by Rosie Thomas
Martin sat by her bedside watching her face. He couldn’t even hold her hand because the lightest touch brought up big purple bruises under her skin. Her face was so dark with bruising that she looked as if she had been beaten over and over again. He sat and waited, almost in despair.
The doctor in charge of the intensive care unit had told him that Annie’s blood had lost all its ability to clot and stop her wounds from oozing. From their battery of tubes and plastic packs they were filling her with all the things that her own blood couldn’t produce. Martin watched the packs emptying themselves into her bruised body. Even her hair seemed to have lost its colour, spreading in grey strands against the flat pillow. Her lips were colourless, and leaden circles like big dark coins hid her eyes.
Steve waited too. Bob’s determined enquiries had led him to Annie’s surgeon, and the surgeon had come down himself to talk to Steve.
‘How is she?’ Steve asked.
The other man had looked at him speculatively, as if he was trying to gauge how much he should be told.
‘I held her hand for six hours,’ Steve said. ‘I want to know what’s happening to her.’
‘She has pneumonia and kidney failure. She is also suffering from disseminated intravascular clotting. That is in addition to the usual post-operative effects and her other, more minor injuries.’
‘Will she live?’ Steve watched the doctor’s face. But he didn’t see any flicker of concealment, and after a moment the man told him, ‘I think her chances are about fifty-fifty. The next two or three days will tell.’
‘Thank you,’ Steve said.
Two days went by.
The third was Christmas Eve, and the hospital hummed with the sad, determined gaiety of all hospitals at Christmas time. The staff nurse on Steve’s ward wore a tinsel circlet over her cap, paper streamers were pinned from corner to corner, and Steve could see a big Christmas tree in the day room that linked the ward to the women’s ward across the corridor.
The double row of beds with their flowered curtains and the narrow view through the doors at the end had become perfectly familiar. It struck Steve that he already knew the other occupants as well as he knew Bob Jefferies or any of his other friends outside the walls of the ward.
On the day of the bombing the eight-bedded ward and its women’s counterpart had been cleared to receive the victims. They had been brought in one by one, and they had found that their experience was a stronger bond than years of acquaintanceship. By unspoken agreement, they almost never mentioned the bombing itself. But there was a wry, grumbling kind of determination to overcome its effects that linked the newspaper seller, whose pitch outside the store had been covered with falling rubble and glass, the teenage store messenger, the five other Christmas shoppers, and Steve himself. In the handful of days that they had been enclosed in the ward, Steve had unwittingly become a kind of hero. It was only partly because he was the most seriously hurt, and because he had been trapped for so long. The real reason was the tide of presents that flowed into the ward for him. Flowers and cards and gifts arrived for all of them, every day. It was Christmas. The world felt guilty sympathy for them, and the loaded table in the middle of the ward clearly showed it.
But Steve’s tributes, from advertising colleague and friends and clients, were set apart by their lavishness. There were complete sides of smoked salmon, champagne and whisky by the case, boxes of chocolate truffles and fruit and flower displays that came in great hooped wicker baskets. Steve had been embarrassed at first by the procession of presents, and he had wanted none of the luxuries except flowers to look at. He gave the rest away, to the other men and the nurses, and then he saw the delighted interest that greeted each new delivery, and he began to enjoy them too.
On Christmas Eve, from Bob Jefferies and some friends in the film industry, a television set and a video recorder arrived. With the machines was a box containing tapes of two dozen of the newest feature films, some not yet even released.
The young messenger-boy shuffled over to Steve’s bed and gaped into the box. ‘I haven’t seen one of these before.’
‘You’ve got plenty of time to see them now, Mitchie.’
That was the accepted level of reference to what had happened to them all. They shied away from anything more. Steve thought of Annie lying somewhere upstairs, and wondered what they would say to one another if she was here, instead of this assortment of strangers precipitated into companionship.
At six o’clock one of the nurses inexpertly opened one of Steve’s bottles of champagne. The cork popped and bounced over the polished linoleum floor and the silvery froth foamed into hospital glasses. The nurses handed the glasses round and the old newsvendor next to Steve sipped at his and smacked his lips.
‘Well,’ he pronounced. ‘I’ve known worse Christmases.’ He looked appreciatively at the staff nurse with the tinsel wound around her cap. ‘But I wish I was your age again, Stevie.’
To be called Stevie, and the way that the old man spoke, reminded Steve of Nan. The thought of her, with the determined paper streamers over his head and the winking fairy lights and his image of the old man’s Christmases, filled him with sadness.
I wish I was your age again.
For what? Steve thought.
He hadn’t cried since he was a little boy, but there were tears in his eyes now. He wanted to get up and walk out of the room, defending himself with solitude as he had always done. But his broken leg and the pain under the blanket cage pinned him down. He felt his own weakness, and the way it exposed him to the need for other people to be tactful. Steve put his champagne glass down on the locker and turned his wet face into the pillows.
The others saw, and looked away again. Steve knew that they were raising the pitch of champagne jollity amongst themselves to shield him, and he felt the strangeness of what was happening more sharply even than the pain.
