was cremated after a brief service in an ugly, modern chapel. The curtains that parted for the coffin to glide through reminded Annie of the thick velvet ones at a pantomime. She wanted to laugh, and cry, but she went on standing stiffly beside Martin and the organ played treacly music over their heads.
Afterwards, they filed out into the overpowering sunshine.
With Jim and Phillip, Annie had made arrangements for Tibby’s family and friends to come back to the old house after the ceremony. Looking backwards, Annie saw the little line of cars draw out after Martin’s. The sun glinted cheerfully off chrome and glass, sharp in her eyes, until she turned her head again. Jim sat in the front of the car with Martin, and Phillip was beside Annie. She felt the vacuum that Tibby had left so profoundly that she wanted to shout out, ‘Wait! We’ve left her behind. Turn round, Martin.’
When they reached the house Martin parked a little way from it to make space for the following cars. In a sombre line the four of them walked towards the gate. As they reached it Jim looked up at the gables of the house.
‘I’m going to put it on the market,’ he said.
The green-painted gate swung inwards, with the same creak that had welcomed Annie home from school.
‘Probably the best thing,’ Phillip said. ‘It’s far too big, now.’
They went on towards the front door, but Annie stood still. Behind her she could hear the other cars drawing up, and muted, respectful voices. She looked at the front door-knocker that Tibby used to brass-polish, and at the windows, veiled with midsummer dust now, that she used to insist on cleaning herself.
It’s only a house, she thought.
But it was more, too. It was Tibby’s elaborate, respectable shrine to a family life that had long ago ebbed out of it. It was, in the end, her reason for being, and now it would be sold and the new owners would smile at the outmoded décor. As she had known that they would. As she stood in the sunshine amidst the scent of roses Annie felt the lustreless pall of compromise and disappointment, her own as well as her parents’, heavy around her.
Martin had waited at the gate, and now he came and put his hand under her arm. ‘It isn’t the same house without Tibby,’ he tried to comfort her.
‘I know,’ Annie said. After a moment she whispered, ‘It’s a waste, isn’t it? A terrible waste.’
They went on inside.
Annie did what was expected of her, just as her mother would have done. She greeted her mother’s friends, and exchanged sympathies with them. She made sure that they were helped to food from the cold buffet, and she poured out glasses of white wine and handed them around. And then, when there was a brief lull, she went up the stairs to her mother’s old bedroom.
She sat down on her bed, and the smooth, pale expanse of the bedcover crumpled up at once beneath her. Annie stood up again and went to the wardrobe, opening the mirrored doors to look in at her mother’s clothes, neatly lined up on their padded hangers. She turned again and went to the dressing table, where Tibby’s old-fashioned glass scent bottles with their braid-covered rubber bulbs stood in exact shining circles in the film of dust.
As she looked down at the rings the voice, insistent in Annie’s head, grew louder and louder. Suddenly, it took possession of her.
Steve. Steve.
She put the scent bottle down and went to the telephone that stood on the table beside Tibby’s bed. She dialled his number and listened to the message once more and the warmth that he had stirred in her leapt up all over again. This time, she left her own message.
It was earlier than his usual time when Steve reached home. He had endured a lunch with an agency man he detested, and he had drunk twice as much as he wanted in order to pass the time. He had sat through a meeting afterwards in a stuffy room while the sun edged past the blinds, and the day had left him with a dull headache and a sour, metallic taste in his mouth.
The flat looked bare and neglected when he came in. He dropped his jacket in a heap on the black sofa and went into the kitchen to make himself another drink. Then, with the full whisky tumbler in his hand, he came back to his desk and flipped the keys on the answering machine.
It was there.
The first time he heard her voice, he wasn’t sure that he hadn’t imagined it. He had done so, before, more than once, in all the time that he had waited. Now, lately, he had stopped waiting. Annie had gone, of course.
He pressed the buttons to hear it again. But she hadn’t gone. She was here, talking to him, vividly and unbearably close, out of the little spool of tape.
‘It’s Annie,’ she said. There was a pause and he saw her, quite clearly, the light and shade on the planes of her face. The words came quickly. ‘I want to see you. It’s not too late, is it? Say it isn’t too late.’
That was all.
Steve closed his eyes. The whisky was malty and cold on his tongue. At last he smiled. It was a painful, crooked smile, but Steve didn’t hesitate. He reached for the telephone and slowly, carefully, picked out the remembered digits.
And then she was there. As soon as he heard her voice, he loved her as much again.
‘Thank you for ringing,’ she said softly.
‘What’s happened, Annie?’
‘My mother died last week.’
‘I’m sorry.’
Annie turned her back to the kitchen and leant her forehead against the wall.
‘It isn’t that,’ she said. ‘Steve, it wasn’t finished, was it? The way that we left one another …’
‘No,’ he answered evenly, ‘it isn’t finished.’
‘I want to see you again.’
Steve saw the sticky rings that the whisky glasses had left on the tops of his tables, and at the corner of the unmade bed visible past the open bedroom door.
‘I’m going away for a few days. Will you come with me?’
He could feel the happiness that jumped inside her because it matched his own, regardless.
Without a second’s pause she answered. ‘Yes. Oh yes, I’ll come.’
Martin and the boys were in the garden. Annie saw them through the bathroom window as she took her jars of cream and cosmetics off the shelves and put them in her sponge bag. With the bag weighing heavy in her hand she stood by the window, watching them. The slats of the lowered blinds were like bars, cutting her off from them. She felt hard and dry inside her skin, and her heart thumped against her ribs. She turned away abruptly, so that she couldn’t see the boys’ heads and the line of Martin’s shoulders.
She had told Martin on the same evening that she had spoken to Steve. The boys were in bed, and the house was quiet, almost as if it were waiting for something. She had let the words spill out, knowing that there was no softening them. Martin had sat for a moment with his head bent, and then he had looked up into her face. She saw that he was neither surprised nor angry, and suddenly she had wanted to crumple down against him and bury
