Strangers (24 page)

‘Annie. It can’t ever be the same.’

Steve was sure that her words were a denial of what she felt. He looked at her thin, pale face, trying to read her thoughts, but she had closed it up to him. She looked very small, hunched up in her chair, her physical frailty seeming at odds with the importance that she held for him.

He wanted to reach out for her. He wanted to make her say what she was denying to herself, and in his turn to tell her how much he needed her. Steve remembered, too vividly, the blankness of his life that had confronted him in the darkness. Listening to Annie, and talking to her, had given him his own reason to hold on. Now, hardly believably, they were here together. Steve’s eyes left Annie’s face and he looked around the ugly room. The other patients seemed fixed in their chairs, resigned and hopeless. He felt the luck, by contrast, of simply being alive. It was sad that these motionless people with their pinched faces couldn’t share the exultation. He knew that Annie felt it, and he experienced a shock of anger with her for her refusal, now, to admit the chance of happiness.

But then, to admit their own chance of happiness was to deny her family’s. His anger disappeared as quickly as it had come. Annie was unselfish, that was all. Steve’s crooked smile lifted again. He had been selfish all his life, and it would be ironic, now, if by being different he was to lose her.

The air in the day room was stale, and the windows were firmly closed. Beyond the glass the grey masses of clouds whipped past, the noise of the wind only emphasizing the stifling stillness inside the hospital.

Whatever came, Steve thought, he wanted Annie to know how much he cared about her. That much selfishness, at least, he would allow himself. He listened to the voices of the television and a woman three chairs away, complaining about her treatment. The wind battered at the hospital windows, and Steve sat silently in his place. He wanted to stumble forward to reach Annie, taking hold of her and drawing her back to him. His hands tightened on the arms of his chair, stopping himself. He could only have done that if they had been alone, if they had been fit, if everything else had been different. Nor could he find the words, here in the day room, that didn’t sound over-used, shop-worn. For all his adult life, Steve had known what to say to women. He had told them what they had wanted to hear and they had accepted it. He had asked for what he had wanted, and it had been given to him.

Steve wondered, now, whether he had been disliked as much as he had deserved. Perhaps. Or perhaps the long procession of girls had used him, too. He thought of Cass and her half-puzzled, half-defiant air. Cass hadn’t used him. Steve tasted the sourness of dislike for himself, thick on his tongue.

And now, confronted with Annie, he didn’t know what to say. He was afraid that everything he could try would sound like a gambit. All the words had a coarse, locker-room echo.

He looked at her, sitting withdrawn from him in her blue dressing gown. A fair-haired woman with blue eyes that changed colour with the light. Not young any more, without Cass’s loveliness or Vicky’s direct female charge. But Annie possessed a kind of beauty that Steve had never seen before. At the thought of losing her, of letting her walk away from him, anger and longing and jealousy boiled up inside him. He shifted in his chair, feeling his physical weakness and his incapacity to reach her.

I love you
.

No, not even the simplicity of that would do. The words were too fragile to say aloud in this listening room with its teacups and ashtrays and dog-eared magazines.

‘Annie.’

He was reduced to repeating her name, as he had done to keep her conscious in the darkness. He had said the other words to her then, at the end, but she hadn’t heard them. They had been lifting her up and away from him, bumping her in the tight harness, up into the circle of lights rimming their hole.

‘Annie. It can’t ever be the same,’ he said again. ‘You can’t make what has happened un-happen.’

‘I know that.’ Her voice was too clear, as if she were trying to keep it steady. ‘We’re here together, in this room, because of a circumstance, a trick of fate. I mean that we can stop that circumstance from rolling on and changing everything that comes after it.’

She wouldn’t look at him now because she didn’t trust herself, but she sensed that he was leaning forward, straining to catch the nuance of what she said.

‘If you and I had met anywhere else, at a party, say, there would have been nothing to draw us together. We’d have passed on by, just like we would have done in that doorway if the bomb hadn’t exploded. It did explode, and we were lucky because we lived and other people didn’t. But it was a circumstance, still. We can’t let it be anything more than that.’

