by Rosie Thomas
‘Why don’t you listen?’ Ben demanded crossly.
Annie felt the heat of unjustified irritation.
‘I can’t listen to everything all the time, Ben,’ she snapped. ‘I need to think sometimes.’
He looked at her, surprised, and then he stuck out his lower lip. ‘I need a cuddle,’ he said, acting, but Annie knew that at another level he wasn’t acting, but telling her the truth. She pushed her anger and sadness ashamedly back within herself.
‘Come and sit on my knee.’
He scrambled up triumphantly and she hugged him, then drew his plate of messy food across and spooned up a mouthful.
‘Come on, finish this and then we’ll watch your programme.’
Ben felt that he had won some undefined battle and so he willingly ate the rest of his lunch. Afterwards they sat on the sofa together, with Benjy’s head heavy against Annie’s chest. Annie stared unseeingly at the puppets on the screen and thought of the afternoon ahead of her, and the other afternoons of motherhood, and tried hopelessly to imagine them in another place, with Steve.
‘Let’s go to the park,’ she suggested when the programme finished. She found Benjy’s red suit and dragged his tricycle out of the tangle in the cupboard under the stairs. They set off, with Benjy trundling beside his mother, his face screwed up with concentration and the effort of pedalling.
The route was numbingly familiar, and the park itself. She followed Benjy from the swings to the roundabout, and stood at the foot of the slide while he hurtled down it. She felt too stiff and far-away to join in his game of hide-and-seek.
‘Not today,’ she told him. ‘Perhaps Daddy will bring you and Tom for a game tomorrow.’
What else would happen tomorrow, and the days afterwards? Annie felt cold. She saw that the sky was streaked with long fingers of cloud. The warmth of the misplaced spring was over, and tomorrow it would be as icy as January again. She walked around the knot of trees that stood in the middle of the park.
‘Come on, Ben. We’ll go and buy some bread for tea, and then we’ll get Thomas from school.’
Teatime came and went, and then the routine of the children’s play time, supper and baths and bedtime stories. When they were both asleep Annie came downstairs and poured herself a drink, looked at the dinner in the oven, and then sat down to wait. She knew that she was waiting for Martin, as she had been waiting all day. She waited for an hour, and then another half an hour, and then she took her portion of the dinner out of the oven and ate it, not tasting anything. She washed up the single plate and put it away, and sat down again in front of the television. She remembered that there was a basketful of mending waiting to be done so she fetched it and began to darn a hole in the elbow of one of Thomas’s school jerseys.
It was nearly half past ten when Martin came up the front path.
He had been sitting for hours in the corner of a bleak pub he had never been into before. Amidst the plastic and neon of brewery décor he had been thinking about himself and Annie, back over all the years that they had been together. He remembered her as they had been when they first met, and he recalled that he had fallen in love with her in a coffee bar, when she was still an awkward hybrid of outré student and shy schoolgirl. They had grown up together, from then. In two, perhaps three years? It seemed a short time to have accomplished so much, looking back at it with the speed of years’ passing now. But it had felt then as if they had for ever ahead of them. The memories went on, parading past him, while he stared unseeingly at his beer.
Was this what for ever added up to, then?
Everything that they had done together seemed much clearer, and precious, now. Because he was afraid that the end of it was coming?
He had never been afraid before, because he had been so sure of her. Even when there was Matthew, he had been sure.
Martin ducked his head over his unwanted beer, confronted by the spectre of arrogance.
Carefully, now, he made himself remember.
Matthew had materialized in the hot weeks of the summer before they were married. Martin had never even seen him, but Annie’s friend Louise, and other friends, had talked about him. Martin remembered that he had understood what was happening, but he had simply waited for her.
He had even asked her, Do I need to worry about it? And she had answered, No.
His certainty that she would come back seemed unbelievable now. Had he been so convinced that he was right about everything else, in those days?
He might have lost her, then.
Instead of losing her now.
For all the noise and distraction of the pub, Martin felt that he was hearing and seeing with sudden, perfect clarity.
Neither of them was fixed, nor defined as themselves at any point in time, not in that Soho coffee bar, nor on their wedding day, nor on the day of the bombing. They both went on changing, and they changed separately as well as together. They were not just the welded, coupled unit that he had silently asked her to confirm on the unhappy night of their dinner party. They were both of them at fault, perhaps, for forgetting that. They had seen each other fixed in a frame, as Martin-and-Annie, or as Benjy and Tom’s Mum and Dad, and when they slipped separately out of their fixed places, then they lost sight of one another.
How restless had Annie been, while he worked and concentrated on other things?
She was so good at giving all of them what they needed from her, he hadn’t troubled to look closely enough. It was only on Christmas Eve, when she had already gone, that he had really seen the neat evidence of her loving care. And then he had thought, Why didn’t I see before?
Or had Annie herself stopped seeing things, too?
Perhaps, Martin thought.
And if they were both at fault in their carelessness of one another, he had been wrong all the last weeks to heap the blame for what was happening on to the bombing.
The bomb was a senseless, terrible catalyst, nothing more.
