by Morag Joss
Yet the world goes on, and I went on. I rose every day and managed to dress myself in the wrong clothes, clothes that were happy and summery, soft old cotton skirts, trainers for getting up through the forest in the morning – I even tied up my hair with that plastic flower you bought me last year at the service station. The tourists had come, so the shop was busy and I was working more hours. Vi was having one of her good spells. The warmer weather helped her. She stayed sober, mostly, and sometimes even took half-days off and disappeared in her rusty red van, coming back with her hair done, and once a birdbath from the garden centre. But she was also harder to please. One day she told me if I didn’t learn to smile at the customers, I could make myself scarce, and I did try, by thinking of the cabin and imagining you back there with Anna, counting the geese on the water. I told myself the world goes on, and the river and the sun go on, and if I also could go on, and even smile, then you could, too. You were still in the world, and you would come back. It could not be otherwise. Now, after all these weeks, the way that I walked each day up through the forest to the road had become a path, well worn and easy to tread.
Watching Annabel grow big made all this both better and worse. Everything she was becoming was a mirror of my own childbearing and of my aching. Her belly began to swell as mine had, sooner than she thought it would, and I also watched her become happy in a way she wasn’t expecting. But I was. I know what it does to you to carry a child you love before it is born. When you love that way, the baby knows it, and grows. I remembered a woman from our village, they talked about how she married a brute, a real rough brute, because of his land and businesses, and her misery to be carrying his child. She couldn’t bear the bulk of it, its weight in her like his weight upon her, they said. She couldn’t forget her disgust over how it got there, that boulder of a child filling and stretching her. Blameless thing, that baby withered and died inside her, and they said it was hatred of its father that killed it.
Never mind. That was a long time ago and far away. There was much to do here, and Annabel was not as good at thinking ahead as she thought she was. She had nothing to do all day but take care of things at the cabin, and she did, in her way. Not in the way I would, but I didn’t complain. It was important not to upset her, so I did not let her see that her standards were not my standards. I was glad to have Ron there in the evenings. He kept the peace without knowing it. He was so sweet and quiet and grateful, and he did so much for us.
I wasn’t surprised when I got up the day after the storm to find him in the kitchen making three cups of tea. Too dangerous last night to go back in the boat, he said, so he’d slept in front of the stove. I was sorry he hadn’t had a mattress, but I liked it that he stayed. With the storm going on outside, I had lain awake for a while thinking that if our cabin had been put here for just this purpose, to be filled with people who needed a haven, there would surely be another place like it somewhere that was sheltering you. I prayed for your arms to be around her, wherever you were, and I fell into a deep sleep. I was sure a part of me knew Ron was there all night, and that was why I slept.
The weather had cleared, and Annabel got up and went to wave him off from the jetty. When she came back I said to her that Ron was a blessing, it was good he had stayed. She nodded.
“It would be good if he could stay more,” I said. “We should get something for him so he doesn’t have to lie on the hard floor.”
For once Annabel had been thinking ahead, because she agreed with that as if she had already planned for it in her mind.
To keep her happy, I let her go off shopping the next Sunday with Ron. I wanted to be by myself, and with her gone I could attend to some of the cleaning she hadn’t done very well. There was nothing I wanted to buy anyway, but she needed some bigger clothes, and there were places in Inverness where they could get folding beds, some pillows and other things. She was excited about going out, and I tidied her up, I brushed her hair myself. But I couldn’t do anything about the sleepy, foolish look that had come into her eyes. She hadn’t been away from the cabin for many weeks and she looked strange and distant, drugged on solitude. Ron had the Land Rover waiting on the road, and she set off up through the forest in her unironed man’s clothes with her belly large and her hair thick and springy, panting with every step. Soon she wouldn’t be able to make it up the steepest part. As I watched her go, I was anxious. I hoped she wouldn’t attract too much attention. But I was also afraid to be letting her disappear out of my sight and into a world that could swallow up the people I loved.
∨ Across the Bridge ∧
Thirty-Five
As Ron drove towards Netherloch, my excitement disappeared and I felt only fear. The people at the Invermuir Lodge Hotel would certainly know that one of those lost on the bridge had been a guest there; quite probably the press had turned up to interview the staff about the tragic couple. What if one of them, the nice waitress, say, saw me and remembered me? And don’t people always notice pregnant women anyway? I would have to spend the entire day with my collar up, staring at pavements, my heart thumping and sweat pouring down my body. I gazed out of the window and wondered if my mother, noticeably pregnant with me, had once ventured out like this and also found her courage melting away the moment she left the shelter of the house.
Ron said, “Some year for foxgloves, this. Just look at them all.”
There were lots of them, growing tall in the banks among the bracken and at the forest edges under the shade of the pine trees. I agreed, pretending I had noticed them, too.
“Sure sign of a good summer, foxgloves,” he said. “A hot, dry summer.”
