Strangers, page 25
‘I’ll come in tomorrow to see you.’
‘Couldn’t you bring Tom and Benjy with you?’
‘Won’t they tire you too much? They wear me out.’
‘I’d like to see them.’
How many more times will there be?
‘Of course I will. Goodbye, love. Sleep well.’
Annie settled her mother against her cushions again and as she left she felt her eyes on her back, greedy, looking through her at the past and into the future that Tibby wouldn’t see for herself.
Annie drove home with the hard brightness of tears behind her own eyes.
On the same evening, Martin and Annie went to do the big monthly shop at the supermarket. As they always had done in the past, they went on late-opening night and left the boys at home under Audrey’s supervision.
It was the first time they had made the trip together since Annie’s return from hospital. Along the clogged urban route she sat in the passenger seat watching the shopfronts flick past. Her face was turned away from him, but she sensed Martin glancing sideways at her, frowning in the silence that hung between them. They reached the big supermarket and Martin parked in the middle of one of the long lines of cars. They walked side by side over the pitted ground towards the entrance, skirting the puddles and the empty, abandoned wire trolleys. Even the air seemed gritty, smelling of diesel exhaust fumes, and greasy onions from the hamburger stall near the shop doors.
Annie was tired, and her legs felt suddenly so heavy that she wondered whether they would support her up and down the crowded aisles with the shopping trolley. Martin’s pace quickened and she had to hurry to keep up with him.
‘Don’t walk so fast,’ she called and he snapped back, without slowing down, ‘Let’s get it over with.’
Annie felt his anger, and her own rose sluggishly through her tiredness.
Is this what it is? she thought. Is this what I’m trying to hold on to?
The automatic doors yawned in front of them, neon-lit, and hissed open. Martin reached for a trolley and swung it round with a vicious clatter. Without speaking they wound their way through the crowds and the piled-up shopping to the end aisle and began to work their way along the shelves.
The harsh overhead lights hurt Annie’s eyes, and the colours of the endless lines of tins and packets danced up and down in front of them. She heard herself repeating a silent litany, eggs, butter, yoghurt, cheese. Love, loyalty, duty, habit.
Martin was moving along the opposite shelf and she saw his mouth set in a straight line and the stiff, angry tilt of his head. Suddenly, with a molten heat that flooded all through her, she hated him. She turned her back on him and stared blindly at the shelf at eye-level, where the red and blue and orange packs shouted their rival claims at her. She reached up, still with the heat of anger flushing her face, and took down a packet of breakfast cereal. She dropped it into the trolley and then another, and followed them with a packet of the sugary variety that Ben insisted on.
Fruit juice, skimmed milk. Routine, responsibility, today, tomorrow. Endlessly. Groping through the fog of her anger Annie tried to recall the certainty that had possessed her under the rubble. She had been sure then that her life and its order was precious. The certainty had evaporated. Now, in the hideous supermarket with its tides of defeated shoppers, she felt the structure of her life silently crumbling. She stood in the rubble of it, as trapped as she had been by the bombed wreckage of her Christmas store.
Martin turned around with an armful of tinned food and saw her face. Annie knew that her expression fanned his own anger.
‘Come on,’ he said sourly. ‘I don’t want to spend all night in here.’
She moved again with a jerk and they worked on along their lines of shelving, not looking at one another and separated by the other loitering shoppers and their cumbersome trolleys.
At the far end of the shop they turned the corner to start the next aisle. Annie’s pace was slower and Martin accidentally ran the wheel of the heavy trolley into her heel bone. The pain shot up her leg, so intense for a second that it made her eyes water.
‘Sorry,’ Martin said, still without looking at her.
