by Morag Joss
“How do we get out of here except by boat?” she said. “How far is it to the road? I can’t even see a path.”
“There must be a path. People got down here once, didn’t they? We’ll find a way up through the trees. It’s peaceful here. It’s safe.”
“But suppose I… What if one of us got ill? Suppose one of us needed something and we were stuck down here?”
“There would be two of us. And that’s only till Stefan comes. Everything will be all right when Stefan and…” My voice gave out. The single word of my daughter’s name was too much to say.
She turned away from me. “Yes, soon you’ll have your husband and your little girl,” she said. Was she scared I wouldn’t let her stay after that? But she sounded more sad than scared. Maybe she was jealous, but she would have her own baby soon.
“Yes. I’ll have Anna back,” I said, and tears rushed into my eyes. “Anyway, you won’t be ill much longer. It passes.”
She decided to ignore what I was really saying and lay back on the mattress.
“This place makes me feel lazy,” she said. “I like the sound of the river. You can hear it now there’s no traffic on the bridge.” She sighed. “I’m so tired. I could fall asleep.”
I wasn’t tired at all. “So we should stay here. We shouldn’t waste that money on rent. If we went somewhere else and I lost my job, Stefan wouldn’t know where to find me. If I’m not at the Highland Bounty, he’ll think of here at once. He knows I’d come here. He knows I love it.”
She didn’t trust what I was saying, but she wouldn’t say so. I could tell she believed you’d left me and taken my baby away. She didn’t know you, and what it was like, the three of us together.
“Anyway, soon you’ll need your money for other things.”
“Well, but I’ll get a job, at some point.”
“You’ll need it for your baby.”
She sat upright. “Why do you say that? Could you tell? How could you tell?”
“Do you think I’m stupid? Of course I can tell. Where’s the father?”
She shook her head. “He’s got nothing to do with it. I’m not with him. I’m going to manage on my own.”
“It’s hard. You don’t know what it’s like.”
“I’ll manage. Plenty of single mothers manage.”
“You don’t know anything. You’re lucky you’ve got me.”
She didn’t argue with that.
“Listen,” I told her. “Tomorrow I have to go back to Vi’s. You can come with me as far as the road. We’ll find a way up together. Then you can come back and unpack some of our things. Sleep. You can have the little room at the front. Get us some firewood. There’s lots of firewood. You’ll be fine. I’m going to look after you.”
PART II
He rose at five o’clock in the morning, was always first up and clattering to the shower before anyone else, trying to make as little noise as possible because the men he shared with worked until late at night. Because of his hours, he’d got a place in a mobile sleeper unit on the site, which he shared with other men who couldn’t get home between shifts. It was spartan: three narrow beds in cubicles, a small recreation area, and a shower room-but it was an improvement over sleeping in the Land Rover. Another identical unit was stacked above his, and alongside stood a third. He saw little of the other men; they pitied him his early hours, but he relished them, the quiet and space to himself before he was caught up in the flow of another day filled with people. Much as he liked being no longer alone, he found it exhausting.
On the first day he’d been instructed to take the boat across and bring back the catering staff, but after he’d done that and made several more crossings for other work crews, they hadn’t known quite what to do with him. He’d driven up to the Highland Bounty Mini-Mart to buy stuff the other workers wanted: tea, coffee, cereal. Then he’d done a few more boat runs and waited out the day until it was time to collect Silva. On the second day he’d been busier. By the third day, his work was acquiring a pattern.
By half past five he would start the launch and set off to pick up the catering crew. Within half an hour they would be back, unloaded and preparing breakfast in the canteen unit, while he crossed the river again to bring over the first of the day’s relays of workers. In the course of the first week, the emergency teams faded away and were replaced by people recruited for salvage and urgent repair work. The boat held only twelve people; Ron would be busy for the next three hours or so, and then he would moor the boat and get a late breakfast at the canteen. At first he made do with tea and toast; by the fourth or fifth day, Jackson, the massive, tattooed cook in charge, knew Ron’s schedule and kept some hot food for him. Ron tried to thank him.