The juke-box in the corner of the bar sent waves of meaningless noise washing around him.
If it hadn’t been Steve, then, it might have been someone else. Sooner or later.
Through the noise, Martin made himself follow the painful threads of thought. Now that it had happened. Think it. Now that his wife had fallen in love with someone else, what could he do?
With the end of his need to blame the bomb, Martin’s anger and bitterness against Steve drifted away too. There was nothing to be gained from going to find him, confronting him, as he had still half-imagined that he would do. To say what? Martin thought, and half-smiled at the picture that it conjured up. To ask for Annie back?
Martin sat for a long time, without moving, and then he picked up the pint glass and drained it.
There was nothing he could do. Nothing except wait, and by waiting hope to show her that he loved her, and wanted her, and needed her.
He stood up at last, stiff and with the bar music beating in his head. It was time to go home.
He drove back the familiar way, and parked the car outside the front gate. The lights were on in the downstairs rooms, and the dim glow of Benjy’s bedroom nightlight glowed against the drawn blind in the top window. The house looked just as it always did, and the sight made him long even more sharply for the old, ordinary times. If they came back again, he vowed to himself, he would keep them, rubbed bright, and never give them a chance to slip away.
He went up the path, and let himself in through the front door. Annie was sitting in the circle of light at one end of the old chesterfield. He saw the colour of her hair and the line of her cheek, and the mending lying in her lap.
They looked at each other without speaking, neither of them knowing what to say. Annie got up slowly and crossed the room to turn off the television news, and Martin stood rooted in the doorway watching the way that she bent down, straightened up again and walked away into the kitchen.
‘Would you like your dinner?’ she called back, tonelessly. ‘It’s rather dry, I’m afraid.’
‘It doesn’t matter. Yes, bring it in here, is that all right?’
A moment later she came in with a tray, a plate of food, ordinary things, like on any other night. Martin took it and began to eat, feeling the food settling on top of the gassy keg beer that he had drunk in the cheerless pub.
After a minute he said, ‘I thought we might talk, Annie.’
She was sitting across the room, her head bent, her hands folded on her darning. ‘Yes. I thought we might too,’ she whispered.
Martin groped, wondering where to start. ‘Tell me what happened.’
She looked at him then with a strange, almost supplicating expression. ‘You know what happened.’
He shook his head. ‘No, Annie. I want you to tell me, now. It’s time.’
She put her hands up to her eyes. He wanted to say, Don’t do that. Let me see your face, but he made himself keep quiet.
At last Annie said, ‘We were a couple, you and me, living here with our kids. It wasn’t anything extraordinary, was it? Nothing exotic, or passionate, or enthralling, but it was working. It was, wasn’t it?’
Martin nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said, very quietly. ‘It was working. Better than we deserved, perhaps.’
She looked across at him then, for a long moment, and then she nodded.
‘And then the bomb happened,’ Annie whispered. Martin saw her lift one shoulder, and let it drop again, a gesture of bewilderment, as though the bomb was something she had tried and failed to understand.
‘Tell me, Annie. You’ve never told me what it was like. What you felt.’
Annie stared at him, and he was afraid that she didn’t see him at all. And then she began to talk, in a low, unemphatic voice. ‘I don’t know how to tell you. I don’t know how to describe what it was like. It was dark, there was a terrible noise and then there was utter silence. I couldn’t move, and I could feel blood in my mouth, and dust and grit on my tongue. And there was pain everywhere.’ She shrugged again. ‘You know all that. What can I tell you?’
‘About fear.’
Annie thought about Tibby. She had come home from her hospice, to her husband and the roses, but she was too weak now to do her pruning. She’s seen you grow up. Seen her grandchildren. Yes. But what else was there? How many patient compromises? ‘I was afraid. I was … angry, too. I suppose it was anger. With the sense that everything was being cut short. That I wasn’t to be allowed to … finish. What I was doing.’
Martin looked round the room. There was a wicker basket full of Ben’s toys next to the hearth, a jar of daffodils on the mantelpiece amongst the clutter of china ornaments and candlesticks and children’s party invitations. ‘To finish what you were doing here, Annie? Was that it?’
‘Yes. Being a wife and mother.’ The words as they came out sounded strange to Annie, as if she had repeated them to herself so many times that their meaning had begun to elude her. ‘We were all right, weren’t we?’ she asked hastily. ‘The four of us.’
The past tense hit Martin squarely now. He looked at his wife in the lamplight, feeling the anger and bitterness of the past few days briefly renewed.
‘We were,’ he said. ‘We can be again, Annie, when all this is forgotten.’
As soon as he had spoken them, he knew that he had chosen the words badly. He shifted in his chair and the cutlery rattled on his plate. He glanced down and saw that the barely-touched food was congealing, and pushed it aside. Annie was still holding Thomas’s school jumper, with the darning wool unravelling on the rug beside her.
‘I can’t forget,’ she said, the words falling like clear drops of icy water.
‘Annie.’ He fought to keep his voice level. ‘You can, if you let yourself. It was a terrible, hideous thing to happen. The only thing you can do now is to be thankful that you survived, and forget everything else.’
