by Rosie Thomas
Annie’s awareness of her body’s workings made her feel naked. The colour flooded into her cheeks and she looked down to hide the heat of it. Steve moved too and their heads bent. For a moment their foreheads touched.
At the opposite end of the room one of the old men levered himself out of his chair. There had been a muted, distantly hysterical racing commentator’s voice in the day room background, but a control button clicked on the television now and there was silence.
Steve raised his head. The circuit broke and Annie thought, No, don’t do that.
But at the same time she felt relief wash through her, cooling her skin.
‘Did your horse come in, Frank?’ Steve called. He squeezed Annie’s hands in his and then let them go. She folded them in her lap, empty.
‘Nah,’ Frank grumbled. ‘The bugger ran like a one-legged ostrich.’
He shuffled across the room towards them, peering at the clock on the window wall.
‘Five to visiting time. They’ll all be pouring in here with their talk, talk. I wish meself that they’d leave me in peace with the racing. Still,’ he winked across at Annie, ‘I wouldn’t miss the sight of Steve’s visitors. You should see ’em.’ His hands outlined explicitly in the air before he stumped off towards his ward.
Annie and Steve were laughing. Their laughter was another link, almost a safety valve.
‘He has me cast,’ Steve explained, ‘as a kind of hybrid between Warren Beatty and Frank Harris. Nothing could be further from the truth, I promise.’
‘Who’s coming to see you today?’
‘Vicky.’
‘Hm.’
Acknowledgement flickered between them, humorous, unexpressed. As if they were partners, Annie thought. It was easy to laugh with Steve. The warmth of it was comfortable.
‘And you?’
‘Martin’s mother, bringing Tom and Benjy.’
Steve reached awkwardly for his crutches. Annie could move more freely so she bent down and retrieved them, holding them upright while he fitted his elbows into the padded cups and then let the metal legs take his weight.
‘Thank you.’ He half turned, then looked back at her. ‘Doesn’t this strike you as absurd? Crutches. Bandages. All the rest of it? A pair of battered bodies …’
‘It will pass,’ Annie interrupted him.
‘Soon, I hope.’
Annie let his challenge lie. Infirmity was a protective shield, and with her old caution she shrank from confronting what lay beyond it.
They moved slowly away towards the opposite doors. Annie imagined the outside world, reaching its long fingers into theirs to draw them apart. The image disturbed her but she still stopped in the doorway.
‘Tomorrow?’ she asked.
Steve nodded gravely. ‘Naturally.’
But then his face split into a smile, a smile that brought the fierce colour into her face again because it was as intimate as if they already lay in one another’s arms. Annie drew her blue robe around her and pushed through the door into the women’s ward.
Martin’s mother and the two little boys came down the length of it towards her.
‘Mummy!’
Somebody’s mother, Annie remembered. Steve had said that about his wife wanting a baby. Just somebody’s mother. The recollection made her angry and she was grateful for it. He was arrogant, and he possessed all the male characteristics that she had turned her back on long ago, when she married Martin. Annie bent down to hug her children, drawing them close to her.
When she stood up again her mother-in-law kissed her and then stood back to look at her, exclaiming, ‘Annie! Darling, you look so much better. You’ve got pink cheeks again.’
‘I am better, Barbara,’ Annie said deliberately. ‘I’m working really hard at it. I want to get home just as soon as I can.’
‘I wish you would come home. Dad won’t let us do anything,’ Thomas complained. ‘Life’s very hard, right now.’
‘Poor boy.’ Annie put her arm round him. ‘Poor Dad, too. When does term start again?’
Thomas stared at her. ‘Monday. You know that.’
‘Of course I do. I’m sorry.’ She had forgotten. The slip of her memory made her aware again of the two worlds, one trying to draw her back and the other enclosing her here.
