Across the Bridge (28 page)

“She has to see it,” Ron said. “She’s bound to see it sometime.
It’s better if we’re the ones to show her.”

“Why?” Annabel said. “What good will it do?”

Ron was taken aback. “If it’s not Stefan and Anna, think how
relieved she’ll be,” he said simply.

“But it is them…I’m sure it is. She won’t be able to bear
it.”

“If it is, she has to know. She’ll have to know sooner or
later.”

Annabel gazed at the door to Silva’s room, her face suddenly
white. “She’ll have to know sooner or later,” she repeated
stupidly. She turned to Ron. “Don’t leave tonight. Stay. Don’t
leave me alone with her.”

Silva’s door opened, and she wandered in, casting a severe
little smile at Ron. Her eyes were over-bright and her hair, as it
always was these days, was pulled back under an exuberant purple
plastic chrysanthemum that looked doubly absurd above her pinched
face. She glanced at the pan of potatoes and slumped into a chair
at the table.

“Not hungry,” she said. Then she caught sight of the paper lying
under Annabel’s hand, and snatched it up.

“Silva, wait. Don’t. Silva!” Annabel said, getting to her
feet.

Silva cried out, once, and in the next moment she was at the
door. She flung the paper down and was off and running, sobbing,
stumbling over the rocks to the jetty, her screams sounding back
across the wet stones of the shore.

∨
Across the Bridge
∧

S
he was simply trying
to get to them. I do not believe a thought of her own death was in
her head. I still think it was blind need that drove her to the
water, to be where they were, where they had died, and that was
all. It was not an actual intent to kill herself.

Ron dashed after her, ahead of me, but he wasn’t quick enough. I
came out of the cabin just in time to see her throw herself
forwards off the jetty. The strange thing was that from the moment
she surfaced, everything was very quiet. She had stopped screaming.
There was no kicking and flailing of arms, no splashing or wailing.
Perhaps it was the shock of the cold water that stilled her. Then
her head sank. The purple flower in her hair bobbed for a second
and disappeared, and the back of her pink cardigan floated up
behind her and for a moment billowed across the surface of the
river before its own waterlogged weight pulled it under and around
her submerged shoulders. By then Ron was in the water, and I ran
down to the jetty as he dived under and seized her by the jaw and
struggled to drag her face up to the air. If she’d fought him
harder and got a few feet farther out and into the current, she
would have been swept away, but the strength went out of her. She
surrendered. He brought her to the side of the jetty and dragged
her out of the water. She collapsed against him as if all her limbs
were broken.

I got her out of her wet clothes and dressed her in a thick dry
shirt and pyjama trousers. Ron heated whisky with sugar in it and
made her drink a lot of it. She sat for a while by the stove until
her shivering and sobbing subsided, and then I put her to bed,
leaving her candles burning and her door open. She fell asleep, and
Ron and I sat up for a long time, wondering how she would be when
she woke and what we might do for her. I stopped him wondering
aloud about Stefan and Anna and how they had come to be in the car.
For shame, I could not tell him my part in it. “Don’t go on about
it,” I told him. “It makes no difference. It won’t bring them back.
We’ll probably never know.”

My back had begun to ache, and Ron said I looked tired and
should go to bed. He kissed me on the forehead and once, gently, on
the lips, and he settled himself on the sofa bed in the main room
so as to be nearby if Silva needed us in the night.

She slept until daybreak. It must have been the
click
of
the door that woke me as she left the cabin; as soon as I
discovered her bed empty I hurried to follow her, leaving Ron
asleep. But this time she hadn’t gone to the jetty. She was
standing on the shore some yards from the water, mirror-smooth
under the early light. She’d picked up some pebbles and was
studying them or counting them in her hand. I started to go to her
and nearly called out, but stopped myself and drew back to the
doorway. She didn’t move. Her head in cameo stillness against the
silver-and-lemon sheen of the sun on the water was bowed and
sorrowing. I was helpless – worse than that, culpable.

