Across the Bridge (32 page)

“It’s on us. Just a wee thank-you from Forward Voice PR.” She
beamed. “As I shall put in my evaluation, your talks have helped us
deliver a key campaign objective, rolling out the message to our
community stakeholders.”

He stared at her. “Fuck me. I can’t just go off having
lunch
. I need to get back over the other side.” He turned to
Ron. “You need to get back over yourself, eh?”

“I’ll be here when you’re ready,” Ron said, smiling.

“It’s all arranged,” Rhona said. “Our managing director
Malcolm’s going to join us, and so is Mrs Sturrock, so there you
go. Table’s booked. See you later, Ron. Thanks a lot for
waiting.”

Mr Sturrock was now pleasantly bewildered. “Christ, you in on
it, too?” he said to Ron. “Well, thanks a bunch, son.”

After they left, Ron picked up the hats and packed them in the
boat, then walked over to get his own lunch at the service station.
There were at least two hours to kill, and when he caught sight of
Colin there, hunched at the same table as last time, for a moment
he considered slipping away. But Colin looked up and saw him, so he
bought sandwiches and tea and joined him at the table. From Colin’s
face, it was obvious there was no right thing Ron could say, but it
wasn’t possible to say nothing at all.

“So. That’s the last of the bridge walks. That’s it, now,” he
offered, hoping Colin would pick up on the idea of their finality.
What else could the man do? It
was
the last; there was
nothing more to be said or done. Ron knew he was being lazy about
Colin’s suffering, but he couldn’t enter into it. He didn’t really
like him. While Colin certainly had ample cause to suffer, Ron
suspected he was in any case inclined to self-pity.

“If you’re about to say something about moving on, don’t
bother,” Colin said. He pulled his pudgy fingers across his face
before he spoke again. “That woman with her fucking photos.”

Ron shrugged. “Yeah, sorry, mate. It’s still tough going, is
it?”

“Her, everybody. People at work. The number of people that say
it.
Moving on
. They say maybe it’s a blessing I didn’t know
her that long, like that makes it better.”

“Aren’t they just trying to help?”

“They think I should be getting over it. Some people tell me I’m
lucky, I should be glad I wasn’t in the car with her.”

He blew his nose into a rag of used paper handkerchief with an
embarrassing, piteous honk that blasted little wisps of tissue
across his chin and cheeks.

“So, anyway, that’s the last of the bridge walks,” Ron said. “No
more trailing up and down from Huddersfield. You’ll be getting your
weekends back, a bit of time to yourself. Any plans?”

Colin glared at him. “I’ll still be coming. Why would I not
still come? She’s still here.”

“Oh. OK. Sorry, I didn’t mean – ”

“You know the worst thing people say? They say I should be glad
we weren’t married long enough to have kids. Because imagine what
that’d be like, they’d have lost their mother and I’d be left to
cope on my own.”

Ron knew how this line of thinking went: grief for loss of what
you did have, beside grief for loss of what you did not but might
have had, is a lesser grief. He also knew this thinking for what it
was, the well-meaning, ill-contrived and fatuous condolence of
outsiders, people uninitiated in loss.

“It’s not like that,” he says.

“No,” Colin says, his voice faltering. “They don’t know how
stupid it is. They don’t know how cruel.”

“They don’t mean to be cruel. Nobody understands what it’s like
to lose somebody until it happens to them.”

“I don’t mean that,” Colin said. Then his face collapsed and his
shoulders started to shudder. The used tissue went up to his eyes,
but huge, splattery tears were already dropping on the front of his
clothes. Ron watched them roll like raindrops down his barrel
chest. “I mean don’t they think I’d be glad if there was a kid?
Don’t they think I’d
want
to bring it up? I’d do it now if I
could, I’d do it right, by both of them. I wish she knew that. I
wish we’d had the kid. But we didn’t, and now it’s too late.”

“The kid?” Ron says. “You mean you lost one, you lost a baby?
I’m really sorry. That’s really tough.”

Colin nodded and cried noisily into his hands. “I never thought
I’d want them both so much. They’ve both gone and it’s my fault.
Nobody knows. Nobody knows.”

