Then there was the other, silent dialogue that grew steadily louder in Annie’s head. Listen to me, Annie, Steve said. You must, sooner or later.
And she babbled back, Wait. I don’t know what to do. I’m afraid. I’m afraid to stay and I’m afraid to leave.
On the third day Steve was irritable and restless. She watched him as he sat tense in his chair and then impatiently levered himself to his feet, hobbling to the window and staring down into the street before turning back to her again. She knew that he was chafing against boredom, and against the frustration of their holding apart. Her sympathy swelled with wishing that she could stay with him.
‘How long will it be?’ she asked. ‘They must have some idea, surely?’
‘You know as much as I do.’ His voice was sharp. ‘Not until the X-rays show new bone formation. Six weeks, perhaps. Therapy. Muscle rehabilitation. Jesus, Annie, how can I survive another six weeks? Without you?’
‘They’ve said I can go.’ The words came out flatly.
Steve swung round, awkward, very close to her. Annie felt her heart lurch.
‘I thought it must be soon. When?’
‘Tomorrow.’
He stood still, then. She saw the denial in his face and her own longing to deny it too, answering him.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘I suppose,’ Annie said softly, ‘I was trying to pretend that it wasn’t going to happen.’
Their eyes fastened on the other’s face, hungry, importunate.
‘I don’t want you to go.’
‘I don’t want to leave you.’
The words spoken aloud, at last. How many days have I made us waste? Annie thought, despairingly.
Steve turned on his crutches again. He looked up and down the room, at the interminable television and the rain-streaked windows, the incurious, sick faces of the others.
‘Come here,’ he said.
Annie stepped forward, unable to question. If he had undone her clothes, then, and asked her to lie down with him on the institutional floor, she would have done it because he wanted her to.
But he led her away, to the door that opened into the corridor. With all her senses painfully sharpened, Annie heard the tiny metallic creak that his crutches made under his weight.
A few steps beyond was another door, this one with a little round window in it. Steve looked in through the window, and then eased the door open. Annie knew what was inside, because the room was the twin of the one over on the women’s side.
‘Where are you going?’ she whispered.
Come on,’ he repeated.
Annie followed him, and Steve closed the door behind them.
The room was unoccupied. It was a single-bedded side ward with a tall, narrow slit of window that looked out at a dark angle of the red-brick hospital walls. There was a high bed, made up with stiff, smooth white sheets and pillows set perfectly straight. The bed table was pushed away to the foot, bare of the usual clutter of belongings. The only other furnishings were two upright chairs, a folding screen and a basin with long-handled taps like metal ears.
As they faced each other in the silence, footsteps passed by the door.
‘No one will come,’ Steve said.
‘I know.’
Steve disengaged himself from one of the crutches and propped it against the wall. He took Annie’s hand and used the other crutch to hobble the few feet across to the bed. He drew her with him, and she followed, without hesitation. Steve reached the bed and rested himself against it, then let the second crutch fall. Then, gently, he took her other hand. She stepped forward, close, and then so close that their bodies touched. She saw the shape of his face and his mouth, the line of his top lip and a muscle that pulled at the corner of it. Her chest was tight with pain and happiness.
He lifted their linked hands and his mouth brushed her knuckles. Annie felt the softness of his tongue between his teeth. Her own mouth opened and she drew the breath in, sharpening the wonderful pain in her heart.
Then Steve let her hands go. He lifted his to cup her face, looking levelly into her eyes, through her eyes and into her head. And then he leant forward, slowly, and his mouth touched hers. He turned her face to one side, and then to the other, and kissed the corners of her mouth.
For that moment, Annie knew nothing except the happiness. She smiled, with her lips curving upwards under his, and he drew her closer still, until her body arched backwards as he kissed her.
His arms came around her and they clung together, greedy, admitting their hunger at last in silence. Annie forgot her physical weakness and the bleak room that enclosed them, and the world waiting for her outside. There was no one but Steve. Her mouth opened under his as she answered him, candid, and his sudden roughness bruised her skin and sent the shocks of sweetness racing all through her.
Annie heard her own voice, wordless, caught low in her throat, Oh.
Steve lifted his mouth from hers, and looked into her eyes again. His eyelids were heavy and she saw the gold-flecked irises. Annie was shaking. Behind Steve’s shoulder she saw the white cover of the hospital bed, drawn up now in rumples like long pointing fingers. She turned her face away from the fingers and rested it against Steve’s shoulder. She brushed the tiny raised loops of his towelling robe and felt the warmth of his skin under her cheek. A pulse beating at the base of his throat answered her own heartbeat. She closed her eyes, giving up all of herself, and put her lips to the little flicker under his skin.
‘Annie.’ His voice crackled.
‘I’m here.’
Their kiss was gentle now, and for a second behind her closed eyelids Annie saw the lit threads of tiny veins that netted her head, as beautiful as winter trees and all the firmaments of stars shining behind them.
When they moved apart at last it was slowly, and their fingers reached out to curl together.
Annie opened her eyes to see again. Behind Steve there was still the high white bed, and the ugly, cream-painted bed table on its black rubber wheels. She looked carefully at the folding screen, the door with its single black eye, and then through the window at the brick walls stained with damp and the black humps of drainage pipes. She thought of the hospital, the nurses, and the other patients with their inquisitive stares, and it was like a microcosm of the world that separated her with Steve into this bare room under the blind eye that could see at any moment. The joy was still vivid inside her, but the pain and uncertainty came back to tangle inseparably with it.
Steve watched her face and she knew that he was reading it, and her thoughts flickering behind it. He lifted and smoothed back a fine strand of hair that had caught up at the corner of her mouth, and then his fingers slid under the thickness of hair at the nape of her neck.
‘You know, Annie,’ he said, ‘that we started at the end, you and me. The two of us, stripped down in the darkness, nowhere further to go. It’s hard to go back and fill in the steps.’
She saw his crooked, amused smile as he ticked the steps off. ‘How do you do? What do you do? How, and where, and what for? I wonder. Another drink? You feel the same? We must be kindred spirits. Let’s talk some more, your husband isn’t looking. Am I boring you? Monopolizing you? No? I’m glad we met. Very glad. Yes, another drink. More talk. Is it so late already? Could we perhaps meet again? Lunch. Yes, lunch some time very soon.’
‘You must be very practised,’