The collapse had come, injuring two men, but the danger was past. Even the injured were forgotten, now that they had been taken away to safety. The rescuers worked on, grimly, digging from the point where the scaffolding shelter had been. The tarpaulins had been rigged up once more, providing a rough screen against the wind and sleet, and from inside them the police guarding the store front could hear the multiplying bite of picks and the juddering whine of the drills.
It was ten past five. Forty-two minutes since the frontage had collapsed. Already, seemingly incredibly, the ground floor had been exposed all over again. They were working downwards, once more, into the basement.
Annie lay with her head in her mother’s lap. It was a warm day, and she had been playing in the garden. She knew that, because she could still smell the scent of crushed grass where the rug had been spread out, and the musty geranium leaf smell from the window boxes. Then she had hurt herself, somehow. Perhaps she had fallen on the path and cut her knees, or perhaps she had bumped her head on the kitchen door as it swung outwards in the breeze.
She had run in tears to find her mother, and her mother had bathed her cuts and dried her face. Then they had gone together into the cool sitting room. There were photographs on the piano and on the low table by the fireplace, Mummy and Daddy when they were young, Annie herself and her brother on seaside holidays. It was very tidy, very quiet. Annie was lying on the sofa. She was wearing sandals with a rising sun pattern punched in the toes and white ankle socks, a green cotton dress and hair ribbons. Once or twice her mother stroked her hair back from her cheek.
Annie smiled contentedly. As she lay there she had a huge, luminous sense of something that was puzzling, because it felt so strange and important, but yet was also utterly comforting and warm and safe. For a brief moment she held the whole of childhood, the summer afternoons and birthdays and holidays and winter bedtimes, all distilled in the recollection of one single day. She turned her head a little, feeling the touch of her mother’s fingers, afraid that the vision would evade her. She wanted to hold it, but she knew that it would burst like a bubble as soon as she touched it.
It stayed with her for a moment longer, and then she felt her smile of joy fading. So complete, so perfect a vision of childhood could never visit a child. A child’s view of its own life was a mass of fragments, frustrations and fleeting pleasures and unexplained loose ends.
She was cold, not pleasantly cool any more. She wasn’t a child, and the precious, glowing vision had vanished. From a distance, Annie saw herself sit up and swing her legs down off the sofa. She ran to the door, with the hair ribbons fluttering like white butterflies. Her mother sat with her hands in her lap, watching her go, and her face was sad.
It wasn’t her mother, then, but Annie herself and she was watching the open door and the sunlight making long squares on the parquet floor of the hall. Pain was stabbing into her side, and there were tears behind her eyes that hurt in a different way. She heard children’s voices in the garden. Somehow she got up and went to the window. It wasn’t the little girl with the hair ribbons playing out there. It was Thomas and Benjamin, Benjamin in his pedal car and Tom clambering up into the branches of the pear tree. They were calling her and she couldn’t run, or even answer them.
‘Children,’ Annie managed to say.
Someone was listening to her, she knew that. It was comforting not to be alone in the dark, with the pain. He was very close to her, and she heard him say, ‘I’m here.’
Annie wanted to ask him, ‘Come outside and see the children,’ but she couldn’t. She watched them herself, instead, knowing that he was close enough to see whatever she saw.
They were absorbed in their play. Benjy came hurtling down the path, his face a concentrated frown. Tom hung out of the tree, his legs dangling as he pretended to fall, just to frighten her. She waved to them, but they didn’t wave back. Watching, she knew that she should have felt the same calm sweetness as when she had recaptured her own childhood. But it was cold in this garden. The trees were bare of leaves and it had been trying to snow. There was a white powdering of it on top of the walls, and the wind was like a knifeblade. The boys were on their own, out there.
Annie knew why she felt so cold and sad. She was afraid of leaving them. She felt her weakness, and the sure sense that she was failing them. Her love for them took in every minute of their lives, interwoven with her own for eight years, unshakable. It couldn’t end, could it, cut off in the darkness?
Annie left the garden window and walked through the house, touching the memories accumulated in the rooms. In the playroom they crouched beside the model train layout, their heads almost touching. In her bedroom Annie saw the wicker crib that he had put Tom into when she brought him home as a baby. He lay under the white covers, a tiny, warm bundle. Their faces turned up to her from the kitchen table, Benjy’s mouth rimmed with jam. The sounds of their voices drifted up the stairs, and she heard running footsteps overhead.
There was nothing of herself left in the house. She wanted to be there, but something terrible had happened to stop her going back. She felt her sons’ love, and their need, and the brutally snapped edges of the circle that had held them together. The dream she had had of her own childhood had contained another circle, unbroken. She had wanted so much to duplicate that circle and to set others moving outwards, ripples on a pool.
The loss hurt unbearably. Annie moaned, and at once the arm holding her tightened.
‘Tom,’ she said, ‘Benjy.’
‘Annie,’ the man’s voice said, very gently, like a lover’s in the most secret darkness. ‘Hold on. They’re coming for us. I can hear them.’
Annie didn’t know what he meant. She had been in the garden, watching her children play.
Steve had been listening. The ring of spades and drills was louder now, and he felt himself shrink from the sharp metal biting over his head. But he was frightened by how quickly Annie seemed to be slipping away from him.
‘Go on thinking about your children,’ he said. ‘You’ll be with them soon. I wish I had children. I’ve never felt that before, but I do now.’ Now it’s too late.
The scraping overhead was much closer, but he felt himself at a distance from it, further with every minute. Another irony. Steve found himself smiling, but couldn’t remember why. He put his hand out to touch Annie’s cheek, strengthening their contact.
‘If I had children,’ he rambled, ‘I’d make it different. Not like for me. It would be so different. I’d make sure of that. Perhaps that was why I didn’t want any with Cass. I never thought of that.’
Annie turned her head a little, perhaps to hear better, perhaps reaching for the touch of his fingers again. He cupped her cheek in his hand.
‘Shall I tell you? I’ve told you everything else. There isn’t much, anyway.’
He began to talk and Annie listened, dimly confusing the little boy he was describing with her own sons, so that Steve and Tom and Benjy ran together down the paths ahead of her and their voices were carried back to her on the wind.
He had been to that flat before, of course. He knew it, on the day that his mother took him there with his suitcase, almost as well as his own home. Three floors, up the hollowed stone steps that had mysterious twinkly fragments embedded in them. Into the living room, where his Nan was waiting for them. Beyond was the kitchen, with the cracked lino floor. There was a grey enamel stove on legs in there, with a little ruff of grease around each of its feet, and the sight of the hairs caught in the grease made him feel sick in the back of his throat.
‘Here
