Strangers (27 page)

They were calling out to her, ‘Good luck, Annie. Think of us, still in here.’

Martin’s hand was at her elbow now, guiding her. Steeling herself she turned to look back, seeing the cluster of faces as pale blobs, except for Steve’s. Every detail of Steve’s face was clear.

‘Thank you,’ she said as steadily as she could, ‘for the flowers, everything. Take care of yourselves.’

As her husband led her away she felt Steve immobile on his crutches behind them, watching her go.

Outside, the world seemed to teem with people and reverberate with traffic. Annie sat in the passenger seat of the car as they threaded precariously through it. Martin was whistling softly as he drove, and then at a red traffic light he leaned across and kissed her on the cheek.

‘How does it feel?’ he grinned at her.

‘Strange,’ she answered, and feeling the coolness of that she added quickly, ‘Wonderful.’

Martin glanced at her and then as the car slid forward again he said, ‘You’ll have to take it easy, even though you’re well enough to be at home. Everything’s organized for you.’

Annie put her hand out to touch the knee of his corduroy trousers. ‘Thank you,’ she said.

They began the familiar climb up the hill towards home, in the grinding stream of lorries and buses, under the span of the wrought-iron bridge that Annie often crossed with the boys, on their way to the park. She looked up at it, curiously, as if she were seeing it for the first time. At the top of the hill they turned, out of the traffic, into quiet streets. The corner shops were familiar here, and then they passed the tube station that Annie had hurried into on her way to do the Christmas shopping, six weeks ago.

A minute later they reached the end of their road.

She looked down the length of it and saw their house, red bricks faced with yellow, bay windows under a little pointed roof. The car stopped outside and Annie saw the boys’ faces bob up at the bedroom window.

Martin took her hand. ‘I didn’t tell the whole world that you would be home today. Everyone wanted to be here, to welcome you, but I thought you might not like a big reception committee.’

Annie smiled at him, touched by his care. But Martin was always kind, in just that way.

‘I’m glad,’ she said. ‘They can all come another day.’

Martin helped her out of the car and they went up the path hand in hand.

‘Thomas and Ben have arranged their own welcome party. Ready?’

She nodded, wondering, and Martin opened the front door.

The hallway was hung everywhere with hand-painted streamers, and huge, cut-out letters dangling from the ceiling spelt out the message WELCOME HOME MUMMY. There was a second’s silence as Annie looked at it and different tears burned in her eyes. And then the children, unable to hide any longer, burst out and tumbled down the stairs into her arms.

‘Did you like it? Were you surprised?’ Tom demanded.

‘I coloured the ribbons,’ Benjy shouted. ‘All these. They go right up the stairs.
Look
, Mummy.’

Annie looked, and saw Barbara coming out of the kitchen, smiling at her. Through the open doors beside her she saw a fire burning in the polished grate. The house was warm, lived-in and comfortable and happy. Her tears blurred the welcome sight of it and ran down her cheeks.

‘Why are you crying?’ Benjy asked and she held him so that his face was warm against hers.

‘Because I’m glad to be home.’

Barbara hugged her, and then the boys took Annie’s hands and she let them lead her upstairs. She found that the bedroom was bright with flowers, and the covers were turned down ready for her on the wide bed. Propped against the pillows was a small, threadbare teddy.

‘I put my ted in, see, to keep you company,’ Benjy announced.

‘I told him that you probably wouldn’t want his smelly teddy,’ Thomas added.

‘I do. Of course I do.’

She sat down on the bed, feeling the familiar sag under her weight, and the boys crowded anxiously against her.

‘You won’t have to go back again, will you?’ Thomas’s casual voice tried to hide his anxiety.

‘No, darling, I won’t have to go away again.’ With her arms around her children Annie looked out of the window at the view, the unchanged composition of slate roofs and bay windows and bare tree branches, thinking.

Nothing was different, and yet the whole world had changed.

She rested her cheek wearily against Benjy’s smooth head.

Martin brought in a glass vase with the hospital’s red roses arranged in it. Their colour reminded her of blood, and of Steve, motionless in the hospital corridor, watching her go.

Martin crossed the room and touched his finger to her cheek.