He lay and waited for the tears to stop forcing themselves out of his eyes, and thought about Annie. He knew Annie now better than he knew anyone else in the world, and he was afraid that she would die.
You mustn’t die, he whispered, as though they were buried again and she could hear him in the dark. You won’t die, will you?
The coldness of his fear for her dried up the weak tears.
Deliberately he turned his head back to face the other beds and reached out for his beaker of champagne.
Later, the hospital medical students came to tour the wards with their portable Christmas pantomime. They put on an extra lively show for the bomb victims. Steve lay and watched the clowning with a smile stretched over his face.
It was later still, when the overhead lights had been dimmed and he could hear the nurses rustling and giggling at the end of the ward, when Steve opened his eyes again and saw a man standing beside his bed.
He had a square, pleasant face with lines of tiredness pulling at his eyes and cheeks. He was tall and stooped a little, and he was looking down from his height at Steve lying in bed, as if he wasn’t sure whether to tiptoe away again.
‘It’s all right,’ Steve said distinctly. ‘I wasn’t asleep.’
The man’s hand rubbed over his face.
‘The sister said I could come in and see you for a minute.’
Steve reached up and clicked on the lamp over his bed. The circle of light enveloped them within the curtained space.
‘I’m Annie’s husband,’ the man said.
She’s dead. You’ve come to tell me that she’s dead.
Steve tried to haul himself upright against his pillows so that he could meet squarely what Martin had come to say.
‘How is she?’ he asked flatly. And then he saw that the lines in her husband’s face were drawn by exhausted relief, and not by defeat at all.
‘She’s going to be all right,’ Martin said. ‘They told me this evening.’
Steve closed his eyes for a minute. He saw Annie as she had been, lying beside him when they shone the rescue lights down on to her face. Then, sup
erimposed on it there was another, suddenly vivid image of her as she must have been before the bombing. She was laughing, with colour in her cheeks and her hair flying around her face. Steve opened his eyes abruptly.
‘Thank God,’ he said.
In his own relief he saw Martin’s exhaustion more clearly. He pointed to the chair beside his bed and Martin flopped down into it.
‘If you look in the locker,’ Steve said softly, ‘you’ll find a bottle of Scotch.’
He took it from Martin and poured a measure into his water glass. Martin wrapped his fingers round the glass and then drank half the whisky at a gulp.
‘Thank you,’ he said.
Steve waited until Annie’s husband looked up again, and then he asked gently, ‘What did they say? The doctors?’
Martin shrugged his shoulders inside his coat, as if he couldn’t believe now that she was indeed going to live in the face of the terrifying list of things that had threatened her.
‘She had pneumonia, but they’re beating that with antibiotics. She’s been on a ventilator machine that has been breathing for her, through a hole cut in her windpipe, but they say now that they’ll be able to take her off that in a couple of days. And her kidneys are starting to work again. They showed me. It’s all shown on the screen and marked on the charts at the end of her bed. Her blood wouldn’t clot, you know. She had bled so much that it couldn’t do what it was supposed to do any more. They filled her up with plasma, and all kinds of other things, and now it’s functioning for itself again. The wound from her operation will start to heal now. She’ll get better quite quickly from now on, they think.’ Martin’s hands rested on the sheet, with the glass held loosely in them. ‘It was so terrible to see her, in there with the monitors and machines all around her as if she belonged to them and not to me. I couldn’t even touch her hand, because it bruised her poor skin.’
Martin’s head was bent, and Steve waited again. The image of Annie was too clear and pitiful. But then Martin looked up, and Steve saw that he was smiling. He shrugged his shoulders once more.
‘But now she’s going to get better. She was awake, tonight. She can’t talk, because of the ventilator. But she smiled at me.’
Steve had to look away to conceal the stroke of jealousy.
He made himself think, Her husband, and then to remember that Martin had waited all through the day and the night of the bombing, and all through the days ever since. But even his understanding of that, and his sympathy, didn’t lessen the shock of his jealousy.
Unseeing, Martin drank the rest of his whisky. The relief was so profound that he wanted to share it. He could have stood up and announced it to the curtained ward, and to the nurses squeezed hilariously into the sister’s office at the far end. He felt a wide, stupid smile breaking through the stiffness of his face, and the whisky burned cheerfully in his head and stomach.
‘She must have wanted to live, you know,’ he murmured. ‘She must want it so much.’
Steve remembered. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘She did. She was very courageous, down there.’
Martin’s hand moved a little, as if he had been going to hold it out to Steve and then found that he couldn’t.
‘I wanted to tell you that she’s getting better, of course.’ The smile, again. ‘And I wanted to … thank you. For helping her.’
Through the glow of relief that had bathed the hospital corridors as he made his way down to the stranger’s bedside, Martin found himself watching Steve. He saw the bomb site again too, and himself peering down into the tiny space where the two of them had been lying together all the fearful hours.
It was smaller than a bed. It was like a grave, he thought, and he remembered a medieval tombstone that Annie and he had seen in a cathedral somewhere. They had been on holiday. Long ago, before the boys were born. The stone lord and his lady lay shoulder to shoulder on their stone slab, with a stone replica of their favourite lapdog asleep at their feet. Annie and Martin had deciphered the Latin lettering on the slab together. In death they were not separated.
