Strangers
BY ROSIE THOMAS

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in the United Kingdom by William Collins and Company 1987

Copyright © Rosie Thomas 1987

Rosie Thomas asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Ebook Edition © MAR 2014 ISBN: 9780007560639

Version: 2018-09-24

Contents

Title Page

Copyright

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Keep Reading

About the Author

Also by Rosie Thomas

About the Publisher

One

It was just starting to snow.

Annie stood beside the row of coats hung untidily on the pegs and looked out of the glass panel in the back door. The dark grey specks fell out of a paler sky, and the wind caught them and blew them up into a spiral before letting them drop on the path. They changed from grey to white, and then vanished. In a minute, Annie thought, the flakes would stop melting. The snow would stick. She would need to wear her boots to go shopping. She opened the door of the cupboard under the stairs and rummaged for them, sighing as she always did at the sight of the tangle of family belongings. Then she took her coat off the peg, disentangling it from a red anorak with the sleeves pulled wrong side out.

A boy came down the stairs, two at a time, thumping his feet. He swung around the banister post and vaulted the last four steps down to the lobby. ‘Careful,’ Annie said automatically. ‘You’ll break a leg doing that, one of these days.’

The child looked squarely at her, and she knew that he was wondering how forcibly to contradict her. Then he shrugged. ‘No I won’t.’ He went to the door and pressed his face against the glass. ‘Look, Mum, it’s snowing. Can’t I come out with you?’ She buttoned up her coat and picked up her handbag, flipping through the contents to see if she had everything.

‘Can’t I?’

She smiled quickly at him, then glanced past him into the kitchen to see if her chequebook was on the table. She felt her attention being pulled two ways, fixing nowhere. It was often like that, nowadays.

‘No, you can’t. You hate shopping and you’ll only nag me to come home as soon as we’ve got there. And I’ve got a lot to do today.’

She found her chequebook in her coat pocket, and put it into her bag with her purse. The boy was sitting on the bottom step now, still staring longingly out at the snow. A thought occurred to him and he looked up at her.

‘Buying presents for me? For my stocking?’

His earnest gaze, a perfect replica of his father’s, made her smile.

‘That depends. And Tom, you may have grown out of Father Christmas, but Benjy hasn’t. You won’t spoil it for him, will you?’

Over the boy’s head she saw the snow beyond the window, falling faster now, powdering the garden wall with the faintest rim of white. Perhaps it would be a white Christmas. She breathed in the scent of pine needles, tangerines, log fires. ‘Okay,’ Tom said grudgingly. ‘He’s such a baby.’

Annie gathered up her scarf and gloves. There were a thousand things to be done before Christmas, faithful preparations for the family myth of a perfect holiday. She hugged Thomas and went to the foot of the stairs.

‘Martin? Where are you? I’m off now.’

There was a muffled thud from upstairs, two seconds of silence, and then the sound of a child’s full-throated yelling.

A moment or two later Annie’s husband appeared at the top of the stairs with Benjy in his arms. The little boy’s face was scarlet and crumpled, but he opened his eyes for long enough to make sure that his mother was watching. The crying went on undiminished.

‘He fell off the end of the bed,’ Martin said.

Annie ran up the stairs, already hot in her outdoor clothes. She rubbed Benjy’s head, feeling the round hardness of his skull under the silky hair. How resilient children are, she thought. Tougher sometimes than their parents.

‘Poor old Benjy,’ she said. Martin stood holding him, rocking him slightly, waiting for the noise to abate.

‘You’re going, then? What time will you be back?’

Martin was tall, with the rounded shoulders of someone used to stooping to reach the more general level. Annie was standing on the step below him and she had to stretch up to press her cheek against his. She didn’t see his face, but she noticed that the label was sticking out at the back of his jersey. He patted her with his free hand and Annie turned and ran back down the stairs.

‘What shall I give them for lunch?’ he called after her.

‘I don’t know. Look in the fridge for something, can’t you?’

The little ripple of domestic irritation washed after her all the way to the front door.

‘Or take them to McDonald’s, if you like.’

Thomas appeared in the kitchen doorway. ‘Yeah, McDonald’s. Dad? Are you listening? Mum said McDonald’s.’

Annie turned back to look at the three of them.

It wasn’t like Annie to turn back but today, for some reason, she did.

She saw Martin at the head of the stairs, his face so familiar that the features seemed to have been rubbed smooth, like a pebble by the sea. Benjy sagged in his arms, his head against his father’s shoulder. He had stopped crying, and his thumb was in his mouth for comfort. A few feet below them Thomas swung in an impatient arc from the newel post.

And all around them, like an over-detailed picture, the evidence of family life came crowding in. There was a broken plastic car overturned in the hallway, a dim grey line of handprints all along the shabby paint of the wall, a basket of clothes waiting to be ironed, on the hall table a sheaf of Polaroid snapshots of the boys.

‘What time will you be back?’ Martin repeated mildly. Annie’s irritation was disregarded. Sometimes it increased her annoyance, but she found herself smiling now.

‘I’m not sure. The crowds will be awful, probably. But I want to try and finish the last of the Christmas shopping today. Expect me when you see me.’

Annie opened the front door, and the cold wind blew in.

‘Bye,’ she called cheerfully. ‘See you all later.’

The door closed again. It was quiet outside. Not the muffled silence that came with snow, yet, but the quiet of waiting for it to happen. Annie ducked her head into the biting cold, and walked on down the path. As she opened the gate the Co-op milk float came round the corner, its little electric hum barely reaching her. Annie reckoned up quickly in her head, how many pints, and held up four fingers to the milkman. The snowflakes patted against her face. The milkman gave her a thumbs-up sign as the float stopped. Annie set off towards the station, walking quickly. She knew that it would take her exactly eight minutes. Martin hadn’t offered to drive her, even in the snow. They both knew without having to mention it that it was easier to walk than dress the children in outdoor clothes and persuade them into their car seats for the short drive. Annie was still smiling. That was the kind of telepathy bred by ten years of marriage, she thought, without bitterness.

As she turned the corner into the main road none of the few passers-by even glanced at her. Annie was just what she seemed, unremarkable, a housewife and mother intent on a day’s shopping. It would have taken a close look to reveal that she appeared a little younger than her real age, that her face was smooth even though her expression was preoccupied, and that she had an air of being capable, and content.

It was still early when Annie reached the first big store on her route for the day. The windows along the street blazed their Christmas displays at her. She looked at them for a moment, savouring the sight of satin ribbons and fir branches frosted with dry, sparkling snow. The real thing in the street outside was already grey-brown, spraying in filthy plumes under the wheels of the traffic. Annie pushed gratefully in through the big glass doors and breathed in the warm, perfumed air. She took her knitted hat off and shook her hair out, then turned towards the lift. She would start on the top floor and work her way down. Her list was ready in her coat pocket.

There was no one in the lift. She looked up at the indicator, congratulating herself on having arrived before the crowds. The doors opened at the top floor and she stepped out. A long counter heaped up with coloured balls faced her, red and green and silver and gold, and a pyramid of clear glass ones that held the iridescence of soap bubbles. She was drawn to the display and picked up a clear ball, turning it so that the colours changed in the light. Expensive, she thought regretfully. Nearly a pound each. But she took four, guiltily, putting them carefully into a wire basket. She moved across the department to the waterfalls of tinsel and buried her hands amongst the strands.

Two assistants waited at the nearest cash till.

‘What time d’you finish?’ Annie heard one of them ask.

‘Seven, tonight,’ her friend answered. ‘Makes the day seem endless, doesn’t it?’

The tinsel was coiled in Annie’s basket now, a bright silver serpent. They needed some new stuff, she reassured herself. Theirs was tarnished from too many annual appearances. But she wouldn’t spend any more money on decorations. She would go on down to the kitchen department and look for something for Martin’s mother. Her own mother needed a new dressing gown. She would go on to Selfridge’s for that, later. Annie’s face clouded as if she had remembered something painful, and she turned quickly with her basket towards the cash desk.

Yawning, one of the assistants wrapped up her purchases in green tissue. The other tapped the till keys and the electronic total flashed at Annie. She counted out the notes, picked up her carrier bag and walked towards the stairs at the back of the store. They were nearer than the lifts. She would walk down two floors. Heavy swing doors led to the stairwell. A sign over them announced Emergency Exit.

Annie reached the doors. She was vaguely conscious of someone else heading the same way. It was a man, he had been standing beside her at the cash desk, and now he was right behind her. She half turned her head, and his arm reached past to push the heavy door open for them both to pass through.

‘After you,’ the man said. She didn’t see his face. Nor did she ever say Thank you, although the words had formed in her head.

It was then that the bomb exploded.

It destroyed the staff cloakroom where it had been left overnight. It blew a hole up through the roof of the store, and the blast waves racing downwards into the heart of the structure ripped a great hole into which the floors tilted and fell. The terrible thunder of the explosion shook the surrounding streets and jolted the houses a mile away.

Annie didn’t hear a sound. There was an instant, an instant as long as infinity, when gravity deserted the world. In total silence she saw a blur of red and gold as the counter threw its load of glass balls into the whirling air, and then smashed them into fragments. She felt a silent wind that tore her clothes and flayed her skin and lifted her up only to pitch her forwards, down into a deathly pit where broken beams and chunks of wall boiled around her.

The fierce, white light was abruptly extinguished, and the dark descended.

The noise came then, like thunder receding, and in the wake of it came the roar of falling masonry as the store was sucked inwards on itself, molten, a whirlpool of stone and steel.

Annie fell, and went on falling, into the dark.

The noise had possessed her, but now it abandoned her again, growing fainter. The roaring crash was finished and in its place was the rattle of chunks of stone and plaster falling down on top of her. That grew fainter too, until it was only a whisper of dust, trickling into the crevices and settling as gravity took hold of the world again.

The girls at the cash desk were both dead. So was the cleaner who had been working in the cloakroom and who had lifted the tartan holdall out of its hiding place. Annie didn’t know it yet, but she was alive. She had fallen into the hole, with the heavy fire door half on top of her, like a shield.

Even the dust had stopped whispering now. The silence came again, long seconds, and nothing stirred. Then, up in the light, above the smoking rubble where tinsel and fragments of pretty glass were mixed with torn girders and other, terrible things, and where the snowflakes drifted and settled impartially, the first siren began to wail.

Annie couldn’t hear it. Her head thundered with the echo of the explosion and her eyes burned with the white flash of light. She closed her eyes, opened them again, but the glare was undimmed. Where had the dark gone? Her own, private darkness, how could that have been taken away? Were her eyes open or shut?

She lay without moving for a long time, she didn’t know how long. The roaring in her ears dropped in pitch, became muffled. The white blaze turned egg-yellow with a brassy point at the centre. The first bodily sensation to return was a wave of nausea. Annie tried instinctively to turn her head in order to be sick, but a sharp pain that seemed to be inside her head cut short the movement. She lay still again, staring up into the middle of the yellow glow. Slowly, like a fist unclenching, the nausea released its grip, and the light dwindled to a little point. Her eyes were opening and closing, she was sure of that now. It dawned on her that the light was inside her own head, and she could see nothing else because she was in utter darkness.

Annie’s tongue moved, finding her lips. They were coated with dust, except for one corner that was clogged with sticky moisture. There was the brackish taste of her own blood. She was suddenly possessed by panic, more powerful than the nausea. She tried to roll sideways, to draw her knees up into the foetal position, and found that she could not. She was hurt, badly hurt, and she was trapped in total blackness.

Annie could hear screaming, a scream that went on and on, up and then down again as the sufferer gasped for breath. When it stopped she wondered if the screams could have been her own.

Where was she? What had happened?

Oh God, please help me.

The screams had been hers. She could feel another one, the voice of pure terror, rising inside her. She clenched her teeth, and felt the grit crunch between them. She tried to swallow it, to clear her mouth, focusing on the smallest thing to keep the fear at bay. She could feel it all around her, like a living thing.

Think. Try to work out what had happened.

Slowly this time, she tried to move. Her right side, arm and shoulder right across to her breastbone, and her hip and thigh, wouldn’t do anything. She was pinned down by something smooth, sloping upwards at an angle. She discovered it by feeling cautiously upwards with her left hand. On her left side, higher up, there was something jagged that felt both hard and crumbling at the same time. She gave up her useless search and let her arm drop to her side again. Legs. Where were her legs? She could feel nothing at all in the lower part of them. It was as if her body was clay that had been crumpled up and crudely remodelled, stopping short at the knees.

And her head, the pain in her head. She rolled it, just a little, to one side and then the other. There was perhaps an inch or two of play before the pain gripped her. Suddenly Annie realized that her hair was caught underneath something. She had taken her knitted hat off – how long ago? – inside the doors of the shop. Now something very heavy was resting on her spread-out hair, and the pain she felt was the roots of it tearing her scalp. So even if there had been nothing else touching her she would still be trapped here by her hair, forced to lie staring upwards, into – into what?

There was only the pitch dark, not a sound except the threatening patter of falling fragments when she moved her arm. The fingers of her left hand fluttered, feeling the rough brick, splintered wood.

She was shuddering now, fully conscious, cold to her bones.

What would happen to her?

Annie screamed again as the fear lurched close and threatened to smother her. When the sound of it died away a voice said, very close to her, ‘Stop. Stop screaming.’

It wasn’t her own voice, she knew that. It was a man’s. A stranger’s.

At the sound of it, she remembered. Before the noise came, before even the silent wind and the shock that had spun her round into a rain of splintering glass balls, there had been a man. That was it. When she had still been Annie, walking calmly to the exit with a carrier bag of Christmas tree decorations, a man had come up behind her and pushed open the door. Out of the corner of her eye, in that last instant, she had seen his hand and arm.

Fear moved right inside her now. Where was the man, how close to her? Annie struggled to make her thoughts fit together.

He must have done this, whatever it was. And if he could do something so cataclysmic what else would there be, when he reached her? To stop the shuddering Annie bit her lips, and tasted salt blood again. She must keep still, or he would hear her. She lay with her head turned as far as it would go towards where the voice had come from, staring wildly into the impenetrable dark.

‘Where are you?’ he asked. ‘I don’t think I can reach you, but …’

‘If you come near me …’ Annie had wanted to scream at him, but her words were a gasp. ‘If you come near me, I’ll kill you.’

There was a long moment’s quiet.

Then the man said softly, ‘It’s all right. Listen, can you hear the sirens? They’ll reach us. They’ll get us out.’

A solitary policewoman had been standing on the opposite pavement, checking the number plate of a grey van parked on the double yellow lines. The side of it had sheltered her from the blast, and she crouched in the gutter for an instant with her cheek against the cold metal. She heard screaming, and the traffic skidding wildly in the roadway, and the crash of breaking glass. Slowly, sliding her hand up the van’s side, she stood up. Under a cloud of black smoke she saw the front of the store. The roof had been blown open to the sky and she could see the inside where the floors hung, pathetically exposed, tipping downwards. Chunks of brick were still falling. In the roadway people were running, some of them away from the falling bricks, others towards them. There were other people lying on the pavement.

The policewoman left the shelter of the grey van and made herself walk across the road. The broken glass crunched under her polished black shoes. She held up one black-gloved hand to stop the traffic, as she had been trained to do. Her other hand reached inside her coat for the pocket transmitter, to call for help.

The first squad car came, weaving up the street between the slewed cars and buses, its lights blazing. The policewoman was kneeling beside a man whose blood seeped through the clenched fist pressed to his cheek. There was suddenly an eerie quiet, and she thought how loud the siren sounded.

