Across the Bridge (22 page)

On the first evening after she was installed there, while
Annabel cooked, Silva wandered with Ron upriver. They were supposed
to be collecting firewood, but she began to pick the sparse little
wild flowers, really just flowering weeds, that grew in the narrow
strip of soil and light between the forest and the bank of stones
on the shore. Back at the cabin, she put them in a mug of water on
the floor in one corner of her new room and surrounded it with
photographs of her husband and daughter, propped up against the
wall. Ron was surprised at the satisfaction this appeared to give
her, arranging the mug on a clean white handkerchief like a votary
at her altar.

“And look!” she said, when she brought him and Annabel in to
admire, “See, there’s this as well.”

It was a drawing in crayon on a scrap of paper, childish but not
done by a child. It showed a wobbly little house surrounded by
trees. A mummy, a daddy and a little girl stood smiling in front of
it. Water flowed past their feet in snaking horizontal blue
lines.

“Oh! That was on the wall in the trailer,” Annabel said. “I’m
glad you brought it. You see?” she said to Ron. “It’s the cabin.
It’s where we are now.”

“Stefan drew it for me,” Silva told them. “From across on the
other side. It was a joke, then. Now it’s important. It doesn’t
matter what guides him here. As long as something does, like this.
This will bring them here.”

She propped the drawing up at the back of her shrine. The paper
was flimsy and it curled over and slid down the wall. The others
watched while Silva fiddled with it until she just about managed to
make it stay. Ron could see that with the least draught across the
floor it would fold in upon itself again and float away.

“I could you make a frame for it, if you like,” he said.

Silva turned and thanked him, her eyes shining with such piteous
gratitude he could think of nothing more to say except that it was
nice for a picture to have a frame.

Most nights after supper they sat outside for a time, since
Silva kept up her old habit of lighting a campfire. They watched
the river and listened to the creaks and rustles of the wind in the
trees and the furtive scrabbling of animals, most likely squirrels
and badgers, Ron said, or deer. The noises from the bridge had
lessened, or perhaps they had got used to them. For the first few
days they saw on the far bank the trailer doors open and a fire lit
nearby, and then one night there was no sign of life at all.
Annabel told them she’d watched that morning from inside the cabin
as the tramps had been escorted off the riverbank by policemen with
dogs.

“Dumped back in Inverness, probably,” Ron said. He’d heard the
men talk about it, too.

None of them said a word about returning to the trailer.

Each day Ron and Silva had bits of overheard news and gossip
about the bridge, to which Annabel listened with patient interest,
but she never craved information. They would sit at times in
silence, and even when talk ranged more widely, they asked one
another very few questions. Silva said nothing about Annabel’s
luggage, supposedly still being kept for her by kind people in a
house in Inverness. Nobody asked Silva about the country she was
from, not even idle enquiries about language or food or customs.
Ron once referred vaguely to losing touch with his family, and
neither Annabel nor Silva followed it up. They all avoided
speculation about when Stefan and Anna would return.

It was courtesy, not indifference, that kept each of them from
probing into the others’ lives, a delicacy that prohibited the
seeking of answers that might make it necessary for them to lie to
one another. Even sincere answers would surely be imperfect and
unreliable, anyway. Perhaps they could assume that for all of them
it had been a long haul to get from the past all the way to here,
and their friendship (if it was that – friendship was another word
they didn’t use) was not rooted in curiosity about what that past
had been. Soon conversation would return to practical concerns: how
to fix the rattle on the door, how deep the water was around the
jetty. Would the matches stay dry longer in tin or in plastic,
would it rain again before morning.

Ron liked to watch the two women together across the failing
light and the smoke from the fire, saving up the images for when he
was alone again. Later, as they walked him down to the jetty, he
would always manage to mention what tasks he could do next, what he
would load into the boat that night: borrowed tools, water
containers for refilling, rubbish for disposal, to be sure they
were expecting him back. And as he turned to wave to them standing
there, he liked not knowing which of them he found more touching
and beautiful, nor whose approval gave him more pleasure, nor of
which of them he was growing fonder.

