Strangers

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Martin took out his wallet. In a pocket at the back there was a snapshot of Annie playing in the garden with the boys. She was laughing, and Benjy was standing between her knees, twisting the hem of her skirt. He pushed the photograph across the desk to the sergeant and then demanded, ‘Do you know anything? Can’t you tell me anything at all?’

The policewoman turned her pen over and over in her fingers while her colleague spoke.

‘As you must know, everything is being done that can be done to explore the shop for possible survivors, and the operation will continue until it is quite certain that no one is left inside. One survivor has been located in the last hour, using thermal imaging equipment, and they should reach him very soon.’

The wild, hopeful flicker was extinguished almost as soon as it had shone out.

‘Him?’

‘Yes. It’s a man, apparently not badly hurt.’

So it was possible, then, for someone to survive under that landslide of rubble. The hope it gave him helped Martin to confront the next question.

‘And the two … bodies that have already been recovered?’

‘Both have been positively identified. They were store employees.’

He wanted to put his hands up to cover his face, letting it sag with relief, but he sat still, ashamed to feel so grateful for the news of someone else’s death.

‘I would go home, sir, and wait there. We’ll contact you immediately if there is any news of your wife.’

The interview was over. Martin got up reluctantly and then stood holding on to the chair back.

‘Or you could wait here,’ the WPC said. It was the first time she had spoken and she glanced nervously at her companion. He nodded, and looked past Martin at the door.

‘Thank you,’ Martin said. He had never intended to go home while Annie might need him here.

‘When your wife does come home, sir,’ the sergeant called after him, ‘would you be kind enough to let us know at once?’

Martin nodded and went out into the stale, chilly air of the corridor again. Instead of sitting down he found his way by the scent of fried food down the stairs to the canteen in the basement. There was a public telephone under a blue plastic hood beside the swing doors. He dialled the familiar number and counted the rings. One … two … Audrey answered before the second one was complete. She sounded breathless, as if she had run to do it.

‘It’s Martin. Have you heard from her?’

In the background he could hear Tom’s voice calling out, ‘Is it Mummy?’ Martin closed his eyes and hunched his shoulders, as if he were waiting for someone to hit him.

‘No,’ Audrey said.

Martin looked at his watch. It was ten to one. Wouldn’t Annie have telephoned, by now, to make sure that everything was all right? He knew there was no particular reason why she should, but the knowledge that she hadn’t reinforced his conviction. She was in the store. Every minute that passed made it more certain.

‘I’m at the police station,’ he said. ‘They can’t tell me much. None of the … ones they have found is Annie. They don’t know any more than that. I’m going to stay here and wait.’

‘Yes,’ Audrey answered, ‘you’d best stay there. We’ll be all right here …’ The dialling tone cut her short. Martin had already hung up and gone. He ran up the stairs again, and walked out of the police station into the street. In front of the store the yellow latticework of a crane stood idle. He walked towards it, into the wind, shivering. He passed the enclave of television cameras and waiting pressmen and thought, with unreasoning savagery, that they were like vultures hovering before the kill. He walked on around the outer edge of the barriers until he came to the point where the policeman had blocked his way. He looked up, over the heads of the crowd. It seemed impossible that the crumpled front of the store could remain standing. As he watched it seemed to sway, curling inwards with a shower of falling fragments that drew clouds of whitish dust down with them.

Martin shivered, and he realized that the wind was strengthening. It swept across the street, lifting a torn paper wrapper into the air before pasting it to the wet roadway again. Even above the noise of the wind, Martin thought he could hear the creak of broken girders as the concrete weight shifted and then settled itself for another moment or two, before the next gust came.

A police van inched along the inside of the cordon. Behind it the police were moving the watchers back, all the way back up the road. More steel barriers were lifted out of the van and pushed into place. Looking backwards, as he was ushered out of range with everyone else, Martin saw a group of men in protective helmets moving under the threatening frontage. The crane swung slowly round. He understood that they were going to try to push the wall outwards so that it collapsed into the street.

They would have to do it quickly, before it fell of its own accord the other way.

Three (#udb16aaf8-1781-5246-a3e5-2633a34a74e3)

Annie was thinking about the wedding picture. Not her own and Martin’s this time. Theirs was as bright as a paintbox with the splashed colours of the girls’ dresses and the vivid blue sky behind the church. She was thinking about her parents’, in a big, old-fashioned leather frame, standing on a table to the left of the fireplace in their sitting room. Theirs was black and white with a faint brownish cast that was deepening with age. It was wartime, and her mother was wearing a two-piece costume with square shoulders and a little hat perched on one side of her head. Her hair was in a roll to frame her face. Her father was beaming in his army uniform. His face had hardly changed, except for thinning hair and lines dug beside his mouth and around his eyes. Her mother was barely recognizable. She had had full cheeks then, and her smile was lavishly painted with dark, shiny lipstick.

