Strangers. Rosie Thomas

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