Two policemen leapt out of the car as it skidded to the kerbside. One of them carried a loudhailer, and he lifted it to his mouth.

‘Get back. Get back and stay back.’

One by one the people who had been milling on the pavement began to move slowly backwards, a step at a time. They were looking up at the ruined façade of the store where the smoke still drifted in black coils.

‘There may be a further explosion. Please leave the area at once.’

They moved a little further, leaving the injured and those who were helping them, bewildered groups on the littered pavement.

Down in the darkness the man’s voice repeated, insistent, ‘Can’t you hear them?’

At last, Annie said, ‘Yes.’

‘I can’t hear you properly,’ the man said louder. ‘Say it louder.’

She repeated, ‘Yes,’ and then, suddenly, ‘What have you done?’

There was quiet again after that, and she heard something moving, close to her. Her skin crept in a cold wave.

‘I didn’t do it.’ The voice sounded even closer now. ‘It must have been a bomb, I think. Perhaps a gas explosion.’

A bomb.

In her mind’s eye, imprinted on the terrifying darkness, the word conjured up flickering images. There were the television news pictures of violent death amongst the rubble, a half-forgotten impression of the reddened dome of St Paul’s still standing amongst the devastation of the Blitz, and then the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima.

A bomb.

The images faded and left her in the dark again. Her eyes stung with the effort of staring into it. She understood that a bomb had gone off, and buried her along with the broken Christmas tree balls, the gaudy strands of tinsel and the heavy door she had been going to push open. It was the same door lying on top of her now, crushing her.

Annie was shivering violently.

‘I’m afraid,’ she said.

She sounded very shocked, the man thought. But she was conscious, and she had stopped screaming. He wondered if there was a chance of manoeuvring himself close enough to help. He eased himself sideways a little, reaching out with his right hand.

‘What are you doing?’ Her voice was sharp with the onset of panic.

‘Trying to reach you. Listen to me, carefully. Where are you hurt?’

He could almost hear her thinking, painfully exploring the inner contours of her body, just as he had done himself.

At last she said, ‘I can’t feel my legs. My side hurts. There’s something heavy on top of me. I think it’s a door.’

‘That’s good. It’s probably like a shield for you.’

‘And my hair’s caught. I can’t move my head.’

She had long, thick fair hair. He remembered seeing it as she walked to the exit in front of him.

‘Can you move any part of you?’ he persisted.

‘My arm. My left arm.’

Gently, he said, ‘Reach out with it, then.’

He heard a tiny clink, perhaps the buckle of her watch against broken masonry, and the soft scraping of her fingers as they moved towards him. He stretched his own arm, further, until the muscles ached, and the splinters scraped his wrist. And then, miraculously, their fingers touched. Their hands gripped, palm to palm, suddenly strong.

Annie thought, Thank God. The hand in the dark was so solid, the feel of it gripping hers almost familiar, as if she already knew the shape of it.

The man heard the sob of relief in her throat. Her hand felt very cold in his.

‘What’s your name?’ he asked into the blackness.

‘Annie.’

‘Annie. I’ve always liked the name Annie. Mine is Steve.’

‘Steve.’

It was a reassurance to repeat the names, an affirmation that they were still there, still themselves after the cataclysm.

Annie felt his thumb move on the back of her hand, a little stroking movement. The fear began to loosen its grip, and her breath came easier. She turned her head towards him, as far as she could. Her hair pulled at her scalp.

‘I thought you did it,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry. I was afraid of you.’

‘I didn’t do it. I was just doing my Christmas shopping, like you.’

Christmas shopping … the translucent glass balls that had been so expensive, the shiny ribbons and fir branches in the shop windows, the snow falling in the wintry streets. And now? To be buried, in this acrid darkness. How far down? She had the impression that she had fallen down and down, into a great pit. What was balanced above them, how many tons of rubble cutting them off from the sky and air?

Annie’s hair tore at the roots as she struggled, involuntarily.

‘Keep still.’ Steve’s fingers tightened over hers.

Annie heard the door creak over her face. Yes, she must keep still.

‘And you?’ she asked. ‘Are you hurt?’

‘I’m cut, here and there. Not badly. My leg’s the worst. I think it’s broken.’

Now Annie’s fingers moved, trying to lace hers between his.

‘Don’t let go,’ Steve said quickly.

‘I won’t. I’m trying to think. How can we get out?’ She was collecting herself now, trying hard to keep her voice level.

‘I … don’t think we can.’ The sound of the sirens came again, multiplying, but a long way off. ‘They’ll come for us, Annie. It won’t be long, if we can just hold on.’

Annie thought, They won’t find us. How can they? No one even knows I’m here. I didn’t tell Martin where I was going.

‘Who is Martin?’

It was only with the question that Annie realized she had been thinking aloud. All her senses were dislocated. She was looking, staring so hard that her eyes stung, but she couldn’t see. There were noises all around her now, not just the sirens but other, rumbling sounds, creaking, and the rattle of falling fragments. Yet she couldn’t tell whether they were real, or replaying themselves inside her head, like her own voice. And suddenly she had the feeling that she wasn’t trapped at all, but falling again, spreadeagled in the blackness. Annie clenched her fists and tilted her face upwards, deliberately, ignoring the pain in her head, until her cheek met the solid, cold, weighty smoothness of the door.

‘My husband,’ she said, willing the words to come out normally. She wasn’t falling any more. ‘Martin is my husband.’

‘Go on,’ Steve said. ‘Talk to me. It doesn’t matter what. Lie still, and just talk.’

Leaving home this morning. There were the three of them, watching her go, little Benjy in Martin’s arms and Tom swinging around the banister post. Before that, she had run to the top of the stairs, reaching up to brush her cheek against Martin’s. A goodbye like a thousand others, hurried, and she hadn’t even seen her husband’s face. It was so familiar, rubbed smooth in her mind’s eye by the years.

Suddenly, Annie felt her solitude. She was going to die, here, alone. But the hand holding hers was blessedly warm. Where had Martin gone, then?

I love you. They repeated the formula often enough, not out of passion but to reassure each other, renewing the pledge. It is true, Annie thought. I do love him.

Yet now, trying to summon it up in pain and fear, she couldn’t see her husband’s face.

In its place she saw the garden behind their house, as vividly as if she was standing in the back doorway. Only a week ago. Martin was stooping with his back to her, his head half-turned, reaching for the hammer he had dropped on the crazy-paving path. She saw his hand, the torn cuff of the old jacket he wore for gardening, and heard the music coming from the kitchen radio.

They were working in the garden together. Martin had at last found time to repair the larchlap fencing that separated them from their neighbour’s voracious Alsatian. The boys had gone to a birthday party and they were alone, a rare two-hour interval of peace.

Annie was standing at the edge of the flower bed. The dead brown stalks of the summer’s anemones poked up beside her, acid with the smell of tomcats, and the earth itself was black and frost-hard. Her arms ached because she was holding up a bowed length of fencing, waiting for Martin to nail it in place. Neither of them spoke. Annie was cold, and Martin was irritable because he was an awkward handyman and the setbacks in the task had brought him close to losing his temper. He picked up the hammer and jabbed it at the nail, and the nail bent sideways. Martin swore and flung the hammer down again.

Annie was thinking back to the days when they had first bought the crumbling Victorian house, long before Tom was born. They had worked endless weekends, painting and hammering, because they couldn’t afford to employ builders or decorators. They would quarrel unrestrainedly then, launching themselves into blazing arguments over the coving that had been mitred wrong, the glaringly mistaken shade of paint, the tiled edge that rippled like waves on a lagoon. And then they would stop, and laugh about it, and they would go upstairs and make love in the bedroom where the last occupants’ purple and orange wallpaper hung down in ragged strips over their heads. Nine, ten years ago.

A similar memory must have touched Martin too. He had kicked the hammer aside and straightened up to look at her.

Annie saw his face now, every line of it. She could have reached up and touched it in the darkness. He looked almost the same as he had when they first met, except for the deeper creases beside his mouth, and his frown.

He had put his arms round her, inside her coat, and kissed her.

‘Let’s ask Audrey to come in tonight, so that we can go and eat at Costa’s.’

They always went to Costa’s. Annie couldn’t remember the last time they had been anywhere else. They shared a plate of hummous, and then they had dolmades and a bottle of retsina. The last time, after their work in the garden a week ago, they had come in late and Martin had taken the babysitter home. Annie had gone on up to bed and she had fallen asleep at once, before he lay down beside her. In the morning Benjy had woken at six, and for the sake of another hour’s peace she had carried him in and put him between them. He had smiled in triumph, with his thumb in his mouth.

Martin had reached out across Benjy to rest his hand regretfully in the hollow of Annie’s waist. They had looked at each other, acknowledging. That was how it was. They were tired, and then there were the children.

Something touched Annie now, colder than the cold that pierced her bones. She was shivering again.

‘We always go to Costa’s,’ she repeated. ‘I don’t know why. Martin likes it.’

‘I know,’ Steve answered her. ‘I know all about that, too.’

‘Why?’ Annie heard herself ask. ‘Are you married?’

The street had been cleared. Out of the first desperate scramble to reach the injured the police had created a kind of order. They had unrolled orange plastic tapes to make a cordon around the store, and inside the circle the rescue workers were at work. The orange fluorescent jackets worn by the police seemed to spill their colour into the grey air, and the firemen’s yellow helmets bobbed up and down as they unloaded their complicated equipment, pulleys and lifting tackle and strange, cumbersome cameras. They moved quickly, with practised efficiency.

Outside the orange line the rescue vehicles were drawn up. The high grey and scarlet walls of the fire engines made a solid wall, and beyond them an ambulance waited, drawn up beside the big white emergency first aid trailer. Another ambulance moved away with the last of the injured from the pavement outside the store. Sixty yards to the south two police constables opened the white tapes of the outer cordon to let it through.

The crowd, swollen with arriving sightseers, had been moved back beyond the fluttering white tapes. One of the uniformed constables at the cordon still carried a loudhailer, to warn back anyone who tried to come closer.

In the centre of a huddle of police cars drawn up between the inner and outer cordons stood an anonymous pale blue van with a domed roof. It was the major incident vehicle from Scotland Yard, and inside it the duty inspector from the local station was handing the direction of the operation over to the commander who had arrived with it. The bomb squad’s equally anonymous control van stood close beside it.

A few yards away, at a special point in the white cordon, the press had already formed a restless knot. The first television news crew had set up, and their reporter was moving along the crowd at the tapes in search of an eye-witness to interview. But he turned away again as a senior police officer and a police press officer emerged from the control van.

‘We don’t have any idea, as yet,’ the policeman told them. ‘The store had only been open for a few minutes, as you know, so the chances are that there were fewer shoppers inside than there would have been later in the morning. We have a list of store personnel and it is being checked now against the survivors we have already reached.’

A dozen more questions were fired at him.

‘No. We do not yet have an accurate figure for the number of casualties, nor will we for some time. The rescue operation has already begun, and it will continue until it is clear that no survivors remain.’

The cold, wet air was alive with the static crackle of police radios.

‘No,’ the officer said. ‘We don’t have any idea yet as to how many people may be buried.’

He turned away with a brusque nod, back towards the control van. At the cordon the press officer read out to the journalists the telephone number of the central casualty bureau set up at Scotland Yard.

Steve knew how it would be. He had been imagining it, using the picture in his mind’s eye to convince himself that they would be rescued. He needed to convince the girl, too, make her believe in the precision of the rescue operation. Her hand was so cold, and he could feel her trembling even in her fingertips.

‘I was married, for a while. Not any more.’

‘Why?’

She wanted him to talk, too. She was reaching out in the same way, wanting to hold on to the sound of his voice. Steve tasted the dust in his throat.

Why? Cass had been waiting for him, that evening. She hadn’t had a booking, and so she had been at home all day. It was very late when he came in, but it was often late. The irony was that that night he really had been working.

‘Had a good time?’ she had asked, without looking up. There was a bottle on the low glass table beside her, almost empty. So she had been drinking. And, as there always was wherever Cass went, there was a litter of other stuff as well. Two or three glossy magazines, a scarlet phial of nail-varnish with a plastic crest to the lid like a stiletto blade, her Sony Walkman with its leads trailing on the floor, a scatter of open cassette packs.

Steve had draped his jacket over the back of a chair and gone into the kitchen to make a cup of coffee.

‘Had a good time?’ she called after him. He had ground the coffee very fine, almost relishing the noise, and then he had gone to the kitchen doorway to look at her.

Cass was a model. She wasn’t quite the youngest in the business now, but she was still successful. Cass’s real name was Jennifer Cassady, but her agency had agreed when they took her on the books that her given name wasn’t quite right. So they had opted simply for ‘Cass’. There was the name, in the agency’s folder, in her portfolio, on her cards. ‘Cass. Hair, brown. Eyes, green. 5ft 10in. 35–24–34.’ And all the rest of the information – her shoe and glove sizes, her particular modelling expertise, her willingness to ‘do’ underwear ads.

Like most of her model friends, Cass rarely wore make-up when she wasn’t working. Her pale, triangular face turned towards Steve, expressionless under its straight-cut fringe of hair. Steve had often thought that with her wide-set eyes and her pointed chin, she looked like a Persian cat. She moved like a cat, too.

‘Not particularly.’ Steve answered her question deliberately slowly. ‘I’ve been doing a reshoot for Fawcetts. I’ve had Phil Day on my back all evening.’

‘That must make a change,’ Cass said, carefully, not wanting to muff her line now that it had been presented to her, ‘from having Vicky on hers.’

Steve hadn’t said anything. There wasn’t any point in saying anything, both of them understood that. He had gone back into the kitchen and rummaged in the drawers for the coffee strainer. He had poured himself a mugful of coffee and leant against the grey-painted cupboard, staring blankly at the newspaper, while he drank it.

When he went back into the living room, Cass wasn’t there. He turned off the lights, went through into the bedroom, and found her.

She had made up her face, and changed out of her sweatshirt and track pants. Steve was used to her chameleon transformations, but now he stood still and stared at her. Later he remembered a black lace bra, French knickers slit high at the sides, suspenders and black stockings. Cass had painted pouting red lips over her own, but her black-rimmed eyes belied them. They met his, full of bewildered resentment. But she faced him squarely with one hand on her hip, posing.

‘I’m sorry you didn’t have a good time tonight. Shall I give you one now?’

‘Cass, for God’s sake …’

She came swaying towards him, reaching up to the catch of her bra but holding it over her breasts, sliding the straps off her smooth brown shoulders.

She was very pretty, tall and a little too thin, with hip-bones that jutted on either side of the soft concavity of her stomach. Against his will, knowing that she was manipulating him, Steve put out his hand to touch her. Her skin was warm, and he knew the intimate scent of it.

‘Cass,’ he whispered. ‘What are you doing?’

‘I am your wife, aren’t I?’

‘You are.’

He drew her to him and her half-naked body fitted against his. He kissed her, smudging the scarlet mouth, and she began to undo the buttons of his shirt. Steve tilted her sideways, down on to the bed. For a moment she lay looking up at him, then she rolled over so that she was on top. She undid the last button and her fingers moved to the buckle of his belt. She bent her head to kiss him and then looked downwards, dreamily, the soft ends of her hair trailing over his bare chest. For the moment Steve had forgotten the complicated sequence of their long-running battle. His fingers found the lace-trimmed edge of the provocative knickers. He slid them inside, reaching for her.

