Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection: Strangers, Bad Girls Good Women, A Woman of Our Times, All My Sins Remembered
David, or Ian. It could be either of them, anyone she had met or never met, with his body pressed to hers, and it would make no difference.
Somehow, cruelly and yet with such potent force that even now it melted her, Steve had become the only man she knew. The only man she wanted, and he wasn’t there. Annie lay quite still while her husband made love to her, and she felt nothing. And then when it was over she lay in the dark and listened to his breathing, like a stranger’s.
Martin had half-turned away, but he didn’t fall asleep.
Annie had been there in his arms, and in that sense she had been as generous as she always was, but for all the intimacy of touch he hadn’t been able to reach her. He could sense her separateness now, and it silenced him. They lay with a cold space between them, holding their feelings painfully apart.
Suddenly, Martin was angry. A knot of it gathered inside him, focused on Steve. He couldn’t be angry with Annie, not yet, because she had been through so much.
He saw Steve’s face as he had been on Christmas Eve, his face dark and drawn against the hospital pillows. And he remembered the little space where Steve had held Annie, and where they had shared the terrible hours that he was ashamed to be jealous of. That space had seemed much smaller than the bed’s hollow that contained Martin and Annie now.
Anger jumped inside Martin and his fists clenched under the bedclothes. He felt no sympathy for Steve, and the certainty came to him that Steve would be a formidable opponent. He would have to be an opponent, an enemy, of course, because Martin would have to cut him off from Annie.
My wife. Annie, in the bedroom’s silence.
He thought she stirred, and he waited breathlessly for her to put her hand out to him. Nothing happened, and with his imagination fuelled by the wine he had drunk Martin planned in angry detail how he would drive to the hospital in the morning. He would stand beside Steve’s bed, and tell him that he was to leave Annie alone. His anger and his determination to keep her were big enough and simple enough to crush any opposition, Martin was sure of that.
When he fell asleep at last it was to uncomfortable, ambiguous dreams.
In the morning the anger had evaporated. As he shaved and went downstairs with a slight, dry headache to listen to the boys squabbling over their breakfasts, Martin knew that he wouldn’t go to see Steve. It wasn’t in his nature to force a confrontation, even with Annie. Especially with Annie. He looked across the kitchen at her white, exhausted face and he felt ashamed again. She had barely recovered, and she must be feeling her own unhappiness.
When the time came for him to leave for work Martin put his arm around her and rested his face against her hair. She returned the warm pressure, although she kept her face turned away, and he left the house holding on to that brief affirmation.
The sense of apartness stayed with Annie. It cast a thin, uncomfortable light on the routine of every day.
Annie ran the house mechanically. She went out to buy food in the local shops, and looked at the familiar shelves as if she had never seen them before. She washed and folded clothes, and drove the boys to and fro, feeling herself physically stronger every day. She sat with Martin in the evenings, hearing the silence between them, afraid. At night the dreams of noise and stifling darkness still came. Annie woke up, shaking, to find him asleep beside her and as the pall of brick-dust lifted again in her imagination she put her hand out to touch the separate warmth of his skin. Annie went back to the hospital regularly, to see her specialists and to submit to more tests. She waited patiently in the various clinics, soothed by the way that the system temporarily took away her sense of responsibility for herself. And after she had gone through what was required of her in out-patients, and only then, Annie allowed herself to go upstairs and see Steve.
The first time was no more than a few days after Annie had been discharged, but it seemed already that they had been painfully separated for months. On the morning of her appointment she went upstairs and chose, very carefully, what she was going to wear. She made her face up, and her hands were shaking so much that she smudged the careful strokes. Annie looked at her reflection and thought, it’s like being a girl again. The recognition and the strangeness made her laugh, but her heart still hammered in her chest. She left the quiet house and walked to the tube station, remembering the last time, the midwinter morning with the snowflakes spiralling after the wind. This morning it was just as cold, but there were snow-drops under the bare hedge in a square of front garden, and the pale spears of crocus leaves pointing up through the broken earth beside them. When she saw the flowers it was as if she had walked into a shaft of light. The same happiness in being alive that she had felt on the day they wheeled her out of intensive care came back and took hold of her. Steve had felt that happiness, and the return of it now drew her even more strongly towards him.
For a moment, standing in the littered street, Annie forgot her anxiety and guilt. She smiled and straightened her shoulders, thinking, Whatever comes, will come. Then she began to walk again, faster, feeling herself strong and complete in her happiness. The people who passed her saw her face and looked again, watching her as she went by, but Annie didn’t see anything except the warm light and the first signs of spring.
When she slipped in through the doors of his ward at last, she saw Steve sitting in the chair beside his bed, his crutches propped up within reach. The reality of his being there made her catch her breath, because all the way up in the lift she had been preparing herself for what she would do if he wasn’t. She saw that he was thinner and much paler than the Steve she had seen inside her head, and she thought that she must have been imagining him as he would be when he could walk again, fit enough to leave the hospital. Willing that to happen. She realized too that the sense of separateness had evaporated. She was simply Annie with her heart thumping and the mixture of joy and apprehension drying her mouth.
Then he looked up and saw her and she wanted to run forward and to hold back at the same time.
Steve watched her walk towards him and he thought, She’s beautiful. I hadn’t noticed that.
As soon as she was close enough, he stretched out his hand and Annie took it. They held on to one another for a moment, all they could do under the eyes of the ward. Then Steve moved to reach for his crutches and Annie said quickly, ‘Don’t move. I’ll sit beside you.’
She brought a chair, and put it beside his.
‘Six days is a long time,’ Steve said softly. Annie saw the hunger in his face and she had to look away, over his shoulder. It was a little before visiting time, and most of the curtains were drawn while the men slept after lunch. Even so there were still one or two patients shuffling to and fro, and the nurses. One of the nurses glanced their way and then looked more carefully. She waved a belated greeting to Annie.
Did they all see what was happening? Annie wondered. They must do, of course. If it was written as plainly in her face as it was in Steve’s.
She turned back to him, closing out the ward behind them. It didn’t matter. Only Steve mattered, here.
‘Today was my first appointment,’ she said.
‘And you won’t come to see me unless you’ve got the excuse of an appointment.’
‘Not an excuse,’ she began, and then stopped. She was using the fact of having to be at the hospital as a pretext, telling herself that she could always say lightly to Martin, ‘Oh, I went up to the ward to see Steve. Just for five minutes, as I was there, you know. He looks much better.’
But of course she wouldn’t say anything to Martin. Nothing at all, beyond the facts like the queue at Haematology, and the reassurances that the doctors had doled out to her. She had stopped talking to Martin about what mattered to her, in case it came too close to this. And gave her away.
Annie’s happiness faded a little. If Martin didn’t know anything about it, it didn’t matter when she came to visit Steve. The subterfuge was for her own benefit, Annie thought, because she lacked the courage to meet what was happening face-on.
‘Don’t look like that,’ Steve said.
‘I