Strangers (42 page)

The first time he heard her voice, he wasn’t sure that he hadn’t imagined it. He had done so, before, more than once, in all the time that he had waited. Now, lately, he had stopped waiting. Annie had gone, of course.

He pressed the buttons to hear it again. But she hadn’t gone. She was here, talking to him, vividly and unbearably close, out of the little spool of tape.

‘It’s Annie,’ she said. There was a pause and he saw her, quite clearly, the light and shade on the planes of her face. The words came quickly. ‘I want to see you. It’s not too late, is it? Say it isn’t too late.’

That was all.

Steve closed his eyes. The whisky was malty and cold on his tongue. At last he smiled. It was a painful, crooked smile, but Steve didn’t hesitate. He reached for the telephone and slowly, carefully, picked out the remembered digits.

And then she was there. As soon as he heard her voice, he loved her as much again.

‘Thank you for ringing,’ she said softly.

‘What’s happened, Annie?’

‘My mother died last week.’

‘I’m sorry.’

Annie turned her back to the kitchen and leant her forehead against the wall.

‘It isn’t that,’ she said. ‘Steve, it wasn’t finished, was it? The way that we left one another …’

‘No,’ he answered evenly, ‘it isn’t finished.’

‘I want to see you again.’

Steve saw the sticky rings that the whisky glasses had left on the tops of his tables, and at the corner of the unmade bed visible past the open bedroom door.

‘I’m going away for a few days. Will you come with me?’

He could feel the happiness that jumped inside her because it matched his own, regardless.

Without a second’s pause she answered. ‘Yes. Oh yes, I’ll come.’

Martin and the boys were in the garden. Annie saw them through the bathroom window as she took her jars of cream and cosmetics off the shelves and put them in her sponge bag. With the bag weighing heavy in her hand she stood by the window, watching them. The slats of the lowered blinds were like bars, cutting her off from them. She felt hard and dry inside her skin, and her heart thumped against her ribs. She turned away abruptly, so that she couldn’t see the boys’ heads and the line of Martin’s shoulders.

She had told Martin on the same evening that she had spoken to Steve. The boys were in bed, and the house was quiet, almost as if it were waiting for something. She had let the words spill out, knowing that there was no softening them. Martin had sat for a moment with his head bent, and then he had looked up into her face. She saw that he was neither surprised nor angry, and suddenly she had wanted to crumple down against him and bury her head in his arms. But she held herself rigid, stiffened by the thought that she had made all this pain for both of them.

‘Will you be coming back?’ he asked her at last. Annie realized that in the panicky flood of longing she had barely thought beyond getting to Steve. It was impossible to think of going, impossible to think of coming back.

What am I doing?

‘I don’t know. Yes. I don’t know.’

‘When are you going?’

She told him and he nodded, almost abstracted.

‘If you do come back, we’ll be here. The boys and me.’

Annie had murmured something then, with the sobs choking her throat, and she had turned and run from the room.

That was all, until now, when she was picking her belongings out of the family jumble and putting them one by one into her suitcase.

What am I doing?

She piled in the last things haphazardly and snapped the locks. It was time to go. Steve would be waiting for her. Annie went slowly down the stairs, carrying her bag. She looked at the line of pictures on the wall, and put up her free hand automatically to straighten one that was crooked. She left the suitcase standing by the front door and went through the kitchen and out into the garden. Their three faces turned to her as she walked across the grass. They were so quiet, waiting.

Benjy moved first. He ran to her and clung to her legs.

‘I don’t want you to go.’

She put her hand on his head, holding the roundness of it against her. Tom didn’t move from his seat beside Martin, but Annie saw that he was staring fiercely to hold back the tears that he thought were babyish. Martin stood up awkwardly and came towards her. Annie felt how much she was hurting him, and the pain of it was worse than anything else she had suffered from the bomb.

I love you
, she thought helplessly.
All of you, I love you so much
.

Martin bent down and scooped Benjy up into his arms, setting her free. She knew that her husband was letting her go, as gently as he could. She ducked her head, like a coward, away from his generosity. She ran across the grass to Thomas and hugged him, but he turned his face away from her. Benjy’s hands snatched at her as she kissed him, but Martin held him tightly.

