Strangers (26 page)

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘I suppose,’ Annie said softly, ‘I was trying to pretend that it wasn’t going to happen.’

Their eyes fastened on the other’s face, hungry, importunate.

‘I don’t want you to go.’

‘I don’t want to leave you.’

The words spoken aloud, at last. How many days have I made us waste? Annie thought, despairingly.

Steve turned on his crutches again. He looked up and down the room, at the interminable television and the rain-streaked windows, the incurious, sick faces of the others.

‘Come here,’ he said.

Annie stepped forward, unable to question. If he had undone her clothes, then, and asked her to lie down with him on the institutional floor, she would have done it because he wanted her to.

But he led her away, to the door that opened into the corridor. With all her senses painfully sharpened, Annie heard the tiny metallic creak that his crutches made under his weight.

A few steps beyond was another door, this one with a little round window in it. Steve looked in through the window, and then eased the door open. Annie knew what was inside, because the room was the twin of the one over on the women’s side.

‘Where are you going?’ she whispered.

Come on,’ he repeated.

Annie followed him, and Steve closed the door behind them.

The room was unoccupied. It was a single-bedded side ward with a tall, narrow slit of window that looked out at a dark angle of the red-brick hospital walls. There was a high bed, made up with stiff, smooth white sheets and pillows set perfectly straight. The bed table was pushed away to the foot, bare of the usual clutter of belongings. The only other furnishings were two upright chairs, a folding screen and a basin with long-handled taps like metal ears.

As they faced each other in the silence, footsteps passed by the door.

‘No one will come,’ Steve said.

‘I know.’

Steve disengaged himself from one of the crutches and propped it against the wall. He took Annie’s hand and used the other crutch to hobble the few feet across to the bed. He drew her with him, and she followed, without hesitation. Steve reached the bed and rested himself against it, then let the second crutch fall. Then, gently, he took her other hand. She stepped forward, close, and then so close that their bodies touched. She saw the shape of his face and his mouth, the line of his top lip and a muscle that pulled at the corner of it. Her chest was tight with pain and happiness.

He lifted their linked hands and his mouth brushed her knuckles. Annie felt the softness of his tongue between his teeth. Her own mouth opened and she drew the breath in, sharpening the wonderful pain in her heart.

Then Steve let her hands go. He lifted his to cup her face, looking levelly into her eyes, through her eyes and into her head. And then he leant forward, slowly, and his mouth touched hers. He turned her face to one side, and then to the other, and kissed the corners of her mouth.

For that moment, Annie knew nothing except the happiness. She smiled, with her lips curving upwards under his, and he drew her closer still, until her body arched backwards as he kissed her.

His arms came around her and they clung together, greedy, admitting their hunger at last in silence. Annie forgot her physical weakness and the bleak room that enclosed them, and the world waiting for her outside. There was no one but Steve. Her mouth opened under his as she answered him, candid, and his sudden roughness bruised her skin and sent the shocks of sweetness racing all through her.

Annie heard her own voice, wordless, caught low in her throat,
Oh
.

Steve lifted his mouth from hers, and looked into her eyes again. His eyelids were heavy and she saw the gold-flecked irises. Annie was shaking. Behind Steve’s shoulder she saw the white cover of the hospital bed, drawn up now in rumples like long pointing fingers. She turned her face away from the fingers and rested it against Steve’s shoulder. She brushed the tiny raised loops of his towelling robe and felt the warmth of his skin under her cheek. A pulse beating at the base of his throat answered her own heartbeat. She closed her eyes, giving up all of herself, and put her lips to the little flicker under his skin.

‘
Annie
.’ His voice crackled.

‘I’m here.’

Their kiss was gentle now, and for a second behind her closed eyelids Annie saw the lit threads of tiny veins that netted her head, as beautiful as winter trees and all the firmaments of stars shining behind them.

When they moved apart at last it was slowly, and their fingers reached out to curl together.

Annie opened her eyes to see again. Behind Steve there was still the high white bed, and the ugly, cream-painted bed table on its black rubber wheels. She looked carefully at the folding screen, the door with its single black eye, and then through the window at the brick walls stained with damp and the black humps of drainage pipes. She thought of the hospital, the nurses, and the other patients with their inquisitive stares, and it was like a microcosm of the world that separated her with Steve into this bare room under the blind eye that could see at any moment. The joy was still vivid inside her, but the pain and uncertainty came back to tangle inseparably with it.

