As they talked they were both aware of the two dialogues, spoken and unspoken, starting up again. They wouldn’t talk about Martin, although he was as close as if he were walking alongside them, making a third pair of slow footsteps. Although they talked about the bones in Steve’s leg that had to knit together before he could walk, before he could leave the hospital, they didn’t ask each other, What will happen then?
They reached the far doors and turned back again.
‘It helps, just to move about like this,’ he said and Annie nodded, knowing that he meant it helped the knot of boredom and frustration.
‘And you?’ he asked. ‘What did the kidney man say?’
‘I’m fine. Luckier than you. It happens much quicker.’
‘Do you still have the dreams?’
‘Yes. Noise, and dark, and being afraid.’
‘I know.’
They looked at one another then, hearing the sound of their voices, as if the sterile hospital light had suddenly been blacked out. That was it, Annie thought. He did know, and when she woke up in the night and reached out to touch Martin’s warm, insensible skin she blamed him in turn because he didn’t, and couldn’t.
‘The dreams will stop,’ Steve said.
‘Yes.’ The dreams, but not the rest of it. Did Steve think that too? The talk, unspoken but still audible, as it had been at the end, before the firemen reached them. They reached the top of the stairs, midway between the two wings, leading down to the main hall. Voices echoed up the stairwell and then the first wave of visitors appeared, trudging upwards, with their bunches of flowers and carrier bags. They watched them pass and for a moment Annie forgot that she belonged to the world outside, too. The visitors looked separate, odd in their thick, outdoor clothes, and she felt her closeness to Steve as it had been when they lay side by side in the dark.
She wondered, with a little beat of despair, if she would ever know closeness like that again.
The group broke up, heading towards the different wards, and Annie and Steve heard more voices and footsteps following them up the stairs.
‘Are you expecting anyone today?’
‘Perhaps.’
Annie was jealous then, thinking of the glimpses she had had of his visitors in the past, and imagining streams of envoys now from his life outside. She pulled the belt of her coat around her and said, too brightly, ‘I must go, anyway. Ben’s with my mother-in-law. He only goes to nursery in the mornings.’ He doesn’t want to hear about my children, she thought painfully. What can I tell him? What ground have we got, except that terrible, random thing that happened to us, and the closeness from it that we can’t escape?
I don’t want to escape, she answered herself.
Steve was balancing awkwardly, trying to free one hand so that he could reach out to her. His face was very dark, almost angry. Now that the moment for leaving him had come, Annie wanted it to be over, quickly, before she could feel the wrench of it.
‘I’ll come next time. My next appointment,’ she gabbled.
Steve wanted to reach out and hold her, saying, Stay, you can’t go yet.
But she was already on her way.
‘Will you come?’ he asked, insistent because of his immobility.
‘Of course.’
She smiled at him then, and he stood at the head of the stairs to watch her go. She looked small and thin inside her big coat and he remembered how unexpectedly lovely her face had been as she came towards him. Then she went down around the curve of the stairs and he couldn’t see her any more. Steve rested his weight on the metal legs for a moment, looking at the place where she had been, and then he went on towards the cubicle in the ward and his empty bed.
The visits that came after that were just the same. Annie waited with contained, anxious impatience for the day to arrive, and when the time came her brief moments with Steve were like dislocated footnotes to her constant, internal awareness of him. They talked, and then they looked silently at one another, and Annie knew that they were only waiting again.
A little while after her visit Steve was moved from the old ward and taken downstairs to a long-stay orthopaedic ward. The other patients were either immobile, slung up in complicated supports, or else they moved painfully like Steve on crutches and walking frames. None of them knew Annie, and so she could meet Steve now without feeling that they were being watched with any particular interest. But none of the staff knew her either, and so she could only come in at visiting times, like everyone else. Sometimes she had a long time to wait after her appointments were over before the wards opened. On another day the queues in the out-patients clinic were so long that the visiting hour was almost over before she could come to Steve. He never asked her again if she would come without another pretext for being at the hospital, and even she could only guess at the importance of her visits in the monotonous procession of days. Annie was able to blunt her longing a little with the round of housework and cooking and caring for the boys, but Steve had nothing except hospital and its constant reminder that he was trapped in it.
He protected Annie’s visits fiercely, by warning everyone else he knew not to come on those days. Most of them looked at his face and accepted the restriction, but just once, whether by a genuine accident or out of curiosity, Vicky came. Annie was already there, and when Vicky saw them they were not even talking. They were simply sitting together, drawing strength from being close enough to touch one another.
Their intent stillness stopped Vicky in her confident walk down the ward. But she only hesitated for an instant and then she went on, calling out to him, ‘Hello, love, I came today instead of Thursday because …’
Then Steve looked up, and when Vicky saw his expression the words caught in her throat. The fair-haired woman glanced at him, and then up at Vicky as the visitor put her package of new books and magazines down on the end of the bed.
‘I didn’t expect you today,’ Steve said softly.
‘No. Well, I’ve got a conference on Thursday, you see, so I decided I’d …’ The words stuck again as she looked at them. Even from where she was standing, Vicky could feel the current between them, deflecting her.
The fair-haired girl said, ‘Come and sit down. I’ve got to go in a minute.’ Vicky noticed that she had a warm voice, and her smile tried hard to be welcoming. The smile made the absence of one from Steve all the more evident. The girl made room for Vicky to bring up a chair, and while she waited for Steve to listen to what Vicky was saying she turned away tactfully to look at the shiny covers of the new novels.
‘So that’s why I came this afternoon,’ Vicky finished crisply. She had regained possession of herself now. ‘I’m sorry if I’m interrupting. Won’t you introduce us, now I’m here?’ She smiled at the other woman.
‘This is Annie.’ Steve held on to the name as he said it, as if he didn’t want to let it go. ‘And this is Vicky.’
‘I know.’ Vicky suddenly understood. ‘You were … you were there in the shop, that day, too, weren’t you?’
‘Yes, I was there,’
