Читать книгу Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection: Strangers, Bad Girls Good Women, A Woman of Our Times, All My Sins Remembered - Rosie Thomas - Страница 15

Tibby had gone into a special hospital for her rest.

When Annie went to see her she was struck by its difference from the big general hospital where she had been treated herself. The rooms and corridors here were carpeted, there were pictures on the walls, and the sitting rooms were pretty and cosy. There was no medicinal smell, and even the nurses’ dresses contrived not to look like uniforms.

Tibby seemed happy.

‘It’s just like home,’ she smiled, ‘without any of the responsibilities.’

Her face was bright, but in the depths of the big chintz-covered armchair that Annie had settled her in she looked shrunken and brittle.

‘That’s good,’ Annie said cheerfully. ‘It seems like a nice place.’

There was no doubt now about the progress of her mother’s illness. The cancer was inoperable, and although the doctors’ estimates were deliberately vague they were beginning to talk in terms of weeks rather than months. Tibby knew exactly what was happening to her, and she had accepted it with silent graceful courage. The hospice’s aim was simply to make her as comfortable as possible, and to help her to enjoy the time that was left.

‘When would you like to come home again?’ Annie asked her.

The doctors had told them that, for a while longer at least, Tibby could choose whether she wanted to be in the hospice or in her own home.

‘Oh dear, I don’t know. It’s so comfortable in here. But I feel very lazy, not doing a thing. I’m still quite capable. I’m just afraid that Jim won’t be managing in the house without me, and I daren’t think about the garden. There’s the roses, you know.’

Annie thought of the big corner garden and the shaggy heads of the old-fashioned roses that sprawled over the walls. Tibby liked to prune her roses in March, and to begin her régime of spraying and feeding. It was quite likely that she wouldn’t see this year’s mass of pink and white and gold, or catch the evening scent of them through the windows as she moved about in the awkward, old-fashioned kitchen. Annie looked down at her own hands, turning them to examine the palms, as if she could see something that mattered there.

‘Don’t worry about the house,’ she managed to say. ‘Dad can cope perfectly well. I went yesterday, and it looks the same as it always does. And if you’d like me to do the roses I can, very easily. Or Martin will.’

Two dialogues, again, Annie thought. We sit here talking about the roses and the dusting, and both of us are thinking, Why must you die? Why is it Tibby, and why now? There are a hundred other things, a thousand other things to say. She began in a rush, ‘Tibby, I want to …’

But her mother took her hand, squeezing it briefly before replacing it in Annie’s lap. It was as clear a way of silencing her as if she had said, ‘I don’t want to talk about it. Forgive me?’

Aloud, Tibby said mildly, ‘Well. Perhaps I’ll stay here just this week. And then I think I should get home.’

‘All right,’ Anne acquiesced. ‘Of course you must go home whenever you feel like it.’

They sat and talked for a little while longer in the pleasant room.

Tibby wanted, more than anything else, to hear about her grandsons. She leaned forward in her armchair, eager for the little snippets of news. Thomas had just joined a local cub pack and Annie described how he had gone off to his first meeting the night before, resplendent and full of pride in his new green uniform.

Tibby nodded and smiled. ‘They’re growing up so quickly, both of them.’

She’s seen you grow up. Seen her grandchildren.

As she tried to fathom the real expression behind her mother’s smile Annie heard Steve’s words again. She remembered the blind fear that she had felt herself when she thought that she was going to die, but more vividly still she remembered the bitterness of having to leave so much unfinished. Did Tibby feel that now? And when Tibby looked around the sunny sitting room with its chintz covers and faint smell of polish, did she feel the same sharp sense of how precious and how beautiful all of it was?

Tibby looked smaller and frailer than before, but her hair was set and she was wearing her own neat, unemphatic clothes. She was still Tibby herself, yet for all the closeness Annie had believed there to be between her mother and herself she couldn’t gauge what she felt or needed now. The careful, light conversation about the garden and the boys ran on, and Annie had the disorientating sense that neither of them was listening to a word of it.

She wanted to shout at her, Don’t go. We need you, all of us. Talk to me.

‘… But with the price of container-grown shrubs nowadays,’ Tibby sighed, ‘what else can you do … ?’

‘I know. But I’ve never had your luck or knack with cuttings.’

I talked to Steve, down there in the blackness. I still could, if I would let it happen, if there weren’t so many other things, such immutable things.

Tibby leaned farther forward and touched Annie’s arm.

‘Are you sure you’re all right, darling? You look a bit drawn in the face, to me.’

I’ve fallen in love, Tibby, with a stranger. I’d walk out of here and go straight to him if I could, if only I could.

‘I’m fine. The specialist says it will take a little time before I’m thoroughly fit again, but everything has mended perfectly well.’

I do it too, of course. I don’t talk either, not to Tibby, not even to Martin. Only to Steve, and he hears me whether I say the words or not.

I wish I was going to him now.

Annie smiled at her mother, with the conviction that they were both close to tears.

‘I must make a move, darling.’

‘Of course you must. Thomas comes out at four o’clock, doesn’t he?’

When Tibby held out her hand Annie saw that her mother’s sapphire engagement ring was slipping on her thin finger. Tibby instinctively turned it back into place with her thumb. Annie leant over and kissed her cheek, noticing the unfamiliar smell of lacquer because Tibby’s hair had grown too sparse to hold her old style.

‘I’ll come in tomorrow to see you.’

‘Couldn’t you bring Tom and Benjy with you?’

‘Won’t they tire you too much? They wear me out.’

‘I’d like to see them.’

How many more times will there be?

‘Of course I will. Goodbye, love. Sleep well.’

Annie settled her mother against her cushions again and as she left she felt her eyes on her back, greedy, looking through her at the past and into the future that Tibby wouldn’t see for herself.

Annie drove home with the hard brightness of tears behind her own eyes.

On the same evening, Martin and Annie went to do the big monthly shop at the supermarket. As they always had done in the past, they went on late-opening night and left the boys at home under Audrey’s supervision.

It was the first time they had made the trip together since Annie’s return from hospital. Along the clogged urban route she sat in the passenger seat watching the shopfronts flick past. Her face was turned away from him, but she sensed Martin glancing sideways at her, frowning in the silence that hung between them. They reached the big supermarket and Martin parked in the middle of one of the long lines of cars. They walked side by side over the pitted ground towards the entrance, skirting the puddles and the empty, abandoned wire trolleys. Even the air seemed gritty, smelling of diesel exhaust fumes, and greasy onions from the hamburger stall near the shop doors.

Annie was tired, and her legs felt suddenly so heavy that she wondered whether they would support her up and down the crowded aisles with the shopping trolley. Martin’s pace quickened and she had to hurry to keep up with him.

‘Don’t walk so fast,’ she called and he snapped back, without slowing down, ‘Let’s get it over with.’

Annie felt his anger, and her own rose sluggishly through her tiredness.

Is this what it is? she thought. Is this what I’m trying to hold on to?

The automatic doors yawned in front of them, neon-lit, and hissed open. Martin reached for a trolley and swung it round with a vicious clatter. Without speaking they wound their way through the crowds and the piled-up shopping to the end aisle and began to work their way along the shelves.

The harsh overhead lights hurt Annie’s eyes, and the colours of the endless lines of tins and packets danced up and down in front of them. She heard herself repeating a silent litany, eggs, butter, yoghurt, cheese. Love, loyalty, duty, habit.