The pain receded as quickly as it had come and in its wake Annie’s anger intensified. She had to clench her fists to control her longing to lash out with them, first at Martin and then at all the tins and bottles and their jaunty labels, sweeping them all together into a broken pile on the supermarket floor. Her anger spread like hot spilt liquid to flood over the other shoppers who blocked her path and stared past her with blank faces, over the supermarket and the life that it represented for her, and everything that had happened since the bombing. The anger was so potent that the current of it sapped her strength and she found herself weak and trembling. She leant against the corner of the shelf to steady herself as it engulfed her and swept her along with it. Under the bald lights and the big orange banners that shouted, ‘SAVE’, Annie knew the first real anger and bitterness against the bombers for what they had done to her. In that instant she hated the world, and the life she led in it, and everything there was except for Steve.
And she was angry because she was separated from him.
As soon as she realized it the flood of her anger turned. The currents swirled and changed direction and then, as if it had been no more than a trickle that evaporated in the heat of understanding, it disappeared.
Annie looked in bewilderment at a row of jam jars, staring at the plum and dull crimson and speckled scarlet of the jam in the glass containers as if it were entirely new to her.
I can’t stay here, like this, she thought with the painful clear-sightedness that her anger had left in its wake.
I’ll have to go.
I’ll have to leave Martin, and go to him.
The knowledge made her shiver. It brought her neither happiness nor relief. A few yards away, over the heads of the crowd, she could see Martin plodding down the aisle. His mouth was set in the same grim line.
Annie’s legs felt as boneless as the jam in the glass jars but she made herself follow him, mechanically picking the family groceries off the shelves as she went.
At last they reached the check-out lines and they stood in silence, inching forward until their turn came. Martin unloaded the trolley and Annie packed the goods into boxes. Eggs, butter, yoghurt, cheese. To feed the family. Annie was shaking as if she had a fever.
Outside, the sky was rimmed orange-brown with the muddy glow of street-lamps. They picked their way past the puddles again to the car, and piled the boxes of shopping in over the tailgate. Still they had spoken hardly an unnecessary word. Annie shivered convulsively, pulling her coat around her, and then slid gratefully into the car as Martin banged the door open for her.
Both doors slammed again, isolating them in the rubber- and plastic-scented box. The usual litter of toys and drawings discarded by the boys drifted over the back seat. Martin fumbled with the keys in the ignition and clicked on the headlights. The light reflected upwards and threw unnatural shadows into his eyesockets and the angles of his jawline. Annie waited miserably, without thinking, for the car engine to splutter and jerk them into reverse. But Martin sat still, with his hands braced on the steering wheel. He seemed to be staring ahead into the orange-tinged darkness.
And then, slowly, he turned to her and said, ‘I want to know what’s wrong with you.’
Annie shook her head from side to side, unable to speak.
Martin’s voice rose. ‘I want to know. Say something, can’t you, even if it’s only fuck off?’
‘I don’t know what to say.’ Even in her own ears Annie’s response sounded thin and pathetic. Martin’s knuckles went white as his fists tightened on the wheel.
‘Why don’t you bloody know what to say? I’m your husband. Have you forgotten that?’
‘No, I haven’t forgotten.’
‘Talk to me then. I’ve tried to be as patient and understanding as I can. I’ve waited, and held off, and hoped you might get round to mentioning why you look as though we all turn your stomach. Why your face never cracks into a smile any more, and why you can’t even bring yourself close enough to me to exchange the time of day. Why, Annie?’
Martin’s questions came spilling out, the words tangling with one another, and she saw a tiny fleck of spit at the corner of his mouth catching the light. His tongue darted it away.
‘Why is it? I want to know where you’ve gone. I want to hear it from you. Say something.’
He was shouting now. Annie saw a couple passing the car turn back to stare curiously, their faces white patches in the gloom. She had no anger left, nothing to match Martin’s. And she knew that she had no reason to answer his rage with her own, because she recognized the portrait that he painted of her.
‘I’m sorry.’ Self-dislike and despair muted her voice.
Martin spat again, ‘Sorry? Jesus, you’re sorry. Look, I’m sorry that you were hurt, and so badly frightened, and that you were ill and in pain and subjected to all those things in the hospital afterwards. But that’s all over now, Annie. You’ve got to start up again. Can’t you understand? If you want me, and the kids, and everything we had before, you’ve got to do it now.’
