Читать книгу Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection: Strangers, Bad Girls Good Women, A Woman of Our Times, All My Sins Remembered - Rosie Thomas - Страница 17

It wasn’t Brighton, as Annie had guiltily pictured it.

Instead, they drove through the unravelling skein of East London, and Annie was intent on Steve’s face and voice, and she saw none of it.

But at last she asked dreamily, ‘Where are we going?’ and he laughed.

‘I told you. To the seaside. And to an East End boy like me, the east coast is the only seaside there is.’

Annie imagined Clacton then, or Southend, but they drove steadily further north, into a wide, flat countryside of huge yellow fields that tipped away at the edges under the arc of the sky. She looked curiously at the unfamiliar place names.

‘I’ve never been up here before.’

‘So it will belong to you and me, when you remember it.’

They didn’t look at each other for a moment after that.

They turned off the main road at last, down a side-road that seemed to lead nowhere. There was rough, open land on each side of them, humped over with gorse bushes, and black outcrops of wind-sculpted pines. Annie knew that they were coming to the sea, and then the road dipped suddenly and she saw it. There was a low huddle of houses and beyond them the North Sea, grey-blue even in the sunshine, and dotted with white horses whipped up by the wind. The little town was at the end of the road, with nothing beyond it but the sea. Steve drove to the sea-wall and they left the car in the shelter of it. In winter the waves would smash against the concrete and soak the street beyond with spray, but in midsummer the sea was a flat, sparkling dish. Annie and Steve climbed out of the car and leant against the wall to watch it.

The beach was big, rounded stones, slate-blue and dove-grey, black and shiny where the waves tipped over them. People walked slowly along the water’s edge, their shadows fractured in the moving water, and dogs bounded in and out of the foam.

Annie turned and saw Steve looking at her, and she breathed in the salt-fresh air.

The light slanting around them was clear and clean, painterly.

‘It’s beautiful.’

‘I think so, too. And it feels very remote.’

That’s right for us, isn’t it? Cut off from the world. Just for now, just for now.

‘Look.’

Steve turned her round to face inland. There was a little row of houses, painted pink and pale blue and eau-de-Nil, their wrought-iron balconies looking out over the sea. He pointed to a blue one, very trim with white-painted curlicues to the gable ends.

‘We’re staying in that one.’

‘Really? Aren’t they pretty? As if they’re painted on a backcloth for an end-of-the pier show. Let’s go inside and look at it.’

Steve produced a key from his pocket.

The little house had bare wooden floors and basket chairs that creaked, faded cotton curtains and a wood-burning stove in the room that looked out over the balcony to the shifting sea. It reminded Annie instantly and vividly of childhood holidays. She could feel the sand in her canvas shoes, and smell salt, and driftwood fires and tar. The complex of sensations and recollections overwhelmed her, and suddenly she felt almost painfully aware, all her senses newly primed. She walked across the room to the windows, touching the sun-blistered paint with her fingertips and with the salt-spray and dust from the curtains strong in the back of her throat.

I’m alive, she thought.

She turned to Steve again. He was watching her from the doorway, half in shadow, one side of his face bathed in the light off the sea.

‘Whose house is it?’

‘It belongs to a friend of mine.’

‘Have you been here before?’

‘Not like this.’

‘So it will belong to you and me, when you remember it.’ She echoed his words, confirming them.

‘Annie. Yes, Annie.’

They came together then, standing in the middle of the room where the brilliance from outside flickered over the ceiling. Steve took her face between his hands and kissed it.

‘Better than a hotel,’ he murmured.

‘Better.’

Hotels were for adulterers, Annie thought. For furtive, stolen times, while this little house was clean and innocent with the sand swept into corners and the beach stones arranged on the wooden mantelpiece. Was she dressing up the reality for her own comfort? Annie wondered. Perhaps she was, but for today, here and now, she knew that it didn’t matter.

‘What shall we do?’ Steve asked her.

She grinned at him. She felt like a child, excited, on its first day in a new place.

‘Let’s go out and explore.’

‘Let’s do that.’

They went out again into the intoxicating air. They walked along the beach, hand in hand, with their shoes crunching satisfyingly in the shingle. Annie stepped backwards to look at the houses along the front, and an unexpected wave washed around her ankles. She took off her shoes and poured the water out, laughing, and Steve carried them for her as they walked on. The ebbing tide uncovered runnels of glittering wet sand, and Annie left her footprints in them until the next wave came and left the sand smooth all over again.

