Among the Missing aka Across the Bridge

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 same 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.

On that Friday afternoon, Marjorie wouldn’t, she told my mother, take so much as a peek at the photos before she got them home, she’d wait and they’d look at them together. I thought of all the pictures I would take of my own baby, and I could imagine Marjorie, glowing with the kindness of her gesture, sitting on the bus with the packet warm in her hands, the crackly waxed paper around the photographs still sealed. Brave, barren Irene, she was thinking, so disappointed and deserving and sweetly interested in Annabel, a perfectly sensible woman when she wasn’t going overboard on the religion. A book of illustrated Bible stories when the baby was a week old, honestly! She could be given at least this, a little share in the immaculate newness of the newest baby photographs.

Had Marjorie really thought all that, sitting on the bus? I didn’t know, and my father had no patience with that kind of conjecture, but in those early days at the cabin, I was certain that she had.

And now here she comes, openhearted Marjorie, through her own back door, calling out to Irene to get the kettle on and they’ll look at the photographs over a cup of tea. She drops the packet and her handbag on the kitchen table, kicks off the shoes that have made her feet swell, and peels away the chiffon head scarf from her soft tower of hair. Irene, looking frowsy and blue about the gills, walks to the sink with the kettle. She’s been feeling off since the heat wave, everything turns her stomach, it must be her age, once upon a time she would have been in the sun all day and loving every minute. Over the running of the tap, she says she looked in on Annabel twice and she’s sound asleep and there hasn’t been a squeak; the mite must have worn herself out this morning with her colic. Marjorie lights the gas, takes the kettle from Irene and sets it over the flame. She puts a saucepan of water on to a gentle simmer and lowers in the sterilized bottle of baby formula. She pulls at two or three escaping strands of hair and tucks them back into the nest of her hairdo, then heads up the stairs in her damp stockinged feet to bring Annabel down for her feed.

It begins as a high keening, a wail that strangely comes and goes as if Marjorie’s whole body is spilling away into a place that’s bottomless and echoing, as if she is drowning in her own agony and also trying to struggle up out of it, screaming with terror. It rides over other sounds: the whistle of the kettle on the gas, the last bubble of water boiling dry in the unwatched pan, and the snap of glass as the feeding bottle bursts, the hiss of milk curds roasting on searing hot tin.

And Irene is rooted in the kitchen doorway and has no words to meet anything as fearsome as this, Marjorie with that look on her face, clutching her dead baby against her and screaming, Marjorie bursting her way out the front door and making off down the road still screaming, holding out her child to people who are now coming from their houses to see what the noise is about. Irene cannot follow. She is trying to stop her bones from shaking themselves loose inside their thin wrappings of muscle, she has set her jaw against letting her own screams escape; she holds on to the doorposts, but sudden pains are shooting inside her and she can’t control the noxious rocking in the cavity of her stomach, which now is slopping with vomit and disgorging it, without warning, all over the floor.

Though she survived another thirteen years, I am certain my mother was never free of the noise of that afternoon in her head, its heat on her skin, the taste of it in her mouth. It made no difference to her that the inquest concluded three weeks later it was a cot death. She had never heard of cot death. Babies sometimes just stopped breathing for no known medical reason, it was mercifully rare but becoming more common? That was no explanation at all. The doctor and coroner were merely giving a name to some newly invented peril for healthy babies. Cot death? The child had died in Irene’s care. She should not have touched her. She should have picked her up. She should have covered her, uncovered her, turned her on her side, not turned her, opened the window, closed the window. She should have kept her alive. In taking the blame on herself, she was not discouraged by the Porters nor, it seemed, the whole town. Nobody else had heard of cot death, either.

My mother came to believe, once she could no longer deny that the disturbance in her own body was a pregnancy, so late and unlooked-for it felt unnatural, that she had taken Annabel’s life as surely as if she had choked the child or driven a blade through her chest. Because there must have been a moment when she had sucked the life out of the baby’s unconscious body and drawn it up, somehow, into hers; that must be why she had left the darkened nursery forgetting to whisper “God bless you,” and feeling even more nauseous and drowsy and faint.

And it wasn’t enough that she believed she’d done it, my father told me, she still had to know how God could have let her. She spoke to her priest, not that it helped. He couldn’t convince her that some force within her had not stolen the child’s life. It must be, she reasoned, that in smoothing Annabel’s hair with too much yearning, she had tapped a well in herself that was not love at all but some distortion of love, something visceral and needy and covetous. She had craved her own baby too much, and there had been nothing to protect Annabel from such aching, unguarded cupidity. The child had been christened, and had that done a thing to keep her sanctified soul moored within her body? I imagined a flummoxed young minister reaching for the orthodox comforts about baptism and the life everlasting. But my mother would have shaken her head. No, God had declined to lift a finger to save Annabel, and so where did that leave it, the soul? Unprotected. Anywhere. Nowhere. There was nothing eternal, or still, or unique about it. It did not-it could not-belong to God. It was not merely unsanctified but unsanctifiable. She knew.

She left the church. Henceforth her soul, unsafe like every other, would have to look after itself just as Annabel’s soul, taking its chances, had proved itself restlessly and promiscuously fluid, capable of passing from person to person, its tenure always provisional upon the beckoning of its next nascent host. So it was that my mother, slaking some ancient thirst for her own child, had drawn Annabel’s supple, migrant soul out of her sleeping body and into her own, where it was to alight, and embed, and animate the simmering, multiplying cells that were even then readying themselves to be expelled exactly thirty-seven weeks later as me, the deplorable little thief whose veins raced with lifeblood stolen from Annabel Porter.

Cot death or not, new phenomenon or not, it was a cruelty of nature on a scale that was medieval, a calamity so woeful and mythic that it had, in fact, brought a chorus of women wailing onto the streets to prize the corpse of an infant from the arms of its deranged, barefoot mother. I think it might have saved my mother’s sanity had her part in the affair been condemned outright as diabolical; an explanation, however anachronistic, that blackened her reputation with the name of witch might have been preferable, in the months that followed, to her neighbors’ askance looks and hasty crossings of the street. The Porters moved away. I was born, and for the next thirteen years my mother did not leave the house to go any farther than the back garden visible behind the fence in the photograph.

When Ron began to help us, I thought it was because he is kind; now I think it is because he likes us. We are doing very well. Annabel is eating like a pig. He has noticed it, and that must be why he brings us so much food as well as all the other things. But I do not think he has noticed why she is so hungry. Her stomach is beginning to show, but he doesn’t look at her body, or at mine. He watches our faces. When he finds out Annabel is having a baby, I think he will help even more. He is a good man. When you come back, he will be like a grandfather to Anna.

Sometimes, when Annabel is thinking about something far away, or is asleep, the look on her face is so smooth I could cry with envy. Sometimes my stomach and throat shut themselves tight when I think of her body getting ready, the way mine did with Anna. I feel a prickling in my breasts the way I did when our baby was suckling. When you come back, I want us to have another baby.

Of course I have wondered if you are dead, but you aren’t. It isn’t possible. I need you too much for you to be gone forever. You can’t be dead because if you are, Anna must be, too, and that isn’t possible, either. I need her too much for her no longer to exist. There is no other need or purpose or reason in this world stronger than my need to hold you both in my arms. You are coming back.

Until then, I’ll watch Annabel grow heavy and lazy, and I’ll take care of her as if the child inside her was mine. We can stay here for a long time, as long as we like, as long as we need. Until you come back and we have our own new baby, there will be Annabel’s to look after.

I didn’t know until now how beautiful the forest is. The trees stand all around us like guarding giants, and they have a smell that is strong and clean, and the sound the branches make at night is a safe sound, like me saying shoosh-shoosh to Anna when she cries.

The Porters left; why didn’t we leave, too? There was nothing about the house or my father’s job at the council that could not have been replicated elsewhere. Was it heroism that made my father choose to stay and stand by his wife in front of the whole town, or was it simple obstinacy? Or was it a failure of imagination-at a time when every family in England that wasn’t doing it themselves knew of some other family, someone at the office or down the street, that was packing its life into oceangoing containers and emigrating to Australia or Canada-that he could not envisage the three of us embarking on a journey even as far as the next county? I think it most likely that by the time he thought of moving us anywhere it was already too late. Our lives were too ingrained in the causes and effects of my mother’s entrapment to withstand any such uprooting.

He cycled everywhere; his bicycle clips were as redolent of his presence in the house as the sound of his voice. They would be on the draining board, or hanging out of the top pocket of his jacket over a kitchen chair, or (to my mother’s consternation) balanced on the Wedgwood clock on the side table in the hall. He went to work and shopped and ran the errands on his bicycle; he fitted a seat to the back of it, and until I was old enough to ride my own bicycle, he fetched and carried me to and from all the excursions of my small life: school, the dentist, the cinema now and then, or a school friend’s birthday party. He would take back to my mother an account of films we saw; he brought her news of happenings in the town: businesses opening or closing, interchanges and supermarkets springing up, the switching on of the shopping center Christmas lights, new benches along the riverbank. Over the years we all grew used to this rhythm of excursions and reports, but he never gave up suggesting gently she might care to see these things for herself, and she always said when she felt a bit more like it she might just do that. But she preferred to stay at home for the time being.

I found myself wishing, those first weeks in the cabin, that I had known then what I was discovering now: that it is possible-not easy, but possible-to draw a life to a close in one place and start another not only somewhere else but as someone else. It would have helped my parents to believe in just the possibility; to dream of it, even if it had remained always a dream, might have saved them. And I still wanted them to know, as if somehow they had time remaining to them to change anything, that with the right moves it could be done, and so I went about the cabin as if they were watching. I wanted all the tasks of cleaning and clearing and getting the place fit to live in to look transparently sensible and natural to them. I wanted to convince them, by taking the strangeness out of it, that I was making a success of this odd turn of events. You see, I was trying to say, it’s all about taking a risk, getting out while you can, finding somewhere to fix up and call home. You can just go. They were present to me every bit as much as my baby was, and I was sure they were pleased to see me perform this act of reinvention for the sake of their grandchild.

The weather improved, and this, too, I could not see as anything other than approval, a kindly warmth cast on my enterprise. During the first two weeks, I scrubbed the cabin from top to bottom: ceilings, walls, floors. I carried out bucket after bucket of filthy black water floating with dead insects and cobwebs and dumped it all in the pit we had dug at the back, a little way into the trees. I unstuck the windows and kept them as well as the doors open all day, and the sun dried out the place and left behind a smell of soap and resin and sawdust. I washed the curtains and hung them back up (they still looked shabby but would have to do for now). I pulled out the linoleum flooring completely, and Ron took it away in the boat to dispose of. At the end of each day, Silva came back down through the trees with pine needles stuck to her shoes and in her hair, and I would make a point of spending the first hour or so showing her all I had done. She needed distracting when she got home at the end of another day without word or sight of Stefan and Anna.

