Strangers (33 page)

After the customary delays and detours they turned the last corner, and came to the church hall that housed the nursery group. There was a knot of mothers with prams and pushchairs standing talking in the yard outside. Benjy pushed through them and ran through the open doors, and Annie followed him, nodding and smiling at the other mothers as she passed them. She knew them all, because she saw them doing the same thing every morning, and she knew their children and their problems, and their houses in the network of streets surrounding the church hall. Most of them lived lives that were similar to Annie’s own, but in the last weeks she had felt so remote that it had been hard to find a word or a gesture that would bridge the gulf.

‘Hello, Annie,’ they called to her. ‘Benjy’s eager this morning, isn’t he?’

‘Feeling the joys of spring, I suppose.’

‘Wish I was,’ someone else chipped in. ‘Sophie had us both up all night.’

‘You look better yourself, Annie. The sight of the sun does us all good, doesn’t it?’

In the past Annie had found the simple camaraderie comforting and even sustaining. She had felt, before, that they all shared the same difficulties and the same rewards. And these women had clubbed together to send her flowers when she was in hospital, then taken it in turns to invite Benjy to play with their own children, so that Annie could rest for an hour or two. She felt that she didn’t know, now, where she belonged or what she believed in. Part of her was still here, amongst the women, yet so much of her was nowhere except with Steve. It made her feel lonely, to be together and yet apart. Annie went slowly inside, out of the bright sunshine, thinking of the random violence that had altered her perspectives so violently that she doubted whether she would ever look out on the same landscape again.

The hall was dingy, but that was hardly noticeable under the bright layers of painting and collages that the staff and children had stuck all over the walls. Children squirmed over the climbing frame and in and out of the Wendy house, and groups of them stood around the little tables deciding whether to paint, or squeeze dough or glue strips of coloured paper into necklaces. As it always did, the sight made Annie smile. They were so busy, all of them, fragile on their wobbly legs, and yet perfectly robust.

Benjy had made a bee-line for the dough table, and now he was squeezing bright pink coils of it between his fingers, with an expression of furious concentration. Annie went across to him and kissed the top of his head.

‘See you later, then?’

‘Unh,’ Benjy said.

She walked out into the sunshine once again.

On the way back she took a different route, passing through the little local park where the daffodils would be followed by municipal rows of scarlet tulips. The council contractors were already repainting the swings and the conical roundabout that Thomas loved to spin faster and faster until Benjy screamed in giddy terror. Annie thought dreamily of the hours that she had spent in this park, from the days when Thomas was a tiny baby out for his first outings in the pram. Martin sometimes brought them here at weekends now, and played elaborate hiding and chasing games with them in the little plot of trees and shrubs enclosed by green railings. She crossed the grass, leaving shiny footprints in the wetness. Beyond the park was a line of shops. Thomas was bringing home a friend for tea, and Annie thought that she would make a chocolate cake.

She did the necessary shopping, exchanging pleasantries with the cheerful Indian family in the general stores. Then she turned towards home, swinging her purchases in a plastic carrier bag. She reached the house and the gate squealed on its hinges, swinging back against the hedge and releasing its dusty scent of privet leaves. Annie went inside, picking up a scatter of brown envelopes from the doormat. The hallway smelt of coffee and the potpourri in a bowl on a sidetable.

Without thinking of anything, her head comfortably empty, Annie walked into the kitchen and filled the kettle. Martin had left the radio playing when he went out, and Annie was whistling to the music, softly, through pursed lips, when the doorbell rang.

As she crossed the hallway she saw a shadow, unidentifiable, beyond the coloured glass. And then she opened her front door and saw that it was Steve waiting on the doorstep.

It was as if the colour drained from the accessible world. The two of them were left standing, face to face, the only moving, breathing things in a grey landscape.

It was Steve who spoke first.

‘Can’t I come inside?’ he prompted her gently.

Annie looked out at the empty street and the windows of the houses opposite, her innocent front gate that Steve had closed behind him, and the crocuses that edged the garden path. Then, stiff-armed, she opened the front door a little wider. As he stepped into the house Annie saw that Steve’s crutches were gone. He leaved heavily on a stick instead.

