The thought of him filled her mind. She longed for him to be with her, with a desperate, almost unbearable longing. She wanted him to lie down beside her and put his hands over her eyes. She wanted him to put his mouth to her ear and whisper, as he had done in the darkness that now seemed less fearsome than the darkness of her nightmare. Steve saw and understood, and it was unthinkable that he should not be with her now.
Annie sat up in bed. Her nightdress clung icily to her skin, and she pushed the damp weight of her hair back from her face.
She stared across the ward to the day room door. Beyond it was the day room itself, in darkness, with the television’s eye briefly extinguished. And beyond that, in the ward that mirrored this room, Steve would be lying asleep.
She saw his face, every line of it clear. She felt his hands holding hers, and the touch of his forehead making a circuit that she had wanted never to break. She thought of how he had kissed her cheek, that first afternoon, and today he had smiled at her like a lover.
She fought against the longing.
She let her head fall forward against her drawn-up knees, hugging herself, almost welcoming the stab of pain from the wound in her stomach. They couldn’t possess one another now. That they had done so already, tenderly and brutally in the darkness through the touch of their hands, that was only the cruelty of the trick that circumstance had played on them.
A trick, an irony. Life’s little irony, in the face of death.
Annie raised her head again. The sweat on her cheeks had dried and they shone with tears now. She stared down the ward as if she could see through the walls and doors that separated her from Steve.
‘Damn you,’ she whispered helplessly. ‘Damn you.’
A student nurse checking the ward had seen that Annie was awake. She came and stood beside Annie’s bed in her pink dress.
‘Are you all right?’
‘Yes,’ Annie said. ‘I had a dream. Just a bad dream.’
The girl moved to straighten her pillows and the crumpled bedclothes.
‘Shall I bring you a drink? Some hot milk, and something to help you sleep?’
They had taken the flowers away for the night. The chintz flowers of the curtains looked like nursery hangings, reassuring in the dimmed light.
‘Yes,’ Annie said. ‘Thank you. Something to make me sleep.’
She slept at last, and it seemed that almost at once they came to wake her up again. The ward routine was already numbingly familiar. A group of doctors came and examined her, and then mumbled amongst themselves at the foot of her bed.
Annie was used to that now.
Their senior beamed at her, once the consultation was finished.
‘You’re doing very well, you know. Your kidney function is normal, and everything else is healing nicely.’
‘I want to do well,’ Annie told him, irresistibly reminded of school interviews with her headmistress. ‘I want to go home.’
‘Oh, I’m making no promises about that. Two or three weeks more with us, and then we’ll see, mmm?’
Annie nodded patiently. Her recovery, going home again to Martin and the children, that was in her power now. That was what she would focus on. She stretched out under the bedclothes, feeling the pull in the tendons as she moved her feet, and the ache in her shoulder.
The hours of the morning crept by. The lunch trays were brought round and then cleared away again, the tea trolley clinked up and down, and the ward settled into its early-afternoon somnolence. Annie lay against her pillows, watching the woman in the bed opposite with her knitting, trying to doze. Unable to sleep, she settled the radio headphones over her head and listened for ten minutes to an incomprehensible play. Another ten minutes passed, then twenty, and Annie found that she was staring at the day room door. Then, without being aware of having made any decision, she found herself pushing back the bedclothes. She put on her blue dressing gown, tied it carefully, and walked across to the door.
Steve was sitting in the day room. He had been watching the sky through the tall windows. It was a windy day, and towers of grey cloud swept behind the roofs and chimneys of the buildings opposite. There were half a dozen other people in the room, their voices competing with the sound of the television.
Annie stood beside his chair and he looked up at her.
How stupid, she thought, to try to deny him. She wanted to put her hand on his shoulder but she stopped herself.
‘I thought you weren’t coming,’ Steve said.
‘I wasn’t going to.’
He nodded, and she wondered if he did understand why. A chair had been drawn up close to his, ready for her, and she moved it back a little way before she sat down. Steve studied her face. The colour and light that he had seen in it yesterday had faded. It looked closed up now, as if the Annie he knew had retreated somewhere.
‘But you did come?’
She bent her head and her hair fell forward. Steve saw the line of her scalp at the parting, and the childish vulnerability touched him.
‘It seemed … mulish, not to.’ Then she looked up again, her eyes meeting his directly. ‘Steve. If I seemed to make you a … promise, of some kind, yesterday, I’m going to tell you now that I can’t keep it.’
He saw the resolution in her face. Annie would be resolute. The certainty of that increased his regard for her.
‘It wasn’t a promise. I thought it was an acknowledgement.’
She moved her hands, quickly, to silence him.
‘It seemed to me that we were going beyond what we could naturally be. Friends.’
Steve smiled crookedly. ‘Is there any definition of natural, in our circumstances?’
In the quiet that followed Annie felt the quicksands shifting around them. She thought of the ground that they had already covered together and the ways ahead, unmarked. There was only one path she could allow herself to take, and that led her away from Steve. Her face changed, showing her uncertainty.
‘Or any definition of friends?’ he persisted.
‘Oh, yes,’ Annie said. ‘I can define friends. Friends are less than we were, yesterday.’ She pressed on, talking rapidly, before he could interrupt her. ‘The doctor told me this morning that I’m getting better very quickly. I shall be able to go home in two weeks, perhaps. When I do go, it will be back to Martin, and our children. I love my husband.’ She lifted her chin as she spoke to emphasize the words. ‘I don’t want to deceive him, or hurt him. When I go home, I want to make everything the same as it was before.’
‘Annie. It can’t ever be the same.’
Steve was sure that her words were a denial of what she felt. He looked at her thin, pale face, trying to read her thoughts, but she had closed it up to him. She looked
