a girl again, in the dark with Steve. Lying with her head in her mother’s lap, in their cool living room. Annie’s mother had come to see her twice since they had brought her out of the intensive care unit. They had been short visits, no more than ten minutes, and all through them she had held on to her husband’s arm with thin white fingers. She had been cheerful, painfully bright, for Annie’s sake.

Listening to Barbara’s stream of talk, Annie felt the vibration of anxiety for her mother, love and fear mixed together. With the anxiety came a sudden, sharp resentment of the demands that the other world made. The dues of love, she thought bitterly. Payable to parents, husbands, children.

Her selfishness startled and shocked her.

In pointless expiation she praised Barbara fulsomely for everything that she was doing. She bent her head over the books and drawings, trying to give of herself as generously as she could.

The visit only lasted an hour, but Annie was glad when it was over. Her head ached fiercely, and the long scar in her stomach burned. She knew that her goodbyes sounded hasty and irritable, and when the boys had gone she ached with guilt and longing for them.

She pushed the tray of supper aside as soon as they brought it to her, and lay dozing against her pillows until Martin came on his way home from work.

He stretched his long legs out in front of him as he sat in the hospital armchair. ‘You look tired,’ he said.

‘I am a bit. But I felt wonderful this afternoon. A tower of strength.’

‘That’s good. How was your day?’

The eagerness in Martin’s voice reproached her. My husband, she thought. Half of me. Annie sat up straighter against the pillows, watching him. She would tell him that she had talked to Steve. Tell him truthfully, now, while there was nothing to tell.

The words didn’t come.

She tried the beginnings of them in her head, and couldn’t voice any of them. Instead she heard herself saying brightly, ‘They took the strapping off my arm. Look.’ She held it up and Martin took her hand, linking his fingers with hers.

‘That’s wonderful.’

Annie’s guilt bit more sharply. She tried to tell herself that there was no reason for guilt. But she knew that there must be, just because it was there. ‘Barbara came in with the kids, you know that. Ben had a stack of drawings, and Tom wanted to read. Barbara talked without drawing breath once, and the boys needed all my attention. They were here an hour, and it gave me a headache. I feel bad about it now.’

Martin drew his chair closer to the bed so that he could put his arm around her.

‘Poor love,’ he said. ‘You’re bound to feel like this, to begin with. Well enough to cope, and then too tired as soon as you try to. Don’t worry so much. We’re all managing perfectly well at home.’

Annie nodded, resting her head against his shoulder.

‘What else?’ he murmured. ‘Any other news?’

‘No,’ she answered. ‘Not really.’

She closed her eyes. He was so kind, she thought. Kind and good, and she loved him. Perhaps it was an unflamboyant, muted love, but it was infinitely valuable. Don’t risk it, she warned herself, and then could almost have laughed wildly out loud. The idea of risking anything, buried alive under tons of rubble and then shuffling in bandages around a hospital ward, was so absurd. She pushed the thoughts aside.

‘Tell me about your day,’ she begged Martin. ‘All about it. Every detail.’ Her fierceness surprised him and to explain it she said, ‘I feel so closed up in this place. Separate from you and the world and everything that matters.’

‘It won’t be long now,’ he soothed her. ‘I saw the sister on the way. She says you’re doing brilliantly.’

Home, Annie thought, not knowing truly what she felt about the prospect. She would be going home, soon.

‘Tell me,’ she insisted.

He settled his arm more comfortably around her.

‘Well. Let’s think. I went to a meeting this morning with the new hotel people in Bayswater. They want to open the place in time for the summer. There isn’t a chance of that, not with the level of work that they want done …’

Annie listened, with her eyes shut, imagining that they were at home. They would be sitting on the shabby chesterfield in front of the fire. The cat would be asleep on the bentwood rocking chair opposite them. The boys asleep upstairs. Newspapers and magazines stacked up on the lower shelf of the television table. The grandmother clock that stood in the hall ticking comfortably. The curtains would be drawn, shutting out the threats that stalked in the darkness outside. Martin went on talking softly while Annie conjured up the certainty of home.

At last he whispered, ‘Are you asleep?’

She shook her head. ‘No. Just thinking.’

Annie opened her eyes and he leant over to kiss her. He fanned her hair out with his fingers and turned her face so that their mouths met.

‘Hurry up and get better. I want you back home. I need you so much, Annie. I love you.’

Love. Need. The dues to be paid.

Annie nodded, unable to say anything.

When Martin had gone she lay still, looking at the flowers on her locker and at the faded, flat shapes on the curtain behind. The fresh ones were so vivid. She could feel the sappy strength of the stems between her fingers, and the green, pollen-rich scent held amongst the tight petals was stronger than the reek of the hospital. It was only by contrast that the curtain flowers seemed drab. The colours and shapes would have been satisfying enough, if they had been allowed to stand alone.

Annie looked away from them, turning her back on the flowers and the unwelcome analogy that they forced upon her.

She made the decision, as she lay there, that she wouldn’t go to the day room tomorrow. There would be no need, then, to shoulder any guilt. She would stay in the ward all day, and so she needn’t see Steve at all. She could stop what was happening, stop what she was afraid of now, simply by not seeing him at all.

Martin walked out of the main doors of the hospital. The cold wind funnelling between the high buildings seemed sharper still after the airless ward, and he ducked his head and moved briskly. His car was parked in a side street nearby, but when he reached it he made no move to drive away. His attempt at briskness had petered out, and he sat instead staring through the windscreen into the darkness, his hands loosely gripping the wheel.

Annie was getting better. Every day he could see the changes, and he looked carefully for the latest proof that she was stronger. Yet the new strength didn’t bring her back again. He had believed it would, while he sat holding her hand among the possessive machines, and now he saw that the expectation had been too simple. The bomb had done more than tear Annie’s body. It had blown a crater between the two of them, and Martin knew that he couldn’t fling himself across it.

Annie had suffered the pain and the fear, and he had not. However much he willed himself to allow and understand, he did not and he accepted that he could not.

The man did. Steve did, because he had shared it with her. It was absurd, Martin thought with sudden bitterness, to envy him for that.

Martin’s hands slipped off the wheel and hung at his sides. The fingers opened and clenched, as if he wanted to reach for something, but it eluded his grasp. He was thinking of the way that Annie had slipped away from him. She was there, the shape of her filling out every day, but she had gone away somewhere.

Just for a few seconds, Martin let his head drop forward and rest against the wheel. His own concerns were with the mundane double load of business, and of keeping himself and the boys fed and clean. How could he guess from that vantage point what Annie’s concerns were, who had nearly died? And who had shared that almost-death with him?

With Steve, Martin made himself repeat.

He jerked his head up and groped for his car keys. He drove home again, too fast, trying to deny the current of his thoughts.

Annie was dreaming.

