Strangers (38 page)

The two weeks were like a time out of somebody else’s life. In the mornings when Annie woke up she had forgotten for a second or two and she felt warm and easy. But then the recollection came back and she had to climb up and out into the cold again, and live through a day that wasn’t her own any more, until it was time to sleep again.

To live without it made her more vividly aware that friendship was truly what she had shared with Martin. Even Benjamin recognized it when it was no longer there. He came early one morning and stood in the bedroom door in his blue pyjamas, seeing Annie alone in the wide bed.

‘Aren’t you friends with Daddy any more?’ he asked, and Annie couldn’t answer him. She held out her arms instead, and even though he came she felt him holding himself a little away from her, as if he didn’t know where to commit his loyalty.

That hurt her more than anything else had done.

And she carried her sadness with her to Steve, although she tried hard not to.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I told you at the beginning. Our happiness makes unhappiness everywhere else.’

Steve was gentle and firm. He sat beside her on his deep black sofa and put his arms around her. He made her talk and he listened and he held her until her frozen shell of anxiety and guilt began to melt. Then he took her into his bedroom and made her lie down beside him. He knew when to coax and when to be insistent, and he knew when to let Annie herself take the initiative. Her need for him surprised her. She sat astride him and the shock of pleasure as he drove upwards made her arch her body and then lean forwards, enclosing him more tightly, until their mouths met and they rolled over, locked together, driving one another further on, and then further still.

‘You’re very sexy, my Annie,’ he told her.

‘I know,’ she said, unblushingly. ‘You’ve shown me that.’

In the face of everything, still, they were happy in their short hours together. When they had finished making love they would get up and go out together. Steve took her to odd, offbeat places. They ate lunch at a Jewish restaurant in the East End, they went to a workshop production of a short, savagely funny, feminist play, and to an organ recital at a Wren church in the City. From the way that strangers stared at her in these places Annie knew that she looked unlike the other women. She was glowing and crackling and alive in a way that she had never expected that she would be again. She took the hours of happiness and held tenaciously on to them, because without them there was no justification for the coldness and blackness that spread through all the other hours like a disease.

Although they were quite different from the penniless days that she had shared long ago with Matthew, her short outings with Steve often reminded her of them. She felt the same exhilaration, and the recklessness was all the more pronounced because of the weight of reason and responsibility that settled around her on the way home again.

And at other times, when she looked at Steve sitting across from her in a restaurant, or standing in the aisle of the Wren church reading the inscription on a marble slab, she could hardly believe that this handsome, faintly ruthless-looking man was anything to do with her at all. She would draw in her breath then, shivering, but Steve with his ability to read her thoughts would reach for her hand, and say something that drew her close to him again, and then the moment would be past. When it was time for Benjy to come home, or at the hour she had agreed with Audrey or whichever of his friends’ mothers had invited him to play, Annie left Steve and went back to collect him.

The glow of happiness faded at once and the dull, enduring pain of being pulled in half took hold of her all over again.

In between the terrible shuttling to and fro, whenever she could, Annie went to see her mother. She was still at home in the old house, but she had grown so weak that she could hardly move from her bed to the wing chair in the corner of the living room next to the fire. Jim and Annie and a home help, with a visiting nurse, looked after her between them as best they could. Tibby still wanted to be dressed in her familiar heathery tweed skirts and woollen cardigans, and on most mornings Annie went to do it after she had taken the boys to school and nursery. The clothes when she took them out of the mahogany wardrobe or the tidy drawers still smelt of her mother’s lavender scent, but they seemed huge when she slipped them over Tibby’s brittle bones.

‘The fit on this skirt is terrible,’ Tibby would murmur as she pulled at a gaping waistband. ‘It’s a good one, too. They don’t make clothes like they used to, darling. I’d like the pink cardigan with this. It’s better, don’t you think?’

As she helped her up and fastened her buttons, pinned the loose folds of fabric and arranged her mother’s thin hair, Annie found that she could hardly answer. Her mother had been the centre and the heart of this big house, and now it was as if a draught had blown her into a corner of it, depositing her in a chair like a cobweb or the dust she had battled against for so many years.