‘Are you all right?’

‘Yes,’ Annie lied to him. ‘Of course I am.’

Six

Annie was cooking dinner. She moved slowly to and fro in the kitchen, opening doors and taking out pans, collecting ingredients from the larder. It seemed a long time since she had done anything of the kind. She had made suppers for the boys, and she had started cooking for herself and Martin within a few days of being home again. Barbara had done it to begin with, but after a few days Annie had taken control. It surprised her to recognize how much she minded the displacement from her own kitchen, and she thought,
I must be more like Tibby than I’ve ever realized
. But tonight was the first proper dinner. It had been Martin’s idea.

‘You haven’t had your welcome home party,’ he had announced one night. ‘Now you’re better, we should all go out to dinner somewhere. We could ask Gail and Ian.’

Enthusiastically he had named three other couples, old friends and neighbours.

‘It’ll cost a fortune to take all of them out,’ Annie had said.

‘Oh, we can all pay for ourselves.’

‘You can’t ask them out to celebrate and then make them pay,’ Annie protested. It was so like a hundred other plans and discussions that they had had over the years that she smiled suddenly.

‘Ask them here. I’ll make chilli or something.’

‘Can you cope with that?’

‘Yes,’ she had said. ‘I’m sure I can.’

‘I’ll help.’

Martin had put his warm hand out to cover hers, and then they had turned on the television to watch the news.

And so it had been arranged. Three couples were coming to dinner, and because she wanted to make everything the same as it would have been before, Annie had decided that it must be a proper meal. She was a good cook, and her dinners had a reputation amongst their friends. So she had planned an elaborate menu, and done the shopping this morning while Benjy was at nursery. Now both the boys were watching television in the sitting room. Annie put down the big casserole dish she had taken out of the cupboard and went to stand in the doorway to look at them.

Tom was sitting on the sofa with his knees drawn up and his chin sunk into his jersey, his eyes fixed on the screen. Benjy was lying on the floor with strands of fine hair fanning out around his head. It was much too long, Annie noted automatically. She must take him for a haircut.

‘D’you want a peanut butter sandwich, either of you, before I start cooking?’ she asked. Neither of them spoke or took their eyes off the television and she asked again, hearing herself on the point of shouting at them.

‘Oh. Yes, okay,’ Tom said and Benjy declared, ‘I want the same as Thomas,’ just as he always did.

Annie went back into the kitchen and made the sandwiches, took them through to the boys, and then started work.

She made a stuffing of spinach and calves’ liver cooked pink and spread it in the boned shoulder of lamb she had stood over her butcher for this morning. She rolled the meat and trussed it neatly with string, then browned it in the frying pan. The smell of fatty meat made her feel slightly sick.

Annie looked at the clock. It was almost six o’clock. She had intended to make her own puff pastry to wrap around the lamb, but she realized now that there wasn’t time for that. She opened the freezer and rummaged for a packet of ready-made, then left it to defrost while she began work on the starter. She had made the same mousselines of sole a dozen times before, but today the fish seemed full of tiny, hair-line bones and her fingers felt clumsy and stiff as she tried to pick them out with the slivers of grey skin that stuck everywhere.

The buzz of the blender sounded unnaturally loud, sawing through her head.

Thomas came in and asked, ‘Can I have another sandwich?’

Annie was about to snap at him, ‘Wait for supper,’ when she realized that it was past time for that. She clattered amongst the dirty saucepans and chopping boards, making beans on toast and poached eggs.

She put the food on the table and Benjy groaned, ‘I don’t
want
this.’

‘It’s all I’ve got time to do tonight. Eat that or nothing at all, I don’t mind which.’

The boys sat opposite one another, silently eating their beans, eyeing her. Just the vegetables to do now, and ten minutes to deal with the pastry, Annie calculated. She had made lemon syllabub the night before and it was ready, a pale yellow froth, in the glass bowl in the fridge. She was congratulating herself on that when she remembered that she had forgotten to buy any cheese. Martin would have to buy some at the deli on the way home. He should
be
home by now, Annie thought with weary resentment. As soon as she recognized that she did feel resentful, it grew inside her. She was on her way to the telephone when it rang.

