Among the Missing (25 page)

Mr. Sturrock also had a new task. The trouser-suited young woman called Rhona, whom Ron had seen from time to time in the site office (there were few women on the site and no others as memorably glamorous), turned out to be in charge of public relations for the project. However preposterous he thought the very idea of public relations, every other Saturday, Mr. Sturrock had to “keep the community updated” by meeting groups of people who signed up for guided walks of the reconstruction site. Ron would take him over by boat, and all the way across Mr. Sturrock would complain his job wasn’t being a fucking tour guide. On the other side, Rhona brought the people who had
assembled at the service station down to the bridge end, from where, wearing an assortment of hard hats and clutching information packs, they would walk along a section of the old roadway, listening to Mr. Sturrock.

Ron listened, too, and he learned that the bridge had been old for its type, opened in 1956 and due for replacement in 2011 anyway. This was fortunate, because work that was already in hand on a provisional new design could be brought forward for almost immediate adoption, with a great saving of time. Not that the bridge’s collapse could be directly related to its age, nor had anything been discovered that pointed to faulty structural design or construction. The maintenance records were up-to-date, and the routine repairs, neither critical nor urgent, that had been completed three months before the bridge collapsed were not considered to have been in any way connected with the accident. Metal fatigue due to heavy traffic had been ruled out.

The bridge was of a deck truss design (here Mr. Sturrock produced from his pockets a handful of metal rods and sticks and laid them one against the other, explaining tension, compression, and load transfer), and in the collapse three of its spans had been destroyed. The final tests on the concrete and steel were still under way, but one theory was that salt used on the roads in winter might over several years have seeped into the concrete and corroded the reinforcing steel rods inside it, causing one or more piers to fail.

But why then, Mr. Sturrock’s listeners sometimes asked, were steel and concrete to be the main materials used in the new bridge? Why was the new bridge also to be of deck truss design, a precast, post-tensioned concrete box girder bridge (as the information pack had it), to be exact?

“Your concrete technology nowadays,” Mr. Sturrock told them, as patiently as he could, “is a far cry from what it was sixty years ago. Your concrete nowadays contains chemical additives that retard the corrosion of the steel rods. Plus,” he went on, “in this region, grit is now favored over salt for treating icy roads, so salt residues are a thing of the past. Plus, modern span bridge design nowadays incorporates what are known as redundancies, which means if there is a failure, the entire bridge doesn’t go down, and single spans can be repaired.”

Invariably Rhona led the groups away, reassured, to the service station for their complimentary refreshments, and invariably Mr. Sturrock complained all the way back over the river.

To Ron it was quite marvelous, this collaborative amassing and expending of expertise and ingenuity, and all for the future sake of perfect strangers crossing a bridge that was still to be built. He took it as evidence of something miraculous, this practical goodwill from one set of human beings—the surveyors, designers, engineers, builders—toward countless other, unknown human beings, many of them yet unborn. It was more than professional responsibility; it was more even than an assumption of good intent between people. Even while Mr. Sturrock was ranting about fucking busybodies and amateur know-it-alls, Ron felt there was no word for it but love. Then he would give himself a shake for getting soft, because whether these guys were filled with tenderness toward others or were just doing their jobs, bridges got built and they got built to stay up. Filtering out his feelings, Ron presented an information pack and all the technical bridge-building facts he could remember as unsentimentally as possible to Silva and Annabel, who weren’t in the least interested. They wanted to know about the cars still in the river.

“The poor people inside. I am so sorry for them,” said Silva, while Annabel nodded but said nothing.

But Ron had nothing to report about that, though he, too, was sorry. He was also sorry for some of the people who showed up for the bridge walks. He didn’t tell Silva and Annabel that many of them came and left white-faced in wretched silence, and that every time at least one person broke down and wept. Some were so stricken they had to be physically supported, and once a woman had fainted. He didn’t mention the regulars, either: those who turned up time and again, tense for new explanations, and those who were already weighed down by what they knew but who could not keep away. There was the ghoulish evangelical who, until Rhona barred him from coming anymore, enjoined the others in prayers of contrition because the disaster was the act of a displeased God. There was the big, solitary, tongue-tied man who drove up from Huddersfield every other weekend because, he said, he’d been in the area when it happened and, for reasons he wouldn’t bother the others with, couldn’t get it out of his mind.

After we had been here for about three months there came, in late May, a week of rain. The river ran high for two days and a night, and when it subsided it left a tide of stinking, sticky mud along the bank. Right in front of the cabin a swarm of flies spewed out of a dead fish stranded in a mesh of washed-up reeds and sticks. I had to take a shovel and push it back into the water. Inside, the cabin walls swelled, and mold bloomed on the ceilings. On the third night of rain, I found silvery slime trails and a snail on my bedding and couldn’t sleep. I lay wide awake, deciding I had to talk to Silva about buying camp beds and some other bits of furniture. There was no need to sleep on the floor and keep everything in boxes, as if we lived in a tent. Even after spending over five hundred pounds on the generator we could surely afford it, and Ron could pick up what we wanted from Inverness in his Land Rover and bring it up to the cabin by boat.

We had electric light now, a fluorescent strip in the kitchen and single bulbs hanging from the ceilings. The friendly buzz of the little fridge and fresh milk were still novelties. There were also two or three electrical outlets so, for just a bit more expense, we could have a lamp or two, maybe even music, and with the rainwater fast collecting in the roof tank, we might soon be able to use the shower, although, like Silva, I had grown to enjoy the ritual of our outdoor baths in heated-up river water. The prospect of such luxuries was thrilling. There would be no harm in spending a little money on a few more comforts. I began to think about a cot for the baby, a small chest of drawers, pretty curtains.

