was trying to remember what had happened eleven years ago. It was important for herself, but it was more important still because she wanted to tell Steve. She felt him close to her, listening. The sensation of drifting intensified. They were both of them afloat, a long way from the shore.
‘I chose the easy option,’ she said again.
‘And what was it?’ His voice was as warm as if his mouth was against her ear and his fingers tangled in her hair.
‘I chose what would be safe, and simple. Because it would be … wholesome.’ Annie laughed, a cracked note. ‘That’s a funny notion, isn’t it? As if you can turn your life into wholemeal bread.’
Her memory was clear now, the images as vivid as early-morning dreams.
The day she met Matthew was exactly eight weeks before her wedding day. She came up the stairs to the fifth floor of the mansion block where her friend Louise lived. The green-painted stairwell smelt of carbolic soap and metal polish, just as it always did. The lift was out of order, just as it always was and Annie was panting, the John Lewis carrier bag bumping against her leg, as she reached Louise’s door. She rang the bell and when Louise opened the door Annie held the bag up in triumph.
‘I got it. Ten yards, hideously expensive. You’d better like it.’
‘Hmm.’ Louise had taken the bag and peered into it. ‘Oh, yes. I’ll make you a wedding dress such as has never been made before. Annie, this is Matthew.’
He was sitting on the floor with his back against Louise’s sofa and his legs stretched out in jeans with frayed bottoms. He had fair, almost colourless hair cut too short for his thin face, grey eyes, and his bare chest showed under his half-open shirt. He was in his early twenties, two or three years younger than Annie was.
He looked up at her and the first thing he said to her was ‘Don’t marry him, whoever he is. Marry me.’
Annie laughed, slotting him into her category automatically flirtatious, but Matthew hadn’t even smiled. He had just looked at her, and Louise stood awkwardly behind them with the carrier bag dangling in her hand. They didn’t talk about the dress that day. They had tea instead, sitting in a sunlit circle on Louise’s rug.
Matthew had been living in Mexico for a year, working as a labourer on a peasant farm in exchange for his food and a bed in a lean-to shack. He told them about the long days monotonously working the thin soil, the efforts at summer irrigation using water brought on the backs of donkeys from the trickling river.
‘Why were you there?’ Annie asked. The self-conscious hippiedom would have irritated her in anyone else, but Matthew was perfectly matter-of-fact.
‘I was thinking. I’m very bad at it. Can’t do it when there are any distractions.’
‘And why did you come home?’
He grinned at her. ‘I’d finished thinking.’
They went on talking while the sun moved across the rug. Annie realized that it was herself and Matthew talking. Louise was sitting in silence, watching them. At six o’clock Annie stood up to go. Matthew stood up too, and she saw that he was tall and very thin.
‘I’ll come a little way with you,’ he said.
‘I …’
‘I would like to.’
Annie left her bag of wedding dress material on Louise’s floor. When she was standing with Matthew on the pavement outside she remembered that she hadn’t even arranged to come back and look at Louise’s design sketches. She hesitated, wondering whether she should go back upstairs, but a taxi came rumbling down the street and Matthew flagged it down. He opened the door for her and they sat side by side on the slippery seat, looking out at the rush-hour traffic idling in the sun.
‘Where are we going?’
‘To St James’s Park,’ Matthew said. She discovered later that he used his last two pound notes to pay the driver.
It was May, the first day of summer’s warm weather. The grass was dotted with abandoned deckchairs, in secretive pairs and in sociable groups of three or four.
The setting sun slanted obliquely through patterns of curled leaves and glittered on the water. They walked under the trees, talking. It seemed to Annie that this hollow-cheeked boy had simply side-stepped the rituals of acquaintanceship and friendship, and had made her a lover without ever having touched her.
They stopped on the bridge to look down at the ducks drawing fans of ripples in their wake, and their shadows fell superimposed on the water.
Looking at the shape they made, Matthew said, ‘You see? We belong together.’
‘No. I’m going to marry Martin. We’ve known each other for seven years.’
‘That’s no reason for marrying him. Any more than you can dismiss me because you’ve known me for less than seven hours.’
She turned to look at him then, suddenly sombre. He had come to block the wide, smooth road she was walking down and he was pointing his finger down narrow lanes that turned sharply, enticing her. She felt angry with him, and at the same time she wanted to step forward so that their faces could touch.
‘I meant what I said, you know.’ Matthew met her stare. He put his hand out and stroked her hair, their first contact.
‘Do you ask everyone you meet to marry you? Did you ask Louise when she offered to let you sleep on her sofa till you found somewhere else?’
He laughed at her. ‘I’ve never said it before in my life. But when you came into the room, I knew you, Annie. I knew your face, and your walk, and your voice, and I knew what you were going to say.’
She couldn’t contradict him, because she knew it was the truth. Matthew didn’t invent or exaggerate.
‘I don’t know you,’ she said defiantly. ‘I don’t know anything about you.’
He took her arm, drawing it through his and settling it so that her head was against his shoulder. They began to walk again with their backs to the sunset and their shadows pointing ahead of them.
‘I’ll tell you,’ he offered. ‘I’ll tell you whatever you want to know. There isn’t much, so it won’t take too long.’
Matthew was the only son of an industrialist, a self-made tycoon with a newspaper name. The family assumption had always been that Matthew would emulate his dynamic father. But from the day he was old enough to begin to assert himself, Matthew had refused to conform to his father’s requirements. His only interest at school had been woodwork, until he became really good at it – at which point he gave it up for ever. When his school contemporaries were heading for Oxford, Matthew turned his back on them and set out on the hippie trail to Afghanistan. He had supported his travels ever since with menial jobs, working in exchange for food, somewhere to sleep, for enough money to carry him on to the next place.
‘What were you thinking about in Mexico?’ Annie asked him.
‘I was thinking about what I should do. And then I felt the pull to come home, so I came. And here you are.’
‘Don’t
