Strangers (5 page)

‘I don’t want to die,’ she said.

Only a few days ago, she had sat over dinner with Martin and talked about what she hoped to do when Benjy went to full-day nursery. She would start work again, perhaps, just for a few hours a week. She had had the sense of wider avenues opening, giving new perspectives that would still let her stay in the places she loved. She had sensed her own good fortune like a jewel hanging round her neck.

‘I can’t bear to leave it.’

The man’s hand holding hers was gentle.

‘You aren’t going to die.’

Out in the daylight it had stopped snowing, and it was growing steadily colder. The policemen manning the cordons moved to and fro across the strip of roadway to keep their feet warm, and their breath hung in front of them in grey clouds. The television crews, with the sightseers beyond them at a distance, huddled in their overcoats and waited as the minutes passed.

The slow, painstaking process of lifting the girders and rubble out of the hole had begun an hour ago. Now there was a flurry of movement amongst the firemen working under the tilted, ragged floors of the store. A broken beam was winched up and swung away to the side and one of the waiting ambulances started up and inched forward. A stretcher was carried across to where the firemen and doctors crouched in a circle, looking down. Then one of the doctors stood up and stepped backwards, over the heaps of wreckage. The firemen worked on until the watchers saw a flutter of something pale as another chunk of masonry was pulled away. A moment later a woman was lifted out of the hole. They laid her on the stretcher, and covered her face with a blanket.

The only sound was the crowd’s sigh, as if it came from a single throat.

The cameramen swung their long black lenses with the stretcher as it was carried, swaying and bumping, over to the ambulance. It was lifted inside and the heavy doors slammed. A moment later the ambulance nosed slowly away down the street.

‘Fight for it, if you want it so much.’

Annie only half heard him. The sense of what she would lose had taken such a powerful hold of her. Her life seemed her own creation, not passionate or original, but warm, and sweet, and infinitely valuable. The threatening darkness, looming and shivering over her head, was unbearable. She wanted to move, throwing her limbs convulsively to fight her way out of it, and yet she couldn’t. Her body hurt, and where it didn’t hurt it didn’t seem to exist any longer. Claustrophobia took hold of her and she felt a scream of terror rising again in her throat.

Annie opened her mouth and the scream came, and she heard the invisible mass around her swallow it up like a whisper.

‘Don’t,’ Steve said harshly. ‘Save that for when they might be able to hear us.’

Could they hear? Where were they? He felt the darkness as a weight now, too, heavy all around them. He strained his ears for a sound of the rescue that his reason told him must be under way, but he could hear nothing except the multiplying echoes of Annie’s scream.

‘Wait,’ he whispered. He let go of her hand and moved his arm across his chest to feel for the watch. His fingers felt numb, but he stroked the face of it, trying to make sense of the tiny hands. He thought it might be half past eleven, and so a whole hour had passed, but then he realized that the hands might just be in the same position as last time. Perhaps he had misread them then, and the watch was broken after all. The dislocation frightened him. He had relied on being able to monitor the time passing, thinking that he could gauge how their strength was holding out. Then he felt the second hand brush against his fingertip again. He slipped the watch back into its place, reassured, and reached out for Annie’s hand again.

‘It’s half past eleven. A whole hour has gone. We’re doing all right.’

The relief in his voice and the touch of his hand pushed Annie’s fear back again.

Fight
, he had said,
if you want it so much
. To live. She moved her head and felt the door tilted against her cheek.

‘You want to fight,’ she said. ‘It’s precious for you, too, isn’t it?’

Precious?

Steve tasted the word, trying it out against his memories of the last months. He began to understand it for Annie, listening to her talk about her children. The need to see them growing up, the fierce determination to protect them that he had glimpsed fleetingly in other women, that was part of her. He had nothing like that. Steve thought often, without much surprise or regret, that he was living at one step removed from life.

How long then, since the sharp edge of pleasure had gone? Not just pleasure, but anticipation, need, fear, even?

He thought backwards, a long tunnel of days and nights.

Before Vicky. He had wanted Vicky, but he had also been quite sure of getting her.

