of turning it over. The gas ring was already lit, a circle of dim blue flame, and it hissed softly in the silence. They couldn’t hear the sea, here at the back of the house. The only other sound, now that Annie was listening, was someone whistling. A milkman, perhaps. Ordinary things, going on all around them. She thought of her parents’ house, and well-washed milk bottles put out on the back step.
‘So they’re caught,’ she said at last.
She was trying to make herself understand what she felt now, and it dawned on her that she felt nothing. She had spent her grief and anger long ago, for those who had died and suffered injuries. And for herself and Steve, the newspaper photographs of those wooden, staring faces had no significance at all. The violence had gone. Annie felt the gentleness of relief. It softened the clenched muscles in her face and throat, and loosened the set of her shoulders. She was lucky, after all. Nothing had happened to Martin or the boys. It wasn’t too late.
‘We’re here,’ Martin had told her in the garden. Sharp joy out of the words sang in her head. Longing and love pulled fiercely at her. She turned her face to look openly at Steve.
‘What do you feel?’ she asked him. The oddness of the question struck them both. She had never needed to ask that before.
His eyes held hers for a moment, and then he looked down at the newspaper faces.
‘Nothing,’ he whispered. ‘What are they to us, now?’
That was all, but unspoken words spilt through the silence.
The blurred newsprint had come like an exorcism. It laid the violence and the fear to rest, and with them a different kind of violence seemed to die too.
Steve took her in his arms and kissed her, and he saw her as he had done at the very beginning. A woman out shopping, with her hair tumbled over the collar of her coat. Annie stood with her head against his shoulder. She was thinking back to the old evenness of her life with Martin and her children. The bomb had blown that apart. She thought of the pain that followed, and the revelation of its obverse side, joy more vivid than anything she had ever known. The pain and, she understood now, the joy had both faded together. It had happened, and it was over.
It was Steve, and herself, and Martin and the children who were left. No different from anyone else, and with the same old human ties.
Love and affection. How deep those ties went, after the violent need had flickered out. Martin was half of her. She couldn’t cut away half of herself, but even more certainly she knew that she couldn’t cut out of Martin the half of him that was herself too. The thought of his pain, much harder to bear than all her own, filled her eyes momentarily with tears.
She bent down to hide them, picking up the discarded newspaper with stiff fingers.
Steve’s arms were warm around her shoulders for an instant longer, and then he let her go.
Annie dropped the paper into the rubbish bin.
‘Let’s make the breakfast,’ she said.
Steve laid the bacon rashers in the blackened pan, and the fat turned translucent before giving its salty, domestic smell up into the air.
They took their plates up to the sunny balcony, and ate looking out over the empty sea.
When they had finished, Steve asked her carefully, ‘What shall we do today?’
Annie busied herself with the coffee cups, and they rattled in her fingers.
Just one more day, she thought. We can allow ourselves that much, can’t we, out of so many?
‘Can we walk inland?’
‘Of course we can. We can go anywhere you like.’
Just for today.
They took the Ordnance Survey map off the shelf of tattered paperbacks and spread it out, planning a route. The practicality of it gave them something to focus on, and they deliberately gave themselves up to it.
‘Can we go that far?’ Annie asked faintly, and he grinned at her.
‘Easily.’
It was a long way, but Annie knew that she would remember every turn of that walk together. She saw every path and lane with extra clarity, and every change of the wide marshland sky as the sun climbed and began to sink again.
They crossed the marshes where the coarse grass brushed rhythmically against their legs, winding with the tiny creeks that had dried into cracked mud. There were larks overhead, spilling out curls of song as they circled their invisible patch of territory. Beyond the marshes they climbed on to sandy downland dotted with huge clumps of coconut-scented gorse and undermined with rabbit warrens. They came to a forbidding belt of conifers, with a tiny church standing almost at the dark edge. They stood for a moment in the cool dimness of the church’s interior, where the sun streaming through the one stained-glass window left pink and amethyst lozenges on the varnished pine pews. The dimness outside under the pines was oddly similar, and they found themselves whispering as they walked over the soft mat of spent brown needles. On the other side the sun was directly overhead, dazzling them momentarily with its brightness.
They ate lunch in a pub garden, made secret by high hedges and whitewashed walls, the only customers for bread and cheese and hoppy local beer.
They walked on again, down shady lanes now that skirted huge fields of corn and barley. The world seemed empty except for themselves and the occasional farmhand who chugged past with a wave, perched high above the ridged wheels of his tractor. And then they began to circle back again, with the sun behind them now, towards the sea.
All the way around the sunlit, empty circle they talked. They talked about simple things, small things that related to themselves and to the past, filling in the blanks that had been left as they lay frozen under the rubble.
Annie told Steve about Tibby, and her mother’s imploring words that had brought her here to the little blue house overlooking the sea. He listened, with the lines showing at the corners of his mouth.
What they were doing was like the walk itself, Annie thought. It was as if they must draw the raw ends together, to complete the circle, before they could step away again along another route.
They didn’t talk about the future. To contemplate the future would have been to tear the raw ends apart.
At last, walking very slowly now, they came to the point where the road dipped eastwards and the sea spread out in front of them, grey, with all the sparkle of the morning drained away. Steve took her hand and they walked the last part of the way in silence, to the end of the road.
The house on the sea-front was full of the evening’s shadows. Neither of them would turn on the lights, yet. Annie sank down on the stairs, too weary to walk another step.
‘Come on,’ he said. And they remembered how they had kept one another going long ago, at the very beginning.
‘I’ll do it for you,’ Annie said. She smiled, but her face was shadowed. She went heavily up the stairs.
Steve followed her and ran a bath in the tiny bathroom with its clanking pipes. He found a jar of salts and tipped them in, whisking the water up into a steamy green froth.
‘You
