Strangers (19 page)

‘Hello.’

‘Cass,’ he said. ‘And on Christmas Day, too.’ He was trying to remember the last time he had seen her, but he couldn’t. Months ago, now. How many months?

Cass shrugged off her furs. She was wearing a tube of cream-coloured cashmere underneath it. It looked as smooth and silky as the pelt of a Siamese cat, emphasizing her resemblance to one. Steve knew that her eyes had the same intriguing smoky depth as a cat’s because Cass was short-sighted, and too vain to wear spectacles.

‘You look well,’ he said, and caught himself smiling inwardly at the bathetic understatement. Cass was, as always, perfectly beautiful.

‘That’s more than I can say for you.’

‘Thanks.’

She swayed forward and sat on the edge of the bed. Her legs under the short knitted hemline were very long and smooth in pale stockings.

‘Oh, darling, I didn’t mean that. I meant that it looks as though it was grim.’

‘It’s all right. I know what you meant.’

There it was, confronting them already, Steve thought. Their almost deliberate inability to understand the first thing about each other. It was hard to believe that this pretty girl with her wide, unfocused eyes had ever been his wife.

She looked around now, and shivered a little. ‘Ugh. I hate hospitals. How are you bearing it?’

‘Oh, I can bear it. I lie here and listen to people talking. Watch the nurses. There’s one very watchable redhead. I think, and sleep. There are worse things.’

Cass laughed and re-crossed her legs. ‘I can’t think of very many. Poor love.’

Steve was thinking that he found her just as attractive in just the same way as when he had first met her. If she was lying down beside him he would run his hand from the hollow of her waist over the satiny hummock of her hips. He knew how she would sigh with satisfaction, her wide-set eyes fixed dreamily on his.

Steve shifted uncomfortably under the bedclothes, feeling the heavy weight of the plaster encasing his leg.

‘Is your leg hurting?’ Cass asked innocently.

‘No. Not my leg.’ She heard the note in his voice and she laughed, pleased with the effect she created. Yet he had hardly known her, Steve reflected. Any more than Cass had known him. Annie and he knew one another intimately, and he had done no more than hold her hand and cradle her head to try to comfort her.

Watching him, Cass asked sharply, ‘Has Vicky been in to see you?’

‘Vicky? Yes, she came the day before yesterday. When they lifted the next-of-kin-only restriction. She’s gone home to Norfolk for Christmas now.’

Cass pouted a little. ‘Why did you have to name Bob Jefferies as your next of kin? It made it look as if you didn’t have anyone else.’

Steve sighed. ‘I couldn’t have named you, my love, could I? We haven’t seen each other for months. I didn’t even know if you were in the country.’

‘I was here. I would have come right away.’ Cass picked up his hand and bent her head, looking at their laced fingers. ‘Didn’t you know that?’

After a moment Steve said, ‘No, I didn’t know. You were the one who left, remember?’

Cass turned her head further, so that a wing of creamy-blonde hair fell and hid her face. Further down the ward someone had turned on the radio. It was a recording of the Nine Lessons and Carols, and they heard the achingly high notes of a boy soprano.

‘Steve, I …’

He moved quickly, knowing that he couldn’t listen. He opened his hand and let her fingers fall back on to the bedcover.

‘Bob came. Bod did everything that was necessary, which wasn’t a lot.’

Cass turned her face squarely to him then, and he read the mixture of hurt and irritation in it. Just as there had always been, almost from the very beginning. ‘It’s no good, is it?’ she asked. He wanted to reach out and touch her then, but he knew that he shouldn’t do that either. There was no point in beginning again, because there was nowhere that he and Cass could go together.

‘No,’ Steve said at last, and the word fell into the stillness between them.

After a moment Cass looked up brightly. ‘Well. I’m not going to dash off at once, having come all the way in here. Let’s talk. What shall we talk about?’

‘Tell me what you’ve been doing.’

She launched into a spirited listing of her bookings and her travels to assignments. She had been to New York for six weeks, to Singapore, and to Rome and Sicily. She was busy and successful, and she was still moving in the same fashionable world that she and Steve had once moved in together. At last, however, she ran out of bright anecdotes and they looked at one another again in silence.

