Strangers (44 page)

Remember it
, Annie told herself.
Remember it
.

They stood in silence for a moment and then Steve said, lightly, as if it were any day, ‘I think we should have a proper seaside breakfast. I’m going to the shops.’

Annie sat on the duckboards of the balcony, her knees drawn up and the sun warm on her face, and waited for him. The first of the fishing boats was winched slowly up on to the shingle, the rusty old engine on the beach painfully grinding.

She heard Steve come in again, and begin to clatter in the kitchen. She went downstairs, barefoot, padding in and out of the shafts of sunlight. She stood in the kitchen doorway smiling, but then Steve glanced sharply at her and her smile faded.

‘What is it?’ Annie asked.

She stared around the kitchen, seeing the box of eggs and the brown paper bag of groceries, the unfolded newspaper and the coffee pot waiting on the table.

Steve hesitated and she felt the cold pulse of her heart, and then he picked up the newspaper. He came to her, holding the front page for her to see. Annie thought,
Martin. Tom and Benjy
. What’s happened to them, while I’m here, away from them? No, please. Please not that … not now, and here.

She looked down in bewilderment at blurred photographs, mugshots, two men and a woman. The meant nothing to her and the fear that had leapt into her throat subsided again. They’re always here inside me, she realized. Wherever I go.

She knew, suddenly and with utter conviction, that there was no decision to be made. It had been made, long ago, with the times that had become memories whirling like confetti in the darkness.

‘What is it?’ she repeated stupidly.

‘Read it.’

Annie forced her eyes to focus, skimming over the words. She saw,
Arrested in South London. In connection with the Christmas bombing
. There were names, absurdly ordinary, and aliases. Suspected political affiliations.
Continued on back page
. She knew that on the back page there would be a reminder of what had happened on that day. Perhaps a photograph of the bombed store.

She let the paper fall instead of turning it over. The gas ring was already lit, a circle of dim blue flame, and it hissed softly in the silence. They couldn’t hear the sea, here at the back of the house. The only other sound, now that Annie was listening, was someone whistling. A milkman, perhaps. Ordinary things, going on all around them. She thought of her parents’ house, and well-washed milk bottles put out on the back step.

‘So they’re caught,’ she said at last.

She was trying to make herself understand what she felt now, and it dawned on her that she felt nothing. She had spent her grief and anger long ago, for those who had died and suffered injuries. And for herself and Steve, the newspaper photographs of those wooden, staring faces had no significance at all. The violence had gone. Annie felt the gentleness of relief. It softened the clenched muscles in her face and throat, and loosened the set of her shoulders. She was lucky, after all. Nothing had happened to Martin or the boys. It wasn’t too late.

‘We’re here,’ Martin had told her in the garden. Sharp joy out of the words sang in her head. Longing and love pulled fiercely at her. She turned her face to look openly at Steve.

‘What do you feel?’ she asked him. The oddness of the question struck them both. She had never needed to ask that before.

His eyes held hers for a moment, and then he looked down at the newspaper faces.

‘Nothing,’ he whispered. ‘What are they to us, now?’

That was all, but unspoken words spilt through the silence.

The blurred newsprint had come like an exorcism. It laid the violence and the fear to rest, and with them a different kind of violence seemed to die too.

Steve took her in his arms and kissed her, and he saw her as he had done at the very beginning. A woman out shopping, with her hair tumbled over the collar of her coat. Annie stood with her head against his shoulder. She was thinking back to the old evenness of her life with Martin and her children. The bomb had blown that apart. She thought of the pain that followed, and the revelation of its obverse side, joy more vivid than anything she had ever known. The pain and, she understood now, the joy had both faded together. It had happened, and it was over.

It was Steve, and herself, and Martin and the children who were left. No different from anyone else, and with the same old human ties.

