Across the Bridge (26 page)

Just then I must have shuddered, because Ron asked if I was all
right and suggested stopping for a cup of coffee. I refused and
said I’d gone off coffee, so I was surprised when he turned into
the car park by Netherloch bridge.

“Why are we stopping?” I asked.

He was already halfway out of the Land Rover. “You can have tea
instead,” he said simply. He walked round to my side, opened the
door and held out his hand. “Come on.”

We paused on the bridge to watch the river flow underneath and
widen into the loch. Three or four men moved around with buckets
and bags far away down on the stones of the loch’s north shore,
dark hunched shapes under the floating veil of morning mist, but we
couldn’t make out what they were doing. We walked on into the town.
Set in the shade of mountains, it was a place of water and stone.
Even in June there was a mineral, chilly scent from the river and
loch, and the echoes of traffic and voices rang off the hard grey
buildings. The main street was unspectacular, but there was an
enigmatic undercurrent about it, as if it operated according to a
closed, parochial logic unintelligible to all but its inhabitants.
I kept noticing oddities: three strands of tinsel tied around a
lamp post, an ironmonger’s shop with a basket of eggs in the
window, a handwritten card on the door of the chemist’s saying
‘Shona left Bermuda on the 17
^th
’. If I had been alone I
would have been slightly unnerved, but then I heard Ron laugh, and
I laughed, too, and wondered why I was taking it all so
seriously.

We went into a gift shop that also had a few tables and a
microwave and a sputtering coffee machine. Ron ate a massive wedge
of lemon cake, but for once I wasn’t hungry. I was entranced, to
begin with, by the modern hardness of the place; after the damp
pine woods and river shore and our shabby, mouldering cabin, the
chrome fittings of the coffee machine, the bleached counter and
plate-glass window looked to me impossibly new and sharp-angled. I
looked around at the girl behind the counter, and two women at
another table, and none of them paid me any attention at all.

Ron looked at me. “People seeing us, they might think I’m the
father,” he said.

“Does that bother you?” I asked, feeling suddenly the force of
the insult to me that was implicit in how much it had bothered
Col.

I didn’t mean it cunningly, but the question seemed to present
Ron with layer upon layer for measurement and consideration. The
answer might be strewn with implications, his silence seemed to
say; whatever he replied might be a blunder. Maybe, I thought, I’d
asked it mainly because all my conversations about my baby and its
father had been with myself. I didn’t really need an answer for any
other reason than to satisfy a thirst for words on the subject from
another person, the way I might ask for a glass of water. To avoid
a long fall into silence, I stood up and said we should get going,
and as we walked back over the bridge and set off in the Land Rover
down the opposite side of the river towards the city, we began to
talk again of this and that, the weather, the way people drove, the
cost of things.

I pointed out a brash-looking house with a Spanish balcony and
pampas grass in the garden, and Ron laughed and said he bet it was
called the Hacienda.

So the miles to Inverness, our voices saying nothing in
particular, the day itself: all passed along. I bought my clothes
while Ron went to a DIY shop, and then we had lunch in a shopping
centre, looking not so different from every other couple there. Ron
had been given a cap in the DIY shop to promote something or other,
and I put it on and he burst out laughing and said I looked like a
boy of seventeen. I kept it on, partly because it amused him but
also because it felt so good to be light-hearted about the matter
of staying unrecognized. Together we shopped in a department store
for the things on the list we’d made with Silva, and Ron insisted
on paying half. We arranged to drive round to the customer
collection point at the back, and we even picked up leaflets about
applying for the store’s charge card. By then I felt soothed by the
ordinariness of our day; it made me absurdly happy to be out and
behaving like everyone else.

It was as if the strange fracture between my past and future had
been imaginary, and my real life could now once again stretch
before me flat and horizontal, within the taut, functioning
predictability of the world. Before we left the city, we bought
delicious things to cook for dinner and lots of wine, thinking that
Silva must be given a treat for having missed the outing, and on
the drive back we talked about recipes and our favourite foods. Our
unfinished exchange of words in the gift-shop café that morning had
got lost in the gentle curve of the day.