Cass pushed him away. She rolled out his arms and stood up. Without a glance back at him she went to her wardrobe, took out a coat and put it on over the black lace underthings. Then she lifted down a suitcase, opened a drawer and began to stuff clothes into it.

‘What in God’s name are you doing?’ Steve felt the heat of his anger fuelled by desire.

Cass didn’t look round. She put an armful of clothes on hangers into the case and slammed it shut.

‘I’m leaving you,’ she said flatly. ‘I hate you. You disgust me.’

‘Don’t be so bloody stupid.’

He had lifted himself up on to his elbows to look at her, and he felt his awkward heat, the frustrated redness of his face. His anger intensified. Cass put her feet into a pair of suede boots. She swept a clutter of things, keys and her chequebook and her precious Filofax, off the bedside table and into her bag.

She went to the door and then, finally, turned back to look at him.

‘Goodbye, Steve,’ she said. She hadn’t been able to resist the final pose.

‘Where the hell are you going?’

‘Nowhere that concerns you.’

His wife walked out, closing the door behind her.

Steve lay motionless for a moment, and then he flung himself off the bed and went to the window. He tucked his shirt back into his trousers and opened the curtain. He saw Cass come out into the street and put her suitcase into her car. It was a little gold-coloured Renault 5, and Steve remembered that he had booked it in for a service later in the week. Cass revved the engine, backed the car up and then shot forwards. He stood at the window watching the street for a long time after the Renault had vanished.

She’ll be back, he told himself. It won’t last more than a couple of days. But she had never come back.

‘I’ve never told anyone exactly what happened,’ Steve said. ‘I just said we’d split up. Out of shame, I suppose. But I’m telling you, now.’

‘I don’t think shame matters very much,’ the girl said quietly, ‘if you’re going to die.’

Annie heard his quick movement, and then his breath catch as pain gripped him somewhere.

‘We aren’t going to die,’ he said. ‘Do you hear?’ And then, when there was no answer, ‘Say something, Annie. We aren’t going to die. They’ll dig us out of here. I know they will.’

‘They’ll dig us out,’ she echoed him, at last. They lay still, their hands clasped.

Annie hated the quiet seeping around them. It seemed to be only a superficial quiet, masking all kind of noises, perhaps the first rumble of the avalanche that would bring the weight of rubble down to crush their precarious shelter.

‘Do you want her to come back?’ she asked quickly.

‘I don’t know. No, I don’t think so.’

Not any more. He still saw Vicky, and one or two others just like her. He worked very hard – it was his own production company, and he had to – and when there was no Vicky or anyone else he came home to the empty flat.

‘You sound sorry for yourself.’

Her words made him look into the blank darkness, wishing he could see her. He had had only the vaguest impression of her turning away from the counter and walking ahead of him towards the door. She had a pleasant, preoccupied face. Ordinary.

‘And you sound like a schoolmistress.’

She did. There was a faint bossiness, a moral certainty. No, it wasn’t a schoolmistress – it was a mother, used to delivering crisp reprimands. Steve heard something that might almost have been a low, painful laugh.

‘Don’t you think it’s odd that we’re buried here, holding hands and insulting each other?’ the girl asked.

His answering smile flickered automatically before the pain in his leg made him wince again.

‘I like the spirit, Annie,’ he said. ‘Nothing’s odd, down here, is it? Say what you like. Talk to me some more. Tell me, are you happily married?’

What was the cold hand that had touched her, when she remembered the day in the garden? It came again now, tightening its hold, and she was already so cold. The shivering took hold of her and she went stiff, trying to stop it because it shook the pain deeper into her side, like a knife stabbing her.

‘Yes. Yes, we’re happy together. I am. I think Martin is.’ She could hear herself gabbling and she made herself talk more slowly, shaping the words in her mouth before she uttered them.

Years, succeeding one another. Changing their texture a little, the colours fading from bright to dim, but all woven in the same, even way.

‘I’m just a housewife. I’ve got two children, boys, eight and three.’

Oh, Thomas, Benjy, I love you so much. Don’t let me die here without seeing you.

‘My husband’s a designer, interiors. His company does shops, that kind of thing. I used to do similar work, before Tom was born. Now I look after the children and Martin, and the house. I’m happy doing it. You can’t imagine what it would be like, can you?’

I know you now, Steve thought. I’ve seen you, all of you, in the park with your kids, or struggling to get off the tube with one in a buggy and the other hanging on to your coat.

‘Cass wanted to be like that, I think. For all her wild outfits and dotty behaviour. I think she really wanted to have dinner ready every evening at eight o’clock, get the holiday brochures in January and make plans for July, have a regular night out together every week.’

‘And you didn’t?

‘No, I didn’t. It was the routine of being married that I couldn’t bear.’

‘Like always going to Costa’s,’ Annie said.

‘I don’t always want dolmades. I like to see different things on the menu. I like to eat in different restaurants.’

She listened carefully to the sound of his words, and felt his hand holding hers. His hand was large, and still quite warm. Annie felt suddenly irrationally angry. ‘I think you sound a bit of a pig.’

Steve did laugh this time, a spluttering cough of laughter. ‘But I’m a pig who survives. And you’ll survive too, my love. I’ll make you.’

Annie’s anger went away as quickly as it had come. Hearing his conviction, a man she had never seen, she believed him. It was important to believe, she understood that too.

‘How long have we been here?’ Her voice sounded childlike now. ‘How long will it be before they come?’

‘We might have been here an hour. Perhaps not even as long as that. Does your watch have hands?’

‘Hands?’ Annie could only think of their own, linked together.

‘Mine’s digital. But if yours has hands, and it isn’t broken, we should be able to feel the time. We can keep track, then. It will help.’

He was practical, seemingly neither afraid nor disorientated. Annie closed her eyes. The pain in her head and her side made it difficult to think. All kinds of other impressions, memories that were more vivid than reality, came crowding in on her, but the simplest coherent thought slipped out of her grasp.

With an effort she said, ‘My watch is on this arm.’ She lifted her hand a little in his. At once the warmth of his hand let go. She felt him reach for her wrist, searching for the watch strap. It was a tiny buckle, and she heard the effort that the little, fumbling movements cost him. At last the strap loosened and the watch slid off her wrist. It dropped through Steve’s fingers and there was a faint chink as it fell somewhere beneath their hands. It was as if a lifeline had been thrown at them, only to drift out of reach.

Steve gathered his strength and hunched his shoulders, trying to edge sideways, reaching down another inch. With his fingertips he explored the rubble, to and fro, probing between the splintered wood and chunks of plaster.

Annie was silent, waiting. Then, miraculously, Steve’s fingers found the leather strap again, still warm from her wrist. He lifted it and touched the smooth, convex watch face. The glass wasn’t even broken.

Very gently he tapped it against a sharp edge of brick, then harder, and then harder still. The little circle of glass refused to break and he felt sweat gather under his hairline until a drop of it rolled down his forehead. It had suddenly become more important to know the time than anything had ever been. If he could find out what the time was they could hang on, counting the minutes together.

Trying to control his strength, he rapped the watch against the brick again. Then he felt the face again with the tip of his finger. The glass was shattered. He put the watch on his chest and picked the fragments of glass away. He touched the winder button and then felt for the hands. They felt tiny, like hairs, under his fingers. The second hand, moving against his skin, was like the touch of an insect on a summer afternoon. The watch was still going, then. He lifted his fingertip quickly.

‘It’s half past ten,’ he said.

He had come into the store as it opened, only an hour ago. They had been lying here for only three-quarters of an hour, perhaps not even as long as that. He moved a little, as if trying to gauge how far down they were. It would take a long time, that was all he knew.

‘Annie?’

‘Hold my hand again,’ she begged him.

He tucked the watch inside the fold of his coat and stretched out his hand. Their fingers touched at once, and they clasped hands.

‘That’s better,’ she said. Steve wanted to take her hand and rub it between his own, chafing the warmth back into it, and his powerlessness struck home to him. She was badly hurt, and if she were to deteriorate before they came, he could do nothing to help her. At the same moment he realized how important it was that she was there. If he were alone, would he want to fight so hard?

‘Tell me what you’re thinking about,’ he ordered her.

‘Not thinking. I keep seeing and hearing things. So vivid.’ Her voice sounded dreamy and distant now. ‘All the old things. They say that happens, don’t they?’

‘No. What things, Annie?’

She had been seeing last Christmas, and the decorated tree in the front window.

Benjy was just two, sitting on the floor with his eyes and mouth wide open, reaching out for the shimmer of it.

‘The boys. I was just seeing the boys. They grow up, and change all the time, but they still stay the same, themselves. If you haven’t got children yourself you can’t know what it’s like. I don’t think that even fathers have the same feeling.’

That was better, Steve thought, not really hearing what she said. Her voice was firmer now.

‘I never thought about it before they came. Even when we decided to have a baby, when I was pregnant, I never understood what it would be like.’

They had driven to the hospital together, Annie and Martin, when she went into labour. That was the last time, she understood afterwards, that little drive through the night, when they were just themselves.

Thomas had been born, a mass of black hair and a red, angry face. He had opened his eyes and looked at her.

In the days afterwards the weight of responsibility had been like a millstone, and at the same time the love had buoyed her up so that she felt she was floating. Whenever the baby cried she felt it inside her like a knife, and his hours of contentment filled her with a satisfaction she had never known.

Steve was listening now, compelled by the tenderness in her voice. Yet with half of himself he thought, Yes, I do know you. She was the kind of woman who undid the front of her dress at dinner parties, and serenely breast-fed a milky-smelling bundle of baby. She almost certainly went to classes to learn how to have her babies in the approved way, and demonstrated her success afterwards to an admiring circle of women around the table. She talked about children all the time. She was talking about them now, and the note in her voice held him. Yet she surprised him when she broke off and asked, ‘Sounds desperate, does it?’

He almost smiled. She was quick, and that was good.

‘Not desperate. I don’t understand, that’s all.’

‘Cass wanted a baby, did she?’

Quick again.

‘Yes, Cass wanted a baby. We talked about it, from time to time. Not much, in those last months, now I come to think of it. I was probably afraid that she might feel the same as you. No … I’m sorry, that didn’t come out quite right. I didn’t want to share her, perhaps. I wanted her to go on being Cass, not somebody’s mother.’

‘Somebody’s mother,’ Annie echoed softly.

Cass had sat cross-legged on the leather sofa, looking at him. She was wearing an armful of ivory and brass bangles and she turned them round and round, rattling them together.

‘What about your work?’ Steve had asked in exasperation.

‘Other women manage, don’t they? Quite a few of the girls I know do. We can always get a nanny to look after it while I’m working.’

‘Why bother to have a baby at all, then?’

She had looked at him with her green eyes wide open and the bangles rattled and clicked under her fingers.

‘Because I want one,’ she answered at last.

‘I don’t.’

Once there was a baby, the responsibility shifted. Steve knew that; he understood that much of what Annie said. And not wanting to share Cass, was that the truth? He lay still, feeling the pain in his leg pushing its fingers up into his groin, and tasted the deception in his mouth. It was Cass who had had to share him, unwittingly at first, and then with increasing bitterness.

On the day that he had announced to his partner that he was going to marry her, Bob had rocked back in his desk chair and stared at him in disbelief.

‘Married? You?’

‘Why not? You’re married, Phil is married, and so are most of my friends and all of our clients.’

‘Yeah. Not you, though.’

‘Perhaps I’m feeling the cold winds of solitude blowing around me.’

Bob had snorted with laughter. ‘Wrap it round yourself for warmth, then. Should be long enough – you’ve given it plenty of exercise.’

‘Fuck you, Jefferies.’

But Bob had only laughed even harder. ‘What, me as well?’

Steve had married Jennifer Cassady two weeks later. He was thirty-six, moving easily along the business track that ran from comfortably off to rich. He was amused at the prospect of having a wife, and captivated by Cass’s looks and abilities. They came from the same background and they were both busy climbing out of it. He thought they understood each other.

Cass was twenty-three and her career was blossoming. On the day that they were married, her face looked out across London from a hundred giant poster boards. It was suntan cream, that ad, Steve remembered. He had taken her out to dinner on the evening after she had been sent to the ad agency on a look-see for the same campaign.

On the day that they were married the party started at eleven o’clock sharp in the company’s offices in Ingestre Place. Bob had masked his cynicism with an ad-man’s enthusiasm, and had had every corner decorated with pink and white flowers. The bath in the directors’ bathroom was full of ice and three cases of Bollinger.

‘For starters,’ Bob had said.

The bride and groom had planned to walk the two or three Soho streets to the restaurant they were to take over for their lunch party. But when they came out of their offices an open-topped vintage bus fluttering with pink and white ribbons was blocking the roadway. The bus was crammed with a cheering crowd of friends and clients, except for two empty front top seats. One of the videotape editors was driving, and the creative director of a medium-sized agency was dressed up as the conductor, complete with a polished brass ticket machine.

Steve had stopped dead on the pavement, but Cass had pulled him on.

‘It’s perfect,’ she had breathed, half laughing and half crying. ‘Did you ever see anything so perfect?’

The lunch went on all day and well into the night. Steve remembered it in hazy patches. He remembered the strippergram, and he remembered Cass looking at him, proud and proprietorial, down the long table.

The marriage had lasted for two years and eight months.

Quite soon after the wedding a day came when he had had lunch with a pretty girl, and he had bought her brandy afterwards. They had leant back against the green, velvet-padded walls of the restaurant booth to look at one another, and Steve had suddenly realized that they were sizing one another up in the old way. Afterwards they had walked along a sun-warmed street and the girl had looked sideways at him and said, ‘Shall we go home for an hour?’

He had gone, almost without thinking, and he had enjoyed their rapid love-making more than he had done for months with Cass.

That hadn’t been Vicky. Vicky had come along months later, when Cass already knew what he was doing. For a time there had been the two of them, and the tissue of deceptions and faked meetings and unnecessary business trips that went with it. And then, two years and eight months after the pink and white wedding, Cass had left him.

‘I don’t blame her,’ the girl said.

The sound of her voice jolted Steve. For a moment, he hadn’t been buried at all. He had been back at home, in the flat that Cass had had redecorated after their marriage. Then the darkness closed around him again, and he remembered whose hand he was holding.

‘Feminine solidarity, is that it?’ he asked.

‘Partly.’ Her voice was crisp.

It occurred to Steve that this girl wasn’t so vulnerable. Then she added, ‘Personal sympathy, mostly. Thinking how I’d feel if Martin did it.’

‘And he doesn’t?’

Almost to her surprise, Annie understood that it wasn’t a taunt. He was asking a simple question.

‘No, I don’t think so.’

Martin came home between six and seven o’clock every evening. She was always glad to hear his bag thud on to the step as he dropped it to search in his pockets for the key. Tom would look up from his drawing, or the Lego, or the television, and say, ‘Dad’s home.’ And if Benjy was still up he would slither in his pyjamas to the front door to meet him.

Seeing herself waiting with the boys, and a glass of wine, and the dinner simmering, Annie sometimes thought bleakly that they were like a family in a television commercial. Just as predictable. Almost as bland. Yet Martin did come home every night, to hug them in turn and to listen to the boys’ recital of the day’s events. After the boys had gone to bed they would sit down to dinner together, adding up in their talk the small change of another day. Annie knew the hours and the demands of Martin’s job because he told her. She knew that there was no room in his life, between his work and the three of them waiting for him at home, for anyone else. She was glad of that.

And when the monotony of domestic life bored her, or the boys were awkward, or she was simply afraid that life was slipping past her in a succession of featureless days, she reminded herself carefully that her life was her own choice. She had chosen the smooth path that led round and round her family and her home.