∨
Across the Bridge
∧

W
ithin a few weeks of
being at the cabin, my sickness vanished and I noticed a firming
and swelling of my stomach. The weight of my fear began to drop
away, like a stone somehow melting, and a different, pleasing
heaviness gradually took its place. My breasts acquired a high,
proud outline. I wondered every day about Col, testing over and
over in my mind the possibility of going back and trying to explain
what I had done and asking him to forgive me, leaving aside any
thought that he might need to be forgiven for anything himself. Any
affront I might have suffered for the apparent misdemeanour of
carrying his child did not enter the equation; I assumed that even
a notional reconciliation would be on his terms only. In my head, I
heard myself plead with him to understand that I could not give up
my baby; I begged him to let us become a family. And that was where
I always stalled, for no reply came. I could not conjure up his
voice speaking any words of acceptance.

I realized I had to allow Col his silence. I resolved to let him
become a distant regret, to turn my concern for him into a
conviction that he was better off without me. It was not that
difficult. I needed only to recall what he had said that day at
breakfast to be convinced again that by staying away I was saving
him from the sight of a child he didn’t want growing in the body of
a wife he didn’t love.

His loss, I told myself, although it was some time before I
really believed it. Several times a day I would run my hand over my
body, slipping it under my clothes to touch my naked skin. I was
touching myself and also my child. Col didn’t love either of us,
and so I would have to, and I did. I loved us both.

With that love came elation, and amazement, too, for I had never
associated love, certainly not self-love or love of the unborn,
with happiness. Yet it took me only a short while to trust in it.
And as must be common enough in pregnant women, I grew reflective
of my own mother, and myself as a child. I had been a teary, clingy
little girl, always scared by my mother’s brisk, dutiful care of
me. The patting-on of talcum powder after my bath, the tying of
hair ribbons, the cutting of birthday cakes – all were guiltily
rushed along and done with before there was time for me to
experience pleasure small or great or, indeed, to cling. (And as
must also be common, I made whispered little vows to my baby that
we would do all these things differently.)

But if love is blind, happiness is kind. I felt no longer
bitter, but merely sad and generous towards both of us, my mother
and me. I saw now that the reason for her roughness and hurry must
have been that she had not wanted to give herself time to dwell
upon the anxious, ashamed frugality of her affection. I saw that
she must have regarded my being born to her at all as a bewildering
miscarriage of justice. For her, it must have been beyond
comprehension that she of all people should be granted a live baby
girl, let alone one who survived babyhood. But what could she do
about a moral error that could be only God’s? Since I was alive and
remained so, she discharged her obligations as a mother with
ruthless attention (being nothing if not conscientious), but she
refused herself any joy in my upbringing.

On the Friday five days after the photograph in the garden was
taken, on an identical, shrivelling-hot afternoon after everybody
had stopped saying the weather was lovely, my mother went next door
to mind baby Annabel while Marjorie popped out to pick up the
developed film from the chemist’s. Annabel had been fractious all
day – too much sun, probably – but she had gone down to sleep in
her cot at last, and Marjorie didn’t want to risk setting her off
again by putting her in the pram and lugging her on and off the bus
in the heat. But she was desperate to get into town that afternoon
for the pictures, because the chemist was closed on Saturdays.
There were lots of new ones of Annabel, as well as last Sunday’s
tea party in the garden.

None of these details was mentioned while my mother was alive. I
heard them from my father afterwards, over the years, in faint,
unintentional allusions and references and little wisps of fact,
never the whole story at once. And in retrospect, the thirteen
years of my childhood before my mother died, before I knew a single
thing about Annabel Porter, seem to have been a strange kind of
waiting time, when I was learning, without understanding what it
was, to live half-drowned in the backwash of an old disaster. It
was always there, never spoken of but still the reason why certain
words and phrases could bring conversation to a halt:
Heatwave.
Died in infancy
. It hung around like a kind of eerie damp
rising up from a long-ago flood that was now a stagnant pool in the
cellar of a house where the words
flood
and
cellar
were unmentionable.

