be shown and sold. Lunch, dinner with Vicky, bed and sleep and work again. And so it would go on, just the same. As if nothing had changed, instead of everything.
Steve picked up his loaded briefcase.
‘There never was a chance for us?’ he echoed aloud. ‘You’re wrong, Annie. We had all the chances that there could be.’
The phone rang again. ‘I’m on my way,’ he shouted at it. ‘What more do you want?’
He went out of the flat and left it, still ringing.
Annie told Martin.
‘I went to see Steve today.’
She was clearing the plates from the pine table after dinner and stacking them on the draining board. Martin would wash them up after they had watched the television news. How odd it was, she thought. They had reached the remotest point of their life together, so far apart that she didn’t know how they would come back again. But they still went padding through the familiar routines, almost silent, barely looking at each other. Like the heavy, neutered tomcats next door. The comparison made Annie want to laugh, incongruously, but she turned from the sink and saw Martin watching her. He looked wary, and exhausted. She went to him then, and put her hand on his arm.
‘I … told him that I was going to stay here. With you and the boys. I didn’t want to go, because … I saw how it would be.’ How inadequate the words were. ‘I’m sorry.’
Martin nodded.
He should have felt a rush of relief, a sense of the oppressive weight that had darkened the house lifting, to let in the light and air. But he felt nothing. He looked at Annie, trying to see behind her face, knowing that he couldn’t because he hadn’t been able to for so many weeks.
‘It doesn’t matter who was right,’ he said at last. ‘Can you live with it, Annie?’
‘Yes,’ she answered him, because she had to. ‘I can live with it.’
And that was all they said.
They were old enough, and they understood one another well enough, Annie reflected, not to expect there to be anything more. There would be no reconciliation in a shower of coloured light. Instead there would be the small tokens of renewal, scraps, cautiously offered one by one. In time they would be stitched up again into a serviceable patchwork, and that was as much as they could hope for.
That night Martin came back and slept beside her. It would take time, of course, before he put his arms round her again. That first night Annie lay quietly on her side of the bed, trying to take simple comfort from the warmth of him next to her. She made herself suppress the voice inside her that cried out for Steve.
But the truth was, as Annie had been half-afraid when she had answered Martin, that she couldn’t live with it. She had made her decision as honourably as she could, and she did her best to keep to it. But the days began to pile up into weeks, and Annie felt that she was building a house without windows. It was clean and polished, and there was food on the table and clean clothes in the chests, but there was no light in it anywhere. It was claustrophobic; the air tasted as if she had breathed it in and out a dozen times, just as she had done the things that she was doing a hundred or a thousand times before. She would have done them gladly if she had felt that their repetition was taking her anywhere – but she was uncertain that she would ever draw close to her husband, or that Martin would ever let her come any nearer. They were polite, and considerate, but they were not partners, or friends.
And Annie missed Steve. She missed him every day, in all the intervals of it. She heard the cadences of his voice in the radio-announcer’s, she glimpsed his head in a crowd and walked faster to keep him in sight, and then suffered the disappointment when the stranger turned and she saw that he was nothing like Steve at all. She found herself thinking about him as she carried baskets of wet washing out to peg on the clothes line, and as she made the plodding walk with Benjy to pick up Tom from afternoon school. She wondered whether Steve thought about her too.
Two or three times, despising herself for her capitulation, she picked up the telephone and dialled his number. The first time, when Martin was away for a two-day business trip, she sat at her kitchen table for an hour, looking at the telephone, before she went to it. She picked out the number with a clumsy finger and listened to the ringing in her ear. There were only two rings, not long enough for him to have reached the phone … there was a click, and Annie heard his voice, and there was a painful beat of pleasure before she realized that it was only a recorded message. He repeated the number, and said his name. He sounded so close, and yet she couldn’t reach him.
With her heart thumping guiltily, Annie listened to the conversational message. I’m sorry, I can’t take your call. If you’ll leave your name and number. After the tone, she hung up. She went back to her place and sat down, her hands loose in her lap, staring into nothing.
A week went by, and she called again. The message was the same, and it gave her the same eerie feeling of closeness.
I must be mad, she thought. What comfort is there in listening to his recorded voice? But there was a kind of comfort, and she rang again, a third time, as guilty and as furtive as an addict.
April went, and May, and June came. The early roses came into bud and then flowered. Tibby was still alive, but she couldn’t see them.
She had been taken into the hospice again, and Annie knew that she wouldn’t be coming home. But for her mother’s sake she still went regularly to the old house, to dust the polished furniture and fill the vases and wind up the mantelpiece clocks. Annie didn’t think that her father would do it. He had retreated from the house, apparently in relief. He lived in the kitchen, strewing it with spent matches from his pipe. It was Annie who cut the roses and brought them in to arrange in Tibby’s silver bowls. She listened to the echo of her own footsteps on the parquet, and remembered the house as it had been when she was a child. She had had the same memories after the bomb. Herself, in a green dress with white ribbons in her hair, running to Tibby. She had hurt herself, and her mother had taken her out of the sun and into the shadowy living room to comfort her.
As she stood in the squares of light that the sun spilt on the wooden floor Annie had a renewed sense of time, ribbons of continuity linking Tibby and her husband, Martin and herself, Annie’s children, children’s children. In the silent house, with the memories of her own childhood close to her, it was the thought of the boys that comforted her. She could hear them calling, as she had heard them in the stifling darkness of the bomb wreckage.
Mum, look at me.
Running in the garden, at home. As she had run in this garden, calling out to Tibby.
Love for all of them warmed her, family love, and all the complicated knots of anxiety, and pride, and relief that they were somehow still together, caught at her and held her. With the sound of their voices in her head Annie remembered the happiness of chains of ordinary days that she had shared with her sons, all the way to yesterday, the last link in the chain.
She had taken them to Hampstead Heath, to the little travelling funfair that arrived two or three times a year and spread its gaudy, temporary camp over a bare patch of hill. For years they had been visiting it whenever it appeared, usually with Martin too, but yesterday he had claimed some drawings to finish and so Annie had driven the boys over on her own. She had felt the dead weight of loneliness as she negotiated the traffic, but when they had left the car behind and the boys were scrambling ahead of her Annie’s spirits lifted like the strings of flags flying from the sideshow tents. They loved the
