Strangers (18 page)

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

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

‘Thank God,’ he said.

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

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

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

‘Thank you,’ he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Yes,’ Martin said. ‘They are.’

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

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

‘I’m glad.’ Lame words, again.

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

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

‘What about you?’

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

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

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

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

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

‘Go and get some sleep.’

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

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

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

If she had died
…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Look!’ cried Benjy. ‘He’s
been
.’

‘Is it all right?’ Thomas whispered.

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

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

‘Hey, Dad. Happy Christmas.’

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

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

They dived in in unison.

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

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

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

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

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

The shadow lifted.

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

‘And I will,’ Benjy chipped in.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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