Strangers (30 page)

‘And you?’ he asked. ‘What did the kidney man say?’

‘I’m fine. Luckier than you. It happens much quicker.’

‘Do you still have the dreams?’

‘Yes. Noise, and dark, and being afraid.’

‘I know.’

They looked at one another then, hearing the sound of their voices, as if the sterile hospital light had suddenly been blacked out. That was it, Annie thought. He did know, and when she woke up in the night and reached out to touch Martin’s warm, insensible skin she blamed him in turn because he didn’t, and couldn’t.

‘The dreams will stop,’ Steve said.

‘Yes.’ The dreams, but not the rest of it. Did Steve think that too? The talk, unspoken but still audible, as it had been at the end, before the firemen reached them. They reached the top of the stairs, midway between the two wings, leading down to the main hall. Voices echoed up the stairwell and then the first wave of visitors appeared, trudging upwards, with their bunches of flowers and carrier bags. They watched them pass and for a moment Annie forgot that she belonged to the world outside, too. The visitors looked separate, odd in their thick, outdoor clothes, and she felt her closeness to Steve as it had been when they lay side by side in the dark.

She wondered, with a little beat of despair, if she would ever know closeness like that again.

The group broke up, heading towards the different wards, and Annie and Steve heard more voices and footsteps following them up the stairs.

‘Are you expecting anyone today?’

‘Perhaps.’

Annie was jealous then, thinking of the glimpses she had had of his visitors in the past, and imagining streams of envoys now from his life outside. She pulled the belt of her coat around her and said, too brightly, ‘I must go, anyway. Ben’s with my mother-in-law. He only goes to nursery in the mornings.’
He doesn’t want to hear about my children
, she thought painfully. What can I tell him? What ground have we got, except that terrible, random thing that happened to us, and the closeness from it that we can’t escape?

I don’t want to escape
, she answered herself.

Steve was balancing awkwardly, trying to free one hand so that he could reach out to her. His face was very dark, almost angry. Now that the moment for leaving him had come, Annie wanted it to be over, quickly, before she could feel the wrench of it.

‘I’ll come next time. My next appointment,’ she gabbled.

Steve wanted to reach out and hold her, saying,
Stay, you can’t go yet
.

But she was already on her way.

‘
Will
you come?’ he asked, insistent because of his immobility.

‘Of course.’

She smiled at him then, and he stood at the head of the stairs to watch her go. She looked small and thin inside her big coat and he remembered how unexpectedly lovely her face had been as she came towards him. Then she went down around the curve of the stairs and he couldn’t see her any more. Steve rested his weight on the metal legs for a moment, looking at the place where she had been, and then he went on towards the cubicle in the ward and his empty bed.

The visits that came after that were just the same. Annie waited with contained, anxious impatience for the day to arrive, and when the time came her brief moments with Steve were like dislocated footnotes to her constant, internal awareness of him. They talked, and then they looked silently at one another, and Annie knew that they were only waiting again.

A little while after her visit Steve was moved from the old ward and taken downstairs to a long-stay orthopaedic ward. The other patients were either immobile, slung up in complicated supports, or else they moved painfully like Steve on crutches and walking frames. None of them knew Annie, and so she could meet Steve now without feeling that they were being watched with any particular interest. But none of the staff knew her either, and so she could only come in at visiting times, like everyone else. Sometimes she had a long time to wait after her appointments were over before the wards opened. On another day the queues in the out-patients clinic were so long that the visiting hour was almost over before she could come to Steve. He never asked her again if she would come without another pretext for being at the hospital, and even she could only guess at the importance of her visits in the monotonous procession of days. Annie was able to blunt her longing a little with the round of housework and cooking and caring for the boys, but Steve had nothing except hospital and its constant reminder that he was trapped in it.

He protected Annie’s visits fiercely, by warning everyone else he knew not to come on those days. Most of them looked at his face and accepted the restriction, but just once, whether by a genuine accident or out of curiosity, Vicky came. Annie was already there, and when Vicky saw them they were not even talking. They were simply sitting together, drawing strength from being close enough to touch one another.

