Strangers (35 page)

At midday she put her grey coat on, bought to replace the blue one she had worn to go Christmas shopping, how long ago? She picked up the chequebook that Martin had left for her on the dresser in the kitchen, and put it into her bag. For a moment she stood looking at the telephone, thinking,
I could still ring
. I could tell him that I can’t come, after all. And then she thought of Steve, waiting in his empty flat for her to come to him.
I must go. I can’t not do it, not now
.

She left the house. She was going to slam the front door, but in the end she closed it behind her with a tiny, final click.

Steve lived at the top of an anonymous block not far from Harrods. Annie rode up in the mirrored lift, turning away from the unwelcome sight of her repeated reflection. When the doors opened on the top floor she stepped out into a long carpeted corridor. She hesitated, caught a last glimpse of her desperate, defiant expression, turned and marched smartly down the length of deep pile. She rang his bell and he opened the door immediately.

Steve kissed her cheek, his hand briefly lifting her hair from the nape of her neck. ‘Come in.’

She followed him inside. The room was bare, surprisingly high, decorated in shades of grey and cream. The few pieces of furniture were black, or glass and chrome. A long black table at the far end was piled with papers.

‘Have you been working?’ Annie asked. In this environment, Steve suddenly seemed a formidable stranger.

Then he smiled crookedly at her. ‘Trying to,’ he said, acknowledging the longing and the apprehensiveness that they both felt.

‘Would you like a drink?’

Annie remembered the conversation that they had had in hospital. Steve had said, ‘We’ve never met for a clandestine drink. I don’t know whether you like vodka martinis or white wine spritzers.’ This is clandestine enough, she thought. Why didn’t we understand before that it would come to this?

‘Just white wine,’ Annie said. ‘No soda.’

Steve nodded. She knew that he remembered too.

He went into the kitchen and Annie walked across the room to the black sofa, looking at the chic emptiness. He poured her wine and she drank it, tasting the gooseberry richness.

‘Why aren’t there any
things?
’ she asked suddenly. ‘No ornaments, or mementoes.’

Steve looked around, seeing the room afresh. ‘There aren’t, are there?’

‘It looks as if it came all together, in a package. Do you mind my saying that?’

Steve laughed. ‘Not a bid. It did. An interior decorator’s package. I suppose I haven’t wanted to remember anything in particular.’ His face softened. ‘Until now.’

‘Come and sit here,’ Annie asked, turning her face up to his. They sat side by side, their heads almost touching.

‘It isn’t very like your house, is it? Your house is full of memories.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It’s easier to be here.’

They drank again in silence, and when Steve spoke again it was in a light, deliberately cheerful voice, about something quite different.

When they had finished their wine Steve said, ‘I told you I was going to take you out for lunch. You’d better know that I can’t cook a thing.’

‘I thought you must have one minor failing,’ she answered, on the same cheerful note.

But under the bright surface they were both thinking that they knew all the big things about one another, the momentous things that made them who they were. Yet they knew none of the little, everyday ones that would have marked them out to their acquaintances. It was strange to have everything, and nothing, to learn.

It was a short walk to the restaurant. Steve seemed to be moving more quickly, leaning less heavily on his stick.

‘The leg will always be slightly stiff,’ he told her. ‘But otherwise as good as new. Look at us.’ They stopped for a moment on the crowded pavement and the shoppers streamed past them in the sunlight. ‘We’re lucky. Remember?’

Annie looked at the light and the colours, and at the reassuring roaring traffic, and at Steve’s face, and uncomplicated joy flooded through her. Their eyes met for a moment, and then they began to walk towards the restaurant again.

It was a small, discreet place, with tables occupied by prosperous-looking lunchers well-separated from each other so that conversation was no more than a low hum. One waiter pulled out Annie’s chair, another unfolded her napkin for her. The menu was placed in her hands by the head waiter. She glanced at it and saw that it was very short and very distinguished.

After they had ordered, Annie sat back in her chair with a sigh, looking around the room. ‘I like it here.’

