Strangers (37 page)

They looked at each other without speaking, neither of them knowing what to say. Annie got up slowly and crossed the room to turn off the television news, and Martin stood rooted in the doorway watching the way that she bent down, straightened up again and walked away into the kitchen.

‘Would you like your dinner?’ she called back, tonelessly. ‘It’s rather dry, I’m afraid.’

‘It doesn’t matter. Yes, bring it in here, is that all right?’

A moment later she came in with a tray, a plate of food, ordinary things, like on any other night. Martin took it and began to eat, feeling the food settling on top of the gassy keg beer that he had drunk in the cheerless pub.

After a minute he said, ‘I thought we might talk, Annie.’

She was sitting across the room, her head bent, her hands folded on her darning. ‘Yes. I thought we might too,’ she whispered.

Martin groped, wondering where to start. ‘Tell me what happened.’

She looked at him then with a strange, almost supplicating expression. ‘You know what happened.’

He shook his head. ‘No, Annie. I want you to tell me, now. It’s time.’

She put her hands up to her eyes. He wanted to say,
Don’t do that. Let me see your face
, but he made himself keep quiet.

At last Annie said, ‘We were a couple, you and me, living here with our kids. It wasn’t anything extraordinary, was it? Nothing exotic, or passionate, or enthralling, but it was working. It was, wasn’t it?’

Martin nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said, very quietly. ‘It was working. Better than we deserved, perhaps.’

She looked across at him then, for a long moment, and then she nodded.

‘And then the bomb happened,’ Annie whispered. Martin saw her lift one shoulder, and let it drop again, a gesture of bewilderment, as though the bomb was something she had tried and failed to understand.

‘Tell me, Annie. You’ve never told me what it was like. What you felt.’

Annie stared at him, and he was afraid that she didn’t see him at all. And then she began to talk, in a low, unemphatic voice. ‘I don’t know how to tell you. I don’t know how to describe what it was like. It was dark, there was a terrible noise and then there was utter silence. I couldn’t move, and I could feel blood in my mouth, and dust and grit on my tongue. And there was pain everywhere.’ She shrugged again. ‘You know all that. What can I tell you?’

‘About fear.’

Annie thought about Tibby. She had come home from her hospice, to her husband and the roses, but she was too weak now to do her pruning.
She’s seen you grow up. Seen her grandchildren
. Yes. But what else was there? How many patient compromises? ‘I was afraid. I was … angry, too. I suppose it was anger. With the sense that everything was being cut short. That I wasn’t to be allowed to … finish. What I was doing.’

Martin looked round the room. There was a wicker basket full of Ben’s toys next to the hearth, a jar of daffodils on the mantelpiece amongst the clutter of china ornaments and candlesticks and children’s party invitations. ‘To finish what you were doing here, Annie? Was that it?’

‘Yes. Being a wife and mother.’ The words as they came out sounded strange to Annie, as if she had repeated them to herself so many times that their meaning had begun to elude her. ‘We were all right, weren’t we?’ she asked hastily. ‘The four of us.’

The past tense hit Martin squarely now. He looked at his wife in the lamplight, feeling the anger and bitterness of the past few days briefly renewed.

‘We were,’ he said. ‘We can be again, Annie, when all this is forgotten.’

As soon as he had spoken them, he knew that he had chosen the words badly. He shifted in his chair and the cutlery rattled on his plate. He glanced down and saw that the barely-touched food was congealing, and pushed it aside. Annie was still holding Thomas’s school jumper, with the darning wool unravelling on the rug beside her.

‘I can’t forget,’ she said, the words falling like clear drops of icy water.

‘Annie.’ He fought to keep his voice level. ‘You can, if you let yourself. It was a terrible, hideous thing to happen. The only thing you can do now is to be thankful that you survived, and forget everything else.’

They were circling around the truth now, watching each other, waiting.

‘If it were that easy,’ Annie whispered at last. ‘If only.’

Martin sat silently, feeling a vein throb in the angle of his jaw. The moment had come, and yet he could hope that it would somehow slip away again.

