Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection: Strangers, Bad Girls Good Women, A Woman of Our Times, All My Sins Remembered. Rosie Thomas
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‘What is it then?’
She knew, and she searched for the words that wouldn’t devalue it, but Martin was quicker and blunter.
‘Friendship. Liking. We’re old friends, Annie. We’ve achieved that.’ He was unmoving, but she felt the anxiety inside him. ‘Oh, I still fancy you. You know that. That part of me belongs to you as comprehensively as everything else. But it’s not the first thing between us, is it? There’s more. We were solid. Perhaps we … didn’t look at one another, or hear one another, as carefully as we should have done. But we were happy, weren’t we?’ As he looked at her she heard the directness of his appeal. It can’t be different now. It can’t disappear, after so long.
And when she didn’t answer he persisted aloud, ‘Doesn’t it mean anything to you?’
Annie held out her hand and then, realizing the inadequacy of it, she let it fall again. ‘Of course it does. Martin, I’m still me. The years haven’t gone anywhere.’
But yet they were looking at each other across a divide. Here, now, so bitterly obvious amidst the shabby warmth of home. Annie knew that she couldn’t explain to him how the violence of what had happened had changed every cosy perspective, and how the same change of perspectives had jolted her into awareness, and then into love with another man.
It’s too late now, she thought.
‘What are you going to do?’ Martin asked her again.
She lifted her head. ‘I don’t know how to be without him.’ It was a simple offering of the truth, but she saw how the words cut into him. She wanted to close her eyes so that she need not look at what she saw in his face.
Martin might have shouted at her, let any of the ugly words that jumbled in his mouth come spilling out, or jumped up and snatched at her in a useless attempt to imprison her.
But with an effort of will he held himself still. When he could trust himself again he said very slowly, as if he had painstakingly learned the words in a strange language, ‘I don’t want to let you go. You’re my wife. Their mother.’
Love. Dues.
‘I don’t know what to say.’ He looked down at his fists, clenching and unclenching them, the knuckles white and then red. ‘Just that I’m here, Annie. If you … when … if you do decide. I want you to think, that’s all. Think what it means. Think quickly.’
All he could focus on now was getting away, out of this room, to hunch over the gaping hole that her words had left. I don’t know how to be without him. He stood up awkwardly, almost falling. And then he went out, closing the door behind him.
Annie heard him going upstairs, and then his footsteps overhead, the door of the spare room closing against her. She sat staring ahead of her, breathless with the pain that she had caused to both of them. Then she drew up her knees and, with her head resting against them, she tried to do what he had asked her.
The two weeks were like a time out of somebody else’s life. In the mornings when Annie woke up she had forgotten for a second or two and she felt warm and easy. But then the recollection came back and she had to climb up and out into the cold again, and live through a day that wasn’t her own any more, until it was time to sleep again.
To live without it made her more vividly aware that friendship was truly what she had shared with Martin. Even Benjamin recognized it when it was no longer there. He came early one morning and stood in the bedroom door in his blue pyjamas, seeing Annie alone in the wide bed.
‘Aren’t you friends with Daddy any more?’ he asked, and Annie couldn’t answer him. She held out her arms instead, and even though he came she felt him holding himself a little away from her, as if he didn’t know where to commit his loyalty.
That hurt her more than anything else had done.
And she carried her sadness with her to Steve, although she tried hard not to.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I told you at the beginning. Our happiness makes unhappiness everywhere else.’
Steve was gentle and firm. He sat beside her on his deep black sofa and put his arms around her. He made her talk and he listened and he held her until her frozen shell of anxiety and guilt began to melt. Then he took her into his bedroom and made her lie down beside him. He knew when to coax and when to be insistent, and he knew when to let Annie herself take the initiative. Her need for him surprised her. She sat astride him and the shock of pleasure as he drove upwards made her arch her body and then lean forwards, enclosing him more tightly, until their mouths met and they rolled over, locked together, driving one another further on, and then further still.
‘You’re very sexy, my Annie,’ he told her.
‘I know,’ she said, unblushingly. ‘You’ve shown me that.’
In the face of everything, still, they were happy in their short hours together. When they had finished making love they would get up and go out together. Steve took her to odd, offbeat places. They ate lunch at a Jewish restaurant in the East End, they went to a workshop production of a short, savagely funny, feminist play, and to an organ recital at a Wren church in the City. From the way that strangers stared at her in these places Annie knew that she looked unlike the other women. She was glowing and crackling and alive in a way that she had never expected that she would be again. She took the hours of happiness and held tenaciously on to them, because without them there was no justification for the coldness and blackness that spread through all the other hours like a disease.
Although they were quite different from the penniless days that she had shared long ago with Matthew, her short outings with Steve often reminded her of them. She felt the same exhilaration, and the recklessness was all the more pronounced because of the weight of reason and responsibility that settled around her on the way home again.
And at other times, when she looked at Steve sitting across from her in a restaurant, or standing in the aisle of the Wren church reading the inscription on a marble slab, she could hardly believe that this handsome, faintly ruthless-looking man was anything to do with her at all. She would draw in her breath then, shivering, but Steve with his ability to read her thoughts would reach for her hand, and say something that drew her close to him again, and then the moment would be past. When it was time for Benjy to come home, or at the hour she had agreed with Audrey or whichever of his friends’ mothers had invited him to play, Annie left Steve and went back to collect him.
The glow of happiness faded at once and the dull, enduring pain of being pulled in half took hold of her all over again.
In between the terrible shuttling to and fro, whenever she could, Annie went to see her mother. She was still at home in the old house, but she had grown so weak that she could hardly move from her bed to the wing chair in the corner of the living room next to the fire. Jim and Annie and a home help, with 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