Ron would come later, after his work on the river, either with something we had asked him to get for us or more often with something he had seen we needed: oil for the creaking doors, a pane of glass and some putty, kerosene lamps, a plastic picnic table. I gave him money for the things I asked him to get, but usually he shrugged and refused it, as if the notion of paying for things just didn’t interest him for the moment. He had access to all kinds of tools and materials; he secured both doors and cleared the roof and gutters and got the water collection tank off the roof, cleaned out, and working again, with new pipes. He was looking for a small generator, he told us, so we could run the fridge and use the shower instead of heating up water in a tin bath outside. He brought containers of drinking water every day, saving Silva the trouble of getting it at Vi’s and carrying it down through the forest. Often he brought leftover food: big slabs of lasagna or bags of meatballs, half a cheesecake, for which I was grateful because I was always hungry. He was staying in a kind of bunkhouse for the workmen who lived on-site during the week, and the catering was crude and generous.

By the middle of April the bridge was secured, the salvage work scaled back, and the investigation into the cause of the collapse, as far as Ron could tell, all but concluded. For the time being, the diving teams had been disbanded and the five vehicles still in the water left wherever they might be lying; strong spring currents were pushing what was left of them to and fro among hunks of submerged rubble and steel, making further recovery dives impossible. Ron heard people say they would never be brought out. They and the bodies in them would probably be washed all the way down the estuary by underwater currents and devoured by the sea.

On the site there was a lull while what Mr. Sturrock called “the fuckin’ powers that be” considered bids (“twiddling their fuckin’ thumbs”) for the rebuilding of the bridge. But Ron was if anything busier; almost every day he took Mr. Sturrock and groups of surveyors and engineers out to examine the bridge piers that were still standing, and every day he overheard them discuss the latest analyses of the wreckage.

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.

An hour later, the weather broke. Gusts of wind, suddenly cold, banged the door shut and pushed and pulled the trees. Then I heard distant groans of thunder, and the sky that had been oppressively still for days began to move, first with a crazy, pinkish yellow shimmering in one high eastern corner and then with clouds, darkening and roiling together low and close to the land. Slow, huge drops of rain hit the river. The thunder advanced, shaking the ground and crumpling the air, and after the second or third shot of lightning, rain began to stream from the sky. It spiked the ground around the cabin, obliterating the river and the far bank. A sheet of water cascaded from the edge of the roof and poured past the windows. From the door I could hear nothing but the drumming of rain over my head and the gurgle of the overflowing gutters. Ron dashed up from the jetty, carrying the ax and some tools he’d rescued from the boat. He dropped them just inside the door, grabbed his jacket, and ran out again, heading downriver. I waited, watching the sky throb with lightning, and after about twenty minutes he came back with Silva drenched and clutching his arm, shivering under the jacket.

I heaped more sticks into the stove to try to get a blaze going, and fetched towels. Silva changed into dry clothes, and Ron stripped down in the kitchen and wrapped himself in a blanket. I arranged his sodden things over chair backs. Then, because lightning was fizzing all around the cabin, I thought it best to turn off the electricity, so I made tea on the gas burner, and then we sat by the stove in candlelight, and the storm went on and on. There was some whiskey that Ron had brought ages ago, and he and Silva both took some to warm them up.

Silva had retreated into herself. I said she looked tired out, and she sighed and said she did need some sleep, and went to bed. Ron and I stayed by the stove. There was nothing to talk about, this late; we had made every remark it was possible to make about the weather. The thunder was distant now, and the rain had lessened but went on falling. Our candles burned down and went out one by one until I looked up and saw by the light of the last one that Ron’s cheeks were wet.

“Is it the smoke?” I said. “It’s got very smoky.”

He wiped his eyes but didn’t answer.

“It’s late now,” I said. “There might be more lightning on the river. You can’t go back tonight.”

He didn’t. Picking up the candle, he followed me into the room where I slept, and I rearranged the cushions and mattresses so we could both lie down. Without a word he took me in his arms in an embrace that was natural and warmth-seeking, nothing else. The smell of his skin was male, pleasantly sharp, like clean metal.

The rain pattered on the roof over our heads, and after the candle had burned down and died, he said quietly, in the dark, “A baby.”

He reached out and just once, over the covers, stroked his hand gently across my stomach, and then we slept.

This is what I learned after you went missing. I learned I would not die of my distress, not even when I wanted to. I would not altogether lose my mind, not even when I was afraid I must.

To begin with, the passing of time with no news sharpened the pain to the point that I couldn’t bear any more. Then there came a day when the passing of more time with no news blunted the pain a little. No news was better than bad news, it meant hope, and it brought a little calm. This was the beginning of fooling myself, the beginning of knowing that fooling myself was what I must do. A way must be found to survive, and it was in my nature, then, to find that way.

And after another little while, the pain, which I didn’t expect would go away, burrowed deeper into my life. It found its place and made its home there, and I let it. It took up room that everything else in my life moved over and made for it. It was just with me, like the sound of my own breathing, while I did all the other things that happen every day. I brushed my hair, counted change, put on my shoes, took off my shoes, and it was there alongside me: pain, and no longer shocking. It became ordinary, as familiar as the mug I drank tea from in the morning. By the time it was like that, that was how I wanted to keep it. I was grateful to be at least used to it.

I discovered also that I could not lie awake weeping forever. Sleep came, if only in short, fretful waves, and when it did, it brought dreams that were sometimes merciful. I dreamed once of walking into a small, bright field, sunny and sweet-smelling, and all at once I forgot the way I had come to arrive there and did not want ever to leave it. And that was how it was also sometimes when I was awake. I could be busy in the shop, or talking with Ron, listening to some story of Annabel’s, or just sitting on the riverbank watching the birds on the rock, and suddenly I would notice that for the past little while I had been carefree, as if I’d been standing in my small, bright field. I had let go of everything in my mind that lay behind or ahead of the little pleasure of that moment. Then I would be ashamed. For what sort of mother and wife enjoys herself when her child and husband have disappeared? By being careless of you even for a minute, maybe I had made it harder for you to come back. As soon as I could, I would hurry to my room and place fresh flowers for you, light a candle, and pray for your return, but also for your forgiveness. I would swear never to let you out of my thoughts again, I vowed to walk a thousand miles barefoot to find you. And when, as it always did, my despair returned, I gave in to it quietly, knowing I deserved it.

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, sneakers 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 center. 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 and Anna. 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 had known Ron was there all night, and that was why I slept.

The weather had cleared, and Annabel got up and went down 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.

As Ron drove toward 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 pavement, 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 in 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 when my mother was carrying me and Annabel Porter died. Maybe someone raised an eyebrow at her rounded stomach and crossed the street, maybe a neighbor, 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 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 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 had 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 filling in for somebody on vacation 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 disoriented 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 again would mean, perfect play weather, hours and hours for swings and sandboxes 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 cord attached to a metal spar in the garage roof, her face black and her neck broken.

The note in the envelope in my pocket said,

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 in to 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 gray 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 lamppost, an ironmonger’s shop with a basket of eggs in the window, a handwritten card on the door of the pharmacy 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 captivated, to begin with, by the modern hardness of the place; after the damp pinewoods and river shore and our shabby, moldering 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 toward 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 hardware store, and then we had lunch in a shopping center, looking not so different from every other couple there. Ron had been given a cap in the hardware store 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 lighthearted 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 favorite foods. Our unfinished exchange of words in the gift shop café that morning got lost in the gentle curve of the day.

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 meters 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 February 19 as it passed onto the bridge only moments before the collapse, the car believed driven by the woman tourist 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, Friday, 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 on 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. Jewelry, 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 Annabel supplied with pebbles because bending down for them 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 pullout bed that they used as a sofa in the daytime. That night when they got back to the cabin, Annabel, turning to say good night, 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. And then she smiled and said, “Oh! The baby’s kicking.”

He said, “I want to see,” and he undressed her, and then himself. When they were lying in her bed, he said, “I want to touch.” She drew his hand over the mound so he could feel the baby inside, bumping against the soft wall of her body. Then he said, “I want to touch you,” and he began to explore her without her guiding him at all, and they made love quietly and saying nothing more, mindful of Silva in the next room who, they knew, would be staring wide awake into the dark.

He left the next morning without waking them up.

Later, after Silva had set off for work, Annabel waited an hour. Then she dressed in what she considered her least noticeable clothes, pushed her hair under the cap, and left the cabin.

I followed Silva’s pathway up through the forest. It rose steeply all the way, and often disappeared completely. In places the hillside had collapsed into soft, lumpy terraces and banks that bulged with the roots of fallen trees, and the broken spars of trunks lay crisscrossed and horizontal. I struggled to keep going, using them like climbing bars to haul myself up; under my weight several of them split, each time with a crack that echoed damply through the trees and sent pigeons and rooks flapping into the sky. I would pause, panting hard, until the quiet returned and I could be sure there had been nobody nearby, only the birds to hear me, and then I fought on, huge and heavy among the spindly, brittle boughs and branches that shivered and shook and swung back against my face as I climbed.

It took me nearly an hour to get near the road where the forest leveled out, and I had to rest for several minutes, leaning behind a tree, to catch my breath. When I felt better, I brushed from my clothes as best I could the black and green streaks and scrapes from the wet bark, and got rid of the mulch and pine needles from my hair and shoes. Then I set off toward the bridge.

After only ten minutes I came across one, then another, then more and more little groups of people on the road, most of them in walking gear, heading in the same direction. I was relieved to be no longer conspicuously solitary, but I didn’t want to be spoken to, so I slowed my pace to an unobtrusive stroll and went on alone, trying to look neither lost nor in need of company, just one of the straggle approaching the bridge. I had to trust that everyone’s interest would be focused on the spectacle to come and not on a disheveled, pregnant woman trudging along by herself. But my heart was beating hard.

I had my jacket pulled around my belly and my hands jammed in the pockets, and I secretly stroked the baby as I walked and I fancied she wriggled and kicked to let me know she could feel my touch upon her. And I thought of Ron and how his hands had roamed over her. I remembered what followed-his directness, so unexpected, yet thoughtful, and so pleasing. And afterward, sleep: peace inspired by and in each other. His awkward tenderness was already playing in my memory like a little grace note, and I didn’t care if I was being idiotic or sentimental. Whatever might happen after this, I had been chosen, and that thought made me surprisingly happy.

