Strangers (4 page)

I know you now, Steve thought. I’ve seen you, all of you, in the park with your kids, or struggling to get off the tube with one in a buggy and the other hanging on to your coat.

‘Cass wanted to be like that, I think. For all her wild outfits and dotty behaviour. I think she really wanted to have dinner ready every evening at eight o’clock, get the holiday brochures in January and make plans for July, have a regular night out together every week.’

‘And you didn’t?

‘No, I didn’t. It was the routine of being married that I couldn’t bear.’

‘Like always going to Costa’s,’ Annie said.

‘I don’t always want dolmades. I like to see different things on the menu. I like to eat in different restaurants.’

She listened carefully to the sound of his words, and felt his hand holding hers. His hand was large, and still quite warm. Annie felt suddenly irrationally angry. ‘I think you sound a bit of a pig.’

Steve did laugh this time, a spluttering cough of laughter. ‘But I’m a pig who survives. And you’ll survive too, my love. I’ll make you.’

Annie’s anger went away as quickly as it had come. Hearing his conviction, a man she had never seen, she believed him. It was important to believe, she understood that too.

‘How long have we been here?’ Her voice sounded childlike now. ‘How long will it be before they come?’

‘We might have been here an hour. Perhaps not even as long as that. Does your watch have hands?’

‘Hands?’ Annie could only think of their own, linked together.

‘Mine’s digital. But if yours has hands, and it isn’t broken, we should be able to feel the time. We can keep track, then. It will help.’

He was practical, seemingly neither afraid nor disorientated. Annie closed her eyes. The pain in her head and her side made it difficult to think. All kinds of other impressions, memories that were more vivid than reality, came crowding in on her, but the simplest coherent thought slipped out of her grasp.

With an effort she said, ‘My watch is on this arm.’ She lifted her hand a little in his. At once the warmth of his hand let go. She felt him reach for her wrist, searching for the watch strap. It was a tiny buckle, and she heard the effort that the little, fumbling movements cost him. At last the strap loosened and the watch slid off her wrist. It dropped through Steve’s fingers and there was a faint chink as it fell somewhere beneath their hands. It was as if a lifeline had been thrown at them, only to drift out of reach.

Steve gathered his strength and hunched his shoulders, trying to edge sideways, reaching down another inch. With his fingertips he explored the rubble, to and fro, probing between the splintered wood and chunks of plaster.

Annie was silent, waiting. Then, miraculously, Steve’s fingers found the leather strap again, still warm from her wrist. He lifted it and touched the smooth, convex watch face. The glass wasn’t even broken.

Very gently he tapped it against a sharp edge of brick, then harder, and then harder still. The little circle of glass refused to break and he felt sweat gather under his hairline until a drop of it rolled down his forehead. It had suddenly become more important to know the time than anything had ever been. If he could find out what the time was they could hang on, counting the minutes together.

Trying to control his strength, he rapped the watch against the brick again. Then he felt the face again with the tip of his finger. The glass was shattered. He put the watch on his chest and picked the fragments of glass away. He touched the winder button and then felt for the hands. They felt tiny, like hairs, under his fingers. The second hand, moving against his skin, was like the touch of an insect on a summer afternoon. The watch was still going, then. He lifted his fingertip quickly.

‘It’s half past ten,’ he said.

He had come into the store as it opened, only an hour ago. They had been lying here for only three-quarters of an hour, perhaps not even as long as that. He moved a little, as if trying to gauge how far down they were. It would take a long time, that was all he knew.

‘Annie?’

‘Hold my hand again,’ she begged him.

He tucked the watch inside the fold of his coat and stretched out his hand. Their fingers touched at once, and they clasped hands.

‘That’s better,’ she said. Steve wanted to take her hand and rub it between his own, chafing the warmth back into it, and his powerlessness struck home to him. She was badly hurt, and if she were to deteriorate before they came, he could do nothing to help her. At the same moment he realized how important it was that she was there. If he were alone, would he want to fight so hard?

‘Tell me what you’re thinking about,’ he ordered her.

