Across the Bridge (24 page)

But why then, Mr Sturrock’s listeners sometimes asked, were
steel and concrete to be the main materials used in the new bridge?
Why was the new bridge also to be of deck-truss design, a pre-cast,
post-tensioned concrete box-girder bridge (as the information pack
had it), to be exact?

“Your concrete technology nowadays,” Mr Sturrock told them, as
patiently as he could, “is a far cry from what it was sixty years
ago. Your concrete nowadays contains chemical additives that retard
the corrosion of the steel rods. Plus,” he went on, “in this
region, grit is now favoured over salt for treating icy roads, so
salt residues are a thing of the past. Plus, modern span-bridge
design nowadays incorporates what are known as redundancies, which
means if there is a failure, the entire bridge doesn’t go down, and
single spans can be repaired.”

Invariably Rhona led the groups away, reassured, to the service
station for their complimentary refreshments, and invariably Mr
Sturrock complained all the way back over the river.

To Ron it was quite marvellous, this collaborative amassing and
expending of expertise and ingenuity, and all for the future sake
of perfect strangers crossing a bridge that was still to be built.
He took it as evidence of something miraculous, this practical
goodwill from one set of human beings – the surveyors, designers,
engineers, builders – towards countless other, unknown human
beings, many of them yet unborn. It was more than professional
responsibility; it was more even than an assumption of good intent
between people. Even while Mr Sturrock was ranting about fucking
busybodies and amateur know-alls, Ron felt there was no word for it
but love. Then he would give himself a shake for getting soft,
because whether these guys were filled with tenderness towards
others or were just doing their jobs, bridges got built, and they
got built to stay up. Filtering out his feelings, Ron presented an
information pack and all the technical bridge-building facts he
could remember as unsentimentally as possible to Silva and Annabel,
who weren’t in the least interested. They wanted to know about the
cars still in the river.

“The poor people inside. I am so sorry for them,” said Silva,
while Annabel nodded but said nothing.

But Ron had nothing to report about that, though he, too, was
sorry. He was also sorry for some of the people who showed up for
the bridge walks. He didn’t tell Silva and Annabel that many of
them came and left white-faced in wretched silence, and that every
time at least one person broke down and wept. Some were so stricken
they had to be physically supported, and once a woman had fainted.
He didn’t mention the regulars, either: those who turned up time
and again, tense for new explanations, and those already weighed
down by what they knew but who could not keep away. There was the
ghoulish evangelical who, until Rhona barred him from coming any
more, enjoined the others in prayers of contrition because the
disaster was the act of a displeased God. There was the big,
solitary, tongue-tied man who drove up from Huddersfield every
other weekend because, he said, he’d been in the area when it
happened and, for reasons he wouldn’t bother the others with,
couldn’t get it out of his mind.

∨
Across the Bridge
∧

A
fter we had been
here for about three months there came, in late May, a week of
rain. The river ran high for two days and a night, and when it
subsided it left a tide of stinking, sticky mud along the bank.
Right in front of the cabin a swarm of flies spewed out of a dead
fish stranded in a mesh of washed-up reeds and sticks. I had to
take a shovel and push it back into the water. Inside, the cabin
walls swelled and mould bloomed on the ceilings. On the third night
of rain I found silvery slime trails and a snail on my bedding, and
couldn’t sleep. I lay wide awake, deciding I had to talk to Silva
about buying camp beds and some other bits of furniture. There was
no need to sleep on the floor and keep everything in boxes, as if
we lived in a tent. Even after spending over five hundred pounds on
the generator we could surely afford it, and Ron could pick up
whatever we bought from Inverness in his Land Rover and bring it up
to the cabin by boat. We had electric light now, a fluorescent
strip in the kitchen and single bulbs hanging from the ceilings.
The friendly buzz of the little fridge and fresh milk were still
novelties. There were also two or three sockets, so for just a bit
more outlay we could have a lamp or two, maybe even music, and with
the rainwater fast collecting in the roof tank we might soon be
able to use the shower – although, like Silva, I had grown to enjoy
the ritual of our outdoor baths in heated-up river water. The
prospect of such luxuries was thrilling. There would be no harm in
spending a little money on a few more comforts. I began to think
about a cot for the baby, a small chest of drawers, pretty
curtains.