Beyond the town there was a long shingle bank, and at the far end of it the high, round mysterious bulk of a Martello tower. Annie put her wet shoes on again and they walked along the track towards it. In the lee of the shingle bank there was a little yacht basin, and the dinghy’s rigging drummed out a sharp tattoo in the wind against the steel masts. When they reached the tower they stood for a moment staring up at the smooth, massive walls, and then looked past it at the line of coast that it had protected. It curved away into the distance, to the point where land and sea were indistinguishable.

They were dwarfed by the tower’s size and by the emptiness beyond it. Annie listened to the waves and the cries of the gulls, now amplified and now drowned out by the wind. She half-turned, away from Steve, and looked inland. Here there was empty marshland spiked with coarse grass and furrowed with muddy tide channels. Further inland, a long way off across the great flat space, she could just see the upraised finger of a church spire. The wind was cold on this exposed promontory, and she shivered. But she was exhilarated, too, by the remoteness of it, and by the noise of the sea and the wind that almost drowned their insistent thoughts. Under the vast sky Annie had a sense of their impermanence, a sense that they borrowed the majesty of their surroundings to reflect on their own small concerns. She knew that they were incapable of making even the smallest lasting impression. But the tower was solid, spanning the centuries, and the sky and the sea were everlasting.

And perhaps nothing else mattered so very much.

Suddenly the notion was comforting, even soothing. They were there, and then they were gone, all of them. Remember this, Annie told herself, when the time comes. She was smiling. Steve had been watching the melting line of the horizon, but he turned now and saw her, and their eyes met.

‘I know,’ he said. He heard her thoughts, as always.

They stood for a moment in the shadow of the tower, looking at one another while they could.

Then Annie shivered again, and she felt the wet bottoms of her trousers clammy against her bare ankles.

‘Let’s walk back through the town,’ Steve said.

They walked slowly, hand in hand, looking in at the windows of genteel teashops and old-fashioned grocers’. There was an estate agent’s in a pinkwashed cottage, but they passed that by, neither of them so much as glancing at the inviting, impossible invitations that it held out. The cosiness of the high street, with its back firmly turned to the sea, warmed Annie through again.

They went back to the little blue house and Annie made tea, carrying it up on a tray to the balcony room so that they could watch the light change on the sea while they ate and drank.

In the quiet isolation of the house they were suddenly almost shy together. Annie was conscious of the months that had gone by since she had seen him last in the chic greyness of his flat. They sat close together but they didn’t quite touch now, as if they were uncertain of what the other wanted or expected. For a moment, Annie wasn’t sure whether she knew him at all. Steve took her hand and she jumped, bumping awkwardly against the wicker sofa arm. They laughed then, fracturing the tension, and Steve said, ‘Come on. I’ll take you out to dinner.’

Annie bathed and changed in the little square bedroom. She took her clothes out of her bag and laid them neatly on one side of the patchwork-quilted bed. She put her hairbrush and jars of cream at one side of the chest of drawers, and then glanced at the bag that Steve had brought, still standing at the opposite side of the bed. She unfolded her clothes and put them on hangers in one half of the wardrobe, feeling the strangeness of having only her own things.

Anne picked up her empty case. It was a battered, nondescript one, veteran of numerous family holidays and weekends. Steve’s unopened bag was a soft black canvas-and-leather holdall, quite unlike anything Martin and she had ever owned. She touched it briefly with her fingertips, thinking with momentary sadness that it belied all the connubial intimacy of the room. She turned quickly and stowed her own suitcase in a cupboard.

Standing in front of the dim mirror, she made up her face as carefully as if she were going to the grandest function of her life. When she came back to Steve he was sitting on the balcony staring out to sea, but he turned at once to look at her with an odd, admiring expression, as if they had only just met.

‘You look wonderful,’ he said. He kissed her and she felt the sudden imperative beat of her response to him. He touched the corner of her mouth with his.

‘Dinner,’ he said.

The roads across the wide, flat fields were empty and he drove the big car very fast. The sun was setting, and the rays of light slanted from the west, behind them, in long, oblique bars. They swept through a dense forest of black pines, miles of it, and when they came out again the sun had gone down and the summer dark had thickened in the sky.

Annie felt that she had never been so aware of the landscape and its lightness and darkness. She thought that all the magnificent effects of it were just for Steve and herself tonight, and then she remembered their insignificance beside the Martello tower, and she laughed softly. Steve’s warm hand closed briefly over hers.