Martin was moving along the opposite shelf and she saw his mouth set in a straight line and the stiff, angry tilt of his head. Suddenly, with a molten heat that flooded all through her, she hated him. She turned her back on him and stared blindly at the shelf at eye-level, where the red and blue and orange packs shouted their rival claims at her. She reached up, still with the heat of anger flushing her face, and took down a packet of breakfast cereal. She dropped it into the trolley and then another, and followed them with a packet of the sugary variety that Ben insisted on.

Fruit juice, skimmed milk. Routine, responsibility, today, tomorrow. Endlessly. Groping through the fog of her anger Annie tried to recall the certainty that had possessed her under the rubble. She had been sure then that her life and its order was precious. The certainty had evaporated. Now, in the hideous supermarket with its tides of defeated shoppers, she felt the structure of her life silently crumbling. She stood in the rubble of it, as trapped as she had been by the bombed wreckage of her Christmas store.

Martin turned around with an armful of tinned food and saw her face. Annie knew that her expression fanned his own anger.

‘Come on,’ he said sourly. ‘I don’t want to spend all night in here.’

She moved again with a jerk and they worked on along their lines of shelving, not looking at one another and separated by the other loitering shoppers and their cumbersome trolleys.

At the far end of the shop they turned the corner to start the next aisle. Annie’s pace was slower and Martin accidentally ran the wheel of the heavy trolley into her heel bone. The pain shot up her leg, so intense for a second that it made her eyes water.

‘Sorry,’ Martin said, still without looking at her.

The pain receded as quickly as it had come and in its wake Annie’s anger intensified. She had to clench her fists to control her longing to lash out with them, first at Martin and then at all the tins and bottles and their jaunty labels, sweeping them all together into a broken pile on the supermarket floor. Her anger spread like hot spilt liquid to flood over the other shoppers who blocked her path and stared past her with blank faces, over the supermarket and the life that it represented for her, and everything that had happened since the bombing. The anger was so potent that the current of it sapped her strength and she found herself weak and trembling. She leant against the corner of the shelf to steady herself as it engulfed her and swept her along with it. Under the bald lights and the big orange banners that shouted, ‘SAVE’, Annie knew the first real anger and bitterness against the bombers for what they had done to her. In that instant she hated the world, and the life she led in it, and everything there was except for Steve.

And she was angry because she was separated from him.

As soon as she realized it the flood of her anger turned. The currents swirled and changed direction and then, as if it had been no more than a trickle that evaporated in the heat of understanding, it disappeared.

Annie looked in bewilderment at a row of jam jars, staring at the plum and dull crimson and speckled scarlet of the jam in the glass containers as if it were entirely new to her.

I can’t stay here, like this, she thought with the painful clear-sightedness that her anger had left in its wake.

I’ll have to go.

I’ll have to leave Martin, and go to him.

The knowledge made her shiver. It brought her neither happiness nor relief. A few yards away, over the heads of the crowd, she could see Martin plodding down the aisle. His mouth was set in the same grim line.

Annie’s legs felt as boneless as the jam in the glass jars but she made herself follow him, mechanically picking the family groceries off the shelves as she went.

At last they reached the check-out lines and they stood in silence, inching forward until their turn came. Martin unloaded the trolley and Annie packed the goods into boxes. Eggs, butter, yoghurt, cheese. To feed the family. Annie was shaking as if she had a fever.

Outside, the sky was rimmed orange-brown with the muddy glow of street-lamps. They picked their way past the puddles again to the car, and piled the boxes of shopping in over the tailgate. Still they had spoken hardly an unnecessary word. Annie shivered convulsively, pulling her coat around her, and then slid gratefully into the car as Martin banged the door open for her.

Both doors slammed again, isolating them in the rubber- and plastic-scented box. The usual litter of toys and drawings discarded by the boys drifted over the back seat. Martin fumbled with the keys in the ignition and clicked on the headlights. The light reflected upwards and threw unnatural shadows into his eyesockets and the angles of his jawline. Annie waited miserably, without thinking, for the car engine to splutter and jerk them into reverse. But Martin sat still, with his hands braced on the steering wheel. He seemed to be staring ahead into the orange-tinged darkness.

And then, slowly, he turned to her and said, ‘I want to know what’s wrong with you.’

Annie shook her head from side to side, unable to speak.

Martin’s voice rose. ‘I want to know. Say something, can’t you, even if it’s only fuck off?’

‘I don’t know what to say.’ Even in her own ears Annie’s response sounded thin and pathetic. Martin’s knuckles went white as his fists tightened on the wheel.

‘Why don’t you bloody know what to say? I’m your husband. Have you forgotten that?’

‘No, I haven’t forgotten.’

‘Talk to me then. I’ve tried to be as patient and understanding as I can. I’ve waited, and held off, and hoped you might get round to mentioning why you look as though we all turn your stomach. Why your face never cracks into a smile any more, and why you can’t even bring yourself close enough to me to exchange the time of day. Why, Annie?’

Martin’s questions came spilling out, the words tangling with one another, and she saw a tiny fleck of spit at the corner of his mouth catching the light. His tongue darted it away.

‘Why is it? I want to know where you’ve gone. I want to hear it from you. Say something.’

He was shouting now. Annie saw a couple passing the car turn back to stare curiously, their faces white patches in the gloom. She had no anger left, nothing to match Martin’s. And she knew that she had no reason to answer his rage with her own, because she recognized the portrait that he painted of her.

‘I’m sorry.’ Self-dislike and despair muted her voice.

Martin spat again, ‘Sorry? Jesus, you’re sorry. Look, I’m sorry that you were hurt, and so badly frightened, and that you were ill and in pain and subjected to all those things in the hospital afterwards. But that’s all over now, Annie. You’ve got to start up again. Can’t you understand? If you want me, and the kids, and everything we had before, you’ve got to do it now.’

Annie looked down at her hands in her lap, twisting her fingers together like pale stalks. Martin is right, and wrong, she thought. I should talk to him, of course I should, but there is nothing I could possibly say.

‘Annie.’

His hands dropped from the steering wheel and they shot out and grabbed her. He shook her, and her head wobbled. Annie knew that he wanted to hit her, and she knew then how desperate he was for her reaction. She jerked defensively to face him and managed to whisper through stiff lips, ‘Leave me alone, can’t you? Just, just leave me alone.’

Martin’s hands dropped heavily to his sides. They were silent for a long minute, looking at one another in the head-lamps’ inverted light. Annie was ironically reminded of the old days when they had quarrelled violently, like this, and then the passion of their reconciliations had reflected the violence back again. A wave of exhausted sadness and regret washed over her.

‘Look. Are you ill? Do you need to get help? A psychiatrist, I mean, Annie.’

‘No,’ Annie said. ‘I’m not mad. I wasn’t, not while it was happening and not afterwards and not now. I don’t need to have my head looked at.’

Martin exhaled, a long, ragged breath. ‘In that case, is it Steve?’

Annie went cold. He had been thinking about it, about them, she realized. She had never mentioned his name, and if it was just a wild guess of Martin’s, wouldn’t he have qualified it somehow? Wouldn’t he have said, Is it anything to do with the man you were with, in there? Steve? Is it to do with him?

Instead of that he had just quietly asked her, as if the question had always been there, waiting.

Tick, tick. Annie heard the seconds whispering around them in the vinyl interior of their car.

‘No.’ Until the word came, she didn’t know what it would be. ‘It’s nothing to do with him.’

And then the sadness took her by the throat, so forcibly that she wanted to drop her head against the seat back, draw her knees up to her chest and let the sobs break out. But because she had said, No, she kept her neck rigid, and went on staring with dry eyes out into the darkness. I’ve done it now, she thought. I have begun the lies. She saw a net of them, drawing in ahead of her. And would the net split open in the end and let the truth out, as she had envisaged through the flood of anger inside the supermarket?