I couldn’t get near the river, nobody could. I walked the road as far as the old bridge approach and went beyond that, farther up the bank toward the sea, and stopped on high ground some way from where the gathering of people was densest. Anchored together on the river, as Ron had told me, were the crane barge and the salvage barge. Around them, a dozen small boats swayed gently on the water. Speeding among them were three or four police launches that threw out white, frothy trails. The helicopters were back, one of them with the logo of a media group slashed in red across it. For half an hour or more, nothing much seemed to happen; I watched as men walked about on the barges, though I could not determine what exactly their purpose was, and I began to wonder if the operation was going ahead at all. Then quite suddenly two small dinghies moored to the back of the salvage barge moved out onto the water, and the men left on deck took up their positions at the far end. The crane swung out over the river. The winch chains, black against the pearly white water, unwound and dipped below the surface. The men in the dinghies went to and fro, guiding them down to the divers underwater. After another long wait, the chains tautened. The dinghies returned to the back of the barge. The crane head juddered and cranked and began to wind in its load, and a few moments later a dome of water began to rise and bubble and then the surface of the river darkened and swelled and broke, and up came the car like a drowned, hanging corpse, crushed and sodden and bleeding dark mud. It hung, swinging, as river water streamed off it. The helicopters came lower and hovered. All around me people were lifting mobile phones into the air and taking pictures, or scanning their screens for live news. One man fiddled importantly with his iPhone and relayed details in a loud voice to his wife and two teenage sons, who stood beside him, gaping and pointing. Others gathered to stand within earshot.

He said, “There are six divers down there… Weather conditions almost ideal, very little wind… But operation may be hampered by strong currents and low visibility underwater.”

Then out on the river we heard a faint metallic cranking, and the crane jerked and shook and pulled the sagging pendulum of the car a few feet across. Then it stopped. The car hung in the air above the salvage barge until the arc of its swings diminished, and then it was lowered slowly onto the deck. As soon as the winch chains came off and were swung clear, tarps went up all around it, screening it from view. Minutes later, three police vessels came alongside the barge, and several men were brought on board.

There was nothing more to see. The small vessels around the barges began to move, some toward the jetty on the far shore, some over to our side. Ron’s boat would be among them, I supposed, but I was too far away to make out which was his. Around me the knots of spectators loosened, shifted, dispersed, but I stood where I was, and so did the man with the iPhone and his little audience.

I knew what I should expect. Why then did I not expect it?

“First images of the vehicle taken from vessels adjacent to the rescue suggest there are human remains inside,” he announced. “Police are not confirming anything at this stage and will make a statement later today.”

The man’s two sons gasped and stared. One of them said, “Human remains, wow!” and grabbed at his brother, and they sniggered in mock revulsion, caught up in the thrill and horror of it. They weren’t being cruel. Laughter was the only route they knew away from what dead bodies in a car might actually mean.

I turned to leave. I had to find Ron. How could I tell Silva? What could I tell her?

The police announced that night that postmortem examinations were being carried out on two bodies found in the car, neither of which was believed to be that of the missing woman. They would not comment on the speculation in some news reports that one of the dead was a child.

At the bridge site, the discovery of the bodies-the wrong bodies-unhinged the operation for several hours. Ron was busy into the evening with unscheduled relays of police, salvage crews, and journalists, and could not go to the cabin that night. He knew that Annabel’s mobile phone sat unused and uncharged on a shelf, and he could not bring himself to call Silva’s. They would have heard the news reports themselves on the radio. But the real reason was cowardice. Late that night he had a missed call from Silva but did not reply. He could not have borne to hear his own voice tell her there was a chance that the people who had died in the car were Stefan and Anna.

The following day he took Mr. Sturrock across the river for the Saturday bridge tour. They were surprised to see more than thirty people waiting at the jetty; over the weeks the numbers had been dwindling. Rhona said she’d been swamped with bookings since yesterday, and this was, at last, evidence of the “penetration” she had been working for. The news of the found bodies was providing an essential “enhanced human interest factor” for the journalists, while being at the same time, of course, a tragic twist.

Mr. Sturrock led them to the end of the bridge approach, gave his stern welcome, and fished out his notes (he never spoke without them). Ron knew the speech by heart now, and as he half-listened, he watched the audience. They were younger than usual, and many had camcorders and cameras. There was something else different about them, too. They were warmed up for something. This was a gathering of ghouls. Gone were the quiet attention of the regular audience of locals and the earnest types interested in bridge design, the sad concentration of people hoping for answers, paying respects to the dead.

Mr. Sturrock was telling them about concrete. “We’re well ahead of schedule,” he read from his notes, “partly because we are fortunate in having suitable sites downriver for the casting sheds, thus minimizing the cost and transportation time for the replacement concrete components. Needless to say, we inspect every casting and reject it unless it meets our strict criteria.”

As he spoke, three or four people detached themselves from the group, wandered away, and began taking pictures. Mr. Sturrock counted on his fingers. “One, concrete has to cure properly, in temperatures above zero degrees centigrade. Two, on top of the temperature, you have to think about what we call air entrainment, which is-”

“Excuse me, are there any more bodies still down there?” somebody asked. Others murmured with interest.

“What about that woman? Have they found her yet?”

“Are the divers down there now? Have they called off the search?”

“That’s a police matter,” Mr. Sturrock said. “Three, your basic concrete recipe has to suit your actual conditions. There are various chemical-”

A few more people drifted away; two or three began a conversation.

“How long would it take a human body to decompose down there?”

“The fish eat everything, that’s what I heard. Everything. Hey, mister, is it true after five months there’d just be bones?”

Mr. Sturrock paused and looked past the crowd. Two of the first defectors had strolled to the barrier at the end of the bridge road and were scanning the river with camcorders, homing in on the crane barge that had lifted the car. Their safety helmets sat on the ground at their feet.

“Hoy!” Mr. Sturrock yelled. “Hoy, you! Stop right there! You’re in breach of regulations!” He pocketed his notes and strode toward them. “You fucking jokers, get your hats on! Get your fucking hats on and get your arses off the fucking bridge!” One man stopped at once and reached for his helmet. But the other swung his camcorder round and began filming Mr. Sturrock.

Ron wasn’t in time to stop it. Mr. Sturrock let out a roar, broke into a run, lunged at the man, and wrenched the camcorder away. Holding the man off with his free hand and ignoring his shouts, he strode to the barrier and flung it into the water. He swung round to the rest of the group. “Aye, and that goes for the lot of yous! This tour is canceled! Fuck off! You are no longer authorized on these premises! So fuck off, the lot o’ yous!”

Rhona came forward, protesting, but he held up a hand. “Rhona, hen, just get them out of here, okay? I’m no’ having it. Hear me? Get them fucking out of here.”

He strode off toward the jetty, stepped into the launch, took a seat in the bow as far as possible from where Ron operated the boat, and stared out at the opposite bank. Ron followed, started the ignition, and when they were midriver he slowed the boat right down so they could feel the soft tilting of the tide against the sides. The quieting of the engine or their distance from the shore, maybe the rhythm of the waves, calmed Mr. Sturrock. He turned and shuffled down until he sat close to the stern.

“Lost my rag for a wee minute there,” he said. “Maybe I went a bit far, eh?”

He had never before talked to Ron in a tone of voice that invited a reply.

“No, served them right,” Ron said. He smiled. “Shouldn’t have taken their hats off, should they?”

Mr. Sturrock laughed. “Aye, right enough, they shouldnae.” He shook his head. “See how they were carrying on, like it’s entertainment? Nae respect.” He paused. “It’s on my mind, I suppose. Him that wasnae there the day, the English fella.”

“What English fella?”

“Fuck’s sake, yon English fella, he’s here every time. Big quiet fella, comes up from Huddersfield.”

“I know who you mean. He wasn’t here today. First one he’s missed,” Ron said.

“That’s what I’m telling you,” Mr. Sturrock said. “You ken why? Rhona told me. See, she had him on his own for a wee minute, one time, over the coffee kinda thing. She makes an effort, Rhona. Turns out it’s his wife. The lady that hired that car, it’s his wife, for fuck’s sake. That’s why he keeps coming. And see they bastards the day, going on like it’s a photo opportunity…” He glanced back at the jetty. “Enter-fucking-tainment. Imagine being him when that fucking car came out the water.”

“Will they ever find her body?” Ron asked. “So at least he’d know what happened to her?”

“I’ve nae fucking idea,” Mr. Sturrock said. “Poor bastard. Put a bit of speed on, will you? I haven’t got all fucking day.”

Ron’s phone rang again, and he didn’t answer. After he’d delivered Mr. Sturrock to the jetty, he checked for messages. The call was from Silva’s number, but it was Annabel’s voice.

“She’s heard about the car,” she said. “I’ve been trying to get you. Can you come today? Please come.”

When he arrived at the cabin, he found Silva sitting on the floor in her room with photographs of Stefan and Anna in her lap. She’d been that way, Annabel told him, since the news came. She had taken Stefan’s drawing of the cabin down from the wall and lit candles around it, and rocked to and fro with her hands clenched against her mouth as the candles burned, gazing at the drawing and whispering to the smiling stick figures he’d made of the three of them in fierce, spitting bursts of language of which Annabel and Ron understood not a word.

All through Saturday and Sunday they tried to care for her, but she would scarcely be deflected by entreaties to eat or rest. When Annabel spoke to tell her there was food ready or to suggest she lie down and sleep, her voice seemed to reach her, if at all, from too far away to be understood. When Ron helped her gently to her feet and brought her to the table or to her bed, she walked carefully on her numbed legs and did not look at him. She ate and slept only to regain enough strength to return to her place on the floor.

But she did not weep, and on Monday morning she was up and ready early to go to Vi’s. The radio was now repeating that the police had confirmed the bodies were those of a man and a child and that the car was the one rented by a woman tourist, who was still missing. And so, Silva announced to the others, these were the bodies of two other people. Stefan never hitched lifts when he had Anna with him because he always said if he ran into trouble he could defend himself all right alone, but he couldn’t be sure of defending her as well. Besides, she said, the police didn’t even say the child was a girl.

She spoke in a firm but faded voice, as if she were under a kind of hypnosis of both hope and dread; an entranced, defiant look had entered her eyes. She got through the next few days at Vi’s, returning exhausted to her candles and photographs and incantations. On the fifth day, she did not go to work because she woke after a vivid dream of Stefan, who had borne a message that the answer to her prayers was nigh. This would be the day they came back. She waited at the cabin all day, and the next, and the next.