They came to another little town, this one left high and dry on its river estuary by the receding sea. There was a square enclosed by old red-brick buildings that glowed in the last of the daylight, and a little restaurant on the corner. There were paper tablecloths and bright overhead lights, and Annie and Steve’s table was crowded into a corner by other tables packed with yachtsmen and fishermen and a handful of holidaymakers.

The seafood was the freshest and sweetest that Annie had ever tasted, and after it came sea bass in a simple, buttery sauce.

The two of them ate as if they had been starved, and drank straw-pale Chablis that tasted of stone and steel. Under the influence of it Annie’s cheeks turned pink, and they talked and laughed about little things as if no world existed beyond the uncurtained velvet-black of the restaurant windows.

Much later, they drove back again to the creaking darkness of the house overlooking the sea. They blinked at each other when Steve turned on the lights, unwilling to let the precious evening slip out of their hands.

‘It’s cold,’ he said. ‘I’ll light the stove, shall I?’

There was wood in the log-basket beside it, and soon the stove was glowing. The real scent of burning driftwood enfolded them. Steve brought out a bottle of brandy and two glasses. He gave a glass to Annie and she drank, feeling the heat of the spirit in her throat.

‘Listen to the sea,’ Steve whispered.

In the room’s stillness the waves seemed to break almost over their heads. He drew aside the curtain and they saw the distant beam of a lighthouse, an arm of light that swept over the sea and withdrew, and then reached out again.

The shyness of the early evening had gone. They turned to each other naturally now, not impatiently, but eagerly, knowing that the time was right. Annie felt his heart beating under her cheek as she rested against him. She tilted her head back to touch her mouth against his, and then he bent over her. He blotted out the red heat of the stove, and the lighthouse beam. Annie’s head fell back against the cushions and her mouth opened to his.

He undid the front of her shirt, touching the buttons one by one, and his hand and then his mouth touched her breast.

‘I love you,’ she said simply.

They were both conscious of the flood of words, held back.

Steve said, ‘Come to bed now.’

They climbed the narrow stairs to the upper room.

Annie had no sense of separation now, no sense of anything except that they were here, and the importance of this moment.

With clumsy hands they took off one another’s clothes, and the air was cold against their skin. They reached out and touched the healing scars with their fingertips.

‘Almost better,’ Steve whispered.

‘Almost. Not quite, yet. Not quite.’

They turned back the patchwork cover, like a couple in their own bedroom. Then Steve lifted her up and laid her on the bed. Annie felt the chilly sheets, and then he was beside her, his arms around her. They clung together and their bodies warmed each other, and they let their hands and mouths speak for them while they still could.

When her body cried out for him he leant over her for a second and they looked into each other’s eyes. Steve smiled, but Annie could see the pain beneath his eyelids.

Oh don’t be hurt, my love.

She reached up, drawing his mouth to hers. He came inside her and she cried out, inarticulate.

They made love slowly, very gently, without the urgency and desperation that had driven them in London. When Annie opened her eyes she saw in the faint changes of light over the beamed ceiling the invisible sweeps of the lighthouse lantern across the sea. And when Steve let himself go at last and called out her name, Annie, Annie, she cradled his head in her arms and kissed his eyelids, and afterwards they lay still together and the murmur of the waves broke over them all over again.

‘Today, with you, has been one of the happiest days I have ever known,’ Annie said, almost to herself. That it couldn’t repeat itself, unfolding into other days until they were old, was both its sadness and its strength. They had known this day, at least. That was what Tibby had meant. Suddenly, with certainty, Annie knew that that was the truth.

‘Remember it,’ Steve echoed.

‘Remember it,’ she echoed, sealing the pact of the day.

She lay in Steve’s arms with her mouth against the smooth warmth of his skin, and fell asleep listening to the sound of the sea.

Annie dreamed the dream again.

The blackness was not just dark, but a terrible weight on top of her. She was pinned by it, crushed and bleeding, and in a minute, in a second, the weight would collapse and she would be blotted out. She opened her eyes wider until they stung in their sockets and there was still only the acrid dark. She was utterly alone. She knew that, because she was shouting somebody’s name and he couldn’t answer her because he was gone, or dead. She was certain he was dead. Terror engulfed her as she heard the rumble beginning overhead and beneath her. Now the rocks would smash down, and the pain would destroy her. She struggled, with a last, impossible effort, and reached out into the empty darkness.

But it wasn’t empty. She was calling his name, and he answered it. His arms held her as she sat up, gasping and sobbing.

‘Annie. Annie. I’m here. It’s all right.’