To leave Martin, and go to Steve?

With sudden briskness Martin turned the key in the ignition and the engine came to life. He swung the wheel and the car nosed out of the car park before he glanced sideways at Annie again. Seeing her face he dropped his hand briefly on to her knee. ‘I’m sorry I lost my temper,’ he said. ‘It hasn’t been very easy for me, either, do you see? I thought you were dead, and then I was afraid that you would die. And now, when it should be all over, you’ve gone somewhere and left me behind.’

The car moved slowly forwards in a double line of traffic. Martin drove one-handed and took Annie’s hand in the other. In a low voice he said, ‘I don’t want to be without you.’

Annie opened her mouth, afraid that her voice would crack, but she found the ability somehow to whisper, ‘I know that.’

Martin drove steadily on. I don’t want you to lie to me, either, he could have added. But strangely, the baldness of Annie’s denial had come as a relief. He saw clearly through it, and saw that she wanted to protect him from being hurt. The carefulness and the irrationality of it touched him, and he felt a warm wash of affection for her that was nothing to do with anger or bitterness.

Nothing had happened yet, he told himself. Perhaps, even, nothing would.

They followed the familiar route, with Annie’s cold fingers still gripped in her husband’s warm ones. They reached home, and they went in and unpacked the shopping side by side in the kitchen.

And later, when they went to bed, Martin lay still for a moment in the darkness and then he reached out for her, as he had always done in the past after they had quarrelled. His hand stroked her shoulder, and then he moved to fit himself into the curve of her back.

‘Don’t be angry.’

‘I’m not angry.’

She was reminded again of the times before. They had always made up their differences, and they had drawn closer because of them. Not now, Annie thought, because of the lie that they had already started. Martin’s hand moved again, to her waist and the bony point of her hips, warming her. His fingers traced the ridge of bone under the skin and he whispered, ‘Poor love. Come here to me.’

His hands coaxed her. Annie thought, He’s good and generous. Truer than I deserve.

For all the weight of her sadness, it was a relief to turn inwards to him. Their bodies met along their full length and his mouth touched hers. Annie felt her husband stir against her. She let her head rest on his shoulder, her face turned to the warmth of his throat. His hands moved, patiently, coaxing her. Annie held herself still, feeling that the anxiety and guilt and sadness of the day were just contained within the leaky package of her body.

But Martin knew her body too. Slowly and gently he worked on it until her fear of his intrusion melted and became, at last, fear that he would draw back again. Her mind stopped revolving around in its tight, overworked circles as the warmth spread through her veins. Annie’s mouth opened and she tasted his skin, following the line of his jaw with her mouth. Under the point of it she felt his pulse flicker against her tongue. A half-forgotten urgency sharpened itself inside her.

‘Martin.’

‘Not yet,’ he whispered. ‘Not yet.’

‘Please.’

The note in her voice broke through his control. He took her wrists and held her so that she couldn’t move. He looked down into her face for an instant and then he fitted himself inside her. It was easy, and certain, because they had known one another for so long. She forgot, as he moved and she lifted her hips to answer him, all the questions and their bleak answers. The ripples of internal pleasure were spreading and Annie let herself be submerged in them. Ever since she had come home to Martin she had felt stiff and cold and now, however briefly, the feelings were gone. She closed her eyes and let their bodies take her over. The peak she was struggling for reared for a long moment beyond her grasp, then within her grasp, and then she had reached it and conquered it and the sharpness of it stabbed within her until at last it melted and ran away down the steep slopes into the level plain of satisfaction.

Annie felt the tears melt too behind her eyes. They ran down her face and into her hair, hot against Martin’s cheeks until he rubbed them away with his fingers and kissed her eyelids, and then he took her face between his hands and kissed it and whispered to her, ‘We’ll be all right, Annie. You see, we’ll be all right.’

She held him in turn as he moved inside her again, until he cried out with his mouth against hers, and then they lay in a different silence, wrapped in each other’s arms in the quiet room. Annie heard Benjamin in his bed across the corridor, turning over and then shouting out something in his sleep. She was very tired, and she knew from Martin’s breathing that he was still awake, listening to her. The circular treadmill of her thoughts began to rotate again until she was forming the word, Steve, and the picture of him lying in the hospital ward, watching the ceiling.

I must decide, she told herself. I must think. Do whatever is for the best.

But she was drifting now, unpinned by exhaustion, almost asleep.

Not now. Soon, I will. I must.

For the first time since she had come home from hospital, Annie fell asleep before Martin. He held her for a long time, not wanting to move in case he disturbed her. The day of the bombing, when he had struggled with fallen masonry to try and reach her, had taken her away from him. It was only now, in this moment of closeness, that he realized just how far. He wanted her back more than anything in the world.

Nothing had changed, Annie discovered in the days that followed, except that the atmosphere in the house was easier. They tried to show one another, with little, unintrusive gestures, that there was a truce. On Annie’s part it was no more than cooking a favourite dinner or buying a special bottle of wine from the off-licence on the corner, but she did her best to appear to be cheerful as they ate and drank, even when her heart was heavy. In his turn Martin brought home an armful of daffodils to fill the clear glass jug that stood on the kitchen dresser, or the latest copy of a magazine that Annie considered too expensive to buy out of her housekeeping. They thanked each other briefly, almost shyly, but they didn’t try to go beyond that. There were still silences, but they judged separately that the silences were more companionable than hostile, and they didn’t try to fill them artificially.

Thomas and Benjamin, with their childish perceptiveness, noticed the difference at once.

‘I think you’re better now, Mummy,’ Thomas said and Annie smiled at him, happy with his confidence.

‘I am better,’ she answered, keeping her awareness of the other things at bay as far as she could.

The boys quarrelled and fought less, slept better, and went off happier in the mornings. Annie could almost have believed that her life might in the end return to the old, smooth pattern of before the bombing, if it had not been for her visits to the hospital, and Steve.

February turned into March. In the middle of March there came a spell of clear, still weather, so warm that the bare, black branches of the trees looked incongruous against the duck-egg blue of the sky. In her garden Annie watched the clumps of daffodils turn almost overnight from sappy stalks, tipped with a swelling of green and pale yellow, into solid banks of miraculous gold. The earth smelt sweet and moist, and in the mornings the sun shone with unexpected strength on the dewy grass and turned the patch of lawn into a sheet of silver.

On the fifth sunny morning, Annie walked with Benjy to his nursery. Even though they made the same trip every day, it was slow because the little boy wanted to examine everything they passed, stopping to peer in through garden gates in search of cats that he had met there before, and at the parrot who sat autocratically on his perch in the window of the house on the corner. Annie walked slowly, patiently, while Benjy alternately dawdled and ran ahead, as bright as a slick of paint in his scarlet tracksuit.

After the customary delays and detours they turned the last corner, and came to the church hall that housed the nursery group. There was a knot of mothers with prams and pushchairs standing talking in the yard outside. Benjy pushed through them and ran through the open doors, and Annie followed him, nodding and smiling at the other mothers as she passed them. She knew them all, because she saw them doing the same thing every morning, and she knew their children and their problems, and their houses in the network of streets surrounding the church hall. Most of them lived lives that were similar to Annie’s own, but in the last weeks she had felt so remote that it had been hard to find a word or a gesture that would bridge the gulf.

‘Hello, Annie,’ they called to her. ‘Benjy’s eager this morning, isn’t he?’

‘Feeling the joys of spring, I suppose.’

‘Wish I was,’ someone else chipped in. ‘Sophie had us both up all night.’