The darkness had absorbed her again and it stretched all round her, limitless. It wasn’t empty darkness. Rather it was tangible, heavy and threatening, and sharp with broken edges that pressed against her. The darkness was utterly silent, but at the same time it held the threat of a terrible cataclysmic noise that might erupt at any instant. The noise would bring the weight, crashing downwards, to extinguish her. She wanted to move, to raise herself on to all fours and then to crawl, to stagger upright and then to run, lurching away, in all her terror. But there was no possibility of movement, no hope of escape. The silence was absolute. There was only Annie herself, trapped in her weakness. No one would rescue her, because no one else existed. No one could comfort her, and when the noise came at last she would be utterly alone. She felt the icy cold in her chest, deep in her heart, and the stick-like fragility of her outstretched arms and legs.

And then she heard the noise begin.

It was a low rumble, a long way off, beneath her and over her head, terrible and implacable and final.

Annie woke up with her scream frozen in her throat. It was always the same dream, and she always woke at the same instant.

She lay with her knees drawn up and her fists clenched, shivering in the grip of terror, waiting for it to relax as she had learned that it would. Her back and her shoulders were clammy with sweat.

Steve.

The thought of him filled her mind. She longed for him to be with her, with a desperate, almost unbearable longing. She wanted him to lie down beside her and put his hands over her eyes. She wanted him to put his mouth to her ear and whisper, as he had done in the darkness that now seemed less fearsome than the darkness of her nightmare. Steve saw and understood, and it was unthinkable that he should not be with her now.

Annie sat up in bed. Her nightdress clung icily to her skin, and she pushed the damp weight of her hair back from her face.

She stared across the ward to the day room door. Beyond it was the day room itself, in darkness, with the television’s eye briefly extinguished. And beyond that, in the ward that mirrored this room, Steve would be lying asleep.

She saw his face, every line of it clear. She felt his hands holding hers, and the touch of his forehead making a circuit that she had wanted never to break. She thought of how he had kissed her cheek, that first afternoon, and today he had smiled at her like a lover.

She fought against the longing.

She let her head fall forward against her drawn-up knees, hugging herself, almost welcoming the stab of pain from the wound in her stomach. They couldn’t possess one another now. That they had done so already, tenderly and brutally in the darkness through the touch of their hands, that was only the cruelty of the trick that circumstance had played on them.

A trick, an irony. Life’s little irony, in the face of death.

Annie raised her head again. The sweat on her cheeks had dried and they shone with tears now. She stared down the ward as if she could see through the walls and doors that separated her from Steve.

‘Damn you,’ she whispered helplessly. ‘Damn you.’

A student nurse checking the ward had seen that Annie was awake. She came and stood beside Annie’s bed in her pink dress.

‘Are you all right?’

‘Yes,’ Annie said. ‘I had a dream. Just a bad dream.’

The girl moved to straighten her pillows and the crumpled bedclothes.

‘Shall I bring you a drink? Some hot milk, and something to help you sleep?’

They had taken the flowers away for the night. The chintz flowers of the curtains looked like nursery hangings, reassuring in the dimmed light.

‘Yes,’ Annie said. ‘Thank you. Something to make me sleep.’

She slept at last, and it seemed that almost at once they came to wake her up again. The ward routine was already numbingly familiar. A group of doctors came and examined her, and then mumbled amongst themselves at the foot of her bed.

Annie was used to that now.

Their senior beamed at her, once the consultation was finished.

‘You’re doing very well, you know. Your kidney function is normal, and everything else is healing nicely.’

‘I want to do well,’ Annie told him, irresistibly reminded of school interviews with her headmistress. ‘I want to go home.’

‘Oh, I’m making no promises about that. Two or three weeks more with us, and then we’ll see, mmm?’

Annie nodded patiently. Her recovery, going home again to Martin and the children, that was in her power now. That was what she would focus on. She stretched out under the bedclothes, feeling the pull in the tendons as she moved her feet, and the ache in her shoulder.

The hours of the morning crept by. The lunch trays were brought round and then cleared away again, the tea trolley clinked up and down, and the ward settled into its early-afternoon somnolence. Annie lay against her pillows, watching the woman in the bed opposite with her knitting, trying to doze. Unable to sleep, she settled the radio headphones over her head and listened for ten minutes to an incomprehensible play. Another ten minutes passed, then twenty, and Annie found that she was staring at the day room door. Then, without being aware of having made any decision, she found herself pushing back the bedclothes. She put on her blue dressing gown, tied it carefully, and walked across to the door.

Steve was sitting in the day room. He had been watching the sky through the tall windows. It was a windy day, and towers of grey cloud swept behind the roofs and chimneys of the buildings opposite. There were half a dozen other people in the room, their voices competing with the sound of the television.

Annie stood beside his chair and he looked up at her.

How stupid, she thought, to try to deny him. She wanted to put her hand on his shoulder but she stopped herself.

‘I thought you weren’t coming,’ Steve said.

‘I wasn’t going to.’

He nodded, and she wondered if he did understand why. A chair had been drawn up close to his, ready for her, and she moved it back a little way before she sat down. Steve studied her face. The colour and light that he had seen in it yesterday had faded. It looked closed up now, as if the Annie he knew had retreated somewhere.

‘But you did come?’

She bent her head and her hair fell forward. Steve saw the line of her scalp at the parting, and the childish vulnerability touched him.

‘It seemed … mulish, not to.’ Then she looked up again, her eyes meeting his directly. ‘Steve. If I seemed to make you a … promise, of some kind, yesterday, I’m going to tell you now that I can’t keep it.’

He saw the resolution in her face. Annie would be resolute. The certainty of that increased his regard for her.

‘It wasn’t a promise. I thought it was an acknowledgement.’

She moved her hands, quickly, to silence him.

‘It seemed to me that we were going beyond what we could naturally be. Friends.’

Steve smiled crookedly. ‘Is there any definition of natural, in our circumstances?’

In the quiet that followed Annie felt the quicksands shifting around them. She thought of the ground that they had already covered together and the ways ahead, unmarked. There was only one path she could allow herself to take, and that led her away from Steve. Her face changed, showing her uncertainty.

‘Or any definition of friends?’ he persisted.

‘Oh, yes,’ Annie said. ‘I can define friends. Friends are less than we were, yesterday.’ She pressed on, talking rapidly, before he could interrupt her. ‘The doctor told me this morning that I’m getting better very quickly. I shall be able to go home in two weeks, perhaps. When I do go, it will be back to Martin, and our children. I love my husband.’ She lifted her chin as she spoke to emphasize the words. ‘I don’t want to deceive him, or hurt him. When I go home, I want to make everything the same as it was before.’

‘Annie. It can’t ever be the same.’

