Strangers (8 page)

He was trying to make her laugh because he didn’t want her to guess the magnitude of what he was really offering. He was holding out everything he valued, his freedom and his independence, for her to take and dispose of. Annie felt the tears like needles behind her eyes.

‘I don’t want you to do anything for my sake. I don’t want to see you go off every morning in a suit. Thank you for offering to do it, but I’m not worth it.’

She hadn’t meant to let him see her crying, but the tears came anyway. Matthew made a little, bitter noise.

‘I can’t win, can I? You won’t marry me when I have no prospects. You won’t marry me when I do, because Matthew with prospects isn’t Matthew.’

A space had opened between them, mocking their physical closeness, and Annie knew that they would never bridge it again.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said hopelessly. She felt smaller, and more selfish and more ashamed, than she had ever done in her life.

‘Tell me one thing,’ he said. ‘Tell me that it isn’t just because you haven’t the guts to cancel your wedding and send back the horrible presents and shock all your mother’s friends.’

Annie lifted her chin to look straight at him. ‘If I was courageous enough to marry you, I would be courageous enough to do all that.’

Matthew let go of her hand. He slid away from her across the bed and lay looking through the window into the trees in the square.

‘All the time,’ he said softly, almost to himself, ‘all the time until tonight I was sure that I could win.’

There was nothing else to say. Heavy with the knowledge that she had disappointed him Annie slid out of bed and put her clothes on. When she was dressed she went to the bedroom door and stood for a moment looking at him, but Matthew never turned his gaze from the trees outside the window. She closed the bedroom door and went downstairs, and out into the square where the day’s heat still hung lifelessly over the paving stones.

She never saw Matthew again.

She went home to her flat, and found Martin sitting at the kitchen table waiting for her.

‘I’m back,’ she said simply. Her face still felt stiff with dried tears.

Martin stood up and came across the room to her, then put his arms around her and held her against him.

‘I’m glad, Annie.’

They were married a week later on a brilliantly bright July day. Their approving families were there, and the dozens of friends they had accumulated over the years of knowing one another, and they had walked out under the rainbow hail of confetti to smile at the photographer who was waiting to capture their memories for them. The photograph stood in a silver frame on the bow-fronted mahogany chest in their bedroom. Eleven years later, when she picked the photograph up to dust it and glanced down into her own face, Annie had forgotten how painful that smile had been.

‘I had forgotten,’ she said. ‘But it’s so vivid now. I can see his face so clearly.’

The boat was rocking gently on the dark water, and in that movement Steve’s hand had become Matthew’s, holding hers, pulling her back. His voice was different but she knew his face, and the way he moved, and she could remember every hour that they had spent together as if she was reliving them.

For an instant she was suffused with happiness.
It isn’t too late
, she thought.
Why was I so sure that it was?

She smiled, and then felt the stinging pain at the corner of her mouth where the blood had dried.

Not Matthew’s hand. This man was Steve, a stranger, and now more important to her than anyone. She felt another pain, not physical now but as quick and sharp as a razor slash. It was the pain of longing and regret.

‘I wish I could reach you,’ she said. ‘I wish we could hold on to each other.’

Tears began to run out of the corners of her eyes and she felt them running backwards into her knotted hair.

‘We are holding each other,’ Steve said. ‘Here.’

The pressure of his hand came again, but Annie ached to turn and find the warmth of him, pressing her face against his human shelter. She was afraid that the weeping would take possession of her. It pulled at her face with its fingers, distorting her mouth into a gaping square and the blood began to run again from the corner of it.

‘It’s too late,’ she cried out, ‘too late for everything.’

This was the end, here in their tomb of wreckage. The tidy plait of her life stretched behind her, the stridently glittering threads of the past softened by time into muted harmonies of colour. Martin and she had woven it together. She thought of her husband and of Thomas and Benjamin left to look at the brutally severed plait, the raw ends uselessly fraying. Sobs pulled at her shoulders, and her hair tore at her scalp.