Steve watched her face and she knew that he was reading it, and her thoughts flickering behind it. He lifted and smoothed back a fine strand of hair that had caught up at the corner of her mouth, and then his fingers slid under the thickness of hair at the nape of her neck.

‘You know, Annie,’ he said, ‘that we started at the end, you and me. The two of us, stripped down in the darkness, nowhere further to go. It’s hard to go back and fill in the steps.’

She saw his crooked, amused smile as he ticked the steps off. ‘How do you do? What do you do? How, and where, and what for? I wonder. Another drink? You feel the same? We must be kindred spirits. Let’s talk some more, your husband isn’t looking. Am I boring you? Monopolizing you? No? I’m glad we met. Very glad. Yes, another drink. More talk. Is it so late already? Could we perhaps meet again? Lunch. Yes, lunch some time very soon.’

‘You must be very practised,’ Annie said. Steve shook his head to answer her, and she saw his truthfulness too.

‘At that. Not at this. This hasn’t happened, never. I don’t know, any more than you do, how to explain the strangers we were and what we are now. I can’t deny it, Annie, and now that I’m holding you like this I know that you can’t deny it either. Nor can I justify it, because of what it means to your family.
Wait
.’

She had tried to move backwards then, to disengage herself, but he held her too tightly.

‘There hasn’t been any neat social two-step between you and me, my love. We came together without anything except ourselves, the parts of ourselves that were real in that bloody wreckage. It was real then, and it is still real now.’

He turned her chin with his fingertips to make her look up at him, and at last she returned his clear gaze.

‘I’ve never taken you to dinner. We’ve never met for a clandestine drink, and so I don’t know whether you prefer white wine spritzers or vodka martinis. We haven’t taken those particular steps together and we won’t do, now. I’m glad, because I don’t believe you tread that path in any case. And we haven’t made love, although I want you now more than I’ve ever wanted anyone in all my life.’

Annie knew that that was the truth. She felt the colour hot in her cheeks, but her eyes held his.

‘I’d lie down with you here, now, this minute, if only we could,’ she whispered.

Steve leant forward and for a second his lips were hard against hers.

‘Thank you,’ he said. He was smiling, but the pulse was still beating at the base of his throat. ‘I will remind you of that. For now, I just want to tell you something.’ He stopped, looking for the words, and Annie understood that Steve was as vulnerable as she was herself. He shrugged then, almost like a boy, and said in a voice so low that she had to strain to catch what he said, ‘You know that I love you, Annie, don’t you?’

In the silence that followed she heard the echoes in her head,
I love you, Annie
, and happiness fluttered against her ribs again. She lifted Steve’s hands and looked down at his knuckles, touching them gently, wonderingly, with her thumb.

From outside in the corridor came the squeak of hurrying feet and a door swung open and shut with a hiss and a bang. In the distance a trolley rattled at the big doors of the lift.

It was so quiet in the room, and the noise outside sharpened her awareness of the difference between there and here. She was hidden with Steve in this little square box. Martin told her,
I love you
, and that was the truth too.

‘I did know,’ Annie said at last, thinking that the words fell gracelessly, like stones. She tried to cover them, saying too quickly, ‘Steve, I didn’t …’ but he stopped her from going any further.

‘That’s all,’ he said. ‘I wanted you to know, before you go. Will you think about it, Annie?’

Very carefully, keeping her mouth steady, Annie said, ‘I won’t be able to think about anything else.’ That was her admission. Her face crumpled then and she blinked to keep back the tears. ‘I don’t want to go, Steve. I …’

Not even Annie knew what she might have said, because he stopped her with his hands to her lips.

‘Think about it,’ he repeated. Steve moved his weight awkwardly against the edge of the bed, and Annie knew that he was thinking,
Bandages, crutches
.

‘It won’t be long,’ she said. ‘They’ll let you go soon.’

‘Until they do, will you come and visit me?’