Steve was sure that her words were a denial of what she felt. He looked at her thin, pale face, trying to read her thoughts, but she had closed it up to him. She looked very small, hunched up in her chair, her physical frailty seeming at odds with the importance that she held for him.

He wanted to reach out for her. He wanted to make her say what she was denying to herself, and in his turn to tell her how much he needed her. Steve remembered, too vividly, the blankness of his life that had confronted him in the darkness. Listening to Annie, and talking to her, had given him his own reason to hold on. Now, hardly believably, they were here together. Steve’s eyes left Annie’s face and he looked around the ugly room. The other patients seemed fixed in their chairs, resigned and hopeless. He felt the luck, by contrast, of simply being alive. It was sad that these motionless people with their pinched faces couldn’t share the exultation. He knew that Annie felt it, and he experienced a shock of anger with her for her refusal, now, to admit the chance of happiness.

But then, to admit their own chance of happiness was to deny her family’s. His anger disappeared as quickly as it had come. Annie was unselfish, that was all. Steve’s crooked smile lifted again. He had been selfish all his life, and it would be ironic, now, if by being different he was to lose her.

The air in the day room was stale, and the windows were firmly closed. Beyond the glass the grey masses of clouds whipped past, the noise of the wind only emphasizing the stifling stillness inside the hospital.

Whatever came, Steve thought, he wanted Annie to know how much he cared about her. That much selfishness, at least, he would allow himself. He listened to the voices of the television and a woman three chairs away, complaining about her treatment. The wind battered at the hospital windows, and Steve sat silently in his place. He wanted to stumble forward to reach Annie, taking hold of her and drawing her back to him. His hands tightened on the arms of his chair, stopping himself. He could only have done that if they had been alone, if they had been fit, if everything else had been different. Nor could he find the words, here in the day room, that didn’t sound over-used, shop-worn. For all his adult life, Steve had known what to say to women. He had told them what they had wanted to hear and they had accepted it. He had asked for what he had wanted, and it had been given to him.

Steve wondered, now, whether he had been disliked as much as he had deserved. Perhaps. Or perhaps the long procession of girls had used him, too. He thought of Cass and her half-puzzled, half-defiant air. Cass hadn’t used him. Steve tasted the sourness of dislike for himself, thick on his tongue.

And now, confronted with Annie, he didn’t know what to say. He was afraid that everything he could try would sound like a gambit. All the words had a coarse, locker-room echo.

He looked at her, sitting withdrawn from him in her blue dressing gown. A fair-haired woman with blue eyes that changed colour with the light. Not young any more, without Cass’s loveliness or Vicky’s direct female charge. But Annie possessed a kind of beauty that Steve had never seen before. At the thought of losing her, of letting her walk away from him, anger and longing and jealousy boiled up inside him. He shifted in his chair, feeling his physical weakness and his incapacity to reach her.

I love you.

No, not even the simplicity of that would do. The words were too fragile to say aloud in this listening room with its teacups and ashtrays and dog-eared magazines.

‘Annie.’

He was reduced to repeating her name, as he had done to keep her conscious in the darkness. He had said the other words to her then, at the end, but she hadn’t heard them. They had been lifting her up and away from him, bumping her in the tight harness, up into the circle of lights rimming their hole.

‘Annie. It can’t ever be the same,’ he said again. ‘You can’t make what has happened un-happen.’

‘I know that.’ Her voice was too clear, as if she were trying to keep it steady. ‘We’re here together, in this room, because of a circumstance, a trick of fate. I mean that we can stop that circumstance from rolling on and changing everything that comes after it.’

She wouldn’t look at him now because she didn’t trust herself, but she sensed that he was leaning forward, straining to catch the nuance of what she said.

‘If you and I had met anywhere else, at a party, say, there would have been nothing to draw us together. We’d have passed on by, just like we would have done in that doorway if the bomb hadn’t exploded. It did explode, and we were lucky because we lived and other people didn’t. But it was a circumstance, still. We can’t let it be anything more than that.’

Annie knew that he was still looking at her. She felt the intensity of his stare. She could even feel, through her own hands, his grip on the arm of his chair.

‘It is more, my love.’

‘I’m not your love,’ she whispered. ‘I can’t be.’

Annie’s head fell forward and she covered her face with her hands. Her hair swung with it, showing the tips of her ears. Steve wanted to lean forward and kiss them, and then to push the hair back and kiss her cheek and her throat, and the palms of her hands where they had covered her eyes.

He made himself look away, then. The television was still blaring, incredibly, and old Frankie and his friend were set squarely in front of it. Mitchie was reading a newspaper, and Sylvia with the knitting was interminably talking. No one was looking at them, but Steve resented their intrusion with unreasonable intensity.

Annie didn’t look up. She pushed her hair back and sat still, looking at the floor.

‘So what shall we do?’ Steve asked.

She shrugged, suddenly weary.

‘Nothing. Get better and go home, I imagine.’

‘Look at me, Annie.’

She raised her head. She knew that he expected more of her. He expected courage in place of the rooted loyalty to Martin that was all she had to offer.

‘Is that really what you mean? What you want?’

His face could look very cold, Annie thought. She nodded, her neck as stiff as a column, seeing his disappointment in her clearly in his face. But to have said it was a relief. She felt the weight of anxiety lift a little, although something else, chillier and more final, slipped to take its place. Regret, Annie thought. She could almost have smiled at the inevitability.

‘And in the meantime?’ Steve asked quietly.

‘We can go on seeing each other in here, and talking.’ She faltered then, seeing the fallacy. ‘As friends. Why not? We are friends, aren’t we?’

His hand shot out and took her wrist, holding it too tightly.

‘What shall we talk about, as friends? The racing?’ He nodded towards the television. ‘Sylvia’s knitting? Nothing too close to home, I imagine. In case it leads us on to dangerous ground.’

Annie heard the bitterness in his voice. He doesn’t like to be denied, she thought. He isn’t used to it. But even as the thought occurred to her, she knew that she was doing him an injustice. She felt the bitterness of loss as strongly as Steve did. She looked past him at the room and knew the artificiality of being confined in it. To get home, that was the important thing. Perhaps then the dreams would stop. Perhaps, in the ordinary world, the potent mixture of happiness and regret that Steve stirred in her would fade away too. It was the unreality of hospital, Annie told herself. Isolation magnified feelings that she would have dismissed outside.

She made her voice light as she answered, ‘We can talk about anything. We already have, haven’t we?’

As she spoke, she knew that she was a coward. Was it the old dues, she wondered, that she was dutifully playing? Or did she use them as an excuse for not meeting a greater challenge?

Annie thought briefly of Matthew.

