‘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