Annie knew that he was still looking at her. She felt the intensity of his stare. She could even feel, through her own hands, his grip on the arm of his chair.

‘It
is
more, my love.’

‘I’m not your love,’ she whispered. ‘I can’t be.’

Annie’s head fell forward and she covered her face with her hands. Her hair swung with it, showing the tips of her ears. Steve wanted to lean forward and kiss them, and then to push the hair back and kiss her cheek and her throat, and the palms of her hands where they had covered her eyes.

He made himself look away, then. The television was still blaring, incredibly, and old Frankie and his friend were set squarely in front of it. Mitchie was reading a newspaper, and Sylvia with the knitting was interminably talking. No one was looking at them, but Steve resented their intrusion with unreasonable intensity.

Annie didn’t look up. She pushed her hair back and sat still, looking at the floor.

‘So what shall we do?’ Steve asked.

She shrugged, suddenly weary.

‘Nothing. Get better and go home, I imagine.’

‘Look at me, Annie.’

She raised her head. She knew that he expected more of her. He expected courage in place of the rooted loyalty to Martin that was all she had to offer.

‘Is that really what you mean? What you want?’

His face could look very cold, Annie thought. She nodded, her neck as stiff as a column, seeing his disappointment in her clearly in his face. But to have said it was a relief. She felt the weight of anxiety lift a little, although something else, chillier and more final, slipped to take its place. Regret, Annie thought. She could almost have smiled at the inevitability.

‘And in the meantime?’ Steve asked quietly.

‘We can go on seeing each other in here, and talking.’ She faltered then, seeing the fallacy. ‘As friends. Why not? We are friends, aren’t we?’

His hand shot out and took her wrist, holding it too tightly.

‘What shall we talk about, as friends? The racing?’ He nodded towards the television. ‘Sylvia’s knitting? Nothing too close to home, I imagine. In case it leads us on to dangerous ground.’

Annie heard the bitterness in his voice. He doesn’t like to be denied, she thought. He isn’t used to it. But even as the thought occurred to her, she knew that she was doing him an injustice. She felt the bitterness of loss as strongly as Steve did. She looked past him at the room and knew the artificiality of being confined in it. To get home, that was the important thing. Perhaps then the dreams would stop. Perhaps, in the ordinary world, the potent mixture of happiness and regret that Steve stirred in her would fade away too. It was the unreality of hospital, Annie told herself. Isolation magnified feelings that she would have dismissed outside.

She made her voice light as she answered, ‘We can talk about anything. We already have, haven’t we?’

As she spoke, she knew that she was a coward. Was it the old dues, she wondered, that she was dutifully playing? Or did she use them as an excuse for not meeting a greater challenge?

Annie thought briefly of Matthew.

Matthew had gone. Steve knew that. She had the sense of choices again, multiplying, and a great windy space all around her from which all the familiar landmarks had been lifted up and tumbled away. And then regret, sharpening, because after all she lacked the courage to enter the space herself. Steve let go of her wrist. His hands settled on the chair-arms again. Annie was close enough to him to feel the tension from inactivity that vibrated in him.

But he simply said, ‘Thank you for saying what you feel,’ and smiled at her.

No
, Annie thought.
What I ought to feel
. Regret, again.

‘Look.’ Steve nodded towards the television. ‘The afternoon movie is
Double Indemnity
.’

‘I’ve never seen it. Martin will know everything about it. Who the second cameraman was, who built the sets. He’s the film buff, not me.’

‘You should see it. Shall I move our chairs?’

The oddness of their knowledge of one another struck her all over again. They had never shared a meal, or seen a film or a play together, never even properly seen one another in day clothes. None of that mattered, she understood that now. Perhaps, in her life with Martin, she had set too much store by it. What had mattered to them, to Annie and Steve, was the recognition and understanding that had come and grown in the darkness.

Annie stared at the grey images on the television screen.

Was it enough, then, to fall in love by?

She knew the answer without asking herself. It was enough.

They stood up, helping one another to their feet, and positioned their chairs side by side, behind Frank and the others.

