Separate Beds (42 page)

‘Thanks,’ she said. She lifted her eyes to his. ‘Four thousand?’

‘At least.’ The skin round his eyes puckered with distress.

She stirred, sighed. ‘Oh, well, then.’

He placed his hands on her shoulders. ‘I’m so very sorry. About so much.’

She touched his hand. ‘So am I, Tom.’

They returned to the car, shrugged on jerseys and Tom remembered he had packed granola bars and orange juice. Leaning against the side of the car, they ate and drank and watched the sunset.

They didn’t talk much on the return journey, but the silence was different: easier, less charged. Annie concentrated on easing her calf, and her toe, which was, again,
threatening cramp, and relished the feel of a body that had taken vigorous exercise.

She flicked on the radio – and they caught mid-way Tom’s programme on HIV in India.

He was inordinately pleased. ‘It’s a repeat.’

As they approached the house, he asked, ‘You’re not going away tonight, are you?’

‘No. I’m at home.’ Annie squeezed her eyes shut and summoned up the golden light, the wind in her hair and the
hoo, hoo
in the silent wood. ‘Who cooks for you?’ she whispered to herself.

Chapter Twenty-five

Fetching Hermione home from hospital occupied an afternoon – an afternoon that Annie could ill spare from work but Tom had announced he wouldn’t be around.

‘What do you mean you won’t be around? Whose mother is she? I’ll have to take a half-day holiday.’

‘I’m sorry.’ He took one of her hands. ‘I wouldn’t do this to you if it wasn’t important.’

‘It’s like the old days,’ she accused him.

‘No, no, Annie.’ His grip on her hand tightened. ‘I promise. It’s not.’

‘What are you doing?’

‘I will tell you, but not now.’

‘You mean you won’t.’

‘Just trust me?’

She searched his face. ‘Now, why would I do that?’

Hermione was restless, fretful and weak. The discharge procedure took for ever and they waited even longer for her medication to arrive from the pharmacy. By the time Annie manhandled her up the stairs to her bedroom, which she and Emily had cleaned within an inch of its life, Hermione was white and sweaty.

Settled in bed, she lay back and closed her eyes. Concerned by her apparent weakness and lack of interest in her homecoming, Annie moved around the room unpacking and stowing clothes, magazines and pills. ‘You see that Sheila’s
sent you a get-well plant?’ It was a particularly uninspiring pink miniature rose in, of all things, a hat box. But because it was awful and Sheila had tried so hard, Annie felt it deserved special care. She tried again. ‘There’s someone waiting to see you.’

Hermione murmured from between white lips, ‘Not now.’

‘I think you’ll want to see him.’

Running downstairs, she liberated Rollo from the back room where he had been shut up, carried him into Hermione’s room and placed him (breaking your own rules – satisfactory or not?) on the bed.

Contrary to what Annie expected, Rollo did not bark or wag his tail. He was silent and had adopted his most mournful expression. Annie had spent some time grooming him but the mismatch between his shaggy, wiry coat and the small body underneath it seemed particularly marked.

‘You know, “Rollo” doesn’t really suit him,’ she said. ‘He needs a smaller name.’

Hermione opened her eyes. Rollo dropped his muzzle and closed his eyes.

‘I think he’s cross with you for leaving him, Hermione.’

Rollo remained motionless but was now staring at Hermione. She looked down at him. He emitted a noise, half snuffle, half whine, and cocked his ears. A tear slid out the corner of one of Hermione’s eyes. ‘Rollo?’

He raised his head and Hermione took the full brunt of his tragic, liquid gaze. Very slowly, she raised her hand and touched his paw. Rollo quivered.

‘Oh, Rollo,’ said Hermione, and her hand shook. ‘I’ve missed you.’

‘Here,’ said Annie, and wiped Hermione’s eyes with a tissue. ‘I’ll get you some tea.’

When she arrived back upstairs with a tray, it was to find that Rollo had whisked up closer to Hermione and was tucked into the crook of her good arm, his nose on her torso. At Annie’s approach, he kept his eyes firmly closed.
You do not exist
.

‘You won’t take him away?’ Hermione held Rollo closer.

Annie surveyed the pair of them. ‘No.’