He had met her at a party, a party for a book that Cass had done some modelling for. Vicky worked for the publishing company. She looked frumpy, in a corduroy skirt and a thick, knitted jersey. They had been introduced and Steve had asked some polite questions and then looked past her, to see where Cass had gone. But Vicky had moved to stand squarely in front of him again. Then he had noticed that she had unusual dark eyes in a clever, challenging face, and that something was amusing her. He suddenly realized that he wanted to find out what it was, and at the same moment Vicky had shifted her weight, resting it on one leg with the other knee bent. She had tilted her head to one side, still looking at him, and he had imagined the line of her body under the thick clothes. They had talked for a moment or two more and then Vicky had licked the corner of her mouth, quickly, like a cat. She had put her hand up to cover it, like a schoolgirl trying out a kiss in the mirror. They had both laughed, then.

Steve had taken her to bed two days later. Her inventiveness, her energy and her exotic tastes had surprised him.

‘Did you learn
that
at LMH?’ he had asked.

‘Some of it,’ she grinned at him.

Yet even then he had been moving with the sense of inevitability, and their affair had unfolded in front of him as though he were watching it on screen.

Was he so used to the distance, then, that he couldn’t remember when it had opened up? Steve lay still, feeling the cramp in his outstretched arm and listening to the painful, irregular indrawn breaths of the girl beside him. The girl was real, he felt her as close as if he were holding her in his arms. He was waiting for each of her breaths, willing her to draw the next, and the next. The blackness was real, and so was the dust that coated his mouth and stung in his eyes, and the pain was real too.

Steve felt a sudden frightening desire to laugh at the fact that it should take
this
to stir him. He understood the fragility of his life and the possibility of survival, the need for it, reared in front of him like a wall. He was afraid, as frightened as Annie was, but he forced himself to shake off the clutch of it with a determination that was almost pleasurable.

Precious, she had said. No, his life wasn’t that. It was hollow and mechanical and faintly shameful. The need to laugh faded, and Steve saw as clearly as if a bright light had been turned on overhead that what was precious was the need to fight, and he had lost that long ago.

‘I always wanted to be rich,’ he said.

‘And are you?’

He thought for a moment. ‘It’s a long time since I’ve had to live without something I wanted because I didn’t have the money to buy it.’ There was a pause before he added, ‘The natural result is that you find yourself not wanting anything anyway. I’ve got a handsome, rather unlived-in flat and several quite good modern paintings. I’ve got a little house in the hills behind Draguignan that I hardly ever go to. I’ve got a BMW, more suits than I can get around to wearing, all sorts of
things
. What else is there?’

Annie listened, trying to picture what he looked like from the sound of his voice and the warmth of his hand. Something in what he said touched her. She knew that he had never said it before.

‘Is that what you wanted?’ she asked.

Steve didn’t answer. To have answered would have been to peer into an abyss, gaping darker than the real darkness where they lay. It was suddenly so very far from what he wanted that he had completely lost his bearings. Wasn’t there anything, then, waiting, if this weight was ever lifted off the two of them?

He lifted his head an inch or two, straining his neck muscles, as if the hopeless movement could push the wreckage and let the daylight come flooding down.

Was it still snowing? What were they doing up there, so long?

‘I want to stay alive, like you,’ he whispered. He did, and he wouldn’t let himself ask,
For what?

‘We will be saved,’ she whispered back to him. ‘I know we will.’

Steve wanted to reach out and take her in his arms. It was the first flicker of her own determination, not cajoled from her by his own will. He felt the warmth of gratitude and it was like weakness because his eyes suddenly filled with tears.

No. Don’t do that. It was important not to be weak. He must keep on holding her hand, listening to her breathing.

‘And you, Annie? Have you got what you want?’

She was vividly aware of the truth that he had offered her. She could feel the intimacy uncoiling between them, incongruous, yet as important as the need to contain the pain, as important as holding on to her wavering consciousness.

She would offer him the truth in return.

Very quietly, so that he had to strain to catch the words, she said, ‘I chose the easy option.’