Annie settled her into her place. Tibby’s hands on her arms looked almost transparent.

‘Shall I turn you round today so that you can see into the garden?’ she asked.

Tibby thought for a moment. Annie saw her glance at the photographs on the low table beside her. Tibby’s wedding picture. Annie and her brother as children, Annie’s own wedding, her brother’s wife and children. Thomas and Benjamin, Tom with his top front teeth missing.

‘Yes, I think so,’ Tibby said.

Annie turned her chair and they looked through the French windows into the garden. It was the first week of April. Tibby’s early daffodils were already falling, but the forsythia hedge behind them was a sheet of gold. Tulips in bud like green spears had come up in the half-moon beside the window, and the prunus showed the first delicate edges of pink blossom. Annie saw that the lawn needed mowing. It must have sprung up in the warm sunshine of March.

‘I’ll ask Martin to come and cut the grass for Jim,’ she murmured.

Tibby nodded; but she didn’t begin to talk about attending to her roses, as she would have done only a week or so ago. She looked at her flowers, and at the blaze of the resplendent hedge.

‘I think the spring has always been the best time,’ she said, almost to herself. ‘I think I’ve always preferred the promise to the reality. Of summer, of course. The brighter colours, you know. Too bright, sometimes. Not like this pale green and gold.’

Go on
, Annie implored her silently. Please, won’t you talk about it to me? She wanted to kneel down in front of her mother and rest her head in her lap. Talk about the promise, and the reality, won’t you? Because we haven’t got very long, Tibby. We both know that we haven’t, and there is such a lot to say.

She was suddenly overwhelmed by her own need to tell her mother everything.

Gently she asked her, ‘How do you feel today?’

If Tibby could admit the truth. If they could just begin, she thought.

Tibby’s back straightened in her chair. She didn’t take her eyes off the gold of the garden, but she said, ‘A little better, I think.’

And so they wouldn’t admit that she was going to die, and that it might happen at any time, and that Tibby would be gone, leaving only the dust and the big house and the echoes of their talk about the roses.

Annie bent her head for a moment, so that Tibby would not see her sadness showing in her face. If that was how Tibby wanted it to be, of course Annie must let it be. She straightened up again and asked brightly, ‘Can I bring anything in here before I go?’

‘The magazine and the book from the table beside my bed, darling, if you wouldn’t mind. Jim will be back from the shops soon.’

Jim always went out to buy the few things that they needed, every morning, at nine-fifteen exactly. As Annie walked back through the shadowy house she saw that the tallboys and the grandfather clock were dusty. But as Tibby had stopped worrying about her roses, she seemed to care less for her house now. She was withdrawing into herself, the battle lost. Had it been worth the fight at all? Annie thought savagely. Was anyone’s fight worth it?

She gave her mother the book and the magazine, kissed the top of her head and fled blindly from the house.

At the end of the second week, Annie knew that she was lost.

Her bearings were gone, and she was groping through days that seemed increasingly to belong to someone who she didn’t know or understand. To compensate for her sense of being adrift she held on as firmly as she could to the familiar, mechanical things. She ironed the clothes, concentrating fiercely on folding the shirts into neat, symmetrical piles. In the evenings Martin often didn’t come home until very late, so Annie filled the hours by cooking casseroles for the freezer. She ladled the food into foil cartons and labelled and dated them in small, neat handwriting that looked quite unlike her own. But the little, domestic satisfaction that she usually gained from such things turned itself against Annie now. She thought bitterly that she was lining her family nest with food and clothes before abandoning it herself.

She caught herself wondering whether, after all, she might be just a little mad. School holiday time came, and the number of hours that she could find to spend with Steve dwindled almost to none.

‘Do you think,’ he had asked her on the telephone, ‘I could meet your children soon?’ She had stood looking across the kitchen at them until his voice in her ear had prompted her, ‘Are you still there?’

‘Yes. Yes, of course, you must. What shall we do?’

They had arranged it. It would be on Friday, for a hamburger lunch and then a trip to the cinema to see a film that Tom had been agitating about for weeks and weeks.

