it when they were alone, and so he had wrapped it up and pushed it delicately across the table to her, under their friends’ eyes.
Do you still love me? It was banal, of course. But you don’t really care about him, do you? Except for what you went through, together …
Annie’s face was a colourless oval, too far away from him, and her eyes were opaque.
In that moment, Martin knew for sure.
Annie had gone away, and he would have to fight to get her back.
He heard his own voice, talking, joking with their friends around the table to hide his fear, and suddenly their whole life was a similar pretence.
Martin emptied his glass, refilled it and then drank again.
No, Annie was thinking, still listening to Martin’s words inside her head. It isn’t like that at all. Not as safe and as comfortable as Martin makes it sound. We were happy, the two of us, weren’t we? And then in a day, in an hour, everything changes. How has it happened, all this, and what can I do now?
The question ran round in her head, unanswerable.
At last, the evening was over.
The last cup of coffee and the last glass of wine had been drained, and their friends followed one another out into the black, icy night.
‘Bye, everybody. It was lovely, Annie. You’re a miracle, you know?’
‘Don’t do too much, though, will you? You look a bit weary, still, to me.’
‘See you on Saturday, then? With the kids, of course.’
Goodbye. Goodnight.
The words rang around Annie, friendly and foreign, emphasizing her isolation.
Martin looked around the kitchen. ‘You go on up. I’ll clear all this.’ He glanced at her, and when she didn’t respond he ordered, ‘Go on, Annie.’
She went, too lonely and too tired to do anything more. She lay down in bed, in the comfortable darkness, and listened to the sounds of the house. She felt like an interloper. At last Martin came up. He turned on the light and sat down heavily on his side of the bed.
‘Still awake?’
‘Yes.’
She didn’t know what to say, now.
Martin stood up again and moved around the room, undressing. He was a little drunk and bumped into the corners of the furniture.
When he was ready, he slid under the bedclothes beside her.
There was a moment when they both lay still. Then, with an awkward, possessive movement, Martin put his arms around her. He fitted her body against the curves of his own, his mouth and tongue against her ear. To Annie he felt very warm and solid, and utterly strange. She closed her eyes. He was her husband. She was suddenly struck by a sense of how random everything had been, all the choices she had made in her life, up until now. She could equally well have married David, or Ian. It could be either of them, anyone she had met or never met, with his body pressed to hers, and it would make no difference.
Somehow, cruelly and yet with such potent force that even now it melted her, Steve had become the only man she knew. The only man she wanted, and he wasn’t there. Annie lay quite still while her husband made love to her, and she felt nothing. And then when it was over she lay in the dark and listened to his breathing, like a stranger’s.
Martin had half-turned away, but he didn’t fall asleep.
Annie had been there in his arms, and in that sense she had been as generous as she always was, but for all the intimacy of touch he hadn’t been able to reach her. He could sense her separateness now, and it silenced him. They lay with a cold space between them, holding their feelings painfully apart.
Suddenly, Martin was angry. A knot of it gathered inside him, focused on Steve. He couldn’t be angry with Annie, not yet, because she had been through so much.
He saw Steve’s face as he had been on Christmas Eve, his face dark and drawn against the hospital pillows. And he remembered the little space where Steve had held Annie, and where they had shared the terrible hours that he was ashamed to be jealous of. That space had seemed much smaller than the bed’s hollow that contained Martin and Annie now.
Anger jumped inside Martin and his fists clenched under the bedclothes. He felt no sympathy for Steve, and the certainty came to him that Steve would be a formidable opponent. He would have to be an opponent, an enemy, of course, because Martin would have to cut him off from Annie.
My wife. Annie, in the bedroom’s silence.
He thought she stirred, and he waited breathlessly for her to put her hand out to him. Nothing happened, and with his imagination fuelled by the wine he had drunk Martin planned in angry detail how he would drive to the hospital in the morning. He would stand beside Steve’s bed, and tell him that he was to leave Annie alone. His anger and his determination to keep her were big enough and simple enough to crush any opposition, Martin was sure of that.
When he fell asleep at last it was to uncomfortable, ambiguous dreams.
In the morning the anger had evaporated. As he shaved and went downstairs with a slight, dry headache to listen to the boys squabbling over their breakfasts, Martin knew that he wouldn’t go to see Steve. It wasn’t in his nature to force a confrontation, even with Annie. Especially with Annie. He looked across the kitchen at her white, exhausted face and he felt ashamed again. She had barely recovered, and she must be feeling her own unhappiness.
When the time came for him to leave for work Martin put his arm around her and rested his face against her hair. She returned the warm pressure, although she kept her face turned away, and he left the house holding on to that brief affirmation.
The sense of apartness stayed with Annie. It cast a thin, uncomfortable light on the routine of every day.
Annie ran the house mechanically. She went out to buy food in the local shops, and looked at the familiar shelves as if she had never seen them before. She washed and folded clothes, and drove the boys to and fro, feeling herself physically stronger every day. She sat with Martin in the evenings, hearing the silence between them, afraid. At night the dreams of noise and stifling darkness still came. Annie woke up, shaking, to find him asleep beside her and as the pall of brick-dust lifted again in her imagination she put her hand out to touch the separate warmth of his skin. Annie went back to the hospital regularly, to see her specialists and to submit to more tests. She waited patiently in the various clinics, soothed by the way that the system temporarily took away her sense of responsibility for herself. And after she had gone through what was required of her in out-patients, and only then, Annie allowed herself to go upstairs and see Steve.
The first time was no more than a few days after Annie had been discharged, but it seemed already that they had been painfully separated for months. On the morning of her appointment she went upstairs and chose, very carefully, what she was going to wear. She made her face up, and her hands were shaking so much that she smudged the careful strokes. Annie looked at her reflection and thought, it’s like being a girl again. The recognition and the strangeness made her laugh, but her heart still hammered in her chest. She left the quiet house and walked to the tube station, remembering the last time, the midwinter