Suddenly, with the pain like a hot band around her, Annie felt a longing for her life that hurt more than the pain of her body. It came back to her in every detail, the intimate pattern of their daily life. She smelt the freshness of clean sheets as she smoothed them out over the double mattress, heard the ping of the alarm clock on Martin’s side of the bed, and saw the house glow in all its worn, crowded, family-rubbed, patinated richness.

‘I don’t want to die,’ she said.

Only a few days ago, she had sat over dinner with Martin and talked about what she hoped to do when Benjy went to full-day nursery. She would start work again, perhaps, just for a few hours a week. She had had the sense of wider avenues opening, giving new perspectives that would still let her stay in the places she loved. She had sensed her own good fortune like a jewel hanging round her neck.

‘I can’t bear to leave it.’

The man’s hand holding hers was gentle.

‘You aren’t going to die.’

Out in the daylight it had stopped snowing, and it was growing steadily colder. The policemen manning the cordons moved to and fro across the strip of roadway to keep their feet warm, and their breath hung in front of them in grey clouds. The television crews, with the sightseers beyond them at a distance, huddled in their overcoats and waited as the minutes passed.

The slow, painstaking process of lifting the girders and rubble out of the hole had begun an hour ago. Now there was a flurry of movement amongst the firemen working under the tilted, ragged floors of the store. A broken beam was winched up and swung away to the side and one of the waiting ambulances started up and inched forward. A stretcher was carried across to where the firemen and doctors crouched in a circle, looking down. Then one of the doctors stood up and stepped backwards, over the heaps of wreckage. The firemen worked on until the watchers saw a flutter of something pale as another chunk of masonry was pulled away. A moment later a woman was lifted out of the hole. They laid her on the stretcher, and covered her face with a blanket.

The only sound was the crowd’s sigh, as if it came from a single throat.

The cameramen swung their long black lenses with the stretcher as it was carried, swaying and bumping, over to the ambulance. It was lifted inside and the heavy doors slammed. A moment later the ambulance nosed slowly away down the street.

‘Fight for it, if you want it so much.’

Annie only half heard him. The sense of what she would lose had taken such a powerful hold of her. Her life seemed her own creation, not passionate or original, but warm, and sweet, and infinitely valuable. The threatening darkness, looming and shivering over her head, was unbearable. She wanted to move, throwing her limbs convulsively to fight her way out of it, and yet she couldn’t. Her body hurt, and where it didn’t hurt it didn’t seem to exist any longer. Claustrophobia took hold of her and she felt a scream of terror rising again in her throat.

Annie opened her mouth and the scream came, and she heard the invisible mass around her swallow it up like a whisper.

‘Don’t,’ Steve said harshly. ‘Save that for when they might be able to hear us.’

Could they hear? Where were they? He felt the darkness as a weight now, too, heavy all around them. He strained his ears for a sound of the rescue that his reason told him must be under way, but he could hear nothing except the multiplying echoes of Annie’s scream.

‘Wait,’ he whispered. He let go of her hand and moved his arm across his chest to feel for the watch. His fingers felt numb, but he stroked the face of it, trying to make sense of the tiny hands. He thought it might be half past eleven, and so a whole hour had passed, but then he realized that the hands might just be in the same position as last time. Perhaps he had misread them then, and the watch was broken after all. The dislocation frightened him. He had relied on being able to monitor the time passing, thinking that he could gauge how their strength was holding out. Then he felt the second hand brush against his fingertip again. He slipped the watch back into its place, reassured, and reached out for Annie’s hand again.

‘It’s half past eleven. A whole hour has gone. We’re doing all right.’

The relief in his voice and the touch of his hand pushed Annie’s fear back again.

Fight, he had said, if you want it so much. To live. She moved her head and felt the door tilted against her cheek.

‘You want to fight,’ she said. ‘It’s precious for you, too, isn’t it?’

Precious?

Steve tasted the word, trying it out against his memories of the last months. He began to understand it for Annie, listening to her talk about her children. The need to see them growing up, the fierce determination to protect them that he had glimpsed fleetingly in other women, that was part of her. He had nothing like that. Steve thought often, without much surprise or regret, that he was living at one step removed from life.

How long then, since the sharp edge of pleasure had gone? Not just pleasure, but anticipation, need, fear, even?

He thought backwards, a long tunnel of days and nights.

Before Vicky. He had wanted Vicky, but he had also been quite sure of getting her.

He had met her at a party, a party for a book that Cass had done some modelling for. Vicky worked for the publishing company. She looked frumpy, in a corduroy skirt and a thick, knitted jersey. They had been introduced and Steve had asked some polite questions and then looked past her, to see where Cass had gone. But Vicky had moved to stand squarely in front of him again. Then he had noticed that she had unusual dark eyes in a clever, challenging face, and that something was amusing her. He suddenly realized that he wanted to find out what it was, and at the same moment Vicky had shifted her weight, resting it on one leg with the other knee bent. She had tilted her head to one side, still looking at him, and he had imagined the line of her body under the thick clothes. They had talked for a moment or two more and then Vicky had licked the corner of her mouth, quickly, like a cat. She had put her hand up to cover it, like a schoolgirl trying out a kiss in the mirror. They had both laughed, then.

Steve had taken her to bed two days later. Her inventiveness, her energy and her exotic tastes had surprised him.

‘Did you learn that at LMH?’ he had asked.

‘Some of it,’ she grinned at him.

Yet even then he had been moving with the sense of inevitability, and their affair had unfolded in front of him as though he were watching it on screen.

Was he so used to the distance, then, that he couldn’t remember when it had opened up? Steve lay still, feeling the cramp in his outstretched arm and listening to the painful, irregular indrawn breaths of the girl beside him. The girl was real, he felt her as close as if he were holding her in his arms. He was waiting for each of her breaths, willing her to draw the next, and the next. The blackness was real, and so was the dust that coated his mouth and stung in his eyes, and the pain was real too.

Steve felt a sudden frightening desire to laugh at the fact that it should take this to stir him. He understood the fragility of his life and the possibility of survival, the need for it, reared in front of him like a wall. He was afraid, as frightened as Annie was, but he forced himself to shake off the clutch of it with a determination that was almost pleasurable.

Precious, she had said. No, his life wasn’t that. It was hollow and mechanical and faintly shameful. The need to laugh faded, and Steve saw as clearly as if a bright light had been turned on overhead that what was precious was the need to fight, and he had lost that long ago.

‘I always wanted to be rich,’ he said.

‘And are you?’

He thought for a moment. ‘It’s a long time since I’ve had to live without something I wanted because I didn’t have the money to buy it.’ There was a pause before he added, ‘The natural result is that you find yourself not wanting anything anyway. I’ve got a handsome, rather unlived-in flat and several quite good modern paintings. I’ve got a little house in the hills behind Draguignan that I hardly ever go to. I’ve got a BMW, more suits than I can get around to wearing, all sorts of things. What else is there?’

Annie listened, trying to picture what he looked like from the sound of his voice and the warmth of his hand. Something in what he said touched her. She knew that he had never said it before.

‘Is that what you wanted?’ she asked.

Steve didn’t answer. To have answered would have been to peer into an abyss, gaping darker than the real darkness where they lay. It was suddenly so very far from what he wanted that he had completely lost his bearings. Wasn’t there anything, then, waiting, if this weight was ever lifted off the two of them?

He lifted his head an inch or two, straining his neck muscles, as if the hopeless movement could push the wreckage and let the daylight come flooding down.

Was it still snowing? What were they doing up there, so long?

‘I want to stay alive, like you,’ he whispered. He did, and he wouldn’t let himself ask, For what?

‘We will be saved,’ she whispered back to him. ‘I know we will.’

Steve wanted to reach out and take her in his arms. It was the first flicker of her own determination, not cajoled from her by his own will. He felt the warmth of gratitude and it was like weakness because his eyes suddenly filled with tears.

No. Don’t do that. It was important not to be weak. He must keep on holding her hand, listening to her breathing.

‘And you, Annie? Have you got what you want?’

She was vividly aware of the truth that he had offered her. She could feel the intimacy uncoiling between them, incongruous, yet as important as the need to contain the pain, as important as holding on to her wavering consciousness.

She would offer him the truth in return.

Very quietly, so that he had to strain to catch the words, she said, ‘I chose the easy option.’

Two

Martin waited until the kettle boiled and the automatic switch clicked back into the off position. He took the coffee jar out of the cupboard and spooned the granules into a flowered mug, then poured the water in so that the liquid frothed up in black bubbles. He opened the door of the refrigerator and peered in, frowning when he saw that there was no milk. Then it occurred to him that the milkman must have been and gone by now. He went up the steps from the kitchen into the hall and pulled the door open over the scatter of minicab cards and free newsheets that had been pushed in through the letterbox. His frown vanished when he saw that there were four pints of milk beside the doormat in the porch. He was whistling as he scooped them up and carried them back into the kitchen. He left three bottles on the worktop and splashed milk from the fourth into his coffee mug. Then, with his thumb hooked over the end of the spoon still standing in it, he carried his coffee through into the sitting room where the boys were sitting side by side on the rug. They were watching Saturday morning television.

As he came in Thomas jumped up and jabbed the buttons.

‘Nothing on,’ he complained.

Martin saw the news picture of the store with the jagged cleft struck through the middle of it, and he caught the reporter’s words.

‘… this morning just after nine thirty. One body has already been recovered from the wreckage, and the search continues. Police have not yet confirmed …’

The image vanished as Thomas impatiently prodded again. It was replaced by the test card of another channel, then by a commercial for breakfast cereal.

‘I like this one,’ Benjy shouted.

Martin stood for a frozen second, seeing his sons’ heads bobbing up and down, hiding the little square of coloured screen. Then he lunged forward and the hot coffee splashed over his fingers. He stepped between the boys and crouched down in front of the set, fumbling for the channel button.

He heard Thomas protest, ‘Oh, Dad …’ and then the picture flickered and steadied itself again. He saw a reporter standing in a windswept street with a hand microphone held close to his mouth. Behind him Martin could see a corner of the store, its bulk oddly foreshortened. He knew exactly where it was without having to listen to the report. Annie had lived in a poky little flat in one of the little streets behind it in the days before they were married. They had walked past the high façade a hundred times on their way to a pub that they liked, just beyond the tube station. The tube was just opposite the store, away to the news reporter’s right.

‘No survivors have been found as yet, but one body was lifted out a few moments ago …’

What was he saying?

Martin knelt down, pressing closer to the screen as if he could draw a contradiction of the implacable picture from it. He saw the reporter’s cold-pinched face dissolve into its component blips of colour, but the hideously altered shape of the big store never wavered.

‘Hush, Tom,’ he said.

What had Annie told him? He struggled to recall the casual words, seeing her run upstairs towards him as he stood with Benjy in his arms. She hadn’t said exactly where she was going. But it was a direct journey from here by tube. And Annie often shopped there. It was almost ‘her’ store, from the days when she had lived so close to it. As he watched the camera panned away from the newsman to a limited panorama of ambulances and fire engines. There were firemen working in yellow helmets, and policemen hemming them in.

Martin was cold, trembling with it, and the sick certainty that Annie was there. What had the man said?

One body was lifted out a few moments ago …

Martin stood up, almost stumbling, and the coffee splashed again. He put it down on top of the set and in the same moment the report ended. The picture changed to a solemn-faced studio continuity announcer.

‘We will be bringing you more news of that explosion in London’s West End as soon as it reaches us. And now …’

Martin turned away, moving so stiffly that Thomas looked up at him.

‘What’s the matter, Dad?’

He saw Annie’s features printed on the boy’s face and irrational fear gripped him in the stomach.

‘Dad?’

‘I … I’m going out to look for Mummy. I’ll call Audrey and ask her to come and stay with you for a while.’

Even as he said it he knew that he should stay where he was and wait, but he couldn’t suppress his primitive urge to rush to the store and pull at the fallen bricks with his bare hands. He snatched up the telephone and dialled the number. It seemed to take an eternity to explain to Audrey. He stammered over the neutral phrases that wouldn’t frighten the boys yet would bring her, quickly. They stood in front of him, reflecting his anxiety back at him, magnified by their bewilderment.

‘Why?’ Thomas said. ‘She’s only gone shopping, hasn’t she? Why do you have to find her?’

‘I want to bring her home, Tom. I’ll go and get her, you’ll see.’ He had a picture in his mind’s eye of crowded shops with thousands of people milling to and fro, and then the bombed store, silent, as he had seen it on the television. How would he find Annie, in the midst of it all? He made himself smile at the boys. ‘Stay here with Audrey, and we’ll be back soon.’

Benjy’s mouth opened, making a third circle with his round eyes. ‘I want Mummy.’ He was frightened, picking the fear up out of the air. Martin didn’t know how to soothe him while his own anxiety pounded inside him. ‘I want Mummy.’ He began to cry, tears spilling out of his eyes and running down his face.

Martin knelt down and held him. ‘I’m going to get her, Benjy. I told you.’

Through the front window he saw Audrey coming up the path. He straightened up and taking Benjy’s hand he led him to the door. Audrey was wearing an overcoat open over her apron, and Martin saw that she hadn’t stopped to change out of her slippers. They left big, blurred prints in the dusting of powdery snow that lay on the path. Her urgency fanned his fear and he felt his hand tightening over Benjy’s so that the child whimpered and tried to pull away.

Audrey came in, incongruously stamping her slippers on the doormat to knock off the snow.

‘Do you know for sure that she was going down there?’ she asked at once.

‘No. But I think she might have.’

‘You should stay here, you know. Wait for the news. You can’t do anything there.’

‘I know, Audrey, but I can’t sit here. I want to be near, at least.’ She was looking at him, her face creased with sympathy. Martin put on his sheepskin coat, feeling in the pockets for his keys.

‘If … she telephones here,’ Audrey said carefully, ‘I’ll tell her what’s happened and where you’ve gone.’

‘I’ll ring in as soon as I can.’

He was ready now. He hugged the boys in turn, quickly. Benjy had stopped crying and was holding the corner of Audrey’s apron. Tom followed Martin to the door and reached out to him as it opened, the cold air blowing in around them.

‘Is … is Mum in that shop, the one on the TV?’

Martin’s throat felt as if it were closing on the words as he lied, ‘No, she isn’t. But if there are things like that going on today, I think she should come home. Don’t worry.’

He closed the door and left the three of them standing. He ran back over Audrey’s slipper-prints to the gate, and to the car parked in the roadway. Inside was the familiar litter of crumpled papers and discarded toys. Annie used the car mostly, for taking the boys to and fro. The thought came to him: What if she’s dead? and he leant forward over the steering wheel. He heard his own supplication – Please, let her be safe.

Then the engine roared and he swung the wheel sharply, heading the car towards the image of the store that he could see as clearly as he could see the road dipping ahead of him.

The police commander followed his opposite number from the fire brigade down the steps of the control van and across the few yards of pavement to the gaping, shattered windows. In the nearest one, on the corner, a tall Christmas tree made out of some green shiny stuff had been blown sideways. It lay amongst torn screens papered with scarlet satin ribbons. Broken glass lay everywhere, and the commander’s shoes crunched in it as he walked.

They came to what had once been the big doors, and looked upwards. The grey sky showed overhead through the torn ends of girders and ragged floors. Dust still whirled in the air and it blew up in choking gusts behind the firemen as they inched under the tangle of brick and metal.