“Lovely,” I said, not meaning it, imagining the hot, dry summer my mother was carrying me and Annabel Porter died. Maybe someone raised an eyebrow at her rounded stomach and crossed the street, maybe a neighbour, bitter on the Porters’ behalf, hissed “child-slayer” as she walked past. Or did the people she met assess her with remote, grieving eyes and say nothing? Perhaps things like that happened, perhaps none did. It’s possible that every single bit of evidence of my mother’s defamation she conjured up herself, out of nothing but her sense of sin.
“A hot, dry summer. We don’t get many of those,” I said.
“Not like we used to. Not like the summers you look back on, when you were a kid.”
I wanted to tell Ron that I never did look back on them, at least I tried not to. I wanted to tell him about the later summer, when I was thirteen, the one my father said sent my mother over the edge, though in truth the weather had little to do with it. We both knew it had been coming for years, but we needed an additional factor, one beyond our control, to blame for an occurrence that we failed to prevent.
It was the summer holidays, and nearly all the girls I knew from school had gone to the seaside or to visit relatives. We, of course, were staying at home.
“Here,” my mother said one afternoon, “take this on down to your dad at work. It’s just a list. A few things we need to get.” She handed me a small envelope. “Tell him I’m not up to much,” she added, as if her not doing the shopping was unusual and required explanation. Her voice sounded careful and hurting, as if there were too many bones in her throat.
She was lying on the sofa with a handkerchief balled in her hand; tears had been spouting from her eyes all day. I didn’t ask why she had put a simple shopping list in an envelope. I asked if it was her hay fever, one of several euphemisms we used to cover her various states of collapse. She said it was.
“I’m just not up to much. Stay while he reads it, you hear?” she said, with her eyes closed. “Don’t skip off. He’ll need you.” More tears trickled from under her eyelids.
“You mean I’m to stay and help carry things back? I’ll take a basket then.”
She took my hand and looked at me.
“Go now and you’ll be down there before five. You’ll find him all right, he’s doing holiday relief in the outer office.”
I nodded. “I’ll push the bike home. He
can carry the basket.”
She closed her eyes again before she let go of my hand. “I’m sorry,” she sighed. “I need some peace and quiet now. Be a good girl. Mind the road.” I put the shopping list in my pocket and left her alone.
But before I set off I went into the bathroom, and that was when I discovered the blood between my legs. I went quietly up to my room. I knew what was happening, in theory; some of the girls in my class had already started, and one or two actually talked about it. But I felt disorientated and shy, and there was the practical problem of what to do about it. Before I could go out I needed help from my mother and I couldn’t go to her; she was vacant and inaccessible, crying on the sofa and wanting peace and quiet. The afternoon was muffled and hot, and I realized then that warm sunshine no longer meant, and never would mean again, perfect play weather, hours and hours for swings and sandpits and running across the grass. I would never be carefree again. The day had turned wearyingly complicated and the heat treacherous; it would make me sweat, and itch, and smell. I lay on my bed unbearably dismayed, with my hands folded over a wad of paper tissues pushed up between my thighs, and I fell asleep.
I woke less than an hour later, in a panic. It was after four o’clock, and I couldn’t delay it any longer. I went in search of my mother. The house was empty. I found her hanging from a flex attached to a metal spar in the garage roof, her face black and her neck broken.
Dear Gerald
Please forgive me there is nothing else I can do to keep going. It is taking me over and getting worse and worse. Thank you for everything Gerald I know it hasn’t been easy. You are a good man, you will both do better without me. She doesn’t need me any more she is not a baby any more. I can go at last. I know I am a coward but I have to let go of it all. Please try and understand it’s for the best.
Love to you both
Irene
If she ever has a baby you need to warn her, make sure she knows it can happen just out of the blue.
Just then I must have shuddered, because Ron asked if I was all right and suggested stopping for a cup of coffee. I refused and said I’d gone off coffee, so I was surprised when he turned into the car park by Netherloch bridge.
“Why are we stopping?” I asked.
He was already halfway out of the Land Rover. “You can have tea instead,” he said simply. He walked round to my side, opened the door and held out his hand. “Come on.”
We paused on the bridge to watch the river flow underneath and widen into the loch. Three or four men moved around with buckets and bags far away down on the stones of the loch’s north shore, dark hunched shapes under the floating veil of morning mist, but we couldn’t make out what they were doing. We walked on into the town. Set in the shade of mountains, it was a place of water and stone. Even in June there was a mineral, chilly scent from the river and loch, and the echoes of traffic and voices rang off the hard grey buildings. The main street was unspectacular, but there was an enigmatic undercurrent about it, as if it operated according to a closed, parochial logic unintelligible to all but its inhabitants. I kept noticing oddities: three strands of tinsel tied around a lamp post, an ironmonger’s shop with a basket of eggs in the window, a handwritten card on the door of the chemist’s saying ‘Shona left Bermuda on the 17th’. If I had been alone I would have been slightly unnerved, but then I heard Ron laugh, and I laughed, too, and wondered why I was taking it all so seriously.
We went into a gift shop that also had a few tables and a microwave and a sputtering coffee machine. Ron ate a massive wedge of lemon cake, but for once I wasn’t hungry. I was entranced, to begin with, by the modern hardness of the place; after the damp pine woods and river shore and our shabby, mouldering cabin, the chrome fittings of the coffee machine, the bleached counter and plate-glass window looked to me impossibly new and sharp-angled. I looked around at the girl behind the counter, and two women at another table, and none of them paid me any attention at all.