School terms. The neat pattern of days, the boys needing to be driven to and fro, her own routines of cooking and shopping and attending to them, and the quiet evenings when she sat with Martin opposite her at the table, exchanging the small snippets of news. And here, the high white beds in their curtained boxes, the terrifying fingers of her dreams, the peaks and troughs of pain. And Steve. Annie put her hand up to the corner of her mouth. The cut there had almost healed. Her body renewing itself. She felt the life in it.
‘Mum, are you listening?’
‘Yes, love, of course I am.’
They settled themselves around her bed. Benjy had brought her a series of drawings, and he wanted her to guess what every crayoned shape represented. Thomas wanted her to read a new book with him. She listened carefully to what they had to say, trying to share her attention between them with scrupulous fairness, suggesting and reassuring.
Barbara wanted to talk, too. She was an indefatigable talker, a friendly, outgoing, ordinary woman to whom Annie had never been particularly close. The bond with her own mother was too strong.
Annie struggled to spare some attention and make the right responses to Barbara’s recitals of how Martin was coping, what the neighbours in her street had said and thought, how the boys were behaving for her, the emergency domestic arrangements. She wished that her own mother were well, and that she were here instead of Barbara.
She remembered how she had imagined that she was a girl again, in the dark with Steve. Lying with her head in her mother’s lap, in their cool living room. Annie’s mother had come to see her twice since they had brought her out of the intensive care unit. They had been short visits, no more than ten minutes, and all through them she had held on to her husband’s arm with thin white fingers. She had been cheerful, painfully bright, for Annie’s sake.
Listening to Barbara’s stream of talk, Annie felt the vibration of anxiety for her mother, love and fear mixed together. With the anxiety came a sudden, sharp resentment of the demands that the other world made. The dues of love, she thought bitterly. Payable to parents, husbands, children.
Her selfishness startled and shocked her.
In pointless expiation she praised Barbara fulsomely for everything that she was doing. She bent her head over the books and drawings, trying to give of herself as generously as she could.
The visit only lasted an hour, but Annie was glad when it was over. Her head ached fiercely, and the long scar in her stomach burned. She knew that her goodbyes sounded hasty and irritable, and when the boys had gone she ached with guilt and longing for them.
She pushed the tray of supper aside as soon as they brought it to her, and lay dozing against her pillows until Martin came on his way home from work.
He stretched his long legs out in front of him as he sat in the hospital armchair. ‘You look tired,’ he said.
‘I am a bit. But I felt wonderful this afternoon. A tower of strength.’
‘That’s good. How was your day?’
The eagerness in Martin’s voice reproached her. My husband, she thought. Half of me. Annie sat up straighter against the pillows, watching him. She would tell him that she had talked to Steve. Tell him truthfully, now, while there was nothing to tell.
The words didn’t come.
She tried the beginnings of them in her head, and couldn’t voice any of them. Instead she heard herself saying brightly, ‘They took the strapping off my arm. Look.’ She held it up and Martin took her hand, linking his fingers with hers.
‘That’s wonderful.’
Annie’s guilt bit more sharply. She tried to tell herself that there was no reason for guilt. But she knew that there must be, just because it was there. ‘Barbara cam
e in with the kids, you know that. Ben had a stack of drawings, and Tom wanted to read. Barbara talked without drawing breath once, and the boys needed all my attention. They were here an hour, and it gave me a headache. I feel bad about it now.’
Martin drew his chair closer to the bed so that he could put his arm around her.
‘Poor love,’ he said. ‘You’re bound to feel like this, to begin with. Well enough to cope, and then too tired as soon as you try to. Don’t worry so much. We’re all managing perfectly well at home.’
Annie nodded, resting her head against his shoulder.
‘What else?’ he murmured. ‘Any other news?’
‘No,’ she answered. ‘Not really.’
She closed her eyes. He was so kind, she thought. Kind and good, and she loved him. Perhaps it was an unflamboyant, muted love, but it was infinitely valuable. Don’t risk it, she warned herself, and then could almost have laughed wildly out loud. The idea of risking anything, buried alive under tons of rubble and then shuffling in bandages around a hospital ward, was so absurd. She pushed the thoughts aside.