With the door closed against the eyes of the street they looked at one another in the dim hallway. Benjy’s tricycle was abandoned at the foot of the stairs.

‘How did you find me?’ Annie asked, stupid with surprise.

‘Were you intending to hide?’

‘No. I didn’t mean that. I’m just surprised, to see you here …’

Steve smiled at her, but Annie read the anxiety in his face. It had been a risk to come. But he must have wanted to, very badly.

‘The telephone directory,’ he reminded her. ‘I looked you up.’

‘Yes. Yes, of course. Come … come through, and I’ll make you a cup of coffee.’

I’m talking to him as if he’s someone from the PTA, Annie thought. Or one of Martin’s clients. She picked up Benjy’s bike and put it aside so that he could pass, and led the way into the kitchen. She tried to hide her awkwardness by rattling the coffee percolator, and the cups as she set them out on the tray. Her hands were shaking, and she was rawly conscious that his nearness overturned the mundane order of her kitchen, as she had known that it would. She longed for him to touch her, and she dreaded it.

‘When did they let you out? You didn’t tell me that they might.’ Her voice shook, too.

‘I let myself out. One leap, and I was free.’ They smiled at each other and Annie turned quickly to the coffee pot.

‘Do you take milk?’

‘Please.’

‘Would you like anything to eat? What is it, breakfast or elevenses?’

‘No, thank you.’

Steve watched her as she moved economically from cupboard to sink. He had imagined her so often, just like this, against the backdrop of her kitchen. Yet now that he was here with her he couldn’t see any of it, nothing except Annie herself. Her hair was growing again to frame her face. In her jeans and shirt, with her untidy hair and her soft, dazed expression, she looked almost like a young girl. As he watched her Steve realized that he had focused so hard on the way to reach her that he had hardly thought beyond the moment when she would open her door. It made him feel so like an adolescent, at a loss when finally confronted with a real girl, that Steve laughed aloud. Annie turned, and when she saw his expression the colour flooded into her face. She put the coffee pot down abruptly.

‘Annie.’

Steve’s stick squeaked on the polished floor as he went to her.

‘Yes.’

‘Annie, I can’t start all over from the beginning. Not with you.’

‘I know that.’

We needn’t talk about what the doctors say, about the weather or the garden or whether he takes one lump or two, Annie thought. Not now, and not ever.

She lifted her head and Steve cupped her face between his hands. He bent and kissed her mouth and her throat and the corners of her eyes. Annie kissed him in return, giving herself up to him, until he took her in his arms and almost lifted her. Their freedom alone in the empty house was extraordinary, beckoning them. For a giddy, drowning moment Annie was just Annie, forgetting the rooms and the furniture that she and Martin had bought and the pictures that they had chosen and hung together. Steve’s hand touched her shoulder and then her breast, and her mouth opened beneath his.

Annie forgot everything except her need for him. The ache of the weeks of separation from him sharpened now that he was here, and close enough for her to understand how he could assuage it. They might have been anywhere, or nowhere, because all that mattered to them was that they were together.

Steve whispered, with his mouth against hers, ‘My love.’

And Annie echoed him, ‘I love you.’ They felt the curves of their separate smiles touching and becoming the same smile of joy because it was the truth, and because it wasn’t time yet to remember what the truth would mean.

Annie had no idea how long they stood there, locked together. When at last they stepped back to see one another again she was giddy, and her mouth was bruised and burning.

They examined each other’s faces, inch by inch, and it was then, seeing into one another’s eyes, that reality intruded again. Annie’s expression changed but Steve took her hand, holding it tightly between his own.

‘Don’t,’ he begged her. ‘Stay with me.’

‘I want to,’ Annie said. ‘What can we do?’

He put his arm around her again and Annie rested her face against his shoulder. With his cheek touching her hair, Steve stared over her head at the pine table in the bay window, and the stick-back chairs grouped neatly around it. There was an antique pine dresser too, with pieces of willow-pattern china and photographs of her husband and children arranged on the shelves. Outside the window he could see the facing houses. Annie and Martin would know the people who lived behind those doors. Probably their children played together, went to the same schools.