“Plate’s hot, mind,” was all Jackson said, passing it over in huge hands etched with blue-black thorns and wine-red roses that entwined all the way up his forearms.
Around nine o’clock each day Ron presented himself at the site office, and now either the younger man or Mr. Sturrock, neither of whom had mentioned Ron’s paperwork again, would assign him here or there to fill in for absentees or where an extra man was needed for unskilled labor. They would also give him a list of river crossings scheduled for that day; as well as contingents of workers, there were police officers and accident investigators, engineers, contractors, and dozens of officials whose role it was not Ron’s place to know.
Midafternoon, when the catering crew would be finishing with clearing after the lunch service and getting ready to return to the jetty for the trip back to the Inverness side, he would return to the canteen. That was how he found himself included in the distribution of the day’s leftovers to the staff; Jackson counted him in, he supposed, because he knew that the men who stayed on-site overnight had to microwave their own evening meals.
Small kindnesses such as these and the routine of work and sleep and waking up in the same place each day put Ron in a more even mood than he had known for years. He was friendly but remained a little reserved. He didn’t join in the daily, mainly obscene banter of the men; he never topped a dirty joke with one of his own. Nor did he care for the taunting that went on among the work teams, for almost every man was singled out for something-having red hair, no hair, being good at darts, unable to whistle-and given a nickname and a greater or lesser amount of teasing about it. Though the banter was not at heart malicious and Ron himself escaped it, probably because he was the boatman and not part of any one team, it sapped his energy to withstand the relentless camaraderie even as a witness. He dreaded being made conspicuous, for any reason at all.
That must be why, he decided, he looked forward all day to the peaceful company of the two women. He carried pictures of them in his head, and he thought about them carefully. The older one, Annabel, was the softer-natured of the two and at times even seemed the younger. Silva didn’t order them about, exactly, but she was always first to be clear about domestic matters, and there was an edge in her way of asserting that things had to be done thus and not otherwise: how long to boil potatoes, how to get their towels dry, which wood burned best on the fires she lit to heat water for washing and where in the forest to find it (about which she was often wrong). Annabel never tried to assert control, and so neither did he. Annabel appeared, actually, to welcome Silva’s bossiness, meeting it always gently, and over the course of an evening Silva’s ferocity would subside a little and slowly she would become less brittle.
All around him at the bridge site there was pilfering going on, not on a big scale but in so matter-of-fact a manner it was clearly, up to a point, tolerated. So on his tasks around the place he was always on the lookout for things Annabel and Silva might need. Being discreet, and keeping his acquisitions modest, he took small things: pallets for kindling sticks, canisters sloshing with the dregs of something useful-a good spoonful of lubricating oil, or bleach, or detergent-a handful of screws and nails, paltry amounts of sand and cement. What tools he needed for work on the cabin he borrowed, returning them always to the s
ame places. With one thing and another, there was never an evening when he turned up empty-handed.
Every time he went, there was daylight a little longer into the evening by which he could work on the repairs. He brought scraps of timber and bitumen sheeting and sealant, and after he’d sawn back the tree roots that were forcing their way into the cabin’s back room, he replaced the split and rotten wood and secured the join between walls and floor. There was no glazing work going on at the bridge, so he took the window measurements and got one of the Inverness men he ferried across each day to have the glass cut there. If the man was curious about why the boatman needed a pane of glass, he didn’t say so.
As soon as the window was mended and the back room dried out after being leaky for so long, Silva, who had been sleeping in the main room while Annabel had the front room, moved her things in. She set out a mattress from the trailer on the floor and kept her own clothes in a couple of deep plastic tubs at the foot of it. Along one wall she arranged a bank of Anna’s and Stefan’s neatly folded clothes and shoes. Anna’s dolls and teddy bears perched atop the pile, staring into space.