‘You look better yourself, Annie. The sight of the sun does us all good, doesn’t it?’

In the past Annie had found the simple camaraderie comforting and even sustaining. She had felt, before, that they all shared the same difficulties and the same rewards. And these women had clubbed together to send her flowers when she was in hospital, then taken it in turns to invite Benjy to play with their own children, so that Annie could rest for an hour or two. She felt that she didn’t know, now, where she belonged or what she believed in. Part of her was still here, amongst the women, yet so much of her was nowhere except with Steve. It made her feel lonely, to be together and yet apart. Annie went slowly inside, out of the bright sunshine, thinking of the random violence that had altered her perspectives so violently that she doubted whether she would ever look out on the same landscape again.

The hall was dingy, but that was hardly noticeable under the bright layers of painting and collages that the staff and children had stuck all over the walls. Children squirmed over the climbing frame and in and out of the Wendy house, and groups of them stood around the little tables deciding whether to paint, or squeeze dough or glue strips of coloured paper into necklaces. As it always did, the sight made Annie smile. They were so busy, all of them, fragile on their wobbly legs, and yet perfectly robust.

Benjy had made a bee-line for the dough table, and now he was squeezing bright pink coils of it between his fingers, with an expression of furious concentration. Annie went across to him and kissed the top of his head.

‘See you later, then?’

‘Unh,’ Benjy said.

She walked out into the sunshine once again.

On the way back she took a different route, passing through the little local park where the daffodils would be followed by municipal rows of scarlet tulips. The council contractors were already repainting the swings and the conical roundabout that Thomas loved to spin faster and faster until Benjy screamed in giddy terror. Annie thought dreamily of the hours that she had spent in this park, from the days when Thomas was a tiny baby out for his first outings in the pram. Martin sometimes brought them here at weekends now, and played elaborate hiding and chasing games with them in the little plot of trees and shrubs enclosed by green railings. She crossed the grass, leaving shiny footprints in the wetness. Beyond the park was a line of shops. Thomas was bringing home a friend for tea, and Annie thought that she would make a chocolate cake.

She did the necessary shopping, exchanging pleasantries with the cheerful Indian family in the general stores. Then she turned towards home, swinging her purchases in a plastic carrier bag. She reached the house and the gate squealed on its hinges, swinging back against the hedge and releasing its dusty scent of privet leaves. Annie went inside, picking up a scatter of brown envelopes from the doormat. The hallway smelt of coffee and the potpourri in a bowl on a sidetable.

Without thinking of anything, her head comfortably empty, Annie walked into the kitchen and filled the kettle. Martin had left the radio playing when he went out, and Annie was whistling to the music, softly, through pursed lips, when the doorbell rang.

As she crossed the hallway she saw a shadow, unidentifiable, beyond the coloured glass. And then she opened her front door and saw that it was Steve waiting on the doorstep.

It was as if the colour drained from the accessible world. The two of them were left standing, face to face, the only moving, breathing things in a grey landscape.

It was Steve who spoke first.

‘Can’t I come inside?’ he prompted her gently.

Annie looked out at the empty street and the windows of the houses opposite, her innocent front gate that Steve had closed behind him, and the crocuses that edged the garden path. Then, stiff-armed, she opened the front door a little wider. As he stepped into the house Annie saw that Steve’s crutches were gone. He leaved heavily on a stick instead.

With the door closed against the eyes of the street they looked at one another in the dim hallway. Benjy’s tricycle was abandoned at the foot of the stairs.

‘How did you find me?’ Annie asked, stupid with surprise.

‘Were you intending to hide?’

‘No. I didn’t mean that. I’m just surprised, to see you here …’

Steve smiled at her, but Annie read the anxiety in his face. It had been a risk to come. But he must have wanted to, very badly.

‘The telephone directory,’ he reminded her. ‘I looked you up.’

‘Yes. Yes, of course. Come … come through, and I’ll make you a cup of coffee.’

I’m talking to him as if he’s someone from the PTA, Annie thought. Or one of Martin’s clients. She picked up Benjy’s bike and put it aside so that he could pass, and led the way into the kitchen. She tried to hide her awkwardness by rattling the coffee percolator, and the cups as she set them out on the tray. Her hands were shaking, and she was rawly conscious that his nearness overturned the mundane order of her kitchen, as she had known that it would. She longed for him to touch her, and she dreaded it.

‘When did they let you out? You didn’t tell me that they might.’ Her voice shook, too.

‘I let myself out. One leap, and I was free.’ They smiled at each other and Annie turned quickly to the coffee pot.

‘Do you take milk?’

‘Please.’

‘Would you like anything to eat? What is it, breakfast or elevenses?’

‘No, thank you.’

Steve watched her as she moved economically from cupboard to sink. He had imagined her so often, just like this, against the backdrop of her kitchen. Yet now that he was here with her he couldn’t see any of it, nothing except Annie herself. Her hair was growing again to frame her face. In her jeans and shirt, with her untidy hair and her soft, dazed expression, she looked almost like a young girl. As he watched her Steve realized that he had focused so hard on the way to reach her that he had hardly thought beyond the moment when she would open her door. It made him feel so like an adolescent, at a loss when finally confronted with a real girl, that Steve laughed aloud. Annie turned, and when she saw his expression the colour flooded into her face. She put the coffee pot down abruptly.

‘Annie.’

Steve’s stick squeaked on the polished floor as he went to her.

‘Yes.’

‘Annie, I can’t start all over from the beginning. Not with you.’

‘I know that.’

We needn’t talk about what the doctors say, about the weather or the garden or whether he takes one lump or two, Annie thought. Not now, and not ever.

She lifted her head and Steve cupped her face between his hands. He bent and kissed her mouth and her throat and the corners of her eyes. Annie kissed him in return, giving herself up to him, until he took her in his arms and almost lifted her. Their freedom alone in the empty house was extraordinary, beckoning them. For a giddy, drowning moment Annie was just Annie, forgetting the rooms and the furniture that she and Martin had bought and the pictures that they had chosen and hung together. Steve’s hand touched her shoulder and then her breast, and her mouth opened beneath his.

Annie forgot everything except her need for him. The ache of the weeks of separation from him sharpened now that he was here, and close enough for her to understand how he could assuage it. They might have been anywhere, or nowhere, because all that mattered to them was that they were together.

Steve whispered, with his mouth against hers, ‘My love.’

And Annie echoed him, ‘I love you.’ They felt the curves of their separate smiles touching and becoming the same smile of joy because it was the truth, and because it wasn’t time yet to remember what the truth would mean.

Annie had no idea how long they stood there, locked together. When at last they stepped back to see one another again she was giddy, and her mouth was bruised and burning.

They examined each other’s faces, inch by inch, and it was then, seeing into one another’s eyes, that reality intruded again. Annie’s expression changed but Steve took her hand, holding it tightly between his own.

‘Don’t,’ he begged her. ‘Stay with me.’

‘I want to,’ Annie said. ‘What can we do?’

He put his arm around her again and Annie rested her face against his shoulder. With his cheek touching her hair, Steve stared over her head at the pine table in the bay window, and the stick-back chairs grouped neatly around it. There was an antique pine dresser too, with pieces of willow-pattern china and photographs of her husband and children arranged on the shelves. Outside the window he could see the facing houses. Annie and Martin would know the people who lived behind those doors. Probably their children played together, went to the same schools.

He understood, suddenly, the magnitude of what he wanted from her. He wanted her to leave this. Yet how could he ask her to walk away from all the accretions of a married life, and come with him? He wanted her to, with single-minded intensity. Steve understood quite clearly that, just as he had never loved anyone before, he loved Annie fiercely now. And the intimacy that they had shared, afraid, and blinded by the dark, stayed with him. It seemed more precious and more real than all the rest of his life.