A young policeman stepped forward and handed the commander a protective helmet. There were two other men waiting. One, a big man in a waterproof jacket, was the borough engineer. He had been called straight out of bed and, under his waterproofs and sweater, he was still in his pyjamas. The other man was grey-faced and his silver hair stood up in unbrushed wings at the sides of his head. He held a helmet in one hand, and as the senior officers approached he put it on with an awkward, unpractised movement. He was one of the directors of the store, and he had arrived ten minutes ago from his home in Hampstead.

‘Our main problem,’ the fire brigade officer was saying, and he gestured upwards as he spoke, ‘is that this portion of the frontage is almost entirely unsupported. There is a real danger that our work underneath will topple it this way.’ He held his arm up to illustrate, flat-handed as if he was directing traffic, and then swung it graphically downwards. Even as they stood there conferring the crooked edifice above them seemed to creak and sway.

‘It will take hours to bring it down from the top,’ the engineer said. ‘Erecting the scaffolding alone will take time. My works people can do it as quickly as is humanly possible, of course, but …’

The unspoken truth was that if there were any survivors underneath, they couldn’t wait that long.

‘Can you go on down as it is?’ the director asked, ‘whilst the work goes on to secure the frontage?’

The policeman and the fireman glanced at each other before the fireman said, ‘Yes. At some risk.’

There was another pause. The policeman waited, touching the corner of his small, clipped moustache with a fingertip. At length he said, ‘Is that the consensus, gentlemen? To continue the rescue operation and to work to make the façade safe, as far as possible, at the same time?’

The three men nodded. ‘Good,’ the policeman said quietly. ‘Thank you.’

They waited side by side, sheltered from the wind by the threatening frontage. A medical team stood a few yards away, huddled together, not speaking. Everyone was watching the black-coated backs of two firemen who were kneeling side by side to lift chunks of masonry away from the lip of a black hollow.

‘Heat camera pinpointed this one. They can see her now. It’s another young girl.’

The commander glanced across at the medical team.

‘Alive?’

‘I’m afraid not.’

The minutes passed. Overhead a crane was being manoeuvred into position to begin the painstaking process of dismantling the toppling store front, piece by piece. The rescue workers in their helmets passed to and fro underneath it, never looking up. The commander waited until the second body was recovered. The girl’s legs looked pitifully thin and white as they lifted her out and laid her on a stretcher. She followed her friend into an ambulance and then away through the cordons towards the hospital.

The commander ducked his head and walked back through the splinters of glass to the trailer. A preliminary report from the bomb squad was waiting for him. It had been a single bomb, sited on the third floor towards the back of the store, probably in a cloakroom. It appeared now that the possibility of another unexploded bomb hidden elsewhere in the store could be discounted.

‘Thank Christ for that, at least,’ the commander murmured. The explosives experts had been at work for an hour. One of them handed him a second report and he glanced quickly at it. Diagrams showed the probable direction of the blast waves following the explosion, and the sliding masses of rubble.

‘Almost exactly the same as at Brighton, sir,’ one of the officers murmured.

‘Except that by a rare stroke of good fortune the PM hadn’t slipped in there for her Christmas shopping.’

‘No, sir.’

According to the calculations, the most hopeful place for survivors in the centre of the store was the basement, sheltered from the falling wreckage by the reinforced thickness of the ground floor. The commander stared through the trailer window at the tangled mountain resting on top of that floor. He put his finger up to his moustache again.

‘Side access to the basement?’ he asked.

‘Almost entirely blocked, sir. They’re working to clear it from both sides now.’

The commander looked down at his watch. It was eleven fifty-five. If there were any survivors in the basement, they had been buried for two hours and thirteen minutes.

Eleven years ago.

Annie wasn’t cold any more. She felt almost comfortable, as if she was drifting in a small boat on a wide, dark lake. Steve’s hand was her anchor.

She was trying to remember what had happened eleven years ago. It was important for herself, but it was more important still because she wanted to tell Steve. She felt him close to her, listening. The sensation of drifting intensified. They were both of them afloat, a long way from the shore.

‘I chose the easy option,’ she said again.

‘And what was it?’ His voice was as warm as if his mouth was against her ear and his fingers tangled in her hair.

‘I chose what would be safe, and simple. Because it would be … wholesome.’ Annie laughed, a cracked note. ‘That’s a funny notion, isn’t it? As if you can turn your life into wholemeal bread.’

Her memory was clear now, the images as vivid as early-morning dreams.

The day she met Matthew was exactly eight weeks before her wedding day. She came up the stairs to the fifth floor of the mansion block where her friend Louise lived. The green-painted stairwell smelt of carbolic soap and metal polish, just as it always did. The lift was out of order, just as it always was and Annie was panting, the John Lewis carrier bag bumping against her leg, as she reached Louise’s door. She rang the bell and when Louise opened the door Annie held the bag up in triumph.

‘I got it. Ten yards, hideously expensive. You’d better like it.’

‘Hmm.’ Louise had taken the bag and peered into it. ‘Oh, yes. I’ll make you a wedding dress such as has never been made before. Annie, this is Matthew.’

He was sitting on the floor with his back against Louise’s sofa and his legs stretched out in jeans with frayed bottoms. He had fair, almost colourless hair cut too short for his thin face, grey eyes, and his bare chest showed under his half-open shirt. He was in his early twenties, two or three years younger than Annie was.

He looked up at her and the first thing he said to her was ‘Don’t marry him, whoever he is. Marry me.’

Annie laughed, slotting him into her category automatically flirtatious, but Matthew hadn’t even smiled. He had just looked at her, and Louise stood awkwardly behind them with the carrier bag dangling in her hand. They didn’t talk about the dress that day. They had tea instead, sitting in a sunlit circle on Louise’s rug.

Matthew had been living in Mexico for a year, working as a labourer on a peasant farm in exchange for his food and a bed in a lean-to shack. He told them about the long days monotonously working the thin soil, the efforts at summer irrigation using water brought on the backs of donkeys from the trickling river.

‘Why were you there?’ Annie asked. The self-conscious hippiedom would have irritated her in anyone else, but Matthew was perfectly matter-of-fact.

‘I was thinking. I’m very bad at it. Can’t do it when there are any distractions.’

‘And why did you come home?’

He grinned at her. ‘I’d finished thinking.’

They went on talking while the sun moved across the rug. Annie realized that it was herself and Matthew talking. Louise was sitting in silence, watching them. At six o’clock Annie stood up to go. Matthew stood up too, and she saw that he was tall and very thin.

‘I’ll come a little way with you,’ he said.

‘I …’

‘I would like to.’

Annie left her bag of wedding dress material on Louise’s floor. When she was standing with Matthew on the pavement outside she remembered that she hadn’t even arranged to come back and look at Louise’s design sketches. She hesitated, wondering whether she should go back upstairs, but a taxi came rumbling down the street and Matthew flagged it down. He opened the door for her and they sat side by side on the slippery seat, looking out at the rush-hour traffic idling in the sun.

‘Where are we going?’

‘To St James’s Park,’ Matthew said. She discovered later that he used his last two pound notes to pay the driver.

It was May, the first day of summer’s warm weather. The grass was dotted with abandoned deckchairs, in secretive pairs and in sociable groups of three or four.

The setting sun slanted obliquely through patterns of curled leaves and glittered on the water. They walked under the trees, talking. It seemed to Annie that this hollow-cheeked boy had simply side-stepped the rituals of acquaintanceship and friendship, and had made her a lover without ever having touched her.

They stopped on the bridge to look down at the ducks drawing fans of ripples in their wake, and their shadows fell superimposed on the water.

Looking at the shape they made, Matthew said, ‘You see? We belong together.’

‘No. I’m going to marry Martin. We’ve known each other for seven years.’

‘That’s no reason for marrying him. Any more than you can dismiss me because you’ve known me for less than seven hours.’

She turned to look at him then, suddenly sombre. He had come to block the wide, smooth road she was walking down and he was pointing his finger down narrow lanes that turned sharply, enticing her. She felt angry with him, and at the same time she wanted to step forward so that their faces could touch.

‘I meant what I said, you know.’ Matthew met her stare. He put his hand out and stroked her hair, their first contact.

‘Do you ask everyone you meet to marry you? Did you ask Louise when she offered to let you sleep on her sofa till you found somewhere else?’

He laughed at her. ‘I’ve never said it before in my life. But when you came into the room, I knew you, Annie. I knew your face, and your walk, and your voice, and I knew what you were going to say.’

She couldn’t contradict him, because she knew it was the truth. Matthew didn’t invent or exaggerate.

‘I don’t know you,’ she said defiantly. ‘I don’t know anything about you.’

He took her arm, drawing it through his and settling it so that her head was against his shoulder. They began to walk again with their backs to the sunset and their shadows pointing ahead of them.

‘I’ll tell you,’ he offered. ‘I’ll tell you whatever you want to know. There isn’t much, so it won’t take too long.’

Matthew was the only son of an industrialist, a self-made tycoon with a newspaper name. The family assumption had always been that Matthew would emulate his dynamic father. But from the day he was old enough to begin to assert himself, Matthew had refused to conform to his father’s requirements. His only interest at school had been woodwork, until he became really good at it – at which point he gave it up for ever. When his school contemporaries were heading for Oxford, Matthew turned his back on them and set out on the hippie trail to Afghanistan. He had supported his travels ever since with menial jobs, working in exchange for food, somewhere to sleep, for enough money to carry him on to the next place.

‘What were you thinking about in Mexico?’ Annie asked him.

‘I was thinking about what I should do. And then I felt the pull to come home, so I came. And here you are.’

‘Don’t you think,’ Annie said, ‘that you might have seized upon me because you think you ought to? That you’re trying to make me someone I’m not, to fill a need in yourself?’

He didn’t hesitate for a second. ‘No. You are the woman I want. You just are. I always knew I would recognize you, and I have. It’s the truth, Annie. You know it too. Admit it.’

‘I suppose you’re going to tell me that we’ve been lovers in some previous life.’

Matthew dropped her arm and stared at her. ‘Certainly not. What d’you think I am? I don’t believe in all that mystical muck.’

They laughed until Annie wiped the tears out of her eyes and rested her forehead against his shoulder, and Matthew put his arms around her, still smiling. It was almost dark, and the cars swished rhythmically along the Mall under the thin glare of the street lights. She waited for him to kiss her. Matthew’s mouth moved against her hair.

‘I’m hungry,’ he said.

So he wasn’t going to kiss her. That made it easier, perhaps.

‘Let’s go and have something to eat.’ Annie moved away a little, regretting the warmth of his arm. ‘There’s a little Italian place in Victoria.’

‘I haven’t got any money,’ Matthew said.

‘My treat,’ she answered lightly.

They began to walk again and he caught her hand. Her ring scraped his fingers and he lifted their clasped hands to peer at it. The stones glinted coldly.

‘Oh dear, diamonds,’ he murmured. ‘I can’t give you any. Will you mind that? Will Martin want this one back?’

She was angry again then, her anger fuelled by a surge of guilt. She pulled her hand out of his and stuffed her clenched fists into the pockets of her jacket.

‘I’m going to marry Martin,’ she repeated. ‘Eight weeks from today. With a ring that matches this one.’

‘Very nice,’ Matthew said icily. They walked over the grass together, silent, both of them angry. But when Matthew spoke again his voice had softened.

‘What are you going to do, Annie?’

She shrugged her shoulders, suddenly bewildered. ‘I don’t know. Some thinking, like you. I just don’t know.’

‘I can wait,’ Matthew told her, and she knew that he would.

It wasn’t a double life, exactly. Half of it was a dream-world, and the other half was briskly real. She went to Louise’s several times, and stood for hours having the dress pinned on her. The invitations came from the printers and she went through the lists with her mother, and then addressed and stamped the dozens of envelopes. She spent weekends with Martin in the flat they had bought, painting the window frames and helping him to put up cupboards in the kitchen. And whenever she could she ran away to be with Matthew.

He drew her into his world, and she discovered with a kind of fascinated fear that Matthew existed without any constraints at all. He didn’t live anywhere. He drifted from a borrowed bedsitter to someone else’s sofa, and from there to an empty room over a shop where he slept on a blanket spread on the floor.

There was plenty of casual work in those days. He washed up in a café, and then spent a week labouring for a builder. He lived in the room over the shop because he was building display cabinets downstairs for the owner.

He never made plans, and he never worried about what might happen to him tomorrow. And so, Annie thought, he could give all his energy to enjoying whatever came. It was the quality of Matthew’s enjoyment that she loved. Afterwards, she thought that the hours she spent with him were the happiest of her life.

When he had money, he spent it without thinking. He loved good food, and he would dig out his one presentable outfit and take her to grand restaurants where he insisted on spending almost a whole week’s wages on a single meal. He derived such pleasure from the plush surroundings and the procession of exotic dishes that Annie couldn’t refuse to go, or even persuade him to let her pay her share.

‘You must know that it’s only any fun,’ Matthew said, ‘if you can’t afford to do it. My father eats lunch in places like this every day of his life, and all he ever wants is grilled sole and mineral water.’

When there was no money, Matthew was endlessly ingenious at finding free pleasures.

In his company Annie discovered tiny parks that she had never known existed, and she saw more pictures and sculptures and Wren churches than she had done in all her time as an art student. It didn’t even matter what they did, particularly. As long as she had an hour or two to spend with him, Matthew was happy. He seemed to want nothing more than her company and their activities, whether they were free or costly, were simply an extra, pleasurable bonus. When she was married and thought back to the benches beside the river and the faintly stuffy smell of the National Gallery, the elaborate dinners and the sudden taxis, she wondered if the times with Matthew were the last in her life when she had felt young.

He made her feel other things, too. They made love for the first time in the room over the shop. Annie had come straight from work. It was a warm evening at the beginning of June and she was wearing a sleeveless blue cotton dress. Her hair crackled with electricity over her shoulders, and when Matthew opened the door he reached out and put his hand underneath the thickness of it, his fingers stroking her neck.

After the first evening in St James’s Park, he had kissed her once or twice, lightly, almost jokingly. She had convinced herself that she was relieved that there was no more to it, and that she wasn’t betraying Martin in any way. But she had also known that Matthew was simply waiting, according to some system of his own, for the right time.

He took her hand and led her across the bare floorboards to the grey blanket with a single sleeping bag spread out on top of it. Annie saw an electric kettle, the neat tin box where Matthew kept his minimal supplies of food, his spare clothes folded tidily in an open suitcase. He stood behind her, lifting her hair and bending down to kiss the nape of her neck. He undid the buttons at the back of her dress and drew her against him, his hands over her breasts.

‘Here?’ Annie asked. She looked at the uncurtained windows with the sun lighting up the coating of grime and throwing elongated golden squares on the floor. She could feel Matthew’s smile curling against her neck.

‘My layers of dust are as effective as your net curtains.’

‘I don’t have net curtains.’

‘I expect your mother does.’

Her dress dropped to the floor and they stepped sideways, away from it, glued together. With the tip of his tongue, Matthew drew a line from the nape of her neck to the hollow at the base of her spine. Then, with his hands on the points of her hips, he turned her round to face him. Annie thought that she could see the sunlight shining straight through the taut skin over his cheekbones. Her hands were shaking but she reached out and unbuttoned his shirt, her movements echoing his. Then she looked at the shape of him, seeing the pale skin reddened from his labouring job, the bones arching at the base of his throat and the hollows behind them. She closed her eyes, and his mouth touched hers.