‘Goodbye,’ Annie whispered. It would have been like a lie, or a taunt, or an empty promise to add,
I’ll be back soon
.

Martin touched her cheek, as lightly as if her skin would still bruise at the brush of his fingers.

‘We’re here,’ he said softly, reminding her.

She nodded, unable even to say,
I know
. She left them then, and went back through the silent house to pick up her suitcase, waiting beside the front door.

When she had gone, and even Benjy had stopped watching the back door to see if she would come out again, Tom burst out fiercely, ‘Why does she have to go away? It isn’t fair.’

Still holding Benjy, Martin went back and sat beside him. Benjy settled his head against his father’s shoulder, his thumb in his mouth.

‘Tom, listen.’ Tom looked away, but Martin was sure that he was listening. ‘Mum isn’t just your mother. She’s a person, too. We belong to each other, all of us, but we belong to ourselves as well. If Annie needs to go, I think we should let her, and do the best we can.’ Thomas’s face was still averted, but Martin knew that he was crying now. ‘She’ll come back to you, Tom. She’ll always be your mother.’

The child rubbed his face with the back of his hand. ‘Like always?’

They know what’s happening, both of them, Martin thought. Somehow, however, they feel it and they know it. ‘Like always,’ he lied to them, for now, until he knew for sure. ‘Like always.’

Of course they believed him. That was enough, for now. Tom sat quietly for a moment, and then he wriggled off the seat.

‘Can I go and phone Daniel?’

‘Good idea. Ask if he wants to come and play.’

Thomas raced away across the grass, and Ben broke out of Martin’s arms and chased after him.

It was very quiet in the garden. A cloud crossed the sun and a line of shadow swept over the grass like a drawn curtain.

Annie
.

Martin’s head dropped into his hands. He hadn’t cried for a long time, but there were tears hot and wet against his fingers now. He had known that there was nothing to do but wait, and hope for her, but he felt his helplessness, crushing him. The sense of impotence brought vividly back to him the hours that he had waited at the police barrier. He had thought then,
If it could be me down there instead of you, Annie
. He had been certain then of loving her enough to take her place, to take on anything if it would save her hurt.

The thought came to him now.

If he loved her, did he love her enough to let her go? To let her go, to Steve? If that was what she wanted, truly.

He said aloud in the empty garden, ‘Yes.’

He wasn’t helpless, then. He could do that for her.

Martin lifted his head. He looked up through the leaves of the pear tree at the sky. There were more clouds drifting towards the sun. It was going to rain. He waited until his eyes were dry, leaning back on the garden bench and watching the sky. When he was sure that the boys would see nothing unusual in his face, he got up and went into the house to look for them.

Steve wrenched the wheel sharply and the car swung out from behind a bus. He accelerated out of the range of a taxi, but the brief burst of speed only brought him up against the wall of traffic waiting at the next lights. He glanced at the clock on the dash. He was late, five minutes already. Impatience made him push the BMW faster still, weaving in and out of the messenger bikes and Telecom vans. He was to meet Annie outside King’s Cross station.

‘Why King’s Cross?’ he had asked her, and she had merely replied, ‘Why not?’

He reckoned quickly, his fingers drumming on the wheel. Five more minutes. Eight at the most. She wouldn’t give him up in that time, would she?

He came past the red and yellow pinnacles of St Pancras in a surge of traffic, and then he saw her. She was standing at the edge of the pavement by the station, perfectly still, with her suitcase beside her. She was wearing a plain cotton dress, with her hair brushed back. She looked as vulnerable as a truant schoolgirl. Steve stopped the car. Absurdly, she was looking the other way, against the flow of traffic, and he had to call to her, ‘Are you going my way?’

She swung around then, and the sudden light shone in her face. A second later she was in the car beside him, her suitcase bumping them both. They sat amidst the stream of cars and put their fingers up to touch each other’s faces, tracing the contours, like blind people. Annie leaned forward and kissed his mouth.

