a visiting nurse, looked after her between them as best they could. Tibby still wanted to be dressed in her familiar heathery tweed skirts and woollen cardigans, and on most mornings Annie went to do it after she had taken the boys to school and nursery. The clothes when she took them out of the mahogany wardrobe or the tidy drawers still smelt of her mother’s lavender scent, but they seemed huge when she slipped them over Tibby’s brittle bones.
‘The fit on this skirt is terrible,’ Tibby would murmur as she pulled at a gaping waistband. ‘It’s a good one, too. They don’t make clothes like they used to, darling. I’d like the pink cardigan with this. It’s better, don’t you think?’
As she helped her up and fastened her buttons, pinned the loose folds of fabric and arranged her mother’s thin hair, Annie found that she could hardly answer. Her mother had been the centre and the heart of this big house, and now it was as if a draught had blown her into a corner of it, depositing her in a chair like a cobweb or the dust she had battled against for so many years.
Annie settled her into her place. Tibby’s hands on her arms looked almost transparent.
‘Shall I turn you round today so that you can see into the garden?’ she asked.
Tibby thought for a moment. Annie saw her glance at the photographs on the low table beside her. Tibby’s wedding picture. Annie and her brother as children, Annie’s own wedding, her brother’s wife and children. Thomas and Benjamin, Tom with his top front teeth missing.
‘Yes, I think so,’ Tibby said.
Annie turned her chair and they looked through the French windows into the garden. It was the first week of April. Tibby’s early daffodils were already falling, but the forsythia hedge behind them was a sheet of gold. Tulips in bud like green spears had come up in the half-moon beside the window, and the prunus showed the first delicate edges of pink blossom. Annie saw that the lawn needed mowing. It must have sprung up in the warm sunshine of March.
‘I’ll ask Martin to come and cut the grass for Jim,’ she murmured.
Tibby nodded; but she didn’t begin to talk about attending to her roses, as she would have done only a week or so ago. She looked at her flowers, and at the blaze of the resplendent hedge.
‘I think the spring has always been the best time,’ she said, almost to herself. ‘I think I’ve always preferred the promise to the reality. Of summer, of course. The brighter colours, you know. Too bright, sometimes. Not like this pale green and gold.’
Go on, Annie implored her silently. Please, won’t you talk about it to me? She wanted to kneel down in front of her mother and rest her head in her lap. Talk about the promise, and the reality, won’t you? Because we haven’t got very long, Tibby. We both know that we haven’t, and there is such a lot to say.
She was suddenly overwhelmed by her own need to tell her mother everything.
Gently she asked her, ‘How do you feel today?’
If Tibby could admit the truth. If they could just begin, she thought.
Tibby’s back straightened in her chair. She didn’t take her eyes off the gold of the garden, but she said, ‘A little better, I think.’
And so they wouldn’t admit that she was going to die, and that it might happen at any time, and that Tibby would be gone, leaving only the dust and the big house and the echoes of their talk about the roses.
Annie bent her head for a moment, so that Tibby would not see her sadness showing in her face. If that was how Tibby wanted it to be, of course Annie must let it be. She straightened up again and asked brightly, ‘Can I bring anything in here before I go?’
‘The magazine and the book from the table beside my bed, darling, if you wouldn’t mind. Jim will be back from the shops soon.’
Jim always went out to buy the few things that they needed, every morning, at nine-fifteen exactly. As Annie walked back through the shadowy house she saw that the tallboys and the grandfather clock were dusty. But as Tibby had stopped worrying about her roses, she seemed to care less for her house now. She was withdrawing into herself, the battle lost. Had it been worth the fight at all? Annie thought savagely. Was anyone’s fight worth it?
She gave her mother the book and the magazine, kissed the top of her head and fled blindly from the house.
At the end of the second week, Annie knew that she was lost.
Her bearings were gone, and she was groping through days that seemed increasingly to belong to someone who she didn’t know or understand. To compensate for her sense of being adrift she held on as firmly as she could to the familiar, mechanical things. She ironed the clothes, concentrating fiercely on folding the shirts into neat, symmetrical piles. In the evenings Martin often didn’t come home until very late, so Annie filled the hours by cooking casseroles for the freezer. She ladled the food into foil cartons and labelled and dated them in small, neat handwriting that looked quite unlike her own. But the little, domestic satisfaction that she usually gained from such things turned itself against Annie now. She thought bitterly that she was lining her family nest with food and clothes before abandoning it herself.
She caught herself wondering whether, after all, she might be just a little mad. School holiday time came, and the number of hours that she could find to spend with Steve dwindled almost to none.
‘Do you think,’ he had asked her on the telephone, ‘I could meet your children soon?’ She had stood looking across the kitchen at them until his voice in her ear had prompted her, ‘Are you still there?’
‘Yes. Yes, of course, you must. What shall we do?’
They had arranged it. It would be on Friday, for a hamburger lunch and then a trip to the cinema to see a film that Tom had been agitating about for weeks and weeks.
Annie put off from day to day the moment of telling the children about the expedition. She told herself that she would make it sound very casual, an almost impromptu adventure with a friend. Then Friday morning came. It was one of those days when Martin had got up and gone to work very early, and Tom and Benjy had hardly seen him. They had been asleep the night before when he came in.
‘What shall we do today, Mum?’ Thomas asked. He had cleared the breakfast dishes for her without protest, and he had spent a patient quarter of an hour doing Lego with Benjy while Annie swept the kitchen and hovered the living room. ‘Can we ring Timothy and ask him to come round?’
Annie wound up the flex of the vacuum cleaner very carefully.
‘I thought we might go on a trip today,’ she said. ‘We could go for a hamburger, and then to see that film of yours.’
Their eyes met over Benjamin’s head. Annie saw the wariness at once. He’s been waiting for something, she thought. He may not know what it is, or even that he is waiting and dreading something. But it’s there, just the same. He can feel it in the house. See it in our faces.
‘Just us?’ Tom asked her.
‘A friend of mine would like to come along too.’ She tried to keep her voice steady and warm.
‘Who?’ The small voice was suspicious.
‘His name is Steve.’
‘We don’t know him,’ Tom said
