Secrets (17 page)

‘Where are your car keys?’

‘But I have hardly any petrol.’

‘Keys, Tess – now!’

‘But –’

‘We're taking my car – I just need your child seat. Give me the bloody keys!’

He wasn't being rude; well, he was, but Tess didn't need to jump to the defensive because Joe was grinning his exasperation at her. There wasn't any genuine urgency, but there was a sense of excitement. Tess had no idea where they were going or what the big secret was. Five minutes into the journey Emmeline was sound asleep, rendering the excursion obsolete. But neither Tess nor Joe was going to say, well, we might as well turn back then.

They drove through Redcar and he told her how the steel industry once had its zenith here; Europe's largest single-blast furnace. He pointed out the remaining vast rolling sheds, super-stretched structures, though many were now empty.

‘We used to come at night when we were kids – the sparks and the heat coming from those sheds. Molten steel, pet – as exciting as any fireworks display.’

Another industry in decline, he said solemnly. But then brightened and told her that the beach here had masqueraded as Dunkirk for a recent Hollywood blockbuster much to the amusement of the locals.

‘
Atonement!
’ Tess had seen it. Joe too.

Then she said, tell me where we're going!

But he just said, patience, woman.

She looked at the road signs for clues.

Middlesbrough?

She had assumed she could ably stay in Saltburn without ever having recourse to visit the city whose slightly grimy, down-at-heel reputation rather preceded it. They were driving through a strange industrial hinterland of yards and depots and storage tanks. Chemicals, Joe explained. Charming, Tess thought. It was all rather dark and desolate.

‘There!’ Joe swung the car to a stop, switched, off the engine and clapped his hands against the steering wheel. ‘What do you think of that, then?’

From the drop of Tess's jaw and from her stunned silence, her face pressed at the windscreen, Joe deduced her reaction as precisely what he'd hoped for.

‘What is it?’

‘You don't know whether it's monstrous or beautiful, do you?’

‘It's monstrously beautiful – but what is it?’

‘Will Emmeline be OK in the car? If we just step outside for a few minutes?’

‘Where are we going? I'm not going
up
.’

‘Stop faffing and trust me, will you?’

She looked at him and he raised an eyebrow. She unclicked her seatbelt, glanced over her shoulder to her daughter.

‘You're OK about Emmeline?’

‘She'll be fine – and I will be too, as long as I'm in earshot.’

‘Come on, Tess. We're the only ones here.’

Floodlit, the blue paint made the vast steel web-like structure appear luminous and contradictorily weightless.

‘What is it, Joe? What's it called?’

‘This, Miss Tess, is the Transporter Bridge,’ Joe said. ‘Tell me you have at least heard of the Transporter?’

Tess shook her head.

‘Did you see
Billy Elliot
? Or
Auf Weidersehen, Pet
? It had a starring role in both – I have the DVDs at home.’

She shook her head again.

They looked up at the bridge as Joe spoke. ‘Built 1911. Supreme cantilever construction with three main bridge spans. 851 feet long, 160 feet high, rising to 225 feet at the top of the two towers. 2,600 tons of steel. Two almost independent structures constructed on opposite banks of the Tees, joined at the centre over the river.’

‘It's – mad! It looks so modern – but it also looks like, I don't know, like two fossilized pterodactyls!’

‘It's bloody marvellous. In 1880, an iron-ore seam was found in the Eston Hills just near here and Middlesbrough turned from a small coal-exporting town with fledgling iron works into a major iron-producing area. Of course, then steel. Chemicals too. Anyway, the banks either side of the river are low, so conventional bridge design was not practical. To build at this great height allowed for the passage of large shipping traffic without inconveniencing the regular river traffic with a traditional swing-bridge.’

‘But?’ Tess stopped to puzzle it. ‘If it's so high up, how does it work as a bridge? How do you get all the way up there in the first place to cross the river?’

‘This bridge reconciled the need to cross the Tees, with the need to sail boats up it.’ Joe turned the angle of Tess's shoulders. ‘See there? Coming back across the river towards us? The gondola travelling above the water, suspended from those thirty wire ropes? Follow them up. The cables run on a wheel-and-rail system all the way up –
there.
Think of it as an aerial ferry.’

‘Oh yes! There's a van on it – and a car.’

‘Since 1911, it has crossed the Tees between Middlesbrough and Port Clarence, in two minutes, every fifteen minutes, up to eighteen hours a day. We're lucky – soon it'll be running on a new, shorter timetable. As a bridge builder myself, over and above the fact that the Transporter provided a solution to a problem, this bridge is also a marvellous virtuoso feat of turn-of-the-century engineering. They built it – because they
could
. There were fewer than twenty transporter bridges built worldwide and all were between 1893 and 1916. Only eleven still exist and few of those are in regular use. The longest was over the Mersey – but it's no longer there. The Middlesbrough Transporter Bridge is the largest operational one in the world. It is now Grade II listed.’

‘Yet it's still a working bridge. A living bridge.’