Annie went on, in the same low voice, looking down at the work in her lap. ‘Without Steve, I don’t think I could have survived. Steve made me hold on. He made me believe that we would get out. I’m not a very brave person. You know that. But he made me be.’

‘How?’ The word stuck in Martin’s throat, like a croak. He was remembering the day too; the cold outside the jagged store front, the corridors of the police station and the smoky tension inside the trailer, and the roughness of the smashed masonry as he pulled at it with the rescue workers.

‘We talked. We could just touch hands. We held on to one another and talked. Some of the time I didn’t know whether I was talking or thinking, but he heard anyway. And I listened to him talking. If you think you are going to die, it doesn’t matter what you say, does it?’

‘What did you say?’

‘We told each other about our lives. Everything, big things and little things.’

There was quiet again. Martin was imagining his wife, as he had done so often before, hurt in the darkness, with her hand held in the stranger’s. And her voice, a whisper like it was in the dark to him too, telling him the big things and the little things, only for him to hear.

‘Did you think about me, Annie?’ The petulance of the question struck at him at once and he thought, That’s how we all are. Annie dropped the darning and came across the room to him. She knelt on the rug in front of him with her head against his knees.

‘Of course.’

Martin said nothing.

‘I told him about you and the children and how I couldn’t bear the thought that our lives should be severed, abruptly, so violently, with the ends left fraying.’ He put out his hand then, tentatively, and stroked her hair. The ends of it were still frizzy from the awkward cut that had tried to repair the damage to it. ‘I told him about when we met, and after that. The ordinary things. The house, and the garden, and all the things we made and did together.’

Made. Did
.

‘And he told you the same?’

‘Yes. Not quite such happy things.’

‘And after that?’ Martin asked gently, with his hand buried in her hair. He twisted his head so that he could see her face and then he saw that she was crying. There was a tear held at the corner of her eye, and the wet streak of another over her cheek. ‘At the end … it seemed like the end, you know … he was, he had become, more real and more important than anything else. He was all there was, then. He had come so close to me that … that I didn’t know any more where I ended and where he began.’

Martin’s hand tightened, just perceptibly, in Annie’s hair. He had looked down into the hole, under the arc lights, and he had seen Steve still lying there. His arm had been stretched out to where Annie had lain. There was a bitter taste in Martin’s mouth and throat. He was afraid of defeat. It had gone so far already, he thought, that they seemed utterly beyond his reach. With an effort at conviction he said, ‘But then you were rescued. It was over.’

Except that it wasn’t, not at all. He had sat beside her in the ambulance, and she had opened her eyes and looked at him with a mixture of bewilderment and disappointment.

When Annie didn’t answer he pushed on, trying in spite of himself to force the admission from her by seeming to misunderstand. ‘I know that you must have shared the shock and the reaction with him afterwards. No one else could possibly have come close to understanding what it was like down there. Of course you would have clung to each other then, while you were still recovering. Like a prop for one another.’

Annie raised her head and looked into his face. ‘Oh no,’ she said. There were still tears in her eyes, but there was a kind of reflected radiance as well. ‘It wasn’t that. It was the joy of it. The pure happiness of finding ourselves still alive. Can you understand?’

Martin counted back the days to that time. He had been preoccupied with the boys, with keeping the three of them going, and with containing his fears for Annie. There had been no opportunity for joy. The closest he had come to it was when the doctors had told him that Annie would live. He had gone down to see Steve, so that he would know too. Christmas Eve. He had sensed it, even then, Martin recalled. Pain and the fear of loss suddenly stabbed into him so that he almost doubled up.

‘Oh yes,’ he whispered, his voice so low that she could hardly hear him. ‘I think I can understand.’

I must tell him the truth
, Annie thought.
Now that we have come this far
.

‘Everything looked so beautiful. So new, and precious, and exact. Steve saw it too. I think that it was because of that same feeing that … that we loved one another.’

And so he had heard her saying the words.

Suddenly his resolution to wait, and to hope, seemed futile. He couldn’t help the pointless anger that surged up in him, against the two of them, against every single thing that had happened since he had stared at the television news picture of the shattered store. He thought of Tom and Benjy upstairs and what the few impossible words would mean to them. And he knew that he loved his wife, and that he didn’t know how to live without her love in return.

