Читать книгу Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection: Strangers, Bad Girls Good Women, A Woman of Our Times, All My Sins Remembered - Rosie Thomas - Страница 14

Annie was cooking dinner. She moved slowly to and fro in the kitchen, opening doors and taking out pans, collecting ingredients from the larder. It seemed a long time since she had done anything of the kind. She had made suppers for the boys, and she had started cooking for herself and Martin within a few days of being home again. Barbara had done it to begin with, but after a few days Annie had taken control. It surprised her to recognize how much she minded the displacement from her own kitchen, and she thought, I must be more like Tibby than I’ve ever realized. But tonight was the first proper dinner. It had been Martin’s idea.

‘You haven’t had your welcome home party,’ he had announced one night. ‘Now you’re better, we should all go out to dinner somewhere. We could ask Gail and Ian.’

Enthusiastically he had named three other couples, old friends and neighbours.

‘It’ll cost a fortune to take all of them out,’ Annie had said.

‘Oh, we can all pay for ourselves.’

‘You can’t ask them out to celebrate and then make them pay,’ Annie protested. It was so like a hundred other plans and discussions that they had had over the years that she smiled suddenly.

‘Ask them here. I’ll make chilli or something.’

‘Can you cope with that?’

‘Yes,’ she had said. ‘I’m sure I can.’

‘I’ll help.’

Martin had put his warm hand out to cover hers, and then they had turned on the television to watch the news.

And so it had been arranged. Three couples were coming to dinner, and because she wanted to make everything the same as it would have been before, Annie had decided that it must be a proper meal. She was a good cook, and her dinners had a reputation amongst their friends. So she had planned an elaborate menu, and done the shopping this morning while Benjy was at nursery. Now both the boys were watching television in the sitting room. Annie put down the big casserole dish she had taken out of the cupboard and went to stand in the doorway to look at them.

Tom was sitting on the sofa with his knees drawn up and his chin sunk into his jersey, his eyes fixed on the screen. Benjy was lying on the floor with strands of fine hair fanning out around his head. It was much too long, Annie noted automatically. She must take him for a haircut.

‘D’you want a peanut butter sandwich, either of you, before I start cooking?’ she asked. Neither of them spoke or took their eyes off the television and she asked again, hearing herself on the point of shouting at them.

‘Oh. Yes, okay,’ Tom said and Benjy declared, ‘I want the same as Thomas,’ just as he always did.

Annie went back into the kitchen and made the sandwiches, took them through to the boys, and then started work.

She made a stuffing of spinach and calves’ liver cooked pink and spread it in the boned shoulder of lamb she had stood over her butcher for this morning. She rolled the meat and trussed it neatly with string, then browned it in the frying pan. The smell of fatty meat made her feel slightly sick.

Annie looked at the clock. It was almost six o’clock. She had intended to make her own puff pastry to wrap around the lamb, but she realized now that there wasn’t time for that. She opened the freezer and rummaged for a packet of ready-made, then left it to defrost while she began work on the starter. She had made the same mousselines of sole a dozen times before, but today the fish seemed full of tiny, hair-line bones and her fingers felt clumsy and stiff as she tried to pick them out with the slivers of grey skin that stuck everywhere.

The buzz of the blender sounded unnaturally loud, sawing through her head.

Thomas came in and asked, ‘Can I have another sandwich?’

Annie was about to snap at him, ‘Wait for supper,’ when she realized that it was past time for that. She clattered amongst the dirty saucepans and chopping boards, making beans on toast and poached eggs.

She put the food on the table and Benjy groaned, ‘I don’t want this.’

‘It’s all I’ve got time to do tonight. Eat that or nothing at all, I don’t mind which.’

The boys sat opposite one another, silently eating their beans, eyeing her. Just the vegetables to do now, and ten minutes to deal with the pastry, Annie calculated. She had made lemon syllabub the night before and it was ready, a pale yellow froth, in the glass bowl in the fridge. She was congratulating herself on that when she remembered that she had forgotten to buy any cheese. Martin would have to buy some at the deli on the way home. He should be home by now, Annie thought with weary resentment. As soon as she recognized that she did feel resentful, it grew inside her. She was on her way to the telephone when it rang.

It was Martin.

‘I’m sorry, love. I had to stay late with the client. One damn niggle after another. I’m on my way now. Are you okay?’

‘Wonderful,’ Annie said.

There was a tiny pause.

‘Oh dear. And it’s supposed to be your party. I’ll do everything else, I promise.’

‘Get some cheese at the deli, will you?’

‘Done.’

Annie went back to the sink and clattered the greasy saucepans. I don’t want to do this, she thought, very clearly. I don’t want to make dinner for these people, and sit through an evening’s talking and drinking. Then a wave of fright washed through her. These people were her friends and her husband, and dinners together had been their pleasure, before. She felt cold as she recognized how much reckoning she did in terms of before.

Before the bomb? Or was it not the bomb at all, but Steve?

To postpone the thought Annie whirled around the kitchen, clearing the worktops and banging the doors shut on the chaos inside the cupboards. Miraculously the room looked tidy again and the sink was empty.

She took the boys’ plates and said, ‘I’m not cross, Ben. Just in a rush.’

She gave them fruit yoghurts, and while they were eating them she stood at the other end of the table and rolled out the defrosted pastry. She set the lamb shoulder in the middle of the rectangle then deftly parcelled it up, trimming off the surplus and crimping the seams with her fingers. She crumpled the leftover pastry into a ball and rolled it out again, then cut out leaves with the point of a knife. The decorations looked pretty and the job was soothing. She was brushing her handiwork with beaten egg when she heard Martin’s bag thud down on the step, and his key in the lock.

‘Dad,’ the boys shouted in unison, and ran to meet him. He came in, swinging Benjy. Martin looked anxiously at Annie and then glanced around the kitchen.

‘Mouthwatering smells and a scene of perfect domestic harmony,’ he murmured. ‘I was expecting something different.’

