Strangers (25 page)

Tibby was tired, and she sat down gratefully. ‘Couldn’t really turn me away, could they? Once I’d landed myself, stick and all. I wanted to see you. They’re asking me to go into some place, for a rest, that’s what they call it.’

The flame of hope went out, at once, and Annie saw the darkness. She felt cold, and pointlessly angry.

‘When? Why didn’t either of you say anything?’

‘Nothing to tell, darling. Jim agreed with me. Just a rest.’

‘Of course,’ Annie said numbly. ‘It will do you good.’

Of course. Tibby was sixty-five, but she looked older. Her hair was thin, and her arms and legs seemed fragile enough to snap under her tiny weight. Annie wondered, How long? Her mother’s pleasure in having reached the ward by herself stood out in a different, colder light.

Tibby was leaning back in the chair, looking at her daughter.

‘I’m glad to see you in your clothes. What about your hair?’

She was striving for the painful brightness that she had adopted for her other visits. Annie had weakly accepted it then, but she was well enough now to look beyond Tibby’s determined smile. She felt almost too heavy-hearted to answer, but at last she said, ‘I’ll have it cut when I get home. It won’t be long now, they’ve promised me.’ She was thinking that she would be going home almost well again, her own strength confirmed in her. But Tibby wasn’t going to get better. Annie remembered that she and Steve had talked about it as they held hands and looked up into the blackness. She had wondered if her mother felt the same anger, confronted by death, the same sense of regret for everything left undone.
No
, Steve had said.
Your mother has seen you grow up. Seen her grandchildren
.

She sat down beside Tibby and took her thin hand between hers. Annie was filled with a longing to be close to her, and to make the most of the time that was left to them.

‘Tibby, what do they say? The doctors. Tell me honestly.’

‘That you’re doing fine.’ Tibby’s smile was transparent.

‘You know that I didn’t mean me. What is this rest? How long is it for?’

Suddenly Annie heard in her own voice the same demanding, indignant note that was familiar from Thomas and Benjy. You’re my mother. You can’t leave me. I need you, and you belong here, with me.

More dues, Annie thought.

Tibby shrugged and said gently, ‘Well, darling. You know this disease. It doesn’t go away. They can’t predict what course it will take. They do what they can, and they tell me what they do know, because I ask them to. One doesn’t want to be deceived about the last thing of all, does one? A rest will help, they say. And it makes a break for your father, too.’

‘I should be helping,’ Annie said dismally.

Tibby surprised her with her laughter. ‘What could you do?’

‘Help Pop out in the house, or something.’

‘Darling, are
you
offering to come and clear up in
my
house?’

Annie laughed then too. In her mind’s eye she saw the polished, formal neatness of her mother’s rooms in contrast with the rag-bag of family possessions that filled her own. Annie’s indifference to domestic order hadn’t always been a joke between them.

‘I’m sure the house looks immaculate.’

Tibby nodded, her smile fading a little. ‘It does. And will, as long as I have anything to do with it.’

Annie wondered, without speaking, how long that would be. She couldn’t imagine even now how Tibby could polish the parquet tiles and scour the big old sinks. She had thought with Steve how sad it was that her mother’s life had been dedicated to a house. How happy had she been? Her hand tightened on Tibby’s.

‘I was thinking about you, and the house, while we … while I was waiting for them to come and dig us out. I could remember it all as clearly as if I was really there. I thought I was a girl again, wearing a green cotton dress with a white collar, and white ribbons in my hair.’

‘I remember that dress,’ Tibby said. ‘I remember the day we bought it for you.’ She leaned forward, closer to Annie, and her fingers clutched more tightly. ‘It was very hot, the middle of a long, hot summer. You were six or seven, and you had gone to play for the day with Janet. Do you remember Janet? You were inseparable, and then the family moved away and you cried for a whole week, insisting that you would never have another best friend in all your life.’

‘I don’t remember her at all,’ Annie said.

‘Your father and I went shopping, and we bought you the green dress. When we came to pick you up you and Janet were playing in the garden, pouring water over each other with a watering can.’