Then on the following day, for the first time, I was bored. The
weather was depressing, and there was little I could do around the
place. I was desperate for company and had too much time on my
hands. I began to have doubts. Why, if I really wanted to get away
and start my life again, was I holed up in a water-soaked shack
within sight of the scene of my ‘death’? What was wrong with me
that I couldn’t tear myself away from the ruined bridge or from
Silva, the only connections I had between my old life and this one?
Why was I willing to use money to establish an invisible existence
at the cabin, when I could just as easily use that money to travel
away from it?

I tried to tell myself it didn’t matter how far from that old
life I had managed to go, as long as I had gone. I told myself it
was not merely natural but necessary to stay. I had to stand by
Silva, and besides, it would be wiser for the baby’s sake to remain
here for the time being rather than find a place elsewhere, and
alone. It was a period of rehearsal; I needed practice at living in
Annabel’s skin. But was I nursing the same delusion – that she
preferred to stay at home
for the time being
, until she felt
a bit more like going out – that had kept my mother captive for
thirteen years? The fact was I had chosen confinement and
concealment. I remained in a hideaway rather than risk venturing
into the open. I had struck out for the freedom to go anywhere in
the whole world and was afraid of freedom.

So that evening I was agitated and upset with myself long before
Silva came back from work. As usual her spirits dipped on finding
there had been neither sight nor word from Stefan, but this time
she didn’t recover her optimism. She didn’t sigh patiently and
wonder if a sign of him might come tomorrow. Ron’s quiet
saintliness I found for once a little irksome. Although I had
longed all day for their company, I discovered I didn’t have much
to say to them after all.

A wet haze of mist lay over the surface of the river and blotted
out the far bank. It was too humid to eat outside, so we had
brought in picnic chairs and set them around the trestle table, and
we sat with the door and windows open to catch the slightest
breeze. But the air was chill and heavy with water; nothing stirred
except an unpleasant cloud of midges in the doorway and the
rainwater that had collected in the chimney and was dripping down
the flue, hissing on the logs in the stove. Ron had managed to
light it, but the flames were sallow and weak, and curls of bitter
smoke leaked through the glass.

He had brought a tinfoil parcel of leftover baked potatoes.
After hours wrapped in their own heat their skins were wrinkled and
soft like warm glove leather, and they smelled like moist leather,
too, salty and dank. I had fried some onions and heated up a tin of
beans, and those smells mingled with the wood smoke and wet rust
smell of the stove and the wormy aroma of rain. I was irritated by
the glances Ron and Silva cast me as we ate.

“I’m starving,” I said, not caring much. I did not mean it
apologetically.

“She’s always starving,” Silva said. She was eating less and
less. Ron watched me scrape the remains from her plate onto my own.
I couldn’t help it if he thought I was greedy and fat. I started on
my third potato.

“Really, I feel like eating meat,” I said. “I would even eat
rabbit. I think there are rabbits in the woods.”

“I don’t think I could shoot a rabbit,” Ron said, “even if I had
a gun.”

“Trapping is better,” Silva said firmly.

“But tomorrow’s Thursday,” Ron said brightly. “Carvery day. The
meat tends to go, but there’ll be Yorkshire puddings over, and
gravy.”

“Can you bring back burgers from the shop or something?” I asked
Silva.

“I might get a bit of beef,” Ron said. “Or pork.”

“Sausages. I could eat sausages,” I said.

“You need proper meat,” Silva told me. “There’s a butcher in
Netherloch. Maybe I could get there, somehow.” She looked at Ron.
“Ron, you know why she wants meat? I will tell you. Your wife, did
you have a wife? Did your wife have babies?”

“Silva!” I protested, with my mouth full.

“It’s all right,” Ron said. “She…no. We didn’t have children.”
He pressed a finger and thumb against his closed eyes. After a
moment he looked at us and said, “My wife, ex-wife…Kathy. She was
cleverer than me, younger, career-minded. Made it to regional
manager, never wanted children. And proud of it.”