‘Don’t cry,’ Steve said. ‘Please, Annie, darling, don’t cry. It isn’t too late.’ If they only could hold each other, he thought, they could draw the shared warmth around them like armour. He tried to move again, and knew that he couldn’t pull his crushed leg with him.

‘My mother’s ill,’ Annie said abruptly. ‘She’s got cancer, they’ve just told her. It must be just the same.’

Steve could follow her thoughts, unconfined, flickering to and fro. The extra dimension of understanding was eerie but he took it gratefully. ‘No,’ he contradicted her. ‘Not the same sense of loss. No waste. Your mother has seen you grow up, marry. Seen her grandchildren. Illness isn’t the same as … violence.’

He wouldn’t say
violent death
, but he sensed Annie’s telepathic hearing as clear as his own.

‘Perhaps … perhaps everyone’s death is violent, when it comes.’

They were silent then, but they were unified by fear and they could hear one another’s thoughts, whispered in childlike voices quite unlike their own.

‘If they come for us in time,’ Annie said, ‘and there is any life left for us that isn’t just lying here, I won’t let any more of the days go. I’ll count each one. I’ll make it live. I’ve shrugged so many days off without a single memory. Dull days. Resigned days. Just one of them would be so precious now. Do you understand, Steve?’

‘Oh yes,’ he answered. ‘I understand. Annie, when we’re free we can do whatever we like.’

Steve tried to think about how it would be, and nothing would come except confused images of Vicky, and of unimportant restaurants where he had sat over lunches, and of preview theatres where he waited in the dark for clients to watch their fifteen-or thirty-second loop of commercial over and over again. ‘Run it through a couple more times, David, will you?’ His own voice. ‘Did you learn all that at LMH?’ The self he had been. Work and play, alternating, undifferentiated, spooling backwards. And now the tape snapped, and the film he had only been half-watching might never start up again.

Steve opened his eyes on the real darkness. He seemed to have been groping backwards for hours, failing to find an image that he could hold on to amongst so many that flickered and vanished.

‘Annie?’ he called out, seized with sudden panic. ‘Are you still there?’

‘Yes.’

She sounded drowsy, too far away from him.

‘
Annie?
’

He could hear the effort, but she responded at last. ‘Yes. I’m still here.’

‘Talk to me again. About your mother. Anything, just go on talking.’

‘I …’ she sighed, a faint expiry of breath and he knew that he was only imagining the brush of it on his cheek. ‘I can’t talk any more. You talk, Steve. I like to hear your voice.’

When was the last time? That was what he wanted to catch hold of before it was too late, the last time he had felt the rawness of wanting something very much. The last time he had wanted something in the way that he wanted to live now, because he wouldn’t be defeated by a maniac’s bomb. Was that the key to it?
Because he wouldn’t be defeated
…

Steve felt his head thickening, the thoughts and memories beginning to short-circuit. He forced his eyes open wide, willing himself to hold on to consciousness, and he began to talk.

‘A long time ago. So long I’d forgotten how important it was. I wanted to get away, that was it. My Nan’s flat, Bow High Street, three floors up. From the moment I went to live there, I wanted to get away.’

It had taken long enough, but he’d made it in the end. When the day came he went into the little room that led off Nan’s kitchen and stuffed jerseys and shirts into his blue duffel bag. Nan was sitting in the kitchen watching the television. He could see her bulk past the half-open door, and the tablecloth half-folded back over the Formica-topped table, and the brown teapot and milk bottle, and her cup and saucer waiting to be refilled with thick brown tea.

‘Off again, are you?’ she shouted over the din of the television.

There had been trial getaways before this. Plenty of Saturday-night stopovers in overcrowded flats when those who were left behind after the part petered out had just fallen asleep wherever they fell down. There had even been a week, not long ago, when he had stayed with a girl up near Victoria Park. That had been too good to last, of course. She’d seen through his assumed adult suavity all too quickly.

‘Sixteen? Is that how bloody old you are?
Sixteen?
Go on, get back to your mother before they come and lock me up for corrupting infants.’

Nan had welcomed him back, and the sharpness of her tongue didn’t disguise her relief. ‘Where the hell d’you think you’ve been? Not a word from you for a week. Didn’t you know I’d be worried stiff? You’ll end up like your Dad, Stevie, after all I’ve done.’

