Strangers (40 page)

Two or three times, despising herself for her capitulation, she picked up the telephone and dialled his number. The first time, when Martin was away for a two-day business trip, she sat at her kitchen table for an hour, looking at the telephone, before she went to it. She picked out the number with a clumsy finger and listened to the ringing in her ear. There were only two rings, not long enough for him to have reached the phone … there was a click, and Annie heard his voice, and there was a painful beat of pleasure before she realized that it was only a recorded message. He repeated the number, and said his name. He sounded so close, and yet she couldn’t reach him.

With her heart thumping guiltily, Annie listened to the conversational message.
I’m sorry, I can’t take your call. If you’ll leave your name and number
. After the tone, she hung up. She went back to her place and sat down, her hands loose in her lap, staring into nothing.

A week went by, and she called again. The message was the same, and it gave her the same eerie feeling of closeness.

I must be mad
, she thought.
What comfort is there in listening to his recorded voice?
But there was a kind of comfort, and she rang again, a third time, as guilty and as furtive as an addict.

April went, and May, and June came. The early roses came into bud and then flowered. Tibby was still alive, but she couldn’t see them.

She had been taken into the hospice again, and Annie knew that she wouldn’t be coming home. But for her mother’s sake she still went regularly to the old house, to dust the polished furniture and fill the vases and wind up the mantelpiece clocks. Annie didn’t think that her father would do it. He had retreated from the house, apparently in relief. He lived in the kitchen, strewing it with spent matches from his pipe. It was Annie who cut the roses and brought them in to arrange in Tibby’s silver bowls. She listened to the echo of her own footsteps on the parquet, and remembered the house as it had been when she was a child. She had had the same memories after the bomb. Herself, in a green dress with white ribbons in her hair, running to Tibby. She had hurt herself, and her mother had taken her out of the sun and into the shadowy living room to comfort her.

As she stood in the squares of light that the sun spilt on the wooden floor Annie had a renewed sense of time, ribbons of continuity linking Tibby and her husband, Martin and herself, Annie’s children, children’s children. In the silent house, with the memories of her own childhood close to her, it was the thought of the boys that comforted her. She could hear them calling, as she had heard them in the stifling darkness of the bomb wreckage.

Mum, look at me
.

Running in the garden, at home. As she had run in this garden, calling out to Tibby.

Love for all of them warmed her, family love, and all the complicated knots of anxiety, and pride, and relief that they were somehow still together, caught at her and held her. With the sound of their voices in her head Annie remembered the happiness of chains of ordinary days that she had shared with her sons, all the way to yesterday, the last link in the chain.

She had taken them to Hampstead Heath, to the little travelling funfair that arrived two or three times a year and spread its gaudy, temporary camp over a bare patch of hill. For years they had been visiting it whenever it appeared, usually with Martin too, but yesterday he had claimed some drawings to finish and so Annie had driven the boys over on her own. She had felt the dead weight of loneliness as she negotiated the traffic, but when they had left the car behind and the boys were scrambling ahead of her Annie’s spirits lifted like the strings of flags flying from the sideshow tents. They loved the fair, all of them.

Annie caught up with the boys who were poised breathlessly at the outer ring of caravans and generators and pulsing machines.

‘What can we go on, Mum?’

She took one hand in each of hers and swung them round.

‘Everything.’

They plunged into the crowds and noise together. The tinny music and the barkers’ shouts, the smell of candyfloss and frying onions and the whirl of colours swallowed the three of them effortlessly. Within the circle of the fair Annie felt suddenly no older than Thomas and Ben. The fierce pleasure of childhood excitement touched her, and it was intensified by the added, subtle pleasure of her adult capacity to indulge her children, and share their indulgence.

With Tom pulling ahead they stumbled to the giant Waltzers at the centre of the fairground. The rumble of cars spinning on the wooden track drowned out even the blaring music. The riders screamed joyfully from their seats as they were swept past.

Annie clutched at responsibility for long enough to shout to Tom, ‘Benjy’s not old enough for this!’

Tom turned for a second, his hands on his hips, the sudden, living replica of his father. ‘He
is
. We can look after him. One on each side.’