For the entire week Ron’s workmates at the bridge traded rumors about the occupants of the car. People sat on in the canteen past their break times, talking and arguing. Ron just listened; nobody asked for his opinion, and he gave none, and least of all would he have said anything about Silva and her vigil for Stefan and Anna, or about the husband of the missing woman and his presence at every bridge walk. Even if he could have strung the words together, Ron believed he had no right to offer up for their scrutiny any stories, and such desperate ones, that belonged to other people.

One rumor was that the child was strapped in the back and nesting in a tangle of blankets as if asleep and the man’s body was floating free and twisting, arms outstretched, toward her. Another had it the other way round, the child reaching for him; another, that the child was cradled in his arms. And who were they, the workmen speculated, and where was the woman who had been or should have been driving? Were they hitchhikers? No sane woman alone picked up hitchhikers. But had she stopped for these two (had it been raining that day?), either for the child’s sake or because the very presence of the child had made her feel safe? But suppose the man was just a car thief, albeit one who operated with a child in his care, and he had stolen the car; where then was the woman? Was the man also a murderer? Had he killed her in front of the child? So where was her body?

The word went round that, when the car was hauled from the river, the driver’s door had not been closed. Ron sat quietly and heard the theories: the door lock must have burst on impact with the water; it had been broken in a collision with other wreckage; it had been corroded and prized open by the tides. But the favored version was that a third occupant, the woman driver, had managed to open the door and get out but had not made it to the surface. She must have been drowned and her body dragged out to sea. The bridge workers had it all worked out, they reckoned, on the balance of probabilities; meanwhile the police investigation continued with what they considered perverse slowness.

Ron was grateful that the patterns of his physical life-work on the boat, food, jobs at the cabin, sleep-kept him immersed in practical tasks and with little time to think. Whatever had happened to the woman, and whoever the man and child had been, all three were lost. And while the deaths of people he had never known were losses abstracted and at a remove, loss recalled all losses. He was sad for their deaths and felt they should be contemplated in silence, in the unshared privacy of his own mind; the thought of their suffering hurt and frightened him. He returned gratefully at the end of each day to the cabin, where such matters could not be discussed.

After two weeks, no next of kin had come forward. On its front page, under the headline POLICE APPEAL TO FAMILY OF MYSTERY VICTIMS, the Inverness Herald printed a photograph of the man’s neck chain and the half-perished remains of a toy giraffe. It also reported that DNA tests showed the bodies were overwhelmingly likely to be those of a father and child. Ron brought the paper with him that evening as well as a can of diesel for the generator, a tub of leftover coleslaw, and a bottle of whiskey. Silva was once again at her devotions. He showed the front page to Annabel, who was peeling potatoes at the table. These days she sat down to do such tasks.

“Oh, God, no,” she said. “Don’t let her see it. Oh, God, what are we to do?”

“She has to see it,” Ron said. “She’s bound to see it sometime. It’s better if we’re the ones to show her.”

“Why?” Annabel said. “What good will it do?”

Ron was taken aback. “If it’s not Stefan and Anna, think how relieved she’ll be,” he said simply.

“But it is them… I’m sure it is. She won’t be able to bear it.”

“If it is, she has to know. She’ll have to know sooner or later.”

Annabel gazed at the door to Silva’s room, her face suddenly white. “She’ll have to know sooner or later,” she repeated stupidly. She turned to Ron. “Don’t leave tonight. Stay. Don’t leave me alone with her.”

Silva’s door opened and she wandered in, casting a severe little smile at Ron. Her eyes were overbright, and her hair, as it always was these days, was pulled back under an exuberant purple plastic chrysanthemum that looked doubly absurd above her pinched face. She glanced at the pan of potatoes and slumped into a chair at the table.

“Not hungry,” she said. Then she caught sight of the paper lying under Annabel’s hand and snatched it up.

“Silva, wait. Don’t. Silva!” Annabel said, getting to her feet.

Silva cried out, once, and in the next moment she was at the door. She flung the paper down and was off and running, sobbing, stumbling over the rocks to the jetty, her screams sounding back across the wet stones of the shore.

She was simply trying to get to them. I do not believe a thought of her own death was in her head. I still think it was blind need that drove her to the water, a need to be where they were, where they had died, and that was all. It was not an actual intent to kill herself.

Ron dashed after her, ahead of me, but he wasn’t quick enough. I came out of the cabin just in time to see her throw herself forward off the jetty. The strange thing was that, from the moment she surfaced, everything was very quiet. She had stopped screaming. There was no kicking and flailing of arms, no splashing or wailing. Perhaps it was the shock of the cold water that stilled her. Then her head sank. The purple chrysanthemum in her hair bobbed for a second and disappeared, and the back of her pink cardigan floated up behind her and for a moment billowed across the surface of the river before its own waterlogged weight pulled it under and around her submerged shoulders. By then Ron was in the water, and I ran down to the jetty as he dived under and seized her by the jaw and struggled to drag her face up to the air. If she’d fought him harder and got a few feet farther out and into the current, she would have been swept away, but the strength went out of her. She surrendered. He brought her to the side of the jetty and dragged her out of the water. She collapsed against him as if all her limbs were broken.

I got her out of her wet clothes and dressed her in a thick, dry shirt and pajama trousers. Ron heated whiskey with sugar in it and made her drink a lot of it. She sat for a while by the stove until her shivering and sobbing subsided, and then I put her to bed, leaving her candles burning and her door open. She fell asleep, and Ron and I sat up for a long time, wondering how she would be when she woke and what we might do for her. I stopped him wondering aloud about Stefan and Anna and how they had come to be in the car. For shame, I could not tell him my part in it.

“Don’t go on about it,” I told him. “It makes no difference. It won’t bring them back. We’ll probably never know.”

My back had begun to ache, and Ron said I looked tired and should go to bed. He kissed me on the forehead and once, gently, on the lips, and he settled himself on the sofa bed in the main room so as to be nearby if Silva needed us in the night.

She slept until daybreak. It must have been the click of the door that woke me as she left the cabin; as soon as I discovered her bed empty, I hurried to follow her, leaving Ron asleep. But this time she hadn’t gone to the jetty. She was standing on the shore some yards from the water, mirror smooth under the early light. She’d picked up some stones and was studying them or counting them in her hand. I started to go to her and nearly called out, but stopped myself and drew back to the doorway. She didn’t move. Her head in cameo stillness against the sun’s silver and lemon sheen on the water was bowed and sorrowing. I was helpless-worse than that, culpable.

All of a sudden she looked up and flung the pebbles from her hand, and they landed scattershot, wrinkling the water with hundreds of colliding circles. She watched until the water was smooth again, and then, her lips working and her arms wrapped tight around herself, she turned and wandered down the riverbank. Now and then she lifted her head and paused, looking at the river and all the time talking to herself. Or maybe she was talking to Stefan, to Anna, to a God who let such things happen. Who could tell?

I couldn’t go back to sleep. I went inside and wrapped myself up warmly and found some shoes, and then I left the cabin, intending to follow her at a distance to make sure she was safe. But by the time I came out of the cabin again and had got down to the river edge, she had already turned and was walking slowly back. She looked up and must have seen me, but she walked past me as if I weren’t there, still mouthing words nobody could hear. When she reached the cabin, she went straight to her room. I heard her lie down, and then, at last, she let out a low, desperate moan and her weeping began.

Ron was awake and had to leave; it was one of the Saturdays for the bridge walk. I went down with him to the jetty and made him promise to come back as soon as he could and to tell no one about Stefan and Anna. He looked puzzled for a moment, I think because the idea of doing otherwise had never crossed his mind. I didn’t want him to leave, but I couldn’t say if that was from a desire to be with him or because I was afraid of coping with Silva alone. Two weeks ago we had made love, he and I, but not since, nor had we talked about what happened. So we were not lovers, exactly, but what were we? The question was tangential now; Silva was our only concern. Maybe it didn’t matter at all. He promised to return in the afternoon.

In the boat going over, Mr. Sturrock, huddled in his waterproof jacket, said, “Did you see that, the wean’s giraffe? In the paper?” He wiped a fleck of rain from his cheek. “Wee soul.”

Ron nodded. He wanted to tell Mr. Sturrock about Silva, bereft and weeping. He wanted to tell anyone who would listen how she was suffering. It grieved him that Stefan and Anna were to be unclaimed and dispossessed in death as they had been in life, the small history of the family as erasable, finally, as a drawing in an exercise book.

“The poor mother,” he said.

“Aye, whoever she is,” Mr. Sturrock replied.

Rhona was waiting under a lime green umbrella. She had pacified the irate customers from the last tour with lunch vouchers for the service station and had also cut the bookings back down. The small gathering now with her stood with the somber decorum of the previous groups; despite their garish wet-weather clothes, they looked like people at a funeral. The big, reticent widower from Huddersfield was there again, aloof in his sadness.

Summer was already in decline. The early morning sun had vanished, and there was a spit of rain in the chill wind that blew up the estuary, raising short white combs of spray off the water. The tree shadows cast on the river margins had grown longer, and in the forest a single stand of larch trees was turning from green to bronze.

Mr. Sturrock introduced himself and began his talk, counting the same points off on his fingers, inserting the same statistics, breathing in the same places. Ron stood at the back with Rhona, who was absorbed in sending text messages. The audience stood lulled, reassured, a little bored. Following Mr. Sturrock, they tramped with a scraping of feet between lines of hazard cones along the bridge approach to the farthest point of the old, ripped-up roadbed. At the barrier a few dozen feet from where the jagged edge of the tarmac dipped down toward the river, they halted and gathered in a semicircle. Collars and hoods went up; out here, squalls from the river blew hard around their heads and down their necks. Calling above the wind, Mr. Sturrock launched into his lecture on the nature of estuaries and the design options for the estuary bridge designer.

“… here you can see that each tendon contains twenty-seven strands of steel and each strand has seven wires. The post-tensioning counteracts sagging and adds strength to the spans.”

This was the point at which he invited people forward to see the new concrete and steel segments, and warned them about slippery surfaces and going too close to the edge. One by one people broke from the group and went to look. But the widower hung back, staring at the ground, and at first paid no attention when Rhona touched his arm.

“You okay, Colin?” she asked.

Colin looked up, pulled his arm away, and walked to the barrier. When he reached the edge, he turned to the others and raised a hand.

“Ladies and gentlemen, just for today, if I may have a minute of your time.” He opened and closed his fists as he spoke, and his voice and big body were full of confused, flashing energy. “I have something I want to say.”

Rhona froze. Mr. Sturrock took a few steps toward him.

“You’re all right, son,” he said. “Remember where you are, now.”