‘If you had been here an hour ago you would have seen something different.’

‘I said I was sorry, Annie. I got the cheese.’ He held up the carrier bag, as if to placate her.

Annie’s resentment was focused on Martin now, but she felt too tired to embark on an argument.

‘Why don’t you go and get ready? I’ll see the kids into bed, and do whatever else needs doing.’

‘Thank you,’ she said, still angry and yet knowing that it would make the evening worse if she and Martin were on bad terms.

She went slowly upstairs and took a shower. Wrapped in the blue dressing gown that made her think of Steve again, she went into her bedroom and took her favourite dress out of the wardrobe. It was a swirly black jersey that clung in the right places. Annie pulled the dress on over her head and stared at herself in the long mirror. She was too thin for it, and it hung like a shroud from her shoulders. The black material made her face look sallow because she hadn’t regained her natural colour yet.

As she looked at her pallid reflection Annie had the vertiginous sense that she was confronting someone else, and not herself at all. Steve, she thought stupidly, you know who I am. Is this me?

Then she snatched up the hem of the dress and pulled it off, struggling for a minute within the black folds of the skirt. She searched along the row of hangers and took out a bright red shirt and narrow trousers, and bundled the black dress into the farthest corner.

When she was dressed, Annie faced the mirror again. She began to make up her face, outlining her eyes with grey pencil and dabbing blusher on to her cheeks. She brushed lipgloss on to her mouth and then sat facing herself, with the little brush dangling in her fingers. The optimistic colours she had applied seemed to stand out against her chalky skin like a clown’s make-up. Annie sighed, and taking a piece of cotton wool she rubbed most of it off again. To neaten the ragged ends of her hair her hairdresser had cut it much shorter than she usually wore it. Annie pulled at the ends with a comb, as if that would stretch it to cover her bare neck and throat, and then dropped the comb with a clatter.

Martin came in and stood behind her, and their eyes met in the mirror.

‘You look very pretty,’ he said, and touched the exposed and vulnerable line of their jaw with his fingers. ‘I like your hair like that. It reminds me of when I first knew you.’

Annie tilted her head, just a little, away from the touch, and his hand dropped. She smiled, hastily, to cover the awkwardness.

‘I don’t feel very pretty. I tried the black dress on first, and it looked hideous.’

‘Red’s better,’ Martin said.

He had turned away when she spoke, and now he was looking in the wardrobe for a clean shirt. Annie watched him in the mirror, thinking of the little nuances of gesture and expression by which they interpreted each other, surprised by her own detachment.

To negotiate the evening, that was the first thing.

‘I’m sorry I was angry when you came in,’ she volunteered.

‘I would have been back earlier if I possibly could.’

‘I know.’ Annie took his shirt out of a drawer and handed it to him, turning her back on their reflections. ‘I was in a flap. I was afraid that the dinner wouldn’t be ready, and that even if it was it would be inedible.’

‘Annie, darling.’ Martin had put the clean shirt on and he came across to her, the buttons still undone. He put his arms around her and Annie felt the shape and the weight of him, perfectly familiar, strangely null. ‘The food you cook is always good. And even if tonight it happened not to be, even if we gave them dry biscuits, do you think it would matter to your friends?’

‘I don’t suppose so,’ Annie said sadly. ‘It’s just that … it’s just that if I’m going to do it at all, I want it to be good, and special.’

Martin laughed and let her go.

‘You know something? In your own way, you’re as much of a perfectionist as Tibby is.’

‘I think I am like her,’ Annie said, very softly. ‘I’ve only just realized it myself.’

She stood for a moment, looking ahead of her with apparently unseeing eyes.

Martin finished dressing and reminded her briskly, ‘Benjy’s in bed. I told him you’d go in and say goodnight.’

Annie jumped, almost guiltily, then said, ‘I’ll go now.’

Benjy was lying under his Superman cover, but Annie knew from the way that his head jerked up that he had been listening, waiting for her. When she sat down on the edge of the bed he turned over, folding his arms comfortably on top of the covers, looking up at her. She felt the sharp, physical pull of love and the weight of unending responsibility that went with it, both sensations conflicting with another, newer feeling. She could have isolated that one, but she turned her thoughts deliberately away. She bent down to kiss Benjy and he put his arms up around her neck, not letting go. He smelt clean and babyish, and his fine, floppy hair was a child’s version of Martin’s.

‘You won’t go away and get hurt again, will you?’ he asked.

Benjy’s fears for her had expressed themselves in nightmares, and in sudden tantrums, and Annie was relieved to hear him put them into words.

‘No.’ She stroked his hair back from his face, soothing him. ‘I’m not going anywhere. I’m staying here with you.’

‘And Tom, and Dad.’

‘Of course.’

Only she looked at the wall behind the little boy’s head, where he had scribbled in purple crayon, and she thought, Impossible. But Annie didn’t know in that minute whether it was impossible to change anything, or impossible for life to go on as it did now.

She settled Benjy’s covers around his shoulders.

‘Goodnight, pumpkin. Sleep tight.’

‘Blow kisses at the door.’ It was his nightly demand, and part of the ritual of letting her go until the morning. Obediently Annie stood in the doorway and blew kisses until, content, he burrowed his head into the pillows. She turned on his night-light and quietly closed the door.

Thomas was in his bath, and she called to him as she passed, ‘Put your dressing gown on when you’ve finished, and come down for half an hour.’

Martin was already in the kitchen, setting out glasses on a tray. They moved around each other, practised, knowing what had to be done. Annie finished preparing the vegetables and then laid the table, polishing the pieces of cutlery hastily as she laid them in place. She took the napkins out of the dresser drawer, frowning at sight of the creases in them. She found the branched pewter candelabrum that had been a wedding present and stuck plain white candles into the holders. There was, as always, satisfaction in making preparations. Annie smiled crookedly as the thought came to her again, Just like Tibby. Yet for almost all her adult life she had been gently, amusedly dismissive of her mother’s fondness of guest towels and matching soaps in china shell dishes.

