Strangers (31 page)

She heard the rapid pips of a payphone, and then Steve’s low voice.

‘Annie.’

She leant against the kitchen wall, her breath taken away with her relief that she had picked up the phone after all, and not left it for Martin.

‘You can’t ring me here.’

‘I just have.’

She knew just where he was, seeing him more clearly than the kitchen tiles and the children’s drawings thumb-tacked to the wall beside the telephone. He was in the long corridor outside the orthopaedic ward, where two grey plastic hoods shielded the public telephones. The lights would already be dimmed for the night, making shadows in the corners. She imagined the hated crutches resting against the wall, as he steadied himself with his free hand. And then the shape of his hand, the warmth of it.

‘What would you have done if Martin had answered? Pretended it was a wrong number, or something stupid like that?’

‘I had to talk to you. Annie, are you listening? I don’t want you to be jealous of Vicky. I don’t want you to be jealous or afraid about anything, or anybody, because there’s no need.’ He was talking very quickly, his voice so low that it was almost a whisper. Annie closed her eyes on the kitchen and strained to hear what he was saying. ‘I wanted just to tell you, before you go to sleep. I love you. Remember.’

She remembered the little side room of the old ward, and the way that they had held on to one another. He hadn’t asked her for anything in return, then. He had even stopped her from saying anything.

Now she had the sense that the old, silent dialogue had swelled in volume. It grew insistently loud so that her whole body reverberated with it and, at last, she had to give voice to it. ‘I know,’ she answered him. And then, helplessly, ‘I love you too.’

She heard, at the other end of the line, his sharply exhaled breath.

There was nothing for either of them to say, beyond that.

The silent words had been spoken, and there was no point in voicing the others that came rushing after them into the physical distance that separated them. ‘I wish I could touch you,’ he said.

‘Soon,’ Annie promised him.

‘Goodnight, my love.’ He was gone then, and Annie stood with the receiver in her hand listening to the purr of the dialling tone. As she replaced it she looked up at the ceiling and then she realized that she had been whispering, as if Martin might hear her, although he was two floors above. Whispering, and pretending, and not talking in case the most innocent-sounding topic accidentally touched on the truth. Deceiving and lying, even though it was by omission. That was what this joy inside her had led her to.

With her hand outstretched, groping across her own kitchen as if she were half blind, Annie found her way back to her chair. She sat hunched over, with her arms wrapped around her chest. Just to hear Steve’s voice, tonight, made her unbearably happy, and the assurances that they had given each other made her blood swirl dizzyingly in her veins.

But the same happiness stabbed her as she looked around the kitchen because she knew that it was hopeless, and that she was trapped here by Martin and their children and the layers of love and habit that they had built up and sealed together over the years.

Exultation and misery ran together and coalesced into a choking knot that lay like a stone underneath Annie’s heart. At last, still moving like an old woman, she went upstairs and undressed ready for bed. She lay down and the sheets felt cold and clammy against her skin. She drew her knees up to her chest and hunched over the painful knot.

‘I don’t know what to do,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t know what to do.’

Seven

Tibby had gone into a special hospital for her rest.

When Annie went to see her she was struck by its difference from the big general hospital where she had been treated herself. The rooms and corridors here were carpeted, there were pictures on the walls, and the sitting rooms were pretty and cosy. There was no medicinal smell, and even the nurses’ dresses contrived not to look like uniforms.

Tibby seemed happy.

‘It’s just like home,’ she smiled, ‘without any of the responsibilities.’

Her face was bright, but in the depths of the big chintz-covered armchair that Annie had settled her in she looked shrunken and brittle.

‘That’s good,’ Annie said cheerfully. ‘It seems like a nice place.’

There was no doubt now about the progress of her mother’s illness. The cancer was inoperable, and although the doctors’ estimates were deliberately vague they were beginning to talk in terms of weeks rather than months. Tibby knew exactly what was happening to her, and she had accepted it with silent graceful courage. The hospice’s aim was simply to make her as comfortable as possible, and to help her to enjoy the time that was left.

‘When would you like to come home again?’ Annie asked her.

The doctors had told them that, for a while longer at least, Tibby could choose whether she wanted to be in the hospice or in her own home.

