Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection: Strangers, Bad Girls Good Women, A Woman of Our Times, All My Sins Remembered
he have qualified it somehow? Wouldn’t he have said, Is it anything to do with the man you were with, in there? Steve? Is it to do with him?
Instead of that he had just quietly asked her, as if the question had always been there, waiting.
Tick, tick. Annie heard the seconds whispering around them in the vinyl interior of their car.
‘No.’ Until the word came, she didn’t know what it would be. ‘It’s nothing to do with him.’
And then the sadness took her by the throat, so forcibly that she wanted to drop her head against the seat back, draw her knees up to her chest and let the sobs break out. But because she had said, No, she kept her neck rigid, and went on staring with dry eyes out into the darkness. I’ve done it now, she thought. I have begun the lies. She saw a net of them, drawing in ahead of her. And would the net split open in the end and let the truth out, as she had envisaged through the flood of anger inside the supermarket?
To leave Martin, and go to Steve?
With sudden briskness Martin turned the key in the ignition and the engine came to life. He swung the wheel and the car nosed out of the car park before he glanced sideways at Annie again. Seeing her face he dropped his hand briefly on to her knee. ‘I’m sorry I lost my temper,’ he said. ‘It hasn’t been very easy for me, either, do you see? I thought you were dead, and then I was afraid that you would die. And now, when it should be all over, you’ve gone somewhere and left me behind.’
The car moved slowly forwards in a double line of traffic. Martin drove one-handed and took Annie’s hand in the other. In a low voice he said, ‘I don’t want to be without you.’
Annie opened her mouth, afraid that her voice would crack, but she found the ability somehow to whisper, ‘I know that.’
Martin drove steadily on. I don’t want you to lie to me, either, he could have added. But strangely, the baldness of Annie’s denial had come as a relief. He saw clearly through it, and saw that she wanted to protect him from being hurt. The carefulness and the irrationality of it touched him, and he felt a warm wash of affection for her that was nothing to do with anger or bitterness.
Nothing had happened yet, he told himself. Perhaps, even, nothing would.
They followed the familiar route, with Annie’s cold fingers still gripped in her husband’s warm ones. They reached home, and they went in and unpacked the shopping side by side in the kitchen.
And later, when they went to bed, Martin lay still for a moment in the darkness and then he reached out for her, as he had always done in the past after they had quarrelled. His hand stroked her shoulder, and then he moved to fit himself into the curve of her back.
‘Don’t be angry.’
‘I’m not angry.’
She was reminded again of the times before. They had always made up their differences, and they had drawn closer because of them. Not now, Annie thought, because of the lie that they had already started. Martin’s hand moved again, to her waist and the bony point of her hips, warming her. His fingers traced the ridge of bone under the skin and he whispered, ‘Poor love. Come here to me.’
His hands coaxed her. Annie thought, He’s good and generous. Truer than I deserve.
For all the weight of her sadness, it was a relief to turn inwards to him. Their bodies met along their full length and his mouth touched hers. Annie felt her husband stir against her. She let her head rest on his shoulder, her face turned to the warmth of his throat. His hands moved, patiently, coaxing her. Annie held herself still, feeling that the anxiety and guilt and sadness of the day were just contained within the leaky package of her body.
But Martin knew her body too. Slowly and gently he worked on it until her fear of his intrusion melted and became, at last, fear that he would draw back again. Her mind stopped revolving around in its tight, overworked circles as the warmth spread through her veins. Annie’s mouth opened and she tasted his skin, following the line of his jaw with her mouth. Under the point of it she felt his pulse flicker against her tongue. A half-forgotten urgency sharpened itself inside her.
‘Martin.’
‘Not yet,’ he whispered. ‘Not yet.’
‘Please.’
The note in her voice broke through his control. He took her wrists and held her so that she couldn’t move. He looked down into her face for an instant and then he fitted himself inside her. It was easy, and certain, because they had known one another for so long. She forgot, as he moved and she lifted her hips to answer him, all the questions and their bleak answers. The ripples of internal pleasure were spreading and Annie let herself be submerged in them. Ever since she had come home to Martin she had felt stiff and cold and now, however briefly, the feelings were gone. She closed her eyes and let their bodies take her over. The peak she was struggling for reared for a long moment beyond her grasp, then within her grasp, and then she had reached it and conquered it and the sharpness of it stabbed within her until at last it melted and ran away down the steep slopes into the level plain of satisfaction.
Annie felt the tears melt too behind her eyes. They ran down her face and into her hair, hot against Martin’s cheeks until he rubbed them away with his fingers and kissed her eyelids, and then he took her face between his hands and kissed it and whispered to her, ‘We’ll be all right, Annie. You see, we’ll be all right.’
She held him in turn as he moved inside her again, until he cried out with his mouth against hers, and then they lay in a different silence, wrapped in each other’s arms in the quiet room. Annie heard Benjamin in his bed across the corridor, turning over and then shouting out something in his sleep. She was very tired, and she knew from Martin’s breathing that he was still awake, listening to her. The circular treadmill of her thoughts began to rotate again until she was forming the word, Steve, and the picture of him lying in the hospital ward, watching the ceiling.
I must decide, she told herself. I must think. Do whatever is for the best.
But she was drifting now, unpinned by exhaustion, almost asleep.
Not now. Soon, I will. I must.
For the first time since she had come home from hospital, Annie fell asleep before Martin. He held her for a long time, not wanting to move in case he disturbed her. The day of the bombing, when he had struggled with fallen masonry to try and reach her, had taken her away from him. It was only now, in this moment of closeness, that he realized just how far. He wanted her back more than anything in the world.
Nothing had changed, Annie discovered in the days that followed, except that the atmosphere in the house was easier. They tried to show one another, with little, unintrusive gestures, that there was a truce. On Annie’s part it was no more than cooking a favourite dinner or buying a special bottle of wine from the off-licence on the corner, but she did her best to appear to be cheerful as they ate and drank, even when her heart was heavy. In his turn Martin brought home an armful of daffodils to fill the clear glass jug that stood on the kitchen dresser, or the latest copy of a magazine that Annie considered too expensive to buy out of her housekeeping. They thanked each other briefly, almost shyly, but they didn’t try to go beyond that. There were still silences, but they judged separately that the silences were more companionable than hostile, and they didn’t try to fill them artificially.
Thomas and Benjamin, with their childish perceptiveness, noticed the difference at once.
‘I think you’re better now, Mummy,’ Thomas said and Annie smiled at him, happy with his confidence.
‘I am better,’ she answered, keeping her awareness of the other things at bay as far as she could.
The boys quarrelled and fought less, slept better, and went off happier in the mornings. Annie could almost have believed that her life might in the end return to the old, smooth pattern of before the bombing, if it had not been for her visits to the hospital, and Steve.
February turned into March. In the middle of March there came a spell of clear, still