Across the Bridge (6 page)

But what if you were wrong? What if they’d been watching for
hours from the darkness beyond the fire? I clutched at you. I was
trying not to scream.

Stefan! Somebody’s there! Get Anna! Oh, God, Stefan, get
Anna!

No, no, just listen. Anna’s fine. Listen to the geese, Silva,
you whispered. Can you hear them? The geese?

I listened hard, waiting for any sound, the slightest sound,
coming off the water. My eyes were watering from the smoke. All I
could hear were the sounds of the fire and the traffic on the
bridge.

The geese? No. I can’t hear anything.

Well now, you said in my ear, pulling me closer to you. Well
now…That’ll be because they’re all fast asleep. As you should be,
silly girl.

I pushed away from you, bashing at your shoulders, and you
grabbed my hands and kissed them and started gnawing on my fingers,
growling and mumbling. Just then there was a wail from the trailer.
You looked round but I got up at once, pulling the blanket with
me.

I’ll go. Don’t stay out long.

I left you poking a long branch into the fire. I was glad she’d
woken up, and to the sound of laughter. In a moment you’d come into
the trailer to see that she was settling again and the sight of
her, asleep or not, would be almost the last stage of your
restoration to yourself, and to me. At such moments I would often
see tears on your face. That night, your love for her flooded your
eyes.

The very last stage came later, after she was asleep again. It
came like this. In the way I might casually happen to be first to
reach a door and open it for both of us, I told you that I was
sorry. It didn’t matter to me at all that I didn’t believe anything
I’d said was untrue or that I didn’t think I had anything to
apologize for. The assumption of blame wasn’t important, that
wasn’t the purpose of it. It was a way of saying I knew that you
wanted to forgive me, but much more to forgive yourself, for the
way we were forced to live. It was a way of letting you do both.
Because then you took me in your arms and wrapped me in close
against you, and with no more words we made love, fitting ourselves
to each other’s bodies for each other’s consolation and for the
glad familiarity of it, our slow, deep rocking together in the
dark.

∨
Across the Bridge
∧

I
was having a bath
when Col returned from his kayaking, and he shouted through the
door that he would wait for me in the bar. When I came down, he
offered me a drink and declared with a little bravado that he would
‘join me’ and ordered the same for himself, tonic without the gin,
though usually he drank beer. He meant it as a kind of compliment,
symbolically rejecting the notion of our incompatibility by
rejecting a different drink, but the gesture was slightly too big
for him. He sat and sipped his tonic, cowed by the formality
between us. We had to be so careful. We exchanged tight remarks and
little smiles, until I ordered him a pint, which he drank as if
released from some test or other. I watched him, not sure what I
loved. But whatever it was in me he wanted, I did not want him to
stop wanting it.

We ate early. Over dinner he drank a bottle of wine, which
helped him, and we talked a little about his day on the river and
about mine, supposedly in Inverness. We pared our stories down to
safe generalities. I barely had to lie; I said I’d had an
interesting time and had enjoyed seeing new places, and he didn’t
ask any more of me than that. His lack of interest in my day was a
courtesy, an offer to me to talk free in the knowledge I would not
really be listened to, so it was easy to reel off inane remarks
about a day of vague impressions without being specific about
locations or – the courtesy reciprocated – endanger him by bringing
him anywhere near the orbit of my real thoughts. In return, when I
asked him about the kayaking, I showed satisfaction with answers
that were neither engaged nor precise. We ate in small mouthfuls,
and every one was taken slowly, as an opportunity to push a little
more of the evening behind us. But still, when we had finished I
was appalled at how much time was left. Our bedroom, smelling of
carpet cleaner and hot electric light, lay above us at the end of a
musty hotel corridor. I had imagined, all through dinner, the hours
of the coming night, cramming themselves into its emptiness, lying
in wait.

I suggested we have coffee in the lounge. The couple from the
morning were already there, drinking whisky and yawning over the
papers. The waitress brought in our tray and made her exit, saying
she hoped we would enjoy the rest of our evening.

