Strangers. Rosie Thomas
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Strangers
BY ROSIE THOMAS
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
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
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Keep Reading
About the Author
Also by Rosie Thomas
About the Publisher
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