‘You see? It doesn’t matter where,’ Matthew said. He took her hand and led her to the blanket, and they lay down together.

It was the most perfectly erotic experience she had ever had. Matthew moved unhurriedly, almost dreamily, and he kissed the thin skin between her fingers, and each of her toes, and then the arches of her feet. He was so slow that she felt he was torturing her, but when at last he came inside her it was so quick and powerful that she heard herself cry out, as she had never done before. When at last they lay still, with Matthew’s arms around her and her head on his shoulder, she said softly, ‘I thought it only happened like that in films, and books.’

He smiled at her. ‘I knew objectively that it could probably happen in real life. But I’ve never known it like that before, either. We do belong together, Annie, my love. Listen to me. I love you.’

She felt real pain then, and she crouched in his arms trying to contain it. ‘Matthew, I …’

But he put his hand up to cover her mouth. ‘Be quiet,’ he ordered her.

Martin knew, of course. He turned to her one day, tidily putting his paintbrush down on the tin lid so that it wouldn’t drip gloss paint on to their kitchen floor.

‘Who is he, Annie?’

He was trying to sound casual. Annie knew him so well that she understood exactly why. He would try to make light of the threat for as long as he could. But that didn’t mean that it wasn’t hurting him.

‘You don’t know him. I met him a month ago, at Louise’s.’

They were standing shoulder to shoulder now, looking out into the well of the block of flats with its smudges of pigeon droppings. She couldn’t see his face but she knew he would be frowning, the vertical lines deepening between his eyebrows.

Carefully, he said, ‘Do I need to worry about it?’

There was a long silence. Decide, Annie commanded herself. You must decide.

At last, recognizing her own cowardice and with the sense of a light fading somewhere as she had been afraid it would, she whispered, ‘No.’

Martin’s hand covered hers. There were paint splashes on his fingers. She could feel the set of his shoulders easing with relief.

‘I won’t worry, then.’ He squeezed her hand and let it go, and then picked up his brush to start work again.

‘What is it?’ he asked after a moment. ‘Pre-marital itch?’

‘I suppose so,’ she said dully. She despised herself for reducing Matthew to that, even for Martin’s sake.

The time trickled by. It was the hottest summer for years, and every day that passed seemed burnt into her memory by the blistering heat of the pavements and the hard blue light of the sky. Matthew finished his carpentry work at the shop and he moved out of the grubby little room. He was staying with another friend now, unrolling his sleeping bag on yet another sofa. Annie wouldn’t let him come to her flat because Martin had a key to it too. They met when and where they could, and she was amazed by his ability to make her forget everything else that was happening. He made her feel irresponsibly happy. When she was with him, she knew that this was reality, and the other half of her life, the half that was occupied with shopping for clothes for her honeymoon and choosing flowers for her bouquet, was the dreamworld.

Then, only a week before the wedding, Matthew asked her again.

They were at yet another friend’s home, but the house was empty for the weekend this time and so Matthew automatically made it his own. They were in bed, and Annie was lying with her hair spread out over the pillow. She was thinking exhaustedly, This must be the last time.

‘Annie, will you marry me?’

Traffic noises from the street outside, and evening birds twittering in the trees in the square. She had a taste of her future with Martin as she lay there. There would be evenings like this in a house that was really theirs. Peace, and comfort, cooking smells and simple domestic rhythms, and Martin who she knew, and understood, and loved. She closed her eyes so as not to see Matthew’s face, because what she felt for him went deeper than love.

‘I can’t jilt him,’ she whispered. ‘I can’t marry you.’

‘Those are two quite distinct and separate incapabilities,’ he told her gently. ‘Which is the real one?’

What would it be like to be married to Matthew?

There would be a succession of rented rooms, and Matthew would manage to make her feel that they were palaces. There would be the wild swings from penury to extravagance and back again, and no two days would ever follow each other in the same way. She was sure that they would be happy. Ever since she had known him he had made happiness blaze like fire inside her. What she didn’t know was how long that could last.

She was afraid that a day would come when the discomforts would begin to matter, and pleasure would fade into resentment. The shortcomings were her own. She was cautious and predictable and careful, and Matthew was none of those things. She longed to be like him, to cut herself loose and sail with him, but she couldn’t do it. She would live her life with Martin and it would be tranquil, and sunny, and safe. The peaks of joy would be out of her reach, but she didn’t think that there were troughs of despair waiting for her either.

She made herself meet Matthew’s steady grey stare.

‘I’m a coward,’ she said. ‘I can’t marry you.’

He bent his head. Their fingers were locked together and the knuckles of both hands were white. Then he looked up again.

‘I know why you think you can’t. You believe that married men have mortgages and salaries to meet them, and prospects and some kind of security to offer you. You’re afraid that after a while you’ll begin to resent me because I haven’t. That’s true, isn’t it?’

She nodded miserably. There was more than that, but that was the stupid, pedestrian nub of it.

‘Well. I went to see my father today. I asked him for a job in the company. There was a long lecture about having to start at the bottom like everyone else. Learn the business. Not expect any quarter just because I’m the boss’s son. Work hard and prove my worth.’ Matthew’s face was a picture of resigned boredom. It made her laugh in the midst of everything, and he beamed back at her. ‘I nearly threw one of his onyx inlaid executive toys at him, but I restrained myself for your sake. After the lecture he told me that he was glad I’d decided to pull myself up by my boot-straps … boot-straps, I promise you … and I could certainly have some simple tasks allotted to me within the corporate structure. So there, now.’ His smile was dazzling. ‘I’ll be so exactly like everyone else that only experts like you will be able to tell the difference. I’ll be able to buy you a diamond ring, and a three-piece suite and a Kenwood Chef, if that’s what you really want.’

He was trying to make her laugh because he didn’t want her to guess the magnitude of what he was really offering. He was holding out everything he valued, his freedom and his independence, for her to take and dispose of. Annie felt the tears like needles behind her eyes.

‘I don’t want you to do anything for my sake. I don’t want to see you go off every morning in a suit. Thank you for offering to do it, but I’m not worth it.’

She hadn’t meant to let him see her crying, but the tears came anyway. Matthew made a little, bitter noise.

‘I can’t win, can I? You won’t marry me when I have no prospects. You won’t marry me when I do, because Matthew with prospects isn’t Matthew.’

A space had opened between them, mocking their physical closeness, and Annie knew that they would never bridge it again.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said hopelessly. She felt smaller, and more selfish and more ashamed, than she had ever done in her life.

‘Tell me one thing,’ he said. ‘Tell me that it isn’t just because you haven’t the guts to cancel your wedding and send back the horrible presents and shock all your mother’s friends.’

Annie lifted her chin to look straight at him. ‘If I was courageous enough to marry you, I would be courageous enough to do all that.’

Matthew let go of her hand. He slid away from her across the bed and lay looking through the window into the trees in the square.

‘All the time,’ he said softly, almost to himself, ‘all the time until tonight I was sure that I could win.’

There was nothing else to say. Heavy with the knowledge that she had disappointed him Annie slid out of bed and put her clothes on. When she was dressed she went to the bedroom door and stood for a moment looking at him, but Matthew never turned his gaze from the trees outside the window. She closed the bedroom door and went downstairs, and out into the square where the day’s heat still hung lifelessly over the paving stones.

She never saw Matthew again.

She went home to her flat, and found Martin sitting at the kitchen table waiting for her.

‘I’m back,’ she said simply. Her face still felt stiff with dried tears.

Martin stood up and came across the room to her, then put his arms around her and held her against him.

‘I’m glad, Annie.’

They were married a week later on a brilliantly bright July day. Their approving families were there, and the dozens of friends they had accumulated over the years of knowing one another, and they had walked out under the rainbow hail of confetti to smile at the photographer who was waiting to capture their memories for them. The photograph stood in a silver frame on the bow-fronted mahogany chest in their bedroom. Eleven years later, when she picked the photograph up to dust it and glanced down into her own face, Annie had forgotten how painful that smile had been.

‘I had forgotten,’ she said. ‘But it’s so vivid now. I can see his face so clearly.’

The boat was rocking gently on the dark water, and in that movement Steve’s hand had become Matthew’s, holding hers, pulling her back. His voice was different but she knew his face, and the way he moved, and she could remember every hour that they had spent together as if she was reliving them.

For an instant she was suffused with happiness. It isn’t too late, she thought. Why was I so sure that it was?

She smiled, and then felt the stinging pain at the corner of her mouth where the blood had dried.

Not Matthew’s hand. This man was Steve, a stranger, and now more important to her than anyone. She felt another pain, not physical now but as quick and sharp as a razor slash. It was the pain of longing and regret.

‘I wish I could reach you,’ she said. ‘I wish we could hold on to each other.’

Tears began to run out of the corners of her eyes and she felt them running backwards into her knotted hair.

‘We are holding each other,’ Steve said. ‘Here.’

The pressure of his hand came again, but Annie ached to turn and find the warmth of him, pressing her face against his human shelter. She was afraid that the weeping would take possession of her. It pulled at her face with its fingers, distorting her mouth into a gaping square and the blood began to run again from the corner of it.

‘It’s too late,’ she cried out, ‘too late for everything.’

This was the end, here in their tomb of wreckage. The tidy plait of her life stretched behind her, the stridently glittering threads of the past softened by time into muted harmonies of colour. Martin and she had woven it together. She thought of her husband and of Thomas and Benjamin left to look at the brutally severed plait, the raw ends uselessly fraying. Sobs pulled at her shoulders, and her hair tore at her scalp.

‘Don’t cry,’ Steve said. ‘Please, Annie, darling, don’t cry. It isn’t too late.’ If they only could hold each other, he thought, they could draw the shared warmth around them like armour. He tried to move again, and knew that he couldn’t pull his crushed leg with him.

‘My mother’s ill,’ Annie said abruptly. ‘She’s got cancer, they’ve just told her. It must be just the same.’

Steve could follow her thoughts, unconfined, flickering to and fro. The extra dimension of understanding was eerie but he took it gratefully. ‘No,’ he contradicted her. ‘Not the same sense of loss. No waste. Your mother has seen you grow up, marry. Seen her grandchildren. Illness isn’t the same as … violence.’

He wouldn’t say violent death, but he sensed Annie’s telepathic hearing as clear as his own.

‘Perhaps … perhaps everyone’s death is violent, when it comes.’

They were silent then, but they were unified by fear and they could hear one another’s thoughts, whispered in childlike voices quite unlike their own.

‘If they come for us in time,’ Annie said, ‘and there is any life left for us that isn’t just lying here, I won’t let any more of the days go. I’ll count each one. I’ll make it live. I’ve shrugged so many days off without a single memory. Dull days. Resigned days. Just one of them would be so precious now. Do you understand, Steve?’

‘Oh yes,’ he answered. ‘I understand. Annie, when we’re free we can do whatever we like.’

Steve tried to think about how it would be, and nothing would come except confused images of Vicky, and of unimportant restaurants where he had sat over lunches, and of preview theatres where he waited in the dark for clients to watch their fifteen-or thirty-second loop of commercial over and over again. ‘Run it through a couple more times, David, will you?’ His own voice. ‘Did you learn all that at LMH?’ The self he had been. Work and play, alternating, undifferentiated, spooling backwards. And now the tape snapped, and the film he had only been half-watching might never start up again.

Steve opened his eyes on the real darkness. He seemed to have been groping backwards for hours, failing to find an image that he could hold on to amongst so many that flickered and vanished.

‘Annie?’ he called out, seized with sudden panic. ‘Are you still there?’

‘Yes.’

She sounded drowsy, too far away from him.

‘Annie?’

He could hear the effort, but she responded at last. ‘Yes. I’m still here.’

‘Talk to me again. About your mother. Anything, just go on talking.’

‘I …’ she sighed, a faint expiry of breath and he knew that he was only imagining the brush of it on his cheek. ‘I can’t talk any more. You talk, Steve. I like to hear your voice.’

When was the last time? That was what he wanted to catch hold of before it was too late, the last time he had felt the rawness of wanting something very much. The last time he had wanted something in the way that he wanted to live now, because he wouldn’t be defeated by a maniac’s bomb. Was that the key to it? Because he wouldn’t be defeated …

Steve felt his head thickening, the thoughts and memories beginning to short-circuit. He forced his eyes open wide, willing himself to hold on to consciousness, and he began to talk.

‘A long time ago. So long I’d forgotten how important it was. I wanted to get away, that was it. My Nan’s flat, Bow High Street, three floors up. From the moment I went to live there, I wanted to get away.’

It had taken long enough, but he’d made it in the end. When the day came he went into the little room that led off Nan’s kitchen and stuffed jerseys and shirts into his blue duffel bag. Nan was sitting in the kitchen watching the television. He could see her bulk past the half-open door, and the tablecloth half-folded back over the Formica-topped table, and the brown teapot and milk bottle, and her cup and saucer waiting to be refilled with thick brown tea.

‘Off again, are you?’ she shouted over the din of the television.

There had been trial getaways before this. Plenty of Saturday-night stopovers in overcrowded flats when those who were left behind after the part petered out had just fallen asleep wherever they fell down. There had even been a week, not long ago, when he had stayed with a girl up near Victoria Park. That had been too good to last, of course. She’d seen through his assumed adult suavity all too quickly.

‘Sixteen? Is that how bloody old you are? Sixteen? Go on, get back to your mother before they come and lock me up for corrupting infants.’

Nan had welcomed him back, and the sharpness of her tongue didn’t disguise her relief. ‘Where the hell d’you think you’ve been? Not a word from you for a week. Didn’t you know I’d be worried stiff? You’ll end up like your Dad, Stevie, after all I’ve done.’

He put his arms around her. She was fat, but she was also frail and she could only move stiffly across the poky kitchen.

‘I will not end up like my Dad. You know that.’

Nan had shifted her dental plate with the tip of her tongue and said acidly, ‘Perhaps not. But there’s plenty of other ways of going to the bad. I daresay you’ll manage to find one that suits you.’

There had been calm after that for several months.

Now, as he closed the empty drawers in his bedroom one by one, he tried calling out, ‘Nan? Nan, I’m going to live up West …’

She couldn’t hear him, of course. The television obliterated everything. So he had finished his methodical packing, even taking down his childhood posters of West Ham United and Buddy Holly and folding them up. Then he went into the kitchen and put his assortment of bags down on the cracked lino floor. He crossed to the vast television set and turned the volume knob, and silence descended.

‘Eh? I was watching that, Stevie. Don’t play about, there’s a good boy.’

‘Nan, I want to talk to you. I’m going to live up West. I’ve got a room and everything. I’ll be all right.’

He had been so callous in those days. Nan had just sat and stared at him, with her big pale fingers twisting in her lap.

‘Eh? Live up there? What for? You live here, love. Ever since you were that high.’

She held her palm out, a couple of feet off the lino, and Steve thought, Yes, I do remember. And ever since I’ve wanted to get out. ‘I can’t live here for ever, Nan. I want to get on. I’ll come and see you weekends, I promise.’

Her face went sullen then. ‘After all I’ve done,’ she murmured.

She had done everything, of course. Mothered him and fended for him, and bought his food and clothes for ten years. He couldn’t pay her back for her devotion, he knew that with chilly sixteen-year-old detachment.

‘I’ll come and see you often,’ he repeated. ‘And as soon as I’ve made it I’ll buy you a better place, up near me or here, whichever you like.’

‘Make it?’ she snapped at him. ‘How are you going to do that? What about school? You could go to college. Mr Grover told me himself.’