Annie had sighed and said it was very romantic, but Martin had been struck by the intimacy of the narrow place beneath the slab for them to lie in.
They had both shivered a little and then laughed, and had gone on down the side aisle, hand in hand, to look at the stained glass windows.
The image of the same terrible intimacy came back to Martin now.
‘I’m so glad she’s getting better,’ Steve said.
The lame words didn’t begin to express the knot of his real feelings, and that was good. ‘I’ve been thinking about her a lot. Wondering. There’s no need to thank me, you know. We helped each other. Taking it in turns, one to be afraid and the other to pretend that there was no need. I know that I couldn’t have … couldn’t have held on as long, without Annie.’
It was very quiet on the ward, Steve noticed. Annie’s husband was looking at him. In ordinary times he would have a relaxed, humorous expression, and his eyes would be friendly. A nice man. Almost certainly a good man.
Quickly, Steve said, ‘What about your children? Benjy, and Tom? They must be … missing her.’
‘Yes,’ Martin said. ‘They are.’
Steve said quietly, ‘We talked, you know. For a long time, before the wall collapsed. We talked about all kinds of things. She told me about you, and the children, and your house. About how she didn’t want to die, and leave you all.’
Martin put his hand up to his eyes and then rubbed them, digging into them with his fingers. He was stupid with exhaustion and relief, wasn’t he? ‘I know she would say that. Annie wouldn’t give up. She wouldn’t give up up there, either. In that room with all the machines.’
‘I’m glad.’ Lame words, again.
Martin stood up. ‘The boys are all right. It’s harder for Tom, because he knows she’s ill, and he can’t see her. They won’t let anyone go up there, except me.’
Steve felt the movement of jealousy again. He wanted Martin to go now, but he still hovered at the bedside.
‘What about you?’
Steve shrugged. ‘Broken leg and cuts and bruises. Nothing much.’
Martin was looking at the dimly-lit ward. ‘It isn’t much of a Christmas for you, either, is it? What about your family?’
‘I’m not married. It isn’t exactly my favourite time of year, in any case.’
Martin nodded. ‘Annie loves Christmas,’ he said. He did hold out his hand then. Steve took it and they shook hands.
Martin smiled. ‘I’d better go. The kids will be awake at five a.m.’
‘Go and get some sleep.’
‘Yes,’ Martin said. ‘I’ll be able to do that now.’
After he had gone Steve lay awake for a long time. He took the fact that Annie would recover and held it close to him like a talisman. He didn’t think beyond that.
The house was quiet when Martin reached it. His parents had already gone to bed, so he sat in the kitchen and drank another whisky. He thought about the other Christmases he had shared with Annie, and her pleasure in the rituals that must be observed every year. It was Annie who had sewn the big red felt stockings for the boys to hang up, and Martin knew that when he went upstairs he would find them draped expectantly over the ends of their beds.
If she had died …
The terror of it struck him all over again and he clenched his fist around the whisky glass.
But Annie wasn’t going to die. He was still afraid of her injuries, but he was sure that she was going to live.
He felt a moment of simple happiness. It was Christmas, and their children were asleep upstairs, and Annie was going to live.
He put his empty glass down and went to the boys’ rooms. He collected the red stockings, turning the covers back for an instant to look at the sleeping faces. Then he went into their own bedroom where Annie had stacked the presents neatly at the back of their big wardrobe. He took them out one by one and filled the stockings. He was touched and impressed by the care she
had given to choosing even the smallest toys. It was so obvious which of the boys each of the things was intended for. He recognized how smoothly and lovingly Annie had orchestrated their simple, domestic affairs. Why had he never told her, or even really noticed it?
When he had finished he laid the bulging red shapes back on the beds. Then he carried their big presents downstairs and put them with the others under the tree.
The fairy lights made a glowing coloured pyramid in the dim room. Martin saw that on the hearth the boys had left a glass of whisky and a mince pie for Father Christmas, and a carrot, neatly peeled, for the reindeer.
That was always at Annie’s insistence. ‘Why shouldn’t the poor old reindeer get something?’ he heard her demanding.
It must have been Thomas who had reminded his grandmother to arrange the little offering tonight.
Martin was smiling as he poured the whisky back into the bottle. He ate the carrot and the mince pie, suddenly ravenous. He realized that he had eaten almost nothing since the bombing.
‘Come on, Father Christmas,’ Annie would have said now. ‘Let’s go to bed.’ He missed the warmth of her hand taking his, and the sweetness and familiarity of lying down beside her.
Martin turned off the tree lights and went upstairs. He would make this Christmas a happy one for the boys, however little he felt like it himself. For Annie’s sake.
The boys woke up very early in the morning, as Martin had known they would. First Benjy and then Thomas came creeping into his bed, the stockings bumping behind them.
‘Look!’ cried Benjy. ‘He’s been.’
‘Is it all right?’ Thomas whispered.
Martin lifted the covers and the two of them scrambled in beside him, a wriggling mass of sharp elbows.
