Strangers (39 page)

At last she stood up, stiffly, with pain in her chest and across her shoulders.

‘All right,’ she said softly. ‘That’s all right. You needn’t come, if you don’t want to. I have to go, because I promised I would. I’ll call Audrey, and ask her if she can come and look after you, just for a little while.’

The boys sat in silence while she telephoned.

‘Audrey?’ Annie said. ‘I know I’ve asked you too many favours lately. This is the last, I promise.’

‘You want me to come in to the boys?’

Audrey, Annie thought, with her grown-up daughters and her grandchildren, and her morose husband. Has Audrey got what she wants? Is she like Tibby? Annie’s face felt hot, and her eyes were bright and hard.

‘Just for an hour or two, this morning.’

‘Of course I will, my love. I’d be glad to. Gets me out of the house, doesn’t it?’ While they waited for her, the three of them sat in a circle round the Lego box, pretending that they were playing together. It wasn’t until he heard Audrey at the gate that Tom said hastily, anxiously, ‘Is it all right, Mum?’

‘I’ll make it all right,’ she promised him.
Whatever it costs
.

Audrey was in the hallway. ‘Only me,’ she called out to them, as she always did. Annie went over and put the kettle on. ‘Hello, Audrey. Shall I make you a cup of tea before I go? It’s kind of you to help out yet again.’

Audrey looked at her, shrewd under her perennial headscarf. ‘You go on, love. Do what you like, while you still can.’

Annie turned away with the kettle heavy in her hand. ‘This is the last time,’ she whispered.

When Audrey was furnished with her tea in her special china cup and saucer, Annie put her coat on. She didn’t stop to look at herself, and Audrey had to call after her, ‘Your collar’s all caught up at the back.’ She came after her and straightened it, motherly. ‘Are you all right, my pet?’

‘Yes,’ Annie said quickly. ‘Yes, I’m fine.’ From the doorway she looked at Benjy and Tom. They were absorbed in their game now. She had told them that she would make everything right, hadn’t she?

‘Bye,’ she said. ‘I’ll be back as soon as I can.’

‘Bye,’ Thomas said absently, not looking up. Ben didn’t make any response at all. Only Audrey said again, ‘You do what you want, Annie. Don’t worry about us.’

She almost laughed at that. The sound of it, beginning in her head, was hideous.

Annie had no memory of how she reached Steve’s flat. She was aware that it took a long time, and that she was afraid that her resolve would desert her. But at last she was riding up in the mirrored lift. She stared down at her feet rather than confront her own reflection.

When he opened the door she looked straight into his eyes.

‘I can’t do it,’ Annie said.

He took her arm, led her inside and closed the door. The black sofa in front of her was too close, too comfortable. Annie broke awkwardly away and sat on an upright chair.

‘What can’t you do?’ Steve asked her.

Nothing
, she wanted to say. There’s nothing I can’t do, so long as I’m with you. Her vacillating spirit shamed her. Outside, a long way beneath the windows, Annie could hear the traffic. The sound was incongruous high up in the enclosed room.

‘I can’t leave them,’ Annie said. The words hurt, as if they were pulled out of her like splinters.

Steve turned his face away. After a moment he stood up and went to the window. He looked at the skeins of cars and taxis down below.

‘Why now, Annie? Why have you decided this now?’ His voice was cold with disappointment. Annie thought of the two weeks that had just gone by, and the weeks before that, all the way back to Christmas. It wasn’t a decision made just this morning, arbitrary, as Steve must see it. It was simply, at last, the recognition of the bald truth that had confronted her always.

‘I am a coward,’ she whispered.

Steve snapped round to face her then. His black eyebrows were drawn together in anger with her.

‘You are nothing of the kind. Don’t use that as an excuse.’

She saw his hurt, and it made her own seem trivial.

‘I’ll tell you what happened,’ she said. ‘The hamburger lunch and film that we’d planned, remember? I offered them to my kids this morning. As casually, lightly as I could. And their faces closed up. They knew at once that here was the threat to them. You and me. Do you know what Thomas said?’

Steve listened motionless as she told him.

