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