‘I am old enough,’ said Benjy stoutly.

‘All right, then.’ They beamed at one another, colluding.

The huge machine was winding down and the riders’ faces, laughing, sprang out of the blur as the cars swung slower up and down the undulating slopes. As soon as an empty car rolled past, Thomas was off up the steps. He squirmed inside it and fended off the crowds who swarmed around it.

‘No, this is ours. Come on, Mum, Benjy.’ They ran up the steep steps after him, hand in hand, and jumped into the padded tub. Annie wedged Benjy tightly between Tom and herself and drew down the chrome hoop for them to hold on to.

‘Here we go,’ Tom yelled, leaning with the car as it began to turn to spin it faster.

Faster, and then faster again, and then to the point where centrifugal force pressed them helplessly against the chair back and tore the shouts from their throats. Annie drew her arm tighter around them, feeling their thin shoulders rigid with delighted fear. Benjy’s face was three amazed circles, and Tom’s smile was pinned right across his face. They spun faster and the world blurred into a solid wall, and the boy who took their money came balancing along the spinning edge and whirled their car faster on its axis, grinning at Annie and then pursing his lips to whistle as the wind blew her skirt up over her thighs.

‘
Oh boy
.’ Thomas was shouting with joy and Benjy managed a faint, tiny echo.

Hold on to them
, Annie thought.
Hold on. Forever
.

And then they were slowing down again, gasping and laughing, thrilled with their daring as the world resolved itself again into its separate parts.

‘Wasn’t it great?’ Thomas demanded and Benjy screamed, ‘Wasn’t I brave?’

‘Oh, it was,’ Annie said weakly. ‘And you were, both of you. How could I have gone on that without you?’

They struggled off with rubber legs, the ground’s immobility strange under their feet.

‘What now?’ asked Thomas.

Seeing his face, Annie wanted to take hold of his delight and keep it, so that it could never fade. So that nothing would fade ever again. But she couldn’t do any more than put her hand on his shoulder, just for a moment, to link herself to him.

‘Something gentle,’ she pleaded.

‘I know the one you like,’ he said triumphantly. He took her hand now, and stretched out the other to Ben. ‘Come on. Don’t anyone get lost.’

He threaded them through the crowds to the huge mirrored roundabout whose steam organ ground out a pleasing, wheezy waltz. Annie looked up at it. The ornate lettering around the canopy spelled out, as it slowly revolved,
The Prancers. H.W. Peacock’s Pride
.

‘The hobby horses,’ she murmured. ‘I do like the hobby horses best.’

‘They’re pretty slow,’ sniffed Thomas. But he enjoyed the ride, whooping from his horse’s slippery back and hanging on to the gilded barley-sugar pole, as much as Annie and Ben did.

After the hobby horses they rode under the musty green hood of the Caterpillar, and on the Dodgems with their blue sparks and thundering crashes, and on the Octopus, and all the others even down to the toddlers’ roundabouts at the outer edges of the magic circle where Benjy swooped on the fire engine and rang the bell furiously as he trundled around, while Thomas squeezed himself into a racing car or helicopter and scowled at Annie every time he came past.

When they had ridden every roundabout they plunged into the sideshows, from the bleeping electronic games that all three of them adored, to the tattered old stalls where Annie and Tom vied with each other to throw darts at wobbly boards or shoot the pingpong balls off nodding ducks. Benjy was furiously partisan, pulling at Annie’s arm and shouting, ‘Come on, Mummy. Why don’t you win?’

Annie laughed and threw down her twisted rifle.

‘It’s no good, Ben. I’m not nearly as good as Thomas is.’

‘Here you are, baby,’ Tom snorted, thrusting the orange fur teddy bear that he had won at Benjy. ‘Is this what you wanted?’

‘I just wanted Mum to win,’ Benjy retorted. ‘I don’t want her to be sad.’

‘I won’t be sad,’ she promised him. The outside reached in, just for a moment, between the caravans and flags. ‘I won’t be sad. Let’s go and see the funny mirrors.’

They lined up in the narrow booth and paraded to and fro in front of the distorting mirrors. The images of the three of them leapt back and forth too, telescoping from spindly giants to squat barrels with grinning turnip faces.

