Strangers (29 page)

The question ran round in her head, unanswerable.

At last, the evening was over.

The last cup of coffee and the last glass of wine had been drained, and their friends followed one another out into the black, icy night.

‘Bye, everybody. It was lovely, Annie. You’re a miracle, you know?’

‘Don’t do too much, though, will you? You look a bit weary, still, to me.’

‘See you on Saturday, then? With the kids, of course.’

Goodbye. Goodnight.

The words rang around Annie, friendly and foreign, emphasizing her isolation.

Martin looked around the kitchen. ‘You go on up. I’ll clear all this.’ He glanced at her, and when she didn’t respond he ordered, ‘Go
on
, Annie.’

She went, too lonely and too tired to do anything more. She lay down in bed, in the comfortable darkness, and listened to the sounds of the house. She felt like an interloper. At last Martin came up. He turned on the light and sat down heavily on his side of the bed.

‘Still awake?’

‘Yes.’

She didn’t know what to say, now.

Martin stood up again and moved around the room, undressing. He was a little drunk and bumped into the corners of the furniture.

When he was ready, he slid under the bedclothes beside her.

There was a moment when they both lay still. Then, with an awkward, possessive movement, Martin put his arms around her. He fitted her body against the curves of his own, his mouth and tongue against her ear. To Annie he felt very warm and solid, and utterly strange. She closed her eyes. He was her husband. She was suddenly struck by a sense of how random everything had been, all the choices she had made in her life, up until now. She could equally well have married David, or Ian. It could be either of them, anyone she had met or never met, with his body pressed to hers, and it would make no difference.

Somehow, cruelly and yet with such potent force that even now it melted her, Steve had become the only man she knew. The only man she wanted, and he wasn’t there. Annie lay quite still while her husband made love to her, and she felt nothing. And then when it was over she lay in the dark and listened to his breathing, like a stranger’s.

Martin had half-turned away, but he didn’t fall asleep.

Annie had been there in his arms, and in that sense she had been as generous as she always was, but for all the intimacy of touch he hadn’t been able to reach her. He could sense her separateness now, and it silenced him. They lay with a cold space between them, holding their feelings painfully apart.

Suddenly, Martin was angry. A knot of it gathered inside him, focused on Steve. He couldn’t be angry with Annie, not yet, because she had been through so much.

He saw Steve’s face as he had been on Christmas Eve, his face dark and drawn against the hospital pillows. And he remembered the little space where Steve had held Annie, and where they had shared the terrible hours that he was ashamed to be jealous of. That space had seemed much smaller than the bed’s hollow that contained Martin and Annie now.

Anger jumped inside Martin and his fists clenched under the bedclothes. He felt no sympathy for Steve, and the certainty came to him that Steve would be a formidable opponent. He would have to be an opponent, an enemy, of course, because Martin would have to cut him off from Annie.

My wife. Annie, in the bedroom’s silence
.

He thought she stirred, and he waited breathlessly for her to put her hand out to him. Nothing happened, and with his imagination fuelled by the wine he had drunk Martin planned in angry detail how he would drive to the hospital in the morning. He would stand beside Steve’s bed, and tell him that he was to leave Annie alone. His anger and his determination to keep her were big enough and simple enough to crush any opposition, Martin was sure of that.

When he fell asleep at last it was to uncomfortable, ambiguous dreams.

In the morning the anger had evaporated. As he shaved and went downstairs with a slight, dry headache to listen to the boys squabbling over their breakfasts, Martin knew that he wouldn’t go to see Steve. It wasn’t in his nature to force a confrontation, even with Annie. Especially with Annie. He looked across the kitchen at her white, exhausted face and he felt ashamed again. She had barely recovered, and she must be feeling her own unhappiness.

When the time came for him to leave for work Martin put his arm around her and rested his face against her hair. She returned the warm pressure, although she kept her face turned away, and he left the house holding on to that brief affirmation.

The sense of apartness stayed with Annie. It cast a thin, uncomfortable light on the routine of every day.