‘Steve?’

‘Yes. Yes, I’m here.’ His voice was low, and calm, and she felt the terror falling away in ugly swathes.

‘The dark.’

‘I know. It’s all right. Look, there’s the lighthouse.’

And through the window she saw the beam of it, bright, and regular, and beautiful. Steve held her until her breath came steadier. He kissed her wet eyelids and brushed the matted damp hair out of her eyes. She shuddered and lay against him, letting the ordinary reality of touch and sight and smell lift her out of the black terror. ‘Was it the same dream?’

‘Yes. Exactly the same.’

With one arm still holding her, Steve reached out and turned on the light beside the bed. Annie saw the reality of the patchwork quilt and the beamed ceiling; their discarded clothes and her own belongings laid out on the top of the chest of drawers. Colour flooded softly back into the room.

‘Look at me now,’ Steve said. She turned her head slowly. He took her fingers and pressed them to his face. To Annie it was as if they were in the wreckage again, but she could see him now, and touch him, and she wasn’t afraid any more.

‘It’s over,’ he said. She listened carefully to the echoes in the words. ‘You’re safe now.’ With their linked fingers he touched the fading scars on her arm and shoulder and the long one across her belly. ‘We survived. We made each other survive. It’s all over, Annie.’

She nodded, suddenly mute with exhaustion.

‘Lie down again.’ Steve turned out the light once more.

She did as he told her, and he drew the quilt around them. Without knowing that he was doing it, Steve put his arms around her and held her exactly as he had done in the worst moments, when he was afraid that she would die. But her breathing was regular now, warm on his cheek, and her face when he touched it was clean and smooth.

It’s over, he told himself once more. He remembered when the rescuers came. He had let go of her in the end, under the arc lights in the icy air. Now, the dim sweep of the lighthouse beam was like the faintest echo of those same lights. Involuntarily, uselessly, he held her tighter. ‘Are you still awake?’

Her cheek moved against his shoulder. ‘Yes.’

‘Are you still frightened?’

‘No,’ Annie said. ‘Not any more.’ She was certain now, as sure as she would ever be of anything, that the terrible dream was gone and that it would never trouble her again. ‘The dream is over too,’ she said. ‘It won’t come back any more.’

In the darkness, with only the faint grey shimmer of the lighthouse as a reminder, Steve smiled with his mouth against her hair.

They lay for a long time, holding each other, in the old position. And then, at last, they fell asleep.

The sun rose over the sea, and filled the rooms of the blue house with penetrating light. When Annie went to look out, yawning and wrapping herself in her robe, the fishing fleet was coming in, drawing after itself a double wake of silvery, foaming wash and black swooping gulls. The diesel engines chugged in the stillness. Steve came and stood beside her and they watched the wake from the boats fan out and reach the shore in ripples which rolled over on to the shingle with hardly a splash.

Remember it, Annie told herself. Remember it.

They stood in silence for a moment and then Steve said, lightly, as if it were any day, ‘I think we should have a proper seaside breakfast. I’m going to the shops.’

Annie sat on the duckboards of the balcony, her knees drawn up and the sun warm on her face, and waited for him. The first of the fishing boats was winched slowly up on to the shingle, the rusty old engine on the beach painfully grinding.

She heard Steve come in again, and begin to clatter in the kitchen. She went downstairs, barefoot, padding in and out of the shafts of sunlight. She stood in the kitchen doorway smiling, but then Steve glanced sharply at her and her smile faded.

‘What is it?’ Annie asked.

She stared around the kitchen, seeing the box of eggs and the brown paper bag of groceries, the unfolded newspaper and the coffee pot waiting on the table.

Steve hesitated and she felt the cold pulse of her heart, and then he picked up the newspaper. He came to her, holding the front page for her to see. Annie thought, Martin. Tom and Benjy. What’s happened to them, while I’m here, away from them? No, please. Please not that … not now, and here.

She looked down in bewilderment at blurred photographs, mugshots, two men and a woman. The meant nothing to her and the fear that had leapt into her throat subsided again. They’re always here inside me, she realized. Wherever I go.

She knew, suddenly and with utter conviction, that there was no decision to be made. It had been made, long ago, with the times that had become memories whirling like confetti in the darkness.

‘What is it?’ she repeated stupidly.

‘Read it.’

Annie forced her eyes to focus, skimming over the words. She saw, Arrested in South London. In connection with the Christmas bombing. There were names, absurdly ordinary, and aliases. Suspected political affiliations. Continued on back page. She knew that on the back page there would be a reminder of what had happened on that day. Perhaps a photograph of the bombed store.