Hermione was a rotten patient. Why would Annie have expected different? Jake did his best to run up and down stairs with her many requests, but he was preoccupied and had his hands full with Maisie. Emily could only help out in the evenings. Tom did a lot but on a couple of occasions he did his mysterious vanishing act. More than once, Annie arrived back in the evenings to the sound of Hermione’s bell.

It was at full peal when, at the end of a long week, she let herself in and discovered Jake (ignoring it) at the kitchen table with a glass of wine.

‘Something up?’ Anxiety struck. ‘The report? Is it un favourable?’

‘Don’t know. But Jocasta has flown over to be grilled by Reginald Brown. She’s asked to see me afterwards and I’m thinking about it.’

‘Right,’ said Annie. She glanced up at the ceiling. ‘I’d better see to your grandmother before we go mad.’

Hermione was angry and restless. She was sitting in her chair by the window and Rollo was in the basket that Annie had triumphantly bid for on eBay. The television was on, but the sound had been turned down. As it was now well
into autumn, the sun slanted into the window at a lower angle, revealing that the room, once so fresh and sparkling, had disintegrated into unkemptness. Several weeks on from Hermione’s arrival back from hospital, the rose in the hat box looked miserable and was shedding petals like spoor on the savannah.

Hermione announced, ‘I haven’t seen anyone all day.’

‘I’m sorry.’ Annie straightened the bedcover and picked up a cushion from the floor. She fetched a dustpan from the cupboard and crouched to sweep up the petals.

‘I find it hard not seeing anyone.’ Hermione addressed the space over Annie’s head.

‘Didn’t the physio turn up? She should have done.’

‘She cancelled.’

Annie grabbed the side of the chair and hauled herself upright. ‘You never minded when you were living on your own.’

‘Ah.’ With her good hand, Hermione bent over to pick up a stray petal. ‘Then I was in charge of my life. It makes a difference.’

‘I must get Tom to see if there are any spaces in the bridge group in the street,’ said Annie. ‘I forgot to remind him.’ She slotted the brush back into the dustpan. ‘There’s Mrs Connor in the basement next door. She lives alone and might like to come over for a cup of tea.’

‘She wears white shoes,’ said Hermione, as if that clinched the matter.

Annie bit her lip.

Hermione read her thoughts. ‘You think I’m an old woman and out of touch. You’re also thinking that you have enough to do without having to worry about me.’

Oh, God, not now, thought Annie, wearily.

‘I wish.’ Hermione’s eyes misted over. ‘I wish … oh, I don’t know what I wish. Except that I wish it wasn’t now.’

Supper. Laundry. Change the sheets. Annie threw away her inner list and sat down in the chair opposite Hermione. She looked across to the portrait of sweet, filmy, supple young Hermione, dreaming in her yellow dress. Wasn’t everyone, even the most trying and demanding of us, entitled to the comfort of others? To be soothed by music and food, to have the peace of living among your own people and your own things acquired over a lifetime and to die among them?

She reached over, grabbed the remote and snapped off the television. ‘In hospital you were telling me about Max.’

‘Do you really want to know?’

‘Yes, I do.’

Hermione focused on the portrait of her young self and frowned. ‘I’d never seen a man’s bare chest before,’ she said, as if that explained everything.

But then, Annie reflected, it probably did.

‘Max was the gardener’s eldest son. The family lived in a cottage not so far from my father’s house. In fact, if I craned out of my bedroom window, I could see their front door. I think I must have been about eighteen.’ She cradled her bad arm with her good hand. ‘I was too happy, and silly with it.’ Her voice sank very low. ‘We didn’t have much time, as it turned out, before he went to Korea and the war there.’

‘And?’ Annie was very gentle.

‘I can only remember bits and pieces. I try to pull them together but they won’t do it. I would like to remember
everything
but … I sometimes wonder if not remembering everything is my punishment.’

‘No, Hermione. It’s not.’

‘Max was set to clearing the riverbank … the river ran through the bottom of the garden. It had rained all winter but the spring was hot. At least, I think it was. I was walking there one day, and there he was. He hadn’t seen me, otherwise he wouldn’t have taken off his shirt, but he did … and that was that.’ There was a long pause. She added, ‘Bill was very suitable, you know.’

‘But what happened to Max?’

‘I was very young. Younger than my years – girls tended to be then. And I didn’t understand the problems, though he did.’

‘What problems?’ Annie felt she was watching a performance on a stage so badly lit that the drama was lost.