All of a sudden she looked up and flung the pebbles from her
hand, and they landed scattershot, wrinkling the water with
hundreds of colliding circles. She watched until the water was
smooth again, and then, her lips working and her arms wrapped tight
around herself, she turned and wandered down the riverbank. Now and
then she lifted her head and paused, looking at the river and all
the time talking to herself. Or maybe she was talking to Stefan, to
Anna, to a God who let such things happen. Who could tell?

I couldn’t go back to sleep. I went inside and wrapped myself up
warmly and found some shoes, and then I left the cabin, intending
to follow her at a distance to make sure she was safe. But by the
time I came out of the cabin again and had got down to the river
edge, she had already turned and was walking slowly back. She
looked up and must have seen me, but she walked past me as if I
weren’t there, still mouthing words nobody could hear. When she
reached the cabin she went straight to her room. I heard her lie
down, and then, at last, she let out a low, desperate moan and her
weeping began.

Ron was awake and had to leave; it was one of the Saturdays for
the bridge walk. I went down with him to the jetty and made him
promise to come back as soon as he could and to tell no one about
Stefan and Anna. He looked puzzled for a moment, I think because
the idea of doing otherwise had never crossed his mind. I didn’t
want him to leave, but I couldn’t say if that was from a desire to
be with him or because I was afraid of coping with Silva alone. Two
weeks ago we had made love, he and I, but not since, nor had we
talked about what happened. So we were not lovers, exactly, but
what were we? The question was tangential now; Silva was our only
concern. Maybe it didn’t matter at all. He promised to return in
the afternoon.

∨
Across the Bridge
∧

I
n the boat going
over, Mr Sturrock, huddled in his waterproof jacket, said, “Did you
see that, the wean’s giraffe? In the paper?” He wiped a fleck of
rain from his cheek. “Wee soul.”

Ron nodded. He wanted to tell Mr Sturrock about Silva, bereft
and weeping. He wanted to tell anyone who would listen how she was
suffering. It grieved him that Stefan and Anna were to be unclaimed
and dispossessed in death as they had been in life, the small
history of the family as erasable, finally, as a drawing in an
exercise book.

“The poor mother,” he said.

“Aye, whoever she is,” Mr Sturrock replied.

Rhona was waiting under a lime-green umbrella. She had pacified
the irate customers from the last tour with lunch vouchers for the
service station and had also cut the bookings back down. The small
gathering now with her stood with the sombre decorum of the
previous groups; despite their garish wet-weather clothes, they
looked like people at a funeral. The big, reticent widower from
Huddersfield was there again, aloof in his sadness.

Summer was already in decline. The early morning sun had
vanished, and there was a spit of rain in the chill wind that blew
up the estuary, raising short white combs of spray off the water.
The tree shadows cast on the river margins had grown longer, and in
the forest a single stand of larch trees was turning from green to
bronze.

Mr Sturrock introduced himself and began his talk, counting the
same points off on his fingers, inserting the same statistics,
breathing in the same places. Ron stood at the back with Rhona, who
was absorbed in sending text messages. The audience stood lulled,
reassured, a little bored. Following Mr Sturrock, they tramped with
a scraping of feet between lines of hazard cones along the bridge
approach to the farthest point of the old, ripped-up roadbed. At
the barrier a few dozen feet from where the jagged edge of the
tarmac dipped down towards the river, they halted and gathered in a
semicircle. Collars and hoods went up; out here, squalls from the
river blew hard around their heads and down their necks. Calling
above the wind, Mr Sturrock launched into his lecture on the nature
of estuaries and the design options for the estuary bridge
designer.

“…here you can see that each tendon contains twenty-seven
strands of steel and each strand has seven wires. The
post-tensioning counteracts sagging and adds strength to the
spans.”

This was the point at which he invited people forward to see the
new concrete and steel segments, and warned them about slippery
surfaces and going too close to the edge. One by one people broke
from the group and went to look. But the big man hung back, staring
at the ground, and paid no attention when Rhona touched his
arm.

“You OK, Colin?” she asked.

Colin looked up, pulled his arm away and walked to the barrier.
When he reached the edge, he turned to the others and raised a
hand.

