Strangers. Rosie Thomas

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