Strangers (21 page)

‘There’s Mummy. There she is.’

Annie’s happiness swelled up again. She held out her free arm.

Tom came first. He ran to her and then stopped just short of the bed.

‘Are you all right?’ he asked, looking at her face.

‘Yes, Tommy, I’m fine.’ The sound of her voice reassured him. He put his arms around her and she hugged him, rubbing her cheek against his hair. She kissed the top of his head, smiling, with the heat of tears in her eyes.

‘I’m so glad you’re better,’ he murmured against her shoulder. ‘Christmas wasn’t nearly so much fun without you.’

‘I know,’ Annie whispered. ‘There’ll be next year, you know. Lots and lots of Christmases to come.’

Benjy was hanging back with his head against Martin’s leg. He was watching her, half-eager and yet reluctant. Annie had never been away from him for more than a day of his life before, and she knew that he was distrustful of her now.

‘Come on, Ben,’ she said gently.

Martin lifted him on to the bed beside her and Annie took his hand. She wanted to squeeze it in hers and then kiss his round face, pulling him to her so that no one could ever take him away. But she made herself suppress the intensity of feeling in case it frightened him. She smiled and hugged him, and said cheerfully, ‘I’m sorry you couldn’t come to see me in the other ward. The doctors were very strict. It’s much better in here, you can come whenever you like.’

‘I want you to come home,’ Benjy said. ‘Straight now.’

They laughed and the little boy squirmed closer to her, reaching out to touch the marks on her face.

‘Is that a bad hurt?’ he asked and Annie said, ‘Not very bad. Benjy, I’ll come home just as soon as I can. I promise I will.’

Over the boys’ heads she looked at Martin.

‘You look much better,’ he said.

‘I know.’

Annie wanted to share the glistening happiness she had felt. She wondered for a moment how to express it, and then gave up the attempt to make it sound rational. She let the words come spilling out. ‘When they brought me downstairs this morning it was like waking up after a long, disturbed night. Or like recovering my sight after being blind. I could see everything so clearly, colours and shapes and people’s faces.’

Steve’s face, she remembered.

‘I felt so happy. As though there were no flaws, no ugliness or misery anywhere. Just for a minute. I’ll never forget.’

She thought that Martin didn’t understand what she was saying. He was listening, but not responding, and so she couldn’t share the miraculous delight with him. If joy in the simple rhythm of the ordinary world didn’t touch him, then it must be her words that were inadequate. Regret and guilt touched her briefly with their light fingers.

‘Do you see?’ she asked humbly.

‘It’s natural relief,’ Martin answered. ‘After what’s happened. Don’t take it too fast, Annie, will you? Don’t expect too much of yourself too quickly.’

So cautious. Not to seize on the happiness? Annie thought. Why not?

‘I won’t ever forget,’ she murmured, almost to herself. Then she made her attention direct itself outwards, beyond her own selfish concerns.

‘How is it at home?’ she asked. She felt the house, too, so clearly.

‘Oh,’ Martin shrugged with a touch of weariness, ‘we’re managing. Aren’t we, Tom?’

He told her that his mother was helping wherever she could, and Audrey was coming in every day. But Annie knew that the responsibility for the boys’ daily life, always hers in the past, would weigh heavily on Martin. He had less patience, and in two days’ time he would have to go back to work after the Christmas break.

‘McDonald’s every day?’ she asked Tom, and he grinned at her.

‘Just about.’

Benjy was lying quietly with his head against her good shoulder, his thumb in his mouth. Annie was still thinking about the house. It was so much part of her, she realized, that it was like an extension of her body. She could see the tiles in the kitchen, two or three of them cracked, the patches on the walls, the ironing basket overflowing next to the washing machine.

‘Can we get someone in? A temporary mother’s help?’

‘Very expensive,’ Martin said stubbornly. ‘Don’t worry. We’ll muddle through.’

Annie felt the ties of responsibility beginning to pull at her. She felt both guilty and relieved that she couldn’t respond to them yet. The hospital felt, momentarily, like a haven of peace and she remembered the brilliance of light that had illuminated it. It was a sanctuary from the demands that had followed her since the boys were babies. She loved them, all of them, but she couldn’t respond to their needs. Not yet.