Annie was very cold.

The drifting sensation was still with her, but it wasn’t like being in a boat on a calm lake any more. She felt that she was floating towards the big, blank mouth of a tunnel. She didn’t want the tunnel to swallow her and so she gripped Steve’s hand as if he were reaching out from the bank to pull her out of the rushing water.

‘It’s so cold,’ she said.

Steve was straining to hear. He had thought for a moment that he caught the clink of metal overhead, a harsh scraping, and the sound of voices not his own or Annie’s.

If they were really coming … If it was soon, they would be all right. Time had lost its meaning now, and Steve cursed the watch irretrievably lost somewhere underneath him. He could hold on himself, but he didn’t know about Annie. He couldn’t hear the noises any more.

‘It won’t be much longer,’ he promised her. ‘Talk to me, if you can.’ He wanted to hear her voice, but he wanted to listen for the other sounds too. He felt himself shaking with the effort of it, his eyes wide open and staring as if he could hear with them in the dark.

‘I was thinking about my father and mother,’ Annie whispered. ‘I didn’t suffer anything when I was a kid, Steve. Not like you. It was all smooth. They made it smooth for me. They always believed in routine, and their lives run like clockwork now. I wonder …’ she breathed in painfully, ‘how happy they’ve been.’

The water stopped rushing forward and seemed to eddy in a wide circle, swinging her round with it, so that all her perspectives changed. She had been thinking about her mother and father as a way of keeping a hold on herself, building them into the bridge of words that linked her to Steve. But now she caught a reflected image of marriages, seeing how hers mirrored theirs, and her parents’ back to her grandparents’, the same coupled conspiracies perpetuating themselves.

What had her mother missed, Annie wondered, that she would never recapture? Not now, when there was nothing to do but wait for the disease to get the better of her. Like me down here, she thought, and the mirror images reflected one another down a long, cold passageway.

She saw her mother’s house, and remembered her totems. Polished parquet floors, and guest towels put neatly beside the basin in the downstairs cloakroom when visitors came. Her store cupboard was always well filled, and there were best tablecloths carefully folded in the drawer underneath the everyday ones. Annie had a faint recollection that there were even certain teatowels kept for best, but the caked blood at the corner of her mouth dried the smile before it began.

The thirties house on the corner of a quiet, sunny street was too big for her parents now, but it still shone from daily polishing and it still smelt of formally-arranged flowers, even though most of the rooms were unused.

Seeing it, Annie felt a sudden, infinite sadness. All her mother’s adult life had been devoted to servicing a house, and when she died her husband would sell up, new people would move in and knock down walls and laugh at the outmoded décor, and there would be nothing left of her. How hollow it was, Annie thought, that her house should be her memorial. It had contained her like a shell and inside it she had waited for her husband’s comings and goings. From the shelter of it she had watched her children until they grew too big and went away.

Annie realized that she had no idea about the marriage that had kept it polished. The house had been its emblem, tidy and clean, and she had assumed that the one stood for the other. Like their house, her parents’ marriage had seemed decent, and respectable. What else?

The sense of how little she knew shocked her.

Martin and me … The same, or different?

The house was no totem, but she loved the things that they had done in it together, and its warmth lapped around the four of them. Yet perhaps she was making the ways of it stand in the place of something else, something once fresh that had faded with middle age. Was it the lost sense of that that had made her think of Matthew?

Annie stirred, turning her face in the sloping space under the door. The smoothness of it felt as cold as a sheet of ice. The reflections had gone and she couldn’t recapture the chilling insight. Everything was confused – her childhood home with the house she shared with Martin, rooms superimposed and faces blurring together. She only knew that she had been happy with Martin. A weak longing for him washed over her like a wave.

Where was he? Wouldn’t he know what had happened, because he knew her well enough to read her thoughts, and so come for her?

She closed her eyes and lay thinking about him. He felt very close, as if his body was part of hers and sharing the same pain. It was his hand holding hers, not Matthew’s, and not the stranger’s.

Man and wife, Annie thought, knitted together by time and habit. The full span of their years seemed to present itself for her recollection, measurable. Annie felt a new throb of terror with the speculation: Is that because it’s finished? The weight above her pressed malevolently downwards. Completed. No, not completed but severed. The image of the plait, blunt ends fraying, came back to her. Yet, she thought sadly, yesterday she had had no sense that she and Martin were constructing anything together, not any more. They had made their marriage and were sure of it. They were busy with the small tasks of maintenance now, not preoccupied by the grand design. It was time that was not fulfilled.