Then on the following day, for the first time, I was bored. The
weather was depressing, and there was little I could do around the place. I was desperate for company and had too much time on my hands. I began to have doubts. Why, if I really wanted to get away and start my life again, was I holed up in a water-soaked shack within sight of the scene of my “death”? What was wrong with me that I couldn’t tear myself away from the ruined bridge or from Silva, the only connections I had between my old life and this one? Why was I willing to use money to establish an invisible existence at the cabin, when I could just as easily use that money to travel away from it?

I tried to tell myself it didn’t matter how far from that old life I had managed to go, as long as I had gone. I told myself it was not merely natural but necessary to stay. I had to stand by Silva, and besides, it would be wiser for the baby’s sake to remain here for the time being rather than find a place elsewhere, and alone. This was a period of rehearsal; I needed practice at living in Annabel’s skin. But was I nursing the same delusion—that she preferred to stay at home
for the time being
, until she felt a bit more like going out—that had kept my mother captive for thirteen years? The fact was I had chosen confinement and concealment. I remained in a hideaway rather than risk venturing into the open. I had struck out for the freedom to go anywhere in the whole world, and was afraid of freedom.

So that evening I was agitated and upset with myself long before Silva came back from work. As usual her spirits dipped on finding there had been neither sight of nor word from Stefan all day, but this time she didn’t recover her optimism. She didn’t sigh patiently and wonder if a sign of him might come tomorrow. Ron’s quiet saintliness I found for once a little irksome. Although I had longed all day for their company, I discovered I didn’t have much to say to them after all.

A wet haze of mist lay over the river and blotted out the far bank. It was too humid to eat outside, so we had brought in picnic chairs and set them around the trestle table, and we sat with the door and windows open to catch the slightest breeze. But the air was chill and heavy with water; nothing stirred except an unpleasant cloud of midges in the doorway and the rainwater that had collected in the chimney and was dripping down the flue, hissing on the logs in the stove. Ron had managed to light it, but the flames were sallow and weak, and curls of bitter smoke leaked through the glass.

He had brought a tinfoil parcel of leftover baked potatoes. After
hours wrapped in their own heat, their skins were wrinkled and soft like warm glove leather and they smelled like moist leather, too, salty and dank. I had fried some onions and heated up a tin of beans, and those smells mingled with the woodsmoke and wet rust smell of the stove and the wormy aroma of rain. I was irritated by the glances Ron and Silva cast me as we ate.

“I’m starving,” I said, not caring much. I did not mean it apologetically.

“She’s always starving,” Silva said. She was eating less and less. Ron watched me scrape the remains from her plate onto my own. I couldn’t help it if he thought I was greedy and fat. I started on my third potato.

“Really, I feel like eating meat,” I said. “I would even eat rabbit. I think there are rabbits in the woods.”

“I don’t think I could shoot a rabbit,” Ron said, “even if I had a gun.”

“Trapping is better,” Silva said firmly.

“But tomorrow’s Thursday,” Ron said brightly. “Buffet day. The meat tends to go, but there’ll be Yorkshire puddings over, and gravy.”

“Can you bring back burgers from the shop or something?” I asked Silva.

“I might get a bit of beef,” Ron said. “Or pork.”

“Sausages. I could eat sausages,” I said.

“You need proper meat,” Silva told me. “There’s a butcher in Netherloch. Maybe I could get there, somehow.” She looked at Ron. “Ron, you know why she wants meat? I will tell you. Your wife, did you have a wife? Did your wife have babies?”

“Silva!” I protested, with my mouth full.

“It’s all right. She … well … no. No babies,” he said. “We didn’t have children.” His face creased, and he pressed a finger and thumb against his closed eyes. After a moment he looked at us and said, “My wife, ex-wife … Kathy. Cleverer than me, she was, younger, career-minded. Made it to regional manager, never wanted children. And proud of it.”

“Proud she didn’t want babies?” Silva said. “Didn’t she love you?”

“Oh, I think she did,” he said. “For a while.”

“But
proud
she didn’t want babies?” she said again, shaking her head. She didn’t understand it.

“Some people are,” I said. “They just are.”

“I thought there’d be time if she changed her mind. Later on … 
when we got divorced, I thought, probably just as well. No kids involved, getting hurt.” There were tears in Ron’s eyes now.

“You see, Ron, Annabel is soon having a baby. Annabel is going to be mama.”

“Silva! What are you telling him for?” I said. “Anyway, it’s not soon! Not that soon.”

“Yes, soon! So why he shouldn’t know? A baby, it’s good news.” Silva shrugged. “Anyway, it shows already. Soon you will be very big, then he’ll know.”

Ron was staring at me, and then at Silva, not sure if he was allowed to be pleased.

“A baby?” he said. “A baby, well. Well, then. Does that mean …” He hesitated and turned to me. “Does that mean, as long as … I mean, you might … I mean, will you be staying here?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’ll be staying here.”

I did not know if at that moment I was making the decision or just announcing it.

“And the … the baby’s …”

“The father?” What could I say? “The father. He’s a man who never … He’s like your ex-wife. Never wanted kids and proud of it. It’s over, and he won’t be bothering us. Ever.”

At last Ron’s face showed relief. “Right,” he said, standing up. He was smiling carefully, softly. “Right, so that’s the case. Well, there’s plenty I should be doing.”

He went outside, and soon I heard the regular chop of the ax on a fallen log he’d dragged down from the woods. Silva and I sat on for a little while until she announced she was going off along the shore. She did that more and more, disappearing downriver for long spells, needing privacy. When I asked her once where she went, she replied cagily there was a place she liked to sit. I ate everything that was left on the table, and then I washed up.