‘You were a funny, good little girl, always,’ Tibby said at last. ‘Isn’t memory a strange thing? I can remember you at eight, nearly thirty years ago, better than I can remember Thomas from last week. And I can’t remember at all whether I paid the milkman last Saturday, or the name of the girl in the book I’ve just read.’
‘I know,’ Annie smiled, seeing the truth in the truism. ‘Tibby, I wish we could talk more.’ She had meant like this, while we still can, but her mother made a little startled gesture and peered at her watch.
‘Oh, my dear, I said I would meet Jim downstairs a quarter of an hour ago. He didn’t think the sister would let us both in. You know what he’ll be like.’
Impatient, Annie knew.
‘I’ll walk down with you.’
‘Can you manage that?’
‘Of course I can.’ I’m stronger, Annie thought sadly. Much stronger than you are.
They stood up, Annie much taller than her mother. Tibby seemed to be shrinking into herself. With her hands on Annie’s arms she said, suddenly, ‘I can manage everything else. Other people do, after all, with reasonable dignity. But I don’t think I could have borne it if you had died. Not now, Annie, after all.’
Her face creased, vulnerable, with the beginning of tears.
Your mother has seen you grow up. Seen her grandchildren.
‘Tibby.’ Annie wrapped her arms around her. She rested her cheek against her mother’s head. ‘I didn’t die,’ she whispered. ‘I didn’t want to die.’
For a long moment, they held on to each other.
Then Tibby sniffed hard.
‘I came to cheer you up,’ she said, her voice wobbly.
Annie let her go, briskly gathering up her mother’s coat and bag. ‘That’s Barbara’s chosen role. I should leave it to her.’ She felt that her mother’s bright, tight smile had transferred itself to her own face, but Tibby responded hearteningly. Their faint disparagement of Martin’s mother had always been a little, contained joke between the two of them.
‘Poor Barbara …’ Tibby protested.
‘… She does mean well,’ Annie completed automatically. ‘Come on. Let’s start shuffling downstairs, or Pop will stamp off without you.’
Arm in arm, they set off for the ward doors.
Annie saw Tibby safely into her father’s care. He was waiting amongst the WRVS drivers in the main hall, looking at his watch every few seconds. He kissed Annie and then he and Tibby began to fuss each other about the time, adopting with clockwork precision the roles that they had fallen into decades ago. Tibby was always very slightly late, and Jim chivvied and agitated to bring her up to schedule. Annie felt the irritation that she always felt, and she recognized that that was her own role. She reassured her father that they had plenty of time, suspecting that they had nothing pressing to do for the rest of the day, and equally aware that her father would insist on a strict timetable for a week in bed.
Perhaps, she thought, Tibby’s rest was a rest from her husband’s precision. They said goodbye, and from a curve in the stairs Annie watched them wander away together. They would still be arguing about the time. She could see Tibby’s head pecking to and fro as she defended herself. The patterns of a lifetime, set long ago. She found herself wondering again whether her parents had really been happy at all, caught up in their own pattern.
And Martin and me? How different now? How different in twenty years?
Annie walked slowly because her legs were heavy. It took her a long time to reach her bed in the ward again.
It was two days later when they told her that she could go home on Friday. That was three days away.
‘You’ll have to come back to out-patients for tests. We don’t want you to escape that easily,’ her surgeon told her jovially. ‘We want to keep a close eye on those kidneys of yours, and there will be blood tests and so forth. But I think that by the weekend you will be well enough to be at home with your family.’
‘Thank you,’ Annie said.
She went to telephone Martin immediately.
‘That’s wonderful news,’ Martin said.
‘It is, isn’t it?’
In her own ears, her voice sounded thin.
They talked for a few minutes more. Martin was making euphoric promises and plans. ‘We’ll all take care of you. All you have to do is rest. Audrey and Barbara will manage the boys between them, and I’m going to take some time off. Annie?’
‘I’m here.’
‘Then when you’re stronger we can have a break together, just the two of us. Barbara says she’ll have the boys to stay. We could go to Paris. Or Venice. What about Venice?’
‘Yes,’ Annie said. ‘We could do that.’
She was looking down at the red-tiled floor and at the toes of her slippers. She tried to imagine beyond here, now, and found that she couldn’t. At the same time she tried to make her voice stronger, as full of conviction as Martin’s.
‘In a few weeks’ time, it’ll be as if all this never happened,’ he said.
That was what Martin wanted, of course, Annie thought. He wanted their lives to be the same as they had been.
You can’t make it un-happen, Annie. What did that mean, then?
‘I’ve got to go, sweetheart. I’ll be in tonight, at the usual time. I can’t wait to get you out of that place. I love you, Annie.’
‘Yes. Yes, I love you too.’
She replaced the receiver and walked slowly along the corridor. She worked out that it was five weeks and two days since the bombing. For all those days the hospital had stood in for the world. She realized now that she had hardly thought beyond it. Her determination to recover had focused on the point of being well enough to leave, and now the vista of afterwards opened coldly up in front of her.
Annie passed the ward kitchen where the trays of meals were unloaded from trolleys. She caught the scent of boiled greens mixed with antiseptic scrub, and realized too that it was the first time for weeks that she had noticed a hospital smell. The day sister from the men’s ward crossed her path at right angles, smiling at Annie.
‘Good news,’ she called cheerfully. ‘Well done.’
Annie noticed the shape of her calves in black stockings, and the high polish of her black shoes. She knew that she was already looking at the hospital as a visitor, not as an inhabitant. Annie went on into her ward. Sylvia came across at once, eager for news.
‘Going home at the weekend, I hear. Looking forward to it?’
‘Oh yes. I can’t wait.’
Giving the expected answer made Annie more sharply aware of the truth. She was afraid to leave. Hospital had been a protective cocoon, and illness had been an immediate obstacle to conquer.
Steve had known that, of course, and he was waiting. Annie smiled wryly. She had fought to be allowed home, and now she didn’t want to go anywhere without Steve. She had willed herself better, so that she could go home safely to Martin. Now she saw that imprisonment in hospital had been their real safety, and when she and Steve were both outside there would be choices infinitely more complex than whether or not to go to the day room.
Annie shivered. She had the sense of open spaces surrounding her again, and an unfamiliar, salty wind blowing.