They were absorbed in their play. Benjy came hurtling down the path, his face a concentrated frown. Tom hung out of the tree, his legs dangling as he pretended to fall, just to frighten her. She waved to them, but they didn’t wave back. Watching, she knew that she should have felt the same calm sweetness as when she had recaptured her own childhood. But it was cold in this garden. The trees were bare of leaves and it had been trying to snow. There was a white powdering of it on top of the walls, and the wind was like a knifeblade. The boys were on their own, out there.
Annie knew why she felt so cold and sad. She was afraid of leaving them. She felt her weakness, and the sure sense that she was failing them. Her love for them took in every minute of their lives, interwoven with her own for eight years, unshakable. It couldn’t end, could it, cut off in the darkness?
Annie left the garden window and walked through the house, touching the memories accumulated in the rooms. In the playroom they crouched beside the model train layout, their heads almost touching. In her bedroom Annie saw the wicker crib that he had put Tom into when she brought him home as a baby. He lay under the white covers, a tiny, warm bundle. Their faces turned up to her from the kitchen table, Benjy’s mouth rimmed with jam. The sounds of their voices drifted up the stairs, and she heard running footsteps overhead.
There was nothing of herself left in the house. She wanted to be there, but something terrible had happened to stop her going back. She felt her sons’ love, and their need, and the brutally snapped edges of the circle that had held them together. The dream she had had of her own childhood had contained another circle, unbroken. She had wanted so much to duplicate that circle and to set others moving outwards, ripples on a pool.
The loss hurt unbearably. Annie moaned, and at once the arm holding her tightened.
‘Tom,’ she said, ‘Benjy.’
‘Annie,’ the man’s voice said, very gently, like a lover’s in the most secret darkness. ‘Hold on. They’re coming for us. I can hear them.’
Annie didn’t know what he meant. She had been in the garden, watching her children play.
Steve had been listening. The ring of spades and drills was louder now, and he felt himself shrink from the sharp metal biting over his head. But he was frightened by how quickly Annie seemed to be slipping away from him.
‘Go on thinking about your children,’ he said. ‘You’ll be with them soon. I wish I had children. I’ve never felt that before, but I do now.’ Now it’s too late.
The scraping overhead was much closer, but he felt himself at a distance from it, further with every minute. Another irony. Steve found himself smiling, but couldn’t remember why. He put his hand out to touch Annie’s cheek, strengthening their contact.
‘If I had children,’ he rambled, ‘I’d make it different. Not like for me. It would be so different. I’d make sure of that. Perhaps that was why I didn’t want any with Cass. I never thought of that.’
Annie turned her head a little, perhaps to hear better, perhaps reaching for the touch of his fingers again. He cupped her cheek in his hand.
‘Shall I tell you? I’ve told you everything else. There isn’t much, anyway.’
He began to talk and Annie listened, dimly confusing the little boy he was describing with her own sons, so that Steve and Tom and Benjy ran together down the paths ahead of her and their voices were carried back to her on the wind.
He had been to that flat before, of course. He knew it, on the day that his mother took him there with his suitcase, almost as well as his own home. Three floors, up the hollowed stone steps that had mysterious twinkly fragments embedded in them. Into the living room, where his Nan was waiting for them. Beyond was the kitchen, with the cracked lino floor. There was a grey enamel stove on legs in there, with a little ruff of grease around each of its feet, and the sight of the hairs caught in the grease made him feel sick in the back of his throat.
‘Here we are then, Mum,’ his mother had said, in the too-cheerful voice that always told him she was about to do something he wouldn’t like.
His Nan had simply jerked her chin and muttered, ‘I can see that.’
He had stayed with Nan before. He didn’t like sleeping in the little room beyond the kitchen because there was no window in it, and it was dark in the mornings when he woke up even when the sun was shining down on the High Street.
His mother had taken his case through into the room. He had seen her putting his things into it; too many, surely, for just one or two nights?
Nan had put the kettle on and made a pot of tea and his mother had drunk hers standing up by the kitchen window, smoking and looking out of the window. She wouldn’t look at him, and that made him afraid.
Then, when she had finished her tea she had come across the room to him and hugged him. She said, ‘Steve, are you listening to me? I’ve got to go away for a bit. Will you stay here and be a good boy for your Nan, and then I’ll come soon and take you home again?’
He had nodded, miserably, knowing that it was pointless to argue. And so his mother had gone and left him with his Nan, and he had gone into his bedroom and taken his toy cars out of his suitcase. He made a line of them on the kitchen lino, taking care not to look at the grease around the feet of the stove.
His mother had come back from time to time, less and less frequently. At first she had brought money, and Nan liked that.
‘Perhaps next week,’ she always said, when Steve asked her when she was going to take him back home. Then she began coming without money, and that made Nan angry.
In the end she didn’t come at all.
In the dark Steve lay holding Annie and trying to remember what it had been like, then.
It was hard, because it had been so featureless. There had been a long, long time when everything stayed exactly the same except that he grew bigger. He would recall the places clearly enough. Outside the flat there was the high, grey-brick school surrounded by a fenced yard. After school he had played between the lines of prefabs at the end of the street, and on the bombsites where the willowherb sprouted cheerfully. It had been the same for him, more or less, as for his friends. And if he had felt anything much, he had forgotten it.
Once, when Nan was angry with him for some reason, he had shouted at her, ‘I’m going away from here. I’m going to find my Dad, and tell him.’
All Nan had said was, ‘That’ll take a better detective than you are, my lad.’
At about the same time, he had learned that his mother had gone to live in Canada, with a friend.
Perhaps a year later, after months of silence, she had sent Nan some money in an envelope. There had been a letter with it, and in the letter his mother had said that part of the money was for a Christmas treat for Steve. Nan was to take him up to the West End, to Selfridges – she had stressed that, Selfridges, underlined – to see Father Christmas.
‘I was eight, or nine perhaps. Too old for Father Christmas. My mother had forgotten I was growing up. She must have thought I was still six. But we went, anyway. All the way, on the bus. I remember everything about it.’
He hadn’t been very interested in Father Christmas. An old boy with cotton wool stuck all over his chin. But the rest of it had been like a vision of Paradise. They had ridden on the escalators past mirrored pillars that reflected the stately lines of shoppers gliding upwards. He could look down at the floors below him, acres of things spread out for him to admire, lit and scented and brilliantly coloured. No one else, even Nan, had seemed to be surprised by it.
‘It’s all right for some,’ was all Nan had said.
But he could have stayed there all day, just wandering about, looking at things. And at the people, all brushed and glossy and furred. When Nan dragged him away at last they had walked along Oxford Street, looking into every glittering window. They had tea in Lyons’,