‘How are we doing?’ Martin asked.

‘Ready, now.’

‘There you are,’ he beamed at her, as though the effort had been all his. ‘Nothing to worry about.’

There was no point in renewing the disagreement, Annie thought, if the evening was to be comfortable. She smiled, and went through to sit by Thomas on the sofa. His hair was wet and brushed flat, his face shone, and he was methodically working his way through a bowl of cashew nuts.

Five minutes later, exactly on time, the doorbell rang.

The evening’s ingredients were exactly the same as for a dozen other evenings over as many years. The six people who came to dinner were all old friends. Martin and Annie had known one couple since their college days, Thomas had been best friends from toddlerhood with the children of the second couple, and the third was Martin’s partner and his wife. Like all long-standing groups of friends they held loosely between them a net of memories and impressions, expressed in private jokes and conversational shorthand, the bric-à-brac of shared weekends and holidays and pleasures and occasional crises. As soon as the eight of them were together, Annie and Martin’s living room filled up with talk and laughter.

All six of their guests had visited Annie in hospital, and they had sent her flowers and brought her presents and offered to take their turn at looking after the boys. She had seen them separately, too, since coming home, but there was a shared sense that tonight was different because it was her proper celebration. She felt their warmth reaching out to her. There was champagne, and Annie drank two glasses, trying to launch herself into her party.

But she knew that she was drifting, smiling but separate.

She watched Tom handing round olives and nuts, and then went into the kitchen to look at the fish. When she came back she was disconcerted by the circle of cheerful, expectant faces all looking up at her.

‘Bedtime, Tom,’ she whispered to him, to cover her unbalance.

He went, with the usual show of reluctance, with the other parents calling out cheerful goodnights. Annie went out with him into the hall and hugged him at the foot of the stairs. The light on the landing was dim and soothing, and Annie looked half-longingly at the darkness beyond the crack of her bedroom door.

When she went back to her seat on the sofa, Martin’s partner Ian was reminiscing about a holiday he and Gail had spent with Martin and Annie in Provence.

‘Ten years ago, can you believe?’

‘Nine,’ Martin said.

It had rained for two weeks, so heavily that when they went to the cottage’s outside lavatory they had had to wear their wellingtons, and shelter under a golf umbrella. They had played bridge, interminable games, unsatisfactory to all of them because Gail and Ian were good players and Annie and Martin weren’t. Annie was a sun-worshipper, and she had sulked at being deprived of her annual sun-tan. They teased her about it good-humouredly now, as they often did, and she did her best to smile back.

‘I’ve got the pictures here, somewhere,’ Martin said. ‘I was looking at them the other day, when Annie was still in hospital.’ He rummaged in a drawer and produced a yellow envelope folder. The photographs passed from hand to hand, bursts of laughter and recollection erupting over each one. When they reached Annie she looked down into her own face, and the others surrounding it, as if she were seeing a group of acquaintances, made long ago and half forgotten.

She gave the photographs back to Martin and went into the kitchen again. She lit the candles in their pewter brackets and watched their reflection in the black glass of the garden windows, little ovals of flame that swayed and spluttered and then burned up bright and clear.

‘It’s ready,’ she called.

They came crowding in and sat down, joking and arguing. Annie decorated the fish mousselines with little feather sprigs of chervil, and handed them round to a chorus of admiration.

‘Annie, you are amazing.’

‘Just look at this, will you? You especially, Gail, my darling.’

Martin walked around the table, pouring more champagne. Annie took her place opposite his, at the foot of the table. The lamb was in the oven, cooking pink inside while the puff pastry case turned gold That much was under control, but with the champagne fizzing in her head Annie frowned, trying to pinpoint another anxiety. Perhaps it had been an unnecessary demonstration to cook a meal like this. Perhaps she was trying to prove that nothing had changed, while all along it really had, irrevocably, and dry biscuits would have been, at least, an honest statement.

Am I lying to them all? Annie thought wildly. At her right hand David, the father of Tom’s friend, reached for the champagne bottle that Martin had left and filled her glass. He lifted his own and said, ‘Here’s to you, love. And many more dinners.’

‘Many more dinners,’ Annie echoed him, and drank.

The evening went on, in all its jollity, around her. After a while she found that the wine helped, because it took the sharp edges off her perception. She served the lamb and then sat back in her chair, looking at the faces.

The room was cosy in the candlelight, and full of the scent of food. One of the other women was wearing long, glittery earrings and as she leaned forward across the table, telling a story, the earrings swung and shot points of coloured light. As she delivered the story’s punchline there was a burst of laughter, and Annie joined in.

‘Not like our Annie,’ David said, in answer to someone else’s remark, and squeezed her hand warmly.

Annie’s gaze moved on around the table. They were all pleasant, good-humoured people, she thought, well-fed and lubricated, sitting together in a warm, comfortable place. Through the nimbus of the candles she looked at Martin, and his face meant no more or less to her than the others. Equally familiar, and just as remote from her. Annie was cold, suddenly, so cold that she shivered in her red shirt. They were all strangers, even Martin. Chillingly she knew that the only person who was real was Steve. She felt his closeness to her, and at the nape of her neck the fine hairs prickled as if his hand reached out to stroke her. Very clearly she saw the hospital ward, with the lights already dimmed for the night, and Steve’s face in the defined circle of light over his bed. She knew that he was thinking about her, and the thoughts were like a bridge, linking them. She longed for him so desperately that she clenched her fists in her lap, digging her nails into her palms to contain the pain of it.

The dinner party seemed to be taking place a long way off, and she was seeing it across a cold and empty space.

‘Annie, are you all right?’

She saw the earrings sparkle again and she focused her smile on them, willing herself to sound normal.

‘Yes, I’m fine. Do you think we should have pudding or cheese next?’

