mouth touched her nipple Annie closed her eyes and buried her face in his black hair.
She thought, for a longing, oblivious instant, of the bed upstairs. It was neat and smooth under its white crocheted cover. She had straightened it before she took Benjy to the nursery.
No.
And then she looked at the stripped boards of the kitchen floor, which Martin had sanded and waxed.
No, nor in any of the other corners of the house that they had created and shared.
Annie lifted her head, and with her fingers entwined in Steve’s hair she made him look up at her. ‘Not here,’ she whispered.
Steve held her for another moment, and then his arms dropped stiffly to his sides. They were both looking at the dresser with its blue plates and framed photographs.
Steve made a little, apologetic gesture. ‘Of course not here.’
They turned away, not looking at each other.
Annie put her hand on the coffee pot to feel if it was still hot enough. She poured each of them a cup and they sat down at the table. But it was painful to see Steve sitting in Martin’s chair, and so she stood up again almost immediately. She carried her cup across the room and stood drinking the tepid coffee by the kitchen window, looking out at the garden.
Steve said in a low voice, ‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have come here.’
Annie slammed her cup down on to the draining board and went to him. She stood behind the chair and put her arms over his shoulders, resting her cheek against his head. He grasped her wrists, holding her there.
‘Of course you should, if you needed to. I needed you to. I didn’t realize how much.’ After a moment she added quietly, ‘It won’t be very easy. Doing … what we’ve agreed.’
We haven’t even begun to talk about what it will mean in pain and unhappiness for all of us, Annie thought.
‘Do you think I expect it to be easy, Annie? I thought about it, all those weeks in hospital. I wouldn’t have dared to come here and ask you, if I didn’t believe it was …’ There was a pause, and then he brought the word out, painfully, ‘… inescapable. Because we belong to one another, good or bad.’
There was another silence. Annie rubbed her cheek against his hair, moving it so that her mouth touched the thin skin at his temple. She felt a tiny pulse flickering there and was reminded of their pathetic, physical frailty under the mounds of rubble. But they had survived. Perhaps they were more resilient, all of them, than she gave them credit for. They would survive.
Would Benjamin? And Thomas?
She straightened up abruptly and began to walk around the kitchen, touching a spoon and a silver-plated toast-rack that Barbara had given to her, straightening the glass jars that held coffee and tea.
‘What would you like to do now?’ Steve asked her gently.
Annie looked at the oven clock.
‘I collect Benjy from his nursery at twelve,’ she said. ‘Before that, perhaps we could go for a walk?’
He smiled at her. ‘All right. A walk it is.’
‘A very short, gentle one, because of your leg.’
His smile broadened. ‘I’m faster than you think.’
They went out together into the March sunshine.
Steve’s car was a big grey BMW, parked at the kerb at the opposite end of the road.
‘I wasn’t sure which was your house,’ he said. He unlocked the passenger door and helped Annie into the plush interior. She was interpreting his words inside her head. It was tactful to park a car like this a little way away. Someone might see it, and wonder who you are.
As they purred out of the quiet street Annie stared straight ahead through the windshield. She knew that her face was pink and that her expression was unnatural enough to make anyone who knew her, and who might be watching, look just a little harder. She thought back to the moments of happiness that she had felt with Steve in the hospital, and wondered at her own naïveté in letting herself believe, however briefly, that loving him as she did was simple and natural.
Steve drove smoothly away from Annie’s immediate neighbourhood. As they left the streets behind she began to relax. She let her head fall back against her seat, passively watching the shop windows as they rolled by. She felt somehow that now she had left the house and come with Steve, the first of a long chain of decisions had been made, irrevocably, and that was a kind of comfort.
It was a short drive to the north side of Hampstead Heath. Annie noticed that Steve seemed well-acquainted with the belt of expensive housing immediately surrounding the Heath. He turned briskly into an unmarked side-road that led directly to the open space. He raised his eyebrows at her and she nodded her assent. Steve took his stick from the back of the car and they crossed on to the grass, walking slowly, shoulder to shoulder.
Annie glanced back at the large houses standing half-hidden behind their high fences. ‘Are you a regular in places like this?’
Steve shrugged and laughed. ‘Here? Film-producer country? Not exactly. I’ve been asked to one or two private functions in houses around and about. And they are functions, believe me. There was a very stiff party, I remember, in one of those houses over there. The green-tiled one, I think. I walked across here afterwards, in the very early hours of the morning, talking to someone. It was so quiet,’ he recalled. ‘Like somewhere very remote, an island or a stretch of moorland. Not London at all.’
Annie wondered whether he had been with Cass, or Vicky, or someone else altogether. She knew that her retrospective jealousy was inappropriate, but it took a moment to overcome it. She put her hands in the pockets of her jeans, dismissing the image of some film woman in a Dynasty dress. She concentrated on their path over the short, tussocky grass.
‘Are you all right to walk like this?’
‘Perfectly, if we don’t go too far or too fast. If we do, I shall have to lean on your arm.’
‘My pleasure,’ she whispered.
They smiled at each other, suddenly warmed by happiness that was stronger than the sunshine, and Annie forgot her jealousy again.
‘Why do you come to film-producer functions?’ Annie asked. ‘I don’t know anything about what you do, do I?’
‘I can tell you, if you really want.’
The open heath dipping in front of them was deserted except for stray joggers in their tracksuits and one or two solitary walkers whose dogs sniffed at the dead leaves still lying in the hollows: for Steve and Annie their isolation here in the empty space under the blue sky was comforting.
‘I do want. Tell me everything.’
They walked on, absorbed in one another, talking about little things as they had done in the long hours in hospital.
It was Steve who looked at his watch and reminded Annie at last that they must turn back to the car. Their steps were heavier as they retraced them, and
