The Broken Bridge

by Philip Pullman

“Yeah. You gave me a card.”

  “Okay, then. I’ll keep looking, see if I can find out anything else. But you’re going to have to talk to him in the end.”

  Ginny put the phone down, and hesitated, and then ran up to bang on Robert’s door.

  “What?” His voice was angry, wide awake.

  She opened the door. He was lying fully clothed on the bed, hands behind his head.

  “D’you want to find out the truth?” she demanded.

  “The truth about what?”

  “Us, of course. What you were saying yesterday. D’you want to find out or not?”

  He sat up. “How?”

  “We’ve got to go now if you do. There’s a train in ten minutes. You coming or not?”

  “Where?”

  “Chester.”

  He shrugged. He was watching her carefully. “All right.”

  “Hurry, then. See you downstairs.”

  She ran to her room, grabbed her rucksack, shoved a few things in it, stuffed the jacket on top, and took all the money she’d earned. She scribbled a note: Gone out with Robert—back sometime, and left it on the kitchen table; then she locked the back door and ran to the front, where Robert was waiting.

  He looked at her rucksack. “How long is this going to take?”

  “As long as it takes. Come on—there’s no time to hang about.”

  —

  At Porthafon they ran to the bus station, where there was a departure for Liverpool and Chester at eleven o’clock. They caught the bus with a minute to spare. Ginny, who had been shaking with nerves as they ran through the town in case she saw Joe Chicago, found herself relaxing as the bus pulled out and began to climb into the hills. She and Robert hadn’t spoken on the train, but now they had three and a half hours to get through before the bus stopped in Chester. Ginny was sitting next to the window on the left, with her rucksack on the empty seat beside her, Robert across the aisle on the right. She was glad they weren’t forced to sit any closer.

  “What’s in Chester, then?” he said finally.

  “Dad’s parents. Our grandparents.”

  He frowned, puzzled.

  “They’ll know what happened, won’t they?” she said impatiently. “They know about me anyway, because I stayed with them once when I was a tiny kid. God knows why. But they’ll know all about your mum and everything; they’re bound to. So we’ll go and ask them.”

  “He’s never mentioned them,” he said.

  “No; he doesn’t talk about them. There’s too bloody much he doesn’t talk about, and I’m sick of it. I just heard this morning…that phone call was Wendy Stevens, the social worker. She told me that I’d been fostered when I was younger. I never knew. I mean, I don’t mind or anything, but I ought to bloody know, I reckon.”

  She was watching him closely, and she saw an honest bewilderment slowly growing. All right, she thought. I don’t like him, I’ll never like him, but we’re both in the same boat, Dad’s messed us both up.

  And, briefly, a flicker of understanding passed between them, and what they understood was that this journey was a time out of battle, a time of truce.

  She hesitated, and moved the rucksack onto her lap. He hesitated, and moved across to sit next to her. She began to tell him everything: Maeve and the trailer, Helen’s first query about whether their father had been in prison, Modern Painters and the exhibition of her mother’s paintings, Joe Chicago’s jacket, Wendy’s phone call.

  At the end of it she said, “Whatever it is he’s done, I don’t care, I can forgive him for it, but I can’t forgive him for not telling me. Telling us.”

  “This prison business,” he said. “I can’t believe it. You don’t think it’s got something to do with the murder in the woods—what’s it called—Staunton Chase? You don’t think he…”

  “Course I’ve thought that. Of course I have. He’s not a violent person, but who knows, Joe Chicago is, and if they knew each other and he got mixed up in something…I just don’t know.”

  “You think these grandparents will know who we are?”

  “Course they will. You’ll see.”

  “They might not want to tell us anything, though.”

  “They will. They’ll have to.”

  —

  A long, hot journey, and then they had to buy a street map from a newsstand in order to look up their way to Grove Road. They found a bus that took them to the nearest shop, next to a row of shops in neat 1930s brick, a wool shop and a florist’s and a dress shop, all looking as if nothing had changed for fifty years. Grove Road, leading off the row of shops, was just as well preserved. Semidetached houses, tidy gardens, net curtains; and stillness, on that blazing afternoon, without even the sound of sprinklers on lawns now that water was scarce, the very insects stunned into silence by the heat.