She pushed her chair back and went unsteadily to the refrigerator, glad of the chance to turn her back until her face was controllable again. She stared into the white interior, and at the lemon syllabub in its glass bowl amongst the humdrum family provisions. None of this was real. The only real experience she had ever had was in the darkness she had shared with Steve. The only real feeling was this, that she felt for him now.

‘I’ll carry it,’ Martin said. He reached from behind her and lifted the pudding out, and he kissed her cheek as he eased past her. ‘That was a wonderful dinner.’

‘I’m glad,’ Annie whispered. ‘I wanted it to be.’

It was, and miraculously no one had seen or guessed how little she belonged to it. She was sitting in her place again, spooning out the creamy foam, when Gail leaned across the table. With her eyes wide open in fascinated dismay she said, ‘I knew I had something to tell you. Has anyone else heard that the Frobishers are splitting up?’

There was a frisson of shocked surprise, and then of clear relief. Not us. So far, so good.

‘I don’t believe it.’

‘Neither do I.’

‘It’s true. She told me. He’s moving out as soon as he’s found a flat. She said that they hadn’t really been getting along for years, and it was better now that it had finally happened.’

‘How odd. They always seemed so keen on each other. Holding hands, and dancing together at parties.’

Martin held up another bottle of wine. ‘Anyone for this? Have I told you my theory?’

‘A thousand times, probably.’

‘My theory is that it’s just those people who are at pains to look so wonderfully happy with one another who are, in fact, right on the rocks. Witness the Frobishers.’

‘Whereas people like us …’

‘Forever nagging each other, and arguing about money, and about who promised not to be late home, are the ones who are happy. The ones who couldn’t live without each other.’

He looked through the candles’ glow at Annie. He had begun lightly, but as he spoke he had been reaching out to her, trying to ask the question. Unspoken, it had been growing louder inside him ever since Annie had come home. He couldn’t make himself deliver it when they were alone, and so he had wrapped it up and pushed it delicately across the table to her, under their friends’ eyes.

Do you still love me? It was banal, of course. But you don’t really care about him, do you? Except for what you went through, together …

Annie’s face was a colourless oval, too far away from him, and her eyes were opaque.

In that moment, Martin knew for sure.

Annie had gone away, and he would have to fight to get her back.

He heard his own voice, talking, joking with their friends around the table to hide his fear, and suddenly their whole life was a similar pretence.

Martin emptied his glass, refilled it and then drank again.

No, Annie was thinking, still listening to Martin’s words inside her head. It isn’t like that at all. Not as safe and as comfortable as Martin makes it sound. We were happy, the two of us, weren’t we? And then in a day, in an hour, everything changes. How has it happened, all this, and what can I do now?

The question ran round in her head, unanswerable.

At last, the evening was over.

The last cup of coffee and the last glass of wine had been drained, and their friends followed one another out into the black, icy night.

‘Bye, everybody. It was lovely, Annie. You’re a miracle, you know?’

‘Don’t do too much, though, will you? You look a bit weary, still, to me.’

‘See you on Saturday, then? With the kids, of course.’

Goodbye. Goodnight.

The words rang around Annie, friendly and foreign, emphasizing her isolation.

Martin looked around the kitchen. ‘You go on up. I’ll clear all this.’ He glanced at her, and when she didn’t respond he ordered, ‘Go on, Annie.’

She went, too lonely and too tired to do anything more. She lay down in bed, in the comfortable darkness, and listened to the sounds of the house. She felt like an interloper. At last Martin came up. He turned on the light and sat down heavily on his side of the bed.

‘Still awake?’

‘Yes.’

She didn’t know what to say, now.

Martin stood up again and moved around the room, undressing. He was a little drunk and bumped into the corners of the furniture.

When he was ready, he slid under the bedclothes beside her.

There was a moment when they both lay still. Then, with an awkward, possessive movement, Martin put his arms around her. He fitted her body against the curves of his own, his mouth and tongue against her ear. To Annie he felt very warm and solid, and utterly strange. She closed her eyes. He was her husband. She was suddenly struck by a sense of how random everything had been, all the choices she had made in her life, up until now. She could equally well have married David, or Ian. It could be either of them, anyone she had met or never met, with his body pressed to hers, and it would make no difference.

Somehow, cruelly and yet with such potent force that even now it melted her, Steve had become the only man she knew. The only man she wanted, and he wasn’t there. Annie lay quite still while her husband made love to her, and she felt nothing. And then when it was over she lay in the dark and listened to his breathing, like a stranger’s.

Martin had half-turned away, but he didn’t fall asleep.

Annie had been there in his arms, and in that sense she had been as generous as she always was, but for all the intimacy of touch he hadn’t been able to reach her. He could sense her separateness now, and it silenced him. They lay with a cold space between them, holding their feelings painfully apart.

Suddenly, Martin was angry. A knot of it gathered inside him, focused on Steve. He couldn’t be angry with Annie, not yet, because she had been through so much.

He saw Steve’s face as he had been on Christmas Eve, his face dark and drawn against the hospital pillows. And he remembered the little space where Steve had held Annie, and where they had shared the terrible hours that he was ashamed to be jealous of. That space had seemed much smaller than the bed’s hollow that contained Martin and Annie now.

Anger jumped inside Martin and his fists clenched under the bedclothes. He felt no sympathy for Steve, and the certainty came to him that Steve would be a formidable opponent. He would have to be an opponent, an enemy, of course, because Martin would have to cut him off from Annie.

My wife. Annie, in the bedroom’s silence.

He thought she stirred, and he waited breathlessly for her to put her hand out to him. Nothing happened, and with his imagination fuelled by the wine he had drunk Martin planned in angry detail how he would drive to the hospital in the morning. He would stand beside Steve’s bed, and tell him that he was to leave Annie alone. His anger and his determination to keep her were big enough and simple enough to crush any opposition, Martin was sure of that.

When he fell asleep at last it was to uncomfortable, ambiguous dreams.