It was to be cheated of the years of calm living in the structure they had created that was bitter, Annie understood. She had taken the promise of years for granted. There would be the boys growing up, Martin and herself moving more slowly together, in harmony. Or there would be nothing. Only death, and the people she loved left behind without her.

She wondered if there would be the same bitterness if she had simply fallen ill like her mother, and been gently told that she had only a little longer. She would have had time, then, to make her goodbyes. To neaten those terrible ends, at the very least. But it would be just the same, she thought. She would feel the same loss and the same fear. Annie had a sudden unbearable longing for life, for all the promises she had never made, let alone never kept, all the conversations unshared, all the bridges of human contact that she had never crossed and never would. The vastness of what she was struggling to confront was ready to crush her. I’m going to die, Annie thought.

The blackness was utterly unmoving but she felt it poised, greedily ready to consume her and to push the tiny coloured pictures out of her head.

I’m sorry. The words swelled, dancing above her, dinning in her ears. Surely they were loud enough? I’m sorry. She wanted Martin to hear them, somehow. She had failed him, and their children, and she knew how much they needed her. ‘I’m afraid,’ Annie said again. ‘I’m afraid to die.’

Steve lay rigid, thinking, I don’t know what to say. He had been absorbed in trying to imagine it as one more thing to get the better of. He felt it facing him, as tense as an animal ready to spring, but it was he who was cornered. I don’t know what to say to her. I’ve always known what to say. I’ve been so bloody sharp. I’ve cut myself. He heard Nan warning him, back in the kitchen three floors up behind Bow High Street. And now. Now there was this.

‘I’m afraid too,’ Steve whispered.

The confession of their fear drew them close, and the spectre of it moved back and let them breathe a little. Steve and Annie couldn’t huddle together and keep it at bay but they felt one another in their fingertips. Their hands became themselves.

‘Thank God you’re here,’ Annie said. And then, after a minute, ‘Steve? If it comes, will you be here with me?’

If death comes, that’s what she means, Steve thought. Will I be with her through it?

‘Yes,’ he promised her. ‘I’ll be here.’

We’ll wait, together.

Annie took the reassurance, and Steve’s admission of his own fear, and built them into her barricades. The terror receded a little further. She used the respite to look at the pictures that whirled in her head like confetti, examining each one and setting it in its place. It became very important to make a logical sequence of them. Annie frowned, gathering the ragged edges of concentration. So many little pieces of confetti.

There was Martin, on the day that they met. That’s right, that one would come first. She looked at the fragment carefully. He was sitting at the next table, in the coffee bar in Old Compton Street favoured by students from St Martin’s. Annie was in her foundation year, and Martin was two years ahead of her. She had seen him before, in the corridors and once across the room at a party, without noticing him in particular. He had long hair and a leather jacket, artfully ripped, like everyone else’s. Today he was drawing on an artists’ pad, his head bent in concentration. She remembered sitting in the warm, steamy atmosphere listening to the hiss of the coffee machines behind the high counter. The boy at the next table had finished his drawing and looked up, smiling at her.

‘Another coffee?’ he asked.

He brought two cups over to her table, and she tilted her head to look at the drawing under his arm. Obligingly he held it out and she saw an intricately shaded pencil drawing of the coffee bar with the chrome-banded sweep of the counter, the polished levers of the Gaggia machine and the owner’s brilliantined head bent behind it. At her table, close to the counter, he had drawn in her friends but Annie’s chair was empty.

‘Why haven’t you drawn me?’ she demanded and he answered, ‘Well, that would have been rather obvious of me, wouldn’t it?’

He’s nice, Annie thought.

She felt the intriguing mixture of excitement and anticipation that she recalled years afterwards as the dominant flavour of those days. Everything that happened was an adventure, every corner turned presented an enticing new vista.

‘What’s your name?’ the boy asked her. ‘I’ve seen you at the college, haven’t I?’

‘Anne. Annie,’ she corrected herself. Since leaving school she had discarded sixth-form gawky Anne in favour of Annie, free-wheeling art student with her Sassoon bob and cut-out Courrèges boots.

‘I’m Martin.’

And so they had met, and the strands had been picked out and pulled together in the first tentative knot. Martin had taken a crumpled handbill from his pocket. It was the term’s programme from the college film society.

‘Look. Zéro de Conduite. Have you seen it?’ And then when Annie shook her head, ‘You really should. Would you like to come with me?’

For all their protestations of freedom they had still been very conventional, all that time ago. He had invited her to see a film and she had accepted, and he had taken her for supper afterwards at the Sorrento.

But there was no fragment to illustrate what had happened next. She simply couldn’t remember. All she could see was herself, trudging through the rain in the streets beyond Battersea Park, with Martin’s address burning in her pocket. He must have taken her out once or twice and then moved on to someone else. Was that it?