‘Go on,’ Annie prompted her, and Tibby smiled. She began to talk. Some recollections made her laugh, and she sighed at others. She told stories about Annie’s childhood and babyhood that Annie had never heard before. She remembered the day that her daughter was born.

Annie listened, watching her mother’s face. She felt Tibby’s need to recollect and to make the patterned strands tidy, as she had remembered herself, with Steve. As she listened the layers shifted over one another to give altered perspectives. Her own memories, rubbed painfully brighter while she lay beside Steve, her mother’s additions to them, stretching back beyond the reach of Annie’s own recollection.

‘You were a funny, good little girl, always,’ Tibby said at last. ‘Isn’t memory a strange thing? I can remember you at eight, nearly thirty years ago, better than I can remember Thomas from last week. And I can’t remember at all whether I paid the milkman last Saturday, or the name of the girl in the book I’ve just read.’

‘I know,’ Annie smiled, seeing the truth in the truism. ‘Tibby, I wish we could talk more.’ She had meant
like this, while we still can
, but her mother made a little startled gesture and peered at her watch.

‘Oh, my dear, I said I would meet Jim downstairs a quarter of an hour ago. He didn’t think the sister would let us both in. You know what he’ll be like.’

Impatient, Annie knew.

‘I’ll walk down with you.’

‘Can you manage that?’

‘Of course I can.’
I’m
stronger, Annie thought sadly. Much stronger than you are.

They stood up, Annie much taller than her mother. Tibby seemed to be shrinking into herself. With her hands on Annie’s arms she said, suddenly, ‘I can manage everything else. Other people do, after all, with reasonable dignity. But I don’t think I could have borne it if you had died. Not now, Annie, after all.’

Her face creased, vulnerable, with the beginning of tears.

Your mother has seen you grow up. Seen her grandchildren
.

‘Tibby.’ Annie wrapped her arms around her. She rested her cheek against her mother’s head. ‘I didn’t die,’ she whispered. ‘I didn’t want to die.’

For a long moment, they held on to each other.

Then Tibby sniffed hard.

‘I came to cheer you up,’ she said, her voice wobbly.

Annie let her go, briskly gathering up her mother’s coat and bag. ‘That’s Barbara’s chosen role. I should leave it to her.’ She felt that her mother’s bright, tight smile had transferred itself to her own face, but Tibby responded hearteningly. Their faint disparagement of Martin’s mother had always been a little, contained joke between the two of them.

‘Poor Barbara …’ Tibby protested.

‘… She does mean well,’ Annie completed automatically. ‘Come on. Let’s start shuffling downstairs, or Pop will stamp off without you.’

Arm in arm, they set off for the ward doors.

Annie saw Tibby safely into her father’s care. He was waiting amongst the WRVS drivers in the main hall, looking at his watch every few seconds. He kissed Annie and then he and Tibby began to fuss each other about the time, adopting with clockwork precision the roles that they had fallen into decades ago. Tibby was always very slightly late, and Jim chivvied and agitated to bring her up to schedule. Annie felt the irritation that she always felt, and she recognized that that was her own role. She reassured her father that they had plenty of time, suspecting that they had nothing pressing to do for the rest of the day, and equally aware that her father would insist on a strict timetable for a week in bed.

Perhaps, she thought, Tibby’s rest was a rest from her husband’s precision. They said goodbye, and from a curve in the stairs Annie watched them wander away together. They would still be arguing about the time. She could see Tibby’s head pecking to and fro as she defended herself. The patterns of a lifetime, set long ago. She found herself wondering again whether her parents had really been happy at all, caught up in their own pattern.

And Martin and me?
How different now? How different in twenty years?

Annie walked slowly because her legs were heavy. It took her a long time to reach her bed in the ward again.

It was two days later when they told her that she could go home on Friday. That was three days away.

‘You’ll have to come back to out-patients for tests. We don’t want you to escape that easily,’ her surgeon told her jovially. ‘We want to keep a close eye on those kidneys of yours, and there will be blood tests and so forth. But I think that by the weekend you will be well enough to be at home with your family.’

‘Thank you,’ Annie said.

She went to telephone Martin immediately.

‘That’s wonderful news,’ Martin said.

