at last it did ring it was Steve. Annie gripped the receiver as if the strength of her fingers could bring him closer.
‘Thank you for yesterday,’ Steve said. Annie could hear that he was smiling and the love and elation that she had felt yesterday lifted her heart. ‘It was one of the happiest days I have ever had.’
‘I was happy too.’
As always, Steve could hear more than the words. ‘Is something wrong?’
Rapidly Annie said, ‘It has to be at the expense of other people’s, our happiness, doesn’t it? At the expense of Martin’s, and the boys’.’
‘What happened?’ he persisted gently.
‘Nothing happened. Martin knows. Because he guessed, not because I had the courage to tell him. I came back without my shopping, you see, and that was supposed to be my alibi. Perhaps he’s seen it all along. We’ve known each other for a long time, Steve.’
‘I know that.’ The words were barely audible. At length he said, ‘He would have had to know some time, Annie. Isn’t it as well that it should be at the beginning?’ He was right, of course. But he hadn’t seen the hurt in Martin’s face last night, or the coldness this morning. Annie’s fingers wrapped even tighter around the receiver. Stop. She must stop feeling that Steve was to blame; that anyone was to blame. What had happened had happened, and now it must be faced. She took a breath, and tried to put a different, stronger note into her voice.
‘I’m sorry. I won’t pretend that what’s happening is anything but painful, or that it won’t go on being painful for a long time to come. Can you face that too, Steve?’
He answered her at once, as she had known that he would. ‘You know that I can.’
‘Yes.’
‘Annie, I’m here if you need me.’
She knew that too. She wanted to go to him, but she was fixed here, and she was afraid that the unfixing would damage them all more viciously than the bomb could ever have done.
‘Will you leave me for a few days to try to work things out here?’
‘Of course.’
After he had rung off Annie resumed her aimless circling of the house. She watched the slow clock until it was time to go to collect Ben, longing to have his innocent company. She set off briskly for the nursery, and all the way back she listened carefully to his recitation of the morning’s activities, trying to focus on him to the exclusion of everything else. When they were home again she cooked his lunch, laying out the carrots in the pattern he insisted on before he would even pretend to eat them, then sitting opposite him with a cup of coffee while he mashed the food up with his fork. Through the stream of Benjy’s questions and observations Annie kept hearing her own questions, and the silence that lay beyond them.
‘Why don’t you listen?’ Ben demanded crossly.
Annie felt the heat of unjustified irritation.
‘I can’t listen to everything all the time, Ben,’ she snapped. ‘I need to think sometimes.’
He looked at her, surprised, and then he stuck out his lower lip. ‘I need a cuddle,’ he said, acting, but Annie knew that at another level he wasn’t acting, but telling her the truth. She pushed her anger and sadness ashamedly back within herself.
‘Come and sit on my knee.’
He scrambled up triumphantly and she hugged him, then drew his plate of messy food across and spooned up a mouthful.
‘Come on, finish this and then we’ll watch your programme.’
Ben felt that he had won some undefined battle and so he willingly ate the rest of his lunch. Afterwards they sat on the sofa together, with Benjy’s head heavy against Annie’s chest. Annie stared unseeingly at the puppets on the screen and thought of the afternoon ahead of her, and the other afternoons of motherhood, and tried hopelessly to imagine them in another place, with Steve.
‘Let’s go to the park,’ she suggested when the programme finished. She found Benjy’s red suit and dragged his tricycle out of the tangle in the cupboard under the stairs. They set off, with Benjy trundling beside his mother, his face screwed up with concentration and the effort of pedalling.
The route was numbingly familiar, and the park itself. She followed Benjy from the swings to the roundabout, and stood at the foot of the slide while he hurtled down it. She felt too stiff and far-away to join in his game of hide-and-seek.
‘Not today,’ she told him. ‘Perhaps Daddy will bring you and Tom for a game tomorrow.’
What else would happen tomorrow, and the days afterwards? Annie felt cold. She saw that the sky was streaked with long fingers of cloud. The warmth of the misplaced spring was over, and tomorrow it would be as icy as January again. She walked around the knot of trees that stood in the middle of the park.
‘Come on, Ben. We’ll go and buy some bread for tea, and then we’ll get Thomas from school.’
Teatime came and went, and then the routine of the children’s play time, supper and baths and bedtime stories. When they were both asleep Annie came downstairs and poured herself a drink, looked at the dinner in the oven, and then sat down to wait. She knew that she was waiting for Martin, as she had been waiting all day. She waited for an hour, and then another half an hour, and then she took her portion of the dinner out of the oven and ate it, not tasting anything. She washed up the single plate and put it away, and sat down again in front of the television. She remembered that there was a basketful of mending waiting to be done so she fetched it and began to darn a hole in the elbow of one of Thomas’s school jerseys.
It was nearly half past ten when Martin came up the front path.
He had been sitting for hours in the corner of a bleak pub he had never been into before. Amidst the plastic and neon of brewery décor he had been thinking about himself and Annie, back over all the years that they had been together. He remembered her as they had been when they first met, and he recalled that he had fallen in love with her in a coffee bar, when she was still an awkward hybrid of outré student and shy schoolgirl. They had grown up together, from then. In two, perhaps three years? It seemed a short time to have accomplished so much, looking back at it with the speed of years’ passing now. But it had felt then as if they had for ever ahead of them. The memories went on, parading past him, while he stared unseeingly at his beer.
Was this what for ever added up to, then?
Everything that they had done together seemed much clearer, and precious, now. Because he was afraid that the end of it was coming?
He had never been afraid before, because he had been so sure of her. Even when there was Matthew, he had been sure.
Martin ducked his head over his unwanted beer, confronted by the spectre of arrogance.
Carefully, now, he made himself remember.
Matthew had materialized in the hot weeks of the summer before they were married. Martin had never even seen him, but Annie’s friend Louise, and other friends, had talked about him. Martin remembered that he had understood what was happening, but he had simply waited for her.
He had even