They were circling around the truth now, watching each other, waiting.
‘If it were that easy,’ Annie whispered at last. ‘If only.’
Martin sat silently, feeling a vein throb in the angle of his jaw. The moment had come, and yet he could hope that it would somehow slip away again.
Annie went on, in the same low voice, looking down at the work in her lap. ‘Without Steve, I don’t think I could have survived. Steve made me hold on. He made me believe that we would get out. I’m not a very brave person. You know that. But he made me be.’
‘How?’ The word stuck in Martin’s throat, like a croak. He was remembering the day too; the cold outside the jagged store front, the corridors of the police station and the smoky tension inside the trailer, and the roughness of the smashed masonry as he pulled at it with the rescue workers.
‘We talked. We could just touch hands. We held on to one another and talked. Some of the time I didn’t know whether I was talking or thinking, but he heard anyway. And I listened to him talking. If you think you are going to die, it doesn’t matter what you say, does it?’
‘What did you say?’
‘We told each other about our lives. Everything, big things and little things.’
There was quiet again. Martin was imagining his wife, as he had done so often before, hurt in the darkness, with her hand held in the stranger’s. And her voice, a whisper like it was in the dark to him too, telling him the big things and the little things, only for him to hear.
‘Did you think about me, Annie?’ The petulance of the question struck at him at once and he thought, That’s how we all are. Annie dropped the darning and came across the room to him. She knelt on the rug in front of him with her head against his knees.
‘Of course.’
Martin said nothing.
‘I told him about you and the children and how I couldn’t bear the thought that our lives should be severed, abruptly, so violently, with the ends left fraying.’ He put out his hand then, tentatively, and stroked her hair. The ends of it were still frizzy from the awkward cut that had tried to repair the damage to it. ‘I told him about when we met, and after that. The ordinary things. The house, and the garden, and all the things we made and did together.’
Made. Did.
‘And he told you the same?’
‘Yes. Not quite such happy things.’
‘And after that?’ Martin asked gently, with his hand buried in her hair. He twisted his head so that he could see her face and then he saw that she was crying. There was a tear held at the corner of her eye, and the wet streak of another over her cheek. ‘At the end … it seemed like the end, you know … he was, he had become, more real and more important than anything else. He was all there was, then. He had come so close to me that … that I didn’t know any more where I ended and where he began.’
Martin’s hand tightened, just perceptibly, in Annie’s hair. He had looked down into the hole, under the arc lights, and he had seen Steve still lying there. His arm had been stretched out to where Annie had lain. There was a bitter taste in Martin’s mouth and throat. He was afraid of defeat. It had gone so far already, he thought, that they seemed utterly beyond his reach. With an effort at conviction he said, ‘But then you were rescued. It was over.’
Except that it wasn’t, not at all. He had sat beside her in the ambulance, and she had opened her eyes and looked at him with a mixture of bewilderment and disappointment.
When Annie didn’t answer he pushed on, trying in spite of himself to force the admission from her by seeming to misunderstand. ‘I know that you must have shared the shock and the reaction with him afterwards. No one else could possibly have come close to understanding what it was like down there. Of course you would have clung to each other then, while you were still recovering. Like a prop for one another.’
Annie raised her head and looked into his face. ‘Oh no,’ she said. There were still tears in her eyes, but there was a kind of reflected radiance as well. ‘It wasn’t that. It was the joy of it. The pure happiness of finding ourselves still alive. Can you understand?’
Martin counted back the days to that time.
He had been preoccupied with the boys, with keeping the three of them going, and with containing his fears for Annie. There had been no opportunity for joy. The closest he had come to it was when the doctors had told him that Annie would live. He had gone down to see Steve, so that he would know too. Christmas Eve. He had sensed it, even then, Martin recalled. Pain and the fear of loss suddenly stabbed into him so that he almost doubled up.
‘Oh yes,’ he whispered, his voice so low that she could hardly hear him. ‘I think I can understand.’
I must tell him the truth, Annie thought. Now that we have come this far.
‘Everything looked so beautiful. So new, and precious, and exact. Steve saw it too. I think that it was because of that same feeing that … that we loved one another.’
And so he had heard her saying the words.
Suddenly his resolution to wait, and to hope, seemed futile. He couldn’t help the pointless anger that surged up in him, against the two of them, against every single thing that had happened since he had stared at the television news picture of the shattered store. He thought of Tom and Benjy upstairs and what the few impossible words would mean to them. And he knew that he loved his wife, and that he didn’t know how to live without her love in return.
‘Annie,’ he murmured. ‘Do you know what you’re saying? Do you know the hurt it will mean to all of us?’
Unable to keep still any longer he stumbled to his feet, knocking into a low table and sending his dinner tray skidding. Annie watched through stinging eyes the blobs of food fall on to the rug.
‘I know,’ she whispered. ‘Do you think I don’t know?’
‘What are you going to do?’
Annie thought of Tibby again, and the life that she had accepted for herself. Would her mother have made different choices if she had lived at a different time? Annie sensed again how precious life was, and how vital and miraculous its reopening had seemed to her in the hospital ward.
