Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection: Strangers, Bad Girls Good Women, A Woman of Our Times, All My Sins Remembered
front door swung open.
Annie stood in the hallway, looking around her. The same, the same as always, and infinitely precious.
Then the silence grew heavy and she turned her head sharply. She dropped her bag at her feet and the thud was unnaturally loud. The house was empty.
Annie ran to the living room door and pushed it open. There was no one there, although the cushions were flattened and the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle were spread on the table. She whirled around and ran into the kitchen, seeing the scatter of bread-crumbs on the worktop, the milk bottle standing on the draining board. In the irrationality of her fear, the signs told her nothing.
They had gone, she thought. She had come home too late, and they were gone. Desperation gripped her.
Into the stillness she shouted, ‘Martin!’
Then, through the window of the kitchen, she saw the three of them. Martin must have been sitting working in the garden, with the boys playing nearby, but now they had heard her. They stood close together, their faces alike, uncertain. Annie saw that they didn’t know what to expect from her.
She fumbled with the door handle, turning it the wrong way in her haste. The door banged behind her and she ran over the grass, almost stumbling. She heard Thomas’s shout.
‘Mum’s home. Oh look, Mum’s home.’
But it was only Martin that she could look at now.
Let me ask you just one more thing. After so many. Let me come back.
Martin’s eyes fixed on Annie’s face. Even though the tears were running down her cheeks he saw the look in it, and he knew that it was over at last. He held out his arms to her.
‘Annie.’
With her head bent, against his shoulder, she asked him, ‘Can I come home?’
He put his hands to her cheeks, turning her face up to his. ‘We’re here. We’ve been waiting for you.’
He kissed the corner of her mouth, and with his thumb he wiped the tears from her cheeks, just as Annie would do to Benjy or Tom. Annie saw her husband then, his face as familiar to her as it had always been, but sharpened with differences and now, suddenly, with the knowledge of happiness.
I don’t deserve so much. She knew it, and she knew that she would remember it. Remember, Annie told herself, for the last time.
‘Thank you,’ she said simply. ‘I love you.’
He smiled at her, then. ‘I love you too.’
The boys’ shrieks broke through to her and she knelt on the grass to look at them, drawing Martin down with her. Benjy’s fists caught at her clothes and she hugged him against her, reaching out an arm for Thomas too.
‘Don’t go away again,’ Thomas shouted at her. ‘Don’t go away again ever.’
She held them closer, so that they wouldn’t see her tears.
‘I won’t go away again,’ she promised him. ‘Never, never.’
The words closed round the four of them, and they made an unbreakable, invisible circle on the grass.
It’s over, Annie thought.
She listened, straining her ears, but there was nothing. The last echoes of the bomb’s terrible roar had died away into the stillness of the garden.
Bad Girls, Good Women
BY ROSIE THOMAS
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
First published in the United Kingdom in 1988 by Michael Joseph
Copyright © Rosie Thomas 1988
Rosie Thomas asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Ebook Edition © APR 2014 ISBN: 9780007560561
Version: 2014-05-13
Contents
Copyright
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-one
Twenty-two
Twenty-three
Twenty-four
Twenty-five
Twenty-six
Twenty-seven
The music, very loud music, filled the corners of the old house.
In the big room where the musicians in their corner were lapped by a sea of dancers, it was as solid as a wall. Overhead, where Julia stood in the shadows at the top of the stairs, it penetrated the thick stone walls and the oak-boarded floors as an insistent bass beat. She stood for a minute to listen to it.
Beneath her was the blaze of lights and the noise of people, laughter and shouting all knitted together by the throb of the music.
Julia swayed dreamily, moving her hips inside the silky tube of her dress. She was smiling, because she loved parties and her own parties were always the best of all. She loved this particular moment, when the party was off and