Perhaps. And perhaps she had been smitten by the anguish that was as much part of those days as the enchantment. She had determined that she wouldn’t let him go, and had boldly gone to the registry to find his address. But she could see her nineteen-year-old self so clearly, in her white plastic mac dotted with shilling-sized black spots, splashing through the puddles wearing her tragic sadness like a black cloak. Just as Jeanne Moreau did, or Catherine Deneuve, or whichever French actress was providing her model for that week. She was going to confront him, beg him to listen to her because she was lost without him. There was a bottle of wine in her carrier bag, and when the time came they were going to drink it together, all barriers down at last.

There, that little piece fitted there.

She had reached his door and rung the bell, her face already composed in its beautiful, sad, brave lines. Martin opened the door, brandishing a kitchen ladle. He beamed at her, and her heart lifted like a kite.

‘Oh, Annie, it’s you. Great. Just the person we need. Come in here.’

She followed him into the kitchen and stared around. It wasn’t what she had planned, not at all.

The room was packed with people, mostly ravenous-looking boys. In the middle of the table, amidst a litter of potato peelings and bottles of beer and cider, there was a slab of roast pork, half carved, with blood still oozing from a round pinky-brown patch in the centre.

‘We were going to have a house feast,’ Martin explained. ‘But the meat looks wrong. What d’you think?’

‘I think it needs about four more hours in the oven,’ Annie retorted. It was hard to maintain her Jeanne Moreau expression confronted with a piece of raw pork and a dozen hungry faces.

Martin shrugged cheerfully. ‘Oh well. Let’s stick it back in the oven and go to the pub.’

They went to the pub, and came back again much later. At some stage they ate the pork, or what was left of it. Somebody else drank Annie’s wine, and later still threw it up again. Annie didn’t care about anything except that she was with Martin. He took her upstairs to his room and put his arms round her, and they looked into each other’s eyes as if at a miracle.

‘Why did you come down here, this evening?’ he asked her and she answered, with daring simplicity, ‘Because I can’t live without you.’

‘You don’t have to,’ Martin said.

It was the truth.

After that, for a long time, all the pieces of confetti that she put into the proper sequence belonged to them both. Slowly, by the same stages that many of their friends were passing through at the same time, Martin and Annie became a couple. They explored each other, awkwardly at first, on the mattress in Martin’s room, then with daring, and then with skill that turned quite quickly into tenderness. In the same way, but even more slowly, their life in the world found its pattern, echoing the private one. The discovery of one another’s likes and pleasures was consolidated by sharing them. They launched themselves into the endless, fascinated talks that convinced them they were identical spirits. They went everywhere and did everything together, exchanging the romantic isolation of adolescence for the luxury of mutual dependence. They became, to all their friends, Martin-and-Annie.

For a while in Martin’s last year they lived together, sharing a chaotically disorganized house with three other students. There were lots of little, disjointed pictures of that time, of faces around the kitchen table and skinny legs sprawling in broken-backed armchairs. Where had all those people gone? Perhaps, Annie thought sadly, they had become Martin. Become him because all the memories of that time were crystallized in him, part of the cement that held them together. In those days, at the age of twenty, Annie had proudly acted out the role of housewife. Here was the image of herself heading for the local launderette with two bulging blue plastic carrier bags. She had cooked meals too, and folded Martin’s shirts for him.

Did I ever, she wondered, see my mother in myself? Was I never afraid that it would be the same for me, too?

No, not that. We thought we were different, so busy making new rules. We thought we had turned the world upside down because Martin used to clank about the house with a mop-up bucket. Because he used to take his turn at cooking dinners that were never ready until midnight, and left every saucepan in the house dirty.

They had been happy … There was a lot of laughter printed on those confetti fragments. Lying numbly in her tiny space with Steve’s hand her only warmth, Annie wished that she could breathe life into them again.

At the end of that time Martin had gone to work in Milan. Here, Annie saw herself with him at the airport, her face crushed against the leather shoulder of his coat as he hugged her. For two years they had separated, because they had grown out of play-acting married life.

Annie remembered the flat that she had taken. It was close to here, above the creaking weight that pinned her like a butterfly to a board. She followed the turns of the streets that would take her there, and up the stairs into her rooms. She saw the colour of the walls – had she really painted them aubergine? – and the fringed Biba lampshades. The flicker under the skin of her face might have been a smile.

At the end of two years Martin had come home from Italy. They had found each other’s company all over again, as comfortably fitting as a winter coat left on a peg all through the summer, and then gratefully put on with the coming of cold weather. Within a year they were engaged. Their parents met and approved, exchanging drinks in their similar houses, pleased that their children had found the way at last. And a year after that, with Matthew’s still face watching from inside her head, Annie was married.