‘Tell me about your day,’ she begged Martin. ‘All about it. Every detail.’ Her fierceness surprised him and to explain it she said, ‘I feel so closed up in this place. Separate from you and the world and everything that matters.’
‘It won’t be long now,’ he soothed her. ‘I saw the sister on the way. She says you’re doing brilliantly.’
Home, Annie thought, not knowing truly what she felt about the prospect. She would be going home, soon.
‘Tell me,’ she insisted.
He settled his arm more comfortably around her.
‘Well. Let’s think. I went to a meeting this morning with the new hotel people in Bayswater. They want to open the place in time for the summer. There isn’t a chance of that, not with the level of work that they want done …’
Annie listened, with her eyes shut, imagining that they were at home. They would be sitting on the shabby chesterfield in front of the fire. The cat would be asleep on the bentwood rocking chair opposite them. The boys asleep upstairs. Newspapers and magazines stacked up on the lower shelf of the television table. The grandmother clock that stood in the hall ticking comfortably. The curtains would be drawn, shutting out the threats that stalked in the darkness outside. Martin went on talking softly while Annie conjured up the certainty of home.
At last he whispered, ‘Are you asleep?’
She shook her head. ‘No. Just thinking.’
Annie opened her eyes and he leant over to kiss her. He fanned her hair out with his fingers and turned her face so that their mouths met.
‘Hurry up and get better. I want you back home. I need you so much, Annie. I love you.’
Love. Need. The dues to be paid.
Annie nodded, unable to say anything.
When Martin had gone she lay still, looking at the flowers on her locker and at the faded, flat shapes on the curtain behind. The fresh ones were so vivid. She could feel the sappy strength of the stems between her fingers, and the green, pollen-rich scent held amongst the tight petals was stronger than the reek of the hospital. It was only by contrast that the curtain flowers seemed drab. The colours and shapes would have been satisfying enough, if they had been allowed to stand alone.
Annie looked away from them, turning her back on the flowers and the unwelcome analogy that they forced upon her.
She made the decision, as she lay there, that she wouldn’t go to the day room tomorrow. There would be no need, then, to shoulder any guilt. She would stay in the ward all day, and so she needn’t see Steve at all. She could stop what was happening, stop what she was afraid of now, simply by not seeing him at all.
Martin walked out of the main doors of the hospital. The cold wind funnelling between the high buildings seemed sharper still after the airless ward, and he ducked his head and moved briskly. His car was parked in a side street nearby, but when he reached it he made no move to drive away. His attempt at briskness had petered out, and he sat instead staring through the windscreen into the darkness, his hands loosely gripping the wheel.
Annie was getting better. Every day he could see the changes, and he looked carefully for the latest proof that she was stronger. Yet the new strength didn’t bring her back again. He had believed it would, while he sat holding her hand among the possessive machines, and now he saw that the expectation had been too simple. The bomb had done more than tear Annie’s body. It had blown a crater between the two of them, and Martin knew that he couldn’t fling himself across it.
Annie had suffered the pain and the fear, and he had not. However much he willed himself to allow and understand, he did not and he accepted that he could not.
The man did. Steve did, because he had shared it with her. It was absurd, Martin thought with sudden bitterness, to envy him for that.
Martin’s hands slipped off the wheel and hung at his sides. The fingers opened and clenched, as if he wanted to reach for something, but it eluded his grasp. He was thinking of the way that Annie had slipped away from him. She was there, the shape of her filling out every day, but she had gone away somewhere.
Just for a few seconds, Martin let his head drop forward and rest against the wheel. His own concerns were with the mundane double load of business, and of keeping himself and the boys fed and clean. How could he guess from that vantage point what Annie’s concerns were, who had nearly died? And who had shared that almost-death with him?
With Steve, Martin made himself repeat.
He jerked his head up and groped for his car keys. He drove home again, too fast, trying to deny the current of his thoughts.
Annie was dreaming.
