Strangers (36 page)

Annie pushed back the covers and sat up. She collected her scattered clothes from the bedroom floor and went into the bathroom. When she came out again Steve was dressed too, waiting for her. He kissed her, lightly, on both cheeks and asked her, ‘Will you come to see me again soon?’

‘As soon as I can,’ she promised him.

They rode down together in the mirrored lift and Annie thought that their reflected selves looked sad, and strange.

Out in the street Steve called a taxi and put Annie into it.

‘Safe home.’

She nodded, suddenly distraught at having to part from him. She didn’t speak and the cab door slammed between them. She looked backwards, with her hand lifted, until the taxi turned the corner. And all the way home she sat stiffly on the edge of her seat, looking out at the lurid glow of the city’s evening lights.

Martin was sitting in the kitchen, with the boys eating their supper. Their three faces turned to her as she came in, and Annie felt that her mouth was bruised and burning, and that her hair was wild even though she knew that she had smoothed it in Steve’s bathroom.

‘Where’s all your shopping?’ Martin asked. ‘Shall I carry it in for you?’

Annie stared at them with the blood thumping in her head.

‘I didn’t buy anything,’ she said. ‘Nothing at all.’

There was a long silence, and Benjy’s alarmed face turned from one of them to the other.

‘I see,’ Martin said, deadly quiet.

Annie knew that he did see. In truth he must have seen all along, while she had pretended to herself that he was blind.

She turned away from the three of them and ran up the stairs to her bedroom. She lay face down on the bed, stiff and cold and stony-eyed. She heard Martin putting the boys to bed, and then going downstairs again. She lay without moving for hours, hearing him moving about, and all the little sounds of ordinary life, but he never came up again. At last she fell into an exhausted sleep.

The dream of the bombing came again, redoubling its terror. In her dream Steve wasn’t there and when she woke up, bathed in cold sweat and with the taste of blood from her bitten lips in her mouth again, she was alone still. She stretched out her hand, timidly, and found that the wide bed was empty.

Annie swung her legs off the bed, with her blue corduroy dress caught up in creases around her. She felt her way through the dark house to the spare bedroom. She opened the door noiselessly and stood there, her fingers curled around the handle, listening to the sound of Martin’s separate breathing.

Eight

For a week, and then another week, Annie felt that she was being slowly drawn in half.

On the first morning after the day with Steve she came down to breakfast and found Martin already sitting at the breakfast table. His eyes were dark with shadows and the pain in his face made the guilt and regret twist inside her. Annie tried to say something, ‘Martin, listen to me, I don’t know …’ but he wouldn’t let her finish.

‘Not now,’ he said coldly.

He left his breakfast, picked up his briefcase and his coat, and walked out of the house without looking at her. Annie wanted to shout after him, or to put her head down on the table and cry until she couldn’t cry any more, but Thomas and Benjamin were standing in the doorway watching her.

‘Are you angry?’ Ben asked.

‘No, love.’ She tried to smile. ‘A little bit sad, today, that’s all.’

Their round faces reproached her.

After delivering them to school and to nursery, Annie came back and wandered in aimless circles through the house. She watched the silent telephone, willing Martin to ring so that she could begin to talk to him.

When at last it did ring it was Steve. Annie gripped the receiver as if the strength of her fingers could bring him closer.

‘Thank you for yesterday,’ Steve said. Annie could hear that he was smiling and the love and elation that she had felt yesterday lifted her heart. ‘It was one of the happiest days I have ever had.’

‘I was happy too.’

As always, Steve could hear more than the words. ‘Is something wrong?’

Rapidly Annie said, ‘It has to be at the expense of other people’s, our happiness, doesn’t it? At the expense of Martin’s, and the boys’.’

‘What happened?’ he persisted gently.

‘Nothing happened. Martin knows. Because he guessed, not because I had the courage to tell him. I came back without my shopping, you see, and that was supposed to be my alibi. Perhaps he’s seen it all along. We’ve known each other for a long time, Steve.’