  Number 16 was as obsessively neat and trim as all the rest. Two rosebushes stood inside the white-painted fence, and the paving stones that surrounded them had been swept and dusted. Ginny found herself thinking: I remember those rosebushes, but she knew she didn’t; she could remember very little. She looked at Robert, whose eyes were screwed up against the glare off the road.

  “Ready?” she said.

  “They can only tell us to get lost,” he said. “They can’t kill us or anything….”

  It sounded as if he was reassuring himself rather than her.

  “That’s right,” she said, and went up the little path and rang the bell.

  Footsteps, a shadow behind the opaque glass; they caught each other’s eye and exchanged a faint smile. Then their grandmother opened the door.

  SHE WAS in her sixties, stooped, gray-haired, with a closed, unhappy expression. She frowned at the two of them suspiciously.

  “Mrs. Howard?” Ginny said.

  The woman nodded. “Yes?” she said.

  “Er…could we come in for a minute? It’s a bit hard to explain….”

  She looked over her shoulder doubtfully. “Well, what’s it about?” she said, looking at Robert with no more friendliness than she’d shown Ginny.

  “It’s a family matter,” he said.

  Then her eyes flicked back to Ginny, and slowly at first and then suddenly, the realization flooded through her, changing her expression like a blush. One second she was closed up and dour, the next alert, and animated, and frightened.

  “It’s Virginia,” she whispered.

  Ginny nodded. Her grandmother was holding the door tight as if to stop herself from falling. She looked at Robert again, and Ginny said, “And my brother. Robert.”

  “Janet’s boy?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Can we come in?”

  She looked overwhelmed, unable to move. There was a sound from behind her, and they looked past, down the hall and through the kitchen, and saw a man standing there, looking at them from outside the back door.

  “Who is it?” he called.

  “It’s—” she began, then hastened back to speak to him from the kitchen door: “It’s Virginia! And Janet’s boy!”

  “Shut the door, then,” they heard him say urgently, as if the most important thing was to keep the neighbors from seeing. Ginny looked at Robert: did that mean they were going to be asked in, or not?

  But their grandmother was back almost at once and urging them in. She shut the door hastily behind them. In the kitchen, their grandfather was standing on a sheet of newspaper and taking off his shoes before putting slippers on.

  “Have you come from…? Where’s…? Is your father…?” She was nearly whispering in her confusion and emotion.

  “No; he’s at home,” Ginny said, finding her own voice weaker than she’d expected. “He doesn’t know we’re here.”

  “And Janet…My God, I don’t know what to say. Is she…?”

  “She’s dead,” said Robert. “She died last month.”

  “Oh, my dear…Ken? Did you hear? Janet’s…”

  He’d arrived in the hall by then, a heavy, quiet-looking man, with something of Dad’
s good looks but with a constant gnawing weakness about the mouth. Like his wife, he was utterly bewildered, quite unable to decide how to behave, what was the appropriate social form to adopt. Ginny felt that any naturalness had withered and died in them long before, and that if there was no established ritual to follow, they were lost, like children.

  “Shall we—” she said, and he said simultaneously, “Why don’t we—” and she was opening the door of the front room, and Ginny and Robert went through.

  Now Ginny began to remember things. The smell: wax polish, potpourri; the little carriage clock on the mantelpiece; the faded pink of the loose covers on the furniture. There was one picture on the wall—a woodland scene in a pretentious gilt frame, of the sort sold by the thousand in the furniture departments of large stores. No other pictures, no books, no records; just a hideous china cart horse with leather reins standing on the windowsill, and the TV set in the corner, with a lace doily on top of it and a little brass pot of artificial flowers.

  She looked around, Robert close beside her, and heard whispering outside the door. A moment later their grandfather came in.

  “Well…Sit down, sit down,” he said. “Make yourselves at home, come on….How old are you now, Virginia? Eh?”

  “Sixteen,” she said, sitting on the sofa. Robert sat next to her.

  “And you…er…”

  “Robert. I’m sixteen too.”

