It was still dark when she got up at 5 a.m. and put the first batch of bread in to cook. She mixed lardy cake and rolls, cut the dough and left them to rise. She was short of yeast. Freddie would get it for her, and he’d said he would be back about midday. Annie was glad she had plenty to do and customers to chat to, but the morning seemed endless.

Once again Joan appeared, full of enthusiasm, just at closing time.

‘I need a chat with you, Annie. Is Freddie back? No? Oh dear – but never mind, that can wait.’

‘What can wait?’ asked Annie. ‘Slow down a bit, Joan, will you? I think your mind goes twice as fast as mine.’

Joan smiled. ‘That’s what my husband says. Now then, Annie, those beautiful flowers you grow – and I see you’re good at arranging them too. How would you like to do the flowers for the church? They really need someone, and I’m no good at it.’

Annie frowned. She turned her back and busied herself brushing crumbs off the shelves. ‘I’ve gotta get on.’

Joan stood there determinedly. ‘I’d come with you and help,’ she said. ‘I can take you down now if you like. Annie?’

‘I – I don’t – walk too well,’ Annie mumbled, and her heart started thumping. The skin on her face felt tight and hot, and she wanted to cry.

‘Annie?’ Joan was there instantly, her hand on Annie’s tense shoulders, her eyes concerned. ‘What is it? You’re shaking. Here, sit down.’

She dragged a chair out but Annie wouldn’t sit down.

‘I can’t tell you,’ she said, gripping the counter.

‘Oh, you can,’ said Joan persuasively. ‘You can tell me. I promise I won’t gossip, Annie. It’ll just be between the two of us. Come on. Let’s sit down at your lovely table.’

Annie couldn’t move. She hadn’t had a friend since before the war. Levi and Freddie had been her whole world. It had to change. This woman with the scarlet nails and the fox furs whom she had totally misjudged was offering her a lifeline. She allowed herself to be led into the scullery where she sat at the table, her hands spread out on the friendly well-scrubbed wood.

‘I can’t – go out,’ she whispered, and put her hands over her face to catch the tears which broke through the layers of shell she had inhabited over the years. At first she could only rock to and fro and say, ‘’Tis terrible – terrible. Nobody knows, only my Freddie.’ She risked a glance at Joan, surprised to see how caringly and closely the woman was listening.

‘What happens when you go out?’ Joan asked gently.

‘I’m all right in the garden, but soon as I go outside that gate – I don’t know why, but I’m so giddy, and I’m frightened of falling. I’m a big woman, I fall heavy. Oh ’tis terrible, the pavement goes all wavy like water, and the buildings look like they’re falling down on me. I panic, see. And the panic is the worst thing. My heart races and I shake and I can’t get my breath. I think I’m going to die. And – and . . .’ Annie glanced up at Joan. ‘You don’t want to be listening to this.’

‘Yes I do. I’ve plenty of time,’ said Joan firmly. ‘You tell me everything, and I mean – everything.’

Annie nodded. Her greatest fear waited at the end of her talking, like a boulder, wobbling, waiting to fall.

‘I can only go out if my Freddie is with me. He’s wonderful. Ever since he was little he’s looked after me, he holds my hands and talks me through it. Many times he’s got me home – and – and Levi never knew. I’m so ashamed of myself, Joan, so ashamed. I’m afraid I’ll make a fool of myself, see? So now I don’t even try to go out. God knows what would happen if I had to.’ Annie looked at Joan again, noticing the confident warmth in her eyes that made the painful silences bearable, and then she finally let go of the boulder. ‘And I shouldn’t be telling you all this – I know your husband is a doctor and I’m so frightened they’ll think I’m a mad woman and put me in the asylum.’

‘My husband wouldn’t,’ Joan assured her, ‘he’s a really understanding doctor. I shan’t tell him, Annie. But – let me think about this – it may be that I can help you.’

‘You already have,’ said Annie gratefully. ‘I’ve got it off my chest.’

‘But,’ Joan wagged her finger, ‘I can only help you if you really want to get over this.’

‘I do.’

The two women smiled at each other and Joan raised a clenched fist, her eyes twinkling. ‘Courage to change,’ she said. ‘That’s what we need.’

When she had gone Annie felt better, more light-hearted. She even sang while she was making Freddie’s meal. She looked at the clock. He should be home by now.

Annie sat in the window to watch for his motorbike coming up the street. For two hours she sat there through the sunset and into the twilight. She watched the lamplighter work his way along the street, and saw people hurrying home, bent against the North wind. She heard the six o’clock train puffing into the station.

But still Freddie didn’t return.

By nine o’clock Annie was distraught. Wrapped in a shawl she paced round and round the cottage, up and down the stairs, looking out of different windows, opening them and listening, watching the distant hills for a moving cone of light that might be a motorbike. All night she paced and she prayed and in the deathly hush of early morning she fell exhausted into the rocking chair and slept, clutching Levi’s dressing gown up to her chin.

At first light she was awoken by a thunderous knocking on the door. Terrified, she heaved herself up and struggled across the flagstone floor. She opened the door just a crack and peered out.

George stood there in a heavy winter coat, his face unshaven, his hair wild, and a grim expression on his face.

‘’Tis bad news,’ he said. ‘I had a telephone call, from a hospital up in Gloucester.’

Chapter Eighteen

FLOATING

Freddie had never been so comfortable in his life. He was floating on a cushion of deliciously warm air and the light streaming over him was intensely yellow like marsh marigolds. He looked down at his body lying in the hospital bed, its face deathly white, its blistered hands limp on the grey blanket, its knees and feet making orderly bumps in the tightly tucked bed covers. He didn’t want to go back into that body which was filled with pain and struggling to breathe.

Each time he looked down, his mind opened up a cavern of nightmares. Ian Tillerman’s voice echoed in there, his eyes gleamed avariciously, he smelled of beer and horse manure and the stench engulfed Freddie like smoke from a wood fire, he had to breathe it and it stung and choked his lungs. Or he would see his motorbike sinking into the deep canal, bits of it shining and bubbling, the handlebars and the headlight were the last to be submerged as the iron grey water closed over that particular pain. A bloody lout, Ian Tillerman had called him. A bloody lout.

For hours he had lain there on the bank of the canal, face down in the mud, the cold earth and the cold sky clamping him like the jaws of winter. Then the floating had started, floating on a cloud made of ice, watching, unable to speak, as his body was dumped on a khaki-coloured stretcher and pushed into the back of an ambulance.

The voices of nurses and doctors had burbled like a distant stream, and he’d felt hands peeling off his muddy clothes. Through half-open eyelids, he glimpsed Herbie’s leather jacket being dropped into a basket, and the pain of thinking he would have to buy him another one sent Freddie deeper into a comatose state, and with the sleep came a profound feeling of surrender as he let go and drifted into the shadows.

Over three days, the darkness of his floating place transmuted into deep colours, ultramarine and crimson, and in the crimson phase he became aware of smells. He lifted his arm and sniffed his skin, vaguely hoping for a reassuring whiff of oil and stone dust, but it reeked of Sunlight soap and Dettol. A pungent tang of camphor hovered around him, and a mild ointmenty smell from the chilblains on his fingers. The space beyond his bed swished and clanked, and squeaked with footsteps, and the alarming rhythmic groans from the man in the next bed. Even more alarming was the shrill rasp of his own breath cutting into his ribs like a bread knife.