Annie said, ‘And I knew then that I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t even begin. Whether it’s weakness or cowardice, Steve, I couldn’t contemplate it being like that, for years, perhaps for ever, until they are grown up.’ Her smile twisted. ‘If it hadn’t been
now
. If it had been in ten years’ time. Or ten years ago.’

Except that it had happened ten years ago, and she had taken the easy option then.
I don’t deserve even as much as I have got
, Annie thought sadly.

‘Do you think your children will appreciate that so much has been sacrificed for them?’

She smiled again, crookedly. No one with children of his own, no one who understood the everyday sacrifices of parenthood, would have asked that. ‘I don’t suppose so.’

‘And Martin?’

Annie thought. ‘Martin and I were friends. Perhaps we can put some of that back together, for the kids.’

Steve made a last attempt. He put aside all the angry complex of feelings and he told her the truth.

‘I love you, Annie. You haven’t given me a chance.’

She wanted to run to him. She ached to lay her head against his heart, to rest in him and to acknowledge the truth. But Annie held her head up. Now that she had come so far, she couldn’t waver any more.

‘I love you too. There never was a chance for us.’

They looked at one another then, and they were drawn helplessly across the room. Annie put her hands out and he took them in his. She knew the touch of them in every mood now, and he seemed suddenly so physically warm and real that the idea of being without him was impossible. Annie had promised herself that she would leave before she started to cry, but the tears came now and she could do nothing about them.

She looked up at Steve through the heat of them and she said, uselessly, ‘I’m sorry. I would give anything for it to be different.’

With a sudden, fierce gesture Steve rubbed the tears off her cheek with the palm of his hand and kissed the red mark that was left. He kissed her eyelids, and the corners of her eyes and mouth, and then her mouth itself. For a moment, a long moment that threatened to tear her all over again, Annie succumbed. She felt that after all there was a possibility, a possibility within her reach. But then it was gone again, and she was left to confront the same truth.

She felt a sob gathering inside her but she forced it down again.

‘I’ve got to go home now,’ she said. ‘Tom and Benjy are … waiting for me.’

Steve’s arms dropped heavily to his sides. ‘Don’t let me keep you from them.’

She couldn’t blame him for the bitterness, Annie thought. She turned, uncertainly, and went to the door. She held on to the handle for a moment with her head bent, on the point of turning to him again. She felt that he was waiting and she told herself,
No. Do it quickly now
. She opened the door and closed it again behind her. And then she was alone in the empty corridor.

Steve stood unmoving for a moment, watching the door. He could still see her quite clearly, as clearly as his reason told him that she was really gone. At last he shook his head, painfully, as if he were trying to clear it. He went to the window and leaned his forehead against the glass. It reminded him of the hospital, and the day room windows high above the side street.

‘Annie?’ he said aloud.

He watched until he saw her come out into the street, her shoulders shrugged defensively into her coat. She crossed the busy road, and then she was swallowed up into the crowd.

He didn’t know how long he stood there, watching the oblivious surge of people. The telephone rang on the black table and he picked it up.

‘I’m sorry to bother you at home, Steve. Bob needs a couple of words about Boneys. Can I put him through?’

It was Bob Jefferies’ secretary. Steve frowned, looking at his table. It was littered with story-boards, reports and notes. Dogfood, he thought.

‘Put him on, Sandra. I’m not busy.’

Steve went through the problem about the pet-food film with his partner, his mind working, just like it always did. When Bob had run off Steve held on to the receiver, weighing it, like a weapon. Then he stabbed out another number. His own secretary answered.

‘Jenny? I’m going to be in full-time again from Monday. I’ve had enough time off. Fix up what needs to be done, will you?’

Jenny made a silent face across the office at the word-processor operator. She knew that tone of Steve’s.

‘Yes, of course. There are some messages for you. Do you want them now?’

‘What messages?’

Even though it was impossible, Steve hoped for a brief moment. Jenny recited them, ordinary, routine requests and reminders. Then she added, ‘Vicky Shaw has called once or twice. She rang again this morning, just to see if you were in.’

It took Steve a second to remember, it seemed so long ago. He frowned again, with the sense of something unwelcome, and then he looked around at the grey flat. Through the open bedroom door he could just see the corner of the bed.

