Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection: Strangers, Bad Girls Good Women, A Woman of Our Times, All My Sins Remembered
shouted at her, ‘I don’t want to. I don’t like Steve. I won’t go. Benjy won’t either.’
Annie was shaking. It wasn’t any use insisting to Tom, You don’t know Steve. He did, of course. From half-heard fragments of his parents’ angry talk, from the unhappy silence of the house, and from his own fearful unconscious, Tom had made up his own picture of Steve. He knew the threat was close, and he had responded to it in the only way he knew.
As she knelt there Annie saw, with perfect clarity, how it would be.
There would be months, probably years, of times like this one. As she watched Thomas’s red face and Benjamin’s bewildered one she felt the pain of their divided loyalties, the sharpening of their premature awareness. There would be the ugly battles over their custody. Martin would fight her, lent strength by his bitterness, she was certain of that. She knew, as vividly as if she had already lived through them, what the bleak Sunday visits with the boys would be like, what they would be like for Martin, whichever of them won whichever portion of their children’s lives.
Was her own happiness worth that? This strange, exotic happiness since the bomb, that seemed increasingly to belong to another woman altogether? What was Steve’s happiness worth? She saw his face, every line of it clear, and she knew that she loved him, and the hurt stabbed like a knife inside her.
At last she stood up, stiffly, with pain in her chest and across her shoulders.
‘All right,’ she said softly. ‘That’s all right. You needn’t come, if you don’t want to. I have to go, because I promised I would. I’ll call Audrey, and ask her if she can come and look after you, just for a little while.’
The boys sat in silence while she telephoned.
‘Audrey?’ Annie said. ‘I know I’ve asked you too many favours lately. This is the last, I promise.’
‘You want me to come in to the boys?’
Audrey, Annie thought, with her grown-up daughters and her grandchildren, and her morose husband. Has Audrey got what she wants? Is she like Tibby? Annie’s face felt hot, and her eyes were bright and hard.
‘Just for an hour or two, this morning.’
‘Of course I will, my love. I’d be glad to. Gets me out of the house, doesn’t it?’ While they waited for her, the three of them sat in a circle round the Lego box, pretending that they were playing together. It wasn’t until he heard Audrey at the gate that Tom said hastily, anxiously, ‘Is it all right, Mum?’
‘I’ll make it all right,’ she promised him. Whatever it costs.
Audrey was in the hallway. ‘Only me,’ she called out to them, as she always did. Annie went over and put the kettle on. ‘Hello, Audrey. Shall I make you a cup of tea before I go? It’s kind of you to help out yet again.’
Audrey looked at her, shrewd under her perennial headscarf. ‘You go on, love. Do what you like, while you still can.’
Annie turned away with the kettle heavy in her hand. ‘This is the last time,’ she whispered.
When Audrey was furnished with her tea in her special china cup and saucer, Annie put her coat on. She didn’t stop to look at herself, and Audrey had to call after her, ‘Your collar’s all caught up at the back.’ She came after her and straightened it, motherly. ‘Are you all right, my pet?’
‘Yes,’ Annie said quickly. ‘Yes, I’m fine.’ From the doorway she looked at Benjy and Tom. They were absorbed in their game now. She had told them that she would make everything right, hadn’t she?
‘Bye,’ she said. ‘I’ll be back as soon as I can.’
‘Bye,’ Thomas said absently, not looking up. Ben didn’t make any response at all. Only Audrey said again, ‘You do what you want, Annie. Don’t worry about us.’
She almost laughed at that. The sound of it, beginning in her head, was hideous.
Annie had no memory of how she reached Steve’s flat. She was aware that it took a long time, and that she was afraid that her resolve would desert her. But at last she was riding up in the mirrored lift. She stared down at her feet rather than confront her own reflection.
When he opened the door she looked straight into his eyes.
‘I can’t do it,’ Annie said.
He took her arm, led her inside and closed the door. The black sofa in front of her was too close, too comfortable. Annie broke awkwardly away and sat on an upright chair.
‘What can’t you do?’ Steve asked her.
Nothing, she wanted to say. There’s nothing I can’t do, so long as I’m with you. Her vacillating spirit shamed her. Outside, a long way beneath the windows, Annie could hear the traffic. The sound was incongruous high up in the enclosed room.
‘I can’t leave them,’ Annie said. The words hurt, as if they were pulled out of her like splinters.
Steve turned his face away. After a moment he stood up and went to the window. He looked at the skeins of cars and taxis down below.
‘Why now, Annie? Why have you decided this now?’ His voice was cold with disappointment. Annie thought of the two weeks that had just gone by, and the weeks before that, all the way back to Christmas. It wasn’t a decision made just this morning, arbitrary, as Steve must see it. It was simply, at last, the recognition of the bald truth that had confronted her always.
‘I am a coward,’ she whispered.
Steve snapped round to face her then. His black eyebrows were drawn together in anger with her.
‘You are nothing of the kind. Don’t use that as an excuse.’
She saw his hurt, and it made her own seem trivial.
‘I’ll tell you what happened,’ she said. ‘The hamburger lunch and film that we’d planned, remember? I offered them to my kids this morning. As casually, lightly as I could. And their faces closed up. They knew at once that here was the threat to them. You and me. Do you know what Thomas said?’
Steve listened motionless as she told him.
Annie said, ‘And I knew then that I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t even begin. Whether it’s weakness or cowardice, Steve, I couldn’t contemplate it being like that, for years, perhaps for ever, until they are grown up.’ Her smile twisted. ‘If it hadn’t been now. If it had been in ten years’ time. Or ten years ago.’
Except that it had happened ten years ago, and she had taken the easy option then. I don’t deserve even as much as I have got, Annie thought sadly.
‘Do you think your children will appreciate that so much has been sacrificed for them?’
She smiled again, crookedly. No one with children of his own, no one who understood the everyday sacrifices of parenthood, would have asked that. ‘I don’t suppose so.’
‘And Martin?’
Annie thought. ‘Martin and I were friends. Perhaps we can put some of that back together, for the kids.’
Steve made a last attempt. He put aside all the angry complex of feelings and he told her the truth.
‘I love you, Annie. You haven’t given me a chance.’
She wanted to run to him. She ached to lay her head against his heart, to rest in him and to acknowledge the truth. But Annie held her head up. Now that she had come so far, she couldn’t waver any more.
‘I love you too. There never was a chance for us.’
They looked at one another then, and they were drawn helplessly across the room. Annie put her hands out and he took them in his. She knew the touch of them in every mood now, and he seemed suddenly so physically warm and real that the idea of being without him was impossible. Annie had promised herself that