∨
Across the Bridge
∧

I
n the middle of
July, the tide dislodged the silver Vauxhall and nudged it along
the riverbed in a gentle veering curve seaward and closer to the
north bank of the river, until it came to rest in about twenty feet
of water some twelve yards from the shore. Though the car was still
submerged, people came to see the salvage barge and crane barge
that were towed out and moored nearby. Barriers went up again on
both sides of the river to keep spectators back. The television
crews returned.

Rhona put out a press release. The car was believed to be the
rental car caught on camera on 19
^th
February as it
passed onto the bridge only moments before the collapse, the car
believed to be driven by the woman holidaymaker missing since the
day of the accident. Her next of kin had been advised to prepare
themselves for the worst. The vehicle would be lifted by crane the
next day, in a delicate operation calling for skill, ingenuity and
teamwork. Members of the public were urged to stay away so as not
to hamper proceedings.

Ron, Silva and Annabel heard the news over supper in the cabin
(they had a radio now, tuned to the local station), and Ron had
also been keeping them up to date with the reconnaissance dives and
crane movements earlier in the week.

“What next of kin?” Annabel asked abruptly.

“There’s just her husband, I think,” Ron said.

“How can they say that – prepare for the worst? He knows the
worst already, he’s known it for months. He won’t come to see, will
he?”

“I think they’d advise against it, even if he wanted to. Poor
guy.”

“Will he have to identify the body?”

Ron shook his head. “They may not find one. Even if they do, the
guys were saying there won’t be much left by now. Jewellery, maybe
clothing, that’ll be about all. Poor guy.”

“Maybe if he’d been with her it wouldn’t have happened,” Annabel
said.

“You can’t blame him for the bridge going down,” Ron said
mildly.

“I don’t mean that. I just mean if he’d been with her, things
might have turned out different. If they were spending the day
together, they might have been somewhere else at the time.”

“Well, but that’s still not his fault.”

“I’m sorry for him and for her,” Silva said. “But at least he
can put her in a grave now.”

It was a warm evening, but Silva had had enough of river and
forest walks, she said, and she went to bed tired and sad. Ron and
Annabel strolled up the shore, chucking little stones in the water.
Ron kept her supplied with pebbles, because bending down was now an
effort for her.

“So, the car. They’re bringing it up tomorrow?” she asked. “What
time?”

“Midday. They’ve got the press coming. I’m supposed to take a
load of photographers out in the boat so they can get their
pictures.”

“Horrible,” Annabel said. “Who wants to see pictures like
that?”

Often now, Ron slept in the main room on a pull-out bed that
they used as a sofa in the daytime. That night when they got back
to the cabin, Annabel, turning to say goodnight, suddenly took hold
of his hand.

“Would you stay with me tonight? Like last time?” she said, her
head bowed. “Just tonight? I keep thinking about that car.”

He led her to her room. As he closed the door behind her, she
gasped. Then she smiled and said, “Oh! The baby’s kicking.”

He said, “I want to see,” and he undressed her, and then
himself. When they were lying in her bed, he said, “I want to
touch.” She drew his hand over the mound so he could feel the baby
inside, bumping against the soft wall of her body. Then he said, “I
want to touch you,” and he began to explore her without her guiding
him at all, and they made love quietly and saying nothing more,
mindful of Silva in the next room who, they knew, would be staring
wide awake into the dark.

He left the next morning without waking them up.

Later, after Silva had set off for work, Annabel waited an hour.
Then she dressed in what she considered her least noticeable
clothes, pushed her hair under the cap, and left the cabin.

