Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection: Strangers, Bad Girls Good Women, A Woman of Our Times, All My Sins Remembered
make her as comfortable as possible, and to help her to enjoy the time that was left.
‘When would you like to come home again?’ Annie asked her.
The doctors had told them that, for a while longer at least, Tibby could choose whether she wanted to be in the hospice or in her own home.
‘Oh dear, I don’t know. It’s so comfortable in here. But I feel very lazy, not doing a thing. I’m still quite capable. I’m just afraid that Jim won’t be managing in the house without me, and I daren’t think about the garden. There’s the roses, you know.’
Annie thought of the big corner garden and the shaggy heads of the old-fashioned roses that sprawled over the walls. Tibby liked to prune her roses in March, and to begin her régime of spraying and feeding. It was quite likely that she wouldn’t see this year’s mass of pink and white and gold, or catch the evening scent of them through the windows as she moved about in the awkward, old-fashioned kitchen. Annie looked down at her own hands, turning them to examine the palms, as if she could see something that mattered there.
‘Don’t worry about the house,’ she managed to say. ‘Dad can cope perfectly well. I went yesterday, and it looks the same as it always does. And if you’d like me to do the roses I can, very easily. Or Martin will.’
Two dialogues, again, Annie thought. We sit here talking about the roses and the dusting, and both of us are thinking, Why must you die? Why is it Tibby, and why now? There are a hundred other things, a thousand other things to say. She began in a rush, ‘Tibby, I want to …’
But her mother took her hand, squeezing it briefly before replacing it in Annie’s lap. It was as clear a way of silencing her as if she had said, ‘I don’t want to talk about it. Forgive me?’
Aloud, Tibby said mildly, ‘Well. Perhaps I’ll stay here just this week. And then I think I should get home.’
‘All right,’ Anne acquiesced. ‘Of course you must go home whenever you feel like it.’
They sat and talked for a little while longer in the pleasant room.
Tibby wanted, more than anything else, to hear about her grandsons. She leaned forward in her armchair, eager for the little snippets of news. Thomas had just joined a local cub pack and Annie described how he had gone off to his first meeting the night before, resplendent and full of pride in his new green uniform.
Tibby nodded and smiled. ‘They’re growing up so quickly, both of them.’
She’s seen you grow up. Seen her grandchildren.
As she tried to fathom the real expression behind her mother’s smile Annie heard Steve’s words again. She remembered the blind fear that she had felt herself when she thought that she was going to die, but more vividly still she remembered the bitterness of having to leave so much unfinished. Did Tibby feel that now? And when Tibby looked around the sunny sitting room with its chintz covers and faint smell of polish, did she feel the same sharp sense of how precious and how beautiful all of it was?
Tibby looked smaller and frailer than before, but her hair was set and she was wearing her own neat, unemphatic clothes. She was still Tibby herself, yet for all the closeness Annie had believed there to be between her mother and herself she couldn’t gauge what she felt or needed now. The careful, light conversation about the garden and the boys ran on, and Annie had the disorientating sense that neither of them was listening to a word of it.
She wanted to shout at her, Don’t go. We need you, all of us. Talk to me.
‘… But with the price of container-grown shrubs nowadays,’ Tibby sighed, ‘what else can you do … ?’
‘I know. But I’ve never had your luck or knack with cuttings.’
I talked to Steve, down there in the blackness. I still could, if I would let it happen, if there weren’t so many other things, such immutable things.
Tibby leaned farther forward and touched Annie’s arm.
‘Are you sure you’re all right, darling? You look a bit drawn in the face, to me.’
I’ve fallen in love, Tibby, with a stranger. I’d walk out of here and go straight to him if I could, if only I could.
‘I’m fine. The specialist says it will take a little time before I’m thoroughly fit again, but everything has mended perfectly well.’
I do it too, of course. I don’t talk either, not to Tibby, not even to Martin. Only to Steve, and he hears me whether I say the words or not.
I wish I was going to him now.
Annie smiled at her mother, with the conviction that they were both close to tears.
‘I must make a move, darling.’
‘Of course you must. Thomas comes out at four o’clock, doesn’t he?’
When Tibby held out her hand Annie saw that her mother’s sapphire engagement ring was slipping on her thin finger. Tibby instinctively turned it back into place with her thumb. Annie leant over and kissed her cheek, noticing the unfamiliar smell of lacquer because Tibby’s hair had grown too sparse to hold her old style.
‘I’ll come in tomorrow to see you.’
‘Couldn’t you bring Tom and Benjy with you?’
‘Won’t they tire you too much? They wear me out.’
‘I’d like to see them.’
How many more times will there be?
‘Of course I will. Goodbye, love. Sleep well.’
Annie settled her mother against her cushions again and as she left she felt her eyes on her back, greedy, looking through her at the past and into the future that Tibby wouldn’t see for herself.
Annie drove home with the hard brightness of tears behind her own eyes.
On the same evening, Martin and Annie went to do the big monthly shop at the supermarket. As they always had done in the past, they went on late-opening night and left the boys at home under Audrey’s supervision.
It was the first time they had made the trip together since Annie’s return from hospital. Along the clogged urban route she sat in the passenger seat watching the shopfronts flick past. Her face was turned away from him, but she sensed Martin glancing sideways at her, frowning in the silence that hung between them. They reached the big supermarket and Martin parked in the middle of one of the long lines of cars. They walked side by side over the pitted ground towards the entrance, skirting the puddles and the empty, abandoned wire trolleys. Even the air seemed gritty, smelling of diesel exhaust fumes, and greasy onions from the hamburger stall near the shop doors.
Annie was tired, and her legs felt suddenly so heavy that she wondered whether they would support her up and down the crowded aisles with the shopping trolley. Martin’s pace quickened and she had to hurry to keep up with him.
‘Don’t walk so fast,’ she called and he snapped back, without slowing down, ‘Let’s get it over with.’
Annie felt his anger, and her own rose sluggishly through her tiredness.
Is this what it is? she thought. Is this what I’m trying to hold on to?
The automatic doors yawned in front of them, neon-lit, and hissed open. Martin reached for a trolley and swung it round with a vicious clatter. Without speaking they wound their way through the crowds and the piled-up shopping to the end aisle and began to work their way along the shelves.
The harsh overhead lights hurt Annie’s eyes, and the colours of the endless lines of tins and packets danced up and down in front of them. She heard herself repeating a silent litany, eggs, butter, yoghurt, cheese. Love, loyalty, duty, habit.
Martin was moving along the opposite shelf and she saw his mouth set in a straight line and the stiff, angry tilt of his head. Suddenly, with