Matthew had gone. Steve knew that. She had the sense of choices again, multiplying, and a great windy space all around her from which all the familiar landmarks had been lifted up and tumbled away. And then regret, sharpening, because after all she lacked the courage to enter the space herself. Steve let go of her wrist. His hands settled on the chair-arms again. Annie was close enough to him to feel the tension from inactivity that vibrated in him.

But he simply said, ‘Thank you for saying what you feel,’ and smiled at her.

No, Annie thought. What I ought to feel. Regret, again.

‘Look.’ Steve nodded towards the television. ‘The afternoon movie is Double Indemnity.’

‘I’ve never seen it. Martin will know everything about it. Who the second cameraman was, who built the sets. He’s the film buff, not me.’

‘You should see it. Shall I move our chairs?’

The oddness of their knowledge of one another struck her all over again. They had never shared a meal, or seen a film or a play together, never even properly seen one another in day clothes. None of that mattered, she understood that now. Perhaps, in her life with Martin, she had set too much store by it. What had mattered to them, to Annie and Steve, was the recognition and understanding that had come and grown in the darkness.

Annie stared at the grey images on the television screen.

Was it enough, then, to fall in love by?

She knew the answer without asking herself. It was enough.

They stood up, helping one another to their feet, and positioned their chairs side by side, behind Frank and the others.

Annie wanted to turn to Steve, to say, Wait. He stood until she was sitting comfortably and then lowered himself awkwardly into his chair. He was close enough for her to feel his elbow touching hers.

After a moment, he turned to look at her. The bitterness seemed to have evaporated and he smiled again.

‘We can watch television together. Just like real life. That’s safe enough, isn’t it?’

‘I don’t know,’ Annie said softly. And she thought, He sees quite clearly, the difference between what I say and what I feel.

She made herself sit perfectly still and they pretended to watch the film together, counterfeiting the ordinariness of real life.

Afterwards, when it was over, they stood up again and went in their opposite directions, back to the wards.

The day of Double Indemnity set a pattern.

Annie’s body healed rapidly. The doctors and nurses began to call her Wonderwoman, joking elaborately about the rapidity of her progress. Every day she felt a little stronger. The walk down the ward became routine instead of a challenge. She walked down to the physiotherapy department, and upstairs to pay a visit to Brendan. He pursed his lips when he saw her, and walked in a circle around her before whistling his admiration.

‘Not bad at all. I wouldn’t like to have had a bet on it, you know. I was anxious, back there, just for a day or two.’

Annie laughed at him. ‘You should have had a bet. I’m pretty tough.’

‘Is that so? Tell me now, how’s that handsome friend of yours?’

‘Steve’s doing okay. He’s impatient, that’s all.’

Brendan sighed. ‘Some people have all the luck, love, don’t you? Take me, then. If I’d been buried alive, it would have been with some little old lady. Not your hero.’

‘I didn’t plan it that way,’ Annie protested.

‘Luck, I said.’

Annie rested, and slept as much as she could, welcoming unconsciousness except for the fearful dreams that still came. She dutifully ate all the food that was presented to her, and her face lost the sharp angles of sickness. She submitted to tests and exercises and the routines that were imposed on her, and she was rewarded with returning strength. Her family and friends came to visit her, and every evening Martin sat beside her bed and told her the day’s news. She tried hard to feel the intimacy of home in the hour of evening visiting, with the over-familiar flowered curtains enclosing them.

She felt closest to Steve, aware of him near to her when they didn’t meet, keeping her manner deliberately neutral when they did. It was hard, and she knew that they both felt the falsity of it.

When they met in the day room they talked about the books they were reading, the progress they had made, the day’s newspapers, but the artificial distance that Annie had imposed made no difference. Sometimes she thought that the casual talk did no more than emphasize another, silent dialogue.

One morning Annie was sitting reading in the chair beside her bed. At the ward sister’s suggestion Martin had brought some of Annie’s clothes in for her, and she had dressed herself in a skirt and jumper. The clothes felt thick and strange, and dowdy with her feet in slippers.

It wasn’t visiting time, and Annie was startled to look up and see her mother making her way slowly towards her bed. She relied on a stick now, and her knuckles stood out sharp and knobby as she grasped it. Annie stood up and went to her mother, putting her arm around her shoulders.

Anxiety made her demand, ‘What is it? Is something wrong?’

‘Nothing at all,’ she answered. ‘Your father dropped me off on his way somewhere. The ward sister kindly let me in. Here I am.’

Her mother was proud of herself, Annie saw. The little solo journey from the hospital doors to the ward was a triumph. The mother and daughter smiled at each other, and a little hopeful flame flickered between them. Perhaps, after all, she was getting better. Annie hugged her.

‘Thank you for coming. Sit down in this chair, Tibby.’

Annie’s mother’s real name was Alicia, but from childhood she had been called Tibby. Thomas and Benjy used the name now.

‘It sounds better than Granny. Sort of furry,’ Thomas said.

‘Like a cat, of course,’ Tibby had agreed. She was close to the two little boys, and it was an added sorrow for her that they tired her too much now to spend more than a few minutes with them. Before her illness Tibby had taken them on day-long expeditions, planning them in advance with Thomas and packing careful provisions in their picnic boxes.

‘It was clever of you to get them to let you in,’ Annie said. ‘They’re quite strict about it.’

Tibby was tired, and she sat down gratefully. ‘Couldn’t really turn me away, could they? Once I’d landed myself, stick and all. I wanted to see you. They’re asking me to go into some place, for a rest, that’s what they call it.’

The flame of hope went out, at once, and Annie saw the darkness. She felt cold, and pointlessly angry.

‘When? Why didn’t either of you say anything?’

‘Nothing to tell, darling. Jim agreed with me. Just a rest.’

‘Of course,’ Annie said numbly. ‘It will do you good.’

Of course. Tibby was sixty-five, but she looked older. Her hair was thin, and her arms and legs seemed fragile enough to snap under her tiny weight. Annie wondered, How long? Her mother’s pleasure in having reached the ward by herself stood out in a different, colder light.

Tibby was leaning back in the chair, looking at her daughter.

‘I’m glad to see you in your clothes. What about your hair?’

She was striving for the painful brightness that she had adopted for her other visits. Annie had weakly accepted it then, but she was well enough now to look beyond Tibby’s determined smile. She felt almost too heavy-hearted to answer, but at last she said, ‘I’ll have it cut when I get home. It won’t be long now, they’ve promised me.’ She was thinking that she would be going home almost well again, her own strength confirmed in her. But Tibby wasn’t going to get better. Annie remembered that she and Steve had talked about it as they held hands and looked up into the blackness. She had wondered if her mother felt the same anger, confronted by death, the same sense of regret for everything left undone. No, Steve had said. Your mother has seen you grow up. Seen her grandchildren.

She sat down beside Tibby and took her thin hand between hers. Annie was filled with a longing to be close to her, and to make the most of the time that was left to them.

