certainty that she would come back seemed unbelievable now. Had he been so convinced that he was right about everything else, in those days?
He might have lost her, then.
Instead of losing her now.
For all the noise and distraction of the pub, Martin felt that he was hearing and seeing with sudden, perfect clarity.
Neither of them was fixed, nor defined as themselves at any point in time, not in that Soho coffee bar, nor on their wedding day, nor on the day of the bombing. They both went on changing, and they changed separately as well as together. They were not just the welded, coupled unit that he had silently asked her to confirm on the unhappy night of their dinner party. They were both of them at fault, perhaps, for forgetting that. They had seen each other fixed in a frame, as Martin-and-Annie, or as Benjy and Tom’s Mum and Dad, and when they slipped separately out of their fixed places, then they lost sight of one another.
How restless had Annie been, while he worked and concentrated on other things?
She was so good at giving all of them what they needed from her, he hadn’t troubled to look closely enough. It was only on Christmas Eve, when she had already gone, that he had really seen the neat evidence of her loving care. And then he had thought, Why didn’t I see before?
Or had Annie herself stopped seeing things, too?
Perhaps, Martin thought.
And if they were both at fault in their carelessness of one another, he had been wrong all the last weeks to heap the blame for what was happening on to the bombing.
The bomb was a senseless, terrible catalyst, nothing more.
The juke-box in the corner of the bar sent waves of meaningless noise washing around him.
If it hadn’t been Steve, then, it might have been someone else. Sooner or later.
Through the noise, Martin made himself follow the painful threads of thought. Now that it had happened. Think it. Now that his wife had fallen in love with someone else, what could he do?
With the end of his need to blame the bomb, Martin’s anger and bitterness against Steve drifted away too. There was nothing to be gained from going to find him, confronting him, as he had still half-imagined that he would do. To say what? Martin thought, and half-smiled at the picture that it conjured up. To ask for Annie back?
Martin sat for a long time, without moving, and then he picked up the pint glass and drained it.
There was nothing he could do. Nothing except wait, and by waiting hope to show her that he loved her, and wanted her, and needed her.
He stood up at last, stiff and with the bar music beating in his head. It was time to go home.
He drove back the familiar way, and parked the car outside the front gate. The lights were on in the downstairs rooms, and the dim glow of Benjy’s bedroom nightlight glowed against the drawn blind in the top window. The house looked just as it always did, and the sight made him long even more sharply for the old, ordinary times. If they came back again, he vowed to himself, he would keep them, rubbed bright, and never give them a chance to slip away.
He went up the path, and let himself in through the front door. Annie was sitting in the circle of light at one end of the old chesterfield. He saw the colour of her hair and the line of her cheek, and the mending lying in her lap.
They looked at each other without speaking, neither of them knowing what to say. Annie got up slowly and crossed the room to turn off the television news, and Martin stood rooted in the doorway watching the way that she bent down, straightened up again and walked away into the kitchen.
‘Would you like your dinner?’ she called back, tonelessly. ‘It’s rather dry, I’m afraid.’
‘It doesn’t matter. Yes, bring it in here, is that all right?’
A moment later she came in with a tray, a plate of food, ordinary things, like on any other night. Martin took it and began to eat, feeling the food settling on top of the gassy keg beer that he had drunk in the cheerless pub.
After a minute he said, ‘I thought we might talk, Annie.’
She was sitting across the room, her head bent, her hands folded on her darning. ‘Yes. I thought we might too,’ she whispered.
Martin groped, wondering where to start. ‘Tell me what happened.’
She looked at him then with a strange, almost supplicating expression. ‘You know what happened.’
He shook his head. ‘No, Annie. I want you to tell me, now. It’s time.’
She put her hands up to her eyes. He wanted to say, Don’t do that. Let me see your face, but he made himself keep quiet.
At last Annie said, ‘We were a couple, you and me, living here with our kids. It wasn’t anything extraordinary, was it? Nothing exotic, or passionate, or enthralling, but it was working. It was, wasn’t it?’
Martin nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said, very quietly. ‘It was working. Better than we deserved, perhaps.’
She looked across at him then, for a long moment, and then she nodded.
‘And then the bomb happened,’ Annie whispered. Martin saw her lift one shoulder, and let it drop again, a gesture of bewilderment, as though the bomb was something she had tried and failed to understand.
‘Tell me, Annie. You’ve never told me what it was like. What you felt.’
Annie stared at him, and he was afraid that she didn’t see him at all. And then she began to talk, in a low, unemphatic voice. ‘I don’t know how to tell you. I don’t know how to describe what it was like. It was dark, there was a terrible noise and then there was utter silence. I couldn’t move, and I could feel blood in my mouth, and dust and grit on my tongue. And there was pain everywhere.’ She shrugged again. ‘You know all that. What can I tell you?’
‘About fear.’
Annie thought about Tibby. She had come home from her hospice, to her husband and the roses, but she was too weak now to do her pruning. She’s seen you grow up. Seen her grandchildren. Yes. But what else was there? How many patient compromises? ‘I was afraid. I was … angry, too. I suppose it was anger. With the sense that everything was being cut short. That I wasn’t to be allowed to … finish. What I was doing.’
Martin looked round the room. There was a wicker basket full of Ben’s toys next to the hearth, a jar of daffodils on the mantelpiece amongst the clutter of china ornaments and candlesticks and children’s party invitations. ‘To finish what you were doing here, Annie? Was that it?’
‘Yes. Being a wife and mother.’ The words as they came out sounded strange to Annie, as if she had repeated them to herself so many times that their meaning had begun to elude her. ‘We were all right, weren’t we?’ she asked hastily. ‘The four of us.’
The past tense hit Martin squarely now. He looked at his wife in the lamplight, feeling the anger and bitterness of the past few days briefly renewed.
‘We were,’ he said. ‘We can be
