Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection: Strangers, Bad Girls Good Women, A Woman of Our Times, All My Sins Remembered
Annie watched the clumps of daffodils turn almost overnight from sappy stalks, tipped with a swelling of green and pale yellow, into solid banks of miraculous gold. The earth smelt sweet and moist, and in the mornings the sun shone with unexpected strength on the dewy grass and turned the patch of lawn into a sheet of silver.
On the fifth sunny morning, Annie walked with Benjy to his nursery. Even though they made the same trip every day, it was slow because the little boy wanted to examine everything they passed, stopping to peer in through garden gates in search of cats that he had met there before, and at the parrot who sat autocratically on his perch in the window of the house on the corner. Annie walked slowly, patiently, while Benjy alternately dawdled and ran ahead, as bright as a slick of paint in his scarlet tracksuit.
After the customary delays and detours they turned the last corner, and came to the church hall that housed the nursery group. There was a knot of mothers with prams and pushchairs standing talking in the yard outside. Benjy pushed through them and ran through the open doors, and Annie followed him, nodding and smiling at the other mothers as she passed them. She knew them all, because she saw them doing the same thing every morning, and she knew their children and their problems, and their houses in the network of streets surrounding the church hall. Most of them lived lives that were similar to Annie’s own, but in the last weeks she had felt so remote that it had been hard to find a word or a gesture that would bridge the gulf.
‘Hello, Annie,’ they called to her. ‘Benjy’s eager this morning, isn’t he?’
‘Feeling the joys of spring, I suppose.’
‘Wish I was,’ someone else chipped in. ‘Sophie had us both up all night.’
‘You look better yourself, Annie. The sight of the sun does us all good, doesn’t it?’
In the past Annie had found the simple camaraderie comforting and even sustaining. She had felt, before, that they all shared the same difficulties and the same rewards. And these women had clubbed together to send her flowers when she was in hospital, then taken it in turns to invite Benjy to play with their own children, so that Annie could rest for an hour or two. She felt that she didn’t know, now, where she belonged or what she believed in. Part of her was still here, amongst the women, yet so much of her was nowhere except with Steve. It made her feel lonely, to be together and yet apart. Annie went slowly inside, out of the bright sunshine, thinking of the random violence that had altered her perspectives so violently that she doubted whether she would ever look out on the same landscape again.
The hall was dingy, but that was hardly noticeable under the bright layers of painting and collages that the staff and children had stuck all over the walls. Children squirmed over the climbing frame and in and out of the Wendy house, and groups of them stood around the little tables deciding whether to paint, or squeeze dough or glue strips of coloured paper into necklaces. As it always did, the sight made Annie smile. They were so busy, all of them, fragile on their wobbly legs, and yet perfectly robust.
Benjy had made a bee-line for the dough table, and now he was squeezing bright pink coils of it between his fingers, with an expression of furious concentration. Annie went across to him and kissed the top of his head.
‘See you later, then?’
‘Unh,’ Benjy said.
She walked out into the sunshine once again.
On the way back she took a different route, passing through the little local park where the daffodils would be followed by municipal rows of scarlet tulips. The council contractors were already repainting the swings and the conical roundabout that Thomas loved to spin faster and faster until Benjy screamed in giddy terror. Annie thought dreamily of the hours that she had spent in this park, from the days when Thomas was a tiny baby out for his first outings in the pram. Martin sometimes brought them here at weekends now, and played elaborate hiding and chasing games with them in the little plot of trees and shrubs enclosed by green railings. She crossed the grass, leaving shiny footprints in the wetness. Beyond the park was a line of shops. Thomas was bringing home a friend for tea, and Annie thought that she would make a chocolate cake.
She did the necessary shopping, exchanging pleasantries with the cheerful Indian family in the general stores. Then she turned towards home, swinging her purchases in a plastic carrier bag. She reached the house and the gate squealed on its hinges, swinging back against the hedge and releasing its dusty scent of privet leaves. Annie went inside, picking up a scatter of brown envelopes from the doormat. The hallway smelt of coffee and the potpourri in a bowl on a sidetable.
Without thinking of anything, her head comfortably empty, Annie walked into the kitchen and filled the kettle. Martin had left the radio playing when he went out, and Annie was whistling to the music, softly, through pursed lips, when the doorbell rang.
As she crossed the hallway she saw a shadow, unidentifiable, beyond the coloured glass. And then she opened her front door and saw that it was Steve waiting on the doorstep.
It was as if the colour drained from the accessible world. The two of them were left standing, face to face, the only moving, breathing things in a grey landscape.
It was Steve who spoke first.
‘Can’t I come inside?’ he prompted her gently.
Annie looked out at the empty street and the windows of the houses opposite, her innocent front gate that Steve had closed behind him, and the crocuses that edged the garden path. Then, stiff-armed, she opened the front door a little wider. As he stepped into the house Annie saw that Steve’s crutches were gone. He leaved heavily on a stick instead.
With the door closed against the eyes of the street they looked at one another in the dim hallway. Benjy’s tricycle was abandoned at the foot of the stairs.
‘How did you find me?’ Annie asked, stupid with surprise.
‘Were you intending to hide?’
‘No. I didn’t mean that. I’m just surprised, to see you here …’
Steve smiled at her, but Annie read the anxiety in his face. It had been a risk to come. But he must have wanted to, very badly.
‘The telephone directory,’ he reminded her. ‘I looked you up.’
‘Yes. Yes, of course. Come … come through, and I’ll make you a cup of coffee.’
I’m talking to him as if he’s someone from the PTA, Annie thought. Or one of Martin’s clients. She picked up Benjy’s bike and put it aside so that he could pass, and led the way into the kitchen. She tried to hide her awkwardness by rattling the coffee percolator, and the cups as she set them out on the tray. Her hands were shaking, and she was rawly conscious that his nearness overturned the mundane order of her kitchen, as she had known that it would. She longed for him to touch her, and she dreaded it.
‘When did they let you out? You didn’t tell me that they might.’ Her voice shook, too.
‘I let myself out. One leap, and I was free.’ They smiled at each other and Annie turned quickly to the coffee pot.
‘Do you take milk?’
‘Please.’
‘Would you like anything to eat? What is it, breakfast or elevenses?’
‘No, thank you.’
Steve watched her as she moved economically from cupboard to sink. He had imagined her so often, just like this, against the backdrop of her kitchen. Yet now that he was here with her he couldn’t see any of it, nothing except Annie herself. Her hair was growing again to frame her face. In her jeans and shirt, with her untidy hair and her soft, dazed expression, she looked almost like a young girl. As he watched her Steve realized that he had focused so hard on the way to reach her that he had hardly thought beyond the moment when she would open her door. It made him feel so like an adolescent, at a loss when finally confronted with a real girl, that Steve laughed aloud. Annie turned, and when she saw his expression the colour flooded into her face. She put the coffee pot down abruptly.
‘Annie.’