‘What about my Mum?’ she asked. ‘How is she?’

‘Um. About the same. She wants to come in and see you. Are you up to it?’

Annie picked at a thread in the bed sheet.

‘Tell her to come. Whenever she can.’

They talked, the four of them, for a few more minutes. The boys told her about Christmas, shouting one another down as they listed their presents.

‘How marvellous,’ Annie said. ‘I
wish
I’d been there.’

Family. Gathered around her, needing her to pick up the threads again. It was hard to be all things, she thought, even some of the time.

Her head and back ached overwhelmingly now.

Martin stood up at last. Reluctantly she let the boys scramble away from the warmth of her hug.

‘Come back soon. Tomorrow?’

Martin kissed her, and she put her hand up to touch his cheek. ‘Thank you for being here.’

‘Where else could I be?’ he whispered.

They held hands for a long minute. Then, remembering something, Martin reached for a bag he had put down at the foot of the bed.

‘I brought you these. Essentials of life.’

Annie peered into the plastic carrier. There was a jar of Marmite and another of anchovy paste, both of which she loved. There was a big box of Bendick’s Bittermints. They always gave one another the dark, bitter mints as a consolation or a gesture of reconciliation. There was the latest copy of her gardening magazine, and the plant encyclopaedia that Annie often sat poring over on winter evenings. Every winter she drew up lists of the plants she would stock her garden with; every spring she failed to put her elaborate plans into force.

The little things were an expression of how well they knew one another, of how their lives had woven a pattern together.

What else? Annie wondered. The question pricked her, disturbing.

‘I love you,’ she said deliberately.

‘I know. Me too.’ He was gathering up the boys’ anoraks, helping Benjy into his. ‘Come on, you kids.’

‘See you tomorrow. See you tomorrow,’ they called to her. Annie waved to them. Martin took Benjy’s hand and with Tom scuffling beside them they went out in the tide of departing visitors.

Annie lay stiffly against her pillows.

She was wondering why she hadn’t mentioned Steve. She should have told Martin that they had met and talked.

But then, answering herself, she thought,
No
. That was separate. The thing had happened to them together, and it didn’t touch on her family. It was important that it didn’t because of the fear, and also because of the other things that she had felt with Steve today.

When it was over, when the dreams had stopped and she was well again, he would be a stranger again too.

Five

Annie stood at the window of the day room. Three floors below her was a narrow side street lined with parked cars. On the corner was a sandwich bar, and she could see office workers from the surrounding buildings going in and out. They looked a very long way off, as if she were watching them in a film about another place.

The dislocation of time increased her sense of separation from the outside world. She knew that it was lunchtime for all the people passing to and fro in the street, but in the hospital wards their meal had been served and cleared away an hour and a half ago. The tea trolley with its rows of clinking white cups and saucers and big enamel teapot had just circulated. Annie didn’t want tea, but she had taken a cup anyway and carried it into the day room. The nurses encouraged her to walk around now. She moved very slowly, slightly hunched, but every painful step gave her pleasure too. A chain of them linked her to the happiness that she had felt on the day when they brought her down from the intensive care ward, and she knew that she would survive.

Annie put her cup down on the window-sill and looked around the room. There were plastic-covered armchairs and a pair of sofas, low metal-framed tables piled with magazines, and the cream-painted walls were haphazardly hung with institutional posters and prints. The curtains and the carpet and the air itself smelt of cigarette smoke. At the opposite end of the room from Annie’s window two old men were smoking determinedly and staring at the screen of the big television. Annie guessed that they were waiting for the day’s racing coverage to begin. A woman in a flowered housecoat was reading a magazine, and another in the chair beside her was knitting ferociously, a long knotted pink coil.

Yesterday, and the day before, Annie and Steve had met in here.

They hadn’t said anything yesterday, when they stood up to walk back to their wards, about meeting for the third time. They had looked at one another instead, and they had smiled, understanding each other perfectly, at the thought of making a date in such a place.