“It’s not your fault, mate. Listen, it happens. Miscarriages
happen. Nobody’s to blame.” Ron now wanted to offer comfort to this
large, off-putting man, but his words were having no effect.
“Here,” he said, pushing Colin’s mug towards him. “Here, go on,
take a swig of that. You need to calm down.”

To his surprise, Colin meekly swallowed some tea, then took
another mouthful.

“No point falling apart, is there,” Ron said. “Doesn’t get you
anywhere.”

“Sorry. Gets to me, that’s all.” Colin drew a hand over his
face.

“Nobody’s to blame,” Ron said again. “Miscarriages aren’t
anybody’s fault.”

Colin drank more of his tea in silence. After a while, he said
in a flat voice, “She was pregnant. I didn’t tell the police.
Nobody knew but me.”

“Why not? Why make a secret of it?”

Colin let out a massive sigh. “I felt guilty. Ashamed. Too
ashamed to say.”

Ron was confused. “I’m telling you, a miscarriage isn’t
anybody’s fault, mate.”

Colin sighed again and took a deep breath. “I’m trying to tell
you. There wasn’t a miscarriage. She was pregnant. What happened,
see, I told her to get rid of it. The day before she died I told
her she couldn’t have a kid and me as well, I said I’d leave.”

Ron stared at him. Colin’s face was pulpy and unwell-looking;
his eyes had an off-centre, uneven way of blinking. It occurred to
Ron that remorse was, literally, a sickness. Colin was so sick, so
unbalanced by it, he looked in danger of falling apart.

“She was my wife. She was going to be the mother of my kid, and
I said that to her. I can’t believe I said that to her,” Colin
said. “And now there is not one single reason I don’t want that
kid. I want them both, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

Ron said quietly, “Do you have a photo of her?”

“No. To be honest, I can’t stand to see her face. Only had a few
pictures, anyway.” Colin tapped his head. “She’s in my mind. I see
her face in my mind. But only here, I only see her when I come
here. She hated Huddersfield, she didn’t like the house. I didn’t
really listen. I should’ve done a lot of things different.”

Ron let his breath out slowly. “We could all say that,
mate.”

∨
Across the Bridge
∧

I
think a lot about
Col, lying here. Not any more in the panicky, guilty way of a few
months ago, but with a strand of regret I follow right back to the
day I chose to disappear, a day I now perceive as marked as much by
regret as by catastrophe. Not that Col will be feeling that. I’m
certain he is back sympathetically engrossed in the caregivers’
chat room, untroubled by ever having known me.

I think of our early days together, how to begin with I did not
feel very much at all except embarrassment at living with a near
stranger. But now I’m almost nostalgic for that early awkwardness:
our misdirected attempts at endearments, my pursuit of some
improved neatness in the arrangements of the house, his wordless,
ritualized moves in bed. It touches me to remember the way every
night he launched himself at me without speaking, his efforts to
please, his mountainous heavings on and off. I forgive myself my
mute acquiescence (I thought it sophisticated to have nothing to
say at such times), which matched his lack of words. I can imagine
the conversations we should have had, the conversations we lay so
self-consciously
not
having afterwards, in the dark, but our
silence strikes me now as more like generosity tongue-tied than
disappointment throttling itself before it can cry out.

Anyway, it will surely happen one day that I’ll be called upon
to give some account to my child of its father, and by then words
will have come to me and I shall have them waiting, as if written
down and placed in an envelope, sealed and put by. I do not have
them ready at present, but it will be years before I need them.
When the time comes I will know what to say, surely.

Ron comes into the cabin scraping his feet, and dumps a heap of
damp wood by the stove. This is what he does every evening; after
he’s tied up the boat he collects an armful of logs from the pile
by the sawhorse he’s set up between the jetty and the cabin and
trudges up with it and adds it to our store. He’ll make several
more trips over the evening; against the thin cabin wall, on either
side of the stove, an inner wall of logs is building up. It is
shoulder-high already and rising in an uneven wave, and Silva keeps
telling him not to make it much higher as we can’t stand on chairs
to get logs down every time we need to stoke the fire.

“How are you doing today?” he asks me routinely, as he starts to
stack the new batch of logs.

Silva appears from the kitchen with a knife in her hand. “She
got too tired,” she answers for me. It so happens she is wrong; I
was out of doors and out of her sight for over an hour, that’s all
that
too tired
means. But I don’t contradict her, I just
smile.