He thought of Annie as she had been in bed, laughing, with her mouth close to his. With her eyes closed, crying out. Asleep, with her hair spread out over his arm. He understood, then, that she was gone. With the understanding he hated the empty flat and the silence, and he was afraid of his solitude.

‘Steve?’

‘Yeah.’ He was gathering up the sheaves of paper with his free hand, cramming them into his expensive black briefcase. ‘Listen, Jenny, if Vicky calls again tell her that I’m on my way in to the office now. I’ll be ringing her later this afternoon. See you in thirty minutes.’

Jenny hung up. ‘Here we go,’ she sighed to the word-processor girl.

Steve finished packing up his work. He thought of his car down in the underground car park, the familiar drive, his desk in the urban-chic company office. The work would be waiting for him. Boneys, fruit-juice, washing powder, whatever it was that needed to be shown and sold. Lunch, dinner with Vicky, bed and sleep and work again. And so it would go on, just the same. As if nothing had changed, instead of everything.

Steve picked up his loaded briefcase.

‘There never was a chance for us?’ he echoed aloud. ‘You’re wrong, Annie. We had all the chances that there could be.’

The phone rang again. ‘I’m on my way,’ he shouted at it. ‘What more do you want?’

He went out of the flat and left it, still ringing.

Annie told Martin.

‘I went to see Steve today.’

She was clearing the plates from the pine table after dinner and stacking them on the draining board. Martin would wash them up after they had watched the television news. How odd it was, she thought. They had reached the remotest point of their life together, so far apart that she didn’t know how they would come back again. But they still went padding through the familiar routines, almost silent, barely looking at each other. Like the heavy, neutered tomcats next door. The comparison made Annie want to laugh, incongruously, but she turned from the sink and saw Martin watching her. He looked wary, and exhausted. She went to him then, and put her hand on his arm.

‘I … told him that I was going to stay here. With you and the boys. I didn’t want to go, because … I saw how it would be.’ How inadequate the words were. ‘I’m sorry.’

Martin nodded.

He should have felt a rush of relief, a sense of the oppressive weight that had darkened the house lifting, to let in the light and air. But he felt nothing. He looked at Annie, trying to see behind her face, knowing that he couldn’t because he hadn’t been able to for so many weeks.

‘It doesn’t matter who was right,’ he said at last. ‘Can you live with it, Annie?’

‘Yes,’ she answered him, because she had to. ‘I can live with it.’

And that was all they said.

They were old enough, and they understood one another well enough, Annie reflected, not to expect there to be anything more. There would be no reconciliation in a shower of coloured light. Instead there would be the small tokens of renewal, scraps, cautiously offered one by one. In time they would be stitched up again into a serviceable patchwork, and that was as much as they could hope for.

That night Martin came back and slept beside her. It would take time, of course, before he put his arms round her again. That first night Annie lay quietly on her side of the bed, trying to take simple comfort from the warmth of him next to her. She made herself suppress the voice inside her that cried out for Steve.

But the truth was, as Annie had been half-afraid when she had answered Martin, that she couldn’t live with it. She had made her decision as honourably as she could, and she did her best to keep to it. But the days began to pile up into weeks, and Annie felt that she was building a house without windows. It was clean and polished, and there was food on the table and clean clothes in the chests, but there was no light in it anywhere. It was claustrophobic; the air tasted as if she had breathed it in and out a dozen times, just as she had done the things that she was doing a hundred or a thousand times before. She would have done them gladly if she had felt that their repetition was taking her anywhere – but she was uncertain that she would ever draw close to her husband, or that Martin would ever let her come any nearer. They were polite, and considerate, but they were not partners, or friends.

And Annie missed Steve. She missed him every day, in all the intervals of it. She heard the cadences of his voice in the radio-announcer’s, she glimpsed his head in a crowd and walked faster to keep him in sight, and then suffered the disappointment when the stranger turned and she saw that he was nothing like Steve at all. She found herself thinking about him as she carried baskets of wet washing out to peg on the clothes line, and as she made the plodding walk with Benjy to pick up Tom from afternoon school. She wondered whether Steve thought about her too.