In the morning the anger had evaporated. As he shaved and went downstairs with a slight, dry headache to listen to the boys squabbling over their breakfasts, Martin knew that he wouldn’t go to see Steve. It wasn’t in his nature to force a confrontation, even with Annie. Especially with Annie. He looked across the kitchen at her white, exhausted face and he felt ashamed again. She had barely recovered, and she must be feeling her own unhappiness.

When the time came for him to leave for work Martin put his arm around her and rested his face against her hair. She returned the warm pressure, although she kept her face turned away, and he left the house holding on to that brief affirmation.

The sense of apartness stayed with Annie. It cast a thin, uncomfortable light on the routine of every day.

Annie ran the house mechanically. She went out to buy food in the local shops, and looked at the familiar shelves as if she had never seen them before. She washed and folded clothes, and drove the boys to and fro, feeling herself physically stronger every day. She sat with Martin in the evenings, hearing the silence between them, afraid. At night the dreams of noise and stifling darkness still came. Annie woke up, shaking, to find him asleep beside her and as the pall of brick-dust lifted again in her imagination she put her hand out to touch the separate warmth of his skin. Annie went back to the hospital regularly, to see her specialists and to submit to more tests. She waited patiently in the various clinics, soothed by the way that the system temporarily took away her sense of responsibility for herself. And after she had gone through what was required of her in out-patients, and only then, Annie allowed herself to go upstairs and see Steve.

The first time was no more than a few days after Annie had been discharged, but it seemed already that they had been painfully separated for months. On the morning of her appointment she went upstairs and chose, very carefully, what she was going to wear. She made her face up, and her hands were shaking so much that she smudged the careful strokes. Annie looked at her reflection and thought, it’s like being a girl again. The recognition and the strangeness made her laugh, but her heart still hammered in her chest. She left the quiet house and walked to the tube station, remembering the last time, the midwinter morning with the snowflakes spiralling after the wind. This morning it was just as cold, but there were snow-drops under the bare hedge in a square of front garden, and the pale spears of crocus leaves pointing up through the broken earth beside them. When she saw the flowers it was as if she had walked into a shaft of light. The same happiness in being alive that she had felt on the day they wheeled her out of intensive care came back and took hold of her. Steve had felt that happiness, and the return of it now drew her even more strongly towards him.

For a moment, standing in the littered street, Annie forgot her anxiety and guilt. She smiled and straightened her shoulders, thinking, Whatever comes, will come. Then she began to walk again, faster, feeling herself strong and complete in her happiness. The people who passed her saw her face and looked again, watching her as she went by, but Annie didn’t see anything except the warm light and the first signs of spring.

When she slipped in through the doors of his ward at last, she saw Steve sitting in the chair beside his bed, his crutches propped up within reach. The reality of his being there made her catch her breath, because all the way up in the lift she had been preparing herself for what she would do if he wasn’t. She saw that he was thinner and much paler than the Steve she had seen inside her head, and she thought that she must have been imagining him as he would be when he could walk again, fit enough to leave the hospital. Willing that to happen. She realized too that the sense of separateness had evaporated. She was simply Annie with her heart thumping and the mixture of joy and apprehension drying her mouth.

Then he looked up and saw her and she wanted to run forward and to hold back at the same time.

Steve watched her walk towards him and he thought, She’s beautiful. I hadn’t noticed that.

As soon as she was close enough, he stretched out his hand and Annie took it. They held on to one another for a moment, all they could do under the eyes of the ward. Then Steve moved to reach for his crutches and Annie said quickly, ‘Don’t move. I’ll sit beside you.’

She brought a chair, and put it beside his.

‘Six days is a long time,’ Steve said softly. Annie saw the hunger in his face and she had to look away, over his shoulder. It was a little before visiting time, and most of the curtains were drawn while the men slept after lunch. Even so there were still one or two patients shuffling to and fro, and the nurses. One of the nurses glanced their way and then looked more carefully. She waved a belated greeting to Annie.

Did they all see what was happening? Annie wondered. They must do, of course. If it was written as plainly in her face as it was in Steve’s.

She turned back to him, closing out the ward behind them. It didn’t matter. Only Steve mattered, here.

‘Today was my first appointment,’ she said.

‘And you won’t come to see me unless you’ve got the excuse of an appointment.’

‘Not an excuse,’ she began, and then stopped. She was using the fact of having to be at the hospital as a pretext, telling herself that she could always say lightly to Martin, ‘Oh, I went up to the ward to see Steve. Just for five minutes, as I was there, you know. He looks much better.’

But of course she wouldn’t say anything to Martin. Nothing at all, beyond the facts like the queue at Haematology, and the reassurances that the doctors had doled out to her. She had stopped talking to Martin about what mattered to her, in case it came too close to this. And gave her away.

Annie’s happiness faded a little. If Martin didn’t know anything about it, it didn’t matter when she came to visit Steve. The subterfuge was for her own benefit, Annie thought, because she lacked the courage to meet what was happening face-on.

‘Don’t look like that,’ Steve said.

‘I don’t know why I’m trying to pretend not to see you,’ Annie was frowning, unravelling her motives. What had been clear, before, was murky now.

Steve leant forward and touched his thumb between her eyebrows.

‘Come when you can, that’s all. It doesn’t matter, so long as I know I’ll see you sometimes. I don’t want to make more demands on you.’

Steve shifted in his chair, trying to contain his impatience with his slow-mending leg and the public tedium of the ward while Annie sat so close to him. Her hair smelt clean, with a mild, lemony scent. And even the brief touch of her had made him sharply aware of the texture of her skin, and the masked outline of her body. Steve was suddenly aware of the weight of love, pressing and trying to force its way into the open. It was new to him, and it made him feel childish and helpless.

Annie saw his impatience and her face lightened with sympathy.

‘Shall we walk a bit?’ she asked. ‘Come on. I’ll help you stand up.’