Steve raised his glass to her. ‘I like it because you are here.’

It was a meal that Annie always remembered.

She forgot the details of the food, but she never forgot the sense of being wrapped in calm, unshakable luxury, or the way that the exquisite food and wine went together, or the happiness of being with Steve. She knew that her skin was glowing and her eyes were shining, and she knew that she was beautiful and clever. Everything that was good and important had come together, as it had only ever done before in dreams. As they ate and talked and looked at one another Annie stepped outside her ordinary self and became somebody magical, and superhuman; a woman in love.

Steve sat across the table from her, oblivious of everything but her face and voice, his own face reflecting his happiness and his pride in her.

Nothing could go wrong. Nothing must go wrong.

And then, so quickly, their coffee cups were empty for the last time, and Annie had eaten the last of the tiny, exotic sweetmeats that had come arranged in their dish like jewels in a casket. She blinked, and looked around the restaurant, and saw that it was empty except for themselves.

‘Shall we go home?’ Steve said softly.

‘Yes, please.’

As they went outside they felt that they were separated from the crowds around them, and the high red buses grinding past, by the secure nimbus of their happiness.

‘Thank you,’ Annie said. ‘I’ve never eaten a meal like that before.’

‘Neither have I,’ Steve said, not meaning the food. ‘It was important, the first time that we sat down to eat together.’

He took her hand securely in his, and guided her back through the ordinary people.

In the bare flat there was nothing for Annie to look at, nothing to remind her. The afternoon sun shone through the slats of the blinds, laying bars of brightness on the grey floor. When Steve held the tips of her fingers and turned her gently to him the light and dark played over their faces too, and it was like moving through water. She was floating, weightless in the waves, and then the current caught her. It was easy to move with it, unthinkable not to.

Their mouths touched, lightly, and the watery light rippled in long rays, spreading away from them. There was a moment of sweet, dreamy stillness and then the current was much stronger. Annie’s mouth opened as the waves caught her breath, crushing her ribs until her heart pounded against them. The kiss opened up unthought-of submerged caverns of love and longing. Annie was trembling, her skin burned and she heard her own voice, a low cry, drowning.

I love you
.

‘I want you,’ Steve said, and Annie answered, ‘I’m here.’

They walked together through the patterns of light and dark, and there was no leader or follower because their need was equal.

And in the bedroom, where the blinds shut out the light except for thin, broken beams, they undressed each other. There was no hurrying, because they were certain of one another now. Their clothes dropped around them, forgotten.

Even as a girl, Annie had never been proud of her body and after the birth of her children her flesh had begun to fall in loose, softening folds. During the weeks in hospital and afterwards the compensating roundness had melted away to leave the skin stretched too tightly over her bones and showing the net of blue veins beneath.

But now, as Steve looked at her, Annie stood upright, natural and strong. Gently he touched the raised, angry pucker of the scar across her belly and the pink junctions of new skin over her arm and shoulder. She saw the fan of fine wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, and the tenderness in his face. She knew that she was beautiful, as beautiful as she had been in the restaurant, and now she was powerful too, because they were like this together.

In her turn, she looked at him. She touched the flat of her hand to the hair on his chest, seeing the blackness of it over the white skin. There were the ladder-marks of lacerations over Steve’s arms and chest too. At the top of his leg the flesh had reformed, knobs of it over the old gash, but the muscles were shrunk and wasted. He was thin, and she saw the pull of muscles across his chest and back as his arms encircled her.

The length of their bodies touched together, hard and soft, unfamiliar and imperious.

She kissed the corner of his mouth and he turned his face to meet hers, his tongue seeking hers out. Annie’s hair fanned lazily over his bare shoulders. She felt him arch against her and she put her hand down to touch him, gently at first and then insistently until he breathed sharply and lifted her off her feet. He laid her down across the bed and knelt beside her.

He parted her legs and put his hand between them and then, with infinite gentleness, his mouth. The pleasure was like a knife, turning inside her, and she cried out to him.