‘I like it –
a living bridge
. Yes, a living, moving structure,’ Joe said. ‘And I love it.’

Tess knew it was a bit daft to smile at a bridge but she did so, looking up and across, up and across. Simultaneously elegant and yet somehow crude, the bridge seemed to exude a personality – like a tall, elderly well-to-do aunt with a mouth like a drain.

‘In 1916, a bomb was dropped from a Zeppelin – but it fell right through the latticework and straight into the Tees. In 1940, a bomb went through the bridge's span and exploded onto the gondola – but the bridge closed for only three days. In the late 1950s, the mechanism broke down just near the shore and the passengers had to walk the plank to the bank – then the rush-hour crowds had to walk all the way up and over the top.’

‘Up
there
? You'd never get me doing that!’

Joe looked at her askance but she was engrossed watching the gondola approaching with its load.

‘Can we – I mean. Would it be much of a detour to – It's just that it's arriving back now. Is it expensive to cross?’

He laughed. ‘Be my guest.’

Joe's car was the only vehicle and they were the only foot passengers in the cradle as it skimmed over the inky Tees with a clunk and a whirr.

‘The synergy that I love most is that when they were planning it, they brought in a Frenchman, Ferdinand Arnodin – the pioneer of transporter bridge engineering. And of course here's me, a smoggie, now involved with the French on their bridges. And the guy who ran the Cleveland Bridge and Engineering Company who designed the Transporter, was one William E. Pease.’

‘Why do I know that name?’

‘Because when I showed you where the Halfpenny Bridge used to be, I told you all about
Henry
Pease, who founded Saltburn and whose white firebricks partly constructed the town.’

‘This bridge is kind of your bridge too then, isn't it,’ Tess said.

‘I like to think so,’ Joe said. ‘I'm proud to be part of Middlesbrough's bridge-building heritage. The bridge over the Tyne – that's ours, also the Geordies’ King Edward VII Bridge. The Sydney Harbour Bridge – that's us too. And the Menai Straits Suspension Bridge. The Severn Bridge – the first use of an aerodynamic deck. The Forth Road Bridge – at the time, the world's two longest spans. The Newport Lifting Bridge just down there. The Victoria Falls Bridge over the Zambesi. The Tsing Ma Bridge in Hong Kong. The New Lambeth Bridge in London, the Jiangyin Yangstze River Bridge in China. Then there's the Strotstrom Bridge in Denmark, the Limpopo Bridge in South Africa, the Bosporus Bridge in Turkey linking Europe and Asia – bloody brilliant bridge builders, us smoggies.’

‘But is this your favourite bridge?’

‘No – my favourite bridge would be the Milau Viaduct. Norman Foster truly achieved sculpture in the landscape and the most profound dialogue between nature and the man-made with that bridge. But the Tranny is the bridge I love most.’

The river was crossed.

‘What do we do now?’

‘We could go via the Newport Bridge – that's some structure too.’

‘We could,’ said Tess, ‘or we could just stay as we are and cross back over again. I wish Em was awake.’

‘Bring her back in daylight,’ Joe said. ‘In fact, you have to see it for yourself in daylight. Actually, when I'm back next time, I'll see if I can take you across.’

‘Across?’

‘Up there.’ Joe pointed and Tess looked up almost fifty metres.

‘I'm not going up there!’

‘Trust me. It's an awesome experience.’

‘I don't do heights.’

‘Heights and beaches?’ He looked at her and then, as he looked away, across to the other side he slipped his arm around her shoulder. And after a loaded pause, he turned his head towards hers, leaning in closer. Their eyes locked. And Tess wondered and wondered. And wondered if she should be doing – something – too. And then he stopped and instead, he turned his gaze out to the river and he cleared his throat.

‘I'd hold your hand,’ he said.

It was as if a kiss hung in the air, floating above the water, left suspended like the cradle of the Transporter Bridge was suspended over the River Tees. And Joe and Tess had to climb back into the car and drive off the cradle and onto firm ground and head back home. At that time of night, it was only fifteen minutes back to Saltburn. As they turned into the drive, Tess thought back to the Transporter, calculating that the bridge would be cranking into action again one last time that night, transporting dreams across the water.

She carries Em to her cot and the baby doesn't wake. And she stands, in the soft glow of the night-light, wondering what she's meant to do now. Did he really mean to kiss her? Or was he coming in close so the sounds of the bridge and the wind wouldn't take his words away? But there was his arm around her shoulder too. It might not have been a kiss in the conventional sense but it had equal impact. And he said, trust me. And how she hopes she can.

Go down, Tess! He's going tomorrow; grab him with both hands like an opportunity you have to prevent slipping away to France. Tell him you hate heights and beaches because they both terrify you. Ask him to hold your hand as you tell him the reasons why.

‘Tess?’

Tell him.

‘Yes?’

‘Fancy a nightcap?’

She peers over the banister and he's looking up from the hallway.

‘Cup of tea?’ he suggests instead because the notion of a nightcap should never necessitate such a pause.