Annie ran the house mechanically. She went out to buy food in the local shops, and looked at the familiar shelves as if she had never seen them before. She washed and folded clothes, and drove the boys to and fro, feeling herself physically stronger every day. She sat with Martin in the evenings, hearing the silence between them, afraid. At night the dreams of noise and stifling darkness still came. Annie woke up, shaking, to find him asleep beside her and as the pall of brick-dust lifted again in her imagination she put her hand out to touch the separate warmth of his skin. Annie went back to the hospital regularly, to see her specialists and to submit to more tests. She waited patiently in the various clinics, soothed by the way that the system temporarily took away her sense of responsibility for herself. And after she had gone through what was required of her in out-patients, and only then, Annie allowed herself to go upstairs and see Steve.

The first time was no more than a few days after Annie had been discharged, but it seemed already that they had been painfully separated for months. On the morning of her appointment she went upstairs and chose, very carefully, what she was going to wear. She made her face up, and her hands were shaking so much that she smudged the careful strokes. Annie looked at her reflection and thought, it’s like being a girl again. The recognition and the strangeness made her laugh, but her heart still hammered in her chest. She left the quiet house and walked to the tube station, remembering the last time, the midwinter morning with the snowflakes spiralling after the wind. This morning it was just as cold, but there were snow-drops under the bare hedge in a square of front garden, and the pale spears of crocus leaves pointing up through the broken earth beside them. When she saw the flowers it was as if she had walked into a shaft of light. The same happiness in being alive that she had felt on the day they wheeled her out of intensive care came back and took hold of her. Steve had felt that happiness, and the return of it now drew her even more strongly towards him.

For a moment, standing in the littered street, Annie forgot her anxiety and guilt. She smiled and straightened her shoulders, thinking,
Whatever comes, will come
. Then she began to walk again, faster, feeling herself strong and complete in her happiness. The people who passed her saw her face and looked again, watching her as she went by, but Annie didn’t see anything except the warm light and the first signs of spring.

When she slipped in through the doors of his ward at last, she saw Steve sitting in the chair beside his bed, his crutches propped up within reach. The reality of his being there made her catch her breath, because all the way up in the lift she had been preparing herself for what she would do if he wasn’t. She saw that he was thinner and much paler than the Steve she had seen inside her head, and she thought that she must have been imagining him as he would be when he could walk again, fit enough to leave the hospital. Willing that to happen. She realized too that the sense of separateness had evaporated. She was simply Annie with her heart thumping and the mixture of joy and apprehension drying her mouth.

Then he looked up and saw her and she wanted to run forward and to hold back at the same time.

Steve watched her walk towards him and he thought, She’s beautiful. I hadn’t noticed that.

As soon as she was close enough, he stretched out his hand and Annie took it. They held on to one another for a moment, all they could do under the eyes of the ward. Then Steve moved to reach for his crutches and Annie said quickly, ‘Don’t move. I’ll sit beside you.’

She brought a chair, and put it beside his.

‘Six days is a long time,’ Steve said softly. Annie saw the hunger in his face and she had to look away, over his shoulder. It was a little before visiting time, and most of the curtains were drawn while the men slept after lunch. Even so there were still one or two patients shuffling to and fro, and the nurses. One of the nurses glanced their way and then looked more carefully. She waved a belated greeting to Annie.

Did they all see what was happening? Annie wondered. They must do, of course. If it was written as plainly in her face as it was in Steve’s.

She turned back to him, closing out the ward behind them. It didn’t matter. Only Steve mattered, here.

‘Today was my first appointment,’ she said.

‘And you won’t come to see me unless you’ve got the excuse of an appointment.’

‘Not an excuse,’ she began, and then stopped. She was using the fact of having to be at the hospital as a pretext, telling herself that she could always say lightly to Martin, ‘Oh, I went up to the ward to see Steve. Just for five minutes, as I was there, you know. He looks much better.’

