The Missing Marriage by Sarah May Page B

outside, and nobody answered the door when she rang so she let herself in, automatically turning on the hall light and calling out softly for Mary. But there was no reply, and the house was full of an overwhelming stillness.
    She ran up to the bedroom.
    Thinking Erwin was asleep, Anna crept round the foot of the bed and sat down in the green G-Plan chair she’d sat in earlier.
    After a while, she felt his hand, cold, trying to take hold of her. ‘It’s me – Anna.’
    Erwin nodded, and gave her hand a weak squeeze.
    â€˜Are you in pain?’
    â€˜Always,’ he smiled.
    â€˜Do you want more morphine?’
    â€˜In a bit. But not right now – just you stay sitting there,’ he trailed off, his mouth too dry to say anything else.
    She sensed his fear, in the way he was watching her, and the way he held her hand, and at the same time how interminable his ending had become to him.
    The house felt emptier each day as his presence in it receded in proportion to the collapse of his will, which had been so strong and which had seen him survive capture at the age of seventeen – after only six months in the Luftwaffe’s signal corps – and internment, first in Belgium then in England.
    Now Erwin was barely there.
    â€˜Where’s Nan?’
    â€˜Out in the garden.’ Erwin shut his eyes. ‘They say Bryan Deane’s gone missing,’ he whispered, slowly. ‘I remember you two up at the club – how old were you, eleven? Twelve? – Saturday afternoons . . .’
    â€˜I don’t remember that.’
    â€˜We’d go to the market in the morning then Nan would come home for some peace and quiet and I’d take you to the club with me, and Bobby Deane was usually there, and you and Bryan would play. You’d play for hours.’
    â€˜We would?’
    â€˜You got your first kiss at the club.’
    She ran two fingers inadvertently over her lips as she remembered, suddenly, the smoky carpet smell of the club. All those Saturday afternoons spent among men talking, mumbling and drinking slowly until one of them said something funny, which everybody was obliged to at some point, and they’d all laugh – before falling silent again over their Federation Ale.
    And Bryan . . . kissing Bryan under the table among all those legs and shoes, and how he’d tasted of sherbet and cigarette and childhood still.
    Her first kiss.
    She could taste sherbet now just thinking about it, and she must have been smiling too because Erwin’s mouth was attempting a smile in return.
    â€˜You remember now, don’t you?’
    â€˜How did you see?’ she said, laughing.
    â€˜I wasn’t at the table. I was at the bar getting in a round.’
    Pouring herself a glass of water from the jug on the bedside table, she made an effort to transfer the memory of sweetness from sherbet to the lime and lemonades Erwin would buy her – as many as she asked for until she was nearly sick on the bus home.
    â€˜Joyce,’ she said, remembering the conductress who was always on the bus home – the thinnest woman she’d ever seen, with tight curls covering her head. ‘She liked you.’
    â€˜Everybody liked me.’
    â€˜That’s why she used to let us on the bus for free, and we always had to sit downstairs because you were too drunk to make the stairs.’
    â€˜I was never drunk.’
    â€˜You were. Every Saturday without fail.’
    They sat in silence after this until Erwin said with dif ficulty, ‘I need to tell you about Bettina. I need to tell you about her before –’
    â€˜Granddad, it doesn’t matter. Bettina doesn’t matter to me.’ She paused, slipping her hand out of Erwin’s still cold grasp. ‘And I want it to stay that way. I don’t want you to say something that’s going to make her matter to me.’
    â€˜You don’t know what I’m going to say.’
    â€˜I