‘Tibby, what do they say? The doctors. Tell me honestly.’

‘That you’re doing fine.’ Tibby’s smile was transparent.

‘You know that I didn’t mean me. What is this rest? How long is it for?’

Suddenly Annie heard in her own voice the same demanding, indignant note that was familiar from Thomas and Benjy. You’re my mother. You can’t leave me. I need you, and you belong here, with me.

More dues, Annie thought.

Tibby shrugged and said gently, ‘Well, darling. You know this disease. It doesn’t go away. They can’t predict what course it will take. They do what they can, and they tell me what they do know, because I ask them to. One doesn’t want to be deceived about the last thing of all, does one? A rest will help, they say. And it makes a break for your father, too.’

‘I should be helping,’ Annie said dismally.

Tibby surprised her with her laughter. ‘What could you do?’

‘Help Pop out in the house, or something.’

‘Darling, are you offering to come and clear up in my house?’

Annie laughed then too. In her mind’s eye she saw the polished, formal neatness of her mother’s rooms in contrast with the rag-bag of family possessions that filled her own. Annie’s indifference to domestic order hadn’t always been a joke between them.

‘I’m sure the house looks immaculate.’

Tibby nodded, her smile fading a little. ‘It does. And will, as long as I have anything to do with it.’

Annie wondered, without speaking, how long that would be. She couldn’t imagine even now how Tibby could polish the parquet tiles and scour the big old sinks. She had thought with Steve how sad it was that her mother’s life had been dedicated to a house. How happy had she been? Her hand tightened on Tibby’s.

‘I was thinking about you, and the house, while we … while I was waiting for them to come and dig us out. I could remember it all as clearly as if I was really there. I thought I was a girl again, wearing a green cotton dress with a white collar, and white ribbons in my hair.’

‘I remember that dress,’ Tibby said. ‘I remember the day we bought it for you.’ She leaned forward, closer to Annie, and her fingers clutched more tightly. ‘It was very hot, the middle of a long, hot summer. You were six or seven, and you had gone to play for the day with Janet. Do you remember Janet? You were inseparable, and then the family moved away and you cried for a whole week, insisting that you would never have another best friend in all your life.’

‘I don’t remember her at all,’ Annie said.

‘Your father and I went shopping, and we bought you the green dress. When we came to pick you up you and Janet were playing in the garden, pouring water over each other with a watering can.’

‘Go on,’ Annie prompted her, and Tibby smiled. She began to talk. Some recollections made her laugh, and she sighed at others. She told stories about Annie’s childhood and babyhood that Annie had never heard before. She remembered the day that her daughter was born.

Annie listened, watching her mother’s face. She felt Tibby’s need to recollect and to make the patterned strands tidy, as she had remembered herself, with Steve. As she listened the layers shifted over one another to give altered perspectives. Her own memories, rubbed painfully brighter while she lay beside Steve, her mother’s additions to them, stretching back beyond the reach of Annie’s own recollection.

‘You were a funny, good little girl, always,’ Tibby said at last. ‘Isn’t memory a strange thing? I can remember you at eight, nearly thirty years ago, better than I can remember Thomas from last week. And I can’t remember at all whether I paid the milkman last Saturday, or the name of the girl in the book I’ve just read.’

‘I know,’ Annie smiled, seeing the truth in the truism. ‘Tibby, I wish we could talk more.’ She had meant like this, while we still can, but her mother made a little startled gesture and peered at her watch.

‘Oh, my dear, I said I would meet Jim downstairs a quarter of an hour ago. He didn’t think the sister would let us both in. You know what he’ll be like.’

Impatient, Annie knew.

‘I’ll walk down with you.’

‘Can you manage that?’

‘Of course I can.’ I’m stronger, Annie thought sadly. Much stronger than you are.

They stood up, Annie much taller than her mother. Tibby seemed to be shrinking into herself. With her hands on Annie’s arms she said, suddenly, ‘I can manage everything else. Other people do, after all, with reasonable dignity. But I don’t think I could have borne it if you had died. Not now, Annie, after all.’

Her face creased, vulnerable, with the beginning of tears.

Your mother has seen you grow up. Seen her grandchildren.

‘Tibby.’ Annie wrapped her arms around her. She rested her cheek against her mother’s head. ‘I didn’t die,’ she whispered. ‘I didn’t want to die.’

For a long moment, they held on to each other.

Then Tibby sniffed hard.

‘I came to cheer you up,’ she said, her voice wobbly.

Annie let her go, briskly gathering up her mother’s coat and bag. ‘That’s Barbara’s chosen role. I should leave it to her.’ She felt that her mother’s bright, tight smile had transferred itself to her own face, but Tibby responded hearteningly. Their faint disparagement of Martin’s mother had always been a little, contained joke between the two of them.

‘Poor Barbara …’ Tibby protested.

‘… She does mean well,’ Annie completed automatically. ‘Come on. Let’s start shuffling downstairs, or Pop will stamp off without you.’

Arm in arm, they set off for the ward doors.

Annie saw Tibby safely into her father’s care. He was waiting amongst the WRVS drivers in the main hall, looking at his watch every few seconds. He kissed Annie and then he and Tibby began to fuss each other about the time, adopting with clockwork precision the roles that they had fallen into decades ago. Tibby was always very slightly late, and Jim chivvied and agitated to bring her up to schedule. Annie felt the irritation that she always felt, and she recognized that that was her own role. She reassured her father that they had plenty of time, suspecting that they had nothing pressing to do for the rest of the day, and equally aware that her father would insist on a strict timetable for a week in bed.

Perhaps, she thought, Tibby’s rest was a rest from her husband’s precision. They said goodbye, and from a curve in the stairs Annie watched them wander away together. They would still be arguing about the time. She could see Tibby’s head pecking to and fro as she defended herself. The patterns of a lifetime, set long ago. She found herself wondering again whether her parents had really been happy at all, caught up in their own pattern.

And Martin and me? How different now? How different in twenty years?

Annie walked slowly because her legs were heavy. It took her a long time to reach her bed in the ward again.

It was two days later when they told her that she could go home on Friday. That was three days away.

‘You’ll have to come back to out-patients for tests. We don’t want you to escape that easily,’ her surgeon told her jovially. ‘We want to keep a close eye on those kidneys of yours, and there will be blood tests and so forth. But I think that by the weekend you will be well enough to be at home with your family.’

‘Thank you,’ Annie said.

She went to telephone Martin immediately.

‘That’s wonderful news,’ Martin said.

‘It is, isn’t it?’

In her own ears, her voice sounded thin.

They talked for a few minutes more. Martin was making euphoric promises and plans. ‘We’ll all take care of you. All you have to do is rest. Audrey and Barbara will manage the boys between them, and I’m going to take some time off. Annie?’

‘I’m here.’