Love and affection. How deep those ties went, after the violent need had flickered out. Martin was half of her. She couldn’t cut away half of herself, but even more certainly she knew that she couldn’t cut out of Martin the half of him that was herself too. The thought of his pain, much harder to bear than all her own, filled her eyes momentarily with tears.

She bent down to hide them, picking up the discarded newspaper with stiff fingers.

Steve’s arms were warm around her shoulders for an instant longer, and then he let her go.

Annie dropped the paper into the rubbish bin.

‘Let’s make the breakfast,’ she said.

Steve laid the bacon rashers in the blackened pan, and the fat turned translucent before giving its salty, domestic smell up into the air.

They took their plates up to the sunny balcony, and ate looking out over the empty sea.

When they had finished, Steve asked her carefully, ‘What shall we do today?’

Annie busied herself with the coffee cups, and they rattled in her fingers.

Just one more day
, she thought.
We can allow ourselves that much, can’t we, out of so many?

‘Can we walk inland?’

‘Of course we can. We can go anywhere you like.’

Just for today
.

They took the Ordnance Survey map off the shelf of tattered paperbacks and spread it out, planning a route. The practicality of it gave them something to focus on, and they deliberately gave themselves up to it.

‘Can we go that far?’ Annie asked faintly, and he grinned at her.

‘Easily.’

It was a long way, but Annie knew that she would remember every turn of that walk together. She saw every path and lane with extra clarity, and every change of the wide marshland sky as the sun climbed and began to sink again.

They crossed the marshes where the coarse grass brushed rhythmically against their legs, winding with the tiny creeks that had dried into cracked mud. There were larks overhead, spilling out curls of song as they circled their invisible patch of territory. Beyond the marshes they climbed on to sandy downland dotted with huge clumps of coconut-scented gorse and undermined with rabbit warrens. They came to a forbidding belt of conifers, with a tiny church standing almost at the dark edge. They stood for a moment in the cool dimness of the church’s interior, where the sun streaming through the one stained-glass window left pink and amethyst lozenges on the varnished pine pews. The dimness outside under the pines was oddly similar, and they found themselves whispering as they walked over the soft mat of spent brown needles. On the other side the sun was directly overhead, dazzling them momentarily with its brightness.

They ate lunch in a pub garden, made secret by high hedges and whitewashed walls, the only customers for bread and cheese and hoppy local beer.

They walked on again, down shady lanes now that skirted huge fields of corn and barley. The world seemed empty except for themselves and the occasional farmhand who chugged past with a wave, perched high above the ridged wheels of his tractor. And then they began to circle back again, with the sun behind them now, towards the sea.

All the way around the sunlit, empty circle they talked. They talked about simple things, small things that related to themselves and to the past, filling in the blanks that had been left as they lay frozen under the rubble.

Annie told Steve about Tibby, and her mother’s imploring words that had brought her here to the little blue house overlooking the sea. He listened, with the lines showing at the corners of his mouth.

What they were doing was like the walk itself, Annie thought. It was as if they must draw the raw ends together, to complete the circle, before they could step away again along another route.

They didn’t talk about the future. To contemplate the future would have been to tear the raw ends apart.

At last, walking very slowly now, they came to the point where the road dipped eastwards and the sea spread out in front of them, grey, with all the sparkle of the morning drained away. Steve took her hand and they walked the last part of the way in silence, to the end of the road.

The house on the sea-front was full of the evening’s shadows. Neither of them would turn on the lights, yet. Annie sank down on the stairs, too weary to walk another step.

‘Come on,’ he said. And they remembered how they had kept one another going long ago, at the very beginning.

‘I’ll do it for you,’ Annie said. She smiled, but her face was shadowed. She went heavily up the stairs.

Steve followed her and ran a bath in the tiny bathroom with its clanking pipes. He found a jar of salts and tipped them in, whisking the water up into a steamy green froth.

‘You read my thoughts,’ Annie said, and he turned to look at her through the steam.

‘And you read mine.’