Ron looked at me. “People seeing us, they might think I’m the father,” he said.
“Does that bother you?” I asked, feeling suddenly the force of the insult to me that was implicit in how much it had bothered Col.
I didn’t mean it cunningly, but the question seemed to present Ron with layer upon layer for measurement and consideration. The answer might be strewn with implications, his silence seemed to say; whatever he replied might be a blunder. Maybe, I thought, I’d asked it mainly because all my conversations about my baby and its father had been with myself. I didn’t really need an answer for any other reason than to satisfy a thirst for words on the subject from another person, the way I might ask for a glass of water. To avoid a long fall into silence, I stood up and said we should get going, and as we walked back over the bridge and set off in the Land Rover down the opposite side of the river towards the city, we began to talk again of this and that, the weather, the way people drove, the cost of things.
I pointed out a brash-looking house with a Spanish balcony and pampas grass in the garden, and Ron laughed and said he bet it was called the Hacienda.
So the miles to Inverness, our voices saying nothing in particular, the day itself: all passed along. I bought my clothes while Ron went to a DIY shop, and then we had lunch in a shopping centre, looking not so different from every other couple there. Ron had been given a cap in the DIY shop to promote something or other, and I put it on and he burst out laughing and said I looked like a boy of seventeen. I kept it on, partly because it amused him but also because it felt so good to be light-hearted about the matter of staying unrecognized. Together we shopped in a department store for the things on the list we’d made with Silva, and Ron insisted on paying half. We arranged to drive round to the customer collection point at the back, and we even picked up leaflets about applying for the store’s charge card. By then I felt soothed by the ordinariness of our day; it made me absurdly happy to be out and behaving like everyone else.
It was as if the strange fracture between my past and future had been imaginary, and my real life could now once again stretch before me flat and horizontal, within the taut, functioning predictability of the world. Before we left the city, we bought delicious things to cook for dinner and lots of wine, thinking that Silva must be given a treat for having missed the outing, and on the drive back we talked about recipes and our favourite foods. Our unfinished exchange of words in the gift-shop café that morning had got lost in the gentle curve of the day.
∨ Across the Bridge ∧
Thirty-Six
In the middle of July, the tide dislodged the silver Vauxhall and nudged it along the riverbed in a gentle veering curve seaward and closer to the north bank of the river, until it came to rest in about twenty feet of water some twelve yards from the shore. Though the car was still submerged, people came to see the salvage barge and crane barge that were towed out and moored nearby. Barriers went up again on both sides of the river to keep spectators back. The television crews returned.
Rhona put out a press release. The car was believed to be the rental car caught on camera on 19th February as it passed onto the bridge only moments before the collapse, the car believed to be driven by the woman holidaymaker missing since the day of the accident. Her next of kin had been advised to prepare themselves for the worst. The vehicle would be lifted by crane the next day, in a delicate operation calling for skill, ingenuity and teamwork. Members of the public were urged to stay away so as not to hamper proceedings.
Ron, Silva and Annabel heard the news over supper in the cabin (they had a radio now, tuned to the local station), and Ron had also been keeping them up to date with the reconnaissance dives and crane movements earlier in the week.
“What next of kin?” Annabel asked abruptly.
“There’s just her husband, I think,” Ron said.
“How can they say that – prepare for the worst? He knows the worst already, he’s known it for months. He won’t come to see, will he?”
“I think they’d advise
against it, even if he wanted to. Poor guy.”
“Will he have to identify the body?”
Ron shook his head. “They may not find one. Even if they do, the guys were saying there won’t be much left by now. Jewellery, maybe clothing, that’ll be about all. Poor guy.”
“Maybe if he’d been with her it wouldn’t have happened,” Annabel said.
“You can’t blame him for the bridge going down,” Ron said mildly.
“I don’t mean that. I just mean if he’d been with her, things might have turned out different. If they were spending the day together, they might have been somewhere else at the time.”
“Well, but that’s still not his fault.”
“I’m sorry for him and for her,” Silva said. “But at least he can put her in a grave now.”
It was a warm evening, but Silva had had enough of river and forest walks, she said, and she went to bed tired and sad. Ron and Annabel strolled up the shore, chucking little stones in the water. Ron kept her supplied with pebbles, because bending down was now an effort for her.
“So, the car. They’re bringing it up tomorrow?” she asked. “What time?”
“Midday. They’ve got the press coming. I’m supposed to take a load of photographers out in the boat so they can get their pictures.”
“Horrible,” Annabel said. “Who wants to see pictures like that?”
Often now, Ron slept in the main room on a pull-out bed that they used as a sofa in the daytime. That night when they got back to the cabin, Annabel, turning to say goodnight, suddenly took hold of his hand.
“Would you stay with me tonight? Like last time?” she said, her head bowed. “Just tonight? I keep thinking about that car.”
He led her to her room. As he closed the door behind her, she gasped. Then she smiled and said, “Oh! The baby’s kicking.”