‘Oh dear, I don’t know. It’s so comfortable in here. But I feel very lazy, not doing a thing. I’m still quite capable. I’m just afraid that Jim won’t be managing in the house without me, and I daren’t think about the garden. There’s the roses, you know.’

Annie thought of the big corner garden and the shaggy heads of the old-fashioned roses that sprawled over the walls. Tibby liked to prune her roses in March, and to begin her régime of spraying and feeding. It was quite likely that she wouldn’t see this year’s mass of pink and white and gold, or catch the evening scent of them through the windows as she moved about in the awkward, old-fashioned kitchen. Annie looked down at her own hands, turning them to examine the palms, as if she could see something that mattered there.

‘Don’t worry about the house,’ she managed to say. ‘Dad can cope perfectly well. I went yesterday, and it looks the same as it always does. And if you’d like me to do the roses I can, very easily. Or Martin will.’

Two dialogues, again, Annie thought. We sit here talking about the roses and the dusting, and both of us are thinking,
Why must you die?
Why is it Tibby, and why now? There are a hundred other things, a thousand other things to say. She began in a rush, ‘Tibby, I want to …’

But her mother took her hand, squeezing it briefly before replacing it in Annie’s lap. It was as clear a way of silencing her as if she had said, ‘I don’t want to talk about it. Forgive me?’

Aloud, Tibby said mildly, ‘Well. Perhaps I’ll stay here just this week. And then I think I should get home.’

‘All right,’ Anne acquiesced. ‘Of course you must go home whenever you feel like it.’

They sat and talked for a little while longer in the pleasant room.

Tibby wanted, more than anything else, to hear about her grandsons. She leaned forward in her armchair, eager for the little snippets of news. Thomas had just joined a local cub pack and Annie described how he had gone off to his first meeting the night before, resplendent and full of pride in his new green uniform.

Tibby nodded and smiled. ‘They’re growing up so quickly, both of them.’

She’s seen you grow up. Seen her grandchildren
.

As she tried to fathom the real expression behind her mother’s smile Annie heard Steve’s words again. She remembered the blind fear that she had felt herself when she thought that she was going to die, but more vividly still she remembered the bitterness of having to leave so much unfinished. Did Tibby feel that now? And when Tibby looked around the sunny sitting room with its chintz covers and faint smell of polish, did she feel the same sharp sense of how precious and how beautiful all of it was?

Tibby looked smaller and frailer than before, but her hair was set and she was wearing her own neat, unemphatic clothes. She was still Tibby herself, yet for all the closeness Annie had believed there to be between her mother and herself she couldn’t gauge what she felt or needed now. The careful, light conversation about the garden and the boys ran on, and Annie had the disorientating sense that neither of them was listening to a word of it.

She wanted to shout at her, Don’t go. We need you, all of us.
Talk to me
.

‘… But with the price of container-grown shrubs nowadays,’ Tibby sighed, ‘what else can you do … ?’

‘I know. But I’ve never had your luck or knack with cuttings.’

I talked to Steve, down there in the blackness
. I still could, if I would let it happen, if there weren’t so many other things, such immutable things.

Tibby leaned farther forward and touched Annie’s arm.

‘Are you sure you’re all right, darling? You look a bit drawn in the face, to me.’

I’ve fallen in love, Tibby, with a stranger. I’d walk out of here and go straight to him if I could, if only I could
.

‘I’m fine. The specialist says it will take a little time before I’m thoroughly fit again, but everything has mended perfectly well.’

I do it too, of course. I don’t talk either, not to Tibby, not even to Martin. Only to Steve, and he hears me whether I say the words or not.

I wish I was going to him now.

Annie smiled at her mother, with the conviction that they were both close to tears.

‘I must make a move, darling.’

‘Of course you must. Thomas comes out at four o’clock, doesn’t he?’

When Tibby held out her hand Annie saw that her mother’s sapphire engagement ring was slipping on her thin finger. Tibby instinctively turned it back into place with her thumb. Annie leant over and kissed her cheek, noticing the unfamiliar smell of lacquer because Tibby’s hair had grown too sparse to hold her old style.

‘I’ll come in tomorrow to see you.’

‘Couldn’t you bring Tom and Benjy with you?’

‘Won’t they tire you too much? They wear me out.’

