Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection: Strangers, Bad Girls Good Women, A Woman of Our Times, All My Sins Remembered
Annie thought, not knowing truly what she felt about the prospect. She would be going home, soon.
‘Tell me,’ she insisted.
He settled his arm more comfortably around her.
‘Well. Let’s think. I went to a meeting this morning with the new hotel people in Bayswater. They want to open the place in time for the summer. There isn’t a chance of that, not with the level of work that they want done …’
Annie listened, with her eyes shut, imagining that they were at home. They would be sitting on the shabby chesterfield in front of the fire. The cat would be asleep on the bentwood rocking chair opposite them. The boys asleep upstairs. Newspapers and magazines stacked up on the lower shelf of the television table. The grandmother clock that stood in the hall ticking comfortably. The curtains would be drawn, shutting out the threats that stalked in the darkness outside. Martin went on talking softly while Annie conjured up the certainty of home.
At last he whispered, ‘Are you asleep?’
She shook her head. ‘No. Just thinking.’
Annie opened her eyes and he leant over to kiss her. He fanned her hair out with his fingers and turned her face so that their mouths met.
‘Hurry up and get better. I want you back home. I need you so much, Annie. I love you.’
Love. Need. The dues to be paid.
Annie nodded, unable to say anything.
When Martin had gone she lay still, looking at the flowers on her locker and at the faded, flat shapes on the curtain behind. The fresh ones were so vivid. She could feel the sappy strength of the stems between her fingers, and the green, pollen-rich scent held amongst the tight petals was stronger than the reek of the hospital. It was only by contrast that the curtain flowers seemed drab. The colours and shapes would have been satisfying enough, if they had been allowed to stand alone.
Annie looked away from them, turning her back on the flowers and the unwelcome analogy that they forced upon her.
She made the decision, as she lay there, that she wouldn’t go to the day room tomorrow. There would be no need, then, to shoulder any guilt. She would stay in the ward all day, and so she needn’t see Steve at all. She could stop what was happening, stop what she was afraid of now, simply by not seeing him at all.
Martin walked out of the main doors of the hospital. The cold wind funnelling between the high buildings seemed sharper still after the airless ward, and he ducked his head and moved briskly. His car was parked in a side street nearby, but when he reached it he made no move to drive away. His attempt at briskness had petered out, and he sat instead staring through the windscreen into the darkness, his hands loosely gripping the wheel.
Annie was getting better. Every day he could see the changes, and he looked carefully for the latest proof that she was stronger. Yet the new strength didn’t bring her back again. He had believed it would, while he sat holding her hand among the possessive machines, and now he saw that the expectation had been too simple. The bomb had done more than tear Annie’s body. It had blown a crater between the two of them, and Martin knew that he couldn’t fling himself across it.
Annie had suffered the pain and the fear, and he had not. However much he willed himself to allow and understand, he did not and he accepted that he could not.
The man did. Steve did, because he had shared it with her. It was absurd, Martin thought with sudden bitterness, to envy him for that.
Martin’s hands slipped off the wheel and hung at his sides. The fingers opened and clenched, as if he wanted to reach for something, but it eluded his grasp. He was thinking of the way that Annie had slipped away from him. She was there, the shape of her filling out every day, but she had gone away somewhere.
Just for a few seconds, Martin let his head drop forward and rest against the wheel. His own concerns were with the mundane double load of business, and of keeping himself and the boys fed and clean. How could he guess from that vantage point what Annie’s concerns were, who had nearly died? And who had shared that almost-death with him?
With Steve, Martin made himself repeat.
He jerked his head up and groped for his car keys. He drove home again, too fast, trying to deny the current of his thoughts.
Annie was dreaming.
The darkness had absorbed her again and it stretched all round her, limitless. It wasn’t empty darkness. Rather it was tangible, heavy and threatening, and sharp with broken edges that pressed against her. The darkness was utterly silent, but at the same time it held the threat of a terrible cataclysmic noise that might erupt at any instant. The noise would bring the weight, crashing downwards, to extinguish her. She wanted to move, to raise herself on to all fours and then to crawl, to stagger upright and then to run, lurching away, in all her terror. But there was no possibility of movement, no hope of escape. The silence was absolute. There was only Annie herself, trapped in her weakness. No one would rescue her, because no one else existed. No one could comfort her, and when the noise came at last she would be utterly alone. She felt the icy cold in her chest, deep in her heart, and the stick-like fragility of her outstretched arms and legs.
And then she heard the noise begin.
It was a low rumble, a long way off, beneath her and over her head, terrible and implacable and final.
Annie woke up with her scream frozen in her throat. It was always the same dream, and she always woke at the same instant.
She lay with her knees drawn up and her fists clenched, shivering in the grip of terror, waiting for it to relax as she had learned that it would. Her back and her shoulders were clammy with sweat.
Steve.
The thought of him filled her mind. She longed for him to be with her, with a desperate, almost unbearable longing. She wanted him to lie down beside her and put his hands over her eyes. She wanted him to put his mouth to her ear and whisper, as he had done in the darkness that now seemed less fearsome than the darkness of her nightmare. Steve saw and understood, and it was unthinkable that he should not be with her now.
Annie sat up in bed. Her nightdress clung icily to her skin, and she pushed the damp weight of her hair back from her face.
She stared across the ward to the day room door. Beyond it was the day room itself, in darkness, with the television’s eye briefly extinguished. And beyond that, in the ward that mirrored this room, Steve would be lying asleep.
She saw his face, every line of it clear. She felt his hands holding hers, and the touch of his forehead making a circuit that she had wanted never to break. She thought of how he had kissed her cheek, that first afternoon, and today he had smiled at her like a lover.
She fought against the longing.
She let her head fall forward against her drawn-up knees, hugging herself, almost welcoming the stab of pain from the wound in her stomach. They couldn’t possess one another now. That they had done so already, tenderly and brutally in the darkness through the touch of their hands, that was only the cruelty of the trick that circumstance had played on them.
A trick, an irony. Life’s little irony, in the face of death.
Annie raised her head again. The sweat on her cheeks had dried and they shone with tears now. She stared down the ward as if she could see through the walls and doors that separated her from Steve.
‘Damn you,’ she whispered helplessly. ‘Damn you.’
A student nurse checking the ward had seen that Annie was awake. She came and stood beside Annie’s bed in her pink dress.
‘Are you all right?’
‘Yes,’ Annie said. ‘I had a dream. Just a bad dream.’
The girl moved to straighten her pillows and the crumpled bedclothes.
‘Shall I bring you a drink? Some hot milk, and something to help you sleep?’