Their intent stillness stopped Vicky in her confident walk down the ward. But she only hesitated for an instant and then she went on, calling out to him, ‘Hello, love, I came today instead of Thursday because …’

Then Steve looked up, and when Vicky saw his expression the words caught in her throat. The fair-haired woman glanced at him, and then up at Vicky as the visitor put her package of new books and magazines down on the end of the bed.

‘I didn’t expect you today,’ Steve said softly.

‘No. Well, I’ve got a conference on Thursday, you see, so I decided I’d …’ The words stuck again as she looked at them. Even from where she was standing, Vicky could feel the current between them, deflecting her.

The fair-haired girl said, ‘Come and sit down. I’ve got to go in a minute.’ Vicky noticed that she had a warm voice, and her smile tried hard to be welcoming. The smile made the absence of one from Steve all the more evident. The girl made room for Vicky to bring up a chair, and while she waited for Steve to listen to what Vicky was saying she turned away tactfully to look at the shiny covers of the new novels.

‘So that’s why I came this afternoon,’ Vicky finished crisply. She had regained possession of herself now. ‘I’m sorry if I’m interrupting. Won’t you introduce us, now I’m here?’ She smiled at the other woman.

‘This is Annie.’ Steve held on to the name as he said it, as if he didn’t want to let it go. ‘And this is Vicky.’

‘
I
know.’ Vicky suddenly understood. ‘You were … you were there in the shop, that day, too, weren’t you?’

‘Yes, I was there,’ Annie said in her low voice.

‘It must have been horrible.’

‘I don’t think I would have survived down there if it hadn’t been for Steve.’

Vicky noticed that she didn’t look at Steve as she said it. As if she couldn’t trust herself to look at him as well, in case her face lost its composure.

There was a moment’s silence before Vicky said, as lightly as she could, ‘You were lucky to have one another.’

Neither Annie nor Steve spoke. It was left to Vicky to talk, and she did her best to fill the awkward quiet with snippets of gossip from her world and from Steve’s.

In a little while, when she judged that it wouldn’t look too much as if she were running away, Annie looked at her watch and then stood up.

Involuntarily, Steve’s hand reached out to catch her wrist. He made himself let go as soon as his fingers touched her.

‘Don’t go yet.’

‘I must. I’ll call in next time.’

She picked up her bag from beside her chair, and as she stooped her face was level with Steve’s.

Vicky sat still, knowingly watching for the goodbye peck on the cheek from which she could gauge how far their relationship had gone. But although neither of them moved for a second, they didn’t kiss each other. They looked, and then the wings of Annie’s hair fell forward to hide her cheeks. She scooped up her belongings and stepped away from the little group of chairs.

‘Goodbye, Vicky,’ she said formally and then, in a much lower voice, ‘Goodbye.’

She can’t even bring herself to say his name, with me listening, Vicky thought.

Annie went, not looking back.

Steve’s face was dark and stiff, and for the first time since they had met Vicky didn’t know what to say to him.

She tried, ‘It must help, being able to talk to someone who went through it too.’

‘It did.’

Summoning up her courage she asked, ‘Are you fond of her?’

‘Fond?’ Steve turned to her, examining her expression as if he had never noticed her before.

‘Yes,’ he said, and the word fell like a hard pebble into black water.

Vicky’s face didn’t change because she was too self-possessed to let her feelings show, but still the words formed inside her head.
That’s it, then
.

Annie walked back to the tube station with her shoulders hunched against the cold. Here in the middle of town the streets were littered and there were none of the tiny signs of spring that had triggered off her happiness this morning. She thought back to it in bewilderment as jealousy crystallized inside her. She could see Vicky’s face in front of her, younger than her own, with clear, pale skin. Steve’s girl had a clever, rather hard expression. She was the kind of ambitious, single-minded woman Annie had always found intimidating, and Steve had chosen her, hadn’t he? He had talked about her in the darkness.
That was before Vicky came along
, he had said.

Annie made herself breathe evenly to counteract the panicky waves that rose in her chest. She thought, What right do I have to be jealous? I’m going home now to my husband and children. I don’t have any claim on Steve. We can’t claim each other.