‘Not thinking. I keep seeing and hearing things. So vivid.’ Her voice sounded dreamy and distant now. ‘All the old things. They say that happens, don’t they?’

‘No. What things, Annie?’

She had been seeing last Christmas, and the decorated tree in the front window.

Benjy was just two, sitting on the floor with his eyes and mouth wide open, reaching out for the shimmer of it.

‘The boys. I was just seeing the boys. They grow up, and change all the time, but they still stay the same, themselves. If you haven’t got children yourself you can’t know what it’s like. I don’t think that even fathers have the same feeling.’

That was better, Steve thought, not really hearing what she said. Her voice was firmer now.

‘I never thought about it before they came. Even when we decided to have a baby, when I was pregnant, I never understood what it would be like.’

They had driven to the hospital together, Annie and Martin, when she went into labour. That was the last time, she understood afterwards, that little drive through the night, when they were just themselves.

Thomas had been born, a mass of black hair and a red, angry face. He had opened his eyes and looked at her.

In the days afterwards the weight of responsibility had been like a millstone, and at the same time the love had buoyed her up so that she felt she was floating. Whenever the baby cried she felt it inside her like a knife, and his hours of contentment filled her with a satisfaction she had never known.

Steve was listening now, compelled by the tenderness in her voice. Yet with half of himself he thought,
Yes, I do know you
. She was the kind of woman who undid the front of her dress at dinner parties, and serenely breast-fed a milky-smelling bundle of baby. She almost certainly went to classes to learn how to have her babies in the approved way, and demonstrated her success afterwards to an admiring circle of women around the table. She talked about children all the time. She was talking about them now, and the note in her voice held him. Yet she surprised him when she broke off and asked, ‘Sounds desperate, does it?’

He almost smiled. She was quick, and that was good.

‘Not desperate. I don’t understand, that’s all.’

‘Cass wanted a baby, did she?’

Quick again.

‘Yes, Cass wanted a baby. We talked about it, from time to time. Not much, in those last months, now I come to think of it. I was probably afraid that she might feel the same as you. No … I’m sorry, that didn’t come out quite right. I didn’t want to share her, perhaps. I wanted her to go on being Cass, not somebody’s mother.’

‘Somebody’s mother,’ Annie echoed softly.

Cass had sat cross-legged on the leather sofa, looking at him. She was wearing an armful of ivory and brass bangles and she turned them round and round, rattling them together.

‘What about your work?’ Steve had asked in exasperation.

‘Other women manage, don’t they? Quite a few of the girls I know do. We can always get a nanny to look after it while I’m working.’

‘Why bother to have a baby at all, then?’

She had looked at him with her green eyes wide open and the bangles rattled and clicked under her fingers.

‘Because I want one,’ she answered at last.

‘I don’t.’

Once there was a baby, the responsibility shifted. Steve knew that; he understood that much of what Annie said. And not wanting to share Cass, was that the truth? He lay still, feeling the pain in his leg pushing its fingers up into his groin, and tasted the deception in his mouth. It was Cass who had had to share him, unwittingly at first, and then with increasing bitterness.

On the day that he had announced to his partner that he was going to marry her, Bob had rocked back in his desk chair and stared at him in disbelief.

‘Married?
You?
’

‘Why not? You’re married, Phil is married, and so are most of my friends and all of our clients.’

‘Yeah. Not you, though.’

‘Perhaps I’m feeling the cold winds of solitude blowing around me.’

Bob had snorted with laughter. ‘Wrap it round yourself for warmth, then. Should be long enough – you’ve given it plenty of exercise.’

‘Fuck you, Jefferies.’

But Bob had only laughed even harder. ‘What, me as well?’

Steve had married Jennifer Cassady two weeks later. He was thirty-six, moving easily along the business track that ran from comfortably off to rich. He was amused at the prospect of having a wife, and captivated by Cass’s looks and abilities. They came from the same background and they were both busy climbing out of it. He thought they understood each other.

Cass was twenty-three and her career was blossoming. On the day that they were married, her face looked out across London from a hundred giant poster boards. It was suntan cream, that ad, Steve remembered. He had taken her out to dinner on the evening after she had been sent to the ad agency on a look-see for the same campaign.