Two

Martin waited until the kettle boiled and the automatic switch clicked back into the off position. He took the coffee jar out of the cupboard and spooned the granules into a flowered mug, then poured the water in so that the liquid frothed up in black bubbles. He opened the door of the refrigerator and peered in, frowning when he saw that there was no milk. Then it occurred to him that the milkman must have been and gone by now. He went up the steps from the kitchen into the hall and pulled the door open over the scatter of minicab cards and free newsheets that had been pushed in through the letterbox. His frown vanished when he saw that there were four pints of milk beside the doormat in the porch. He was whistling as he scooped them up and carried them back into the kitchen. He left three bottles on the worktop and splashed milk from the fourth into his coffee mug. Then, with his thumb hooked over the end of the spoon still standing in it, he carried his coffee through into the sitting room where the boys were sitting side by side on the rug. They were watching Saturday morning television.

As he came in Thomas jumped up and jabbed the buttons.

‘Nothing on,’ he complained.

Martin saw the news picture of the store with the jagged cleft struck through the middle of it, and he caught the reporter’s words.

‘… this morning just after nine thirty. One body has already been recovered from the wreckage, and the search continues. Police have not yet confirmed …’

The image vanished as Thomas impatiently prodded again. It was replaced by the test card of another channel, then by a commercial for breakfast cereal.

‘I like this one,’ Benjy shouted.

Martin stood for a frozen second, seeing his sons’ heads bobbing up and down, hiding the little square of coloured screen. Then he lunged forward and the hot coffee splashed over his fingers. He stepped between the boys and crouched down in front of the set, fumbling for the channel button.

He heard Thomas protest, ‘Oh,
Dad
…’ and then the picture flickered and steadied itself again. He saw a reporter standing in a windswept street with a hand microphone held close to his mouth. Behind him Martin could see a corner of the store, its bulk oddly foreshortened. He knew exactly where it was without having to listen to the report. Annie had lived in a poky little flat in one of the little streets behind it in the days before they were married. They had walked past the high façade a hundred times on their way to a pub that they liked, just beyond the tube station. The tube was just opposite the store, away to the news reporter’s right.

‘No survivors have been found as yet, but one body was lifted out a few moments ago …’

What was he saying?

Martin knelt down, pressing closer to the screen as if he could draw a contradiction of the implacable picture from it. He saw the reporter’s cold-pinched face dissolve into its component blips of colour, but the hideously altered shape of the big store never wavered.

‘Hush, Tom,’ he said.

What had Annie told him? He struggled to recall the casual words, seeing her run upstairs towards him as he stood with Benjy in his arms. She hadn’t said exactly where she was going. But it was a direct journey from here by tube. And Annie often shopped there. It was almost ‘her’ store, from the days when she had lived so close to it. As he watched the camera panned away from the newsman to a limited panorama of ambulances and fire engines. There were firemen working in yellow helmets, and policemen hemming them in.

Martin was cold, trembling with it, and the sick certainty that Annie was there. What had the man said?

One body was lifted out a few moments ago
…

Martin stood up, almost stumbling, and the coffee splashed again. He put it down on top of the set and in the same moment the report ended. The picture changed to a solemn-faced studio continuity announcer.

‘We will be bringing you more news of that explosion in London’s West End as soon as it reaches us. And now …’

Martin turned away, moving so stiffly that Thomas looked up at him.

‘What’s the matter, Dad?’

He saw Annie’s features printed on the boy’s face and irrational fear gripped him in the stomach.

‘
Dad?
’

‘I … I’m going out to look for Mummy. I’ll call Audrey and ask her to come and stay with you for a while.’

Even as he said it he knew that he should stay where he was and wait, but he couldn’t suppress his primitive urge to rush to the store and pull at the fallen bricks with his bare hands. He snatched up the telephone and dialled the number. It seemed to take an eternity to explain to Audrey. He stammered over the neutral phrases that wouldn’t frighten the boys yet would bring her, quickly. They stood in front of him, reflecting his anxiety back at him, magnified by their bewilderment.