‘Then when you’re stronger we can have a break together, just the two of us. Barbara says she’ll have the boys to stay. We could go to Paris. Or Venice. What about Venice?’

‘Yes,’ Annie said. ‘We could do that.’

She was looking down at the red-tiled floor and at the toes of her slippers. She tried to imagine beyond here, now, and found that she couldn’t. At the same time she tried to make her voice stronger, as full of conviction as Martin’s.

‘In a few weeks’ time, it’ll be as if all this never happened,’ he said.

That was what Martin wanted, of course, Annie thought. He wanted their lives to be the same as they had been.

You can’t make it un-happen, Annie. What did that mean, then?

‘I’ve got to go, sweetheart. I’ll be in tonight, at the usual time. I can’t wait to get you out of that place. I love you, Annie.’

‘Yes. Yes, I love you too.’

She replaced the receiver and walked slowly along the corridor. She worked out that it was five weeks and two days since the bombing. For all those days the hospital had stood in for the world. She realized now that she had hardly thought beyond it. Her determination to recover had focused on the point of being well enough to leave, and now the vista of afterwards opened coldly up in front of her.

Annie passed the ward kitchen where the trays of meals were unloaded from trolleys. She caught the scent of boiled greens mixed with antiseptic scrub, and realized too that it was the first time for weeks that she had noticed a hospital smell. The day sister from the men’s ward crossed her path at right angles, smiling at Annie.

‘Good news,’ she called cheerfully. ‘Well done.’

Annie noticed the shape of her calves in black stockings, and the high polish of her black shoes. She knew that she was already looking at the hospital as a visitor, not as an inhabitant. Annie went on into her ward. Sylvia came across at once, eager for news.

‘Going home at the weekend, I hear. Looking forward to it?’

‘Oh yes. I can’t wait.’

Giving the expected answer made Annie more sharply aware of the truth. She was afraid to leave. Hospital had been a protective cocoon, and illness had been an immediate obstacle to conquer.

Steve had known that, of course, and he was waiting. Annie smiled wryly. She had fought to be allowed home, and now she didn’t want to go anywhere without Steve. She had willed herself better, so that she could go home safely to Martin. Now she saw that imprisonment in hospital had been their real safety, and when she and Steve were both outside there would be choices infinitely more complex than whether or not to go to the day room.

Annie shivered. She had the sense of open spaces surrounding her again, and an unfamiliar, salty wind blowing.

That day, and the next, she sat with Steve in the day room and didn’t tell him that she was going home. More vividly than ever, she was aware that they talked on two levels. There was the banal, public conversation that she had led them into. It was innocently audible to any of the other patients who passed their corner, or who drew up their chairs to join them.

Then there was the other, silent dialogue that grew steadily louder in Annie’s head. Listen to me, Annie, Steve said. You must, sooner or later.

And she babbled back, Wait. I don’t know what to do. I’m afraid. I’m afraid to stay and I’m afraid to leave.

On the third day Steve was irritable and restless. She watched him as he sat tense in his chair and then impatiently levered himself to his feet, hobbling to the window and staring down into the street before turning back to her again. She knew that he was chafing against boredom, and against the frustration of their holding apart. Her sympathy swelled with wishing that she could stay with him.

‘How long will it be?’ she asked. ‘They must have some idea, surely?’

‘You know as much as I do.’ His voice was sharp. ‘Not until the X-rays show new bone formation. Six weeks, perhaps. Therapy. Muscle rehabilitation. Jesus, Annie, how can I survive another six weeks? Without you?’

‘They’ve said I can go.’ The words came out flatly.

Steve swung round, awkward, very close to her. Annie felt her heart lurch.

‘I thought it must be soon. When?’

‘Tomorrow.’

He stood still, then. She saw the denial in his face and her own longing to deny it too, answering him.

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘I suppose,’ Annie said softly, ‘I was trying to pretend that it wasn’t going to happen.’

Their eyes fastened on the other’s face, hungry, importunate.

‘I don’t want you to go.’

‘I don’t want to leave you.’

The words spoken aloud, at last. How many days have I made us waste? Annie thought, despairingly.

Steve turned on his crutches again. He looked up and down the room, at the interminable television and the rain-streaked windows, the incurious, sick faces of the others.

‘Come here,’ he said.

Annie stepped forward, unable to question. If he had undone her clothes, then, and asked her to lie down with him on the institutional floor, she would have done it because he wanted her to.

But he led her away, to the door that opened into the corridor. With all her senses painfully sharpened, Annie heard the tiny metallic creak that his crutches made under his weight.

A few steps beyond was another door, this one with a little round window in it. Steve looked in through the window, and then eased the door open. Annie knew what was inside, because the room was the twin of the one over on the women’s side.

‘Where are you going?’ she whispered.

Come on,’ he repeated.

Annie followed him, and Steve closed the door behind them.

The room was unoccupied. It was a single-bedded side ward with a tall, narrow slit of window that looked out at a dark angle of the red-brick hospital walls. There was a high bed, made up with stiff, smooth white sheets and pillows set perfectly straight. The bed table was pushed away to the foot, bare of the usual clutter of belongings. The only other furnishings were two upright chairs, a folding screen and a basin with long-handled taps like metal ears.

As they faced each other in the silence, footsteps passed by the door.

‘No one will come,’ Steve said.

‘I know.’

Steve disengaged himself from one of the crutches and propped it against the wall. He took Annie’s hand and used the other crutch to hobble the few feet across to the bed. He drew her with him, and she followed, without hesitation. Steve reached the bed and rested himself against it, then let the second crutch fall. Then, gently, he took her other hand. She stepped forward, close, and then so close that their bodies touched. She saw the shape of his face and his mouth, the line of his top lip and a muscle that pulled at the corner of it. Her chest was tight with pain and happiness.

He lifted their linked hands and his mouth brushed her knuckles. Annie felt the softness of his tongue between his teeth. Her own mouth opened and she drew the breath in, sharpening the wonderful pain in her heart.

Then Steve let her hands go. He lifted his to cup her face, looking levelly into her eyes, through her eyes and into her head. And then he leant forward, slowly, and his mouth touched hers. He turned her face to one side, and then to the other, and kissed the corners of her mouth.

For that moment, Annie knew nothing except the happiness. She smiled, with her lips curving upwards under his, and he drew her closer still, until her body arched backwards as he kissed her.

His arms came around her and they clung together, greedy, admitting their hunger at last in silence. Annie forgot her physical weakness and the bleak room that enclosed them, and the world waiting for her outside. There was no one but Steve. Her mouth opened under his as she answered him, candid, and his sudden roughness bruised her skin and sent the shocks of sweetness racing all through her.

Annie heard her own voice, wordless, caught low in her throat, Oh.