A taxi began its insistent hooting behind them.

‘Where are we going?’ she asked.

Steve slipped out into the flow of traffic again. The hooting died away and he looked sideways at her.

‘We’re going to the seaside,’ he said.

Nine

It wasn’t Brighton, as Annie had guiltily pictured it.

Instead, they drove through the unravelling skein of East London, and Annie was intent on Steve’s face and voice, and she saw none of it.

But at last she asked dreamily, ‘Where
are
we going?’ and he laughed.

‘I told you. To the seaside. And to an East End boy like me, the east coast is the only seaside there is.’

Annie imagined Clacton then, or Southend, but they drove steadily further north, into a wide, flat countryside of huge yellow fields that tipped away at the edges under the arc of the sky. She looked curiously at the unfamiliar place names.

‘I’ve never been up here before.’

‘So it will belong to you and me, when you remember it.’

They didn’t look at each other for a moment after that.

They turned off the main road at last, down a side-road that seemed to lead nowhere. There was rough, open land on each side of them, humped over with gorse bushes, and black outcrops of wind-sculpted pines. Annie knew that they were coming to the sea, and then the road dipped suddenly and she saw it. There was a low huddle of houses and beyond them the North Sea, grey-blue even in the sunshine, and dotted with white horses whipped up by the wind. The little town was at the end of the road, with nothing beyond it but the sea. Steve drove to the sea-wall and they left the car in the shelter of it. In winter the waves would smash against the concrete and soak the street beyond with spray, but in midsummer the sea was a flat, sparkling dish. Annie and Steve climbed out of the car and leant against the wall to watch it.

The beach was big, rounded stones, slate-blue and dove-grey, black and shiny where the waves tipped over them. People walked slowly along the water’s edge, their shadows fractured in the moving water, and dogs bounded in and out of the foam.

Annie turned and saw Steve looking at her, and she breathed in the salt-fresh air.

The light slanting around them was clear and clean, painterly.

‘It’s beautiful.’

‘I think so, too. And it feels very remote.’

That’s right for us, isn’t it? Cut off from the world. Just for now, just for now
.

‘Look.’

Steve turned her round to face inland. There was a little row of houses, painted pink and pale blue and eau-de-Nil, their wrought-iron balconies looking out over the sea. He pointed to a blue one, very trim with white-painted curlicues to the gable ends.

‘We’re staying in that one.’

‘Really? Aren’t they pretty? As if they’re painted on a backcloth for an end-of-the pier show. Let’s go inside and look at it.’

Steve produced a key from his pocket.

The little house had bare wooden floors and basket chairs that creaked, faded cotton curtains and a wood-burning stove in the room that looked out over the balcony to the shifting sea. It reminded Annie instantly and vividly of childhood holidays. She could feel the sand in her canvas shoes, and smell salt, and driftwood fires and tar. The complex of sensations and recollections overwhelmed her, and suddenly she felt almost painfully aware, all her senses newly primed. She walked across the room to the windows, touching the sun-blistered paint with her fingertips and with the salt-spray and dust from the curtains strong in the back of her throat.

I’m alive
, she thought.

She turned to Steve again. He was watching her from the doorway, half in shadow, one side of his face bathed in the light off the sea.

‘Whose house is it?’

‘It belongs to a friend of mine.’

‘Have you been here before?’

‘Not like this.’

‘So it will belong to you and me, when you remember it.’ She echoed his words, confirming them.

‘Annie. Yes, Annie.’

They came together then, standing in the middle of the room where the brilliance from outside flickered over the ceiling. Steve took her face between his hands and kissed it.

‘Better than a hotel,’ he murmured.

‘Better.’

Hotels were for adulterers, Annie thought. For furtive, stolen times, while this little house was clean and innocent with the sand swept into corners and the beach stones arranged on the wooden mantelpiece. Was she dressing up the reality for her own comfort? Annie wondered. Perhaps she was, but for today, here and now, she knew that it didn’t matter.

‘What shall we do?’ Steve asked her.

She grinned at him. She felt like a child, excited, on its first day in a new place.