He took her hand, very gently, and guided her to the table. He pulled out a chair and made her sit down. The coffee cups sat forgotten on their tray between them.

‘I want you to come and live with me,’ Steve said. She made a move to interrupt him but he held her hand tighter and went on, faster. ‘Not today. Not next week, not even next month if you really can’t. When you’re ready to come to me, Annie. If you want to come.’

Annie thought, I do, and the enormity of it was like a tidal wave, submerging her. She looked at Steve’s face and at the way that a muscle at one corner of his mouth pulled it downwards in anxiety. I should say, I can’t. I can’t leave my husband and children, or bring my children to you. But I can’t be without you, either. I know that, after this morning.

‘I don’t want there to be half-measures between you and me, Annie.’

Not an affair, she thought, with me creeping away to meet you when I can steal the time from Martin and the boys. No, I couldn’t bear that, either. It must be white or black, of course, with no murky shades in between. Annie remembered the evening in the supermarket, and the anger with Martin that had overtaken her. She had thought that a truce had reigned since then, but now she felt more as if they had been nursing themselves, separately, in readiness for this.

She jerked her head up suddenly.

‘I don’t want half-measures either. But whatever has to be done must be done gently, so that Martin … so that it doesn’t hurt Martin more than it has to.’

It was only then, when she saw the relief rub out the sharp lines in Steve’s face, that Annie realized how he had gambled, coming to ask her for everything, without knowing or even hoping for what her answer would be. His honesty and the love that she read behind it touched Annie’s heart.

‘And so?’ he whispered. ‘Will you come?’

She waited, listening to the little sounds of the house as if she might hear something that would stop her. But there was nothing, and she answered at last, ‘Yes.’

Steve moved then, stumbling from his chair with such violence that his awkward leg caught it and tipped it backwards, banging to the floor. Neither of them even glanced at it.

They had reached out for each other, and they were as hungry as if they had eaten nothing since they lay together in the darkness of the store. Annie knew an intensity of physical longing that she hadn’t felt for years and years. Not since Matthew.

She heard herself laugh, shakily.

‘I was thinking of Matthew.’

‘I know,’ he murmured, and he tipped Annie’s head back so that he could taste the hollow at the base of her throat. ‘Don’t. Think of me.’

That was easy. It was easy as he touched the pearly buttons of her shirt, and then undid them. He bent his head again and kissed the curve of her breast where the shirt fell away from it. As his mouth touched her nipple Annie closed her eyes and buried her face in his black hair.

She thought, for a longing, oblivious instant, of the bed upstairs. It was neat and smooth under its white crocheted cover. She had straightened it before she took Benjy to the nursery.

No.

And then she looked at the stripped boards of the kitchen floor, which Martin had sanded and waxed.

No, nor in any of the other corners of the house that they had created and shared.

Annie lifted her head, and with her fingers entwined in Steve’s hair she made him look up at her. ‘Not here,’ she whispered.

Steve held her for another moment, and then his arms dropped stiffly to his sides. They were both looking at the dresser with its blue plates and framed photographs.

Steve made a little, apologetic gesture. ‘Of course not here.’

They turned away, not looking at each other.

Annie put her hand on the coffee pot to feel if it was still hot enough. She poured each of them a cup and they sat down at the table. But it was painful to see Steve sitting in Martin’s chair, and so she stood up again almost immediately. She carried her cup across the room and stood drinking the tepid coffee by the kitchen window, looking out at the garden.

Steve said in a low voice, ‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have come here.’

Annie slammed her cup down on to the draining board and went to him. She stood behind the chair and put her arms over his shoulders, resting her cheek against his head. He grasped her wrists, holding her there.

‘Of course you should, if you needed to. I needed you to. I didn’t realize how much.’ After a moment she added quietly, ‘It won’t be very easy. Doing … what we’ve agreed.’

We haven’t even begun to talk about what it will mean in pain and unhappiness for all of us, Annie thought.

‘Do you think I expect it to be easy, Annie? I thought about it, all those weeks in hospital. I wouldn’t have dared to come here and ask you, if I didn’t believe it was …’ There was a pause, and then he brought the word out, painfully, ‘… inescapable. Because we belong to one another, good or bad.’

There was another silence. Annie rubbed her cheek against his hair, moving it so that her mouth touched the thin skin at his temple. She felt a tiny pulse flickering there and was reminded of their pathetic, physical frailty under the mounds of rubble. But they had survived. Perhaps they were more resilient, all of them, than she gave them credit for. They would survive.

Would Benjamin? And Thomas?

She straightened up abruptly and began to walk around the kitchen, touching a spoon and a silver-plated toast-rack that Barbara had given to her, straightening the glass jars that held coffee and tea.

‘What would you like to do now?’ Steve asked her gently.

Annie looked at the oven clock.

‘I collect Benjy from his nursery at twelve,’ she said. ‘Before that, perhaps we could go for a walk?’

He smiled at her. ‘All right. A walk it is.’

‘A very short, gentle one, because of your leg.’

His smile broadened. ‘I’m faster than you think.’

They went out together into the March sunshine.

Steve’s car was a big grey BMW, parked at the kerb at the opposite end of the road.

‘I wasn’t sure which was your house,’ he said. He unlocked the passenger door and helped Annie into the plush interior. She was interpreting his words inside her head. It was tactful to park a car like this a little way away. Someone might see it, and wonder who you are.

As they purred out of the quiet street Annie stared straight ahead through the windshield. She knew that her face was pink and that her expression was unnatural enough to make anyone who knew her, and who might be watching, look just a little harder. She thought back to the moments of happiness that she had felt with Steve in the hospital, and wondered at her own naïveté in letting herself believe, however briefly, that loving him as she did was simple and natural.

Steve drove smoothly away from Annie’s immediate neighbourhood. As they left the streets behind she began to relax. She let her head fall back against her seat, passively watching the shop windows as they rolled by. She felt somehow that now she had left the house and come with Steve, the first of a long chain of decisions had been made, irrevocably, and that was a kind of comfort.

It was a short drive to the north side of Hampstead Heath. Annie noticed that Steve seemed well-acquainted with the belt of expensive housing immediately surrounding the Heath. He turned briskly into an unmarked side-road that led directly to the open space. He raised his eyebrows at her and she nodded her assent. Steve took his stick from the back of the car and they crossed on to the grass, walking slowly, shoulder to shoulder.

Annie glanced back at the large houses standing half-hidden behind their high fences. ‘Are you a regular in places like this?’

Steve shrugged and laughed. ‘Here? Film-producer country? Not exactly. I’ve been asked to one or two private functions in houses around and about. And they are functions, believe me. There was a very stiff party, I remember, in one of those houses over there. The green-tiled one, I think. I walked across here afterwards, in the very early hours of the morning, talking to someone. It was so quiet,’ he recalled. ‘Like somewhere very remote, an island or a stretch of moorland. Not London at all.’

Annie wondered whether he had been with Cass, or Vicky, or someone else altogether. She knew that her retrospective jealousy was inappropriate, but it took a moment to overcome it. She put her hands in the pockets of her jeans, dismissing the image of some film woman in a Dynasty dress. She concentrated on their path over the short, tussocky grass.

‘Are you all right to walk like this?’

‘Perfectly, if we don’t go too far or too fast. If we do, I shall have to lean on your arm.’

‘My pleasure,’ she whispered.

They smiled at each other, suddenly warmed by happiness that was stronger than the sunshine, and Annie forgot her jealousy again.