‘Annie,’ he murmured. ‘Do you know what you’re saying? Do you know the hurt it will mean to all of us?’

Unable to keep still any longer he stumbled to his feet, knocking into a low table and sending his dinner tray skidding. Annie watched through stinging eyes the blobs of food fall on to the rug.

‘I know,’ she whispered. ‘Do you think I don’t know?’

‘What are you going to do?’

Annie thought of Tibby again, and the life that she had accepted for herself. Would her mother have made different choices if she had lived at a different time? Annie sensed again how precious life was, and how vital and miraculous its reopening had seemed to her in the hospital ward.

‘I don’t know,’ she said hopelessly. ‘I don’t know what to do. That’s the truth, Martin.’

He turned to the window, jerking the curtains aside so that he could stare into the street, then letting them fall again, a big man in a small space.

‘Are you going to bed with him?’

‘Once,’ Annie said.

There was a long silence after that. Martin sat wearily down again and Annie stayed motionless on the rug, her legs folded awkwardly beneath her, too numb to move.

At last Martin said in a softer voice, ‘People who have been together for as long as we have, what do they feel for each other? If you take away all the props of routine and familiarity and comfortable habit, I mean? They don’t love each other, do they? Not the kind of love you’re talking about.’

Annie thought of the wrenching intensity of her longing for Steve, and the crystalline happiness that she had known with him yesterday in the restaurant and in the shadow-barred flat.

‘No,’ she said painfully. ‘Not that kind.’

‘What is it then?’

She knew, and she searched for the words that wouldn’t devalue it, but Martin was quicker and blunter.

‘Friendship. Liking. We’re old friends, Annie. We’ve achieved that.’ He was unmoving, but she felt the anxiety inside him. ‘Oh, I still fancy you. You know that. That part of me belongs to you as comprehensively as everything else. But it’s not the first thing between us, is it? There’s more. We were solid. Perhaps we … didn’t look at one another, or hear one another, as carefully as we should have done. But we were happy, weren’t we?’ As he looked at her she heard the directness of his appeal.
It can’t be different now. It can’t disappear, after so long
.

And when she didn’t answer he persisted aloud, ‘Doesn’t it mean anything to you?’

Annie held out her hand and then, realizing the inadequacy of it, she let it fall again. ‘Of course it does. Martin, I’m still me. The years haven’t gone anywhere.’

But yet they were looking at each other across a divide. Here, now, so bitterly obvious amidst the shabby warmth of home. Annie knew that she couldn’t explain to him how the violence of what had happened had changed every cosy perspective, and how the same change of perspectives had jolted her into awareness, and then into love with another man.

It’s too late now, she thought.

‘What are you going to do?’ Martin asked her again.

She lifted her head. ‘I don’t know how to be without him.’ It was a simple offering of the truth, but she saw how the words cut into him. She wanted to close her eyes so that she need not look at what she saw in his face.

Martin might have shouted at her, let any of the ugly words that jumbled in his mouth come spilling out, or jumped up and snatched at her in a useless attempt to imprison her.

But with an effort of will he held himself still. When he could trust himself again he said very slowly, as if he had painstakingly learned the words in a strange language, ‘I don’t want to let you go. You’re my wife. Their mother.’

Love. Dues
.

‘I don’t know what to say.’ He looked down at his fists, clenching and unclenching them, the knuckles white and then red. ‘Just that I’m here, Annie. If you … when … if you do decide. I want you to think, that’s all. Think what it means. Think quickly.’

All he could focus on now was getting away, out of this room, to hunch over the gaping hole that her words had left.
I don’t know how to be without him
. He stood up awkwardly, almost falling. And then he went out, closing the door behind him.

Annie heard him going upstairs, and then his footsteps overhead, the door of the spare room closing against her. She sat staring ahead of her, breathless with the pain that she had caused to both of them. Then she drew up her knees and, with her head resting against them, she tried to do what he had asked her.