  “Ah. Yes…Getting on all right at school?”

  She nodded. He shrugged. “All right, I suppose,” he said.

  “Good. That’s the style.”

  He sat down heavily in the armchair by the fireplace.

  “Have you had some tea?” he said.

  “No,” said Ginny. “We came straight here from the bus station.”

  “Grandma’s getting some now. Soon be ready. Have you…come a long way?”

  “Yeah. From home.”

  “And…where’s…?”

  “You don’t know where we live?”

  He shook his head.

  “Llangynog,” Robert said. “In Wales.”

  “Oh, Wales? And your father, has he…he’s not coming with you?”

  “He doesn’t know we’re here. This was our idea,” said Ginny, looking at Robert. “We thought we’d just like to find out about things. We didn’t tell him. So…I found out your address and we just came. That’s it, really.”

  “Ah. Yes. Right. Well, it’s a big surprise, naturally; we’re not prepared or anything….You’re a big girl now, Virginia; I’d never have recognized you. And your mother? How’s she getting on these days?”

  He wouldn’t look either of them in the eye, or if he did, he’d look away after a second and direct his gaze over their shoulders or above their heads, so it wasn’t clear whom this last question was directed to. Ginny and Robert looked at each other, and then Robert looked back at him and said, “Mum’s dead. She died a short while ago. That’s why I’m living with Dad and Ginny, you see.”

  “Oh! I’m sorry. I didn’t grasp what she was saying out there, what she was going to say….My dear boy, I—I’m very sorry to hear about that. She’d been ill, had she? Or…?”

  “Yes,” Robert said. “She’d been ill for a few months.”

  “Ah,” he said. “And what about your grandmother? Kitty? I heard that Janet’s father had, er, passed away a few years back, but…”

  “She lives in Spain now,” Robert said. “She married someone with a lot of money. She sort of lost touch with us, I think.”

  Hearing him talk like this was a revelation to Ginny, and to hear him refer to her by name and call her Ginny and not Virginia, as their grandparents were doing, made it almost worth coming all this way.

  “What should we call you?” she said into the little silence.

  “Oh, I should think it would have to be Granddad, don’t you? And Grandma.”

  “Because, you see, there’re a lot of things we don’t know. And we really came here to see if you could tell us….” Ginny trailed off as the door opened.

  “I expect you’d like to wash your hands,” said their grandmother. “D’you remember where it is, Virginia?”

  “No. Sorry. I was only four or something….”

  “Oh, less than that, I think,” said Grandma, showing her the way.

  Well, Robert should like this house, Ginny thought in the bathroom. Every corner of it was obsessively clean, the windows sparkled, the water in the lavatory was blue and foaming, two neatly folded towels hung side by side on the rack. Despite the cleanliness, there was a closed-up, unused feeling in the air, as if no one had visited the house for years, no one had trodden the carpets or drawn the curtains or looked out the windows but that silent, awkward, broken couple downstairs. And everything was so ugly. Didn’t they have any idea how ugly it was? Or was that just her snobbery again?

  She passed Robert on the stairs, and he blew out his cheeks and rolled his eyes, obviously finding it as difficult as she was.

  Grandma was standing by another door, which Ginny vaguely remembered led into the dining room. The layout of the house was coming back to her, but it all seemed so small, so cramped. Grandma smiled, and Ginny smiled back, nervous formal smiles both of them, and then to her surprise her grandmother gave her a brief tight hug and then stepped away quickly. Ginny had no time to respond.

  In the few minutes since they’d arrived, Grandma had laid the dining room table with a tablecloth, a silver teapot, cups and saucers, a plate of bread and butter, a cake, biscuits….It was as if it had been ready and waiting for years.

  Ginny, fighting her shyness, said, “I can hardly remember what it was like, being here before.”

  “Well, you weren’t here for long; just a few days. And then your daddy came and took you away, and…that was that,” she said with an attempt at brightness. “How is he? Is he all right?”

  “Yeah, he’s fine. He’s—you know—working and things. He bought a boat last week. We haven’t actually been out in it yet.”