On the first evening after she was installed there, while Annabel cooked, Silva wandered with Ron upriver. They were supposed to be collecting firewood, but she began to pick the sparse little wildflowers, really just flowering weeds, that grew in the narrow strip of soil and light between the forest and the bank of stones on the shore. Back at the cabin, she put them in a mug of water on the floor in one corner of her new room and surrounded it with photographs of her husband and daughter, propped up against the wall. Ron was surprised at the satisfaction this appeared to give her, arranging the mug on a clean white handkerchief like a votary at her altar.
“And look!” she said, when she brought him and Annabel in to admire. “See, there’s this as well.”
It was a drawing in crayon on a scrap of paper, childish but not done by a child. It showed a wobbly little house surrounded by trees. A mummy, a daddy, and a little girl stood smiling in front of it. Water flowed past their feet in snaking horizontal blue lines.
“Oh! That was on the wall in the trailer,” Annabel said. “I’m glad you brought it. You see?” she said to Ron. “It’s the cabin. It’s where we are now.”
“Stefan drew it for me,” Silva told them. “From across on the other side. It was a joke, then. Now it’s important. It doesn’t matter what guides him here. As long as something does, like this. This will bring them here.”
She propped the drawing up at the back of her shrine. The paper was flimsy, and it curled over and slid down the wall. The others watched while Silva fiddled with it until she just about managed to make it stay. Ron could see that with the least draft across the floor it would fold in upon itself again and float away.
“I could make you a frame for it, if you like,” he said.
Silva turned and thanked him, her eyes shining with such piteous gratitude he could think of nothing more to say except that it was nice for a picture to have a frame.
Most nights after supper they sat outside for a time, since Silva kept up her old habit of lighting a campfire. They watched the river and listened to creaks and rustles of the wind in the trees and the furtive scrabbling of animals, most likely squirrels and badgers, Ron said, or deer. The noises from the bridge had lessened, or perhaps they had gotten accustomed to them. For the first few days they saw on the far bank the trailer doors open and a fire lit nearby, and then one night there was no sign of life at all. Annabel told them that morning she’d watched from inside the cabin as the tramps had been escorted off the riverbank by policemen with dogs.
“Dumped back in Inverness, probably,” Ron said. He’d heard the men talk about it, too.
None of them said a word about returning to the trailer.
Each day Ron and Silva had bits of overheard news and gossip about the bridge, to which Annabel listened with patient interest, but she never craved information. They would sit at times in silence, and even when talk ranged more widely, they asked one another very few questions. Silva said nothing about Annabel’s luggage, supposedly still being kept for her by kind people in a house in Inverness. Nobody asked Silva about the country she was from, not even idle inquiries about language or food or customs. Ron once referred vaguely to losing touch with his family, and neither Annabel nor Silva followed it up. They all avoided speculation about when Stefan and Anna would return.
It was courtesy, not indifference, that kept each of them from probing into the others’ lives, a delicacy that prohibited the seeking of answers that might make it necessary for them to lie to one another. Even sincere answers would surely be imperfect and unreliable, anyway. Perhaps they could assume that for all of them it had been a long haul to get from the past all the way to here, and their friendship (if it was that-friendship was another word they didn’t use) was not rooted in curiosity about what that past had been. Soon conversation would return to practical concerns: how to fix the rattle on the door, how deep the water was around the jetty. Would the matches stay dry longer in tin or in plastic, would it rain again before morning.
Ron liked to watch the two women together across the failing light and the smoke from the fire, saving up the images for when he was alone again. Later, as they walked him down to the jetty, he would always manage to mention what tasks he could do next, what he would load into the boat that night: borrowed tools, water containers for refilling, rubbish for disposal, to be sure they were expecting him back. And as he turned to wave to them standing there, he liked not knowing which of them he found more touching and beautiful, nor whose approval gave him more pleasure, nor of which of them he was growing fonder.