She let the paper fall instead of turning it over. The gas ring was already lit, a circle of dim blue flame, and it hissed softly in the silence. They couldn’t hear the sea, here at the back of the house. The only other sound, now that Annie was listening, was someone whistling. A milkman, perhaps. Ordinary things, going on all around them. She thought of her parents’ house, and well-washed milk bottles put out on the back step.

‘So they’re caught,’ she said at last.

She was trying to make herself understand what she felt now, and it dawned on her that she felt nothing. She had spent her grief and anger long ago, for those who had died and suffered injuries. And for herself and Steve, the newspaper photographs of those wooden, staring faces had no significance at all. The violence had gone. Annie felt the gentleness of relief. It softened the clenched muscles in her face and throat, and loosened the set of her shoulders. She was lucky, after all. Nothing had happened to Martin or the boys. It wasn’t too late.

‘We’re here,’ Martin had told her in the garden. Sharp joy out of the words sang in her head. Longing and love pulled fiercely at her. She turned her face to look openly at Steve.

‘What do you feel?’ she asked him. The oddness of the question struck them both. She had never needed to ask that before.

His eyes held hers for a moment, and then he looked down at the newspaper faces.

‘Nothing,’ he whispered. ‘What are they to us, now?’

That was all, but unspoken words spilt through the silence.

The blurred newsprint had come like an exorcism. It laid the violence and the fear to rest, and with them a different kind of violence seemed to die too.

Steve took her in his arms and kissed her, and he saw her as he had done at the very beginning. A woman out shopping, with her hair tumbled over the collar of her coat. Annie stood with her head against his shoulder. She was thinking back to the old evenness of her life with Martin and her children. The bomb had blown that apart. She thought of the pain that followed, and the revelation of its obverse side, joy more vivid than anything she had ever known. The pain and, she understood now, the joy had both faded together. It had happened, and it was over.

It was Steve, and herself, and Martin and the children who were left. No different from anyone else, and with the same old human ties.

Love and affection. How deep those ties went, after the violent need had flickered out. Martin was half of her. She couldn’t cut away half of herself, but even more certainly she knew that she couldn’t cut out of Martin the half of him that was herself too. The thought of his pain, much harder to bear than all her own, filled her eyes momentarily with tears.

She bent down to hide them, picking up the discarded newspaper with stiff fingers.

Steve’s arms were warm around her shoulders for an instant longer, and then he let her go.

Annie dropped the paper into the rubbish bin.

‘Let’s make the breakfast,’ she said.

Steve laid the bacon rashers in the blackened pan, and the fat turned translucent before giving its salty, domestic smell up into the air.

They took their plates up to the sunny balcony, and ate looking out over the empty sea.

When they had finished, Steve asked her carefully, ‘What shall we do today?’

Annie busied herself with the coffee cups, and they rattled in her fingers.

Just one more day, she thought. We can allow ourselves that much, can’t we, out of so many?

‘Can we walk inland?’

‘Of course we can. We can go anywhere you like.’

Just for today.

They took the Ordnance Survey map off the shelf of tattered paperbacks and spread it out, planning a route. The practicality of it gave them something to focus on, and they deliberately gave themselves up to it.

‘Can we go that far?’ Annie asked faintly, and he grinned at her.

‘Easily.’

It was a long way, but Annie knew that she would remember every turn of that walk together. She saw every path and lane with extra clarity, and every change of the wide marshland sky as the sun climbed and began to sink again.

They crossed the marshes where the coarse grass brushed rhythmically against their legs, winding with the tiny creeks that had dried into cracked mud. There were larks overhead, spilling out curls of song as they circled their invisible patch of territory. Beyond the marshes they climbed on to sandy downland dotted with huge clumps of coconut-scented gorse and undermined with rabbit warrens. They came to a forbidding belt of conifers, with a tiny church standing almost at the dark edge. They stood for a moment in the cool dimness of the church’s interior, where the sun streaming through the one stained-glass window left pink and amethyst lozenges on the varnished pine pews. The dimness outside under the pines was oddly similar, and they found themselves whispering as they walked over the soft mat of spent brown needles. On the other side the sun was directly overhead, dazzling them momentarily with its brightness.

They ate lunch in a pub garden, made secret by high hedges and whitewashed walls, the only customers for bread and cheese and hoppy local beer.