‘Why do you come to film-producer functions?’ Annie asked. ‘I don’t know anything about what you do, do I?’

‘I can tell you, if you really want.’

The open heath dipping in front of them was deserted except for stray joggers in their tracksuits and one or two solitary walkers whose dogs sniffed at the dead leaves still lying in the hollows: for Steve and Annie their isolation here in the empty space under the blue sky was comforting.

‘I do want. Tell me everything.’

They walked on, absorbed in one another, talking about little things as they had done in the long hours in hospital.

It was Steve who looked at his watch and reminded Annie at last that they must turn back to the car. Their steps were heavier as they retraced them, and they drove back through the streets towards Annie’s home in deepening silence.

Two streets away from the nursery Annie said abruptly, ‘Could you let me out here?’

‘Of course not,’ Steve answered, unthinking. ‘I’ll take you right to the door.’

‘No,’ she said sharply. ‘I …’ She was thinking of the group of mothers on the church hall steps, watching her.

Steve glanced at her face and then he drew in to the side of the road. His hands stayed gripping the steering wheel.

‘I’m sorry,’ Annie said softly.

Steve was silent, looking out at the suburban street. Annie wanted to whisper his name, to lay her head against his shoulder, but she made herself sit rigid.

‘When will I see you again?’ he asked her.

‘I don’t know. As soon as I possibly can. Will … the daytime be all right?’

‘Come at any time you want, my darling.’

‘I’ll … come to you, this time.’ She said the words very quietly, almost with distaste. She was thinking, then we’ll be committed to the lies. Or else to making all the hurtful steps towards the truth.

Oh, Steve, don’t go and leave me.

Go now, why don’t you, and leave us in peace?

She felt herself torn, the pain from all the ragged pieces as severe as any of the physical hurt she had felt in the darkness.

‘All right, then,’ Annie said wearily.

Steve took a little square of pasteboard from his wallet and gave it to her.

‘That’s my address. And my number. You can always reach me there.’

‘Thank you,’ she whispered. She opened her handbag and slipped the card without looking at it through a tear in the lining, where it could lie safely hidden.

She lifted her head to look at him then. His face was soft, and his eyes were clouded with sympathy. Not a despoiler at all, Annie thought. Why was I thinking that of him? She leant forward very slowly and touched the corner of his mouth with her own. For a second they held together, burning, motionless. Then, as stiffly as an old woman, she sat back again.

‘Goodbye,’ Annie said.

He nodded, his eyes fixed on her face.

Annie fumbled for the door catch and stepped out on to the kerb. She raised her arm in an awkward wave and then she began to walk, too fast, heading for the church hall nursery.

Steve watched her until she was out of sight, but she never turned to look back.

‘Can I do this puzzle?’ Benjy asked. He was sitting at the kitchen table, already tipping the pieces out of their box.

Annie glanced briefly over her shoulder. She was standing at the sink, peeling potatoes.

‘All right. Remember that there isn’t much time before bed.’

‘I want to.’

‘I said yes, Ben. Just don’t get cross if it isn’t finished before you have to go upstairs.’ Annie’s response was patient, automatic. She wasn’t listening, because her thoughts were busy elsewhere. Benjy spread the pieces out over the table and stared fiercely at them.

‘I want you to help me.’

‘I can’t, love. I’m busy now. You do it.’

Benjy reached out across the table and with a lazy sweep of his arm he tipped the puzzle pieces over the edge and on to the floor. They fell with a satisfying clatter.

Annie threw down her potato peeler, the second clatter like an echo. ‘What did you do that for, Ben?’

The little boy gazed at her, his face a pucker of defiance. Then he asked, ‘Why are you always busy?’

Annie stood still, holding on to the sink edge, staring at her children.

Thomas lifted his head from his drawing. He said, as if he were stating the obvious for his brother’s benefit, ‘Because she’s a grown-up.’

They watched her, the two of them, accusing and vulnerable at the same time, their uncertainty clear for her to see.

‘Oh, Thomas,’ she said.

Annie went to them. Benjy slid off his chair and wrapped his arms around her legs. Thomas stood up awkwardly, his shoulders hunched, feeling that he was too old to run into his mother’s arms. She held them out to him and then she hugged them both, burying their faces against her so that they wouldn’t see her own expression.

‘I’m sorry,’ she managed to say. ‘I’m sorry that I haven’t been very much fun, lately.’

I’m doing this all wrong, Annie thought. I’m thinking about myself, and Steve, every minute of the day. Instead of my kids. It would be better for them if I weren’t here. If I just went, and left them, would they be happier in the end, than if I took them away from their home and their father, to a stranger? Suddenly, she was almost overcome by the physical pull of her love for them. She drew them closer, smelling their warm, grubby scent, her cheek against Thomas’s hair.

I can’t leave them, she thought. If I go, they must come with me.

‘I love you both,’ she whispered. ‘You know that.’

She hugged them one last time, and then let them go. The button on her cuff caught against Thomas’s ear and he clapped his hand to it, yelling, ‘Ow!’

‘Baby,’ Benjamin said sternly and then the three of them were laughing, the tension breaking up like mist.

‘Come on,’ Annie said. ‘It’s bath time.’

Another day negotiated, she thought, as they went up the stairs.

The boys were asleep before Martin came home. He was tired after a meeting with a particularly exigent client, and he came into the kitchen wearily rubbing his hand over his eyes.

‘Was it a bad day, then?’ Annie asked.

Martin pecked her cheek, reaching past her for the wine bottle at the same time. ‘Mmm? Only fairly bad. Dinner smells good. How was your day?’

‘Oh. Usual,’ Annie said carefully.

Martin poured himself a drink and took the evening paper over to the sofa at the far end of the room. He cleared a pile of clean washing out of the way and sank down with a sigh of relief.

‘Thank God for peace and quite,’ Annie heard him murmur.

She stood at the stove, poking unnecessarily at a saucepan with her wooden spoon. She was thinking, If I say something now, will it sound as if I haven’t been able to hold it back? If I don’t mention it till later, will it come out sounding contrived? Annie frowned down into the bubbling casserole. Lying didn’t come easily.

‘Martin?’ she said, too loudly.

‘Yes?’

‘I thought I might go shopping tomorrow. Down to the West End. The boys need some things, and so do I. Benjy’s going out to play for the afternoon, and Audrey will come in at tea-time …’

Martin looked up from the paper. It was a good sign that she felt safe enough to go into crowded stores again. He smiled at her, trying to gauge if it was anxiety or the effort of concealment that made her voice sound strained.

‘Good idea. Look, shall I come with you? I couldn’t manage all day, but I might take a couple of hours after lunch.’

‘There’s no need.’ Look down into the saucepan. Stir in one direction, then the other, take a deep breath. ‘It’s boring things, like a new duffel coat for Tom.’

I hate lying to him.

Martin watched her averted profile for a moment. And then he said lightly, ‘Okay. If you’re sure you’ll be all right. Take the joint account chequebook. There’s a couple of hundred pounds in that account.’

‘Thanks,’ Annie said. And so, she thought, she would have to rush into John Lewis’s on the way home, and buy things to make her husband believe that she had been shopping all day long. Annie realized that the sight of the food was making her feel sick. She wondered bleakly whether it was her love affair itself that was sordid, or whether it was the lying and the subterfuge that made it seem so.

She had telephoned Steve two days ago, when she knew that she couldn’t go any longer without seeing him. Her hands shook as she dialled the number, but they steadied again as soon as he answered. His voice sounded very warm and confident.

‘I can arrange for a whole day. Until the children’s suppertime, that is,’ she said.

‘When?’