They had been slow and patient before, but they were helpless in the current now. Steve lifted himself to look at her and then his mouth touched her thighs and the curve of her waist, then her breast. The waves seemed to break over them, deafening them with their roar. Annie’s mouth formed a word, inaudible, as she reached her arms up to him. There could be no holding back any longer. He came blindly up against her and she guided him until he found the place and joined them together at last.

There was an instant of shivering stillness.

Annie opened her eyes and saw the bare grey walls and the gold threads of sunlight spanning them. The gold light seemed to spill outwards to lap over them. It was hot and sweet over her skin and inside it and she rolled in Steve’s arm, finding him as he found her, question and answer. She was hungry now, ravenous with hunger, as Steve was, and they were the only way to feed one another. If he had seemed strange to her in that moment of stillness, Annie forgot the strangeness at once. He knew her, and he opened recesses within her that she had forgotten, or had perhaps never known. As her body moved against his, as she leaned over him so that her hair brushed his face, or as they lay side by side so that they could look into one another’s eyes, Annie was as supple as a girl again, but she was as knowing as a grown woman too.

At last they had taken each other as far as they could go. Annie’s head tipped back and her legs wound tighter around his. Steve was still for a moment, holding her there, and then he thrust again until she cried out and he felt the butterfly flutter of her muscles against him.

‘My love,’ he whispered. ‘Oh yes, my love.’

He held her with his love like a stone inside him, and when she was quiet again he let his face fall against the hollow of her shoulder and he gave himself up to her.

Annie’s eyes were languorously heavy when she opened them again. She saw the gold-flecked irises of Steve’s eyes, very close, and she smiled slowly. Their bodies were still joined, sticky and sweet, and their arms wound round each other. The room was quiet, and the murmur of traffic from the streets below seemed far distant. She knew that they were happy, here and now in this narrow space and time. She closed her eyes again.

They slept for a little while, dreamlessly, and when Annie woke up the sun had gone and the room was almost dark. She raised herself on one elbow, soundlessly, because Steve was still sleeping. She saw from the clock beside the bed that it was five o’clock, and she must leave in half an hour’s time. She let herself lie down again beside him for a moment, listening to his even breathing.

Something in the shape of the room, or perhaps the quality of the light, made her think of the last time she had seen Matthew, lying in the upstairs room of the house overlooking the square.

Memories stirred inside her, reality quickening again, and she moved sharply, blocking them out. Steve stirred and opened his eyes.

‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have fallen asleep.’

She kissed him. ‘I did too. I must go home soon.’

But he reached up and put his arms around her neck, drawing her down on top of him so that the firm foundation of her resolve cracked wide apart.

‘Not yet. I want to make love to you again.’

His hands touched her and she lay back, protesting and then acquiescent, and at last as her body took her over again she was as demanding as Steve himself. They were slower this time, more calculating because of what they had learned already, but the final shock that took hold of Annie went deeper and burned her more fiercely than anything she had ever known before.

When it was over, Steve rolled away from her and lay on his back, staring up at the shadows over the ceiling.

He reached his hand out to touch his fingers to hers as they lay side by side and the recollection flooded over them at once.

‘Remember.’

She felt the pain of her injuries again, and the momentous joy of having escaped. For a moment neither of them was able to move, as if the weight of the wreckage reared up above them all over again.

‘I remember.’

Annie turned her head towards him then, and saw that there were tears at the corner of his eyes.

‘What is it?’ she asked, bewildered.

‘Now that you’re here, Annie, don’t go away. Don’t go.’

She looked away. ‘I must go. You know that I have to go home to my kids.’

There was a second’s pause, and then Steve sat up abruptly, his back to her. When he looked round again, she didn’t know whether she had really seen his tears. ‘I’ll drive you home.’

‘No. No, there isn’t any need.’ He couldn’t drive her home, of course. ‘I’ll go back on the tube. I bought myself a return ticket.’