In a different voice Cass said abruptly, ‘You look so wretched. Why don’t you talk about what happened?’

‘It happened. I don’t remember all that much about it. Except that it hurt, and it was very dark.’

He longed to talk to Annie about it. No one else.

‘I saw the news pictures on television.’ Cass shuddered. ‘Before I knew you were there. There was someone trapped with you, wasn’t there?’

‘Yes. A woman. We talked, to keep each other company. It made it easier.’

It was impossible to say any more. Somehow Cass understood that.

‘I’m sorry,’ Steve said. ‘I’m very tired.’

She stood up at once and slung her fur coat over her shoulder so that the animals’ tails swished to and fro.

‘I know. I’ll go now. I didn’t even bring you a present, did I?’

Steve grinned crookedly at that. ‘No need. Everyone in the business has sent things. Half the stock of Harrods.’

Cass laughed. ‘I can imagine.’ It was the first completely natural note that they had struck between them, and they smiled at each other. Suddenly Cass leaned forward and kissed him, her hair falling against his cheek. Steve was reminded vividly of the night she left him. Cass in her black lace bra and French knickers. He put his hand up to hold her head down to his and kissed her in return. It was Cass who eased herself away in the end.

‘Behave yourself.’

‘No option, in this plaster.’

Cass sketched a model’s little pouting gesture of mock-disappointment. It was all right, Steve thought. They had steered themselves safely through the visit. Cass pulled the fur cloud of her hat down over her forehead.

‘Goodbye, my love.’

‘Goodbye, Cass.’

Her confident, graceful walk set the tails swinging around her. She didn’t look back from the doors.

The old newsvendor leant forward as soon as they had closed behind her.

‘Who was that, son?’

‘My ex-wife.’

He chuckled throatily. ‘Didn’t look all that ex to me.’

Steve laughed. ‘Appearances can be deceptive, Frankie. Especially with Cass.’

‘Well.’ The old man settled himself down gain. ‘I wouldn’t say no myself, I can tell you that much.’

Steve looked around the ward. It had the appearance of the end of a party, with empty chairs abandoned at odd angles, strewn wrapping paper, one or two lingering guests. The smell of cigar smoke drifted in from the day room. Steve was smiling when he closed his eyes. He fell asleep at once.

The lights overhead were clear now. Annie could see the line of rectangles with the neon tubes more brightly defined behind the opaque glass. She knew the faces of each of her nurses, and the eight-hour cycles that governed their appearances made sense because she could see a big, white-faced clock on the wall opposite her bed. The Irish male nurse called Brendan was on duty now. Annie liked him best, because his touch was light and he never hurt her when he changed her dressings or slid a needle into her skin. She watched him in his white jacket as he took a reading from a scale beside her and wrote a figure on one of his charts at the foot of her bed. Behind him Annie could see the senior nurse sitting at her desk on the raised platform in the middle of the room.

Brendan finished what he was doing and leant over her. ‘There you are, my love,’ he said. ‘That’s that for another hour. Are you comfortable?’

She could move her head just enough to make a little nod. She tried to smile at him too, feeling the quivering in her swollen lips.

‘That’s my girl,’ Brendan said. He stood still for a moment with his head to one side. Then he said, ‘Listen, can you hear?’

It was a long way off, but she could hear it. It was people singing, a warm and familiar sound. It was a Christmas carol.
Hark, the Herald Angels Sing
. The sound of Christmas Day.

‘Ah, that’s beautiful,’ Brendan sighed. ‘Our hospital choir, it is. As good as anything you hear on the radio.’

Annie wished that Martin were there to hear it too. He had been sitting beside her bed earlier, but he had leant over to kiss her and then he had gone away. She liked it when he was there. Sometimes he talked, telling her little, ordinary things about the boys and the house. At other times he sat in companionable silence, and that was comforting because it was tiring to listen. It was only when he held her hand that Annie felt uncomfortable. She wanted the other man to be there, then. Steve. The man who had held her hand in the dark. The thought puzzled her, and she turned herself away from it.

Annie lay and listened to the singing until she couldn’t hear it any more. Then she let the warm wave of drowsiness take hold of her again. Sleep was so safe, except when the dreams came.

A week later, in the absurdly early hospital morning, Steve was sitting in the armchair beside his bed. He had been up for several days now.