∨
Across the Bridge
∧

I
followed Silva’s
pathway up through the forest. It rose steeply all the way, and
often disappeared completely. In places the hillside had collapsed
into soft, lumpy terraces and banks that bulged with the roots of
fallen trees, and the broken spars of trunks lay criss-crossed and
horizontal. I struggled to keep going, using them like climbing
bars to haul myself up; under my weight several of them split, each
time with a crack that echoed damply through the trees and sent
pigeons and rooks flapping into the sky. I would pause, panting
hard, until the quiet returned and I could be sure there had been
nobody nearby, only the birds to hear me, and then I fought on,
huge and heavy among the spindly, brittle boughs and branches that
shivered and shook and swung back against my face as I climbed.

It took me nearly an hour to get near the road where the forest
levelled out, and I had to rest for several minutes leaning behind
a tree to catch my breath. When I felt better, I brushed from my
clothes as best I could the black and green streaks and scrapes
from the wet bark, and got rid of the mulch and pine needles from
my hair and shoes. Then I set off towards the bridge.

After only ten minutes I came across one, then another, then
more and more little groups of people on the road, most of them in
walking gear, heading in the same direction. I was relieved to be
no longer conspicuously solitary, but I didn’t want to be spoken
to, so I slowed my pace to an unobtrusive stroll and went on alone,
trying to look neither lost nor in need of company, just one of the
straggle approaching the bridge. I had to trust that everyone’s
interest would be focused on the spectacle to come and not on a
dishevelled, pregnant woman trudging along by herself. But my heart
was beating hard.

I had my jacket pulled around my belly and my hands jammed in
the pockets, and I secretly stroked the baby as I walked, and I
fancied she wriggled and kicked to let me know she could feel my
touch upon her. And I thought of Ron and how his hands had roamed
over her, I remembered what followed – his directness, so
unexpected, yet thoughtful, and so pleasing. And afterwards, sleep:
peace inspired by and in each other, somehow. His awkward
tenderness was already playing in my memory like a little grace
note, and I didn’t care if I was being idiotic or sentimental.
Whatever might happen after this, I felt that I had been favoured,
and that thought made me surprisingly happy.

I couldn’t get near the river, nobody could. I walked the road
as far as the old bridge approach and went beyond that, farther up
the bank towards the sea, and stopped on high ground some way from
where the gathering of people was densest. Anchored together on the
river, as Ron had told me, were the crane barge and the salvage
barge. Around them, a dozen small boats swayed on the water.
Speeding among them were three or four police launches that threw
out white, frothy trails. The helicopters were back, one of them
with the logo of a media group slashed in red across it. For half
an hour or more, nothing much seemed to happen; I watched as men
walked about on the barges, though I could not determine what
exactly their purpose was, and I began to wonder if the operation
was going ahead at all. Then quite suddenly two small dinghies
moored to the back of the salvage barge moved out onto the water
and the men left on deck took up positions at the far end. The
crane swung out over the river. The winch chains, black against the
pearly white water, unwound and dipped below the surface. The men
in the dinghies went to and fro, guiding the chains down to the
divers underwater. After another long wait, the chains tautened.
The dinghies returned to the back of the barge. The crane head
juddered and cranked and began to wind in its load, and a few
moments later a dome of water began to rise and bubble and then the
surface of the river darkened and swelled and broke, and up came
the car like a drowned, hanging corpse, crushed and sodden and
bleeding dark mud. It hung, swinging, as river water streamed off
it. The helicopters came lower and hovered. All around me people
were lifting mobile phones into the air and taking pictures, or
scanning their screens for live news. One man fiddled importantly
with his iPhone and relayed details in a loud voice to his wife and
two teenage sons who stood beside him, gaping and pointing. Others
gathered to stand within earshot.

He said, “There are six divers down there…weather conditions
almost ideal…very little wind…but operation may be hampered by
strong currents and low visibility underwater.”

Then out on the river we heard a faint metallic cranking, and
the crane jerked and shook and pulled the sagging pendulum of the
car a few feet across. Then it stopped. The car hung in the air
above the salvage barge until the arc of its swings diminished, and
then it was lowered slowly onto the deck. As soon as the winch
chains came off and were swung clear, tarpaulin screens went up all
around it. A few minutes later three police vessels came alongside
the barge, and several men were brought on board.