Annie looked down at her hands in her lap, twisting her fingers together like pale stalks. Martin is right, and wrong, she thought. I should talk to him, of course I should, but there is nothing I could possibly say.
‘Annie.’
His hands dropped from the steering wheel and they shot out and grabbed her. He shook her, and her head wobbled. Annie knew that he wanted to hit her, and she knew then how desperate he was for her reaction. She jerked defensively to face him and managed to whisper through stiff lips, ‘Leave me alone, can’t you? Just, just leave me alone.’
Martin’s hands dropped heavily to his sides. They were silent for a long minute, looking at one another in the head-lamps’ inverted light. Annie was ironically reminded of the old days when they had quarrelled violently, like this, and then the passion of their reconciliations had reflected the violence back again. A wave of exhausted sadness and regret washed over her.
‘Look. Are you ill? Do you need to get help? A psychiatrist, I mean, Annie.’
‘No,’ Annie said. ‘I’m not mad. I wasn’t, not while it was happening and not afterwards and not now. I don’t need to have my head looked at.’
Martin exhaled, a long, ragged breath. ‘In that case, is it Steve?’
Annie went cold. He had been thinking about it, about them, she realized. She had never mentioned his name, and if it was just a wild guess of Martin’s, wouldn’t he have qualified it somehow? Wouldn’t he have said, Is it anything to do with the man you were with, in there? Steve? Is it to do with him?
Instead of that he had just quietly asked her, as if the question had always been there, waiting.
Tick, tick. Annie heard the seconds whispering around them in the vinyl interior of their car.
‘No.’ Until the word came, she didn’t know what it would be. ‘It’s nothing to do with him.’
And then the sadness took her by the throat, so forcibly that she wanted to drop her head against the seat back, draw her knees up to her chest and let the sobs break out. But because she had said, No, she kept her neck rigid, and went on staring with dry eyes out into the darkness. I’ve done it now, she thought. I have begun the lies. She saw a net of them, drawing in ahead of her. And would the net split open in the end and let the truth out, as she had envisaged through the flood of anger inside the supermarket?
To leave Martin, and go to Steve?
With sudden briskness Martin turned the key in the ignition and the engine came to life. He swung the wheel and the car nosed out of the car park before he glanced sideways at Annie again. Seeing her face he dropped his hand briefly on to her knee. ‘I’m sorry I lost my temper,’ he said. ‘It hasn’t been very easy for me, either, do you see? I thought you were dead, and then I was afraid that you would die. And now, when it should be all over, you’ve gone somewhere and left me behind.’
The car moved slowly forwards in a double line of traffic. Martin drove one-handed and took Annie’s hand in the other. In a low voice he said, ‘I don’t want to be without you.’
Annie opened her mouth, afraid that her voice would crack, but she found the ability somehow to whisper, ‘I know that.’
Martin drove steadily on. I don’t want you to lie to me, either, he could have added. But strangely, the baldness of Annie’s denial had come as a relief. He saw clearly through it, and saw that she wanted to protect him from being hurt. The carefulness and the irrationality of it touched him, and he felt a warm wash of affection for her that was nothing to do with anger or bitterness.
Nothing had happened yet, he told himself. Perhaps, even, nothing would.
They followed the familiar route, with Annie’s cold fingers still gripped in her husband’s warm ones. They reached home, and they went in and unpacked the shopping side by side in the kitchen.
And later, when they went to bed, Martin lay still for a moment in the darkness and then he reached out for her, as he had always done in the past after they had quarrelled. His hand stroked her shoulder, and then he moved to fit himself into the curve of her back.
‘Don’t be angry.’
‘I’m not angry.’
