Strangers, page 24
‘So that’s why I came this afternoon,’ Vicky finished crisply. She had regained possession of herself now. ‘I’m sorry if I’m interrupting. Won’t you introduce us, now I’m here?’ She smiled at the other woman.
‘This is Annie.’ Steve held on to the name as he said it, as if he didn’t want to let it go. ‘And this is Vicky.’
‘I know.’ Vicky suddenly understood. ‘You were … you were there in the shop, that day, too, weren’t you?’
‘Yes, I was there,’ Annie said in her low voice.
‘It must have been horrible.’
‘I don’t think I would have survived down there if it hadn’t been for Steve.’
Vicky noticed that she didn’t look at Steve as she said it. As if she couldn’t trust herself to look at him as well, in case her face lost its composure.
There was a moment’s silence before Vicky said, as lightly as she could, ‘You were lucky to have one another.’
Neither Annie nor Steve spoke. It was left to Vicky to talk, and she did her best to fill the awkward quiet with snippets of gossip from her world and from Steve’s.
In a little while, when she judged that it wouldn’t look too much as if she were running away, Annie looked at her watch and then stood up.
Involuntarily, Steve’s hand reached out to catch her wrist. He made himself let go as soon as his fingers touched her.
‘Don’t go yet.’
‘I must. I’ll call in next time.’
She picked up her bag from beside her chair, and as she stooped her face was level with Steve’s.
Vicky sat still, knowingly watching for the goodbye peck on the cheek from which she could gauge how far their relationship had gone. But although neither of them moved for a second, they didn’t kiss each other. They looked, and then the wings of Annie’s hair fell forward to hide her cheeks. She scooped up her belongings and stepped away from the little group of chairs.
‘Goodbye, Vicky,’ she said formally and then, in a much lower voice, ‘Goodbye.’
She can’t even bring herself to say his name, with me listening, Vicky thought.
Annie went, not looking back.
Steve’s face was dark and stiff, and for the first time since they had met Vicky didn’t know what to say to him.
She tried, ‘It must help, being able to talk to someone who went through it too.’
‘It did.’
Summoning up her courage she asked, ‘Are you fond of her?’
‘Fond?’ Steve turned to her, examining her expression as if he had never noticed her before.
‘Yes,’ he said, and the word fell like a hard pebble into black water.
Vicky’s face didn’t change because she was too self-possessed to let her feelings show, but still the words formed inside her head. That’s it, then.
Annie walked back to the tube station with her shoulders hunched against the cold. Here in the middle of town the streets were littered and there were none of the tiny signs of spring that had triggered off her happiness this morning. She thought back to it in bewilderment as jealousy crystallized inside her. She could see Vicky’s face in front of her, younger than her own, with clear, pale skin. Steve’s girl had a clever, rather hard expression. She was the kind of ambitious, single-minded woman Annie had always found intimidating, and Steve had chosen her, hadn’t he? He had talked about her in the darkness. That was before Vicky came along, he had said.
Annie made herself breathe evenly to counteract the panicky waves that rose in her chest. She thought, What right do I have to be jealous? I’m going home now to my husband and children. I don’t have any claim on Steve. We can’t claim each other.
But she wanted to be able to. That was the truth, and the significance of it made her shiver in the February wind.
It was on that day too, Annie remembered later, that Martin first showed that he knew something was wrong.
He came home earlier than usual. Annie was washing up after the boys’ supper, and the kitchen was still untidy with dirty plates and scattered toys and crayons. She heard Martin’s bag thud on the step, and then the sound of his key in the lock. As the front door opened Benjy, who had been lying on the floor watching television, suddenly rolled sideways and snatched at Thomas’s Lego model. There was an immediate howl of protest and the children fell in a heap, shouting and punching each other.
Annie jerked her fingers out of the washing-up water. It was too hot, and she had thought that she was in too much of a hurry to cool it. She wiped her scalding hands on her skirt and pushed past Martin as he came in, without looking at him. She bent over her children and pulled them apart. She was trembling with anger as she shouted incoherently at them.
‘Stop it. Stop. Fighting all the time. I can’t stand it. I can’t stand it. Do you hear?’ She aimed an ineffectual blow at the nearest bottom as they wriggled past her. ‘Upstairs. Both of you. Get ready for bed.’
‘Dad …’
‘Do as your mother says,’ Martin said evenly.
They went, still squabbling. When the door had closed behind them Annie’s shoulders sagged. Her anger drained away as quickly as it had come, and left her with the blood throbbing dully in her head.
‘Hello,’ Martin said. ‘Remember me?’
Annie looked at him, seeing him framed against the closed door with its grey finger-marks, part of the family furniture in the oppressive room.
‘How could I forget?’
She walked back to the sink and began to lift out the dripping plates. He followed her and took her arm so that she had to stop, standing with her head bent over the popping suds. From overhead she heard thumping feet, and then the splash of bathwater.
‘Annie, we’ve all had enough of this. What’s the matter with you?’
The bathwater was turned off again and in the sudden quiet the bubbles in the sink burst with the sound of smacking kisses. Suddenly, insanely, Annie wanted to laugh.