The boys roared and gurgled with laugher, clutching at one another for support. ‘Look at Mum! Look at her legs!’

‘And her teeth. Like an old horse’s.’

Annie laughed much more at their abandoned enjoyment than at the gaping figures. Adults never laugh like this, like children do, she thought. Not giving themselves up to it.

In the end she had to pull them away from the mirrors to make room for the press of people coming in behind them. She hauled them out into the sunshine, blinking and still snorting with laughter.

‘Are you hungry?’

‘I’m
so
hungry.’

‘And me.’

They picnicked on hot dogs oozing with fried onions and ketchup, and Annie bought them huge puffballs of candyfloss that collapsed in sticky pink ridges over their beaming faces.

‘You’re letting us have all the bad things, Ma.’

‘Just for today,’ she said severely.

When they had finished the repellent meal they turned to her again.

‘Is it time for the Big Wheel now?’

By unspoken agreement, they had saved it until last. They crossed the trampled grass now and joined the queue in its spidery shadow. Benjy tilted his head backwards to peer up at the height of it.

‘I was too little last time.’

Annie crouched beside him, straightening his jacket, an excuse to hold on to him.

‘You’re big enough now. After the Waltzers you’re big enough for anything.’

They grew so quickly. They were here and now, together. Wasn’t that enough? As they inched forward in the queue the cold fingers from outside reached in to clutch at Annie. She tried to shake them off, and hold on to the day’s hermetic happiness.

It was enough, because it would have to be.

At last their turn came. The attendant let them in through the little metal gate and they climbed into the little swinging car, the boys on either side of Annie. The safety bar was latched into place and the wheel turned, sweeping them upwards and backwards. As they soared up they felt the wind in their faces, scented with grass and woodsmoke up here, above the packed crowds and the hot-dog stalls. When they reached the highest point the wheel stopped turning and they hung in the stillness, rocking in windy, empty space. Ben gave a little squeak of fear and burrowed against her, and Annie held her arm around him, hiding his eyes with her hand. But Tom leaned forward, his face turning sombre.

Beneath them spread all the tumult of the fairground, suddenly dwarfed. Beyond was the undulating green of treetops, rolling downhill, and the houses edging the heath, a jumble of slate and stone. London stretched out beyond that, pale blue and grey and ochre.

‘It’s beautiful,’ Tom said.

Annie felt tears in her eyes, and ducked her head. She put her arm round him and drew him close to her.

‘It is,’ she whispered. ‘It’s very beautiful.’

They sat silent in the rocking chair, and looked at it. In that moment of stillness Annie felt that she loved her children more than she had ever done before.

And then the wheel jerked and began to turn again, sweeping them down towards the ground.

After the ride they stood in the shadow of the wheel again.

‘What shall we do now?’

Annie took out her purse. She opened it and showed them the recesses. ‘Look. We’ve spent all the money. I’ve got just enough to buy you a balloon each to take home.’

They peered into the purse, needing to be convinced. Then they sighed with reluctant satisfaction. They agreed with the logic of staying until every penny was spent, and then of having to go home. On the way out of the noisy, joyful circle they chose a pair of red and silver helium balloons, decorated with Superman for Tom and Spiderman for Benjy. And then with the balloons tugging and twisting above them they plodded back down the hill to the car.

When they were inside it, insulated from the people streaming by, Tom turned to Annie.

‘That was so good,’ he said simply. ‘I can’t think of anyone else’s Mum who would have gone on everything, like you. Well, I suppose they might have done. But they wouldn’t have
enjoyed
it, like you did.’

‘I did enjoy it,’ Annie said. ‘Thank you.’

Benjy scrambled forward and laid his face briefly against her neck, stickily, his own form of thanks.

Then Annie started the car up and turned towards home. Martin would be waiting, and the ache of Steve’s absence would be waiting for her too.

It was not many days after the funfair that Tibby’s doctor took Annie and her father aside. ‘If you were going to ask her son to come home and see her,’ he said, ‘I think it should be done quite soon.’

Annie’s brother was working as an engineer in the Middle East. Annie and Jim put through the call at once, as they had agreed with Phillip that they would.