Strangers (23 page)

The eagerness in Martin’s voice reproached her. My husband, she thought. Half of me. Annie sat up straighter against the pillows, watching him. She would tell him that she had talked to Steve. Tell him truthfully, now, while there was nothing to tell.

The words didn’t come.

She tried the beginnings of them in her head, and couldn’t voice any of them. Instead she heard herself saying brightly, ‘They took the strapping off my arm. Look.’ She held it up and Martin took her hand, linking his fingers with hers.

‘That’s wonderful.’

Annie’s guilt bit more sharply. She tried to tell herself that there was no reason for guilt. But she knew that there must be, just because it was there. ‘Barbara came in with the kids, you know that. Ben had a stack of drawings, and Tom wanted to read. Barbara talked without drawing breath once, and the boys needed all my attention. They were here an hour, and it gave me a headache. I feel bad about it now.’

Martin drew his chair closer to the bed so that he could put his arm around her.

‘Poor love,’ he said. ‘You’re bound to feel like this, to begin with. Well enough to cope, and then too tired as soon as you try to. Don’t worry so much. We’re all managing perfectly well at home.’

Annie nodded, resting her head against his shoulder.

‘What else?’ he murmured. ‘Any other news?’

‘No,’ she answered. ‘Not really.’

She closed her eyes. He was so kind, she thought. Kind and good, and she loved him. Perhaps it was an unflamboyant, muted love, but it was infinitely valuable.
Don’t risk it
, she warned herself, and then could almost have laughed wildly out loud. The idea of risking anything, buried alive under tons of rubble and then shuffling in bandages around a hospital ward, was so absurd. She pushed the thoughts aside.

‘Tell me about your day,’ she begged Martin. ‘All about it. Every detail.’ Her fierceness surprised him and to explain it she said, ‘I feel so closed up in this place. Separate from you and the world and everything that matters.’

‘It won’t be long now,’ he soothed her. ‘I saw the sister on the way. She says you’re doing brilliantly.’

Home, Annie thought, not knowing truly what she felt about the prospect. She would be going home, soon.

‘Tell me,’ she insisted.

He settled his arm more comfortably around her.

‘Well. Let’s think. I went to a meeting this morning with the new hotel people in Bayswater. They want to open the place in time for the summer. There isn’t a chance of that, not with the level of work that they want done …’

Annie listened, with her eyes shut, imagining that they were at home. They would be sitting on the shabby chesterfield in front of the fire. The cat would be asleep on the bentwood rocking chair opposite them. The boys asleep upstairs. Newspapers and magazines stacked up on the lower shelf of the television table. The grandmother clock that stood in the hall ticking comfortably. The curtains would be drawn, shutting out the threats that stalked in the darkness outside. Martin went on talking softly while Annie conjured up the certainty of home.

At last he whispered, ‘Are you asleep?’

She shook her head. ‘No. Just thinking.’

Annie opened her eyes and he leant over to kiss her. He fanned her hair out with his fingers and turned her face so that their mouths met.

‘Hurry up and get better. I want you back home. I need you so much, Annie. I love you.’

Love. Need. The dues to be paid
.

Annie nodded, unable to say anything.

When Martin had gone she lay still, looking at the flowers on her locker and at the faded, flat shapes on the curtain behind. The fresh ones were so vivid. She could feel the sappy strength of the stems between her fingers, and the green, pollen-rich scent held amongst the tight petals was stronger than the reek of the hospital. It was only by contrast that the curtain flowers seemed drab. The colours and shapes would have been satisfying enough, if they had been allowed to stand alone.

Annie looked away from them, turning her back on the flowers and the unwelcome analogy that they forced upon her.

She made the decision, as she lay there, that she wouldn’t go to the day room tomorrow. There would be no need, then, to shoulder any guilt. She would stay in the ward all day, and so she needn’t see Steve at all. She could stop what was happening, stop what she was afraid of now, simply by not seeing him at all.

Martin walked out of the main doors of the hospital. The cold wind funnelling between the high buildings seemed sharper still after the airless ward, and he ducked his head and moved briskly. His car was parked in a side street nearby, but when he reached it he made no move to drive away. His attempt at briskness had petered out, and he sat instead staring through the windscreen into the darkness, his hands loosely gripping the wheel.