‘Nothing’s the matter.’
‘Ever since you came home, it’s been either silent martyrdom or frothing rage. I know that something terrible happened to you …’
Is it so very terrible, to fall in love with a man who isn’t your husband?
‘… but sooner or later you have to forget it, and start to live your life again. If you need help, Annie, have the sense to ask for it. And if it’s something else, tell me and stop taking it out on the kids.’
He broke off, and the silence closed down again. He had given her the opening, deliberately. But Annie knew that she couldn’t find the right words to deny what was happening, or to convince him that everything was all right, after all.
Martin sighed, and turned away from her. ‘What needs doing now?’
‘You could bath the boys and put them to bed.’
‘Of course I will, if that’s any help.’
He went out and closed the door behind him, and in a moment Annie heard the three of them talking and then laughing in the bathroom. In solitude she finished clearing the kitchen and then she scoured the sink until it shone at her.
Later, when the boys were asleep, Martin and Annie sat down opposite one another at the kitchen table and ate their evening meal together.
Talk, Annie willed herself. Talk to him. But she couldn’t think of anything to say that might not touch on the dangerous things, and she was afraid that if they came close to the truth her fragile defences would break down, and all the misery and the guilty happiness would come spilling out. She knew how much the truth would hurt Martin, and she recognized that she was more afraid of hurting him than of anything else in the world. Even more than the darkness of her dreams, and the emptiness she discovered when she woke up and found that Steve was gone from her side.
And so they sat in silence in the pool of light spreading over the table, while Martin unseeingly turned the pages of Architectural Review.
After supper, when the washing up was done, Martin said that he had some drawings that needed urgent work. He took his bag and went upstairs to his studio at the top of the house.
Annie didn’t know how long she had been sitting in her place, unmoving, before the telephone rang. She stood up automatically and went to answer it, thinking as she crossed the floor that it was sure to be someone for Martin, something to do with whatever he was working on upstairs. There was an extension in the studio, but Annie lifted the kitchen receiver from its hook on the wall and said, ‘Hello?’
She heard the rapid pips of a payphone, and then Steve’s low voice.
‘Annie.’
She leant against the kitchen wall, her breath taken away with her relief that she had picked up the phone after all, and not left it for Martin.
‘You can’t ring me here.’
‘I just have.’
She knew just where he was, seeing him more clearly than the kitchen tiles and the children’s drawings thumb-tacked to the wall beside the telephone. He was in the long corridor outside the orthopaedic ward, where two grey plastic hoods shielded the public telephones. The lights would already be dimmed for the night, making shadows in the corners. She imagined the hated crutches resting against the wall, as he steadied himself with his free hand. And then the shape of his hand, the warmth of it.
‘What would you have done if Martin had answered? Pretended it was a wrong number, or something stupid like that?’
‘I had to talk to you. Annie, are you listening? I don’t want you to be jealous of Vicky. I don’t want you to be jealous or afraid about anything, or anybody, because there’s no need.’ He was talking very quickly, his voice so low that it was almost a whisper. Annie closed her eyes on the kitchen and strained to hear what he was saying. ‘I wanted just to tell you, before you go to sleep. I love you. Remember.’
She remembered the little side room of the old ward, and the way that they had held on to one another. He hadn’t asked her for anything in return, then. He had even stopped her from saying anything.
Now she had the sense that the old, silent dialogue had swelled in volume. It grew insistently loud so that her whole body reverberated with it and, at last, she had to give voice to it. ‘I know,’ she answered him. And then, helplessly, ‘I love you too.’
She heard, at the other end of the line, his sharply exhaled breath.
There was nothing for either of them to say, beyond that.
The silent words had been spoken, and there was no point in voicing the others that came rushing after them into the physical distance that separated them. ‘I wish I could touch you,’ he said.
‘Soon,’ Annie promised him.
‘Goodnight, my love.’ He was gone then, and Annie stood with the receiver in her hand listening to the purr of the dialling tone. As she replaced it she looked up at the ceiling and then she realized that she had been whispering, as if Martin might hear her, although he was two floors above. Whispering, and pretending, and not talking in case the most innocent-sounding topic accidentally touched on the truth. Deceiving and lying, even though it was by omission. That was what this joy inside her had led her to.
With her hand outstretched, groping across her own kitchen as if she were half blind, Annie found her way back to her chair. She sat hunched over, with her arms wrapped around her chest. Just to hear Steve’s voice, tonight, made her unbearably happy, and the assurances that they had given each other made her blood swirl dizzyingly in her veins.
But the same happiness stabbed her as she looked around the kitchen because she knew that it was hopeless, and that she was trapped here by Martin and their children and the layers of love and habit that they had built up and sealed together over the years.
Exultation and misery ran together and coalesced into a choking knot that lay like a stone underneath Annie’s heart. At last, still moving like an old woman, she went upstairs and undressed ready for bed. She lay down and the sheets felt cold and clammy against her skin. She drew her knees up to her chest and hunched over the painful knot.
‘I don’t know what to do,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t know what to do.’
Seven
Tibby had gone into a special hospital for her rest.
