Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection: Strangers, Bad Girls Good Women, A Woman of Our Times, All My Sins Remembered
looked like nursery hangings, reassuring in the dimmed light.
‘Yes,’ Annie said. ‘Thank you. Something to make me sleep.’
She slept at last, and it seemed that almost at once they came to wake her up again. The ward routine was already numbingly familiar. A group of doctors came and examined her, and then mumbled amongst themselves at the foot of her bed.
Annie was used to that now.
Their senior beamed at her, once the consultation was finished.
‘You’re doing very well, you know. Your kidney function is normal, and everything else is healing nicely.’
‘I want to do well,’ Annie told him, irresistibly reminded of school interviews with her headmistress. ‘I want to go home.’
‘Oh, I’m making no promises about that. Two or three weeks more with us, and then we’ll see, mmm?’
Annie nodded patiently. Her recovery, going home again to Martin and the children, that was in her power now. That was what she would focus on. She stretched out under the bedclothes, feeling the pull in the tendons as she moved her feet, and the ache in her shoulder.
The hours of the morning crept by. The lunch trays were brought round and then cleared away again, the tea trolley clinked up and down, and the ward settled into its early-afternoon somnolence. Annie lay against her pillows, watching the woman in the bed opposite with her knitting, trying to doze. Unable to sleep, she settled the radio headphones over her head and listened for ten minutes to an incomprehensible play. Another ten minutes passed, then twenty, and Annie found that she was staring at the day room door. Then, without being aware of having made any decision, she found herself pushing back the bedclothes. She put on her blue dressing gown, tied it carefully, and walked across to the door.
Steve was sitting in the day room. He had been watching the sky through the tall windows. It was a windy day, and towers of grey cloud swept behind the roofs and chimneys of the buildings opposite. There were half a dozen other people in the room, their voices competing with the sound of the television.
Annie stood beside his chair and he looked up at her.
How stupid, she thought, to try to deny him. She wanted to put her hand on his shoulder but she stopped herself.
‘I thought you weren’t coming,’ Steve said.
‘I wasn’t going to.’
He nodded, and she wondered if he did understand why. A chair had been drawn up close to his, ready for her, and she moved it back a little way before she sat down. Steve studied her face. The colour and light that he had seen in it yesterday had faded. It looked closed up now, as if the Annie he knew had retreated somewhere.
‘But you did come?’
She bent her head and her hair fell forward. Steve saw the line of her scalp at the parting, and the childish vulnerability touched him.
‘It seemed … mulish, not to.’ Then she looked up again, her eyes meeting his directly. ‘Steve. If I seemed to make you a … promise, of some kind, yesterday, I’m going to tell you now that I can’t keep it.’
He saw the resolution in her face. Annie would be resolute. The certainty of that increased his regard for her.
‘It wasn’t a promise. I thought it was an acknowledgement.’
She moved her hands, quickly, to silence him.
‘It seemed to me that we were going beyond what we could naturally be. Friends.’
Steve smiled crookedly. ‘Is there any definition of natural, in our circumstances?’
In the quiet that followed Annie felt the quicksands shifting around them. She thought of the ground that they had already covered together and the ways ahead, unmarked. There was only one path she could allow herself to take, and that led her away from Steve. Her face changed, showing her uncertainty.
‘Or any definition of friends?’ he persisted.
‘Oh, yes,’ Annie said. ‘I can define friends. Friends are less than we were, yesterday.’ She pressed on, talking rapidly, before he could interrupt her. ‘The doctor told me this morning that I’m getting better very quickly. I shall be able to go home in two weeks, perhaps. When I do go, it will be back to Martin, and our children. I love my husband.’ She lifted her chin as she spoke to emphasize the words. ‘I don’t want to deceive him, or hurt him. When I go home, I want to make everything the same as it was before.’
‘Annie. It can’t ever be the same.’
Steve was sure that her words were a denial of what she felt. He looked at her thin, pale face, trying to read her thoughts, but she had closed it up to him. She looked very small, hunched up in her chair, her physical frailty seeming at odds with the importance that she held for him.
He wanted to reach out for her. He wanted to make her say what she was denying to herself, and in his turn to tell her how much he needed her. Steve remembered, too vividly, the blankness of his life that had confronted him in the darkness. Listening to Annie, and talking to her, had given him his own reason to hold on. Now, hardly believably, they were here together. Steve’s eyes left Annie’s face and he looked around the ugly room. The other patients seemed fixed in their chairs, resigned and hopeless. He felt the luck, by contrast, of simply being alive. It was sad that these motionless people with their pinched faces couldn’t share the exultation. He knew that Annie felt it, and he experienced a shock of anger with her for her refusal, now, to admit the chance of happiness.
But then, to admit their own chance of happiness was to deny her family’s. His anger disappeared as quickly as it had come. Annie was unselfish, that was all. Steve’s crooked smile lifted again. He had been selfish all his life, and it would be ironic, now, if by being different he was to lose her.
The air in the day room was stale, and the windows were firmly closed. Beyond the glass the grey masses of clouds whipped past, the noise of the wind only emphasizing the stifling stillness inside the hospital.
Whatever came, Steve thought, he wanted Annie to know how much he cared about her. That much selfishness, at least, he would allow himself. He listened to the voices of the television and a woman three chairs away, complaining about her treatment. The wind battered at the hospital windows, and Steve sat silently in his place. He wanted to stumble forward to reach Annie, taking hold of her and drawing her back to him. His hands tightened on the arms of his chair, stopping himself. He could only have done that if they had been alone, if they had been fit, if everything else had been different. Nor could he find the words, here in the day room, that didn’t sound over-used, shop-worn. For all his adult life, Steve had known what to say to women. He had told them what they had wanted to hear and they had accepted it. He had asked for what he had wanted, and it had been given to him.
Steve wondered, now, whether he had been disliked as much as he had deserved. Perhaps. Or perhaps the long procession of girls had used him, too. He thought of Cass and her half-puzzled, half-defiant air. Cass hadn’t used him. Steve tasted the sourness of dislike for himself, thick on his tongue.
And now, confronted with Annie, he didn’t know what to say. He was afraid that everything he could try would sound like a gambit. All the words had a coarse, locker-room echo.
He looked at her, sitting withdrawn from him in her blue dressing gown. A fair-haired woman with blue eyes that changed colour with the light. Not young any more, without Cass’s loveliness or Vicky’s direct female charge. But Annie possessed a kind of beauty that Steve had never seen before. At the thought of losing her, of letting her walk away from him, anger and longing and jealousy boiled up inside him. He shifted in his chair, feeling his physical weakness and his incapacity to reach her.
I love you.
No, not even the simplicity of that would do. The words were too fragile to say aloud in this listening room with its teacups and ashtrays and dog-eared magazines.
‘Annie.’
He