Within a few weeks of being at the cabin, my sickness vanished and I noticed a firming and swelling of my stomach. The weight of my fear had begun to drop away, like a stone somehow melting, and a different, pleasing heaviness gradually took its place. My breasts acquired a high, proud outline. I wondered every day about Col, testing over and over in my mind the possibility of going back and trying to explain what I had done and asking him to forgive me, leaving aside any thought that he might need to be forgiven for anything himself. Any affront I might have suffered for the apparent misdemeanor of carrying his child did not enter the equation; I assumed that even a notional reconciliation would be on his terms only. In my head, I heard myself plead with him to understand that I could not give up my baby; I begged him to let us become a family. And that was where I always stalled, for no reply came. I could not conjure up his voice framing any words of acceptance.
I realized I had to allow Col his silence. I resolved to let him become a distant regret, to turn my concern for him into a conviction that he was better off without me. It was not that difficult. I needed only recall what he had said that day at breakfast to be convinced again that by staying away I was saving him from the sight of a child he didn’t want growing in the body of a wife he didn’t love.
His loss, I told myself, although it was some time before I really believed it. Several times a day I would run my hand over my body, slipping it under my clothes to touch my naked skin. I was touching myself and also my child. Col didn’t love either of us and so I would have to, and I did. I loved us both.
With that love came elation, and amazement, too, for I had never associated love, certainly not self-love or love of the unborn, with happiness. Yet it took me only a short while to trust in it. And as must be common enough in pregnant women, I grew reflective of my own mother, and of myself as a child. I had been a teary, clingy little girl, always scared by my mother’s brisk, dutiful care of me. The patting on of talcum powder after my bath, the tying of hair ribbons, the cutting of birthday cakes-all were guiltily rushed along and done with before there was time for me to experience pleasure small or great or, indeed, to cling. (And as must also be common, I made whispered little vows to my baby that we would do all these things differently.)
But if love is blind, happiness is kind. I felt no longer bitter
but merely sad and generous toward both of us, my mother and me. I saw now that the reason for her roughness and hurry must have been that she had not wanted to give herself time to dwell upon the anxious, ashamed frugality of her affection. I saw that she must have regarded my being born to her at all as a bewildering miscarriage of justice. For her, it must have been beyond comprehension that she of all people should be granted a live baby girl, let alone one who survived babyhood. But what could she do about a moral error that could be only God’s? Since I was alive and remained so, she discharged her obligations as a mother with ruthless attention (being nothing if not conscientious), but she refused herself any joy in my upbringing.
On the Friday five days after the photograph in the garden was taken, on an identical, shriveling hot afternoon after everybody had stopped saying the weather was lovely, my mother went next door to mind baby Annabel while Marjorie popped out to pick up the developed film from the pharmacy. Annabel had been difficult all day-too much sun, probably-but she had gone down to sleep in her cot at last, and Marjorie didn’t want to risk setting her off again by putting her in the pram and lugging her on and off the bus in the heat. But she was desperate to get into town that afternoon for the pictures because the pharmacy was closed on Saturdays. There were lots of new ones of Annabel, as well as last Sunday’s tea party in the garden.
None of these details was mentioned while my mother was alive. I heard them from my father afterward, over the years, in faint, unintentional allusions and references and little wisps of fact, never the whole story at once. And in retrospect, the thirteen years of my childhood before my mother died, before I knew a single thing about Annabel Porter, seem to have been a strange kind of waiting time, when I was learning, without understanding what it was, to live half-drowned in the backwash of an old disaster. It was always there, never spoken of but still the reason why certain words and phrases could bring conversation to a halt: Inquest. Heat wave. Died in infancy. It hung around like a kind of eerie damp rising up from a long-ago flood that was now a stagnant pool in the cellar of a house where the words flood and cellar were unmentionable.