  “Oh, a boat, eh?” said Granddad, who’d come in quietly.

  “Is he…did he ever marry again?” said Grandma.

  “Oh, no. No. See, he was never divorced from Robert’s mum,” Ginny said.

  They both nodded wisely, as if they’d expected something of the sort, but Ginny could tell they were surprised.

  Granddad turned to the door. “Here’s the boy,” he said, with a fragile heartiness. “Come and sit down. We’ll have some tea, eh?”

  “Expect you’re hungry,” said Grandma as they all sat down. “Come a long way.”

  “How did you get here?” said Granddad. “On the train?”

  “No. There aren’t any trains. On a bus,” Ginny said.

  “Oh, so you said, yes, the bus station…”

  Polite, empty words, formal teatime courtesy: have a biscuit, let me cut you some cake, would you like some more tea. It seemed to go on forever. Ginny knew that Robert felt as she did, that he wanted to bang the table and shake their stupid old tortoise heads and shout, Tell us the truth, for God’s sake! And, like her, he was reining it in for Dad’s sake—being polite to Dad’s parents out of consideration for him.

  Finally she’d had enough.

  “Look, please,” she said, “we want to ask you about Dad and everything, that’s why we’ve come. Because Robert and I, we don’t know anything about the family….I mean, I didn’t know anything about Robert till a few weeks ago, I’d never heard of him, even, and I thought my mother was married to Dad. I never dreamed any of it would be like it is, and then I remembered being here when I was little, and I thought you’d probably know….”

  Her voice trailed off. They were sitting like sculptures: Robert looking down at his plate, Granddad gazing fixedly at the wall, Grandma with her eyes closed altogether. It was as if they’d all lost the use of sight but Ginny, and she was looking from one to the other, her eyes doing the asking that her voice had given up, and feeling herself hot-cheeked with embarrassment. Why did
they have to behave like this? Was she different again, inwardly as well as visibly?

  But then Robert helped her.

  He looked up and said, “Yeah. That’s right. See, Mum— my mother—she never told me anything. About you or about Dad. Nothing. It was just as if you—he’d—never existed. And I didn’t know about Ginny, either. So I never knew Dad, and I don’t know him now, really, not to ask about things. And Ginny can’t ask him because he never told her about me, so we’re both in the dark.”

  “And you’re the only people we can ask,” Ginny added. “That’s why we came. We won’t tell him about it, if you don’t want us to.”

  After a moment their grandmother said, “Is he treating you all right?”

  Granddad shifted as if he was uncomfortable. Ginny nodded. Robert said, “Yeah. He’s very…kind. But we just want to know where we come from.”

  That was so exactly what Ginny wanted that she could only look at him and nod eagerly. Then Granddad put both hands on the table and stood up.

  “Let’s go in the front room,” he said. “We’ll be more comfortable in there. Can’t talk comfortably at the tea table….”

  —

  It had begun just after the war. Granddad had a great friend, Arthur Weaver, and when they left the army, they set up a little business together, selling motor parts, and then within a month of each other they both got married. Granddad and Grandma—Ken and Dorothy—and Arthur and Kitty became inseparable. They went to the cinema together; they took turns giving each other dinner every weekend after which they’d play bridge; they shared holidays; borrowed each other’s lawn mowers and power drills and slide projectors; even took up the same hobbies—golf, camping, wine-making. When Tony was born to Dorothy, and Janet six months later to Kitty, it seemed as if some kind of seal had been set on this wonderful friendship. It was a golden time, Granddad said, and Grandma said separately that they were golden years….

  Ginny listened to this recital with powerful curiosity. This was where she came from—half of her: this narrow, prim, cozy, insufferably complacent world of bridge parties and polishing the car and pruning the roses and unfailingly voting Conservative. It was like another planet. But nothing was more alien to her than that friendship, the obsessive repetition of Arthur and Kitty, Arthur and Kitty, Arthur and Kitty. It was more than a friendship; it was more like a four-way marriage, and Ginny, used to the casual independent freedom she shared with Dad, felt oppressed and claustrophobic as she thought about it. It wasn’t natural; it was asking for trouble.