She was reminded again of the times before. They had always made up their differences, and they had drawn closer because of them. Not now, Annie thought, because of the lie that they had already started. Martin’s hand moved again, to her waist and the bony point of her hips, warming her. His fingers traced the ridge of bone under the skin and he whispered, ‘Poor love. Come here to me.’
His hands coaxed her. Annie thought, He’s good and generous. Truer than I deserve.
For all the weight of her sadness, it was a relief to turn inwards to him. Their bodies met along their full length and his mouth touched hers. Annie felt her husband stir against her. She let her head rest on his shoulder, her face turned to the warmth of his throat. His hands moved, patiently, coaxing her. Annie held herself still, feeling that the anxiety and guilt and sadness of the day were just contained within the leaky package of her body.
But Martin knew her body too. Slowly and gently he worked on it until her fear of his intrusion melted and became, at last, fear that he would draw back again. Her mind stopped revolving around in its tight, overworked circles as the warmth spread through her veins. Annie’s mouth opened and she tasted his skin, following the line of his jaw with her mouth. Under the point of it she felt his pulse flicker against her tongue. A half-forgotten urgency sharpened itself inside her.
‘Martin.’
‘Not yet,’ he whispered. ‘Not yet.’
‘Please.’
The note in her voice broke through his control. He took her wrists and held her so that she couldn’t move. He looked down into her face for an instant and then he fitted himself inside her. It was easy, and certain, because they had known one another for so long. She forgot, as he moved and she lifted her hips to answer him, all the questions and their bleak answers. The ripples of internal pleasure were spreading and Annie let herself be submerged in them. Ever since she had come home to Martin she had felt stiff and cold and now, however briefly, the feelings were gone. She closed her eyes and let their bodies take her over. The peak she was struggling for reared for a long moment beyond her grasp, then within her grasp, and then she had reached it and conquered it and the sharpness of it stabbed within her until at last it melted and ran away down the steep slopes into the level plain of satisfaction.
Annie felt the tears melt too behind her eyes. They ran down her face and into her hair, hot against Martin’s cheeks until he rubbed them away with his fingers and kissed her eyelids, and then he took her face between his hands and kissed it and whispered to her, ‘We’ll be all right, Annie. You see, we’ll be all right.’
She held him in turn as he moved inside her again, until he cried out with his mouth against hers, and then they lay in a different silence, wrapped in each other’s arms in the quiet room. Annie heard Benjamin in his bed across the corridor, turning over and then shouting out something in his sleep. She was very tired, and she knew from Martin’s breathing that he was still awake, listening to her. The circular treadmill of her thoughts began to rotate again until she was forming the word, Steve, and the picture of him lying in the hospital ward, watching the ceiling.
I must decide, she told herself. I must think. Do whatever is for the best.
But she was drifting now, unpinned by exhaustion, almost asleep.
Not now. Soon, I will. I must.
For the first time since she had come home from hospital, Annie fell asleep before Martin. He held her for a long time, not wanting to move in case he disturbed her. The day of the bombing, when he had struggled with fallen masonry to try and reach her, had taken her away from him. It was only now, in this moment of closeness, that he realized just how far. He wanted her back more than anything in the world.
Nothing had changed, Annie discovered in the days that followed, except that the atmosphere in the house was easier. They tried to show one another, with little, unintrusive gestures, that there was a truce. On Annie’s part it was no more than cooking a favourite dinner or buying a special bottle of wine from the off-licence on the corner, but she did her best to appear to be cheerful as they ate and drank, even when her heart was heavy. In his turn Martin brought home an armful of daffodils to fill the clear glass jug that stood on the kitchen dresser, or the latest copy of a magazine that Annie considered too expensive to buy out of her housekeeping. They thanked each other briefly, almost shyly, but they didn’t try to go beyond that. There were still silences, but they judged separately that the silences were more companionable than hostile, and they didn’t try to fill them artificially.
Thomas and Benjamin, with their childish perceptiveness, noticed the difference at once.
‘I think you’re better now, Mummy,’ Thomas said and Annie smiled at him, happy with his confidence.
