Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection: Strangers, Bad Girls Good Women, A Woman of Our Times, All My Sins Remembered
blue and orange packs shouted their rival claims at her. She reached up, still with the heat of anger flushing her face, and took down a packet of breakfast cereal. She dropped it into the trolley and then another, and followed them with a packet of the sugary variety that Ben insisted on.
Fruit juice, skimmed milk. Routine, responsibility, today, tomorrow. Endlessly. Groping through the fog of her anger Annie tried to recall the certainty that had possessed her under the rubble. She had been sure then that her life and its order was precious. The certainty had evaporated. Now, in the hideous supermarket with its tides of defeated shoppers, she felt the structure of her life silently crumbling. She stood in the rubble of it, as trapped as she had been by the bombed wreckage of her Christmas store.
Martin turned around with an armful of tinned food and saw her face. Annie knew that her expression fanned his own anger.
‘Come on,’ he said sourly. ‘I don’t want to spend all night in here.’
She moved again with a jerk and they worked on along their lines of shelving, not looking at one another and separated by the other loitering shoppers and their cumbersome trolleys.
At the far end of the shop they turned the corner to start the next aisle. Annie’s pace was slower and Martin accidentally ran the wheel of the heavy trolley into her heel bone. The pain shot up her leg, so intense for a second that it made her eyes water.
‘Sorry,’ Martin said, still without looking at her.
The pain receded as quickly as it had come and in its wake Annie’s anger intensified. She had to clench her fists to control her longing to lash out with them, first at Martin and then at all the tins and bottles and their jaunty labels, sweeping them all together into a broken pile on the supermarket floor. Her anger spread like hot spilt liquid to flood over the other shoppers who blocked her path and stared past her with blank faces, over the supermarket and the life that it represented for her, and everything that had happened since the bombing. The anger was so potent that the current of it sapped her strength and she found herself weak and trembling. She leant against the corner of the shelf to steady herself as it engulfed her and swept her along with it. Under the bald lights and the big orange banners that shouted, ‘SAVE’, Annie knew the first real anger and bitterness against the bombers for what they had done to her. In that instant she hated the world, and the life she led in it, and everything there was except for Steve.
And she was angry because she was separated from him.
As soon as she realized it the flood of her anger turned. The currents swirled and changed direction and then, as if it had been no more than a trickle that evaporated in the heat of understanding, it disappeared.
Annie looked in bewilderment at a row of jam jars, staring at the plum and dull crimson and speckled scarlet of the jam in the glass containers as if it were entirely new to her.
I can’t stay here, like this, she thought with the painful clear-sightedness that her anger had left in its wake.
I’ll have to go.
I’ll have to leave Martin, and go to him.
The knowledge made her shiver. It brought her neither happiness nor relief. A few yards away, over the heads of the crowd, she could see Martin plodding down the aisle. His mouth was set in the same grim line.
Annie’s legs felt as boneless as the jam in the glass jars but she made herself follow him, mechanically picking the family groceries off the shelves as she went.
At last they reached the check-out lines and they stood in silence, inching forward until their turn came. Martin unloaded the trolley and Annie packed the goods into boxes. Eggs, butter, yoghurt, cheese. To feed the family. Annie was shaking as if she had a fever.
Outside, the sky was rimmed orange-brown with the muddy glow of street-lamps. They picked their way past the puddles again to the car, and piled the boxes of shopping in over the tailgate. Still they had spoken hardly an unnecessary word. Annie shivered convulsively, pulling her coat around her, and then slid gratefully into the car as Martin banged the door open for her.
Both doors slammed again, isolating them in the rubber- and plastic-scented box. The usual litter of toys and drawings discarded by the boys drifted over the back seat. Martin fumbled with the keys in the ignition and clicked on the headlights. The light reflected upwards and threw unnatural shadows into his eyesockets and the angles of his jawline. Annie waited miserably, without thinking, for the car engine to splutter and jerk them into reverse. But Martin sat still, with his hands braced on the steering wheel. He seemed to be staring ahead into the orange-tinged darkness.
And then, slowly, he turned to her and said, ‘I want to know what’s wrong with you.’
Annie shook her head from side to side, unable to speak.
Martin’s voice rose. ‘I want to know. Say something, can’t you, even if it’s only fuck off?’
‘I don’t know what to say.’ Even in her own ears Annie’s response sounded thin and pathetic. Martin’s knuckles went white as his fists tightened on the wheel.
‘Why don’t you bloody know what to say? I’m your husband. Have you forgotten that?’
‘No, I haven’t forgotten.’
‘Talk to me then. I’ve tried to be as patient and understanding as I can. I’ve waited, and held off, and hoped you might get round to mentioning why you look as though we all turn your stomach. Why your face never cracks into a smile any more, and why you can’t even bring yourself close enough to me to exchange the time of day. Why, Annie?’
Martin’s questions came spilling out, the words tangling with one another, and she saw a tiny fleck of spit at the corner of his mouth catching the light. His tongue darted it away.
‘Why is it? I want to know where you’ve gone. I want to hear it from you. Say something.’
He was shouting now. Annie saw a couple passing the car turn back to stare curiously, their faces white patches in the gloom. She had no anger left, nothing to match Martin’s. And she knew that she had no reason to answer his rage with her own, because she recognized the portrait that he painted of her.
‘I’m sorry.’ Self-dislike and despair muted her voice.
Martin spat again, ‘Sorry? Jesus, you’re sorry. Look, I’m sorry that you were hurt, and so badly frightened, and that you were ill and in pain and subjected to all those things in the hospital afterwards. But that’s all over now, Annie. You’ve got to start up again. Can’t you understand? If you want me, and the kids, and everything we had before, you’ve got to do it now.’
Annie looked down at her hands in her lap, twisting her fingers together like pale stalks. Martin is right, and wrong, she thought. I should talk to him, of course I should, but there is nothing I could possibly say.
‘Annie.’
His hands dropped from the steering wheel and they shot out and grabbed her. He shook her, and her head wobbled. Annie knew that he wanted to hit her, and she knew then how desperate he was for her reaction. She jerked defensively to face him and managed to whisper through stiff lips, ‘Leave me alone, can’t you? Just, just leave me alone.’
Martin’s hands dropped heavily to his sides. They were silent for a long minute, looking at one another in the head-lamps’ inverted light. Annie was ironically reminded of the old days when they had quarrelled violently, like this, and then the passion of their reconciliations had reflected the violence back again. A wave of exhausted sadness and regret washed over her.
‘Look. Are you ill? Do you need to get help? A psychiatrist, I mean, Annie.’
‘No,’ Annie said. ‘I’m not mad. I wasn’t, not while it was happening and not afterwards and not now. I don’t need to have my head looked at.’
Martin exhaled, a long, ragged breath. ‘In that case, is it Steve?’
Annie went cold. He had been thinking