They walked on again, down shady lanes now that skirted huge fields of corn and barley. The world seemed empty except for themselves and the occasional farmhand who chugged past with a wave, perched high above the ridged wheels of his tractor. And then they began to circle back again, with the sun behind them now, towards the sea.

All the way around the sunlit, empty circle they talked. They talked about simple things, small things that related to themselves and to the past, filling in the blanks that had been left as they lay frozen under the rubble.

Annie told Steve about Tibby, and her mother’s imploring words that had brought her here to the little blue house overlooking the sea. He listened, with the lines showing at the corners of his mouth.

What they were doing was like the walk itself, Annie thought. It was as if they must draw the raw ends together, to complete the circle, before they could step away again along another route.

They didn’t talk about the future. To contemplate the future would have been to tear the raw ends apart.

At last, walking very slowly now, they came to the point where the road dipped eastwards and the sea spread out in front of them, grey, with all the sparkle of the morning drained away. Steve took her hand and they walked the last part of the way in silence, to the end of the road.

The house on the sea-front was full of the evening’s shadows. Neither of them would turn on the lights, yet. Annie sank down on the stairs, too weary to walk another step.

‘Come on,’ he said. And they remembered how they had kept one another going long ago, at the very beginning.

‘I’ll do it for you,’ Annie said. She smiled, but her face was shadowed. She went heavily up the stairs.

Steve followed her and ran a bath in the tiny bathroom with its clanking pipes. He found a jar of salts and tipped them in, whisking the water up into a steamy green froth.

‘You read my thoughts,’ Annie said, and he turned to look at her through the steam.

‘And you read mine.’

They undressed each other, and lowered themselves into the welcome heat. Annie wound her legs around his, holding on to him. They took the soap in turn and washed each other, gently, as if their scars might open again. Steve leant forward and kissed her mouth, and then her breast as the bubbles of foam burst and revealed it. He stood up abruptly, sending a wave of scented water on to the floor. He lifted Annie out of the bath and wrapped her in a towel, and carried her through into the bedroom. They lay down as they were, wet and slippery, and they made love with all the urgency and pain and desperation that they had held at bay all through the day. And they lay in silence afterwards, not knowing, suddenly, what they could say to one another.

Much later, when they ate dinner together, it was with the spectres of the first afternoon in the restaurant watching them. Annie remembered that she had felt beautiful, and invincible, because of Steve. She looked at his dark face now with the weight of inevitability pressing down on her, and she pushed the unwanted food to one side of her plate, and drank too many glasses of wine. Instead of dulling her senses, the wine sharpened them. She could hear unspoken words and feel the touch of their hands, even though the rickety table separated them. Their hands were still clasped, as they had been at the beginning, but the real world was prising them apart and wrenching back the fingers, one by one.

Annie and Steve sat for a long time over that dinner. Not for the pleasure of it, because the silences that they were too careful of each other to fill were lengthening, but because they were like children, unwilling to let the day end. But at last Steve tipped the empty bottle sideways. It didn’t yield even a drop. He laid it on its side and spun it, and the bottle came to rest with the neck pointing away from them, out into the darkness. He shrugged, but Annie saw through the protectiveness.

She stood up, scraping her chair in the soft quiet, and went round the table to him. She put her arms around him and rested her face against his.

‘Don’t,’ she said. She was going to say, I can’t bear it, but she stopped short. You can, she told herself, because you must.

‘I don’t want to sit here any more,’ Steve said.

They looked at each other calmly. And then they went up the stairs, very slowly, turning off the lights behind them.

The wind was rising and the little bedroom was full of the sound of the sea. They lay down together once more, and they were glad of the darkness because it hid their faces. In the darkness they gave themselves blindly up to murmured words and to the touch of their hands, and then at last to the insistent tide that caught them up and carried them away.

When it had ebbed into sad silence they lay holding each other and listening to the real waves breaking on the pebbles below.

When Annie woke up in the morning she reached out her hand to Steve. The hollow of the bed beside her was still warm, but he had gone. She lay for a moment while recollection knotted itself around her, and then she got out of bed and went to the window.

The sky was veiled with thin grey summer cloud, and the sea was the same flat colour, almost white at the far point where it met the sky. There were people on the beach, sitting on the slope of stones or walking in ones and twos at the water’s edge. She watched them for a moment, seeing the more distant ones as little dark figures, matchstick people. One of them was standing still, staring out to sea. Annie saw that it was Steve. A couple with a dog passed by him, then a child, running, all arms and legs.