Annie wanted to turn to Steve, to say,
Wait
. He stood until she was sitting comfortably and then lowered himself awkwardly into his chair. He was close enough for her to feel his elbow touching hers.

After a moment, he turned to look at her. The bitterness seemed to have evaporated and he smiled again.

‘We can watch television together. Just like real life. That’s safe enough, isn’t it?’

‘I don’t know,’ Annie said softly. And she thought, He sees quite clearly, the difference between what I say and what I feel.

She made herself sit perfectly still and they pretended to watch the film together, counterfeiting the ordinariness of real life.

Afterwards, when it was over, they stood up again and went in their opposite directions, back to the wards.

The day of
Double Indemnity
set a pattern.

Annie’s body healed rapidly. The doctors and nurses began to call her Wonderwoman, joking elaborately about the rapidity of her progress. Every day she felt a little stronger. The walk down the ward became routine instead of a challenge. She walked down to the physiotherapy department, and upstairs to pay a visit to Brendan. He pursed his lips when he saw her, and walked in a circle around her before whistling his admiration.

‘Not bad at all. I wouldn’t like to have had a bet on it, you know. I was anxious, back there, just for a day or two.’

Annie laughed at him. ‘You should have had a bet. I’m pretty tough.’

‘Is that so? Tell me now, how’s that handsome friend of yours?’

‘Steve’s doing okay. He’s impatient, that’s all.’

Brendan sighed. ‘Some people have all the luck, love, don’t you? Take me, then. If I’d been buried alive, it would have been with some little old lady. Not your hero.’

‘I didn’t plan it that way,’ Annie protested.

‘Luck, I said.’

Annie rested, and slept as much as she could, welcoming unconsciousness except for the fearful dreams that still came. She dutifully ate all the food that was presented to her, and her face lost the sharp angles of sickness. She submitted to tests and exercises and the routines that were imposed on her, and she was rewarded with returning strength. Her family and friends came to visit her, and every evening Martin sat beside her bed and told her the day’s news. She tried hard to feel the intimacy of home in the hour of evening visiting, with the over-familiar flowered curtains enclosing them.

She felt closest to Steve, aware of him near to her when they didn’t meet, keeping her manner deliberately neutral when they did. It was hard, and she knew that they both felt the falsity of it.

When they met in the day room they talked about the books they were reading, the progress they had made, the day’s newspapers, but the artificial distance that Annie had imposed made no difference. Sometimes she thought that the casual talk did no more than emphasize another, silent dialogue.

One morning Annie was sitting reading in the chair beside her bed. At the ward sister’s suggestion Martin had brought some of Annie’s clothes in for her, and she had dressed herself in a skirt and jumper. The clothes felt thick and strange, and dowdy with her feet in slippers.

It wasn’t visiting time, and Annie was startled to look up and see her mother making her way slowly towards her bed. She relied on a stick now, and her knuckles stood out sharp and knobby as she grasped it. Annie stood up and went to her mother, putting her arm around her shoulders.

Anxiety made her demand, ‘What is it? Is something wrong?’

‘Nothing at all,’ she answered. ‘Your father dropped me off on his way somewhere. The ward sister kindly let me in. Here I am.’

Her mother was proud of herself, Annie saw. The little solo journey from the hospital doors to the ward was a triumph. The mother and daughter smiled at each other, and a little hopeful flame flickered between them. Perhaps, after all, she was getting better. Annie hugged her.

‘Thank you for coming. Sit down in this chair, Tibby.’

Annie’s mother’s real name was Alicia, but from childhood she had been called Tibby. Thomas and Benjy used the name now.

‘It sounds better than Granny. Sort of furry,’ Thomas said.

‘Like a cat, of course,’ Tibby had agreed. She was close to the two little boys, and it was an added sorrow for her that they tired her too much now to spend more than a few minutes with them. Before her illness Tibby had taken them on day-long expeditions, planning them in advance with Thomas and packing careful provisions in their picnic boxes.

‘It was clever of you to get them to let you in,’ Annie said. ‘They’re quite strict about it.’