They had hauled him out of bed and given him crutches that fitted under his elbows, then helped him to stand upright. There was a little knob embedded in the heel of his leg plaster. When he was ready to take the first awkward, swaying steps with the crutches, he was allowed to rest it on the floor to balance himself. Never to put any weight on it. For several days one of the nurses and a physiotherapist had made him walk up and down, a little further every time.

Frank and Mitchie and the other men cheered and called out as he struggled to and fro.

He was resting in his armchair now while the nurses made his bed. One of them looked backwards over her shoulder at him as she worked.

‘I’ve got some news for you, Steve. One of my friends works in the ICU. She told me when she came off last night that they’re bringing your friend down today. There’s a bed for her in there.’ She nodded across the room to the door that linked the day room to the women’s ward. ‘So you’ll be able to see each other.’

‘Aw,’ the other nurse said, ‘isn’t that nice?’

Steve looked at the door, and at the reflections of light from the windows on the floor separating him from it. His fingers moved on the metal shaft of the crutches propped against his chair.

‘When?’ he asked. ‘When will they bring her down?’

The nurses looked at each other. ‘After rounds, I should think.’

Now that the time had come, Steve was afraid. He could feel the flutter of fear in his stomach. Annie was so important. She was important because she was herself, but also because it was only through Annie that he could learn to come to terms with what had been done to them both.

He was waiting to see her, waiting to begin it together.

Yet he was afraid. What if Annie looked at him with the blank, polite face of a stranger?

She mustn’t do that.

Steve curled his hands deliberately round the crutches and held them tight while he sat looking at the door of the ward.

Brendan and another nurse helped Annie up from her bed. They had put one of her own nightdresses on her, and she looked down at her legs under the frilled hem of it. They looked unfamiliar, very thin, their whiteness veined and mottled with blue, as though they belonged to someone else. Brendan brought her blue wool dressing gown and helped her left arm into the sleeve. Her right arm was strapped up and so he draped the dressing gown over it and tied the sash around her waist.

A wheelchair was waiting beside the bed. They lowered her into it, then put her slippers on her feet.

‘There you are, now,’ Brendan beamed at her.

A person again
, Annie completed for him.

For a week, since she had heard the carol singers on Christmas Day, her body had been reassembling itself. It was defined now, within its own skin. It no longer blurred at the edges through tubes into incomprehensible machines. She had become an individual again, dressed in her own clothes, colours and materials she had chosen for herself. She was well enough to be taken out of this quiet, humming room with its bright lights and immobile bodies.

Brendan took the handles of her chair and pushed.

Annie was suddenly frightened. She was used to the room. She had given herself up to it, and the nurses and doctors and their machines had done everything for her. Now they were thrusting the responsibility back at her. The doors came closer, and she was afraid of what lay beyond them. Annie’s hand clenched in her lap, and she felt the weakness of her grip.

The nurses in their white coveralls came to the door to see her off. Even the sister left her observation platform for a moment.

‘Good luck!’ they said.

‘Be good, downstairs where we can’t keep an eye on you!’

‘What does she want to be good for?’ Brendan pouted.

The doors opened.

Annie took a deep breath. She had come this far, and to stop was unthinkable. This afternoon, she told herself, she would be able to see Thomas and Benjy.

Annie turned round to smile at the circle of nurses.

‘Thank you,’ she said. They waved, and the doors closed behind her wheelchair.

Annie faced the hospital corridor as they rolled along. Brendan was whistling behind her. She saw the little cream-painted curve where the wall met the maroon vinyl floor, and the scuff marks in the paintwork. A porter passed them and she noticed a tiny three-cornered tear near the hem of his overall coat. A group of student nurses in pink uniform dresses were as bright as figures in a primitive painting. It was as if the light were brighter than she had seen it before, or as if a thin veil of mist had lifted to define sharper contours and strengthen the colours that sizzled around her. It was a grey, lowering day outside the windows but Annie thought that the utilitarian corridor had been illuminated by bright sunshine. She could hear with perfect clarity, too, the separate sharp notes of Brendan’s whistled tune, the clash of a trolley, footsteps and voices, traffic, even distinguishing the diesel sputter of a taxi in the street outside.