Steve lifted his mouth from hers, and looked into her eyes again. His eyelids were heavy and she saw the gold-flecked irises. Annie was shaking. Behind Steve’s shoulder she saw the white cover of the hospital bed, drawn up now in rumples like long pointing fingers. She turned her face away from the fingers and rested it against Steve’s shoulder. She brushed the tiny raised loops of his towelling robe and felt the warmth of his skin under her cheek. A pulse beating at the base of his throat answered her own heartbeat. She closed her eyes, giving up all of herself, and put her lips to the little flicker under his skin.

‘Annie.’ His voice crackled.

‘I’m here.’

Their kiss was gentle now, and for a second behind her closed eyelids Annie saw the lit threads of tiny veins that netted her head, as beautiful as winter trees and all the firmaments of stars shining behind them.

When they moved apart at last it was slowly, and their fingers reached out to curl together.

Annie opened her eyes to see again. Behind Steve there was still the high white bed, and the ugly, cream-painted bed table on its black rubber wheels. She looked carefully at the folding screen, the door with its single black eye, and then through the window at the brick walls stained with damp and the black humps of drainage pipes. She thought of the hospital, the nurses, and the other patients with their inquisitive stares, and it was like a microcosm of the world that separated her with Steve into this bare room under the blind eye that could see at any moment. The joy was still vivid inside her, but the pain and uncertainty came back to tangle inseparably with it.

Steve watched her face and she knew that he was reading it, and her thoughts flickering behind it. He lifted and smoothed back a fine strand of hair that had caught up at the corner of her mouth, and then his fingers slid under the thickness of hair at the nape of her neck.

‘You know, Annie,’ he said, ‘that we started at the end, you and me. The two of us, stripped down in the darkness, nowhere further to go. It’s hard to go back and fill in the steps.’

She saw his crooked, amused smile as he ticked the steps off. ‘How do you do? What do you do? How, and where, and what for? I wonder. Another drink? You feel the same? We must be kindred spirits. Let’s talk some more, your husband isn’t looking. Am I boring you? Monopolizing you? No? I’m glad we met. Very glad. Yes, another drink. More talk. Is it so late already? Could we perhaps meet again? Lunch. Yes, lunch some time very soon.’

‘You must be very practised,’ Annie said. Steve shook his head to answer her, and she saw his truthfulness too.

‘At that. Not at this. This hasn’t happened, never. I don’t know, any more than you do, how to explain the strangers we were and what we are now. I can’t deny it, Annie, and now that I’m holding you like this I know that you can’t deny it either. Nor can I justify it, because of what it means to your family. Wait.’

She had tried to move backwards then, to disengage herself, but he held her too tightly.

‘There hasn’t been any neat social two-step between you and me, my love. We came together without anything except ourselves, the parts of ourselves that were real in that bloody wreckage. It was real then, and it is still real now.’

He turned her chin with his fingertips to make her look up at him, and at last she returned his clear gaze.

‘I’ve never taken you to dinner. We’ve never met for a clandestine drink, and so I don’t know whether you prefer white wine spritzers or vodka martinis. We haven’t taken those particular steps together and we won’t do, now. I’m glad, because I don’t believe you tread that path in any case. And we haven’t made love, although I want you now more than I’ve ever wanted anyone in all my life.’

Annie knew that that was the truth. She felt the colour hot in her cheeks, but her eyes held his.

‘I’d lie down with you here, now, this minute, if only we could,’ she whispered.

Steve leant forward and for a second his lips were hard against hers.

‘Thank you,’ he said. He was smiling, but the pulse was still beating at the base of his throat. ‘I will remind you of that. For now, I just want to tell you something.’ He stopped, looking for the words, and Annie understood that Steve was as vulnerable as she was herself. He shrugged then, almost like a boy, and said in a voice so low that she had to strain to catch what he said, ‘You know that I love you, Annie, don’t you?’

In the silence that followed she heard the echoes in her head, I love you, Annie, and happiness fluttered against her ribs again. She lifted Steve’s hands and looked down at his knuckles, touching them gently, wonderingly, with her thumb.

From outside in the corridor came the squeak of hurrying feet and a door swung open and shut with a hiss and a bang. In the distance a trolley rattled at the big doors of the lift.

It was so quiet in the room, and the noise outside sharpened her awareness of the difference between there and here. She was hidden with Steve in this little square box. Martin told her, I love you, and that was the truth too.

‘I did know,’ Annie said at last, thinking that the words fell gracelessly, like stones. She tried to cover them, saying too quickly, ‘Steve, I didn’t …’ but he stopped her from going any further.

‘That’s all,’ he said. ‘I wanted you to know, before you go. Will you think about it, Annie?’

Very carefully, keeping her mouth steady, Annie said, ‘I won’t be able to think about anything else.’ That was her admission. Her face crumpled then and she blinked to keep back the tears. ‘I don’t want to go, Steve. I …’

Not even Annie knew what she might have said, because he stopped her with his hands to her lips.

‘Think about it,’ he repeated. Steve moved his weight awkwardly against the edge of the bed, and Annie knew that he was thinking, Bandages, crutches.

‘It won’t be long,’ she said. ‘They’ll let you go soon.’

‘Until they do, will you come and visit me?’

‘Like all the others?’ Annie smiled suddenly as she copied old Frank’s descriptive outline in the air, but Steve caught her hands and kissed them.

‘Not like that at all. Will you?’

Annie knew that she would come. The prospect of it seemed now the only way that she could bear to leave him.

‘Yes,’ she said simply. ‘As often as I can. I promise I will.’

‘It won’t be long,’ he echoed, and they looked at one another soberly.

‘What will you say to Martin?’ he asked, because he couldn’t help it.

Annie let go of his hands. She turned her head to look at the window, and then walked slowly across the room. Dozens of other windows faced into the dark well. She saw the edges of curtains, cupboards, and through one window opposite the crimped edge of a sister’s cap as she sat at a desk.

Painfully, she said, ‘I won’t tell Martin anything. There isn’t anything to tell, yet, is there? I don’t want to hurt him.’ Annie realized that she was rationalizing aloud. She didn’t understand herself what was happening, not yet. ‘I have to think,’ she said softly. Steve nodded, accepting. Annie went back to him and rested her head against his shoulder. Out of the tangle of feelings, suddenly happiness was dominant again. They had come through all of it, and they had held on to one another.

With his mouth against her hair he whispered, ‘We should go now.’

Annie wanted to leave this, too, at the point that they had reached. She let herself hold on to him for a moment longer, and then she slipped out of his reach. She stooped to pick up his hated crutches and fitted them gently under his arms so that he could walk again.