Annie was getting better. Every day he could see the changes, and he looked carefully for the latest proof that she was stronger. Yet the new strength didn’t bring her back again. He had believed it would, while he sat holding her hand among the possessive machines, and now he saw that the expectation had been too simple. The bomb had done more than tear Annie’s body. It had blown a crater between the two of them, and Martin knew that he couldn’t fling himself across it.

Annie had suffered the pain and the fear, and he had not. However much he willed himself to allow and understand, he did not and he accepted that he could not.

The man did. Steve did, because he had shared it with her. It was absurd, Martin thought with sudden bitterness, to envy him for that.

Martin’s hands slipped off the wheel and hung at his sides. The fingers opened and clenched, as if he wanted to reach for something, but it eluded his grasp. He was thinking of the way that Annie had slipped away from him. She was there, the shape of her filling out every day, but she had gone away somewhere.

Just for a few seconds, Martin let his head drop forward and rest against the wheel. His own concerns were with the mundane double load of business, and of keeping himself and the boys fed and clean. How could he guess from that vantage point what Annie’s concerns were, who had nearly died? And who had shared that almost-death with
him?

With Steve
, Martin made himself repeat.

He jerked his head up and groped for his car keys. He drove home again, too fast, trying to deny the current of his thoughts.

Annie was dreaming.

The darkness had absorbed her again and it stretched all round her, limitless. It wasn’t empty darkness. Rather it was tangible, heavy and threatening, and sharp with broken edges that pressed against her. The darkness was utterly silent, but at the same time it held the threat of a terrible cataclysmic noise that might erupt at any instant. The noise would bring the weight, crashing downwards, to extinguish her. She wanted to move, to raise herself on to all fours and then to crawl, to stagger upright and then to run, lurching away, in all her terror. But there was no possibility of movement, no hope of escape. The silence was absolute. There was only Annie herself, trapped in her weakness. No one would rescue her, because no one else existed. No one could comfort her, and when the noise came at last she would be utterly alone. She felt the icy cold in her chest, deep in her heart, and the stick-like fragility of her outstretched arms and legs.

And then she heard the noise begin.

It was a low rumble, a long way off, beneath her and over her head, terrible and implacable and final.

Annie woke up with her scream frozen in her throat. It was always the same dream, and she always woke at the same instant.

She lay with her knees drawn up and her fists clenched, shivering in the grip of terror, waiting for it to relax as she had learned that it would. Her back and her shoulders were clammy with sweat.

Steve
.

The thought of him filled her mind. She longed for him to be with her, with a desperate, almost unbearable longing. She wanted him to lie down beside her and put his hands over her eyes. She wanted him to put his mouth to her ear and whisper, as he had done in the darkness that now seemed less fearsome than the darkness of her nightmare. Steve saw and understood, and it was unthinkable that he should not be with her now.

Annie sat up in bed. Her nightdress clung icily to her skin, and she pushed the damp weight of her hair back from her face.

She stared across the ward to the day room door. Beyond it was the day room itself, in darkness, with the television’s eye briefly extinguished. And beyond that, in the ward that mirrored this room, Steve would be lying asleep.

She saw his face, every line of it clear. She felt his hands holding hers, and the touch of his forehead making a circuit that she had wanted never to break. She thought of how he had kissed her cheek, that first afternoon, and today he had smiled at her like a lover.

She fought against the longing.

She let her head fall forward against her drawn-up knees, hugging herself, almost welcoming the stab of pain from the wound in her stomach. They couldn’t possess one another now. That they had done so already, tenderly and brutally in the darkness through the touch of their hands, that was only the cruelty of the trick that circumstance had played on them.

A trick, an irony. Life’s little irony, in the face of death.

Annie raised her head again. The sweat on her cheeks had dried and they shone with tears now. She stared down the ward as if she could see through the walls and doors that separated her from Steve.

‘Damn you,’ she whispered helplessly. ‘Damn you.’