Steve was a long way off, diminished by the curve of the beach and the sky. He was a stranger amongst other strangers. Annie closed her eyes. When she opened them she saw him bend down to pick up a stone, and then pitch it in a wide arc into the sea. Abruptly Annie turned and went to the wardrobe. She began to take her clothes off the hangers, fumbling with them because the tears were blurring her eyes.

When Annie came downstairs Steve was at the front door. She saw him framed in the glass, a tall dark man whose face she knew as well as her own.

He opened the door and looked at her, startled for an instant and then seeing too clearly.

‘You have to go home today.’

It wasn’t a question, or a statement, but a confirmation.

The words spoken at last.

‘Yes,’ she said softy. ‘I must go home.’

He caught her hands in his then, unable to let her go as gently as he had promised himself he would. Out on the clean wide beach he had believed that it was possible. Now he didn’t trust himself any longer.

‘Annie.’ He tried for simple words. ‘I’ve never known anyone like you.’

Steve knew that to say more would be hurtful, and clumsy, but he couldn’t stop himself. ‘I want you to stay with me. I love you. Please don’t go.’

‘Oh, my love.’

Her face was wet, and she felt the last pain sharper than any she had suffered before. ‘I can’t stay. If I could change anything, if I could change this small, little world of me and …’

He stopped her then, his mouth against hers. ‘Don’t. I know that you can’t stay. I love you for that too, because you’re strong and I can’t be.’ They clung together, helpless, and the sun seemed to have left the sea and the horizon was a dull grey line, suddenly finite and fathomable.

It was Steve who moved at last. He turned away, making a pretence of putting things down on the table, tidying a tidy space. Annie watched him, her heart tearing inside her.

He said, ‘I’ll drive you to the main line station. There are good trains to London.’ That was all.

Annie nodded, and looked blindly away.

Now that the time had come they seized on the mechanics of preparing for travel, as if their busyness would keep it at bay. Steve brought down her suitcase and put it in the car while Annie telephoned the station. Within an hour, they had locked the door of the little blue house and turned away from the expressionless sea.

As they drove past the wide fields Annie commanded herself, Remember.

Remember the Martello tower, and the marshes and the skylarks, and the church by the pine woods. Remember the bedroom and the lighthouse beam sliding across the dim ceiling.

That’s all I can do, Tibby. Is that right? What is right, for any of us?

The miles to the station rippled past, as fast as in a dream.

Steve left the car in the forecourt and they walked into the ticket hall. At the glass hatch Annie bought one second-class single ticket to London. She put it into her bag without looking at it, and they went out on to the platform. It was crowded with shoppers going up to London for the day.

Steve jerked his chin impatiently. ‘Let’s walk up to the other end.’

They went, side by side, not quite touching one another. At the far end of the platform was the station buffet. Annie looked in through the glass doors at the hideous red plastic padded benches and steel-legged tables, at the perspex-fronted display cases with their curling doily exhibits, and the smeared chrome of the hot water geyser. The little sign hanging in the double doors said firmly, CLOSED.

When Annie turned she saw the yellow snout of the diesel engine rounding the distant curve of the track.

When the time comes. The time had come.

Steve put out his hand, tilting her chin so that he could see her face. Their eyes moved, taking each other in, remembering how the darkness had denied them that.

Annie heard the hiss of the train’s brakes, the roar coming up behind them.

‘What will you do?’ she whispered. She didn’t mean without me. Her own days were mapped out now, with a clear, lucid appeal that she couldn’t think about yet, and she felt the sharpness of the contrast for Steve.

To her surprise he smiled, a genuine smile with a warmth that touched her. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘All I do know is that it won’t be the same thing, over and over, like it was before. It changed everything, didn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ Annie answered. The bomb had changed everything. The violence that it had detonated had gone, and the passion that had followed would fade too, as all passion did. The bombing was old news, and it left them as it had found them, separate. But yet they had changed everything for one another. It would be impossible, Annie thought wildly, here and now with the train snorting behind them, if she couldn’t believe that it was, at least, change for the better.

Remember. She wanted to say, I love you.

The train rushed into the station, a hissing blur of blue and grey resolving itself into carriages, packed with people. Steve picked up her case and walked with Annie to an open door. She let the other passengers stream past her, her eyes still holding his. The last London-bound shopper scrambled on to the train and the doors began to slam along the platform.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said stupidly.

He took her face between his hands and kissed her. His mouth was very warm.

‘Don’t,’ he told her. ‘Don’t be sorry.’