Patiently he had tried to explain it to her. ‘I don’t need to go to college. It’s a waste of time, all that. I’ve got a job, Nan. I’m not going back to school.’

She was too angry to listen to him. So he had hugged her unyielding bulk, picked up his belongings, and marched out.

All he felt was relief as he left the Peabody Buildings. He bumped past each pair of heavily-curled brown-painted balcony railings, down the tight spiral of stone steps to the road. He walked briskly up the street to the bus stop and then stood peering eastwards into the traffic for the first sight of the bus that would take him up West for good.

The job was as a messenger for an advertising agency, and his home was a second-floor bedsitter with a restricted view straight down into the Earl’s Court Road. As soon as he arrived, Steve knew that he would never look back. After eighteen months as the Thompson, Wright, Rivington messenger boy he was offered the humblest of jobs in the media buying department. That job led to another and then another, and then to the huge leap upstairs to the circus of the creative floor. From Thompson, Wright, Rivington he was headhunted by another agency, and he began to enjoy money for the first time in his life.

Then, Steve remembered, I wanted everything. I was so busy making sure I got it that I never thought about anything else.

There were plenty of other people like him, and the time was ripe for all of them. His agency career began with the first shy appearances of pink shirts at client meetings, and it blossomed all through the sixties and into the seventies between lunches at the Terrazza and afternoons at the Colony Club, punctuated by parties swaying with girls in miniskirts and location shoots in exotic places and creative crises when somebody, usually Steve himself, managed to come up with a headline in the nick of time. Perhaps it hadn’t really been like that at all. It felt too far back to remember. But it had seemed easy and so congenial that for a long, long time he had gobbled up everything that came his way.

Some time during those years, Nan had died. Steve had been in Cannes at the time of the funeral, doing business, and he couldn’t fly back home for it. But he had paid for everything to be done properly. And he had sent a wreath, which was more than Nan’s only daughter, Steve’s mother, had bothered to do. If she even knew that her mother was dead. Steve himself had hardly seen her since she had taken him, at the age of six, to live with his grandmother.

‘Poor Nan,’ he said softly. And then, is remembering always feeling ashamed?

No, it wasn’t so for Annie. Annie had fulfilled all kinds of promises that he had broken himself. Steve felt the slash of regret and telepathically she whispered, ‘It isn’t too late.’

His reaction to the pain was anger instead of fear now. He heard himself shouting, ‘Where are they then? Why don’t they come for us, before it is too late?’

The mass hanging over them swallowed the sound and gave nothing back. They couldn’t hear anything at all.

‘Oh, Jesus,’ Steve said.

‘It’s all right.’ Annie soothed him as if he were Benjy. ‘You believe that they’ll reach us in time. You made me believe, too. They’ll come. We must just hold on … What are you doing?’

Steve was disentangling his hand from hers.

‘I want to find out how long it’s been.’ His fingers felt swollen and hooked with cramp as he fumbled painfully for the watch.

‘We must hold on,’ Annie repeated, as if she was obediently reciting a rote lesson, ‘until they come for us.’

Steve realized how much of her strength she was drawing from his reassurance, and wondered how long that could last. He felt much weaker now, and the pain from his leg clawed across his hip and stomach. He drew the watch out and laid it face upwards on his chest. Again he traced over the tiny hands with his fingertip. Suddenly dizziness enveloped him as he struggled to make sense of what he could feel. The hands were almost vertical, opposite to one another, and he touched the winder button to make sure.

Six o’clock … it could be six o’clock. If it was six o’clock it would be dark outside too. How could they search in the dark? Lights. Of course, they would bring emergency generators. They wouldn’t stop looking until they had found the two of them. Steve struggled to draw sense out of the tiny, baffling circle and suddenly realized with a wave of relief, not six o’clock … It was half past twelve. Saturday lunchtime. Out there people would be cooking meals, telephoning one another, driving past twinkling shop windows on the way to warmth, doors closing against the wind, the sound of voices. The dizziness disorientated him, and he was shivering.

‘Annie …’ He moved involuntarily, too quickly, and the watch dropped out of his grasp. He heard it rattling and then clinking to rest somewhere beneath him. It was gone.

‘I’m here,’ she said. ‘Go on talking.’

‘I’m very thirsty,’ Steve answered. He was sleepy too, but he wouldn’t let that take hold of him. He began to talk again. His voice sounded slurred and he breathed deeper to control it.

What had happened? Some time during those agency years, without Steve ever having time to recognize it, he had stopped wanting anything. He had stopped feeling hungry. He almost laughed at the obviousness of it now. But the pleasure of being in the thick of such a business, where huge sums of money were treated so anarchically and still successfully, had faded too. It wasn’t just his own appetite that had gone.

By the mid-seventies most of the parties were long over. Budgets were being cut back and unprofitable companies were toppling everywhere. The lunch-tables were ordered by a new breed of accountants, and to describe something as ‘Mickey Mouse’ was no longer a kind of inverted, admiring compliment. Steve’s job was never threatened, he was too good at it for that, but most of what he had liked about it was gone. Holding-company decisions and corporate images and long-term business projections bored him. He liked making commercials, and his freedom to do so was increasingly restricted.

He had known Bob Jefferies for two or three years before Bob suggested that they might set up on their own together. Bob was shrewd enough, and he was also unusually clever. He had been at the LSE while Steve was riding his Thompson, Wright, Rivington scooter around the West End delivering packages of artwork. And Bob’s proposal came at the tail end of a particularly dreary week.

Steve looked at him across the table in Zanzibar and shrugged. ‘Yes, I’ll come in with you. Why not?’

Bob exhaled sharply, irritated. ‘Christ, Steve, don’t you ever think anything out?’

Steve grinned at him. ‘You do that. I’ll make the commercials.’

That was how they had arranged it, and it had worked.

At the beginning, when there were just the two of them and an assistant and a girl to answer the telephones, it had even felt important. Not as exciting as the old Earl’s Court days, because Steve knew exactly what success would buy him if it came. But interesting enough to absorb his attention and energies for a while. Then the studio diaries filled up, and they took on new staff, and moved to the offices in Ingestre Place.

After that the images slid together again. There was Cass’s face looking down at him from the hoardings, and Vicky in her thick jersey and unflattering spectacles, his office with half a dozen people sitting around the table, and nothing that he could pick out and hold on to while the dizziness swooped down around him.

Annie’s voice came out of the darkness. ‘You sound important.’

She sounded stronger than he did now, and he took hold of that gratefully.

‘No. There are plenty of companies like ours. I made some money, if you think that’s important.’

‘Steve?’

‘I’m listening.’

‘When all this is over, will you give me a job?’

A job? He turned his face towards the sound of her, caught short in his disjointed recollections by the recognition of her casual courage. For a moment the dizziness lifted and his head was as clear as a bell again.

‘I don’t think I’ve got a card with me. But I’ll give you my number …’

‘And I can leave my name with your secretary …’

‘I’ll get back to you if there’s anything suitable on the books …’

They laughed in unison, crazy-sounding but it was real laughter, and it set the dust billowing in invisible clouds around them.

The traffic stood motionless in every direction. Martin peered ahead down the long line of cars and buses, and then over his shoulder at the blank faces waiting in the vehicles crammed behind him. In his panicky rush he hadn’t stopped to think that the streets surrounding the bombed store would be thrown into chaos. He sat with his hands rigid on the steering wheel, trying to decide what to do. The news bulletins on the car radio told him hardly anything more than he already knew, yet his conviction that Annie was there deepened with every minute.

The press of cars moved forward a few yards and then stopped again. Martin could see the junction a hundred yards ahead of him now, where a solitary policewoman was diverting the traffic northwards, the wrong way, and he was still nearly a mile from Annie’s store. He looked quickly from side to side, searching for a way out of the dense, immobile mass. He saw a narrow turning twenty yards ahead, on the wrong side of the road across three jammed lanes, but as soon as the next inching forwards began Martin turned on his headlights, rammed his finger on the horn and swung the car sideways. Oblivious to the storm of hooting that rose up around him he forced his way through the maze and shot down into the mews. He abandoned his car against a garage door and began to run.

The network of little streets at the back of the store were eerily quiet with the usual press of traffic. Once, ahead of him, Martin saw a patrolling police car nose across a junction. Instinctively he ducked sideways down another turning, and ran on until a stitch stabbed viciously into his side.

His feet seemed to drum out Annie, Annie, as they pounded along, but it was a relief to be moving, coming closer to her.

The streets nearest to the store had been cleared once by the police but there were still people passing quietly, in twos and threes. They turned to stare at Martin but he didn’t see them. At last, with the blood pounding in his ears, he turned the last corner and saw what was left of Annie’s store. He pushed through the people who still stood gaping outside the police cordons, and stared upwards. Terrified fear for her froze him motionless.

Some of the giant letters spelling out the shop’s name that hadn’t been blown away hung at crazy angles. One of them swung outwards, buffeted by the wind. On either side of the name Christmas trees hung with golden lights had stood on ledges. There were a few tattered shreds of green left now, and the lights had been blown out with all the others. High above the remains of the trees the shop was open to the sky, because the roof had gone. The front of it looked as if a giant fist had smashed downwards, ripping through the floors like tissue paper, and as he looked at it a jagged column of masonry seemed to sway, ready to topple inwards.

On either side, away from its ruined centre, the façade was a blinded expanse of broken windows. Decorations had spilled out of the windows and they lay ruined in the street on top of the shattered glass. Everywhere, beneath the buckled walls and in and out of the smashed windows, rescue workers swarmed to and fro, pathetically small, like busy ants over some huge carcass.

Martin stared at the torn-out heart of the shop. It was impossible to imagine that anyone could be alive in there.

He heard the words of the radio announcer repeating themselves endlessly inside his skull. A second body has been recovered from the store in London’s West End, severely damaged by a bomb explosion this morning.

Not Annie, please, not Annie. If she is in there …

Martin’s limbs began to work again. He stumbled forwards, elbowing his way brutally until he came up against the cordons. He clambered through them, thinking blindly that he would run forward to stand beneath the twisted letters and call out her name.

A police constable moved quickly to intercept him, putting his black-leather hand on his arm.

‘Would you move back behind the barricade, sir. This way.’

‘I’m looking for my wife. She’s in there somewhere.’

The policeman hesitated for a moment in propelling Martin backwards. Martin saw the young face twitch with sympathy under the helmet.

‘Do you know for sure that your wife was in there, sir?’

Martin thought, he didn’t know anything. Annie could be anywhere in London. But yet he was sure, with sick, intuitive certainty, that she was here.

‘Not for certain. But she could be.’

The policeman’s brisk manner reasserted itself. There was a procedure to follow. He guided Martin back across the tapes, and they faced each other over them. The officer pointed away down the displaced street.

‘If you will go to the local station, sir, down there on the left …’

He knew where it was. Once, when he and Annie had been out shopping, they had found a gold earring on the pavement. She had insisted on taking it to the police station, and he had waited impatiently beside her while the desk sergeant wrote everything in the lost property file.

‘… they will take down your wife’s details. And there is a number you can ring at Scotland Yard. They’ll give you more information there.’

I want to help her. Over the man’s shoulder Martin looked at the devastation again, and felt his own impotence. His fists clenched involuntarily, aching to reach out and pull at the rubble, to uncover her and set her free.

He shrugged uncertainly and turned away from the barrier. The watchers stood aside to let him through, and he walked down the road to the police station.

They showed him to a corridor lined with hard chairs. There was an office at the far end with a frosted glass panel in the closed door. Two or three people were sitting in a row, waiting, not looking at one another, and the stagnant air smelt of their anxiety.

Martin sat down in the empty chair at the end of the line.

The minutes ticked by and he thought about Annie and the boys. Whenever the question What would we do, without her? reared up he tried to make himself face it, but there was nothing he could see beyond it. It was impossible to envisage. He couldn’t think beyond the diminished figures of the firemen that he had seen, working away up the road. He thought about them instead, willing them to uncover her, as if the intensity of his longing would spur them on.

The door at the end of the corridor opened and a woman came out. Someone else from the silent line went in in her place, and the rest of them went on helplessly waiting. A fat woman in a checked overall came past and asked if anyone wanted a cup of tea from the canteen. Martin shook his head numbly.

At last, after what seemed like hours, it was his turn. The office was cramped, lined with steel filing cabinets. A police sergeant sat behind the desk with a young WPC beside him. They nodded reassuringly at Martin, and the sergeant asked him to sit down.

As Martin answered their questions, the girl filled in a sheet of paper. He gave Annie’s name and age, her general description. They asked him why he thought she had been in the shop and he answered, unable to convey his fearful conviction, simply that it seemed likely.

‘I’ve got a photograph of her here,’ he said.

Martin took out his wallet. In a pocket at the back there was a snapshot of Annie playing in the garden with the boys. She was laughing, and Benjy was standing between her knees, twisting the hem of her skirt. He pushed the photograph across the desk to the sergeant and then demanded, ‘Do you know anything? Can’t you tell me anything at all?’

The policewoman turned her pen over and over in her fingers while her colleague spoke.

‘As you must know, everything is being done that can be done to explore the shop for possible survivors, and the operation will continue until it is quite certain that no one is left inside. One survivor has been located in the last hour, using thermal imaging equipment, and they should reach him very soon.’

The wild, hopeful flicker was extinguished almost as soon as it had shone out.

‘Him?’

‘Yes. It’s a man, apparently not badly hurt.’

So it was possible, then, for someone to survive under that landslide of rubble. The hope it gave him helped Martin to confront the next question.

‘And the two … bodies that have already been recovered?’

‘Both have been positively identified. They were store employees.’

He wanted to put his hands up to cover his face, letting it sag with relief, but he sat still, ashamed to feel so grateful for the news of someone else’s death.

‘I would go home, sir, and wait there. We’ll contact you immediately if there is any news of your wife.’

The interview was over. Martin got up reluctantly and then stood holding on to the chair back.

‘Or you could wait here,’ the WPC said. It was the first time she had spoken and she glanced nervously at her companion. He nodded, and looked past Martin at the door.

‘Thank you,’ Martin said. He had never intended to go home while Annie might need him here.

‘When your wife does come home, sir,’ the sergeant called after him, ‘would you be kind enough to let us know at once?’

Martin nodded and went out into the stale, chilly air of the corridor again. Instead of sitting down he found his way by the scent of fried food down the stairs to the canteen in the basement. There was a public telephone under a blue plastic hood beside the swing doors. He dialled the familiar number and counted the rings. One … two … Audrey answered before the second one was complete. She sounded breathless, as if she had run to do it.

‘It’s Martin. Have you heard from her?’

In the background he could hear Tom’s voice calling out, ‘Is it Mummy?’ Martin closed his eyes and hunched his shoulders, as if he were waiting for someone to hit him.

‘No,’ Audrey said.

Martin looked at his watch. It was ten to one. Wouldn’t Annie have telephoned, by now, to make sure that everything was all right? He knew there was no particular reason why she should, but the knowledge that she hadn’t reinforced his conviction. She was in the store. Every minute that passed made it more certain.

‘I’m at the police station,’ he said. ‘They can’t tell me much. None of the … ones they have found is Annie. They don’t know any more than that. I’m going to stay here and wait.’

‘Yes,’ Audrey answered, ‘you’d best stay there. We’ll be all right here …’ The dialling tone cut her short. Martin had already hung up and gone. He ran up the stairs again, and walked out of the police station into the street. In front of the store the yellow latticework of a crane stood idle. He walked towards it, into the wind, shivering. He passed the enclave of television cameras and waiting pressmen and thought, with unreasoning savagery, that they were like vultures hovering before the kill. He walked on around the outer edge of the barriers until he came to the point where the policeman had blocked his way. He looked up, over the heads of the crowd. It seemed impossible that the crumpled front of the store could remain standing. As he watched it seemed to sway, curling inwards with a shower of falling fragments that drew clouds of whitish dust down with them.