A student nurse checking the ward had seen that Annie was awake. She came and stood beside Annie’s bed in her pink dress.

‘Are you all right?’

‘Yes,’ Annie said. ‘I had a dream. Just a bad dream.’

The girl moved to straighten her pillows and the crumpled bedclothes.

‘Shall I bring you a drink? Some hot milk, and something to help you sleep?’

They had taken the flowers away for the night. The chintz flowers of the curtains looked like nursery hangings, reassuring in the dimmed light.

‘Yes,’ Annie said. ‘Thank you. Something to make me sleep.’

She slept at last, and it seemed that almost at once they came to wake her up again. The ward routine was already numbingly familiar. A group of doctors came and examined her, and then mumbled amongst themselves at the foot of her bed.

Annie was used to that now.

Their senior beamed at her, once the consultation was finished.

‘You’re doing very well, you know. Your kidney function is normal, and everything else is healing nicely.’

‘I
want
to do well,’ Annie told him, irresistibly reminded of school interviews with her headmistress. ‘I want to go home.’

‘Oh, I’m making no promises about that. Two or three weeks more with us, and then we’ll see, mmm?’

Annie nodded patiently. Her recovery, going home again to Martin and the children, that was in her power now. That was what she would focus on. She stretched out under the bedclothes, feeling the pull in the tendons as she moved her feet, and the ache in her shoulder.

The hours of the morning crept by. The lunch trays were brought round and then cleared away again, the tea trolley clinked up and down, and the ward settled into its early-afternoon somnolence. Annie lay against her pillows, watching the woman in the bed opposite with her knitting, trying to doze. Unable to sleep, she settled the radio headphones over her head and listened for ten minutes to an incomprehensible play. Another ten minutes passed, then twenty, and Annie found that she was staring at the day room door. Then, without being aware of having made any decision, she found herself pushing back the bedclothes. She put on her blue dressing gown, tied it carefully, and walked across to the door.

Steve was sitting in the day room. He had been watching the sky through the tall windows. It was a windy day, and towers of grey cloud swept behind the roofs and chimneys of the buildings opposite. There were half a dozen other people in the room, their voices competing with the sound of the television.

Annie stood beside his chair and he looked up at her.

How stupid, she thought, to try to deny him. She wanted to put her hand on his shoulder but she stopped herself.

‘I thought you weren’t coming,’ Steve said.

‘I wasn’t going to.’

He nodded, and she wondered if he did understand why. A chair had been drawn up close to his, ready for her, and she moved it back a little way before she sat down. Steve studied her face. The colour and light that he had seen in it yesterday had faded. It looked closed up now, as if the Annie he knew had retreated somewhere.

‘But you did come?’

She bent her head and her hair fell forward. Steve saw the line of her scalp at the parting, and the childish vulnerability touched him.

‘It seemed … mulish, not to.’ Then she looked up again, her eyes meeting his directly. ‘Steve. If I seemed to make you a … promise, of some kind, yesterday, I’m going to tell you now that I can’t keep it.’

He saw the resolution in her face. Annie would be resolute. The certainty of that increased his regard for her.

‘It wasn’t a promise. I thought it was an acknowledgement.’

She moved her hands, quickly, to silence him.

‘It seemed to me that we were going beyond what we could naturally be. Friends.’

Steve smiled crookedly. ‘Is there any definition of natural, in our circumstances?’

In the quiet that followed Annie felt the quicksands shifting around them. She thought of the ground that they had already covered together and the ways ahead, unmarked. There was only one path she could allow herself to take, and that led her away from Steve. Her face changed, showing her uncertainty.

‘Or any definition of friends?’ he persisted.

‘Oh, yes,’ Annie said. ‘I can define friends. Friends are less than we were, yesterday.’ She pressed on, talking rapidly, before he could interrupt her. ‘The doctor told me this morning that I’m getting better very quickly. I shall be able to go home in two weeks, perhaps. When I do go, it will be back to Martin, and our children. I love my husband.’ She lifted her chin as she spoke to emphasize the words. ‘I don’t want to deceive him, or hurt him. When I go home, I want to make everything the same as it was before.’