The darkness had absorbed her again and it stretched all round her, limitless. It wasn’t empty darkness. Rather it was tangible, heavy and threatening, and sharp with broken edges that pressed against her. The darkness was utterly silent, but at the same time it held the threat of a terrible cataclysmic noise that might erupt at any instant. The noise would bring the weight, crashing downwards, to extinguish her. She wanted to move, to raise herself on to all fours and then to crawl, to stagger upright and then to run, lurching away, in all her terror. But there was no possibility of movement, no hope of escape. The silence was absolute. There was only Annie herself, trapped in her weakness. No one would rescue her, because no one else existed. No one could comfort her, and when the noise came at last she would be utterly alone. She felt the icy cold in her chest, deep in her heart, and the stick-like fragility of her outstretched arms and legs.
And then she heard the noise begin.
It was a low rumble, a long way off, beneath her and over her head, terrible and implacable and final.
Annie woke up with her scream frozen in her throat. It was always the same dream, and she always woke at the same instant.
She lay with her knees drawn up and her fists clenched, shivering in the grip of terror, waiting for it to relax as she had learned that it would. Her back and her shoulders were clammy with sweat.
Steve.
The thought of him filled her mind. She longed for him to be with her, with a desperate, almost unbearable longing. She wanted him to lie down beside her and put his hands over her eyes. She wanted him to put his mouth to her ear and whisper, as he had done in the darkness that now seemed less fearsome than the darkness of her nightmare. Steve saw and understood, and it was unthinkable that he should not be with her now.
Annie sat up in bed. Her nightdress clung icily to her skin, and she pushed the damp weight of her hair back from her face.
She stared across the ward to the day room door. Beyond it was the day room itself, in darkness, with the television’s eye briefly extinguished. And beyond that, in the ward that mirrored this room, Steve would be lying asleep.
She saw his face, every line of it clear. She felt his hands holding hers, and the touch of his forehead making a circuit that she had wanted never to break. She thought of how he had kissed her cheek, that firs
t afternoon, and today he had smiled at her like a lover.
She fought against the longing.
She let her head fall forward against her drawn-up knees, hugging herself, almost welcoming the stab of pain from the wound in her stomach. They couldn’t possess one another now. That they had done so already, tenderly and brutally in the darkness through the touch of their hands, that was only the cruelty of the trick that circumstance had played on them.
A trick, an irony. Life’s little irony, in the face of death.
Annie raised her head again. The sweat on her cheeks had dried and they shone with tears now. She stared down the ward as if she could see through the walls and doors that separated her from Steve.
‘Damn you,’ she whispered helplessly. ‘Damn you.’
A student nurse checking the ward had seen that Annie was awake. She came and stood beside Annie’s bed in her pink dress.
‘Are you all right?’
‘Yes,’ Annie said. ‘I had a dream. Just a bad dream.’
The girl moved to straighten her pillows and the crumpled bedclothes.
‘Shall I bring you a drink? Some hot milk, and something to help you sleep?’
They had taken the flowers away for the night. The chintz flowers of the curtains looked like nursery hangings, reassuring in the dimmed light.
‘Yes,’ Annie said. ‘Thank you. Something to make me sleep.’
She slept at last, and it seemed that almost at once they came to wake her up again. The ward routine was already numbingly familiar. A group of doctors came and examined her, and then mumbled amongst themselves at the foot of her bed.
Annie was used to that now.
Their senior beamed at her, once the consultation was finished.
‘You’re doing very well, you know. Your kidney function is normal, and everything else is healing nicely.’
‘I want to do well,’ Annie told him, irresistibly reminded of school interviews with her headmistress. ‘I want to go home.’
‘Oh, I’m making no promises about that. Two or three weeks more with us, and then we’ll see, mmm?’
Annie nodded patiently. Her recovery, going home again to Martin and the children, that was in her power now. That was what she would focus on. She stretched out under the bedclothes, feeling the pull in the tendons as she moved her feet, and the ache in her shoulder.