Martin shivered, and he realized that the wind was strengthening. It swept across the street, lifting a torn paper wrapper into the air before pasting it to the wet roadway again. Even above the noise of the wind, Martin thought he could hear the creak of broken girders as the concrete weight shifted and then settled itself for another moment or two, before the next gust came.

A police van inched along the inside of the cordon. Behind it the police were moving the watchers back, all the way back up the road. More steel barriers were lifted out of the van and pushed into place. Looking backwards, as he was ushered out of range with everyone else, Martin saw a group of men in protective helmets moving under the threatening frontage. The crane swung slowly round. He understood that they were going to try to push the wall outwards so that it collapsed into the street.

They would have to do it quickly, before it fell of its own accord the other way.

Three

Annie was thinking about the wedding picture. Not her own and Martin’s this time. Theirs was as bright as a paintbox with the splashed colours of the girls’ dresses and the vivid blue sky behind the church. She was thinking about her parents’, in a big, old-fashioned leather frame, standing on a table to the left of the fireplace in their sitting room. Theirs was black and white with a faint brownish cast that was deepening with age. It was wartime, and her mother was wearing a two-piece costume with square shoulders and a little hat perched on one side of her head. Her hair was in a roll to frame her face. Her father was beaming in his army uniform. His face had hardly changed, except for thinning hair and lines dug beside his mouth and around his eyes. Her mother was barely recognizable. She had had full cheeks then, and her smile was lavishly painted with dark, shiny lipstick.

Annie was very cold.

The drifting sensation was still with her, but it wasn’t like being in a boat on a calm lake any more. She felt that she was floating towards the big, blank mouth of a tunnel. She didn’t want the tunnel to swallow her and so she gripped Steve’s hand as if he were reaching out from the bank to pull her out of the rushing water.

‘It’s so cold,’ she said.

Steve was straining to hear. He had thought for a moment that he caught the clink of metal overhead, a harsh scraping, and the sound of voices not his own or Annie’s.

If they were really coming … If it was soon, they would be all right. Time had lost its meaning now, and Steve cursed the watch irretrievably lost somewhere underneath him. He could hold on himself, but he didn’t know about Annie. He couldn’t hear the noises any more.

‘It won’t be much longer,’ he promised her. ‘Talk to me, if you can.’ He wanted to hear her voice, but he wanted to listen for the other sounds too. He felt himself shaking with the effort of it, his eyes wide open and staring as if he could hear with them in the dark.

‘I was thinking about my father and mother,’ Annie whispered. ‘I didn’t suffer anything when I was a kid, Steve. Not like you. It was all smooth. They made it smooth for me. They always believed in routine, and their lives run like clockwork now. I wonder …’ she breathed in painfully, ‘how happy they’ve been.’

The water stopped rushing forward and seemed to eddy in a wide circle, swinging her round with it, so that all her perspectives changed. She had been thinking about her mother and father as a way of keeping a hold on herself, building them into the bridge of words that linked her to Steve. But now she caught a reflected image of marriages, seeing how hers mirrored theirs, and her parents’ back to her grandparents’, the same coupled conspiracies perpetuating themselves.

What had her mother missed, Annie wondered, that she would never recapture? Not now, when there was nothing to do but wait for the disease to get the better of her. Like me down here, she thought, and the mirror images reflected one another down a long, cold passageway.

She saw her mother’s house, and remembered her totems. Polished parquet floors, and guest towels put neatly beside the basin in the downstairs cloakroom when visitors came. Her store cupboard was always well filled, and there were best tablecloths carefully folded in the drawer underneath the everyday ones. Annie had a faint recollection that there were even certain teatowels kept for best, but the caked blood at the corner of her mouth dried the smile before it began.

The thirties house on the corner of a quiet, sunny street was too big for her parents now, but it still shone from daily polishing and it still smelt of formally-arranged flowers, even though most of the rooms were unused.

Seeing it, Annie felt a sudden, infinite sadness. All her mother’s adult life had been devoted to servicing a house, and when she died her husband would sell up, new people would move in and knock down walls and laugh at the outmoded décor, and there would be nothing left of her. How hollow it was, Annie thought, that her house should be her memorial. It had contained her like a shell and inside it she had waited for her husband’s comings and goings. From the shelter of it she had watched her children until they grew too big and went away.

Annie realized that she had no idea about the marriage that had kept it polished. The house had been its emblem, tidy and clean, and she had assumed that the one stood for the other. Like their house, her parents’ marriage had seemed decent, and respectable. What else?

The sense of how little she knew shocked her.

Martin and me … The same, or different?

The house was no totem, but she loved the things that they had done in it together, and its warmth lapped around the four of them. Yet perhaps she was making the ways of it stand in the place of something else, something once fresh that had faded with middle age. Was it the lost sense of that that had made her think of Matthew?

Annie stirred, turning her face in the sloping space under the door. The smoothness of it felt as cold as a sheet of ice. The reflections had gone and she couldn’t recapture the chilling insight. Everything was confused – her childhood home with the house she shared with Martin, rooms superimposed and faces blurring together. She only knew that she had been happy with Martin. A weak longing for him washed over her like a wave.

Where was he? Wouldn’t he know what had happened, because he knew her well enough to read her thoughts, and so come for her?

She closed her eyes and lay thinking about him. He felt very close, as if his body was part of hers and sharing the same pain. It was his hand holding hers, not Matthew’s, and not the stranger’s.

Man and wife, Annie thought, knitted together by time and habit. The full span of their years seemed to present itself for her recollection, measurable. Annie felt a new throb of terror with the speculation: Is that because it’s finished? The weight above her pressed malevolently downwards. Completed. No, not completed but severed. The image of the plait, blunt ends fraying, came back to her. Yet, she thought sadly, yesterday she had had no sense that she and Martin were constructing anything together, not any more. They had made their marriage and were sure of it. They were busy with the small tasks of maintenance now, not preoccupied by the grand design. It was time that was not fulfilled.

It was to be cheated of the years of calm living in the structure they had created that was bitter, Annie understood. She had taken the promise of years for granted. There would be the boys growing up, Martin and herself moving more slowly together, in harmony. Or there would be nothing. Only death, and the people she loved left behind without her.

She wondered if there would be the same bitterness if she had simply fallen ill like her mother, and been gently told that she had only a little longer. She would have had time, then, to make her goodbyes. To neaten those terrible ends, at the very least. But it would be just the same, she thought. She would feel the same loss and the same fear. Annie had a sudden unbearable longing for life, for all the promises she had never made, let alone never kept, all the conversations unshared, all the bridges of human contact that she had never crossed and never would. The vastness of what she was struggling to confront was ready to crush her. I’m going to die, Annie thought.

The blackness was utterly unmoving but she felt it poised, greedily ready to consume her and to push the tiny coloured pictures out of her head.

I’m sorry. The words swelled, dancing above her, dinning in her ears. Surely they were loud enough? I’m sorry. She wanted Martin to hear them, somehow. She had failed him, and their children, and she knew how much they needed her. ‘I’m afraid,’ Annie said again. ‘I’m afraid to die.’

Steve lay rigid, thinking, I don’t know what to say. He had been absorbed in trying to imagine it as one more thing to get the better of. He felt it facing him, as tense as an animal ready to spring, but it was he who was cornered. I don’t know what to say to her. I’ve always known what to say. I’ve been so bloody sharp. I’ve cut myself. He heard Nan warning him, back in the kitchen three floors up behind Bow High Street. And now. Now there was this.

‘I’m afraid too,’ Steve whispered.

The confession of their fear drew them close, and the spectre of it moved back and let them breathe a little. Steve and Annie couldn’t huddle together and keep it at bay but they felt one another in their fingertips. Their hands became themselves.

‘Thank God you’re here,’ Annie said. And then, after a minute, ‘Steve? If it comes, will you be here with me?’

If death comes, that’s what she means, Steve thought. Will I be with her through it?

‘Yes,’ he promised her. ‘I’ll be here.’

We’ll wait, together.

Annie took the reassurance, and Steve’s admission of his own fear, and built them into her barricades. The terror receded a little further. She used the respite to look at the pictures that whirled in her head like confetti, examining each one and setting it in its place. It became very important to make a logical sequence of them. Annie frowned, gathering the ragged edges of concentration. So many little pieces of confetti.

There was Martin, on the day that they met. That’s right, that one would come first. She looked at the fragment carefully. He was sitting at the next table, in the coffee bar in Old Compton Street favoured by students from St Martin’s. Annie was in her foundation year, and Martin was two years ahead of her. She had seen him before, in the corridors and once across the room at a party, without noticing him in particular. He had long hair and a leather jacket, artfully ripped, like everyone else’s. Today he was drawing on an artists’ pad, his head bent in concentration. She remembered sitting in the warm, steamy atmosphere listening to the hiss of the coffee machines behind the high counter. The boy at the next table had finished his drawing and looked up, smiling at her.

‘Another coffee?’ he asked.

He brought two cups over to her table, and she tilted her head to look at the drawing under his arm. Obligingly he held it out and she saw an intricately shaded pencil drawing of the coffee bar with the chrome-banded sweep of the counter, the polished levers of the Gaggia machine and the owner’s brilliantined head bent behind it. At her table, close to the counter, he had drawn in her friends but Annie’s chair was empty.

‘Why haven’t you drawn me?’ she demanded and he answered, ‘Well, that would have been rather obvious of me, wouldn’t it?’

He’s nice, Annie thought.

She felt the intriguing mixture of excitement and anticipation that she recalled years afterwards as the dominant flavour of those days. Everything that happened was an adventure, every corner turned presented an enticing new vista.

‘What’s your name?’ the boy asked her. ‘I’ve seen you at the college, haven’t I?’

‘Anne. Annie,’ she corrected herself. Since leaving school she had discarded sixth-form gawky Anne in favour of Annie, free-wheeling art student with her Sassoon bob and cut-out Courrèges boots.

‘I’m Martin.’

And so they had met, and the strands had been picked out and pulled together in the first tentative knot. Martin had taken a crumpled handbill from his pocket. It was the term’s programme from the college film society.

‘Look. Zéro de Conduite. Have you seen it?’ And then when Annie shook her head, ‘You really should. Would you like to come with me?’

For all their protestations of freedom they had still been very conventional, all that time ago. He had invited her to see a film and she had accepted, and he had taken her for supper afterwards at the Sorrento.

But there was no fragment to illustrate what had happened next. She simply couldn’t remember. All she could see was herself, trudging through the rain in the streets beyond Battersea Park, with Martin’s address burning in her pocket. He must have taken her out once or twice and then moved on to someone else. Was that it?

Perhaps. And perhaps she had been smitten by the anguish that was as much part of those days as the enchantment. She had determined that she wouldn’t let him go, and had boldly gone to the registry to find his address. But she could see her nineteen-year-old self so clearly, in her white plastic mac dotted with shilling-sized black spots, splashing through the puddles wearing her tragic sadness like a black cloak. Just as Jeanne Moreau did, or Catherine Deneuve, or whichever French actress was providing her model for that week. She was going to confront him, beg him to listen to her because she was lost without him. There was a bottle of wine in her carrier bag, and when the time came they were going to drink it together, all barriers down at last.

There, that little piece fitted there.

She had reached his door and rung the bell, her face already composed in its beautiful, sad, brave lines. Martin opened the door, brandishing a kitchen ladle. He beamed at her, and her heart lifted like a kite.

‘Oh, Annie, it’s you. Great. Just the person we need. Come in here.’

She followed him into the kitchen and stared around. It wasn’t what she had planned, not at all.

The room was packed with people, mostly ravenous-looking boys. In the middle of the table, amidst a litter of potato peelings and bottles of beer and cider, there was a slab of roast pork, half carved, with blood still oozing from a round pinky-brown patch in the centre.

‘We were going to have a house feast,’ Martin explained. ‘But the meat looks wrong. What d’you think?’

‘I think it needs about four more hours in the oven,’ Annie retorted. It was hard to maintain her Jeanne Moreau expression confronted with a piece of raw pork and a dozen hungry faces.

Martin shrugged cheerfully. ‘Oh well. Let’s stick it back in the oven and go to the pub.’

They went to the pub, and came back again much later. At some stage they ate the pork, or what was left of it. Somebody else drank Annie’s wine, and later still threw it up again. Annie didn’t care about anything except that she was with Martin. He took her upstairs to his room and put his arms round her, and they looked into each other’s eyes as if at a miracle.

‘Why did you come down here, this evening?’ he asked her and she answered, with daring simplicity, ‘Because I can’t live without you.’

‘You don’t have to,’ Martin said.

It was the truth.

After that, for a long time, all the pieces of confetti that she put into the proper sequence belonged to them both. Slowly, by the same stages that many of their friends were passing through at the same time, Martin and Annie became a couple. They explored each other, awkwardly at first, on the mattress in Martin’s room, then with daring, and then with skill that turned quite quickly into tenderness. In the same way, but even more slowly, their life in the world found its pattern, echoing the private one. The discovery of one another’s likes and pleasures was consolidated by sharing them. They launched themselves into the endless, fascinated talks that convinced them they were identical spirits. They went everywhere and did everything together, exchanging the romantic isolation of adolescence for the luxury of mutual dependence. They became, to all their friends, Martin-and-Annie.

For a while in Martin’s last year they lived together, sharing a chaotically disorganized house with three other students. There were lots of little, disjointed pictures of that time, of faces around the kitchen table and skinny legs sprawling in broken-backed armchairs. Where had all those people gone? Perhaps, Annie thought sadly, they had become Martin. Become him because all the memories of that time were crystallized in him, part of the cement that held them together. In those days, at the age of twenty, Annie had proudly acted out the role of housewife. Here was the image of herself heading for the local launderette with two bulging blue plastic carrier bags. She had cooked meals too, and folded Martin’s shirts for him.

Did I ever, she wondered, see my mother in myself? Was I never afraid that it would be the same for me, too?

No, not that. We thought we were different, so busy making new rules. We thought we had turned the world upside down because Martin used to clank about the house with a mop-up bucket. Because he used to take his turn at cooking dinners that were never ready until midnight, and left every saucepan in the house dirty.

They had been happy … There was a lot of laughter printed on those confetti fragments. Lying numbly in her tiny space with Steve’s hand her only warmth, Annie wished that she could breathe life into them again.

At the end of that time Martin had gone to work in Milan. Here, Annie saw herself with him at the airport, her face crushed against the leather shoulder of his coat as he hugged her. For two years they had separated, because they had grown out of play-acting married life.

Annie remembered the flat that she had taken. It was close to here, above the creaking weight that pinned her like a butterfly to a board. She followed the turns of the streets that would take her there, and up the stairs into her rooms. She saw the colour of the walls – had she really painted them aubergine? – and the fringed Biba lampshades. The flicker under the skin of her face might have been a smile.

At the end of two years Martin had come home from Italy. They had found each other’s company all over again, as comfortably fitting as a winter coat left on a peg all through the summer, and then gratefully put on with the coming of cold weather. Within a year they were engaged. Their parents met and approved, exchanging drinks in their similar houses, pleased that their children had found the way at last. And a year after that, with Matthew’s still face watching from inside her head, Annie was married.

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