Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection: Strangers, Bad Girls Good Women, A Woman of Our Times, All My Sins Remembered
‘Annie, I can’t start all over from the beginning. Not with you.’
‘I know that.’
We needn’t talk about what the doctors say, about the weather or the garden or whether he takes one lump or two, Annie thought. Not now, and not ever.
She lifted her head and Steve cupped her face between his hands. He bent and kissed her mouth and her throat and the corners of her eyes. Annie kissed him in return, giving herself up to him, until he took her in his arms and almost lifted her. Their freedom alone in the empty house was extraordinary, beckoning them. For a giddy, drowning moment Annie was just Annie, forgetting the rooms and the furniture that she and Martin had bought and the pictures that they had chosen and hung together. Steve’s hand touched her shoulder and then her breast, and her mouth opened beneath his.
Annie forgot everything except her need for him. The ache of the weeks of separation from him sharpened now that he was here, and close enough for her to understand how he could assuage it. They might have been anywhere, or nowhere, because all that mattered to them was that they were together.
Steve whispered, with his mouth against hers, ‘My love.’
And Annie echoed him, ‘I love you.’ They felt the curves of their separate smiles touching and becoming the same smile of joy because it was the truth, and because it wasn’t time yet to remember what the truth would mean.
Annie had no idea how long they stood there, locked together. When at last they stepped back to see one another again she was giddy, and her mouth was bruised and burning.
They examined each other’s faces, inch by inch, and it was then, seeing into one another’s eyes, that reality intruded again. Annie’s expression changed but Steve took her hand, holding it tightly between his own.
‘Don’t,’ he begged her. ‘Stay with me.’
‘I want to,’ Annie said. ‘What can we do?’
He put his arm around her again and Annie rested her face against his shoulder. With his cheek touching her hair, Steve stared over her head at the pine table in the bay window, and the stick-back chairs grouped neatly around it. There was an antique pine dresser too, with pieces of willow-pattern china and photographs of her husband and children arranged on the shelves. Outside the window he could see the facing houses. Annie and Martin would know the people who lived behind those doors. Probably their children played together, went to the same schools.
He understood, suddenly, the magnitude of what he wanted from her. He wanted her to leave this. Yet how could he ask her to walk away from all the accretions of a married life, and come with him? He wanted her to, with single-minded intensity. Steve understood quite clearly that, just as he had never loved anyone before, he loved Annie fiercely now. And the intimacy that they had shared, afraid, and blinded by the dark, stayed with him. It seemed more precious and more real than all the rest of his life.
He took her hand, very gently, and guided her to the table. He pulled out a chair and made her sit down. The coffee cups sat forgotten on their tray between them.
‘I want you to come and live with me,’ Steve said. She made a move to interrupt him but he held her hand tighter and went on, faster. ‘Not today. Not next week, not even next month if you really can’t. When you’re ready to come to me, Annie. If you want to come.’
Annie thought, I do, and the enormity of it was like a tidal wave, submerging her. She looked at Steve’s face and at the way that a muscle at one corner of his mouth pulled it downwards in anxiety. I should say, I can’t. I can’t leave my husband and children, or bring my children to you. But I can’t be without you, either. I know that, after this morning.
‘I don’t want there to be half-measures between you and me, Annie.’
Not an affair, she thought, with me creeping away to meet you when I can steal the time from Martin and the boys. No, I couldn’t bear that, either. It must be white or black, of course, with no murky shades in between. Annie remembered the evening in the supermarket, and the anger with Martin that had overtaken her. She had thought that a truce had reigned since then, but now she felt more as if they had been nursing themselves, separately, in readiness for this.
She jerked her head up suddenly.
‘I don’t want half-measures either. But whatever has to be done must be done gently, so that Martin … so that it doesn’t hurt Martin more than it has to.’
It was only then, when she saw the relief rub out the sharp lines in Steve’s face, that Annie realized how he had gambled, coming to ask her for everything, without knowing or even hoping for what her answer would be. His honesty and the love that she read behind it touched Annie’s heart.
‘And so?’ he whispered. ‘Will you come?’
She waited, listening to the little sounds of the house as if she might hear something that would stop her. But there was nothing, and she answered at last, ‘Yes.’
Steve moved then, stumbling from his chair with such violence that his awkward leg caught it and tipped it backwards, banging to the floor. Neither of them even glanced at it.
They had reached out for each other, and they were as hungry as if they had eaten nothing since they lay together in the darkness of the store. Annie knew an intensity of physical longing that she hadn’t felt for years and years. Not since Matthew.
She heard herself laugh, shakily.
‘I was thinking of Matthew.’
‘I know,’ he murmured, and he tipped Annie’s head back so that he could taste the hollow at the base of her throat. ‘Don’t. Think of me.’
That was easy. It was easy as he touched the pearly buttons of her shirt, and then undid them. He bent his head again and kissed the curve of her breast where the shirt fell away from it. As his mouth touched her nipple Annie closed her eyes and buried her face in his black hair.
She thought, for a longing, oblivious instant, of the bed upstairs. It was neat and smooth under its white crocheted cover. She had straightened it before she took Benjy to the nursery.
No.
And then she looked at the stripped boards of the kitchen floor, which Martin had sanded and waxed.
No, nor in any of the other corners of the house that they had created and shared.
Annie lifted her head, and with her fingers entwined in Steve’s hair she made him look up at her. ‘Not here,’ she whispered.
Steve held her for another moment, and then his arms dropped stiffly to his sides. They were both looking at the dresser with its blue plates and framed photographs.
Steve made a little, apologetic gesture. ‘Of course not here.’
They turned away, not looking at each other.
Annie put her hand on the coffee pot to feel if it was still hot enough. She poured each of them a cup and they sat down at the table. But it was painful to see Steve sitting in Martin’s chair, and so she stood up again almost immediately. She carried her cup across the room and stood drinking the tepid coffee by the kitchen window, looking out at the garden.
Steve said in a low voice, ‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have come here.’
Annie slammed her cup down on to the draining board and went to him. She stood behind the chair and put her arms over his shoulders, resting her cheek against his head. He grasped her wrists, holding her there.
‘Of course you should, if you needed to. I needed you to. I didn’t realize how much.’ After a moment she added quietly, ‘It won’t be very easy. Doing … what we’ve agreed.’
We haven’t even begun to talk about what it will mean in pain and unhappiness for all of us, Annie thought.
‘Do you think I expect it to be easy, Annie? I thought about it, all those weeks in hospital.