“Ladies and gentlemen, just for today, if I may have a minute of
your time.” He opened and closed his fists as he spoke, and his
voice and big body were full of confused, flashing energy. “I have
something I want to say.”

Rhona froze. Mr Sturrock took a few steps towards him.

“You’re all right, son,” he said. “Remember where you are,
now.”

Colin threw out an arm to hold him at bay. “There’s something I
need to say!” He paused, expecting to be stopped. “I want to…well,
anyway…here…” He reached in his inside pocket and brought out a
small toy dog with floppy ears and huge, mawkish eyes. A red felt
tongue lolled out of its mouth. From the other pocket he fished out
a posy of artificial flowers set within a ruff of plastic lace and
tied with a ribbon.

“My name’s Colin. I wanted…It’s just a gesture,” he said,
reddening and unfolding a piece of paper. Aloud he read, “For the
two victims.”

Ron strained to hear the words above the sighing of the wind.
Colin threw the posy and toy dog into the water, and took from his
pocket a red rose, a rigid, dry-looking thing on a long stem.

“My wife…This is for my wife. She also died here. And I just
want to say to her, not that she can hear me now…you don’t know
what you’ve got till you lose it. It’s no good wishing for a second
chance, but if I could make it up to you, I would.” He sucked in a
huge breath to steady himself. “I didn’t give you flowers when you
were alive, and I should’ve. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”

He let go of the rose and a current of air caught it and blew it
high into the sharp wind. It all but disappeared against the grimy
rain and river spray and lowering clouds, until it finally came to
land on the water too far away to look at all like a rose any more.
It floated there diminished and misplaced, a dark, untidy twig.
Rhona stood open-mouthed. Gradually people fanned out past Colin to
the barrier to watch his offerings bob on the waves and begin to
sink.

One man turned back. “Well said, there, sir,” he said.

Someone else said, “So say all of us,” and began to applaud, and
the others joined in. Colin broke away and walked off fast, back up
the ruined road. Rhona hurried over to Ron.

“Christ, what next? I can’t take this! I
so
can’t take
another drama. Could you go after him for me? Get him a coffee or
something, see he’s all right? I have to stay with the group.”

Ron followed the man up across the site and into the
service-station café. At the counter he caught up with him.

“I’ll get this, mate,” he said. “Go and find us a seat, OK?”

He bought coffee for himself and hot chocolate for Colin,
remembering something vague about sugar and stress. When he brought
it to the table, Colin was sitting with his hands over his
face.

“Here you go, Colin.”

Colin lowered his hands and nodded thanks. His eyes were
red-rimmed. “Was it OK? Me coming out with all that?” he asked in a
shaky voice.

Before Ron could speak, Colin waved his answer away. “I had to
say it. Needed saying. Even if nobody was interested.”

“I’m very sorry about your wife. It’s a terrible way to lose
somebody.”

“Yeah.” Colin’s eyes filled with tears. He wiped them away,
lowered his head almost to the table and took a slurp of his hot
chocolate. “Well, there you go.”

“People say the worst part is the waiting, don’t they?” ventured
Ron. “The not knowing. I can believe that.”

“Five months I was waiting. Then when they brought that car up
and she wasn’t in it, the police were straight round. I thought
they’d come to tell me she could still be alive. Still hoping, see?
Stupid, but I was. Only they acted like I’d killed her. Took the
place apart, went through the whole thing over and over again.”

“Bloody hell. Must’ve made it even worse.”

“Had to rule out foul play, they said.”

“Were you married a long time?”

Colin screwed up his face and shook his head. “You married?”

“Was once,” Ron said. “Long time ago, now.”

“Got kids?”

“No.”

Colin shrugged as if he’d lost interest. He picked up his mug
and stirred his drink hard and began feeding it into his mouth with
his teaspoon. Ron watched him, wondering if he was too upset to
talk any more or if he was a person who didn’t mind long silences.
He thought it likely to be the second, and a few months ago would
have accommodated it easily, being then that kind of person
himself. He could leave now and tell Rhona that Colin was all
right. But he said, “So you come up from England, is that right?
I’ve seen you at every walk. Where are you from?”