Hermione frowned. ‘As I said, he was the gardener’s son. Now do you see?’

‘But did he come back from Korea?’

Hermione’s eyes were bright with tears – or it might have been a trick of the light. ‘No, he didn’t.’

‘But if he had it might have been different.’

Hermione relapsed into irritation. ‘You
don’t
understand.’

Annie refused to rise to the bait. The women exchanged glances and Annie could have sworn that Hermione was begging her to look beyond the wrinkled face and crossness to the girl who had yearned and wept and lost.

‘I’ll get supper,’ she said.

She felt sad thinking about it as she got ready for bed. She had seen contemporary photos of the period Hermione had been talking about and the contrast between the well-fed bodies of today and the pitiful, half-starved men of the post-war period would strike anybody with an ounce
of sensibility. (What must they have felt, those innocent boys, who, having grown up during the Second World War, and having congratulated themselves at missing the fighting, suddenly found themselves packed off to eastern jungles to die in droves?)

She fought with a tangle in her hair, wielding the brush with such ruthlessness that it made her wince. It was extraordinary the obstacles that men and women put in the way of their happiness. It was almost as if they didn’t
wish
to be happy. A gardener’s son and the daughter of the big house: it was ridiculous they considered themselves irrevocably divided. But if you did, you did.

The bathroom was now full of Tom’s paraphernalia. Extra tins of shaving foam. Plastic razors. A telephone soap-on-a-rope that Maddie had given him on leaving and which he had unearthed a few days ago. In the old days it would have been put into the charity box. No longer. Tom lurched in as Annie was stroking night cream into her neck.

She looked round. ‘Do I deduce you finished the bottle? Or is it just high spirits?’

Having returned from his mysterious outing, Tom was in a peculiar mood. He had insisted on opening a bottle of wine to go with the oxtail stew and remained in the kitchen after Annie had gone upstairs to settle Hermione for the night.

‘Yes.’ Unrepentant. ‘Nice.’

She regarded him with some suspicion. ‘Tom, what’s going on?’

‘Wait and see.’ He was owlish and, she realized, really quite drunk. He leaned experimentally against the shower. ‘How about a holiday, Annie? Like we used to do? Yes?
No? Very cheap. Shanks’s pony.’ He paused. ‘Remember walking in Umbria?’

‘Hm,’ said Annie. ‘That was a
huge
success. You refused to talk to the group during the day. And after a day on my feet I didn’t want to talk to anyone in the evening.’

Tom grinned. ‘Pointless to chat up people you were never going to see again.’

She retired to the bedroom and, after some crashing and splashing, he reappeared. The soap-on-a-rope dangled from his neck, a detail he had apparently forgotten – he made no move to take it off as he tried to get into bed.

‘Tom. Come here.’ Annie removed the soap. He looked up at her, rueful and shadowed by the events of the past year. ‘Last time you were like this was just before you lost your job.’

He put a hand up to his eyes. ‘My job.’ And there was a world of grief in the words.

‘Here.’ Annie pushed him down on the pillows, covered him up and switched off the light. ‘Sleep.’

Obediently he closed his eyes. ‘World going round.’ He smiled schoolboyishly. ‘It’s been some time.’

She had no idea what he meant. She regarded the prone figure. Why had Tom chosen now to get drunk? Suspicion rose. He couldn’t, he
couldn’t
, have gone betting on the stock market again? It was financial mayhem out there … and now he would almost certainly never get a job. Yet of late he had been more cheerful and the rapprochement between him and Jake almost made her cry. Tom hunched over. A snore escaped. The outline of his body plumped out by the duvet, he was substantial and solid – not like those poor vitamin-deprived boys who had gone to Korea to be picked off in the jungle.

Snaffling the soap, she returned it to the dish in the bathroom – cheap, but still white – that had replaced the one Tom had broken. Catching sight of herself in the mirror, she sat down on the edge of the bath.

Very soon, the year would have gone, slipping away like a ripple in the water – and the jaws of economic uncertainty snapped even harder for everyone. What good would she have done, or achieved? What sense would she have made of events? She and Tom had been lovers once, proper lovers with all the pleasure and sweetness of being so, and she had hoped it would last. But time and wear and tear – terrible wear and tear – had altered that. They had changed, become parents. The people they had once been had disappeared and she had allowed that important strand of her life to be swamped by grief and anger.