I wish I was your age again.
For what? Steve thought.
He hadn’t cried since he was a little boy, but there were tears in his eyes now. He wanted to get up and walk out of the room, defending himself with solitude as he had always done. But his broken leg and the pain under the blanket cage pinned him down. He felt his own weakness, and the way it exposed him to the need for other people to be tactful. Steve put his champagne glass down on the locker and turned his wet face into the pillows.
The others saw, and looked away again. Steve knew that they were raising the pitch of champagne jollity amongst themselves to shield him, and he felt the strangeness of what was happening more sharply even than the pain.
He lay and waited for the tears to stop forcing themselves out of his eyes, and thought about Annie. He knew Annie now better than he knew anyone else in the world, and he was afraid that she would die.
You mustn’t die, he whispered, as though they were buried again and she could hear him in the dark. You won’t die, will you?
The coldness of his fear for her dried up the weak tears.
Deliberately he turned his head back to face the other beds and reached out for his beaker of champagne.
Later, the hospital medical students came to tour the wards with their portable Christmas pantomime. They put on an extra lively show for the bomb victims. Steve lay and watched the clowning with a smile stretched over his face.
It was later still, when the overhead lights had been dimmed and he could hear the nurses rustling and giggling at the end of the ward, when Steve opened his eyes again and saw a man standing beside his bed.
He had a square, pleasant face with lines of tiredness pulling at his eyes and cheeks. He was tall and stooped a little, and he was looking down from his height at Steve lying in bed, as if he wasn’t sure whether to tiptoe away again.
‘It’s all right,’ Steve said distinctly. ‘I wasn’t asleep.’
The man’s hand rubbed over his face.
‘The sister said I could come in and see you for a minute.’
Steve reached up and clicked on the lamp over his bed. The circle of light enveloped them within the curtained space.
‘I’m Annie’s husband,’ the man said.
She’s dead. You’ve come to tell me that she’s dead.
Steve tried to haul himself upright against his pillows so that he could meet squarely what Martin had come to say.
‘How is she?’ he asked flatly. And then he saw that the lines in her husband’s face were drawn by exhausted relief, and not by defeat at all.
‘She’s going to be all right,’ Martin said. ‘They told me this evening.’
Steve closed his eyes for a minute. He saw Annie as she had been, lying beside him when they shone the rescue lights down on to her face. Then, superimposed on it there was another, suddenly vivid image of her as she must have been before the bombing. She was laughing, with colour in her cheeks and her hair flying around her face. Steve opened his eyes abruptly.
‘Thank God,’ he said.
In his own relief he saw Martin’s exhaustion more clearly. He pointed to the chair beside his bed and Martin flopped down into it.
‘If you look in the locker,’ Steve said softly, ‘you’ll find a bottle of Scotch.’
He took it from Martin and poured a measure into his water glass. Martin wrapped his fingers round the glass and then drank half the whisky at a gulp.
‘Thank you,’ he said.
Steve waited until Annie’s husband looked up again, and then he asked gently, ‘What did they say? The doctors?’
Martin shrugged his shoulders inside his coat, as if he couldn’t believe now that she was indeed going to live in the face of the terrifying list of things that had threatened her.
‘She had pneumonia, but they’re beating that with antibiotics. She’s been on a ventilator machine that has been breathing for her, through a hole cut in her windpipe, but they say now that they’ll be able to take her off that in a couple of days. And her kidneys are starting to work again. They showed me. It’s all shown on the screen and marked on the charts at the end of her bed. Her blood wouldn’t clot, you know. She had bled so much that it couldn’t do what it was supposed to do any more. They filled her up with plasma, and all kinds of other things, and now it’s functioning for itself again. The wound from her operation will start to heal now. She’ll get better quite quickly from now on, they think.’ Martin’s hands rested on the sheet, with the glass held loosely in them. ‘It was so terrible to see her, in there with the monitors and machines all around her as if she belonged to them and not to me. I couldn’t even touch her hand, because it bruised her poor skin.’
Martin’s head was bent, and Steve waited again. The image of Annie was too clear and pitiful. But then Martin looked up, and Steve saw that he was smiling. He shrugged his shoulders once more.
‘But now she’s going to get better. She was awake, tonight. She can’t talk, because of the ventilator. But she smiled at me.’
Steve had to look away to conceal the stroke of jealousy.
He made himself think, Her husband, and then to remember that Martin had waited all through the day and the night of the bombing, and all through the days ever since. But even his understanding of that, and his sympathy, didn’t lessen the shock of his jealousy.
Unseeing, Martin drank the rest of his whisky. The relief was so profound that he wanted to share it. He could have stood up and announced it to the curtained ward, and to the nurses squeezed hilariously into the sister’s office at the far end. He felt a wide, stupid smile breaking through the stiffness of his face, and the whisky burned cheerfully in his head and stomach.
‘She must have wanted to live, you know,’ he murmured. ‘She must want it so much.’
Steve remembered. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘She did. She was very courageous, down there.’
Martin’s hand moved a little, as if he had been going to hold it out to Steve and then found that he couldn’t.
‘I wanted to tell you that she’s getting better, of course.’ The smile, again. ‘And I wanted to … thank you. For helping her.’
Through the glow of relief that had bathed the hospital corridors as he made his way down to the stranger’s bedside, Martin found himself watching Steve. He saw the bomb site again too, and himself peering down into the tiny space where the two of them had been lying together all the fearful hours.
It was smaller than a bed. It was like a grave, he thought, and he remembered a medieval tombstone that Annie and he had seen in a cathedral somewhere. They had been on holiday. Long ago, before the boys were born. The stone lord and his lady lay shoulder to shoulder on their stone slab, with a stone replica of their favourite lapdog asleep at their feet. Annie and Martin had deciphered the Latin lettering on the slab together. In death they were not separated.
Annie had sighed and said it was very romantic, but Martin had been struck by the intimacy of the narrow place beneath the slab for them to lie in.
They had both shivered a little and then laughed, and had gone on down the side aisle, hand in hand, to look at the stained glass windows.
The image of the same terrible intimacy came back to Martin now.
‘I’m so glad she’s getting better,’ Steve said.
The lame words didn’t begin to express the knot of his real feelings, and that was good. ‘I’ve