“I’m fine,” I tell him. “I went for a nice long stroll. I sat
down and rested every five minutes,” I add, before Silva can
lecture me again about drawing blood away from the baby.

She gives a snort. “Look at the colour of her, she’s white like
a sheet of paper. Ugh, don’t put that one on, it’s filthy. Don’t
make it any higher there, the whole thing will fall over.” She
returns to the kitchen, and Ron continues to stack.

When I’m resting here and watching him, I like to conjure animal
faces out of the rings and whorls of the newly sawn log ends he
puts in place: one looks like an owl, another is a baboon, yet
another is a cat wearing spectacles. When this wall’s complete, Ron
intends to start on the adjoining wall, and once that’s done he’ll
replenish our stocks as they go down. Not only will we have good,
dry fuel all the time, he says, but double wooden walls provide
excellent insulation. It’s what they do in Norway, and there’s not
much you can teach a Norwegian about insulation. I’m sure this is
true, but of course as the wall goes up our room grows smaller. You
might even say it’s closing in on us; it does smell blocked and
earthy, with an end-of-year whiff that carries a note of decay. And
the new wall is full of trapped, trembling insects. Whenever I lift
a log to put on the stove, it comes away from the pile with a gauzy
trail of tearing spider webs, gritty with rotting bark and mould
and sawdust. Silva says mice will move in, and Ron laughs and says
even mice need to live somewhere, and at least the wood will stay
dry enough to burn.

“So you are all right?” he asks, as he’s putting the last logs
in place.

“Yes, I’m fine. I’m so lazy, I’m too heavy to do anything much,”
I say.

“He was there again today, that bloke from Huddersfield. Colin.
The bloke whose wife died.”

I pick up my knitting from the floor and fiddle with it. “How is
he? Did he speak to you?”

“He says he’s going to keep coming. Every weekend.”

“What’s the point in that now the walks are finished? He should
stay away.”

“There’s a point in it for him. They still haven’t found her.
Have you ever been to Huddersfield?”

“No, never.” I haul myself up till I’m sitting on the sofa bed,
and I start on a row of knitting. “If I go for it, I think I could
get this sleeve finished by bedtime.”

“Annabel, where is it you’re from?” Ron asks. He is breaking the
rule. No matter that the rule is unstated, it has held us together
for months. The rule is that the three of us ended up here by ways
and means we don’t have to explain. Ron knows that.

“What does it matter?” I say. “I don’t ask you questions like
that. I don’t have the right. There’s no need for me to know. And
what about her?” I nod towards the kitchen, where the radio is
blaring music. “Are you going to start asking her that kind of
question? She’ll run a mile. You shouldn’t – ”

Just then Silva walks in again, carrying a plate of bread. She
looks tired in a way only a much older person should look. I can’t
be sure what she heard or didn’t hear. She waits for me to finish
what I was saying.

“You shouldn’t stack the logs so high. Silva’s right.” I put the
knitting aside and get up. “I need to stretch my legs,” I tell
them, and leave.

It’s too cold to stay out without another sweater, and in fact I
am too tired to walk far. I go down to the jetty and look back at
the cabin, its windows glowing with firelight, squares of soft
yellow in the grainy, grey dusk. The baby’s weight makes me
breathless. All I want is to go back inside, all I want is to carry
on living by the rules that have served us well enough, but what
awaits me in the yellow light is altered now. The door opens and
Ron steps out. I turn away and stare at the river, listening to his
footsteps on the shingle coming nearer and then the hard clump as
he walks along the jetty and stands next to me. I am too angry to
say anything.

He sighs, lifts a hand and strokes my hair. He is crying.

“He wants you back” is all he says before he unties the boat and
climbs in, starts the motor and moves off into the tide flowing
down towards the bridge. I wait until I’m shivering before I go
back to the cabin. Silva is coming out of the kitchen with three
plates, and when I tell her Ron has left she thinks it is because
she spoke sharply to him about the logs. She is peeved and
difficult all evening. In truth she exhausts me. Later I go to bed,
and although the baby kicks and kicks I fall asleep. I’m glad I’m
too tired to dwell on the strange truth that now that Ron may know
who I am, I feel more unknown than ever.