‘I know that.’ The words were barely audible. At length he said, ‘He would have had to know some time, Annie. Isn’t it as well that it should be at the beginning?’ He was right, of course. But he hadn’t seen the hurt in Martin’s face last night, or the coldness this morning. Annie’s fingers wrapped even tighter around the receiver. Stop. She must stop feeling that Steve was to blame; that anyone was to blame. What had happened had happened, and now it must be faced. She took a breath, and tried to put a different, stronger note into her voice.

‘I’m sorry. I won’t pretend that what’s happening is anything but painful, or that it won’t go on being painful for a long time to come. Can you face that too, Steve?’

He answered her at once, as she had known that he would. ‘You know that I can.’

‘Yes.’

‘Annie, I’m here if you need me.’

She knew that too. She wanted to go to him, but she was fixed here, and she was afraid that the unfixing would damage them all more viciously than the bomb could ever have done.

‘Will you leave me for a few days to try to work things out here?’

‘Of course.’

After he had rung off Annie resumed her aimless circling of the house. She watched the slow clock until it was time to go to collect Ben, longing to have his innocent company. She set off briskly for the nursery, and all the way back she listened carefully to his recitation of the morning’s activities, trying to focus on him to the exclusion of everything else. When they were home again she cooked his lunch, laying out the carrots in the pattern he insisted on before he would even pretend to eat them, then sitting opposite him with a cup of coffee while he mashed the food up with his fork. Through the stream of Benjy’s questions and observations Annie kept hearing her own questions, and the silence that lay beyond them.

‘Why don’t you listen?’ Ben demanded crossly.

Annie felt the heat of unjustified irritation.

‘I can’t listen to everything all the time, Ben,’ she snapped. ‘I need to think sometimes.’

He looked at her, surprised, and then he stuck out his lower lip. ‘I need a cuddle,’ he said, acting, but Annie knew that at another level he wasn’t acting, but telling her the truth. She pushed her anger and sadness ashamedly back within herself.

‘Come and sit on my knee.’

He scrambled up triumphantly and she hugged him, then drew his plate of messy food across and spooned up a mouthful.

‘Come on, finish this and then we’ll watch your programme.’

Ben felt that he had won some undefined battle and so he willingly ate the rest of his lunch. Afterwards they sat on the sofa together, with Benjy’s head heavy against Annie’s chest. Annie stared unseeingly at the puppets on the screen and thought of the afternoon ahead of her, and the other afternoons of motherhood, and tried hopelessly to imagine them in another place, with Steve.

‘Let’s go to the park,’ she suggested when the programme finished. She found Benjy’s red suit and dragged his tricycle out of the tangle in the cupboard under the stairs. They set off, with Benjy trundling beside his mother, his face screwed up with concentration and the effort of pedalling.

The route was numbingly familiar, and the park itself. She followed Benjy from the swings to the roundabout, and stood at the foot of the slide while he hurtled down it. She felt too stiff and far-away to join in his game of hide-and-seek.

‘Not today,’ she told him. ‘Perhaps Daddy will bring you and Tom for a game tomorrow.’

What else would happen tomorrow, and the days afterwards? Annie felt cold. She saw that the sky was streaked with long fingers of cloud. The warmth of the misplaced spring was over, and tomorrow it would be as icy as January again. She walked around the knot of trees that stood in the middle of the park.

‘Come on, Ben. We’ll go and buy some bread for tea, and then we’ll get Thomas from school.’

Teatime came and went, and then the routine of the children’s play time, supper and baths and bedtime stories. When they were both asleep Annie came downstairs and poured herself a drink, looked at the dinner in the oven, and then sat down to wait. She knew that she was waiting for Martin, as she had been waiting all day. She waited for an hour, and then another half an hour, and then she took her portion of the dinner out of the oven and ate it, not tasting anything. She washed up the single plate and put it away, and sat down again in front of the television. She remembered that there was a basketful of mending waiting to be done so she fetched it and began to darn a hole in the elbow of one of Thomas’s school jerseys.