On the day that they were married the party started at eleven o’clock sharp in the company’s offices in Ingestre Place. Bob had masked his cynicism with an ad-man’s enthusiasm, and had had every corner decorated with pink and white flowers. The bath in the directors’ bathroom was full of ice and three cases of Bollinger.

‘For starters,’ Bob had said.

The bride and groom had planned to walk the two or three Soho streets to the restaurant they were to take over for their lunch party. But when they came out of their offices an open-topped vintage bus fluttering with pink and white ribbons was blocking the roadway. The bus was crammed with a cheering crowd of friends and clients, except for two empty front top seats. One of the videotape editors was driving, and the creative director of a medium-sized agency was dressed up as the conductor, complete with a polished brass ticket machine.

Steve had stopped dead on the pavement, but Cass had pulled him on.

‘It’s perfect,’ she had breathed, half laughing and half crying. ‘Did you ever see anything so perfect?’

The lunch went on all day and well into the night. Steve remembered it in hazy patches. He remembered the strippergram, and he remembered Cass looking at him, proud and proprietorial, down the long table.

The marriage had lasted for two years and eight months.

Quite soon after the wedding a day came when he had had lunch with a pretty girl, and he had bought her brandy afterwards. They had leant back against the green, velvet-padded walls of the restaurant booth to look at one another, and Steve had suddenly realized that they were sizing one another up in the old way. Afterwards they had walked along a sun-warmed street and the girl had looked sideways at him and said, ‘Shall we go home for an hour?’

He had gone, almost without thinking, and he had enjoyed their rapid love-making more than he had done for months with Cass.

That hadn’t been Vicky. Vicky had come along months later, when Cass already knew what he was doing. For a time there had been the two of them, and the tissue of deceptions and faked meetings and unnecessary business trips that went with it. And then, two years and eight months after the pink and white wedding, Cass had left him.

‘I don’t blame her,’ the girl said.

The sound of her voice jolted Steve. For a moment, he hadn’t been buried at all. He had been back at home, in the flat that Cass had had redecorated after their marriage. Then the darkness closed around him again, and he remembered whose hand he was holding.

‘Feminine solidarity, is that it?’ he asked.

‘Partly.’ Her voice was crisp.

It occurred to Steve that this girl wasn’t so vulnerable. Then she added, ‘Personal sympathy, mostly. Thinking how I’d feel if Martin did it.’

‘And he doesn’t?’

Almost to her surprise, Annie understood that it wasn’t a taunt. He was asking a simple question.

‘No, I don’t think so.’

Martin came home between six and seven o’clock every evening. She was always glad to hear his bag thud on to the step as he dropped it to search in his pockets for the key. Tom would look up from his drawing, or the Lego, or the television, and say, ‘Dad’s home.’ And if Benjy was still up he would slither in his pyjamas to the front door to meet him.

Seeing herself waiting with the boys, and a glass of wine, and the dinner simmering, Annie sometimes thought bleakly that they were like a family in a television commercial. Just as predictable. Almost as bland. Yet Martin did come home every night, to hug them in turn and to listen to the boys’ recital of the day’s events. After the boys had gone to bed they would sit down to dinner together, adding up in their talk the small change of another day. Annie knew the hours and the demands of Martin’s job because he told her. She knew that there was no room in his life, between his work and the three of them waiting for him at home, for anyone else. She was glad of that.

And when the monotony of domestic life bored her, or the boys were awkward, or she was simply afraid that life was slipping past her in a succession of featureless days, she reminded herself carefully that her life was her own choice. She had chosen the smooth path that led round and round her family and her home.

Suddenly, with the pain like a hot band around her, Annie felt a longing for her life that hurt more than the pain of her body. It came back to her in every detail, the intimate pattern of their daily life. She smelt the freshness of clean sheets as she smoothed them out over the double mattress, heard the
ping
of the alarm clock on Martin’s side of the bed, and saw the house glow in all its worn, crowded, family-rubbed, patinated richness.