‘On Thursday. Is that all right?’

‘Of course it is. I’ll take you to lunch somewhere.’

And so it had been arranged. Annie dropped the wooden spoon into the sink with the rest of the washing up.

‘Dinner’s ready, Martin.’

‘Wonderful.’

Another ordinary evening. Annie slept badly that night, restlessly turning between guilt and happiness.

In the morning, when the house was empty and quiet after the rush of work and school, she walked dreamily through the cluttered rooms. She put the cushions straight on the old chesterfield, and wound up the pretty little French clock that stood on the mantelpiece. Then she went upstairs. She touched the bottle of body lotion on her dressing table, then opened one of the drawers and looked at her underwear neatly folded inside. Annie owned an expensive set of cream lace and silk underthings, but Martin had given them to her for her birthday a year ago. Annie took out her plain, everyday things and slammed the drawer shut again. She lifted a blue corduroy dress off its hanger and put that on too, defiantly not looking at herself in the wardrobe mirror. When she was dressed she went into the bathroom and combed her hair into waves around her face. Almost as an afterthought she took out a pair of jet combs that Tibby had given her, saying, ‘I won’t need these now that my hair’s so thin.’ She pinned the waves of hair back, and stared into her own eyes. They seemed very bright, and there were spots of colour on her high cheekbones. She looked, Annie thought, as if she were about to do something very dangerous, and desperate.

At midday she put her grey coat on, bought to replace the blue one she had worn to go Christmas shopping, how long ago? She picked up the chequebook that Martin had left for her on the dresser in the kitchen, and put it into her bag. For a moment she stood looking at the telephone, thinking, I could still ring. I could tell him that I can’t come, after all. And then she thought of Steve, waiting in his empty flat for her to come to him. I must go. I can’t not do it, not now.

She left the house. She was going to slam the front door, but in the end she closed it behind her with a tiny, final click.

Steve lived at the top of an anonymous block not far from Harrods. Annie rode up in the mirrored lift, turning away from the unwelcome sight of her repeated reflection. When the doors opened on the top floor she stepped out into a long carpeted corridor. She hesitated, caught a last glimpse of her desperate, defiant expression, turned and marched smartly down the length of deep pile. She rang his bell and he opened the door immediately.

Steve kissed her cheek, his hand briefly lifting her hair from the nape of her neck. ‘Come in.’

She followed him inside. The room was bare, surprisingly high, decorated in shades of grey and cream. The few pieces of furniture were black, or glass and chrome. A long black table at the far end was piled with papers.

‘Have you been working?’ Annie asked. In this environment, Steve suddenly seemed a formidable stranger.

Then he smiled crookedly at her. ‘Trying to,’ he said, acknowledging the longing and the apprehensiveness that they both felt.

‘Would you like a drink?’

Annie remembered the conversation that they had had in hospital. Steve had said, ‘We’ve never met for a clandestine drink. I don’t know whether you like vodka martinis or white wine spritzers.’ This is clandestine enough, she thought. Why didn’t we understand before that it would come to this?

‘Just white wine,’ Annie said. ‘No soda.’

Steve nodded. She knew that he remembered too.

He went into the kitchen and Annie walked across the room to the black sofa, looking at the chic emptiness. He poured her wine and she drank it, tasting the gooseberry richness.

‘Why aren’t there any things?’ she asked suddenly. ‘No ornaments, or mementoes.’

Steve looked around, seeing the room afresh. ‘There aren’t, are there?’

‘It looks as if it came all together, in a package. Do you mind my saying that?’

Steve laughed. ‘Not a bid. It did. An interior decorator’s package. I suppose I haven’t wanted to remember anything in particular.’ His face softened. ‘Until now.’

‘Come and sit here,’ Annie asked, turning her face up to his. They sat side by side, their heads almost touching.

‘It isn’t very like your house, is it? Your house is full of memories.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It’s easier to be here.’

They drank again in silence, and when Steve spoke again it was in a light, deliberately cheerful voice, about something quite different.

When they had finished their wine Steve said, ‘I told you I was going to take you out for lunch. You’d better know that I can’t cook a thing.’

‘I thought you must have one minor failing,’ she answered, on the same cheerful note.

But under the bright surface they were both thinking that they knew all the big things about one another, the momentous things that made them who they were. Yet they knew none of the little, everyday ones that would have marked them out to their acquaintances. It was strange to have everything, and nothing, to learn.

It was a short walk to the restaurant. Steve seemed to be moving more quickly, leaning less heavily on his stick.

‘The leg will always be slightly stiff,’ he told her. ‘But otherwise as good as new. Look at us.’ They stopped for a moment on the crowded pavement and the shoppers streamed past them in the sunlight. ‘We’re lucky. Remember?’

Annie looked at the light and the colours, and at the reassuring roaring traffic, and at Steve’s face, and uncomplicated joy flooded through her. Their eyes met for a moment, and then they began to walk towards the restaurant again.

It was a small, discreet place, with tables occupied by prosperous-looking lunchers well-separated from each other so that conversation was no more than a low hum. One waiter pulled out Annie’s chair, another unfolded her napkin for her. The menu was placed in her hands by the head waiter. She glanced at it and saw that it was very short and very distinguished.

After they had ordered, Annie sat back in her chair with a sigh, looking around the room. ‘I like it here.’

Steve raised his glass to her. ‘I like it because you are here.’

It was a meal that Annie always remembered.

She forgot the details of the food, but she never forgot the sense of being wrapped in calm, unshakable luxury, or the way that the exquisite food and wine went together, or the happiness of being with Steve. She knew that her skin was glowing and her eyes were shining, and she knew that she was beautiful and clever. Everything that was good and important had come together, as it had only ever done before in dreams. As they ate and talked and looked at one another Annie stepped outside her ordinary self and became somebody magical, and superhuman; a woman in love.

Steve sat across the table from her, oblivious of everything but her face and voice, his own face reflecting his happiness and his pride in her.

Nothing could go wrong. Nothing must go wrong.

And then, so quickly, their coffee cups were empty for the last time, and Annie had eaten the last of the tiny, exotic sweetmeats that had come arranged in their dish like jewels in a casket. She blinked, and looked around the restaurant, and saw that it was empty except for themselves.

‘Shall we go home?’ Steve said softly.

‘Yes, please.’

As they went outside they felt that they were separated from the crowds around them, and the high red buses grinding past, by the secure nimbus of their happiness.

‘Thank you,’ Annie said. ‘I’ve never eaten a meal like that before.’

‘Neither have I,’ Steve said, not meaning the food. ‘It was important, the first time that we sat down to eat together.’

He took her hand securely in his, and guided her back through the ordinary people.

In the bare flat there was nothing for Annie to look at, nothing to remind her. The afternoon sun shone through the slats of the blinds, laying bars of brightness on the grey floor. When Steve held the tips of her fingers and turned her gently to him the light and dark played over their faces too, and it was like moving through water. She was floating, weightless in the waves, and then the current caught her. It was easy to move with it, unthinkable not to.

Their mouths touched, lightly, and the watery light rippled in long rays, spreading away from them. There was a moment of sweet, dreamy stillness and then the current was much stronger. Annie’s mouth opened as the waves caught her breath, crushing her ribs until her heart pounded against them. The kiss opened up unthought-of submerged caverns of love and longing. Annie was trembling, her skin burned and she heard her own voice, a low cry, drowning.

I love you.

‘I want you,’ Steve said, and Annie answered, ‘I’m here.’

They walked together through the patterns of light and dark, and there was no leader or follower because their need was equal.