“Proud she didn’t want babies?” Silva said. “Didn’t she love
you?”

“Oh, I think she did,” he said. “For a while.”

“But
proud
she didn’t want babies?” she said again,
shaking her head. She didn’t understand it.

“Some people are,” I said. “They just are.”

“I thought there’d be time if she changed her mind. Later
on…when we got divorced, I thought probably it’s just as well. No
kids involved, getting hurt.” There were tears standing in Ron’s
eyes now.

“You see, Ron, Annabel is soon having a baby. Annabel is going
to be mama.”

“Silva! What are you telling him that for?” I said. “Anyway,
it’s not soon! Not that soon.”

“Yes, soon! So why he shouldn’t know? A baby, it’s good news.”
Silva shrugged. “Anyway, it shows already. Soon you will be very
big, then he’ll know.”

Ron was staring at me, and then at Silva, not sure if he was
allowed to be pleased.

“A baby?” he said. “A baby, well. Well, then. Does that mean – ”
He hesitated and turned to me. “Does that mean, as long as…I mean,
you might…I mean, will you be staying here?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’ll be staying here.”

I did not know if at that moment I was making the decision or
just announcing it.

“And the…the baby’s…”

“The father?” What could I say? “The father. He never…he’s like
your ex-wife. Never wanted kids and proud of it. It’s over, and he
won’t be bothering us. Ever.”

At last Ron’s face showed relief. “Right,” he said, standing up.
He was smiling carefully, softly. “Right, so, that’s the case then.
Well, there’s plenty I should be getting on with.”

He went outside, and soon I heard the regular chop of the axe on
a fallen log he’d dragged down from the woods. Silva and I sat on
for a little while until she said she was going off along the
shore. She did that more and more, disappearing downriver for long
spells, needing privacy. When I asked her once where she went, she
said cagily there was a place she liked to sit. I finished
everything that was left on the table and then I washed up.

An hour later, the weather broke. Gusts of wind, suddenly cold,
banged the door shut and pushed and pulled through the trees. Then
I heard distant groans of thunder, and the sky that had been
oppressively still for days began to move, first with a crazy,
pinkish-yellow shimmering in one high eastern corner and then with
clouds, darkening and roiling together low and close to the land.
Slow, huge drops of rain hit the river. The thunder advanced,
shaking the ground and crumpling the air, and after the second or
third shot of lightning, rain began to stream from the sky. It
spiked the ground around the cabin, obliterating the river and the
far bank. A sheet of water cascaded from the edge of the roof and
poured past the windows. From the door I could hear nothing but the
drumming of rain over my head and the gurgle of the overflowing
gutterings. Ron dashed up from the jetty carrying the axe and some
tools he’d rescued from the boat. He dropped them just inside the
door, grabbed his jacket and ran out again, heading downriver. I
waited, watching the sky throb with lightning, and after about
twenty minutes he came back with Silva drenched and clutching his
arm, shivering under the jacket.

I heaped more sticks into the stove to try to get a blaze going,
and fetched towels. Silva changed into dry clothes and Ron stripped
down in the kitchen and wrapped himself in a blanket. I arranged
his sodden things over chair backs. Then, because lightning was
fizzing all around the cabin, I thought it best to turn off the
electricity, so I made tea on the gas ring and then we sat by the
stove in candlelight, and the storm went on and on. There was some
whisky that Ron had brought ages ago, and he and Silva both took
some to warm them up.

Silva had retreated into herself. I said she looked tired out,
and she sighed and said she did need some sleep, and went to bed.
Ron and I stayed by the stove. There was nothing to talk about,
this late; we had made every remark it was possible to make about
the weather. The thunder was distant now, and the rain had lessened
but went on falling. Our candles burned down and went out one by
one, until I looked up and saw by the light of the last one that
Ron’s cheeks were wet.

“Is it the smoke?” I said. “It’s got very smoky.”

He wiped his eyes but didn’t answer.

“It’s late now,” I said. “There might be more lightning on the
river. You can’t go back tonight.”