They undressed each other, and lowered themselves into the welcome heat. Annie wound her legs around his, holding on to him. They took the soap in turn and washed each other, gently, as if their scars might open again. Steve leant forward and kissed her mouth, and then her breast as the bubbles of foam burst and revealed it. He stood up abruptly, sending a wave of scented water on to the floor. He lifted Annie out of the bath and wrapped her in a towel, and carried her through into the bedroom. They lay down as they were, wet and slippery, and they made love with all the urgency and pain and desperation that they had held at bay all through the day. And they lay in silence afterwards, not knowing, suddenly, what they could say to one another.

Much later, when they ate dinner together, it was with the spectres of the first afternoon in the restaurant watching them. Annie remembered that she had felt beautiful, and invincible, because of Steve. She looked at his dark face now with the weight of inevitability pressing down on her, and she pushed the unwanted food to one side of her plate, and drank too many glasses of wine. Instead of dulling her senses, the wine sharpened them. She could hear unspoken words and feel the touch of their hands, even though the rickety table separated them. Their hands were still clasped, as they had been at the beginning, but the real world was prising them apart and wrenching back the fingers, one by one.

Annie and Steve sat for a long time over that dinner. Not for the pleasure of it, because the silences that they were too careful of each other to fill were lengthening, but because they were like children, unwilling to let the day end. But at last Steve tipped the empty bottle sideways. It didn’t yield even a drop. He laid it on its side and spun it, and the bottle came to rest with the neck pointing away from them, out into the darkness. He shrugged, but Annie saw through the protectiveness.

She stood up, scraping her chair in the soft quiet, and went round the table to him. She put her arms around him and rested her face against his.

‘Don’t,’ she said. She was going to say,
I can’t bear it
, but she stopped short.
You can
, she told herself,
because you must
.

‘I don’t want to sit here any more,’ Steve said.

They looked at each other calmly. And then they went up the stairs, very slowly, turning off the lights behind them.

The wind was rising and the little bedroom was full of the sound of the sea. They lay down together once more, and they were glad of the darkness because it hid their faces. In the darkness they gave themselves blindly up to murmured words and to the touch of their hands, and then at last to the insistent tide that caught them up and carried them away.

When it had ebbed into sad silence they lay holding each other and listening to the real waves breaking on the pebbles below.

When Annie woke up in the morning she reached out her hand to Steve. The hollow of the bed beside her was still warm, but he had gone. She lay for a moment while recollection knotted itself around her, and then she got out of bed and went to the window.

The sky was veiled with thin grey summer cloud, and the sea was the same flat colour, almost white at the far point where it met the sky. There were people on the beach, sitting on the slope of stones or walking in ones and twos at the water’s edge. She watched them for a moment, seeing the more distant ones as little dark figures, matchstick people. One of them was standing still, staring out to sea. Annie saw that it was Steve. A couple with a dog passed by him, then a child, running, all arms and legs.

Steve was a long way off, diminished by the curve of the beach and the sky. He was a stranger amongst other strangers. Annie closed her eyes. When she opened them she saw him bend down to pick up a stone, and then pitch it in a wide arc into the sea. Abruptly Annie turned and went to the wardrobe. She began to take her clothes off the hangers, fumbling with them because the tears were blurring her eyes.

When Annie came downstairs Steve was at the front door. She saw him framed in the glass, a tall dark man whose face she knew as well as her own.

He opened the door and looked at her, startled for an instant and then seeing too clearly.

‘You have to go home today.’

It wasn’t a question, or a statement, but a confirmation.

The words spoken at last.

‘Yes,’ she said softy. ‘I must go home.’

He caught her hands in his then, unable to let her go as gently as he had promised himself he would. Out on the clean wide beach he had believed that it was possible. Now he didn’t trust himself any longer.

‘Annie.’ He tried for simple words. ‘I’ve never known anyone like you.’

Steve knew that to say more would be hurtful, and clumsy, but he couldn’t stop himself. ‘I want you to stay with me. I love you. Please don’t go.’