Together, they levered him to his feet. Annie held out his crutches and Steve leant his weight on the metal legs.

‘We could go to the day room.’ He smiled at her, crookedly.

They went slowly down the ward. Annie nodded cheerfully and spoke to the people they passed.

‘No, they can’t keep me away, can they?’

Truer than you know, she thought.

Annie pushed the doors open and the stale, smoky air of the day room enveloped them. It was deserted, but the television still shouted in the empty space. Steve went to the window and looked down into the street, then leant his forehead against the glass.

‘It’s like being in prison,’ he said.

Annie came to stand beside him and he manoeuvred himself awkwardly so that he could put his arm around her shoulders.

‘It won’t be long,’ she said.

‘It can’t be,’ he answered. He wanted to kiss her but he felt as awkward as a boy with his crutches and his heavy, plastered leg. And even if he managed to reach her and fit her against him, the doors would open at once behind them, bringing in Frankie, or sister, or the first phalanx of visitors eager for a cigarette and a talk about operations.

He whispered, ‘Annie,’ feeling his helplessness again, and she moved quickly, turning her face to his and kissing him.

‘It won’t be long,’ she repeated.

I love you, he thought, and the weight of it was pleasurable now. ‘Let’s try a walk along the corridor,’ he said. They went out again, passing the round window of the side-ward and smiling, sideways conspirators’ smiles.

They moved slowly along the corridor towards the opposite wing of the hospital, close together, listening to the sound of their awkward steps on the polished floor. After a moment Steve asked, ‘How is it, being back at home? Are the boys happier now?’

‘It’s fine,’ Annie answered carefully. ‘Tiring, sometimes. They’re reacting to my desertion of them by being truculent and clinging, by turns. Copybook behaviour, which I should have been ready for, and wasn’t. If I had the energy I’d have lost my temper with them days ago. I’m relying on a kind of weary patience.’

She grinned up at him suddenly and he saw how she must be at home, ordinarily. Jealousy of Martin and her children, and their life with her, gripped him viciously. He said something as neutral as he could, looking ahead to the patch of light through the doors at the end of the corridor, but he knew that Annie glanced quickly at him. They were silent for a few more steps, and then began deliberately to talk about their physical progress, safe hospital ground.

As they talked they were both aware of the two dialogues, spoken and unspoken, starting up again. They wouldn’t talk about Martin, although he was as close as if he were walking alongside them, making a third pair of slow footsteps. Although they talked about the bones in Steve’s leg that had to knit together before he could walk, before he could leave the hospital, they didn’t ask each other, What will happen then?

They reached the far doors and turned back again.

‘It helps, just to move about like this,’ he said and Annie nodded, knowing that he meant it helped the knot of boredom and frustration.

‘And you?’ he asked. ‘What did the kidney man say?’

‘I’m fine. Luckier than you. It happens much quicker.’

‘Do you still have the dreams?’

‘Yes. Noise, and dark, and being afraid.’

‘I know.’

They looked at one another then, hearing the sound of their voices, as if the sterile hospital light had suddenly been blacked out. That was it, Annie thought. He did know, and when she woke up in the night and reached out to touch Martin’s warm, insensible skin she blamed him in turn because he didn’t, and couldn’t.

‘The dreams will stop,’ Steve said.

‘Yes.’ The dreams, but not the rest of it. Did Steve think that too? The talk, unspoken but still audible, as it had been at the end, before the firemen reached them. They reached the top of the stairs, midway between the two wings, leading down to the main hall. Voices echoed up the stairwell and then the first wave of visitors appeared, trudging upwards, with their bunches of flowers and carrier bags. They watched them pass and for a moment Annie forgot that she belonged to the world outside, too. The visitors looked separate, odd in their thick, outdoor clothes, and she felt her closeness to Steve as it had been when they lay side by side in the dark.

She wondered, with a little beat of despair, if she would ever know closeness like that again.

The group broke up, heading towards the different wards, and Annie and Steve heard more voices and footsteps following them up the stairs.

‘Are you expecting anyone today?’

‘Perhaps.’

Annie was jealous then, thinking of the glimpses she had had of his visitors in the past, and imagining streams of envoys now from his life outside. She pulled the belt of her coat around her and said, too brightly, ‘I must go, anyway. Ben’s with my mother-in-law. He only goes to nursery in the mornings.’ He doesn’t want to hear about my children, she thought painfully. What can I tell him? What ground have we got, except that terrible, random thing that happened to us, and the closeness from it that we can’t escape?

I don’t want to escape, she answered herself.

Steve was balancing awkwardly, trying to free one hand so that he could reach out to her. His face was very dark, almost angry. Now that the moment for leaving him had come, Annie wanted it to be over, quickly, before she could feel the wrench of it.

‘I’ll come next time. My next appointment,’ she gabbled.

Steve wanted to reach out and hold her, saying, Stay, you can’t go yet.

But she was already on her way.

‘Will you come?’ he asked, insistent because of his immobility.

‘Of course.’

She smiled at him then, and he stood at the head of the stairs to watch her go. She looked small and thin inside her big coat and he remembered how unexpectedly lovely her face had been as she came towards him. Then she went down around the curve of the stairs and he couldn’t see her any more. Steve rested his weight on the metal legs for a moment, looking at the place where she had been, and then he went on towards the cubicle in the ward and his empty bed.

The visits that came after that were just the same. Annie waited with contained, anxious impatience for the day to arrive, and when the time came her brief moments with Steve were like dislocated footnotes to her constant, internal awareness of him. They talked, and then they looked silently at one another, and Annie knew that they were only waiting again.