‘I’d like to see them.’

How many more times will there be?

‘Of course I will. Goodbye, love. Sleep well.’

Annie settled her mother against her cushions again and as she left she felt her eyes on her back, greedy, looking through her at the past and into the future that Tibby wouldn’t see for herself.

Annie drove home with the hard brightness of tears behind her own eyes.

On the same evening, Martin and Annie went to do the big monthly shop at the supermarket. As they always had done in the past, they went on late-opening night and left the boys at home under Audrey’s supervision.

It was the first time they had made the trip together since Annie’s return from hospital. Along the clogged urban route she sat in the passenger seat watching the shopfronts flick past. Her face was turned away from him, but she sensed Martin glancing sideways at her, frowning in the silence that hung between them. They reached the big supermarket and Martin parked in the middle of one of the long lines of cars. They walked side by side over the pitted ground towards the entrance, skirting the puddles and the empty, abandoned wire trolleys. Even the air seemed gritty, smelling of diesel exhaust fumes, and greasy onions from the hamburger stall near the shop doors.

Annie was tired, and her legs felt suddenly so heavy that she wondered whether they would support her up and down the crowded aisles with the shopping trolley. Martin’s pace quickened and she had to hurry to keep up with him.

‘Don’t walk so fast,’ she called and he snapped back, without slowing down, ‘Let’s get it over with.’

Annie felt his anger, and her own rose sluggishly through her tiredness.

Is this what it is? she thought. Is this what I’m trying to hold on to?

The automatic doors yawned in front of them, neon-lit, and hissed open. Martin reached for a trolley and swung it round with a vicious clatter. Without speaking they wound their way through the crowds and the piled-up shopping to the end aisle and began to work their way along the shelves.

The harsh overhead lights hurt Annie’s eyes, and the colours of the endless lines of tins and packets danced up and down in front of them. She heard herself repeating a silent litany, eggs, butter, yoghurt, cheese. Love, loyalty, duty, habit.

Martin was moving along the opposite shelf and she saw his mouth set in a straight line and the stiff, angry tilt of his head. Suddenly, with a molten heat that flooded all through her, she hated him. She turned her back on him and stared blindly at the shelf at eye-level, where the red and blue and orange packs shouted their rival claims at her. She reached up, still with the heat of anger flushing her face, and took down a packet of breakfast cereal. She dropped it into the trolley and then another, and followed them with a packet of the sugary variety that Ben insisted on.

Fruit juice, skimmed milk. Routine, responsibility, today, tomorrow. Endlessly. Groping through the fog of her anger Annie tried to recall the certainty that had possessed her under the rubble. She had been sure then that her life and its order was precious. The certainty had evaporated. Now, in the hideous supermarket with its tides of defeated shoppers, she felt the structure of her life silently crumbling. She stood in the rubble of it, as trapped as she had been by the bombed wreckage of her Christmas store.

Martin turned around with an armful of tinned food and saw her face. Annie knew that her expression fanned his own anger.

‘Come on,’ he said sourly. ‘I don’t want to spend all night in here.’

She moved again with a jerk and they worked on along their lines of shelving, not looking at one another and separated by the other loitering shoppers and their cumbersome trolleys.

At the far end of the shop they turned the corner to start the next aisle. Annie’s pace was slower and Martin accidentally ran the wheel of the heavy trolley into her heel bone. The pain shot up her leg, so intense for a second that it made her eyes water.

‘Sorry,’ Martin said, still without looking at her.

The pain receded as quickly as it had come and in its wake Annie’s anger intensified. She had to clench her fists to control her longing to lash out with them, first at Martin and then at all the tins and bottles and their jaunty labels, sweeping them all together into a broken pile on the supermarket floor. Her anger spread like hot spilt liquid to flood over the other shoppers who blocked her path and stared past her with blank faces, over the supermarket and the life that it represented for her, and everything that had happened since the bombing. The anger was so potent that the current of it sapped her strength and she found herself weak and trembling. She leant against the corner of the shelf to steady herself as it engulfed her and swept her along with it. Under the bald lights and the big orange banners that shouted, ‘SAVE’, Annie knew the first real anger and bitterness against the bombers for what they had done to her. In that instant she hated the world, and the life she led in it, and everything there was except for Steve.