On that Friday afternoon Marjorie wouldn’t, she told my mother,
take so much as a peek at the snaps before she got them home, she’d
wait and they’d look at them together. I thought of all the
pictures I would take of my own baby, and I could imagine Marjorie,
glowing with the kindness of her gesture, sitting on the bus with
the packet warm in her hands, the crackly waxed paper around the
photographs still sealed. Brave, barren Irene, she was thinking, so
disappointed and deserving and sweetly interested in Annabel, a
perfectly sensible woman when she wasn’t going overboard on the
religion. A book of illustrated Bible stories when the baby was a
week old, honestly! She could be given at least this, a little
share in the immaculate newness of the newest baby photographs.

Had Marjorie really thought all that, sitting on the bus? I
didn’t know, and my father had no patience with that kind of
conjecture, but in those early days at the cabin, I was certain
that she had.

And now here she comes, open-hearted Marjorie, through her own
back door, calling out to Irene to get the kettle on and they’ll
have a dekko at the snaps over a cup of tea. She drops the packet
of photographs and her handbag on the kitchen table, kicks off the
shoes that have made her feet swell and peels away the chiffon
headscarf from her soft tower of hair. Irene, looking frowsty and
blue about the gills, walks to the sink with the kettle. She’s been
feeling off since the heatwave, everything turns her stomach, it
must be her age, once upon a time she would have been in the sun
all day and loving every minute. Over the running of the tap she
says she looked in on Annabel twice and she’s flat out and there
hasn’t been a squeak; the mite must have worn herself out this
morning with her fractiousness. Marjorie lights the gas, takes the
kettle from Irene and sets it over the flame. She puts a saucepan
of water onto a gentle simmer and lowers in the sterilized bottle
of baby formula. She pulls at two or three escaping strands of hair
and tucks them back into the nest of her hairdo, then heads up the
stairs in her damp stockinged feet to bring Annabel down for her
feed.

It begins as a high keening, a wail that strangely comes and
goes as if Marjorie’s whole body is spilling away into a place
that’s bottomless and echoing, as if she is drowning in her own
agony and also trying to struggle up out of it, screaming with
terror. It rides over other sounds: the whistle of the kettle on
the gas, the last bubble of water boiling dry in the unwatched pan,
and the snap of glass as the feeding bottle bursts, the hiss of
milk curds roasting on searing-hot tin.

And Irene is rooted in the kitchen doorway and has no words to
meet anything as fearsome as this, Marjorie with that look on her
face, clutching her dead baby against her and screaming, Marjorie
bursting her way out of the front door and making off down the road
still screaming, holding out her child to people who are now coming
from their houses to see what the noise is about. Irene cannot
follow. She is trying to stop her bones from shaking themselves
loose inside their thin wrappings of muscle, she has set her jaw
against letting her own screams escape; she holds on to the
doorposts, but sudden pains are shooting inside her and she can’t
control the noxious rocking in the cavity of her stomach, which now
is slopping with vomit and disgorging it, without warning, all over
the floor.

Though she survived another thirteen years, I am certain my
mother was never free of the noise of that afternoon in her head,
its heat on her skin, the taste of it in her mouth. It made no
difference to her that the inquest concluded three weeks later it
was a cot death. She had never heard of cot death. Babies sometimes
just stopped breathing for no known medical reason, it was
mercifully rare but becoming more common? That was no explanation
at all. The doctor and coroner were merely giving a name to some
newly invented peril for healthy babies. Cot death? The child had
died in Irene’s care. She should not have touched her. She should
have picked her up. She should have covered her, uncovered her,
turned her on her side, not turned her, opened the window, closed
the window. She should have kept her alive. In taking the blame on
herself she was not discouraged by the Porters nor, it seemed, the
whole town. Nobody else had heard of cot death either.