Colin threw out an arm to hold him at bay. “There’s something I need to say!” He paused, expecting to be stopped. “I want to… well, anyway… here…” He reached in his inside pocket and brought out a small toy dog with floppy ears and huge, mawkish eyes. A red felt tongue lolled out of its mouth. From the other pocket he fished out a posy of artificial flowers set within a ruff of plastic lace and tied with a ribbon.

“I wanted… It’s just a gesture,” he said, reddening and unfolding a piece of paper. Aloud he read, “For the two victims.”

Ron strained to hear the words above the sighing of the wind. Colin threw the posy and toy dog into the water and took from his pocket a red rose, a rigid, dry-looking thing on a long stem.

“My wife… This is for my wife. She also died here. And I just want to say to her, not that she can hear me now… you don’t know what you’ve got till you lose it. It’s no good wishing for a second chance, but if I could make it up to you, I would.” He sucked in a huge breath to steady himself. “I didn’t give you flowers when you were alive, and I should’ve. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”

He let go of the rose and a current of air caught it and blew it high into the sharp wind. It all but disappeared against the grimy rain and river spray and lowering clouds, until it finally came to land on the water too far away to look at all like a rose anymore. It floated there diminished and misplaced, a dark, untidy twig. Rhona stood open-mouthed. Gradually people fanned out past Colin to the barrier to watch his offerings bob on the waves and begin to sink.

One man turned back. “Well said, there, sir,” he said.

Someone else said, “So say all of us,” and began to applaud, and the others joined in. Colin broke away, and walked off fast back up the ruined road. Rhona hurried over to Ron.

“Christ, what next?” she said. “I can’t take this! I so can’t take another drama. Ron, could you go after him for me? Get him a coffee or something, see he’s all right? I have to stay with the group.”

Ron followed the man up across the site and into the service station café. At the counter he caught up with him.

“I’ll get this, mate,” he said. “Go and find us a seat, okay?”

He bought coffee for himself and hot chocolate for Colin, remembering something vague about sugar and stress. When he brought it to the table, Colin was sitting with his hands over his face.

“Here you go, Colin.”

Colin lowered his hands and nodded thanks. His eyes were red-rimmed. “Was it okay? Me coming out with all that?” he asked in a shaky voice.

Before Ron could speak, Colin waved his answer away. “I had to say it. Needed saying. Even if nobody was interested.”

“I’m very sorry about your wife. It’s a terrible way to lose somebody.”

“Yeah.” Colin’s eyes filled with tears. He wiped them away, lowered his head almost to the table, and took a slurp of his hot chocolate. “Well, there you go.”

“People say the worst part is the waiting, don’t they,” ventured Ron. “The not knowing. I can believe that.”

“Five months I was waiting. Then when they brought that car up and she wasn’t in it, the police were straight round. I thought they’d come to tell me she could still be alive. Still hoping, see? Stupid, but I was. Only they acted like I’d killed her. Took the place apart, went through the whole thing over and over again.”

“Bloody hell. Must’ve made it even worse.”

“Had to rule out foul play, they said.”

“Were you married a long time?”

Colin blinked several times and shook his head. “You married?”

“Was once,” Ron said. “Long time ago, now.”

“Got kids?”

“No.”

Colin shrugged as if he’d lost interest. He picked up his mug and stirred his drink hard and began feeding it into his mouth with his teaspoon. Ron watched him, wondering if he was too upset to talk any more or if he was a person who didn’t mind long silences. He thought it likely to be the second and a few months ago would have accommodated it easily, being then that kind of person himself. He could leave now and tell Rhona that Colin was all right. But he said, “So you come up from England, is that right? I’ve seen you at every walk. Where are you from?”

He didn’t in the least care where Colin was from, but it was necessary to pull words, on neat and neutral subjects, into the empty space between them.

“Huddersfield,” Colin said dully. “Know it?”

“Passed through a couple of times. Nice place to live, is it?”

The silence returned. Just as Ron was about to give up-he couldn’t keep this going all on his own-Colin said, “My wife didn’t like it. People don’t unless they’re from there.”

“Where was she from?”

“Way down south. Near Portsmouth.”

There was another silence.

Colin said, “She would’ve got used to it. She was only there a few months.”

“Is her family in Portsmouth still?”

“No. There was just her dad, and he died last year. Nobody left now.” Colin squeezed his eyes tight. “There’s nobody to talk to about her. I went down there, found her old address, saw where she grew up. Spent two days just walking about. How stupid is that? Same again?”

He was already on his feet and on his way to the counter, and Ron could not find the heart to say no. When he came back, he tried harder and asked questions, since Colin had mentioned not being able to talk about his dead wife and seemed to want to, insofar as he wanted to talk about anything. How had they met? What did she do? What were her hobbies? Colin answered with a handful of words or skirted the question altogether. It struck Ron that the more he spoke, the more distraught he became. Colin wanted to tell someone things about her, but not these things; Ron was asking the wrong questions and had no idea what the right ones might be. He sneaked a look at his watch.

“Sorry, mate, you don’t want to hear me babbling on. A total stranger,” Colin said.

Ron felt terrible because it was true. “No, no, it’s just I need to watch the time. I have to get Sturrock back across the river. Talk all you want. If it helps.”

“Nah, I’m no good at talking. That was part of the problem, maybe. But thanks, mate. Maybe it helps a bit.”

“Any time. Anything else I can do for you, just ask.”

Colin stood up and shifted on his feet. Shyly, he held out his hand. “Thanks. Appreciate it.”

Ron got up and accepted the handshake. “Well, I’d better be getting back to the boat,” he said. “Take care, now.”

“Actually there is something,” Colin said abruptly. “But maybe… No, you probably can’t help.”

“What is it?”

Colin looked at him directly for the first time. Behind the thick socket bones and pouches of his fleshy face, his eyes were small, bewildered dots.

“Over the other side, is that where you’re going?” he asked.

“That’s right. The forest side.”

“Well, it’s just… I’ve never been there. Never thought of it. Then when I did, I couldn’t face it, but I could now, I kind of want to. I mean, that’s where she was trying to get to, across the bridge.” He raised his arms and let them drop against his sides. “Never made it, did she? And they’re doing a memorial garden over there, aren’t they? For all the victims. Putting up a proper memorial. If I went over in the boat with you, I could, well, you know, have a look round.”

Ron had heard something about the garden. “It’s not planted yet. They’ve only just decided where it’s going. Don’t think there’s much to see.”

Colin shrugged. “Never mind, doesn’t matter.” He turned away. “Just thought I’d ask. See you around.”

“No, no, wait,” Ron said. “It’s just, it’s not up to me. Depends on Sturrock. We can ask.”

Mr. Sturrock turned out to have a view of his own. Colin’s gesture at the barrier was a lovely wee tribute, he said. As if the wean’s giraffe in the paper wasn’t enough.

“Och, go on, then, we’ll take you over the once,” he told Colin. “Only the once, mind. Compassionate reasons, okay? And you’ll need to get yourself back by Netherloch.”

They chugged over through the blustery wind saying nothing, the tang of diesel mixing with the smell of cold rain. When they reached the other shore, Sturrock hurried away to the site office to pick up his car keys. Colin stepped off the jetty and followed Ron’s directions to a new walkway. The garden, Ron said, was going to be on the bank on the far side of the bridge, a short way downriver. He watched Colin go, trudging through the mud, his eyes on the ground and his big shoulders stooped under the rain. Then Ron cast off again to go upriver to the cabin. He really couldn’t do any more.

If Silva slept at all, she would often wake distraught and wander about the cabin with rage in her eyes, pulling at her hair and clothes. She would not be held or comforted. Other times she would lie helpless and weep for hours until the skin on her cheeks was raw from her tears. Sometimes I found her, as I had the first morning, staring at the water and unable to move. Every couple of days, I think to get away from me, she would wander off farther downriver and come back hours later, exhausted. She hadn’t the strength to go far. I tried to judge when to leave her be and when to talk. I kept her warm, covering her when she fell asleep, and I cooked her tiny meals of eggs or pasta and coaxed her to eat, not that I managed to get her to take much. Often she’d accept only tea. Her grief terrified me, and all the time I looked after her I hardly spoke. When I did, something about her made me whisper.

I cared for her on my own, until Ron came in the evenings. I looked forward all day to seeing him and by the time he arrived was desperate for his company. With Silva he was circumspect and solemn, hardly less reticent than I, and I was pleased if she went to bed after supper and I could have him to myself. I was delighted when he noticed how much bigger I was getting and fussed over me a little. Now each night he would lie with me for a while, sometimes shyly stroking my belly and sometimes not, but always peacefully, without intensity. I was grateful. When I was nearly asleep, he would go back out to the main room and bed down next to the stove.

Silva began to sleep longer and more deeply, and slowly she began to eat a little more. After several more days she was almost alert again and more talkative, but she was also restless and weepy, and she tired so easily. She hadn’t been to work for weeks. We had sent Vi a text message when Silva first missed work saying she was ill and would be back when she was better. There had been no reply. One evening Ron suggested she might try going back.

“Routine,” he said. “Good thing, routine.”

I didn’t think it was such a good idea. I was afraid Silva wouldn’t be able to stand up to Vi in one of her difficult moods. And there was still some money left; we didn’t need to worry yet.

“It’s a bit soon,” I said. “Why not wait a little longer?”

Silva listened as if none of it had anything to do with her, and I took her calm as a sign she was getting better.

You are not gone. I am full of pictures of you that spill through my head in an unending stream, and I have your voices all around me. You are not gone, because what I see and hear are not memories. I am not remembering the sight of you both, your sounds and your words, I am not bringing you to mind as you once were. It is you I see and hear. But there is no comfort in it, because I know you are dead. I have not gone mad. You are dead, and how can there ever be any comfort from that? I no longer have you, though I see and hear you. It just means that nothing in this world is as real as you are. You will never be gone, but no more will you ever come back to me. You are both dead.

I remember the first few days only as a time when I thought my throat was blocked with stones and I wanted my heart to stop. Every beat of it hurt me. I tried to stop breathing. I wanted my lungs to choke, I wanted to sink to the bottom of the river and be with you, not that that made sense, even to me. Of course I knew you were no longer there, for they had lifted you, poor drowned souls, out of the water.

Yet the river is, for me, where you were and now will always be, down under the water, your faces calm and your skin as clean and white as shell. You do not perish. Slowly, patiently, you blink your eyes, and your dark, curling hair still grows, and all day long the river current plays with it, spinning it in wafts around your shoulders. You let the water turn you this way and that, and your hands rise and fall, your fingers open and close. You are waiting for me now just as I, since the day you disappeared, waited for you. This is why I will not go far from the river.