Annie put off from day to day the moment of telling the children about the expedition. She told herself that she would make it sound very casual, an almost impromptu adventure with a friend. Then Friday morning came. It was one of those days when Martin had got up and gone to work very early, and Tom and Benjy had hardly seen him. They had been asleep the night before when he came in.

‘What shall we do today, Mum?’ Thomas asked. He had cleared the breakfast dishes for her without protest, and he had spent a patient quarter of an hour doing Lego with Benjy while Annie swept the kitchen and hovered the living room. ‘Can we ring Timothy and ask him to come round?’

Annie wound up the flex of the vacuum cleaner very carefully.

‘I thought we might go on a trip today,’ she said. ‘We could go for a hamburger, and then to see that film of yours.’

Their eyes met over Benjamin’s head. Annie saw the wariness at once. He’s been waiting for something, she thought. He may not know what it is, or even that he is waiting and dreading something. But it’s there, just the same. He can feel it in the house. See it in our faces.

‘Just us?’ Tom asked her.

‘A friend of mine would like to come along too.’ She tried to keep her voice steady and warm.

‘Who?’ The small voice was suspicious.

‘His name is Steve.’

‘We don’t know him,’ Tom said at once, with utter finality.

‘Not yet,’ Annie agreed. ‘But I hope that you will like him.’

Thomas lowered his eyes. He turned back to the box of Lego and rummaged through it, making ostentatious noise.

‘We should go quite soon, I think,’ Annie continued. ‘We’ll have to go into town on the tube.’

Thomas sat back on his heels, but with his head still bent over his model. He turned it to and fro, looking carefully at it.

‘I don’t want to go,’ he said.

Benjy’s eyes went from one to the other. ‘I don’t want to go,’ he echoed. ‘Not at all.’

They had set themselves solidly against her, by instinct, closing their ranks against the stranger their mother tried to push forward as a friend. Annie was convinced that their refusal was absolute.

They’re eight years and three years old, she tried to tell herself. You’re adult, and their mother. You can persuade them. Bribe them, force them.

For Steve’s sake? For her own? Not for their own, she was certain of that.

She went across and knelt beside Tom. ‘Why don’t you want to go?’ she asked gently. ‘You’ve been telling me for weeks that you must see this film.’

She had thought, not carefully enough, that their eagerness for it would carry all of them through the first meeting. And after that, then it would be easier.

Thomas raised his eyes again, and the adult awareness in them made her feel cold.

What am I doing to my kids?
she thought.

‘I want to see the film with Dad,’ he told her clearly. ‘It’s about space. Dad likes things like that.’

‘Me too,’ Benjamin said. ‘I want to see the film with Dad.’

Annie took a breath, trying to smile. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘We’ll leave the film for Dad. Shall we just go and have lunch with Steve?’

Thomas flung the Lego back into the box. His face went dull red, as it always did when he was upset. And then he shouted at her, ‘I don’t want to. I don’t like Steve. I won’t go. Benjy won’t either.’

Annie was shaking. It wasn’t any use insisting to Tom,
You don’t know Steve
. He did, of course. From half-heard fragments of his parents’ angry talk, from the unhappy silence of the house, and from his own fearful unconscious, Tom had made up his own picture of Steve. He knew the threat was close, and he had responded to it in the only way he knew.

As she knelt there Annie saw, with perfect clarity, how it would be.

There would be months, probably years, of times like this one. As she watched Thomas’s red face and Benjamin’s bewildered one she felt the pain of their divided loyalties, the sharpening of their premature awareness. There would be the ugly battles over their custody. Martin would fight her, lent strength by his bitterness, she was certain of that. She knew, as vividly as if she had already lived through them, what the bleak Sunday visits with the boys would be like, what they would be like for Martin, whichever of them won whichever portion of their children’s lives.

Was her own happiness worth that? This strange, exotic happiness since the bomb, that seemed increasingly to belong to another woman altogether? What was Steve’s happiness worth? She saw his face, every line of it clear, and she knew that she loved him, and the hurt stabbed like a knife inside her.