Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection: Strangers, Bad Girls Good Women, A Woman of Our Times, All My Sins Remembered
didn’t see the bruises, or the unhealthy pallor of the rest of her skin, or the half-healed graze blurring the corner of her mouth. He saw the Annie he had imagined when her husband told him that she was going to live. Laughing, as she had been a moment ago, with her fair hair loose around her face. She had blue eyes and warmly coloured skin. She wasn’t beautiful, or even particularly striking, but she was full of life.
‘Look,’ Annie said.
She held out their linked hands to touch the tightly furled petals of the yellow chrysanthemum.
They looked at the flowers, and then at the simple things all around them, a plastic water jug and a glass, the chipped wooden locker, the curtains and the dingy view from the window. They were both thinking about the pain in the darkness, and their fear that they would never see anything so ordinary and beautiful again. Annie felt her happiness rising once more, rippling and ballooning outwards until she could have floated with it. She looked at Steve’s face and saw from the light in it that he felt it too.
They smiled at each other in their triumphant pride that they had survived. Steve lifted her hand and touched his mouth to her knuckles. For a moment there was nothing to say. They knew everything already, yet they had to begin all over again, here in the warm daylight.
When they did speak again the questions came spilling out together and they broke off together too, half embarrassed and half laughing, like adolescents.
‘Go on.’
‘No, you go on,’ Steve said.
‘I was just going to ask how you are. Is your leg bad?’
He told her briefly, shrugging it off. As he talked Annie listened to the familiar sound of his voice, trying to piece it together with his face and the shape of his head. His attractiveness surprised her. In her mind’s eye, down in the darkness, he had been a bigger, bulkier man with blunt, assured features. But this Steve was lean, and she guessed that before the accident he must have been very fit. His dark hair was cut short over his forehead, which made him look younger than the age she knew he was. There were marked frown lines between his dark eyebrows and more lines beside his mouth, but the mouth itself curled humorously. When he smiled, she found herself smiling back.
‘I know how you are,’ Steve told her.
‘How come?’
‘I’ve had regular bulletins. Mostly from the nurses, once from your surgeon. And your husband came to see me on Christmas Eve.’
‘Martin did?’ Annie was startled.
‘He told me that you were going to be all right. He said that you smiled at him.’
‘I don’t remember.’ Annie was thinking about the blur of the overhead lights and Brendan’s face looming over hers, the possessive pain. ‘I remember hearing the carol singers. My nurse told me afterwards that it was Christmas. What else did Martin say?’
‘He wanted to thank me for helping you through.’ There was an expression in Steve’s eyes that Annie couldn’t fathom. ‘I told him it wasn’t necessary, because we helped each other.’
‘Yes,’ Annie said.
The raw recollections gathered around them. Annie knew how badly she needed to talk to Steve. Not to Martin, because to tell him how it had been in the darkness would be to start at the beginning. It was only Steve who could exorcise it.
‘Are you still afraid?’ he asked, his voice gentle.
Annie looked around again, at the flowers on the locker and the curtains’ pattern. The radiance of the light had faded.
‘No, I’m not afraid. We’re safe in hospital, aren’t we? You said all along that we would be. Do you know what? The first thing I remember thinking, when I came round afterwards, with a tube in my throat, was, Steve said that they would come for us in time. I tried to reach out for your hand again, but I couldn’t move. I was afraid then. There were more tubes in my wrist. I could feel them touching my skin.’ Annie put her fingers up to touch the corner of her mouth. ‘I’m only afraid now when I dream. I dream that we’re buried again, and that we won’t be rescued. And that there’s no air, so we can’t breathe. I wake up choking, then. The worst dreams, nightmares, are the ones where I’m alone. You aren’t there.’
Steve took her hand and held it. He fitted his fingers between hers and clasped them to hold their palms together.
‘Remember?’ he demanded. ‘I was there. I’m here now.’ And then, as if she might reject the intimacy that that implied, he said quickly, ‘The dreams are only dreams. They’ll go away.’
‘Will you stay?’ Annie asked suddenly. ‘To talk?’ They had already talked so much. ‘Not now, I mean. But some time?’
‘Yes,’ he promised her. ‘I need that, too.’
He could hear someone walking down the ward. Not too long, the staff nurse had warned him when she showed him in. Steve let go of her hand. He tapped at the solid leg plaster under the folds of his bathrobe.
‘I’m going to be here for weeks,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Long after they’ve sent you back to the real world. I should think we’ll have plenty of time for conversation.’ He nodded past the curtains. ‘I’m in the next door ward. It links to this one via a charming day room. There are a great many vintage magazines and a dozen or so videotapes of bloodthirsty films. I can’t wait to show you round.’
Annie smiled at him. ‘I’ll look forward to that.’
The staff nurse came and began briskly pulling aside the curtains. Annie saw other beds across the ward, women looking over at her, more flowers.
‘Don’t tire her out, will you?’ the staff said. She looked pointedly at Steve and added, ‘Wouldn’t you be more comfortable in the chair?’ Meaning, Annie translated silently, ‘Don’t sit on the bed.’ She sensed Steve’s amusement answering her own.
‘I would,’ Steve said regretfully. ‘But I couldn’t lower myself into it. I’m going to hobble back now and leave Annie in peace. Will you help me?’
Annie recognized his charm. The nurse moved happily to take his arm.
‘I’ll be back as soon as they let me,’ he promised Annie. They began to shuffle slowly away. Without knowing why she did it, Annie told him, ‘Benjy and Tom are coming this afternoon. I haven’t seen them since it happened.’
Steve paused, looking back at her.
‘I’m glad they’re coming,’ he said gravely. Then the nurse led him away through the day room doors.
There were three hours to wait until afternoon visiting time. Annie made herself be patient.
One by one the women in the ward came over to talk to her. Two of them had been injured in the bombing. Others had already been discharged, and new patients unconnected with it had taken their places. Annie had the sense of other tragedies and losses, piling up within the hospital walls, each one obscured in its turn by the next.
She remembered that she had wanted to ask Steve if he felt angry. She looked towards the door, thinking about him. He had said that he would come back. The knowledge was a firm, steady point in the thoughts that moved like fish, directionless, inside her head.
At two-thirty exactly, Martin and the boys came in. They must have been waiting outside for visiting time to begin. Annie saw them immediately. They stood at the end of the new ward, looking around for her, Martin stooping protectively behind the children. Tom’s face was anxious and serious, but Benjy was swinging Martin’s hand and staring along the beds. Suddenly he pointed and called out.
‘There’s Mummy. There she is.’
Annie’s happiness swelled up again. She held out her free arm.
Tom came first. He ran to her and then stopped just short of the bed.
‘Are