Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection: Strangers, Bad Girls Good Women, A Woman of Our Times, All My Sins Remembered
know. It’s all right. Look, there’s the lighthouse.’
And through the window she saw the beam of it, bright, and regular, and beautiful. Steve held her until her breath came steadier. He kissed her wet eyelids and brushed the matted damp hair out of her eyes. She shuddered and lay against him, letting the ordinary reality of touch and sight and smell lift her out of the black terror. ‘Was it the same dream?’
‘Yes. Exactly the same.’
With one arm still holding her, Steve reached out and turned on the light beside the bed. Annie saw the reality of the patchwork quilt and the beamed ceiling; their discarded clothes and her own belongings laid out on the top of the chest of drawers. Colour flooded softly back into the room.
‘Look at me now,’ Steve said. She turned her head slowly. He took her fingers and pressed them to his face. To Annie it was as if they were in the wreckage again, but she could see him now, and touch him, and she wasn’t afraid any more.
‘It’s over,’ he said. She listened carefully to the echoes in the words. ‘You’re safe now.’ With their linked fingers he touched the fading scars on her arm and shoulder and the long one across her belly. ‘We survived. We made each other survive. It’s all over, Annie.’
She nodded, suddenly mute with exhaustion.
‘Lie down again.’ Steve turned out the light once more.
She did as he told her, and he drew the quilt around them. Without knowing that he was doing it, Steve put his arms around her and held her exactly as he had done in the worst moments, when he was afraid that she would die. But her breathing was regular now, warm on his cheek, and her face when he touched it was clean and smooth.
It’s over, he told himself once more. He remembered when the rescuers came. He had let go of her in the end, under the arc lights in the icy air. Now, the dim sweep of the lighthouse beam was like the faintest echo of those same lights. Involuntarily, uselessly, he held her tighter. ‘Are you still awake?’
Her cheek moved against his shoulder. ‘Yes.’
‘Are you still frightened?’
‘No,’ Annie said. ‘Not any more.’ She was certain now, as sure as she would ever be of anything, that the terrible dream was gone and that it would never trouble her again. ‘The dream is over too,’ she said. ‘It won’t come back any more.’
In the darkness, with only the faint grey shimmer of the lighthouse as a reminder, Steve smiled with his mouth against her hair.
They lay for a long time, holding each other, in the old position. And then, at last, they fell asleep.
The sun rose over the sea, and filled the rooms of the blue house with penetrating light. When Annie went to look out, yawning and wrapping herself in her robe, the fishing fleet was coming in, drawing after itself a double wake of silvery, foaming wash and black swooping gulls. The diesel engines chugged in the stillness. Steve came and stood beside her and they watched the wake from the boats fan out and reach the shore in ripples which rolled over on to the shingle with hardly a splash.
Remember it, Annie told herself. Remember it.
They stood in silence for a moment and then Steve said, lightly, as if it were any day, ‘I think we should have a proper seaside breakfast. I’m going to the shops.’
Annie sat on the duckboards of the balcony, her knees drawn up and the sun warm on her face, and waited for him. The first of the fishing boats was winched slowly up on to the shingle, the rusty old engine on the beach painfully grinding.
She heard Steve come in again, and begin to clatter in the kitchen. She went downstairs, barefoot, padding in and out of the shafts of sunlight. She stood in the kitchen doorway smiling, but then Steve glanced sharply at her and her smile faded.
‘What is it?’ Annie asked.
She stared around the kitchen, seeing the box of eggs and the brown paper bag of groceries, the unfolded newspaper and the coffee pot waiting on the table.
Steve hesitated and she felt the cold pulse of her heart, and then he picked up the newspaper. He came to her, holding the front page for her to see. Annie thought, Martin. Tom and Benjy. What’s happened to them, while I’m here, away from them? No, please. Please not that … not now, and here.
She looked down in bewilderment at blurred photographs, mugshots, two men and a woman. The meant nothing to her and the fear that had leapt into her throat subsided again. They’re always here inside me, she realized. Wherever I go.
She knew, suddenly and with utter conviction, that there was no decision to be made. It had been made, long ago, with the times that had become memories whirling like confetti in the darkness.
‘What is it?’ she repeated stupidly.
‘Read it.’
Annie forced her eyes to focus, skimming over the words. She saw, Arrested in South London. In connection with the Christmas bombing. There were names, absurdly ordinary, and aliases. Suspected political affiliations. Continued on back page. She knew that on the back page there would be a reminder of what had happened on that day. Perhaps a photograph of the bombed store.
She let the paper fall instead of turning it over. The gas ring was already lit, a circle of dim blue flame, and it hissed softly in the silence. They couldn’t hear the sea, here at the back of the house. The only other sound, now that Annie was listening, was someone whistling. A milkman, perhaps. Ordinary things, going on all around them. She thought of her parents’ house, and well-washed milk bottles put out on the back step.
‘So they’re caught,’ she said at last.
She was trying to make herself understand what she felt now, and it dawned on her that she felt nothing. She had spent her grief and anger long ago, for those who had died and suffered injuries. And for herself and Steve, the newspaper photographs of those wooden, staring faces had no significance at all. The violence had gone. Annie felt the gentleness of relief. It softened the clenched muscles in her face and throat, and loosened the set of her shoulders. She was lucky, after all. Nothing had happened to Martin or the boys. It wasn’t too late.
‘We’re here,’ Martin had told her in the garden. Sharp joy out of the words sang in her head. Longing and love pulled fiercely at her. She turned her face to look openly at Steve.
‘What do you feel?’ she asked him. The oddness of the question struck them both. She had never needed to ask that before.
His eyes held hers for a moment, and then he looked down at the newspaper faces.
‘Nothing,’ he whispered. ‘What are they to us, now?’
That was all, but unspoken words spilt through the silence.
The blurred newsprint had come like an exorcism. It laid the violence and the fear to rest, and with them a different kind of violence seemed to die too.
Steve took her in his arms and kissed her, and he saw her as he had done at the very beginning. A woman out shopping, with her hair tumbled over the collar of her coat. Annie stood with her head against his shoulder. She was thinking back to the old evenness of her life with Martin and her children. The bomb had blown that apart. She thought of the pain that followed, and the revelation of its obverse side, joy more vivid than anything she had ever known. The pain and, she understood now, the joy had both faded together. It had happened, and it was over.
It was Steve, and herself, and Martin and the children who were left. No different from anyone else, and with the same old human ties.
Love and affection. How deep those ties went, after the violent need had flickered out. Martin was half of her. She couldn’t cut away half of herself, but even more certainly she knew that she couldn’t cut out of Martin the half of him that was herself too. The thought of his pain, much harder to bear than all her own, filled her eyes momentarily with tears.
She bent down to hide them, picking