Other people are waiting, too, official people. They are waiting for someone to come and tell them who you are, and to bury you. And I can’t, because the official people have got rules. They are holding behind their backs all the rules they have for people like us, and as soon as they knew I didn’t belong here, they wouldn’t let me near you. There are laws, they will say. They wouldn’t let me bury you, and they’d send me back, and then I would be farther away from you than ever.

So, soon they will have to bury you without your names, and I won’t know where. But at least you-no, not you, only the discarded shells of you they brought to the shore-will lie together, and not far away. I will stay nearby and go on talking to you every day, and every day I will watch the river for a runnel in the tide, a flicker of light, a wave feathering the surface that will tell me you are waiting.

I have heard them since I was a child, but I never felt before now the truth of them, those fairy tales of mortal people who step off dry land leaving not a single footprint, drawn to the sea or a lake or river for love of a lost one who has been taken and transformed into an underwater spirit. But the oldest stories turn out to be true, at least in this: the vanishing from sight, the yearning of the one who waits for the beloved who is never coming back. An old story, my love, is what we are now, and all we have.

Annabel and Ron try to take my mind off all this. They think it is not good for me to spend my time wandering between my bed and the river. They think I talk to myself. Ron thinks I should go back and work for Vi again, Annabel doesn’t, but she doesn’t know what I should do instead. I don’t want them to worry so much, especially not Annabel. I want her to think I am beginning to recover.

Meanwhile she is very kind, and Ron would do anything in his power to make me comfortable, and it is calming to know I am not wholly alone. I am grateful for them. If they were not here, there would be no reason not to go mad. Annabel herself is growing heavier and slower by the day, and there is a certain calm in that for me, too. She is stupidly content. She does not know I am waiting for her baby just as much as she is. She does not know her baby is my reason to stay alive a little longer.

I wasn’t so out of touch with reality as to want to give birth in the cabin, without help. I knew I would have to see a doctor eventually. I wanted to be the one to choose when, that was all. I would go when I felt ready. For months I’d imagined it as if I were watching myself in a film, enacting the scene where I present myself to a jovial doctor with some story about being new in the area, and my bump would be routinely examined and we’d make arrangements about the delivery. Well done, Mum, you’re doing fine, we’ll expect you at hospital when Baby decides to put in an appearance!

Now I could see it might be more difficult than that. I needed time to prepare myself, but there was no hurry. By the middle of August, the northern summer had begun to give way to autumn, but still I had no proper sense of time passing. Across the river on dry days now the combines were at work in the fields, raising clouds of pale dust in long, straight rows. I went for walks under rainy skies, grateful for a new sharpness in the wind off the water, utterly content. I don’t know where my complacency came from unless from pregnancy itself-some merciful, hormonal muffling of the very idea of risk-but I was sure everything was fine. The baby was growing and kicking, and didn’t millions of women give birth every day? There was nothing to worry about. There were times when I was tempted to give up on the idea of the doctor and just let nature take its course. I had ages to go.

It was worth putting up with Silva nagging me about it, and about everything else, to hear her talking again, or so I thought. At least she had come far enough out of her torpor to care about something. Besides, nothing upset me much. I felt safer than I had ever felt in my life, attuned to my body’s accruing weight, its rhythms, even to its small lapses and betrayals; I swelled and sweated, I gasped with heartburn, the veins on my legs bulged like coiled worms. I had to pee a dozen times a day, and I could no longer lie flat on my back. But I accepted everything that was happening to me. I marveled at the willing, aching vessel my body had become for the child, whose size was now quite tremendous, and I gave myself up easily to its nightlong pummeling under my ribs. I was happy.

But unlike me, and although there was no reason for it, Silva was edgy all the time. At the cabin she watched me constantly, and although she cared about the baby, she wasn’t kind to me. Her attention was scrupulous but disapproving, as if the baby needed her guardianship because it was being born to a mother too hapless to deserve it. And she was full of opinions, all of them superstitious and most of them closer to witchcraft than to midwifery: I mustn’t stand for more than half an hour (as if I wanted to) because I’d draw blood from the baby’s brain; I shouldn’t cut my hair because the baby would be born with weak hair. I suppose I was touched, but nonetheless her scrutiny was wearing, and if I objected mildly to any of it or took a shade too lightly some silly piece of advice, she got angry. I learned to overcome the urge to laugh her concerns away. There was some respite when she went off on her wanderings along the river, but when she returned she would be more dogmatic still, with plans for more unpleasant, almost punitive little rituals that I would have to undergo. I lay with my feet pointing to the ceiling, I inhaled bitter, steaming concoctions of boiled leaves for lung strength. All, of course, for the baby’s good. Often the cabin seemed unbearably small, yet when Ron came there would always somehow be more room, not less.

The worst days were the ones when I got ridiculously hungry. I could eat half a loaf of bread in minutes, impatient with the time it took me to spread the butter and jam, folding each oozing slice over and shoving it in my mouth, chewing as I spread the next. This put Silva in such a rage I would have to wait and gorge in secret when she was busy getting firewood or washing her hair outside in the tub, or had gone walking along the river. I could not explain to her the need to fill myself up in this way, the strength and pleasure it gave me, the floppy collapse in my mouth of bread slick with butter, the tingle of strawberry syrup on the tongue. Afterward I would lie still and feel my stomach gurgling and squirting its juices and doing its work like the wondrous factory I now trusted it to be, transforming the heaps of food I had eaten into the bones, flesh, hair, fingernails of my baby. I thought of its face in the dark of my womb, blinking its wet eyes and smiling a sated, gummy smile.

Other times, I craved sugar. It would hit me suddenly, the need to crunch and suck on glassy grains of it, squeezing them through my teeth; some days I stole so much sugar I made my tongue sore with abrasions from working its sweet, scratchy crystals against the roof of my mouth. Then there were days when I needed sugar to slide around inside my mouth all smooth and golden and chewy, and I walked around salivating with a desire for soft lumps of toffee. Once I was so desperate I set about making some without a recipe, just melting and boiling up sugar with butter, and Silva lost her temper. She lifted the whole seething pan of it from the gas burner, carried it outside, and tipped it all out on the ground, shouting at me that it was bad for me, bad for the baby, a waste of gas, a waste of sugar, I had ruined the pan. Not even then did I do more than protest I hadn’t meant any harm. Actually I had already made up my mind to get Ron to bring me as much toffee as I could ever want. Silva need never know.

After that she wrote down her rules for my diet. She made a timetable with my hours all set out, for domestic tasks, periods of rest, gentle exercise. I wanted to laugh. She was rationing my knitting to an hour a day because, she said, pregnant women who knitted too much could produce confused babies. I went along with it, more or less. My days were all now so much the same, so uneventful and poised for this last period of waiting, that I didn’t care what I did. It hardly mattered that Silva wanted to shift me along from one activity to the next according to her notion of what was good for the baby.

In fact, it suited me to let her do the thinking. While time was of course stretching forward, I was basking in a dream that it stood still. Insofar as I bothered to grasp that everything was about to change, I was enjoying not knowing quite what to expect. I never once thought of pain, for instance. I had the dreamiest notions about breast feeding. I trusted myself to deal with these things naturally, when the time came. It was as much as I could do, day by day, to heft around this massive body of mine and make sense of the idea that all it was, for the time being, was a vault for the round boulder of baby pushing harder and harder against its walls.

Still, eventually I said I should find a doctor and make arrangements. Silva was reluctant at first. I don’t think she wanted me to hear any advice that might compete with hers, or get the idea that anyone but she was managing my pregnancy. So, more for vigilance than support, she came with me.

I stood no chance of making it up the slope through the pine trees, so very early one morning Ron took us in the boat to the other side of the river, where he picked up the catering crew. Silva and I walked to the service station and waited there for a bus.

We were in the center of Inverness before half past six. It was a blowy, colorless morning, and the pavement at the bus station where we stepped off was dark and cold in the long, early shadow cast by high buildings; seagulls squabbled over discarded food wrappers blowing along the gutter. The air was brackish with the exhaust fumes of arriving and departing buses, and already the city was noisy with traffic. We hung around until the station coffee stall opened at seven o’clock, and we bought muffins and tea. There wasn’t a proper seat in the place, just a ledge, and the ground was littered with cigarette ends and stained with spilled drink and dropped food and urine. My back ached, and I kept yawning. The tea was both weak and bitter, and I said I felt sick and wished I was still in bed.

Silva told me to shut up. It wasn’t unusual for her to say that kind of thing, but away from the cabin it sounded harsh and different, a way of being spoken to that I should not have had to get used to. Still, I didn’t let it bother me. I remember gazing at her profile as she swallowed her tea and thinking how thin her cheeks were, how much more in need of a doctor she looked than I. I took her hand and whispered my thanks to her for bringing me. And then, although it hadn’t crossed my mind before, I told her that she would be the first to hold the baby. She turned with a gasp. Then she squeezed my hand and smiled, a shining smile full of delight that I had never seen on her face before and that revealed, perhaps, her delight in having me confirm something she had already decided.

We waited until nearly eight o’clock and then caught a bus to the clinic, which opened at half past. Of course, we had had no idea how to find a doctor in Inverness, so Ron had done an Internet search for us and printed out details of the largest clinic in the city. It wasn’t in the center, but it had ten doctors, as well as nurses and midwives and other staff, and I hoped it would be busy and impersonal, too system-bound to probe into my circumstances. I didn’t want to be treated as a person, just as a container that might need technical help to empty it of its load of baby.

I was glad to see that the building was modern and low, an austere, small institution, its doors plastered with notices. Inside, we joined the queue at the receptionist’s window. When my turn came, there were several people behind me and within earshot. Silva kept turning and glaring at them.

“Yes?”

I opened my mouth and stalled. The receptionist had begun writing, and I didn’t like to speak to the top of her head.

“Hello, yes?” She looked up with a microsmile, no more than a twitch of the mouth.

“Sorry, yes, hello… I’ve just moved here,” I said. “I wonder if I-”

“You want to register,” she said, rolling herself a few feet back on her office chair and reaching into a filing cabinet. “Both of you?”

“No! Not me,” Silva said. “Only her.”

“Do you want the forms in English? We’ve got them in other languages,” she said, rolling back.

“I’m just having a baby,” I blurted. “I don’t need a doctor for anything else. I’m just having a baby.”

The receptionist sat up higher in her chair and looked at my belly, nodded, then swung herself over to another filing cabinet.

“You want Maternity Services. Here’s the antenatal questionnaire as well. We’ll need details of your previous GP. Once you’ve registered, we book you in for an assessment with the community midwife. Antenatal clinic’s Tuesday morning; you need to attend weekly from thirty-five weeks. Postal code?”

“Postal code? Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “Sorry.”

“What’s your address? You have to be a resident within the area.”