But she wanted to be able to. That was the truth, and the significance of it made her shiver in the February wind.

It was on that day too, Annie remembered later, that Martin first showed that he knew something was wrong.

He came home earlier than usual. Annie was washing up after the boys’ supper, and the kitchen was still untidy with dirty plates and scattered toys and crayons. She heard Martin’s bag thud on the step, and then the sound of his key in the lock. As the front door opened Benjy, who had been lying on the floor watching television, suddenly rolled sideways and snatched at Thomas’s Lego model. There was an immediate howl of protest and the children fell in a heap, shouting and punching each other.

Annie jerked her fingers out of the washing-up water. It was too hot, and she had thought that she was in too much of a hurry to cool it. She wiped her scalding hands on her skirt and pushed past Martin as he came in, without looking at him. She bent over her children and pulled them apart. She was trembling with anger as she shouted incoherently at them.

‘Stop it. Stop. Fighting all the time. I can’t stand it. I can’t stand it. Do you hear?’ She aimed an ineffectual blow at the nearest bottom as they wriggled past her. ‘Upstairs. Both of you. Get ready for bed.’

‘Dad …’

‘Do as your mother says,’ Martin said evenly.

They went, still squabbling. When the door had closed behind them Annie’s shoulders sagged. Her anger drained away as quickly as it had come, and left her with the blood throbbing dully in her head.

‘Hello,’ Martin said. ‘Remember me?’

Annie looked at him, seeing him framed against the closed door with its grey finger-marks, part of the family furniture in the oppressive room.

‘How could I forget?’

She walked back to the sink and began to lift out the dripping plates. He followed her and took her arm so that she had to stop, standing with her head bent over the popping suds. From overhead she heard thumping feet, and then the splash of bathwater.

‘Annie, we’ve all had enough of this. What’s the matter with you?’

The bathwater was turned off again and in the sudden quiet the bubbles in the sink burst with the sound of smacking kisses. Suddenly, insanely, Annie wanted to laugh.

‘Nothing’s the matter.’

‘Ever since you came home, it’s been either silent martyrdom or frothing rage. I know that something terrible happened to you …’

Is it so very terrible, to fall in love with a man who isn’t your husband?

‘… but sooner or later you have to forget it, and start to live your life again. If you need help, Annie, have the sense to ask for it. And if it’s something else, tell me and stop taking it out on the kids.’

He broke off, and the silence closed down again. He had given her the opening, deliberately. But Annie knew that she couldn’t find the right words to deny what was happening, or to convince him that everything was all right, after all.

Martin sighed, and turned away from her. ‘What needs doing now?’

‘You could bath the boys and put them to bed.’

‘Of course I will, if that’s any help.’

He went out and closed the door behind him, and in a moment Annie heard the three of them talking and then laughing in the bathroom. In solitude she finished clearing the kitchen and then she scoured the sink until it shone at her.

Later, when the boys were asleep, Martin and Annie sat down opposite one another at the kitchen table and ate their evening meal together.

Talk
, Annie willed herself.
Talk to him
. But she couldn’t think of anything to say that might not touch on the dangerous things, and she was afraid that if they came close to the truth her fragile defences would break down, and all the misery and the guilty happiness would come spilling out. She knew how much the truth would hurt Martin, and she recognized that she was more afraid of hurting him than of anything else in the world. Even more than the darkness of her dreams, and the emptiness she discovered when she woke up and found that Steve was gone from her side.

And so they sat in silence in the pool of light spreading over the table, while Martin unseeingly turned the pages of
Architectural Review
.

After supper, when the washing up was done, Martin said that he had some drawings that needed urgent work. He took his bag and went upstairs to his studio at the top of the house.

Annie didn’t know how long she had been sitting in her place, unmoving, before the telephone rang. She stood up automatically and went to answer it, thinking as she crossed the floor that it was sure to be someone for Martin, something to do with whatever he was working on upstairs. There was an extension in the studio, but Annie lifted the kitchen receiver from its hook on the wall and said, ‘Hello?’