He understood, suddenly, the magnitude of what he wanted from her. He wanted her to leave this. Yet how could he ask her to walk away from all the accretions of a married life, and come with him? He wanted her to, with single-minded intensity. Steve understood quite clearly that, just as he had never loved anyone before, he loved Annie fiercely now. And the intimacy that they had shared, afraid, and blinded by the dark, stayed with him. It seemed more precious and more real than all the rest of his life.

He took her hand, very gently, and guided her to the table. He pulled out a chair and made her sit down. The coffee cups sat forgotten on their tray between them.

‘I want you to come and live with me,’ Steve said. She made a move to interrupt him but he held her hand tighter and went on, faster. ‘Not today. Not next week, not even next month if you really can’t. When you’re ready to come to me, Annie. If you want to come.’

Annie thought, I
do
, and the enormity of it was like a tidal wave, submerging her. She looked at Steve’s face and at the way that a muscle at one corner of his mouth pulled it downwards in anxiety. I should say,
I can’t
. I can’t leave my husband and children, or bring my children to you. But I can’t be without you, either. I know that, after this morning.

‘I don’t want there to be half-measures between you and me, Annie.’

Not an affair, she thought, with me creeping away to meet you when I can steal the time from Martin and the boys. No, I couldn’t bear that, either. It must be white or black, of course, with no murky shades in between. Annie remembered the evening in the supermarket, and the anger with Martin that had overtaken her. She had thought that a truce had reigned since then, but now she felt more as if they had been nursing themselves, separately, in readiness for this.

She jerked her head up suddenly.

‘I don’t want half-measures either. But whatever has to be done must be done gently, so that Martin … so that it doesn’t hurt Martin more than it has to.’

It was only then, when she saw the relief rub out the sharp lines in Steve’s face, that Annie realized how he had gambled, coming to ask her for everything, without knowing or even hoping for what her answer would be. His honesty and the love that she read behind it touched Annie’s heart.

‘And so?’ he whispered. ‘Will you come?’

She waited, listening to the little sounds of the house as if she might hear something that would stop her. But there was nothing, and she answered at last, ‘Yes.’

Steve moved then, stumbling from his chair with such violence that his awkward leg caught it and tipped it backwards, banging to the floor. Neither of them even glanced at it.

They had reached out for each other, and they were as hungry as if they had eaten nothing since they lay together in the darkness of the store. Annie knew an intensity of physical longing that she hadn’t felt for years and years. Not since Matthew.

She heard herself laugh, shakily.

‘I was thinking of Matthew.’

‘I know,’ he murmured, and he tipped Annie’s head back so that he could taste the hollow at the base of her throat. ‘Don’t. Think of me.’

That was easy. It was easy as he touched the pearly buttons of her shirt, and then undid them. He bent his head again and kissed the curve of her breast where the shirt fell away from it. As his mouth touched her nipple Annie closed her eyes and buried her face in his black hair.

She thought, for a longing, oblivious instant, of the bed upstairs. It was neat and smooth under its white crocheted cover. She had straightened it before she took Benjy to the nursery.

No
.

And then she looked at the stripped boards of the kitchen floor, which Martin had sanded and waxed.

No, nor in any of the other corners of the house that they had created and shared.

Annie lifted her head, and with her fingers entwined in Steve’s hair she made him look up at her. ‘Not here,’ she whispered.

Steve held her for another moment, and then his arms dropped stiffly to his sides. They were both looking at the dresser with its blue plates and framed photographs.

Steve made a little, apologetic gesture. ‘Of course not here.’

They turned away, not looking at each other.

Annie put her hand on the coffee pot to feel if it was still hot enough. She poured each of them a cup and they sat down at the table. But it was painful to see Steve sitting in Martin’s chair, and so she stood up again almost immediately. She carried her cup across the room and stood drinking the tepid coffee by the kitchen window, looking out at the garden.