Strangers, page 20
‘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.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘I suppose,’ Annie said softly, ‘I was trying to pretend that it wasn’t going to happen.’
Their eyes fastened on the other’s face, hungry, importunate.
‘I don’t want you to go.’
‘I don’t want to leave you.’
The words spoken aloud, at last. How many days have I made us waste? Annie thought, despairingly.
Steve turned on his crutches again. He looked up and down the room, at the interminable television and the rain-streaked windows, the incurious, sick faces of the others.
‘Come here,’ he said.
Annie stepped forward, unable to question. If he had undone her clothes, then, and asked her to lie down with him on the institutional floor, she would have done it because he wanted her to.
But he led her away, to the door that opened into the corridor. With all her senses painfully sharpened, Annie heard the tiny metallic creak that his crutches made under his weight.
A few steps beyond was another door, this one with a little round window in it. Steve looked in through the window, and then eased the door open. Annie knew what was inside, because the room was the twin of the one over on the women’s side.
‘Where are you going?’ she whispered.
Come on,’ he repeated.
Annie followed him, and Steve closed the door behind them.
The room was unoccupied. It was a single-bedded side ward with a tall, narrow slit of window that looked out at a dark angle of the red-brick hospital walls. There was a high bed, made up with stiff, smooth white sheets and pillows set perfectly straight. The bed table was pushed away to the foot, bare of the usual clutter of belongings. The only other furnishings were two upright chairs, a folding screen and a basin with long-handled taps like metal ears.
As they faced each other in the silence, footsteps passed by the door.
‘No one will come,’ Steve said.
‘I know.’
Steve disengaged himself from one of the crutches and propped it against the wall. He took Annie’s hand and used the other crutch to hobble the few feet across to the bed. He drew her with him, and she followed, without hesitation. Steve reached the bed and rested himself against it, then let the second crutch fall. Then, gently, he took her other hand. She stepped forward, close, and then so close that their bodies touched. She saw the shape of his face and his mouth, the line of his top lip and a muscle that pulled at the corner of it. Her chest was tight with pain and happiness.
He lifted their linked hands and his mouth brushed her knuckles. Annie felt the softness of his tongue between his teeth. Her own mouth opened and she drew the breath in, sharpening the wonderful pain in her heart.
Then Steve let her hands go. He lifted his to cup her face, looking levelly into her eyes, through her eyes and into her head. And then he leant forward, slowly, and his mouth touched hers. He turned her face to one side, and then to the other, and kissed the corners of her mouth.
For that moment, Annie knew nothing except the happiness. She smiled, with her lips curving upwards under his, and he drew her closer still, until her body arched backwards as he kissed her.
His arms came around her and they clung together, greedy, admitting their hunger at last in silence. Annie forgot her physical weakness and the bleak room that enclosed them, and the world waiting for her outside. There was no one but Steve. Her mouth opened under his as she answered him, candid, and his sudden roughness bruised her skin and sent the shocks of sweetness racing all through her.
Annie heard her own voice, wordless, caught low in her throat, Oh.
Steve lifted his mouth from hers, and looked into her eyes again. His eyelids were heavy and she saw the gold-flecked irises. Annie was shaking. Behind Steve’s shoulder she saw the white cover of the hospital bed, drawn up now in rumples like long pointing fingers. She turned her face away from the fingers and rested it against Steve’s shoulder. She brushed the tiny raised loops of his towelling robe and felt the warmth of his skin under her cheek. A pulse beating at the base of his throat answered her own heartbeat. She closed her eyes, giving up all of herself, and put her lips to the little flicker under his skin.
‘Annie.’ His voice crackled.
‘I’m here.’
Their kiss was gentle now, and for a second behind her closed eyelids Annie saw the lit threads of tiny veins that netted her head, as beautiful as winter trees and all the firmaments of stars shining behind them.
When they moved apart at last it was slowly, and their fingers reached out to curl together.
Annie opened her eyes to see again. Behind Steve there was still the high white bed, and the ugly, cream-painted bed table on its black rubber wheels. She looked carefully at the folding screen, the door with its single black eye, and then through the window at the brick walls stained with damp and the black humps of drainage pipes. She thought of the hospital, the nurses, and the other patients with their inquisitive stares, and it was like a microcosm of the world that separated her with Steve into this bare room under the blind eye that could see at any moment. The joy was still vivid inside her, but the pain and uncertainty came back to tangle inseparably with it.
Steve watched her face and she knew that he was reading it, and her thoughts flickering behind it. He lifted and smoothed back a fine strand of hair that had caught up at the corner of her mouth, and then his fingers slid under the thickness of hair at the nape of her neck.
‘You know, Annie,’ he said, ‘that we started at the end, you and me. The two of us, stripped down in the darkness, nowhere further to go. It’s hard to go back and fill in the steps.’
She saw his crooked, amused smile as he ticked the steps off. ‘How do you do? What do you do? How, and where, and what for? I wonder. Another drink? You feel the same? We must be kindred spirits. Let’s talk some more, your husband isn’t looking. Am I boring you? Monopolizing you? No? I’m glad we met. Very glad. Yes, another drink. More talk. Is it so late already? Could we perhaps meet again? Lunch. Yes, lunch some time very soon.’
‘You must be very practised,’ Annie said. Steve shook his head to answer her, and she saw his truthfulness too.
‘At that. Not at this. This hasn’t happened, never. I don’t know, any more than you do, how to explain the strangers we were and what we are now. I can’t deny it, Annie, and now that I’m holding you like this I know that you can’t deny it either. Nor can I justify it, because of what it means to your family. Wait.’
She had tried to move backwards then, to disengage herself, but he held her too tightly.
‘There hasn’t been any neat social two-step between you and me, my love. We came together without anything except ourselves, the parts of ourselves that were real in that bloody wreckage. It was real then, and it is still real now.’
He turned her chin with his fingertips to make her look up at him, and at last she returned his clear gaze.
‘I’ve never taken you to dinner. We’ve never met for a clandestine drink, and so I don’t know whether you prefer white wine spritzers or vodka martinis. We haven’t taken those particular steps together and we won’t do, now. I’m glad, because I don’t believe you tread that path in any case. And we haven’t made love, although I want you now more than I’ve ever wanted anyone in all my life.’
Annie knew that that was the truth. She felt the colour hot in her cheeks, but her eyes held his.
‘I’d lie down with you here, now, this minute, if only we could,’ she whispered.
Steve leant forward and for a second his lips were hard against hers.
‘Thank you,’ he said. He was smiling, but the pulse was still beating at the base of his throat. ‘I will remind you of that. For now, I just want to tell you something.’ He stopped, looking for the words, and Annie understood that Steve was as vulnerable as she was herself. He shrugged then, almost like a boy, and said in a voice so low that she had to strain to catch what he said, ‘You know that I love you, Annie, don’t you?’
In the silence that followed she heard the echoes in her head, I love you, Annie, and happiness fluttered against her ribs again. She lifted Steve’s hands and looked down at his knuckles, touching them gently, wonderingly, with her thumb.
From outside in the corridor came the squeak of hurrying feet and a door swung open and shut with a hiss and a bang. In the distance a trolley rattled at the big doors of the lift.