It was Martin.

‘I’m sorry, love. I had to stay late with the client. One damn niggle after another. I’m on my way now. Are you okay?’

‘Wonderful,’ Annie said.

There was a tiny pause.

‘Oh dear. And it’s supposed to be your party. I’ll do everything else, I promise.’

‘Get some cheese at the deli, will you?’

‘Done.’

Annie went back to the sink and clattered the greasy saucepans. I don’t want to do this, she thought, very clearly. I don’t want to make dinner for these people, and sit through an evening’s talking and drinking. Then a wave of fright washed through her.
These people
were her friends and her husband, and dinners together had been their pleasure, before. She felt cold as she recognized how much reckoning she did in terms of
before
.

Before the bomb? Or was it not the bomb at all, but Steve?

To postpone the thought Annie whirled around the kitchen, clearing the worktops and banging the doors shut on the chaos inside the cupboards. Miraculously the room looked tidy again and the sink was empty.

She took the boys’ plates and said, ‘I’m not cross, Ben. Just in a rush.’

She gave them fruit yoghurts, and while they were eating them she stood at the other end of the table and rolled out the defrosted pastry. She set the lamb shoulder in the middle of the rectangle then deftly parcelled it up, trimming off the surplus and crimping the seams with her fingers. She crumpled the leftover pastry into a ball and rolled it out again, then cut out leaves with the point of a knife. The decorations looked pretty and the job was soothing. She was brushing her handiwork with beaten egg when she heard Martin’s bag thud down on the step, and his key in the lock.

‘
Dad
,’ the boys shouted in unison, and ran to meet him. He came in, swinging Benjy. Martin looked anxiously at Annie and then glanced around the kitchen.

‘Mouthwatering smells and a scene of perfect domestic harmony,’ he murmured. ‘I was expecting something different.’

‘If you had been here an hour ago you would have seen something different.’

‘I said I was sorry, Annie. I got the cheese.’ He held up the carrier bag, as if to placate her.

Annie’s resentment was focused on Martin now, but she felt too tired to embark on an argument.

‘Why don’t you go and get ready? I’ll see the kids into bed, and do whatever else needs doing.’

‘Thank you,’ she said, still angry and yet knowing that it would make the evening worse if she and Martin were on bad terms.

She went slowly upstairs and took a shower. Wrapped in the blue dressing gown that made her think of Steve again, she went into her bedroom and took her favourite dress out of the wardrobe. It was a swirly black jersey that clung in the right places. Annie pulled the dress on over her head and stared at herself in the long mirror. She was too thin for it, and it hung like a shroud from her shoulders. The black material made her face look sallow because she hadn’t regained her natural colour yet.

As she looked at her pallid reflection Annie had the vertiginous sense that she was confronting someone else, and not herself at all.
Steve
, she thought stupidly,
you know who I am. Is this me?

Then she snatched up the hem of the dress and pulled it off, struggling for a minute within the black folds of the skirt. She searched along the row of hangers and took out a bright red shirt and narrow trousers, and bundled the black dress into the farthest corner.

When she was dressed, Annie faced the mirror again. She began to make up her face, outlining her eyes with grey pencil and dabbing blusher on to her cheeks. She brushed lipgloss on to her mouth and then sat facing herself, with the little brush dangling in her fingers. The optimistic colours she had applied seemed to stand out against her chalky skin like a clown’s make-up. Annie sighed, and taking a piece of cotton wool she rubbed most of it off again. To neaten the ragged ends of her hair her hairdresser had cut it much shorter than she usually wore it. Annie pulled at the ends with a comb, as if that would stretch it to cover her bare neck and throat, and then dropped the comb with a clatter.

Martin came in and stood behind her, and their eyes met in the mirror.

‘You look very pretty,’ he said, and touched the exposed and vulnerable line of their jaw with his fingers. ‘I like your hair like that. It reminds me of when I first knew you.’

Annie tilted her head, just a little, away from the touch, and his hand dropped. She smiled, hastily, to cover the awkwardness.

‘I don’t feel very pretty. I tried the black dress on first, and it looked hideous.’