It was nearly half past ten when Martin came up the front path.

He had been sitting for hours in the corner of a bleak pub he had never been into before. Amidst the plastic and neon of brewery décor he had been thinking about himself and Annie, back over all the years that they had been together. He remembered her as they had been when they first met, and he recalled that he had fallen in love with her in a coffee bar, when she was still an awkward hybrid of
outré
student and shy schoolgirl. They had grown up together, from then. In two, perhaps three years? It seemed a short time to have accomplished so much, looking back at it with the speed of years’ passing now. But it had felt then as if they had for ever ahead of them. The memories went on, parading past him, while he stared unseeingly at his beer.

Was this what
for ever
added up to, then?

Everything that they had done together seemed much clearer, and precious, now. Because he was afraid that the end of it was coming?

He had never been afraid before, because he had been so sure of her. Even when there was Matthew, he had been sure.

Martin ducked his head over his unwanted beer, confronted by the spectre of arrogance.

Carefully, now, he made himself remember.

Matthew had materialized in the hot weeks of the summer before they were married. Martin had never even seen him, but Annie’s friend Louise, and other friends, had talked about him. Martin remembered that he had understood what was happening, but he had simply waited for her.

He had even asked her,
Do I need to worry about it?
And she had answered,
No
.

His certainty that she would come back seemed unbelievable now. Had he been so convinced that he was right about everything else, in those days?

He might have lost her, then.

Instead of losing her now.

For all the noise and distraction of the pub, Martin felt that he was hearing and seeing with sudden, perfect clarity.

Neither of them was fixed, nor defined as themselves at any point in time, not in that Soho coffee bar, nor on their wedding day, nor on the day of the bombing. They both went on changing, and they changed separately as well as together. They were not just the welded, coupled unit that he had silently asked her to confirm on the unhappy night of their dinner party. They were both of them at fault, perhaps, for forgetting that. They had seen each other fixed in a frame, as Martin-and-Annie, or as Benjy and Tom’s Mum and Dad, and when they slipped separately out of their fixed places, then they lost sight of one another.

How restless had Annie been, while he worked and concentrated on other things?

She was so good at giving all of them what they needed from her, he hadn’t troubled to look closely enough. It was only on Christmas Eve, when she had already gone, that he had really seen the neat evidence of her loving care. And then he had thought,
Why didn’t I see before?

Or had Annie herself stopped seeing things, too?

Perhaps, Martin thought.

And if they were both at fault in their carelessness of one another, he had been wrong all the last weeks to heap the blame for what was happening on to the bombing.

The bomb was a senseless, terrible catalyst, nothing more.

The juke-box in the corner of the bar sent waves of meaningless noise washing around him.

If it hadn’t been Steve, then, it might have been someone else. Sooner or later.

Through the noise, Martin made himself follow the painful threads of thought. Now that it had happened.
Think it
. Now that his wife had fallen in love with someone else, what could he do?

With the end of his need to blame the bomb, Martin’s anger and bitterness against Steve drifted away too. There was nothing to be gained from going to find him, confronting him, as he had still half-imagined that he would do. To say what? Martin thought, and half-smiled at the picture that it conjured up. To ask for Annie back?

Martin sat for a long time, without moving, and then he picked up the pint glass and drained it.

There was nothing he could do. Nothing except wait, and by waiting hope to show her that he loved her, and wanted her, and needed her.

He stood up at last, stiff and with the bar music beating in his head. It was time to go home.

He drove back the familiar way, and parked the car outside the front gate. The lights were on in the downstairs rooms, and the dim glow of Benjy’s bedroom nightlight glowed against the drawn blind in the top window. The house looked just as it always did, and the sight made him long even more sharply for the old, ordinary times. If they came back again, he vowed to himself, he would keep them, rubbed bright, and never give them a chance to slip away.

He went up the path, and let himself in through the front door. Annie was sitting in the circle of light at one end of the old chesterfield. He saw the colour of her hair and the line of her cheek, and the mending lying in her lap.