Watching her, Steve thought that he had never seen anyone as clearly, with such intimacy, as he saw Annie now. With her hand at his elbow he lumbered towards the door. A cramp gnawed at his good leg so that he swayed, leaning against Annie for support, and she almost fell under his weight. They struggled for a moment before they were steady, and then they stood upright. Laughter washed over them until Annie had to hold on to the door jamb for support. She found herself thinking, How can this have happened, out of pain and fear, this laughter, and the happiness of loving a stranger?

But it had happened. There was no going back now.

‘It isn’t funny,’ Steve protested as their laughter died down. ‘I’m incapable.’ He saw the brightness of Annie’s eyes.

‘That’s just as well. Think what might have happened otherwise.’ She dodged past him, and went to smooth the hospital bedcover back into its rigid folds. ‘There. Now Sister will never guess.’

‘Don’t be so sure. She’s probably got a spyhole somewhere.’

‘Now you tell me.’

Annie peered through the glass porthole. Her face was serious again as she turned back to him, and then leant forward to touch her mouth to his.

Neither of them spoke, because in that long moment there was no need to.

It was Annie who moved first. Slowly she opened the door. She saw that the corridor was deserted and so she went quickly away, without looking back, afraid that if she didn’t leave him then she never would.

Martin came to collect her the next morning.

Annie had packed her bag, and she was waiting for him, sitting in the chair beside her empty bed, when Sylvia saw him through the open doors and called across to her, ‘Here he comes, love.’

She stood up to meet him and he kissed her cheek, both of them aware of all the others watching them. Annie felt the familiarity of him beside her, and at the same time her fear of leaving the safe, small hospital world.

Martin picked up her bag. ‘Ready?’

‘I just want to say goodbye.’

The nurses and the other patients were already waiting, lined up in dressing gowns and uniforms at the ward doors. Annie saw the sister slip out through the doors. With Martin at her side Annie said goodbye to each one of the others. Their good wishes and congratulations made a lump in her throat, and she was afraid that she was going to cry.

She was reaching the end of the row when the ward door opened again. The sister was back and there were others with her, all the men from the adjoining ward who were well enough to walk. Frankie the news vendor was at the head of them, with a big bunch of cellophane-wrapped roses in his arms. He held them out to her, beaming. ‘Here you are, my duck. You’re a brave girl. Good luck, from all of us.’

Behind him, taller than the others, she saw Steve’s dark head.

Not brave, Annie thought. For an instant she thought that the terrible pull, one way and then the other, would tear her in half. She took the flowers blindly and kissed Frankie’s cheek. There were other kisses too, but in all the press of people she felt a light touch on her shoulder and she knew that it was Steve’s. She nodded, not trusting herself to look at him, and stumbled forward with her flowers. She felt rather than saw that Martin held out his hand to Steve.

They were calling out to her, ‘Good luck, Annie. Think of us, still in here.’

Martin’s hand was at her elbow now, guiding her. Steeling herself she turned to look back, seeing the cluster of faces as pale blobs, except for Steve’s. Every detail of Steve’s face was clear.

‘Thank you,’ she said as steadily as she could, ‘for the flowers, everything. Take care of yourselves.’

As her husband led her away she felt Steve immobile on his crutches behind them, watching her go.

Outside, the world seemed to teem with people and reverberate with traffic. Annie sat in the passenger seat of the car as they threaded precariously through it. Martin was whistling softly as he drove, and then at a red traffic light he leaned across and kissed her on the cheek.

‘How does it feel?’ he grinned at her.

‘Strange,’ she answered, and feeling the coolness of that she added quickly, ‘Wonderful.’

Martin glanced at her and then as the car slid forward again he said, ‘You’ll have to take it easy, even though you’re well enough to be at home. Everything’s organized for you.’

Annie put her hand out to touch the knee of his corduroy trousers. ‘Thank you,’ she said.

They began the familiar climb up the hill towards home, in the grinding stream of lorries and buses, under the span of the wrought-iron bridge that Annie often crossed with the boys, on their way to the park. She looked up at it, curiously, as if she were seeing it for the first time. At the top of the hill they turned, out of the traffic, into quiet streets. The corner shops were familiar here, and then they passed the tube station that Annie had hurried into on her way to do the Christmas shopping, six weeks ago.

A minute later they reached the end of their road.

She looked down the length of it and saw their house, red bricks faced with yellow, bay windows under a little pointed roof. The car stopped outside and Annie saw the boys’ faces bob up at the bedroom window.

Martin took her hand. ‘I didn’t tell the whole world that you would be home today. Everyone wanted to be here, to welcome you, but I thought you might not like a big reception committee.’

Annie smiled at him, touched by his care. But Martin was always kind, in just that way.

‘I’m glad,’ she said. ‘They can all come another day.’

Martin helped her out of the car and they went up the path hand in hand.

‘Thomas and Ben have arranged their own welcome party. Ready?’

She nodded, wondering, and Martin opened the front door.

The hallway was hung everywhere with hand-painted streamers, and huge, cut-out letters dangling from the ceiling spelt out the message WELCOME HOME MUMMY. There was a second’s silence as Annie looked at it and different tears burned in her eyes. And then the children, unable to hide any longer, burst out and tumbled down the stairs into her arms.

‘Did you like it? Were you surprised?’ Tom demanded.

‘I coloured the ribbons,’ Benjy shouted. ‘All these. They go right up the stairs. Look, Mummy.’

Annie looked, and saw Barbara coming out of the kitchen, smiling at her. Through the open doors beside her she saw a fire burning in the polished grate. The house was warm, lived-in and comfortable and happy. Her tears blurred the welcome sight of it and ran down her cheeks.

‘Why are you crying?’ Benjy asked and she held him so that his face was warm against hers.

‘Because I’m glad to be home.’

Barbara hugged her, and then the boys took Annie’s hands and she let them lead her upstairs. She found that the bedroom was bright with flowers, and the covers were turned down ready for her on the wide bed. Propped against the pillows was a small, threadbare teddy.

‘I put my ted in, see, to keep you company,’ Benjy announced.

‘I told him that you probably wouldn’t want his smelly teddy,’ Thomas added.

‘I do. Of course I do.’

She sat down on the bed, feeling the familiar sag under her weight, and the boys crowded anxiously against her.

‘You won’t have to go back again, will you?’ Thomas’s casual voice tried to hide his anxiety.

‘No, darling, I won’t have to go away again.’ With her arms around her children Annie looked out of the window at the view, the unchanged composition of slate roofs and bay windows and bare tree branches, thinking.

Nothing was different, and yet the whole world had changed.

She rested her cheek wearily against Benjy’s smooth head.

Martin brought in a glass vase with the hospital’s red roses arranged in it. Their colour reminded her of blood, and of Steve, motionless in the hospital corridor, watching her go.

Martin crossed the room and touched his finger to her cheek.

‘Are you all right?’

‘Yes,’ Annie lied to him. ‘Of course I am.’