she couldn’t think of anything to say that might not touch on the dangerous things, and she was afraid that if they came close to the truth her fragile defences would break down, and all the misery and the guilty happiness would come spilling out. She knew how much the truth would hurt Martin, and she recognized that she was more afraid of hurting him than of anything else in the world. Even more than the darkness of her dreams, and the emptiness she discovered when she woke up and found that Steve was gone from her side.
And so they sat in silence in the pool of light spreading over the table, while Martin unseeingly turned the pages of Architectural Review.
After supper, when the washing up was done, Martin said that he had some drawings that needed urgent work. He took his bag and went upstairs to his studio at the top of the house.
Annie didn’t know how long she had been sitting in her place, unmoving, before the telephone rang. She stood up automatically and went to answer it, thinking as she crossed the floor that it was sure to be someone for Martin, something to do with whatever he was working on upstairs. There was an extension in the studio, but Annie lifted the kitchen receiver from its hook on the wall and said, ‘Hello?’
She heard the rapid pips of a payphone, and then Steve’s low voice.
‘Annie.’
She leant against the kitchen wall, her breath taken away with her relief that she had picked up the phone after all, and not left it for Martin.
‘You can’t ring me here.’
‘I just have.’
She knew just where he was, seeing him more clearly than the kitchen tiles and the children’s drawings thumb-tacked to the wall beside the telephone. He was in the long corridor outside the orthopaedic ward, where two grey plastic hoods shielded the public telephones. The lights would already be dimmed for the night, making shadows in the corners. She imagined the hated crutches resting against the wall, as he steadied himself with his free hand. And then the shape of his hand, the warmth of it.
‘What would you have done if Martin had answered? Pretended it was a wrong number, or something stupid like that?’
‘I had to talk to you. Annie, are you listening? I don’t want you to be jealous of Vicky. I don’t want you to be jealous or afraid about anything, or anybody, because there’s no need.’ He was talking very quickly, his voice so low that it was almost a whisper. Annie closed her eyes on the kitchen and strained to hear what he was saying. ‘I wanted just to tell you, before you go to sleep. I love you. Remember.’
She remembered the little side room of the old ward, and the way that they had held on to one another. He hadn’t asked her for anything in return, then. He had even stopped her from saying anything.
Now she had the sense that the old, silent dialogue had swelled in volume. It grew insistently loud so that her whole body reverberated with it and, at last, she had to give voice to it. ‘I know,’ she answered him. And then, helplessly, ‘I love you too.’
She heard, at the other end of the line, his sharply exhaled breath.
There was nothing for either of them to say, beyond that.
The silent words had been spoken, and there was no point in voicing the others that came rushing after them into the physical distance that separated them. ‘I wish I could touch you,’ he said.
‘Soon,’ Annie promised him.
‘Goodnight, my love.’ He was gone then, and Annie stood with the receiver in her hand listening to the purr of the dialling tone. As she replaced it she looked up at the ceiling and then she realized that she had been whispering, as if Martin might hear her, although he was two floors above. Whispering, and pretending, and not talking in case the most innocent-sounding topic accidentally touched on the truth. Deceiving and lying, even though it was by omission. That was what this joy inside her had led her to.
With her hand outstretched, groping across her own kitchen as if she were half blind, Annie found her way back to her chair. She sat hunched over, with her arms wrapped around her chest. Just to hear Steve’s voice, tonight, made her unbearably happy, and the assurances that they had given each other made her blood swirl dizzyingly in her veins.
But the same happiness stabbed her as she looked around the kitchen because she knew that it was hopeless, and that she was trapped here by Martin and their children and the layers of love and habit that they had built up and sealed together over the years.
Exultation and misery ran together and coalesced into a choking knot that lay like a stone underneath Annie’s heart. At last, still moving like an old woman, she went upstairs and undressed ready for bed. She lay down and the sheets felt cold and clammy against her skin. She drew her knees up to her chest and hunched over the painful knot.
‘I don’t know what to do,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t know what to do.’
Tibby had gone into a special hospital for her rest.
When Annie went to see her she was struck by its difference from the big general hospital where she had been treated herself. The rooms and corridors here were carpeted, there were pictures on the walls, and the sitting rooms were pretty and cosy. There was no medicinal smell, and even the nurses’ dresses contrived not to look like uniforms.
Tibby seemed happy.
‘It’s just like home,’ she smiled, ‘without any of the responsibilities.’
Her face was bright, but in the depths of the big chintz-covered armchair that Annie had settled her in she looked shrunken and brittle.
‘That’s good,’ Annie said cheerfully. ‘It seems like a nice place.’
There was no doubt now about the progress of her mother’s illness. The cancer was inoperable, and although the doctors’ estimates were deliberately vague they were beginning to talk in terms of weeks rather than months. Tibby knew exactly what was happening to her, and she had accepted it with silent graceful courage. The hospice’s aim was simply to make her as comfortable as possible, and to help her to enjoy the time that was left.
‘When would you like to come home again?’ Annie asked her.
The doctors had told them that, for a while longer at least, Tibby could choose whether she wanted to be in the hospice or in her own home.
‘Oh dear, I don’t know. It’s so comfortable in here. But I feel very lazy, not doing a thing. I’m still quite capable. I’m just afraid that Jim won’t be managing in the house without me, and I daren’t think about the garden. There’s the roses, you know.’
Annie thought of the big corner garden and the shaggy heads of the old-fashioned roses that sprawled over the walls. Tibby liked to prune her roses in March, and to begin her régime of spraying and feeding. It was quite likely that she wouldn’t see this year’s mass of pink and white and gold, or catch the evening scent of them through the windows as she moved about in the awkward, old-fashioned kitchen. Annie looked down at her own hands, turning them to examine the palms, as if she could see something that mattered there.
‘Don’t worry about the house,’ she managed to say. ‘Dad can cope perfectly
