style="font-size:15px;"> He wanted to reach out for her. He wanted to make her say what she was denying to herself, and in his turn to tell her how much he needed her. Steve remembered, too vividly, the blankness of his life that had confronted him in the darkness. Listening to Annie, and talking to her, had given him his own reason to hold on. Now, hardly believably, they were here together. Steve’s eyes left Annie’s face and he looked around the ugly room. The other patients seemed fixed in their chairs, resigned and hopeless. He felt the luck, by contrast, of simply being alive. It was sad that these motionless people with their pinched faces couldn’t share the exultation. He knew that Annie felt it, and he experienced a shock of anger with her for her refusal, now, to admit the chance of happiness.
But then, to admit their own chance of happiness was to deny her family’s. His anger disappeared as quickly as it had come. Annie was unselfish, that was all. Steve’s crooked smile lifted again. He had been selfish all his life, and it would be ironic, now, if by being different he was to lose her.
The air in the day room was stale, and the windows were firmly closed. Beyond the glass the grey masses of clouds whipped past, the noise of the wind only emphasizing the stifling stillness inside the hospital.
Whatever came, Steve thought, he wanted Annie to know how much he cared about her. That much selfishness, at least, he would allow himself. He listened to the voices of the television and a woman three chairs away, complaining about her treatment. The wind battered at the hospital windows, and Steve sat silently in his place. He wanted to stumble forward to reach Annie, taking hold of her and drawing her back to him. His hands tightened on the arms of his chair, stopping himself. He could only have done that if they had been alone, if they had been fit, if everything else had been different. Nor could he find the words, here in the day room, that didn’t sound over-used, shop-worn. For all his adult life, Steve had known what to say to women. He had told them what they had wanted to hear and they had accepted it. He had asked for what he had wanted, and it had been given to him.
Steve wondered, now, whether he had been disliked as much as he had deserved. Perhaps. Or perhaps the long procession of girls had used him, too. He thought of Cass and her half-puzzled, half-defiant air. Cass hadn’t used him. Steve tasted the sourness of dislike for himself, thick on his tongue.
And now, confronted with Annie, he didn’t know what to say. He was afraid that everything he could try would sound like a gambit. All the words had a coarse, locker-room echo.
He looked at her, sitting withdrawn from him in her blue dressing gown. A fair-haired woman with blue eyes that changed colour with the light. Not young any more, without Cass’s loveliness or Vicky’s direct female charge. But Annie possessed a kind of beauty that Steve had never seen before. At the thought of losing her, of letting her walk away from him, anger and longing and jealousy boiled up inside him. He shifted in his chair, feeling his physical weakness and his incapacity to reach her.
I love you.
No, not even the simplicity of that would do. The words were too fragile to say aloud in this listening room with its teacups and ashtrays and dog-eared magazines.
‘Annie.’
He was reduced to repeating her name, as he had done to keep her conscious in the darkness. He had said the other words to her then, at the end, but she hadn’t heard them. They had been lifting her up and away from him, bumping her in the tight harness, up into the circle of lights rimming their hole.
‘Annie. It can’t ever be the same,’ he said again. ‘You can’t make what has happened un-happen.’
‘I know that.’ Her voice was too clear, as if she were trying to keep it steady. ‘We’re here together, in this room, because of a circumstance, a trick of fate. I mean that we can stop that circumstance from rolling on and changing everything that comes after it.’
She wouldn’t look at him now because she didn’t trust herself, but she sensed that he was leaning forward, straining to catch the nuance of what she said.
‘If you and I had met anywhere else, at a party, say, there would have been nothing to draw us together. We’d have passed on by, just like we would have done in that doorway if the bomb hadn’t exploded. It did explode, and we were lucky because we lived and other people didn’t. But it was a circumstance, still. We can’t let it be anything more than that.’
Annie knew that he was still looking at her. She felt the intensity of his stare. She could even feel, through her own hands, his grip on the arm of his chair.
‘It is more, my love.’
‘I’m not your love,’ she whispered. ‘I can’t be.’
Annie’s head fell forward and she covered her face with her hands. Her hair swung with it, showing the tips of her ears. Steve wanted to lean forward and kiss them, and then to push the hair back and kiss her cheek and her throat, and the palms of her hands where they had covered her eyes.
He made himself look away, then. The television was still blaring, incredibly, and old Frankie and his friend were set squarely in front of it. Mitchie was reading a newspaper, and Sylvia with the knitting was interminably talking. No one was looking at them, but Steve resented their intrusion with unreasonable intensity.
Annie didn’t look up. She pushed her hair back and sat still, looking at the floor.
‘So what shall we do?’ Steve asked.
She shrugged, suddenly weary.
‘Nothing. Get better and go home, I imagine.’
‘Look at me, Annie.’
She raised her head. She knew that he expected more of her. He expected courage in place of the rooted loyalty to Martin that was all she had to offer.
‘Is that really what you mean? What you want?’
His face could look very cold, Annie thought. She nodded, her neck as stiff as a column, seeing his disappointment in her clearly in his face. But to have said it was a relief. She felt the weight of anxiety lift a little, although something else, chillier and more final, slipped to take its place. Regret, Annie thought. She could almost have smiled at the inevitability.
‘And in the meantime?’ Steve asked quietly.
‘We can go on seeing each other in here, and talking.’ She faltered then, seeing the fallacy. ‘As friends. Why not? We are friends, aren’t we?’
His hand shot out and took her wrist, holding it too tightly.
‘What shall we talk about, as friends? The racing?’ He nodded towards the television. ‘Sylvia’s knitting? Nothing too close to home, I imagine. In case it leads us on to dangerous ground.’
Annie heard the bitterness in his voice. He doesn’t like to be denied, she thought. He isn’t used to it. But even as the thought occurred to her, she knew that she was doing him an injustice. She felt the bitterness of loss as strongly as Steve did. She looked past him at the room and knew the artificiality of being confined in it. To get home, that was the important thing. Perhaps then the dreams would stop. Perhaps, in the ordinary world, the potent mixture of happiness and regret that Steve stirred in her would fade away too. It was the unreality of hospital, Annie told herself. Isolation magnified feelings that she would have dismissed outside.
She made her voice light as she answered, ‘We can talk about