But there was so much of it. While Col glowered over a book of
aerial photographs, I browsed the bookcases on the other side of
the room and wandered around studying the prints on the walls, of
stags and mountains, Highland crofts and cattle. I sat down again
on the sofa and examined the china minutely, as if I might discover
in it something about cups and saucers that had so far eluded me.
The couple got up to leave, and invited us to join them in the bar
when we had finished. Col looked longingly after them. I took up
the newspaper they had left behind and completed a couple of
crossword clues, then folded the paper back up as neatly as I had
found it. Col drank his coffee. I drank my herb tea.

“Col, if it’s about money, if there wasn’t a problem about
money, do you think – ”

“There’s no point discussing it,” he said. “We haven’t got the
money. I’m not discussing it.”

“But suppose we had, suppose – ”

“Stop. Just – stop,” he said. “There is nothing to say.”

I got up again and studied a rack of leaflets and maps. It was
no good. No task took long enough. I found myself looking at a
pamphlet about salmon-fishing, wondering how long I would be able
to keep this up, listening to my life pass along in thudding little
ticks of my heart. I was forty-two years old and I knew it was
finite, this bright, regular tapping in my chest, but I also knew
that for every few seconds I aged, the baby grew a little; it
became a larger, livelier thing to kill. I wanted to blurt out my
feelings; I feared my impatience for the next day would somehow
break out of me and declare itself. I returned to the sofa.

“By the way, I’m going kayaking again tomorrow,” Col said.
“You’ll be all right, will you?”

“Yes, I’ll be fine,” I lied.

I couldn’t think of anything else to say. The air of the lounge
grew dense with our hoarded silence; the clock ticked and ticked
with a sound like seconds snapping off in small splinters, only to
reassemble maliciously behind us, ready to come round again. The
hours yet to come thronged around us with all their awful
availability for no other purpose than to keep a vigil against
marital disintegration. Eventually a drift of laughter came from
the bar. My husband raised his head.

“I’m tired,” I told him. “You go on and enjoy yourself. I think
I’ll have an early night.”

∨
Across the Bridge
∧

T
he rain fell all
night, clattering on the roof and cascading off into the ground
around the trailer as if it was being poured from a jug. The place
would be a mud bath in the morning. I would have to fish out Anna’s
boots from the storage space under the mattress. Would they still
fit her? As I lay thinking in the dark, working out that if she
needed new boots I wouldn’t be able to get them before Friday, the
day Vi usually paid me, I heard a different dripping noise. It was
inside. It was coming from over near the door. I slipped out of bed
and immediately knew that we were unsheltered. I felt a chill on my
skin as if nothing protected us properly any more. Either the door
was open or the roof was leaking. Rain or night air had entered the
trailer. Anything could enter. In a couple of steps I had reached
the door. It was shut and locked, but my feet were wet. I touched
the wall. It was running with water, seeping in through the join
between the trailer’s side and the roof. Reaching up, I discovered
that it was dripping from farther along, where the seam turned at a
right angle. From there it was plocking down on the shelf where I
had left bread for our breakfast in a paper bag, now soaking
wet.

You were asleep. I fumbled my way back to Anna’s bed. She was
asleep, too, but her covers were pushed up against the wall, and
they were already damp. I lifted her up gently out of her nest,
hoping the sudden cold breath of air wouldn’t wake her, and clasped
her against me, willing my arms and the palms of my hands to
project all my body’s warmth into her through her back. Without
waking, she curled her legs and arms around me and pushed her head
in under my jaw, snuffling against my neck. I settled her in
against you and got back into bed. I wouldn’t be able to sleep
perched on the narrow edge of the bed that was left now, but I
could lie calmly enough, knowing she was warm. I dreaded the
morning, so I spent the rest of the night waiting for it, trying to
work out what to do.