‘It is, isn’t it?’

In her own ears, her voice sounded thin.

They talked for a few minutes more. Martin was making euphoric promises and plans. ‘We’ll all take care of you. All you have to do is rest. Audrey and Barbara will manage the boys between them, and I’m going to take some time off. Annie?’

‘I’m here.’

‘Then when you’re stronger we can have a break together, just the two of us. Barbara says she’ll have the boys to stay. We could go to Paris. Or Venice. What about Venice?’

‘Yes,’ Annie said. ‘We could do that.’

She was looking down at the red-tiled floor and at the toes of her slippers. She tried to imagine beyond
here, now
, and found that she couldn’t. At the same time she tried to make her voice stronger, as full of conviction as Martin’s.

‘In a few weeks’ time, it’ll be as if all this never happened,’ he said.

That was what Martin wanted, of course, Annie thought. He wanted their lives to be the same as they had been.

You can’t make it un-happen, Annie
. What did that mean, then?

‘I’ve got to go, sweetheart. I’ll be in tonight, at the usual time. I can’t wait to get you out of that place. I love you, Annie.’

‘Yes. Yes, I love you too.’

She replaced the receiver and walked slowly along the corridor. She worked out that it was five weeks and two days since the bombing. For all those days the hospital had stood in for the world. She realized now that she had hardly thought beyond it. Her determination to recover had focused on the point of being well enough to leave, and now the vista of
afterwards
opened coldly up in front of her.

Annie passed the ward kitchen where the trays of meals were unloaded from trolleys. She caught the scent of boiled greens mixed with antiseptic scrub, and realized too that it was the first time for weeks that she had noticed a hospital smell. The day sister from the men’s ward crossed her path at right angles, smiling at Annie.

‘Good news,’ she called cheerfully. ‘Well done.’

Annie noticed the shape of her calves in black stockings, and the high polish of her black shoes. She knew that she was already looking at the hospital as a visitor, not as an inhabitant. Annie went on into her ward. Sylvia came across at once, eager for news.

‘Going home at the weekend, I hear. Looking forward to it?’

‘Oh yes. I can’t wait.’

Giving the expected answer made Annie more sharply aware of the truth. She was afraid to leave. Hospital had been a protective cocoon, and illness had been an immediate obstacle to conquer.

Steve had known that, of course, and he was waiting. Annie smiled wryly. She had fought to be allowed home, and now she didn’t want to go anywhere without Steve. She had willed herself better, so that she could go home safely to Martin. Now she saw that imprisonment in hospital had been their real safety, and when she and Steve were both outside there would be choices infinitely more complex than whether or not to go to the day room.

Annie shivered. She had the sense of open spaces surrounding her again, and an unfamiliar, salty wind blowing.

That day, and the next, she sat with Steve in the day room and didn’t tell him that she was going home. More vividly than ever, she was aware that they talked on two levels. There was the banal, public conversation that she had led them into. It was innocently audible to any of the other patients who passed their corner, or who drew up their chairs to join them.

Then there was the other, silent dialogue that grew steadily louder in Annie’s head.
Listen to me, Annie
, Steve said.
You must, sooner or later
.

And she babbled back,
Wait. I don’t know what to do. I’m afraid. I’m afraid to stay and I’m afraid to leave
.

On the third day Steve was irritable and restless. She watched him as he sat tense in his chair and then impatiently levered himself to his feet, hobbling to the window and staring down into the street before turning back to her again. She knew that he was chafing against boredom, and against the frustration of their holding apart. Her sympathy swelled with wishing that she could stay with him.

‘How long will it be?’ she asked. ‘They must have some idea, surely?’

‘You know as much as I do.’ His voice was sharp. ‘Not until the X-rays show new bone formation. Six weeks, perhaps. Therapy. Muscle rehabilitation. Jesus, Annie, how can I survive another six weeks? Without you?’

‘They’ve said I can go.’ The words came out flatly.

Steve swung round, awkward, very close to her. Annie felt her heart lurch.

‘I thought it must be soon. When?’

‘Tomorrow.’

He stood still, then. She saw the denial in his face and her own longing to deny it too, answering him.