“Oh, yes. I mean, we’re just moving in. I don’t have it on me.”

I had thought up an address, but suddenly I didn’t dare give it. I felt certain this woman had an encyclopedic memory of Inverness and knew the sound of every doorbell in every street.

Silva pushed forward and pulled at my arm. “Come on, we don’t need this!” she said fiercely. “Let’s go, come on!”

“Silva, wait. Just a minute,” I said. I smiled at the receptionist. “Sorry.”

Silva pushed her face to the window. “She’ll come back another day. She has many weeks still, maybe eight, nine. It’s not urgent.”

The receptionist ignored her and handed me several sheets of paper. “If you want to see a doctor today, you’ll need to go on the end of the list. First you have to fill in the new patient registration form, the patient questionnaire, and also the antenatal questionnaire. We’ll also need your medical card, passport or other photo ID, proof of address, and contact details of your previous medical practitioner.”

She looked past me to the next person in the queue. “Yes?”

Silva steered me out and strode off. She kept walking until we were several streets away and slowed only as we reached a park with paths and litter bins and a tatty children’s playground. She marched through the gates and sat down on a bench, and I followed, exhausted and sweating. She pulled the papers from my hands and sifted through them.

“Questions, so many! For one baby! Why?”

I pulled the papers back and began to read them. I could give a false name and address. I could make up a name for my previous doctor. I could say I had lost my medical card and leave my National Insurance number blank. They might not follow those up straightaway.

But the questions became more nosy, more dangerous. How would I rate my feelings about my pregnancy from one to five, extremely negative to highly positive? Did I live with a partner? How many adults, smokers and nonsmokers, were living at my address, and were any unemployed? Were there domestic pets or other animals at the premises? I could give false answers to all of them, too, but if I turned up every Tuesday at an antenatal clinic, there would be more and more questions. Soon I would make a mistake or give something away. If I registered but didn’t go to the clinic, they would make inquiries and find out I had lied. And once they knew I wasn’t Annabel, what else would they uncover? The newspapers had said nothing about the missing woman tourist being pregnant, but that didn’t mean Col hadn’t told the police that I was.

Col. I had a sudden recollection of him as I had last seen him, his stricken face as he turned away from the wrecked bridge. But I could not undo what I had done.

“They want to know everything,” I said. “If I don’t tell them, they’ll find out anyway.”

Silva’s face was white. “You shouldn’t go back there,” she said. “If you do, when the baby’s born they’ll take it away. It was a stupid idea to come.”

“What am I supposed to do when I go into labor? I can’t have the baby all on my own. What if something goes wrong?”

Silva stood up and started walking. “You just have to go to hospital. Ron will take us. It will be fine.”

I was surprised at how relaxed she was about it.

“You mean just turn up?” I said. “They’ll think that’s very odd, they’ll ask me all sorts of questions. They’ll interfere.”

“So? Have you done a crime, to have a baby? No. They will look after you. Then afterward we’ll leave with the baby, they can’t stop us.”

“And you’ll come with me?”

“Sure, of course! Ron will take us in the boat, then the Land Rover. Then after, he comes again to pick us up in the Land Rover. Four of us!”

She looked almost happy.

“Then everything can get back to normal,” I said. “Then we’ll decide what to do next.”

On the way back she was silent. Just before we got off the bus, she turned to me and said, “I’m going to look after you.”

There’s that rock in the river you used to watch, the one you only see at the ebb tide, a long, low, shining lump of black. The geese and gulls land and feed around it, but no bird nests there because once a day the water swirls over and covers it again and the birds fly off. Between it and the forest bank of the river, there are other, smaller rocks in the water, some flat and some jagged, set in a loose tumble as if they landed there from a prehistoric avalanche. For all I know, they did. The water swirls and gathers and turns all around them, and maybe it’s also because of the rocks that the river flows in strongly just there and has worn a curve in the bank. Or maybe it’s because the ground in that particular place is so soft to begin with, formed of nothing but disintegrating acid shreds of forest soil that are easily licked out from the pine roots by the tongue of the tide. Either way, the water has washed the soil away and borne it down to the riverbed, and it has hollowed out a tiny bay in the bank right into the base of the trees, leaving their roots under a thin mortar of salty dried mud. They look grayish and gappy, like old teeth. And other stones, dragged in from the sea on the high winter currents and dropped there, are daily pulled and rolled up the beach by the methodical tide into an arrangement of ridges, the boulders lodged farthest up, a scree of stones you can walk on, and little pebbles and broken seashells shirring to and fro at the water’s edge.

Here is where I sit most often to think about you, close in by the trees in the deepest part of the curve and hidden from Ron or Annabel, who might just be (though seldom are) strolling along the river from the bridge or from the cabin. Here is where I began, without knowing that was what I was doing, to build.

One day I saw two stones side by side not far from where I sat, and it so happened I noticed them in a spell of numbness when I was neither talking aloud to you nor crying. In fact I was caught off guard, when I was not thinking of anything at all. Of these two stones, one was large and dark and squarish, and had a ribbon of quartz running through it. The other was pale and much smaller, and its rounded surface sparkled with dots of mica. It was touching the other one in a way that made me think of a person whose forehead was resting against the chest of someone bigger. They leaned toward each other, joined and motionless, arrested in the moment just before they would embrace. That was the remarkable thing, that their absolute stillness held within it an intimation of a movement yet to happen. Father and child. I moved closer, my eyes traveling across every line and plane, gauging the shape of the empty space around them, measuring the distance between. And as I gazed at the point where the two stones tilted and met-the touching of forehead to chest-I felt the world shrink around me. This was surprising, because what I was looking at were, after all, lumps of stone.

Yet I wanted them kept exactly this way, leaning together, and I wanted to be able to find them again the next time I came. So I got up and gathered a pile of the biggest stones I could lift and I set them, one by one, in a wide circle around my stones (and they were certainly, after my concentrated attention to them, mine, as if I had sculpted every angle myself). Then I saw that one of the large stones I’d placed in the circle was crusted with dead strands of waterweed, blackened and brittle from the sun. This displeased me. I carried it down to the river and cleaned it and set it back in its place.

Now inside their circle, my pair of stones looked diminished and without distinction. So I began clearing the space between them and the circle, lifting away pebbles and digging my stones in with my hands to fix them precisely, and so elaborating, without changing it, their relationship to each other. My mind was absolutely clear about how these two figures should look. Yes, they were now figures. When I had finished, they stood proud on a flat bed of shingle within the low ring of stones.

After that, every time I came there I set to work, adding a few more stones to the circle. To protect the figures, I told myself. I went up and down finding shards of slate and flat stones to keep the ring stable as it grew, then I added bulky stones again, for height. I made mistakes and learned as I went. I had to build, dismantle, and rebuild. As the circle rose up around the figures, there were collapses to deal with. I needed to use smaller and smaller stones as it went higher, and I don’t know why I didn’t abandon the whole thing when it became irksome to go searching for just the right stone to keep going. Instead, feeling very clever, I started to bring Ron’s hammers with me so I could break stones to the size I wanted. Nor did I know, when I loved the sight of my father and child stones, why I went on with a task that was going to conceal them from me. Because by then I had recognized that the ring of stones was a wall going up around my beloved ones.

After a few weeks, and almost imperceptibly at first, the wall began to incline inward upon itself. At last I could see what was happening. With much trial and error, and slow and careful chipping, I fashioned long pieces of stone and slate and devised a way of laying them so they overlapped and evolved, finally, into a domelike roof over the figures beneath. I had built a tomb.

I stayed away for a while after that, afraid that I would be too restless to let it alone, afraid I might take the whole thing down. But I drifted back, because now that you have a memorial, there are repairs to attend to, most days. I like to sit under the trees, to sit near you, the figures of you, invisible but close by and in the shadow of the trees. I like to be here at the time of the incoming current and watch the black rock disappear under the river until there is nothing to see except a patch of silver on the surface, strangely glassy and unrippled amid the running waters of the flood tide.

On the evening after the visit to the doctor in Inverness, Silva was full of a hard, snappy energy. Only six weeks to go, and was she the only one who was concerned? Six weeks! Her impatience, her air of unspoken superiority (what did either of them know about childbirth?), made Ron feel he had been lackadaisical in some way, while Annabel was simply worn-out. While she dozed and half-listened, he watched, startled, as Silva talked, words flying from her mouth, about the new plans they now had to make. Though in fact she had made them already.

Annabel handed over her mobile phone, not used since the first night she’d turned up at the trailer. The next day Ron went after work to Inverness and bought a new charger for it, and that evening, when it was working again, Silva entered her own and Ron’s numbers and explained once again how the system was going to work.

“We have phones switched on all the time, all day, okay? You don’t go anywhere without phone, not even two minutes to the jetty,” she told Annabel. “You’re so heavy now, and what do you do if you fall? You take your phone in your pocket everywhere. Then, so, if I am along the river and there is a problem, if the pains come, straightaway first you call me. Straightaway, okay? Me first.”

Annabel smiled and nodded from the sofa bed, where she lay every evening now, her bare feet on two pillows. By the end of the day her ankles were swollen and her shoes tight.

“Then, if the pains are coming, I call you,” Silva said to Ron. “So same for you, you keep your phone on. I call you, and straightaway you come to us here, in the boat. You bring her in the boat to the bridge, then we take her up to the Land Rover and we all go to hospital.”

Ron nodded, too. Earlier that day, on Silva’s orders, he had warned Mr. Sturrock he might need to take some hours off at short notice.

“Or I might not, it depends,” he’d said, not sure what mood Sturrock was in. “I’m on standby. To take a… someone to hospital. She’s having a baby.”

“Fuck’s sake. You having a wean? Congratulations in order, eh?” Sturrock had said.

Immediately Ron not only corrected him but had an elaborate lie ready. No, he wasn’t the father, in fact he hardly knew her, she was the partner of a friend of his. She wasn’t due until early October, but the friend was working on the rigs, putting in all the hours right through till the end of September, and they’d just moved and she had no family here. The friend could get off the rig in under three hours if the baby came early, but his partner was nervous. Ron was the backup to take her to hospital in case he was delayed. Almost certainly he wouldn’t be. It was just for her peace of mind.

Mr. Sturrock had grumbled a little, then told him to inform the office if he had to go off-site and keep his time sheet straight, and be grateful he worked for a fool ready to let him away at the drop of a hat to be a fucking ambulance service.