There was a porter beside them now, holding the door impatiently. Steve lifted her bag into the train and stood back to let her go. Annie went up the steps and the door slammed resonantly behind her. At once the whistle blew and the train began to slide forward. They watched each other still, as long as they could, not waving, as if all the power of the diesel engine couldn’t pull them apart.

And then the train moved faster, too fast, until they couldn’t see each other any more.

Steve stood and watched the train until the oblong tail of it vanished out of his sight.

Remember it, he told himself. And as if by the old telepathy, Remember it, all of it, and keep it.

And then he turned and walked very slowly out into the car park where his car stood waiting for him.

Annie walked down the length of the train, her eyes stinging with her uncried tears. She found a seat at last, opposite a large family wedged in with sandwiches and Thermos flasks. As the big yellow fields slid backwards past her she sat and listened to the children talking and squabbling and crowing with laughter, and the net of familiarity began to close around her once again. She felt the sweetness of it, and the warmth, like gentle fingers. And then, with sudden gratitude, she thought, Home. I’m going home. The thundering engine seemed too slow, and the distance that separated her from them too great ever to cover again.

But at last, in the afternoon sun that had turned hot, Annie rounded the corner into the old street. Her arms ached from the weight of her suitcase, but she walked quickly past the red-brick houses that seemed to glow with satisfaction in the sunlight. A handful of children were roller-skating on the pavement at the far end. Annie passed the garden gates, counting the numbers. The old man who lived next door but one to Martin and Annie was leaning over his gate, watching her. As she drew level he took his pipe out of his mouth and nodded at her suitcase.

‘What did you do, run away from home?’

‘Something like that,’ Annie smiled at him.

She went up her own path, with the gate giving its perfectly-remembered creak behind her. As she found her key and put it into the lock she noticed that the front garden needed weeding. It was a job that she always enjoyed, tidying up the little square patch and raking the gravel into lines. Home.

The front door swung open.

Annie stood in the hallway, looking around her. The same, the same as always, and infinitely precious.

Then the silence grew heavy and she turned her head sharply. She dropped her bag at her feet and the thud was unnaturally loud. The house was empty.

Annie ran to the living room door and pushed it open. There was no one there, although the cushions were flattened and the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle were spread on the table. She whirled around and ran into the kitchen, seeing the scatter of bread-crumbs on the worktop, the milk bottle standing on the draining board. In the irrationality of her fear, the signs told her nothing.

They had gone, she thought. She had come home too late, and they were gone. Desperation gripped her.

Into the stillness she shouted, ‘Martin!’

Then, through the window of the kitchen, she saw the three of them. Martin must have been sitting working in the garden, with the boys playing nearby, but now they had heard her. They stood close together, their faces alike, uncertain. Annie saw that they didn’t know what to expect from her.

She fumbled with the door handle, turning it the wrong way in her haste. The door banged behind her and she ran over the grass, almost stumbling. She heard Thomas’s shout.

‘Mum’s home. Oh look, Mum’s home.’

But it was only Martin that she could look at now.

Let me ask you just one more thing. After so many. Let me come back.

Martin’s eyes fixed on Annie’s face. Even though the tears were running down her cheeks he saw the look in it, and he knew that it was over at last. He held out his arms to her.

‘Annie.’

With her head bent, against his shoulder, she asked him, ‘Can I come home?’

He put his hands to her cheeks, turning her face up to his. ‘We’re here. We’ve been waiting for you.’

He kissed the corner of her mouth, and with his thumb he wiped the tears from her cheeks, just as Annie would do to Benjy or Tom. Annie saw her husband then, his face as familiar to her as it had always been, but sharpened with differences and now, suddenly, with the knowledge of happiness.

I don’t deserve so much. She knew it, and she knew that she would remember it. Remember, Annie told herself, for the last time.

‘Thank you,’ she said simply. ‘I love you.’

He smiled at her, then. ‘I love you too.’

The boys’ shrieks broke through to her and she knelt on the grass to look at them, drawing Martin down with her. Benjy’s fists caught at her clothes and she hugged him against her, reaching out an arm for Thomas too.

‘Don’t go away again,’ Thomas shouted at her. ‘Don’t go away again ever.’

She held them closer, so that they wouldn’t see her tears.

‘I won’t go away again,’ she promised him. ‘Never, never.’

The words closed round the four of them, and they made an unbreakable, invisible circle on the grass.

It’s over, Annie thought.

She listened, straining her ears, but there was nothing. The last echoes of the bomb’s terrible roar had died away into the stillness of the garden.