Her voice was crisp.
It occurred to Steve that this girl wasn’t so vulnerable. Then she added, ‘Personal sympathy, mostly. Thinking how I’d feel if Martin did it.’
‘And he doesn’t?’
Almost to her surprise, Annie understood that it wasn’t a taunt. He was asking a simple question.
‘No, I don’t think so.’
Martin came home between six and seven o’clock every evening. She was always glad to hear his bag thud on to the step as he dropped it to search in his pockets for the key. Tom would look up from his drawing, or the Lego, or the television, and say, ‘Dad’s home.’ And if Benjy was still up he would slither in his pyjamas to the front door to meet him.
Seeing herself waiting with the boys, and a glass of wine, and the dinner simmering, Annie sometimes thought bleakly that they were like a family in a television commercial. Just as predictable. Almost as bland. Yet Martin did come home every night, to hug them in turn and to listen to the boys’ recital of the day’s events. After the boys had gone to bed they would sit down to dinner together, adding up in their talk the small change of another day. Annie knew the hours and the demands of Martin’s job because he told her. She knew that there was no room in his life, between his work and the three of them waiting for him at home, for anyone else. She was glad of that.
And when the monotony of domestic life bored her, or the boys were awkward, or she was simply afraid that life was slipping past her in a succession of featureless days, she reminded herself carefully that her life was her own choice. She had chosen the smooth path that led round and round her family and her home.
Suddenly, with the pain like a hot band around her, Annie felt a longing for her life that hurt more than the pain of her body. It came back to her in every detail, the intimate pattern of their daily life. She smelt the freshness of clean sheets as she smoothed them out over the double mattress, heard the ping of the alarm clock on Martin’s side of the bed, and saw the house glow in all its worn, crowded, family-rubbed, patinated richness.
‘I don’t want to die,’ she said.
Only a few days ago, she had sat over dinner with Martin and talked about what she hoped to do when Benjy went to full-day nursery. She would start work again, perhaps, just for a few hours a week. She had had the sense of wider avenues opening, giving new perspectives that would still let her stay in the places she loved. She had sensed her own good fortune like a jewel hanging round her neck.
‘I can’t bear to leave it.’
The man’s hand holding hers was gentle.
‘You aren’t going to die.’
Out in the daylight it had stopped snowing, and it was growing steadily colder. The policemen manning the cordons moved to and fro across the strip of roadway to keep their feet warm, and their breath hung in front of them in grey clouds. The television crews, with the sightseers beyond them at a distance, huddled in their overcoats and waited as the minutes passed.
The slow, painstaking process of lifting the girders and rubble out of the hole had begun an hour ago. Now there was a flurry of movement amongst the firemen working under the tilted, ragged floors of the store. A broken beam was winched up and swung away to the side and one of the waiting ambulances started up and inched forward. A stretcher was carried across to where the firemen and doctors crouched in a circle, looking down. Then one of the doctors stood up and stepped backwards, over the heaps of wreckage. The firemen worked on until the watchers saw a flutter of something pale as another chunk of masonry was pulled away. A moment later a woman was lifted out of the hole. They laid her on the stretcher, and covered her face with a blanket.
The only sound was the crowd’s sigh, as if it came from a single throat.
The cameramen swung their long black lenses with the stretcher as it was carried, swaying and bumping, over to the ambulance. It was lifted inside and the heavy doors slammed. A moment later the ambulance nosed slowly away down the street.
‘Fight for it, if you want it so much.’
Annie only half heard him. The sense of what she would lose had taken such a powerful hold of her. Her life seemed her own creation, not passionate or original, but warm, and sweet, and infinitely valuable. The threatening darkness, looming and shivering over her head, was unbearable. She wanted to move, throwing her limbs convulsively to fight her way out of it, and yet she couldn’t. Her body hurt, and where it didn’t hurt it didn’t seem to exist any longer. Claustrophobia took hold of her and she felt a scream of terror rising again in her throat.
Annie opened her mouth and the scream came, and she heard the invisible mass around her swallow it up like a whisper.
‘Don’t,’ Steve said harshly. ‘Save that for when they might be able to hear us.’
Could they hear? Where were they? He felt the darkness as a weight now, too, heavy all around them. He strained his ears for a sound of the rescue that his reason told him must be under way, but he could hear nothing except the multiplying echoes of Annie’s scream.
‘Wait,’ he whispered. He let go of her hand and moved his arm across his chest to feel for the watch. His fingers felt numb, but he stroked the face of it, trying to make sense of the tiny hands. He thought it might be half past eleven, and so a whole hour had passed, but then he realized that the hands might just be in the same position as last time. Perhaps he had misread them then, and the watch was broken after all. The dislocation frightened him. He had relied on being able to monitor the time passing, thinking that he could gauge how their strength was holding out. Then he felt the second hand brush against his fingertip again. He slipped the watch back into its place, reassured, and reached out for Annie’s hand again.
‘It’s half past eleven. A whole hour has gone. We’re doing all right.’
The relief in his voice and the touch of his hand pushed Annie’s fear back again.
Fight, he had said, if you want it so much. To live. She moved her head and felt the door tilted against her cheek.
‘You want to fight,’ she said. ‘It’s precious for you, too, isn’t it?’
Precious?
Steve tasted the word, trying it out against his memories of the last months. He began to understand it for Annie, listening to her talk about her children. The need to see them growing up, the fierce determination to protect them that he had glimpsed fleetingly in other women, that was part of her. He had nothing like that. Steve thought often, without much surprise or regret, that he was living at one step removed from life.
How long then, since the sharp edge of pleasure had gone? Not just pleasure, but anticipation, need, fear, even?
He thought backwards, a long tunnel of days and nights.
Before Vicky. He had wanted Vicky, but he had also been quite sure of getting her.
He had met her at a party, a party for a book that Cass had done some modelling for. Vicky worked for the publishing company. She looked frumpy, in a corduroy skirt and a thick, knitted jersey. They had been introduced and Steve had asked some polite questions and then looked past her, to see where Cass had gone. But Vicky had moved to stand squarely in front of him again. Then he had noticed that she had unusual dark eyes in a clever, challenging face, and that something was amusing her.
