Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection: Strangers, Bad Girls Good Women, A Woman of Our Times, All My Sins Remembered
leant forward and touched his thumb between her eyebrows.
‘Come when you can, that’s all. It doesn’t matter, so long as I know I’ll see you sometimes. I don’t want to make more demands on you.’
Steve shifted in his chair, trying to contain his impatience with his slow-mending leg and the public tedium of the ward while Annie sat so close to him. Her hair smelt clean, with a mild, lemony scent. And even the brief touch of her had made him sharply aware of the texture of her skin, and the masked outline of her body. Steve was suddenly aware of the weight of love, pressing and trying to force its way into the open. It was new to him, and it made him feel childish and helpless.
Annie saw his impatience and her face lightened with sympathy.
‘Shall we walk a bit?’ she asked. ‘Come on. I’ll help you stand up.’
Together, they levered him to his feet. Annie held out his crutches and Steve leant his weight on the metal legs.
‘We could go to the day room.’ He smiled at her, crookedly.
They went slowly down the ward. Annie nodded cheerfully and spoke to the people they passed.
‘No, they can’t keep me away, can they?’
Truer than you know, she thought.
Annie pushed the doors open and the stale, smoky air of the day room enveloped them. It was deserted, but the television still shouted in the empty space. Steve went to the window and looked down into the street, then leant his forehead against the glass.
‘It’s like being in prison,’ he said.
Annie came to stand beside him and he manoeuvred himself awkwardly so that he could put his arm around her shoulders.
‘It won’t be long,’ she said.
‘It can’t be,’ he answered. He wanted to kiss her but he felt as awkward as a boy with his crutches and his heavy, plastered leg. And even if he managed to reach her and fit her against him, the doors would open at once behind them, bringing in Frankie, or sister, or the first phalanx of visitors eager for a cigarette and a talk about operations.
He whispered, ‘Annie,’ feeling his helplessness again, and she moved quickly, turning her face to his and kissing him.
‘It won’t be long,’ she repeated.
I love you, he thought, and the weight of it was pleasurable now. ‘Let’s try a walk along the corridor,’ he said. They went out again, passing the round window of the side-ward and smiling, sideways conspirators’ smiles.
They moved slowly along the corridor towards the opposite wing of the hospital, close together, listening to the sound of their awkward steps on the polished floor. After a moment Steve asked, ‘How is it, being back at home? Are the boys happier now?’
‘It’s fine,’ Annie answered carefully. ‘Tiring, sometimes. They’re reacting to my desertion of them by being truculent and clinging, by turns. Copybook behaviour, which I should have been ready for, and wasn’t. If I had the energy I’d have lost my temper with them days ago. I’m relying on a kind of weary patience.’
She grinned up at him suddenly and he saw how she must be at home, ordinarily. Jealousy of Martin and her children, and their life with her, gripped him viciously. He said something as neutral as he could, looking ahead to the patch of light through the doors at the end of the corridor, but he knew that Annie glanced quickly at him. They were silent for a few more steps, and then began deliberately to talk about their physical progress, safe hospital ground.
As they talked they were both aware of the two dialogues, spoken and unspoken, starting up again. They wouldn’t talk about Martin, although he was as close as if he were walking alongside them, making a third pair of slow footsteps. Although they talked about the bones in Steve’s leg that had to knit together before he could walk, before he could leave the hospital, they didn’t ask each other, What will happen then?
They reached the far doors and turned back again.
‘It helps, just to move about like this,’ he said and Annie nodded, knowing that he meant it helped the knot of boredom and frustration.
‘And you?’ he asked. ‘What did the kidney man say?’
‘I’m fine. Luckier than you. It happens much quicker.’
‘Do you still have the dreams?’
‘Yes. Noise, and dark, and being afraid.’
‘I know.’
They looked at one another then, hearing the sound of their voices, as if the sterile hospital light had suddenly been blacked out. That was it, Annie thought. He did know, and when she woke up in the night and reached out to touch Martin’s warm, insensible skin she blamed him in turn because he didn’t, and couldn’t.
‘The dreams will stop,’ Steve said.
‘Yes.’ The dreams, but not the rest of it. Did Steve think that too? The talk, unspoken but still audible, as it had been at the end, before the firemen reached them. They reached the top of the stairs, midway between the two wings, leading down to the main hall. Voices echoed up the stairwell and then the first wave of visitors appeared, trudging upwards, with their bunches of flowers and carrier bags. They watched them pass and for a moment Annie forgot that she belonged to the world outside, too. The visitors looked separate, odd in their thick, outdoor clothes, and she felt her closeness to Steve as it had been when they lay side by side in the dark.
She wondered, with a little beat of despair, if she would ever know closeness like that again.
The group broke up, heading towards the different wards, and Annie and Steve heard more voices and footsteps following them up the stairs.
‘Are you expecting anyone today?’
‘Perhaps.’
Annie was jealous then, thinking of the glimpses she had had of his visitors in the past, and imagining streams of envoys now from his life outside. She pulled the belt of her coat around her and said, too brightly, ‘I must go, anyway. Ben’s with my mother-in-law. He only goes to nursery in the mornings.’ He doesn’t want to hear about my children, she thought painfully. What can I tell him? What ground have we got, except that terrible, random thing that happened to us, and the closeness from it that we can’t escape?
I don’t want to escape, she answered herself.
Steve was balancing awkwardly, trying to free one hand so that he could reach out to her. His face was very dark, almost angry. Now that the moment for leaving him had come, Annie wanted it to be over, quickly, before she could feel the wrench of it.
‘I’ll come next time. My next appointment,’ she gabbled.
Steve wanted to reach out and hold her, saying, Stay, you can’t go yet.
But she was already on her way.
‘Will you come?’ he asked, insistent because of his immobility.
‘Of course.’
She smiled at him then, and he stood at the head of the stairs to watch her go. She looked small and thin inside her big coat and he remembered how unexpectedly lovely her face had been as she came towards him. Then she went down around the curve of the stairs and he couldn’t see her any more. Steve rested his weight on the metal legs for a moment, looking at the place where she had been, and then he went on towards the cubicle in the ward and his empty bed.
The visits that came after that were just the same. Annie waited with contained, anxious impatience for the day to arrive, and when the time came her brief moments with Steve were like dislocated footnotes to her constant, internal awareness of him. They talked, and then they looked silently at one another, and Annie knew that they were only waiting again.
A little while after her visit Steve was moved from the old