He put his arms around her. She was fat, but she was also frail and she could only move stiffly across the poky kitchen.

‘I will
not
end up like my Dad. You know that.’

Nan had shifted her dental plate with the tip of her tongue and said acidly, ‘Perhaps not. But there’s plenty of other ways of going to the bad. I daresay you’ll manage to find one that suits you.’

There had been calm after that for several months.

Now, as he closed the empty drawers in his bedroom one by one, he tried calling out, ‘Nan? Nan, I’m going to live up West …’

She couldn’t hear him, of course. The television obliterated everything. So he had finished his methodical packing, even taking down his childhood posters of West Ham United and Buddy Holly and folding them up. Then he went into the kitchen and put his assortment of bags down on the cracked lino floor. He crossed to the vast television set and turned the volume knob, and silence descended.

‘Eh? I was watching that, Stevie. Don’t play about, there’s a good boy.’

‘Nan, I want to talk to you. I’m going to live up West. I’ve got a room and everything. I’ll be all right.’

He had been so callous in those days. Nan had just sat and stared at him, with her big pale fingers twisting in her lap.

‘Eh? Live up there? What for? You live here, love. Ever since you were that high.’

She held her palm out, a couple of feet off the lino, and Steve thought,
Yes, I do remember. And ever since I’ve wanted to get out
. ‘I can’t live here for ever, Nan. I want to get on. I’ll come and see you weekends, I promise.’

Her face went sullen then. ‘After all I’ve done,’ she murmured.

She had done everything, of course. Mothered him and fended for him, and bought his food and clothes for ten years. He couldn’t pay her back for her devotion, he knew that with chilly sixteen-year-old detachment.

‘I’ll come and see you often,’ he repeated. ‘And as soon as I’ve made it I’ll buy you a better place, up near me or here, whichever you like.’

‘Make it?’ she snapped at him. ‘How are you going to do that? What about school? You could go to college. Mr Grover told me himself.’

Patiently he had tried to explain it to her. ‘I don’t need to go to college. It’s a waste of time, all that. I’ve got a job, Nan. I’m not going back to school.’

She was too angry to listen to him. So he had hugged her unyielding bulk, picked up his belongings, and marched out.

All he felt was relief as he left the Peabody Buildings. He bumped past each pair of heavily-curled brown-painted balcony railings, down the tight spiral of stone steps to the road. He walked briskly up the street to the bus stop and then stood peering eastwards into the traffic for the first sight of the bus that would take him up West for good.

The job was as a messenger for an advertising agency, and his home was a second-floor bedsitter with a restricted view straight down into the Earl’s Court Road. As soon as he arrived, Steve knew that he would never look back. After eighteen months as the Thompson, Wright, Rivington messenger boy he was offered the humblest of jobs in the media buying department. That job led to another and then another, and then to the huge leap upstairs to the circus of the creative floor. From Thompson, Wright, Rivington he was headhunted by another agency, and he began to enjoy money for the first time in his life.

Then, Steve remembered, I wanted everything. I was so busy making sure I got it that I never thought about anything else.

There were plenty of other people like him, and the time was ripe for all of them. His agency career began with the first shy appearances of pink shirts at client meetings, and it blossomed all through the sixties and into the seventies between lunches at the Terrazza and afternoons at the Colony Club, punctuated by parties swaying with girls in miniskirts and location shoots in exotic places and creative crises when somebody, usually Steve himself, managed to come up with a headline in the nick of time. Perhaps it hadn’t really been like that at all. It felt too far back to remember. But it had seemed easy and so congenial that for a long, long time he had gobbled up everything that came his way.

Some time during those years, Nan had died. Steve had been in Cannes at the time of the funeral, doing business, and he couldn’t fly back home for it. But he had paid for everything to be done properly. And he had sent a wreath, which was more than Nan’s only daughter, Steve’s mother, had bothered to do. If she even knew that her mother was dead. Steve himself had hardly seen her since she had taken him, at the age of six, to live with his grandmother.