‘Like all the others?’ Annie smiled suddenly as she copied old Frank’s descriptive outline in the air, but Steve caught her hands and kissed them.

‘Not like that at all. Will you?’

Annie knew that she would come. The prospect of it seemed now the only way that she could bear to leave him.

‘Yes,’ she said simply. ‘As often as I can. I promise I will.’

‘It won’t be long,’ he echoed, and they looked at one another soberly.

‘What will you say to Martin?’ he asked, because he couldn’t help it.

Annie let go of his hands. She turned her head to look at the window, and then walked slowly across the room. Dozens of other windows faced into the dark well. She saw the edges of curtains, cupboards, and through one window opposite the crimped edge of a sister’s cap as she sat at a desk.

Painfully, she said, ‘I won’t tell Martin anything. There isn’t anything to tell, yet, is there? I don’t want to hurt him.’ Annie realized that she was rationalizing aloud. She didn’t understand herself what was happening, not yet. ‘I have to think,’ she said softly. Steve nodded, accepting. Annie went back to him and rested her head against his shoulder. Out of the tangle of feelings, suddenly happiness was dominant again. They had come through all of it, and they had held on to one another.

With his mouth against her hair he whispered, ‘We should go now.’

Annie wanted to leave this, too, at the point that they had reached. She let herself hold on to him for a moment longer, and then she slipped out of his reach. She stooped to pick up his hated crutches and fitted them gently under his arms so that he could walk again.

Watching her, Steve thought that he had never seen anyone as clearly, with such intimacy, as he saw Annie now. With her hand at his elbow he lumbered towards the door. A cramp gnawed at his good leg so that he swayed, leaning against Annie for support, and she almost fell under his weight. They struggled for a moment before they were steady, and then they stood upright. Laughter washed over them until Annie had to hold on to the door jamb for support. She found herself thinking, How can this have happened, out of pain and fear, this laughter, and the happiness of loving a stranger?

But it had happened. There was no going back now.

‘It isn’t funny,’ Steve protested as their laughter died down. ‘I’m incapable.’ He saw the brightness of Annie’s eyes.

‘That’s just as well. Think what might have happened otherwise.’ She dodged past him, and went to smooth the hospital bedcover back into its rigid folds. ‘There. Now Sister will never guess.’

‘Don’t be so sure. She’s probably got a spyhole somewhere.’

‘Now you tell me.’

Annie peered through the glass porthole. Her face was serious again as she turned back to him, and then leant forward to touch her mouth to his.

Neither of them spoke, because in that long moment there was no need to.

It was Annie who moved first. Slowly she opened the door. She saw that the corridor was deserted and so she went quickly away, without looking back, afraid that if she didn’t leave him then she never would.

Martin came to collect her the next morning.

Annie had packed her bag, and she was waiting for him, sitting in the chair beside her empty bed, when Sylvia saw him through the open doors and called across to her, ‘Here he comes, love.’

She stood up to meet him and he kissed her cheek, both of them aware of all the others watching them. Annie felt the familiarity of him beside her, and at the same time her fear of leaving the safe, small hospital world.

Martin picked up her bag. ‘Ready?’

‘I just want to say goodbye.’

The nurses and the other patients were already waiting, lined up in dressing gowns and uniforms at the ward doors. Annie saw the sister slip out through the doors. With Martin at her side Annie said goodbye to each one of the others. Their good wishes and congratulations made a lump in her throat, and she was afraid that she was going to cry.

She was reaching the end of the row when the ward door opened again. The sister was back and there were others with her, all the men from the adjoining ward who were well enough to walk. Frankie the news vendor was at the head of them, with a big bunch of cellophane-wrapped roses in his arms. He held them out to her, beaming. ‘Here you are, my duck. You’re a brave girl. Good luck, from all of us.’

Behind him, taller than the others, she saw Steve’s dark head.

Not brave
, Annie thought. For an instant she thought that the terrible pull, one way and then the other, would tear her in half. She took the flowers blindly and kissed Frankie’s cheek. There were other kisses too, but in all the press of people she felt a light touch on her shoulder and she knew that it was Steve’s. She nodded, not trusting herself to look at him, and stumbled forward with her flowers. She felt rather than saw that Martin held out his hand to Steve.