But before she had left her ward today Annie had looked in the mirror. She had looked at the hollows in her pale face, and she had even thought of lipstick. Then she had imagined how the colour would make a too-vivid gash in the whiteness. She had simply brushed her hair out so that it waved loosely and hid her cheeks, deciding that she must find a pair of scissors to trim the jagged ends.

She was standing with her hand on the window-sill, looking out into the street again, when Steve hobbled in. He saw her against the light, and the brightness of it shining through her cloud of hair gave it a reddish glow.

She turned towards him at once.

‘Did you get your five bob on, Steve, like I told you?’

It was one of the old men in front of the television, calling out to him.

Steve stopped, thinking,
She was waiting for me
.

‘Merrythought,’ the old man prompted. ‘Two-fifteen, Kempton.’

Steve shook his head. ‘No, Frank, I’m afraid I didn’t.’

The newsvendor clicked his tongue. ‘You’ll be sorry, son. It’s a cert.’ He swivelled back to face the screen.

Annie and Steve looked at each other and felt the laughter rising again. They had laughed yesterday too, like school-children, at almost nothing.

Trying to keep a straight face Annie asked, ‘How’s the leg today?’

‘Itching. Right down inside the plaster.’

The woman with the knitting peered up at him, then held out one of her steel needles. ‘Here. Poke this down inside and have a good scratch with it.’

Steve looked gravely at the implement.

‘I’d have to take my pyjamas down to get at the top of the plaster.’

The woman beamed at him. ‘Feel free, my duck.’

Her friend smothered her laughter behind her magazine.

‘The itching is probably safer,’ Steve murmured. He reached Annie’s side and turned a chair with its back to the room. They sat down in their corner, facing each other.

‘This place,’ he sighed.

‘You could afford to get yourself transferred to a smart private clinic,’ Annie reminded him sharply. ‘Peace and privacy. Menu food and real art on the walls.’

She wondered if Steve knew that she was voicing her fear that he might really go. He was sitting with his hands curled loosely over the arms of his chair, his crutches laid neatly at his feet.

‘No, I couldn’t,’ he said. ‘I want to stay here, because this is where you are.’

Annie felt the tightness of joy and panic knotted together under her ribs. It took her breath away, and the blood beat in her throat. She felt the closeness of his hand on the chair arm, and her own lying in her lap. She would have reached out, but panic suddenly overwhelmed her happiness. She lifted her arms and slotted her hands into the opposite sleeves of her robe, hugging them against her chest, shutting him out.

Steve saw the gesture and read its implication. She knew, and regretted it at once. She saw his handsome, haggard face and the grey showing in his dark hair. Steve was more than a man sitting in a hospital day room. He had been her friend and her comforter, her family and her lifeline all through the hours that still came back, renewing their terror, almost every time she slept. The memory and the fear were still potent, and Steve belonged with them, inextricably.

But he meant much more than that, because he was the man he was. Nothing to do with the bombing.

Annie was certain that it would be wrong to add fear of what Steve might demand from her to the pantheon of all the rest.

He was, and would be, her friend.

She slid her hands out of her sleeves again. She couldn’t reach out to him now, and she made an awkward little gesture instead.

‘I am here,’ she said simply. ‘Don’t go to a clinic.’

Over Steve’s shoulder she saw the woman with the knitting look up, curious. And with the intuitive quickness that seemed to link them now whether they wished it or not, Steve intercepted and understood Annie’s glance.

‘When did they unstrap your arm?’ he asked casually, nodding at it.

She took the opening gratefully. The progress of their injuries and illnesses was the common currency of ward conversation. Annie and the other women exchanged their latest details first thing in the morning and last thing at night, after the doctors’ rounds, and in between times when the nurses brought round the drugs trolley and the dressings packs.

‘This morning,’ she told him. ‘When the physio came round. It’s still strapped at the shoulder, but at least I can use the hand and elbow.’ Annie held out her arm, turning it stiffly. The woman looked down at her knitting again, uninterested. She had heard the details already.

‘That’s good news,’ Steve said. ‘They took me down to the physiotherapy room this morning. They had me pulling weights to and fro for hours, to get my arms and shoulders working.’