When Annie went to see her she was struck by its difference from the big general hospital where she had been treated herself. The rooms and corridors here were carpeted, there were pictures on the walls, and the sitting rooms were pretty and cosy. There was no medicinal smell, and even the nurses’ dresses contrived not to look like uniforms.
Tibby seemed happy.
‘It’s just like home,’ she smiled, ‘without any of the responsibilities.’
Her face was bright, but in the depths of the big chintz-covered armchair that Annie had settled her in she looked shrunken and brittle.
‘That’s good,’ Annie said cheerfully. ‘It seems like a nice place.’
There was no doubt now about the progress of her mother’s illness. The cancer was inoperable, and although the doctors’ estimates were deliberately vague they were beginning to talk in terms of weeks rather than months. Tibby knew exactly what was happening to her, and she had accepted it with silent graceful courage. The hospice’s aim was simply to make her as comfortable as possible, and to help her to enjoy the time that was left.
‘When would you like to come home again?’ Annie asked her.
The doctors had told them that, for a while longer at least, Tibby could choose whether she wanted to be in the hospice or in her own home.
‘Oh dear, I don’t know. It’s so comfortable in here. But I feel very lazy, not doing a thing. I’m still quite capable. I’m just afraid that Jim won’t be managing in the house without me, and I daren’t think about the garden. There’s the roses, you know.’
Annie thought of the big corner garden and the shaggy heads of the old-fashioned roses that sprawled over the walls. Tibby liked to prune her roses in March, and to begin her régime of spraying and feeding. It was quite likely that she wouldn’t see this year’s mass of pink and white and gold, or catch the evening scent of them through the windows as she moved about in the awkward, old-fashioned kitchen. Annie looked down at her own hands, turning them to examine the palms, as if she could see something that mattered there.
‘Don’t worry about the house,’ she managed to say. ‘Dad can cope perfectly well. I went yesterday, and it looks the same as it always does. And if you’d like me to do the roses I can, very easily. Or Martin will.’
Two dialogues, again, Annie thought. We sit here talking about the roses and the dusting, and both of us are thinking, Why must you die? Why is it Tibby, and why now? There are a hundred other things, a thousand other things to say. She began in a rush, ‘Tibby, I want to …’
But her mother took her hand, squeezing it briefly before replacing it in Annie’s lap. It was as clear a way of silencing her as if she had said, ‘I don’t want to talk about it. Forgive me?’
Aloud, Tibby said mildly, ‘Well. Perhaps I’ll stay here just this week. And then I think I should get home.’
‘All right,’ Anne acquiesced. ‘Of course you must go home whenever you feel like it.’
They sat and talked for a little while longer in the pleasant room.
Tibby wanted, more than anything else, to hear about her grandsons. She leaned forward in her armchair, eager for the little snippets of news. Thomas had just joined a local cub pack and Annie described how he had gone off to his first meeting the night before, resplendent and full of pride in his new green uniform.
Tibby nodded and smiled. ‘They’re growing up so quickly, both of them.’
She’s seen you grow up. Seen her grandchildren.
As she tried to fathom the real expression behind her mother’s smile Annie heard Steve’s words again. She remembered the blind fear that she had felt herself when she thought that she was going to die, but more vividly still she remembered the bitterness of having to leave so much unfinished. Did Tibby feel that now? And when Tibby looked around the sunny sitting room with its chintz covers and faint smell of polish, did she feel the same sharp sense of how precious and how beautiful all of it was?
Tibby looked smaller and frailer than before, but her hair was set and she was wearing her own neat, unemphatic clothes. She was still Tibby herself, yet for all the closeness Annie had believed there to be between her mother and herself she couldn’t gauge what she felt or needed now. The careful, light conversation about the garden and the boys ran on, and Annie had the disorientating sense that neither of them was listening to a word of it.
She wanted to shout at her, Don’t go. We need you, all of us. Talk to me.
‘… But with the price of container-grown shrubs nowadays,’ Tibby sighed, ‘what else can you do … ?’
‘I know. But I’ve never had your luck or knack with cuttings.’
I talked to Steve, down there in the blackness. I still could, if I would let it happen, if there weren’t so many other things, such immutable things.
Tibby leaned farther forward and touched Annie’s arm.
‘Are you sure you’re all right, darling? You look a bit drawn in the face, to me.’
I’ve fallen in love, Tibby, with a stranger. I’d walk out of here and go straight to him if I could, if only I could.
‘I’m fine. The specialist says it will take a little time before I’m thoroughly fit again, but everything has mended perfectly well.’
I do it too, of course. I don’t talk either, not to Tibby, not even to Martin. Only to Steve, and he hears me whether I say the words or not.
I wish I was going to him now.
Annie smiled at her mother, with the conviction that they were both close to tears.
‘I must make a move, darling.’
‘Of course you must. Thomas comes out at four o’clock, doesn’t he?’
When Tibby held out her hand Annie saw that her mother’s sapphire engagement ring was slipping on her thin finger. Tibby instinctively turned it back into place with her thumb. Annie leant over and kissed her cheek, noticing the unfamiliar smell of lacquer because Tibby’s hair had grown too sparse to hold her old style.