A little while after her visit Steve was moved from the old ward and taken downstairs to a long-stay orthopaedic ward. The other patients were either immobile, slung up in complicated supports, or else they moved painfully like Steve on crutches and walking frames. None of them knew Annie, and so she could meet Steve now without feeling that they were being watched with any particular interest. But none of the staff knew her either, and so she could only come in at visiting times, like everyone else. Sometimes she had a long time to wait after her appointments were over before the wards opened. On another day the queues in the out-patients clinic were so long that the visiting hour was almost over before she could come to Steve. He never asked her again if she would come without another pretext for being at the hospital, and even she could only guess at the importance of her visits in the monotonous procession of days. Annie was able to blunt her longing a little with the round of housework and cooking and caring for the boys, but Steve had nothing except hospital and its constant reminder that he was trapped in it.

He protected Annie’s visits fiercely, by warning everyone else he knew not to come on those days. Most of them looked at his face and accepted the restriction, but just once, whether by a genuine accident or out of curiosity, Vicky came. Annie was already there, and when Vicky saw them they were not even talking. They were simply sitting together, drawing strength from being close enough to touch one another.

Their intent stillness stopped Vicky in her confident walk down the ward. But she only hesitated for an instant and then she went on, calling out to him, ‘Hello, love, I came today instead of Thursday because …’

Then Steve looked up, and when Vicky saw his expression the words caught in her throat. The fair-haired woman glanced at him, and then up at Vicky as the visitor put her package of new books and magazines down on the end of the bed.

‘I didn’t expect you today,’ Steve said softly.

‘No. Well, I’ve got a conference on Thursday, you see, so I decided I’d …’ The words stuck again as she looked at them. Even from where she was standing, Vicky could feel the current between them, deflecting her.

The fair-haired girl said, ‘Come and sit down. I’ve got to go in a minute.’ Vicky noticed that she had a warm voice, and her smile tried hard to be welcoming. The smile made the absence of one from Steve all the more evident. The girl made room for Vicky to bring up a chair, and while she waited for Steve to listen to what Vicky was saying she turned away tactfully to look at the shiny covers of the new novels.

‘So that’s why I came this afternoon,’ Vicky finished crisply. She had regained possession of herself now. ‘I’m sorry if I’m interrupting. Won’t you introduce us, now I’m here?’ She smiled at the other woman.

‘This is Annie.’ Steve held on to the name as he said it, as if he didn’t want to let it go. ‘And this is Vicky.’

‘I know.’ Vicky suddenly understood. ‘You were … you were there in the shop, that day, too, weren’t you?’

‘Yes, I was there,’ Annie said in her low voice.

‘It must have been horrible.’

‘I don’t think I would have survived down there if it hadn’t been for Steve.’

Vicky noticed that she didn’t look at Steve as she said it. As if she couldn’t trust herself to look at him as well, in case her face lost its composure.

There was a moment’s silence before Vicky said, as lightly as she could, ‘You were lucky to have one another.’

Neither Annie nor Steve spoke. It was left to Vicky to talk, and she did her best to fill the awkward quiet with snippets of gossip from her world and from Steve’s.

In a little while, when she judged that it wouldn’t look too much as if she were running away, Annie looked at her watch and then stood up.

Involuntarily, Steve’s hand reached out to catch her wrist. He made himself let go as soon as his fingers touched her.

‘Don’t go yet.’

‘I must. I’ll call in next time.’

She picked up her bag from beside her chair, and as she stooped her face was level with Steve’s.

Vicky sat still, knowingly watching for the goodbye peck on the cheek from which she could gauge how far their relationship had gone. But although neither of them moved for a second, they didn’t kiss each other. They looked, and then the wings of Annie’s hair fell forward to hide her cheeks. She scooped up her belongings and stepped away from the little group of chairs.

‘Goodbye, Vicky,’ she said formally and then, in a much lower voice, ‘Goodbye.’

She can’t even bring herself to say his name, with me listening, Vicky thought.

Annie went, not looking back.

Steve’s face was dark and stiff, and for the first time since they had met Vicky didn’t know what to say to him.

She tried, ‘It must help, being able to talk to someone who went through it too.’

‘It did.’

Summoning up her courage she asked, ‘Are you fond of her?’

‘Fond?’ Steve turned to her, examining her expression as if he had never noticed her before.

‘Yes,’ he said, and the word fell like a hard pebble into black water.

Vicky’s face didn’t change because she was too self-possessed to let her feelings show, but still the words formed inside her head. That’s it, then.

Annie walked back to the tube station with her shoulders hunched against the cold. Here in the middle of town the streets were littered and there were none of the tiny signs of spring that had triggered off her happiness this morning. She thought back to it in bewilderment as jealousy crystallized inside her. She could see Vicky’s face in front of her, younger than her own, with clear, pale skin. Steve’s girl had a clever, rather hard expression. She was the kind of ambitious, single-minded woman Annie had always found intimidating, and Steve had chosen her, hadn’t he? He had talked about her in the darkness. That was before Vicky came along, he had said.

Annie made herself breathe evenly to counteract the panicky waves that rose in her chest. She thought, What right do I have to be jealous? I’m going home now to my husband and children. I don’t have any claim on Steve. We can’t claim each other.

But she wanted to be able to. That was the truth, and the significance of it made her shiver in the February wind.

It was on that day too, Annie remembered later, that Martin first showed that he knew something was wrong.

He came home earlier than usual. Annie was washing up after the boys’ supper, and the kitchen was still untidy with dirty plates and scattered toys and crayons. She heard Martin’s bag thud on the step, and then the sound of his key in the lock. As the front door opened Benjy, who had been lying on the floor watching television, suddenly rolled sideways and snatched at Thomas’s Lego model. There was an immediate howl of protest and the children fell in a heap, shouting and punching each other.

Annie jerked her fingers out of the washing-up water. It was too hot, and she had thought that she was in too much of a hurry to cool it. She wiped her scalding hands on her skirt and pushed past Martin as he came in, without looking at him. She bent over her children and pulled them apart. She was trembling with anger as she shouted incoherently at them.

‘Stop it. Stop. Fighting all the time. I can’t stand it. I can’t stand it. Do you hear?’ She aimed an ineffectual blow at the nearest bottom as they wriggled past her. ‘Upstairs. Both of you. Get ready for bed.’