And in the bedroom, where the blinds shut out the light except for thin, broken beams, they undressed each other. There was no hurrying, because they were certain of one another now. Their clothes dropped around them, forgotten.

Even as a girl, Annie had never been proud of her body and after the birth of her children her flesh had begun to fall in loose, softening folds. During the weeks in hospital and afterwards the compensating roundness had melted away to leave the skin stretched too tightly over her bones and showing the net of blue veins beneath.

But now, as Steve looked at her, Annie stood upright, natural and strong. Gently he touched the raised, angry pucker of the scar across her belly and the pink junctions of new skin over her arm and shoulder. She saw the fan of fine wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, and the tenderness in his face. She knew that she was beautiful, as beautiful as she had been in the restaurant, and now she was powerful too, because they were like this together.

In her turn, she looked at him. She touched the flat of her hand to the hair on his chest, seeing the blackness of it over the white skin. There were the ladder-marks of lacerations over Steve’s arms and chest too. At the top of his leg the flesh had reformed, knobs of it over the old gash, but the muscles were shrunk and wasted. He was thin, and she saw the pull of muscles across his chest and back as his arms encircled her.

The length of their bodies touched together, hard and soft, unfamiliar and imperious.

She kissed the corner of his mouth and he turned his face to meet hers, his tongue seeking hers out. Annie’s hair fanned lazily over his bare shoulders. She felt him arch against her and she put her hand down to touch him, gently at first and then insistently until he breathed sharply and lifted her off her feet. He laid her down across the bed and knelt beside her.

He parted her legs and put his hand between them and then, with infinite gentleness, his mouth. The pleasure was like a knife, turning inside her, and she cried out to him.

They had been slow and patient before, but they were helpless in the current now. Steve lifted himself to look at her and then his mouth touched her thighs and the curve of her waist, then her breast. The waves seemed to break over them, deafening them with their roar. Annie’s mouth formed a word, inaudible, as she reached her arms up to him. There could be no holding back any longer. He came blindly up against her and she guided him until he found the place and joined them together at last.

There was an instant of shivering stillness.

Annie opened her eyes and saw the bare grey walls and the gold threads of sunlight spanning them. The gold light seemed to spill outwards to lap over them. It was hot and sweet over her skin and inside it and she rolled in Steve’s arm, finding him as he found her, question and answer. She was hungry now, ravenous with hunger, as Steve was, and they were the only way to feed one another. If he had seemed strange to her in that moment of stillness, Annie forgot the strangeness at once. He knew her, and he opened recesses within her that she had forgotten, or had perhaps never known. As her body moved against his, as she leaned over him so that her hair brushed his face, or as they lay side by side so that they could look into one another’s eyes, Annie was as supple as a girl again, but she was as knowing as a grown woman too.

At last they had taken each other as far as they could go. Annie’s head tipped back and her legs wound tighter around his. Steve was still for a moment, holding her there, and then he thrust again until she cried out and he felt the butterfly flutter of her muscles against him.

‘My love,’ he whispered. ‘Oh yes, my love.’

He held her with his love like a stone inside him, and when she was quiet again he let his face fall against the hollow of her shoulder and he gave himself up to her.

Annie’s eyes were languorously heavy when she opened them again. She saw the gold-flecked irises of Steve’s eyes, very close, and she smiled slowly. Their bodies were still joined, sticky and sweet, and their arms wound round each other. The room was quiet, and the murmur of traffic from the streets below seemed far distant. She knew that they were happy, here and now in this narrow space and time. She closed her eyes again.

They slept for a little while, dreamlessly, and when Annie woke up the sun had gone and the room was almost dark. She raised herself on one elbow, soundlessly, because Steve was still sleeping. She saw from the clock beside the bed that it was five o’clock, and she must leave in half an hour’s time. She let herself lie down again beside him for a moment, listening to his even breathing.

Something in the shape of the room, or perhaps the quality of the light, made her think of the last time she had seen Matthew, lying in the upstairs room of the house overlooking the square.

Memories stirred inside her, reality quickening again, and she moved sharply, blocking them out. Steve stirred and opened his eyes.

‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have fallen asleep.’

She kissed him. ‘I did too. I must go home soon.’

But he reached up and put his arms around her neck, drawing her down on top of him so that the firm foundation of her resolve cracked wide apart.

‘Not yet. I want to make love to you again.’

His hands touched her and she lay back, protesting and then acquiescent, and at last as her body took her over again she was as demanding as Steve himself. They were slower this time, more calculating because of what they had learned already, but the final shock that took hold of Annie went deeper and burned her more fiercely than anything she had ever known before.

When it was over, Steve rolled away from her and lay on his back, staring up at the shadows over the ceiling.

He reached his hand out to touch his fingers to hers as they lay side by side and the recollection flooded over them at once.

‘Remember.’

She felt the pain of her injuries again, and the momentous joy of having escaped. For a moment neither of them was able to move, as if the weight of the wreckage reared up above them all over again.

‘I remember.’

Annie turned her head towards him then, and saw that there were tears at the corner of his eyes.

‘What is it?’ she asked, bewildered.

‘Now that you’re here, Annie, don’t go away. Don’t go.’

She looked away. ‘I must go. You know that I have to go home to my kids.’

There was a second’s pause, and then Steve sat up abruptly, his back to her. When he looked round again, she didn’t know whether she had really seen his tears. ‘I’ll drive you home.’

‘No. No, there isn’t any need.’ He couldn’t drive her home, of course. ‘I’ll go back on the tube. I bought myself a return ticket.’

Annie pushed back the covers and sat up. She collected her scattered clothes from the bedroom floor and went into the bathroom. When she came out again Steve was dressed too, waiting for her. He kissed her, lightly, on both cheeks and asked her, ‘Will you come to see me again soon?’

‘As soon as I can,’ she promised him.

They rode down together in the mirrored lift and Annie thought that their reflected selves looked sad, and strange.

Out in the street Steve called a taxi and put Annie into it.

‘Safe home.’

She nodded, suddenly distraught at having to part from him. She didn’t speak and the cab door slammed between them. She looked backwards, with her hand lifted, until the taxi turned the corner. And all the way home she sat stiffly on the edge of her seat, looking out at the lurid glow of the city’s evening lights.

Martin was sitting in the kitchen, with the boys eating their supper. Their three faces turned to her as she came in, and Annie felt that her mouth was bruised and burning, and that her hair was wild even though she knew that she had smoothed it in Steve’s bathroom.

‘Where’s all your shopping?’ Martin asked. ‘Shall I carry it in for you?’

Annie stared at them with the blood thumping in her head.

‘I didn’t buy anything,’ she said. ‘Nothing at all.’

There was a long silence, and Benjy’s alarmed face turned from one of them to the other.

‘I see,’ Martin said, deadly quiet.

Annie knew that he did see. In truth he must have seen all along, while she had pretended to herself that he was blind.

She turned away from the three of them and ran up the stairs to her bedroom. She lay face down on the bed, stiff and cold and stony-eyed. She heard Martin putting the boys to bed, and then going downstairs again. She lay without moving for hours, hearing him moving about, and all the little sounds of ordinary life, but he never came up again. At last she fell into an exhausted sleep.

The dream of the bombing came again, redoubling its terror. In her dream Steve wasn’t there and when she woke up, bathed in cold sweat and with the taste of blood from her bitten lips in her mouth again, she was alone still. She stretched out her hand, timidly, and found that the wide bed was empty.

Annie swung her legs off the bed, with her blue corduroy dress caught up in creases around her. She felt her way through the dark house to the spare bedroom. She opened the door noiselessly and stood there, her fingers curled around the handle, listening to the sound of Martin’s separate breathing.