But of course she wouldn’t say anything to Martin. Nothing at all, beyond the facts like the queue at Haematology, and the reassurances that the doctors had doled out to her. She had stopped talking to Martin about what mattered to her, in case it came too close to this. And gave her away.

Annie’s happiness faded a little. If Martin didn’t know anything about it, it didn’t matter when she came to visit Steve. The subterfuge was for her own benefit, Annie thought, because she lacked the courage to meet what was happening face-on.

‘Don’t look like that,’ Steve said.

‘I don’t know why I’m trying to pretend not to see you,’ Annie was frowning, unravelling her motives. What had been clear, before, was murky now.

Steve leant forward and touched his thumb between her eyebrows.

‘Come when you can, that’s all. It doesn’t matter, so long as I know I’ll see you sometimes. I don’t want to make more demands on you.’

Steve shifted in his chair, trying to contain his impatience with his slow-mending leg and the public tedium of the ward while Annie sat so close to him. Her hair smelt clean, with a mild, lemony scent. And even the brief touch of her had made him sharply aware of the texture of her skin, and the masked outline of her body. Steve was suddenly aware of the weight of love, pressing and trying to force its way into the open. It was new to him, and it made him feel childish and helpless.

Annie saw his impatience and her face lightened with sympathy.

‘Shall we walk a bit?’ she asked. ‘Come on. I’ll help you stand up.’

Together, they levered him to his feet. Annie held out his crutches and Steve leant his weight on the metal legs.

‘We could go to the day room.’ He smiled at her, crookedly.

They went slowly down the ward. Annie nodded cheerfully and spoke to the people they passed.

‘No, they can’t keep me away, can they?’

Truer than you know
, she thought.

Annie pushed the doors open and the stale, smoky air of the day room enveloped them. It was deserted, but the television still shouted in the empty space. Steve went to the window and looked down into the street, then leant his forehead against the glass.

‘It’s like being in prison,’ he said.

Annie came to stand beside him and he manoeuvred himself awkwardly so that he could put his arm around her shoulders.

‘It won’t be long,’ she said.

‘It can’t be,’ he answered. He wanted to kiss her but he felt as awkward as a boy with his crutches and his heavy, plastered leg. And even if he managed to reach her and fit her against him, the doors would open at once behind them, bringing in Frankie, or sister, or the first phalanx of visitors eager for a cigarette and a talk about operations.

He whispered, ‘Annie,’ feeling his helplessness again, and she moved quickly, turning her face to his and kissing him.

‘It won’t be long,’ she repeated.

I love you
, he thought, and the weight of it was pleasurable now. ‘Let’s try a walk along the corridor,’ he said. They went out again, passing the round window of the side-ward and smiling, sideways conspirators’ smiles.

They moved slowly along the corridor towards the opposite wing of the hospital, close together, listening to the sound of their awkward steps on the polished floor. After a moment Steve asked, ‘How is it, being back at home? Are the boys happier now?’

‘It’s fine,’ Annie answered carefully. ‘Tiring, sometimes. They’re reacting to my desertion of them by being truculent and clinging, by turns. Copybook behaviour, which I should have been ready for, and wasn’t. If I had the energy I’d have lost my temper with them days ago. I’m relying on a kind of weary patience.’

She grinned up at him suddenly and he saw how she must be at home, ordinarily. Jealousy of Martin and her children, and their life with her, gripped him viciously. He said something as neutral as he could, looking ahead to the patch of light through the doors at the end of the corridor, but he knew that Annie glanced quickly at him. They were silent for a few more steps, and then began deliberately to talk about their physical progress, safe hospital ground.

As they talked they were both aware of the two dialogues, spoken and unspoken, starting up again. They wouldn’t talk about Martin, although he was as close as if he were walking alongside them, making a third pair of slow footsteps. Although they talked about the bones in Steve’s leg that had to knit together before he could walk, before he could leave the hospital, they didn’t ask each other,
What will happen then?

They reached the far doors and turned back again.

‘It helps, just to move about like this,’ he said and Annie nodded, knowing that he meant it helped the knot of boredom and frustration.