‘Dad …’

‘Do as your mother says,’ Martin said evenly.

They went, still squabbling. When the door had closed behind them Annie’s shoulders sagged. Her anger drained away as quickly as it had come, and left her with the blood throbbing dully in her head.

‘Hello,’ Martin said. ‘Remember me?’

Annie looked at him, seeing him framed against the closed door with its grey finger-marks, part of the family furniture in the oppressive room.

‘How could I forget?’

She walked back to the sink and began to lift out the dripping plates. He followed her and took her arm so that she had to stop, standing with her head bent over the popping suds. From overhead she heard thumping feet, and then the splash of bathwater.

‘Annie, we’ve all had enough of this. What’s the matter with you?’

The bathwater was turned off again and in the sudden quiet the bubbles in the sink burst with the sound of smacking kisses. Suddenly, insanely, Annie wanted to laugh.

‘Nothing’s the matter.’

‘Ever since you came home, it’s been either silent martyrdom or frothing rage. I know that something terrible happened to you …’

Is it so very terrible, to fall in love with a man who isn’t your husband?

‘… but sooner or later you have to forget it, and start to live your life again. If you need help, Annie, have the sense to ask for it. And if it’s something else, tell me and stop taking it out on the kids.’

He broke off, and the silence closed down again. He had given her the opening, deliberately. But Annie knew that she couldn’t find the right words to deny what was happening, or to convince him that everything was all right, after all.

Martin sighed, and turned away from her. ‘What needs doing now?’

‘You could bath the boys and put them to bed.’

‘Of course I will, if that’s any help.’

He went out and closed the door behind him, and in a moment Annie heard the three of them talking and then laughing in the bathroom. In solitude she finished clearing the kitchen and then she scoured the sink until it shone at her.

Later, when the boys were asleep, Martin and Annie sat down opposite one another at the kitchen table and ate their evening meal together.

Talk, Annie willed herself. Talk to him. But she couldn’t think of anything to say that might not touch on the dangerous things, and she was afraid that if they came close to the truth her fragile defences would break down, and all the misery and the guilty happiness would come spilling out. She knew how much the truth would hurt Martin, and she recognized that she was more afraid of hurting him than of anything else in the world. Even more than the darkness of her dreams, and the emptiness she discovered when she woke up and found that Steve was gone from her side.

And so they sat in silence in the pool of light spreading over the table, while Martin unseeingly turned the pages of Architectural Review.

After supper, when the washing up was done, Martin said that he had some drawings that needed urgent work. He took his bag and went upstairs to his studio at the top of the house.

Annie didn’t know how long she had been sitting in her place, unmoving, before the telephone rang. She stood up automatically and went to answer it, thinking as she crossed the floor that it was sure to be someone for Martin, something to do with whatever he was working on upstairs. There was an extension in the studio, but Annie lifted the kitchen receiver from its hook on the wall and said, ‘Hello?’

She heard the rapid pips of a payphone, and then Steve’s low voice.

‘Annie.’

She leant against the kitchen wall, her breath taken away with her relief that she had picked up the phone after all, and not left it for Martin.

‘You can’t ring me here.’

‘I just have.’

She knew just where he was, seeing him more clearly than the kitchen tiles and the children’s drawings thumb-tacked to the wall beside the telephone. He was in the long corridor outside the orthopaedic ward, where two grey plastic hoods shielded the public telephones. The lights would already be dimmed for the night, making shadows in the corners. She imagined the hated crutches resting against the wall, as he steadied himself with his free hand. And then the shape of his hand, the warmth of it.

‘What would you have done if Martin had answered? Pretended it was a wrong number, or something stupid like that?’

‘I had to talk to you. Annie, are you listening? I don’t want you to be jealous of Vicky. I don’t want you to be jealous or afraid about anything, or anybody, because there’s no need.’ He was talking very quickly, his voice so low that it was almost a whisper. Annie closed her eyes on the kitchen and strained to hear what he was saying. ‘I wanted just to tell you, before you go to sleep. I love you. Remember.’

She remembered the little side room of the old ward, and the way that they had held on to one another. He hadn’t asked her for anything in return, then. He had even stopped her from saying anything.

Now she had the sense that the old, silent dialogue had swelled in volume. It grew insistently loud so that her whole body reverberated with it and, at last, she had to give voice to it. ‘I know,’ she answered him. And then, helplessly, ‘I love you too.’

She heard, at the other end of the line, his sharply exhaled breath.

There was nothing for either of them to say, beyond that.

The silent words had been spoken, and there was no point in voicing the others that came rushing after them into the physical distance that separated them. ‘I wish I could touch you,’ he said.

‘Soon,’ Annie promised him.

‘Goodnight, my love.’ He was gone then, and Annie stood with the receiver in her hand listening to the purr of the dialling tone. As she replaced it she looked up at the ceiling and then she realized that she had been whispering, as if Martin might hear her, although he was two floors above. Whispering, and pretending, and not talking in case the most innocent-sounding topic accidentally touched on the truth. Deceiving and lying, even though it was by omission. That was what this joy inside her had led her to.

With her hand outstretched, groping across her own kitchen as if she were half blind, Annie found her way back to her chair. She sat hunched over, with her arms wrapped around her chest. Just to hear Steve’s voice, tonight, made her unbearably happy, and the assurances that they had given each other made her blood swirl dizzyingly in her veins.

But the same happiness stabbed her as she looked around the kitchen because she knew that it was hopeless, and that she was trapped here by Martin and their children and the layers of love and habit that they had built up and sealed together over the years.

Exultation and misery ran together and coalesced into a choking knot that lay like a stone underneath Annie’s heart. At last, still moving like an old woman, she went upstairs and undressed ready for bed. She lay down and the sheets felt cold and clammy against her skin. She drew her knees up to her chest and hunched over the painful knot.

‘I don’t know what to do,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t know what to do.’