First thing, you would climb onto the top of the trailer, which
would be slippery, and wonder how to repair it this time. You’d
sealed it before, which only worked for a while; if you could get
hold of some plastic sheeting or tarpaulin you could cover the roof
and weight it with rocks from the shore. That might work for a bit
longer. Then we’d have to dry the trailer out, but if it kept
raining that would take days. The ground would be soaked, and the
mud and damp would cling to us, we’d bring it into the trailer and
make matters worse. Anna couldn’t be left outside so she would have
to be kept in the trailer, and she hated that, and the floor would
be filthy. You would have to get a fire lit somehow to dry out our
clothes and bedding, never mind wash off the mud, and I didn’t know
how you were going to manage that if the rain poured down all day,
and with only soaked wood to burn. There was the propane heater to
keep Anna a bit warmer but it cost so much, and the cartridge was
low and I wouldn’t be able to get back with a new one until the
evening. How would you manage? You’d need hot food. It took nearly
an hour to get up to the service station for hot chocolate and
muffins, soup maybe, and nearly an hour back, probably longer if it
was muddy, and you’d get so wet coming and going it might not be
worth it.

I was glad you were asleep.

I did manage to doze off towards dawn. When I woke again a soft
pale light was replacing the grey inside the trailer. I was aware
of an absence, but for a moment couldn’t work out what it was. You
and Anna were still beside me; Anna had a few strands of my hair
clutched in her hand and had pulled them into her mouth, and you
were just beginning to wake but in that eyes-shut way of yours,
convincing yourself you were still asleep. You turned and draped
your arm across me. I started to prepare in my mind how I would
tell you about the weather and the leaking trailer and the horrible
day ahead. That was when I realized what was missing. It was quiet,
because the rain had stopped. All I could hear was the traffic on
the bridge. I drew my hair gently out of Anna’s grip and raised
myself on my elbows. The trailer was set too far back from the bank
of the river for me to see the horizon at the end of the estuary,
but from that direction, over from the east, a few fringes of
sunlight were beginning to sparkle on the pewtery, dark reaches of
the water. That meant there was about to be a proper, unclouded
sunrise, and if the sun shone bright for even a few hours today,
we’d have a chance.

You would be awake in a minute, and soon you’d be outside
clapping your hands at the geese and laughing at me for worrying.
You’d fix the trailer, you always managed to fix it. By tonight we
would be all right again. Maybe if the mini-mart wasn’t too busy or
I got a minute when Vi went to lunch or dozed off, I might be able
to raid the freezer and bring back some steaks for us. I’d seen
some lying in the bottom nobody would want to buy, anyway. I could
lift a bag of charcoal from round the back on my way home, and if
the rain stayed off we could cook on the old barbecue you picked up
that time from the verge at the top of the track.

But when we were awake and up and dressed, you didn’t say
anything to that idea. You swore a few times and stared at the
trailer and then didn’t seem to care about it any more. You set
your mouth in a grim, thin line, and I didn’t get a happy word or a
smile from you before I had to leave for work. You had been that
way before, impatient to make it all different, angry about things
you couldn’t change, furious with yourself for not giving us a
regular life. But you had been getting angry more and more often,
and for longer, and it was harder each time to bring you round. I
didn’t really see that that was because what made you angry had
changed. By then it was me you were angry with.

That day you wouldn’t walk me even part of the way up to the
bus. You didn’t take Anna to say good morning to the geese, though
they were lovely with the sun on their wings and they landed so
beautifully on the black rock in the river, hooting that low,
rounded noise over and over like a thousand wheezy old organs in a
fairground, so funny and also so sad a sound it was, like home, and
sweet and faraway.

∨
Across the Bridge
∧

I
slept badly and got
up long before Col was awake. I didn’t want to speak to him, about
the baby or anything else, so I left quietly and drove east from
the hotel, as I had done the day before. That early in the morning
there was frost on the ground and the grip of ice in the air, as if
during the night winter had crept down from the mountains, pushing
back the spring. A white fog obscured the hills and shoreline of
the north bank of the river. I drove into swirls of it ahead of me
on the road, and on either side it hung in freezing clouds under
the bare trees and along the hedges.