Afterward Ron wondered why he had lied at all, never mind so extravagantly. There had been no need to pretend that the mother was almost a stranger; he could have said that she and the baby were close to him without going into the peculiarity of their arrangement. Why, when every part of him wished he could be the child’s father, was he so afraid that someone might suppose he was? Because he didn’t deserve to be, that was it. What he deserved was what he most dreaded, to be found out for what he was instead: a man who had killed children. If that happened, Mr. Sturrock-everybody-would turn on him, outraged that he was trying to pass himself off as fit to take care of anyone ever again. All he deserved was to feel like a monster for the rest of his life.

He and Annabel continued to bow under Silva’s dictatorship. It was the price they paid to have her reanimated and back with them. It was lovely, they said to each other privately, to see her looking forward so much to the baby. A new life is a healing thing.

One day at low tide Silva untied the partly submerged white boat from the jetty and dragged it onto the shore. Ron hadn’t looked at it in months, but now she wanted it fixed up.

“Suppose the baby starts coming and we can’t get hold of you?” she said.

She bailed out the rainwater and tipped the boat over, and Ron cleaned off enough of the clinging green weed to inspect the hull. It was sound, but the boat was barely eight feet long and made of a light plastic. An oarlock was hanging loose, and one of the oars was split at the handle end; although the paddle was in one piece, it would be difficult to use.

“We can mend it. Or we’ll get another one,” Silva decreed.

Ron laughed and chucked the broken oar on the ground. It would make a few sticks of kindling. “You can’t go out in a thing that size, not even with two oars,” he told her. “It’s going nowhere, not without a motor. Look at it. It’d be just about all right on a duck pond.”

“But someone here before us must have gone out in it. Fishing, maybe.”

Ron shrugged. “Probably brought it down here and realized it was useless in more than a breath of wind. Anyway, look at your arms. You couldn’t row three feet with Annabel on board. You’d never make it down to the bridge.”

“I can row a boat all right,” Silva said. “I want it ready, just in case.”

He shook his head. “You wouldn’t be safe,” he said and started back to the cabin, away from her objections. “There’s no need, anyway. I’ll be straight up in the launch when the time comes. It’s all arranged.”

In September, suddenly the weather turned colder. The cabin floors were damp all the time, and Ron began to wonder how he could put in a decent layer of insulation that wouldn’t involve hours of disruption and threaten Annabel’s calm. He thought carefully about her calm, and how to keep her cheerful. Lately, though she hadn’t the will to withstand Silva, she was often impatient with her. She complained of being bossed about, and being uncomfortable and bored. Silva was, by turns, irritable and morose, and she was also constantly watchful, like an investor with a stake in a dumb but valuable animal. Ron was struck by the simplicity of his function in it all, which was to move between the two women as a force dedicated to both of them equally, no matter how wayward or unaccountable either of them became.

Drafts whistled in through the windows and walls, and they had to keep the stove alight all day. He set to work on getting in a log supply for the months to come, but pinewood burned up fast, and he was having to go farther and farther into the forest to find dead trunks he could drag back for cutting. But it occurred to him over and over that secretly he was delighted all these obstacles had presented themselves, otherwise where else would he be now, what would he be doing?

More and more was being required of him, and it was exhausting, but also exhilarating. He loved how the land was sodden and chill and how the sky lowered; he hoped for a dramatic, freezing winter. All day long he walked around trying to keep his gratitude hidden.

The cranes and concrete pourers were at work; dull cranking sounds vibrated around the small group assembled on the jetty. Even after several months, the bridge talk was still an ordeal in public speaking for Mr. Sturrock. He could not look at even familiar faces as if he had seen them before; he stared over his audience’s heads for fear of making eye contact, and called above the noise.

“As you can see, the last segment has been brought along the new roadbed, and the crane will lift it into position within the next forty-eight hours. This represents”-a gull streaked past him, shrieking-“a significant achievement, and not a little way ahead of schedule. Thank you for your attention, ladies and gentlemen,” he added with a formal smile as he folded his speech back into his pocket.

The tiny group nodded. They had been expecting all this because they had been on several bridge walks already. This was the very last one and numbers had tailed off to just three; the bridge would be reopening in a few weeks. Ron recognized every face, and so did Rhona and Mr. Sturrock. Two of the three were a couple whose interest had become for some reason obsessive. Each time they made a day of it: after the tour they would drive up to Netherloch for lunch and in the afternoon walk through the forest to the top of the Netherloch Falls. There they would take photographs of the river snaking from the far end of the loch and widening into the distance as far as the bridge, and on the next walk, after Mr. Sturrock had finished, they would pass the new pictures around in a way that seemed to Ron strangely agitated and boastful, as if the gap between the broken bridge ends were being closed under their personal supervision. Today as usual the woman produced some new photographs, but apart from himself, Mr. Sturrock, and Rhona (who all saw the bridge every day), there was only Colin, the third member of the audience, to show them to. He took them reluctantly. The woman could not permit his indifference; she pointed out this and that detail, eager for him to show more pleasure. Not that she didn’t understand that the restored bridge was no compensation for his loss, of course not, but still, a new bridge. That was something positive, wasn’t it, something that would help everybody move on? Colin’s big face worked away with an expression of polite interest. Handing back the last of the photographs, he sighed.

Rhona stepped forward. As this was the final bridge talk, she said, she was sure the group would want to take this opportunity to join her in thanking Mr. Sturrock. A thin, clacking round of applause rose and died. One by one the three shook Rhona’s and Mr. Sturrock’s hands and then one another’s, and began to drift away, pulling off their hard hats and depositing them on the ground at Rhona’s feet. Colin lingered. It was four weeks since his tribute to the victims and his dead wife. Since then, he had been quieter than ever. He looked as if he might have wanted to speak but instead nodded to Ron and turned away.

Rhona was applying something glittery to her lips and shaking out her hair. She grinned at Ron, who knew what was about to happen; she’d let him in on it two weeks before, apologizing that she couldn’t include him, too.

“And now, John,” she said playfully, turning to Sturrock. “I am spiriting you away. I’m taking you for lunch at the Royal Highland Hotel. I hope you’re hungry?”

“What? Steady on, now. Lunch? The Royal Highland?” Sturrock said. “There’s no need for that.”

“Away you go, it’s on us. Just a wee thank-you from Forward Voice PR. Your talks have helped us deliver a key campaign objective, rolling out the message to our community stakeholders.”

He stared at her. “Fuck me. I can’t just go off having lunch. I need to get back over the other side.” He turned to Ron. “You need to get back over yourself, eh?”

“I’ll be here when you’re ready,” Ron said, smiling.

“It’s all arranged,” Rhona said. “Our managing director Malcolm’s going to join us, and so is Mrs. Sturrock. So there you go. Table’s booked. See you later, Ron. Thanks a lot for waiting.”

Mr. Sturrock was now pleasantly bewildered. “Christ, you in on it, too?” he said to Ron. “Well, thanks a bunch, son.”

After they left, Ron picked up the hats and packed them in the boat, then walked over to get his own lunch at the service station. There were at least two hours to kill, and when he caught sight of Colin there, hunched at the same table as last time, for a moment he considered slipping away. But Colin looked up and saw him, so he bought sandwiches and tea and joined him at the table. From Colin’s face, it was obvious there was no right thing Ron could say, but it wasn’t possible to say nothing at all.

“So. That’s the last of the bridge walks. That’s it, now,” he offered, hoping Colin would pick up on the idea of their finality. What else could the man do? It was the last; there was nothing more to be said or done. Ron knew he was being lazy about Colin’s suffering, but he couldn’t enter into it. He didn’t really like him. While Colin certainly had ample cause to suffer, Ron suspected he was in any case inclined to be sorry for himself.

“If you’re about to say something about moving on, don’t bother,” Colin said. He pulled his pudgy fingers across his face before he spoke again. “That woman with her fucking photos.”

Ron shrugged. “Yeah, sorry, mate. It’s still tough going, is it?”

“Her, everybody. People at work. The number of people that say it. Moving on. They say maybe it’s a blessing I didn’t know her that long, like that makes it better.”

“Aren’t they just trying to help?”

“They think I should be getting over it. Some people tell me I’m lucky, I should be glad I wasn’t in the car with her.”

He blew his nose into a rag of used paper handkerchief with an embarrassing, piteous honk that blasted little wisps of tissue across his chin and cheeks.

“So, anyway, that’s the last of the bridge walks,” Ron said. “No more trailing up and down from Huddersfield. You’ll be getting your weekends back, a bit of time to yourself. Any plans?”

Colin glared at him. “I’ll still be coming. Why would I not still come? She’s still here.”

“Oh. Okay. Sorry, I didn’t mean-”

“You know the worst thing people say? They say be glad we weren’t married long enough to have kids. Because imagine what that’d be like, they’d have lost their mother and I’d be left to cope on my own.”

Ron knew how this line of thinking went: grief for loss of what you did have, beside grief for loss of what you did not but might have had, is a lesser grief. He also knew this thinking for what it was, the well-meaning, ill-contrived, and fatuous condolence of outsiders, people uninitiated in loss.

“It’s not like that,” he said.

“No,” Colin said, his voice faltering. “They don’t know how stupid it is. They don’t know how cruel.”

“They don’t mean to be cruel. Nobody understands what it’s like to lose somebody until it happens to them.”

“I don’t mean that,” Colin said. Then his face collapsed and his shoulders started to shudder. The used tissue went up to his eyes, but huge, splattery tears were already dropping on the front of his clothes. Ron watched them roll like raindrops down his barrel chest. “I mean, don’t they think I’d be glad if there was a kid? Don’t they think I’d want to bring it up? I’d do it now if I could, I’d do it right, by both of them. I wish she knew that. I wish we’d had the kid. But we didn’t and now it’s too late.”

“The kid?” Ron said. “You mean you lost one, you lost a baby? I’m really sorry. That’s really tough.”

Colin nodded and cried noisily into his hands. “I never thought I’d want them both so much. They’ve both gone, and it’s my fault. Nobody knows. Nobody knows.”

“It’s not your fault, mate. Listen, it happens. Miscarriages happen. Nobody’s to blame.” Ron now wanted to offer comfort to this large, off-putting man, but his words were having no effect. “Here,” he said, pushing Colin’s mug toward him. “Here, go on, take a swig of that. You need to calm down.”

To his surprise, Colin meekly swallowed some tea, then took another mouthful.

“No point falling apart, is there,” Ron said. “Doesn’t get you anywhere.”

“Sorry. Gets to me, that’s all.” Colin drew a hand over his face.

“Nobody’s to blame,” Ron said again. “Miscarriages aren’t anybody’s fault.”

Colin drank more of his tea in silence. After a while, he said in a flat voice, “She was pregnant. I didn’t tell the police. Nobody knew but me.”

“Why not? Why make a secret of it?”

Colin let out a massive sigh. “I felt guilty. Ashamed. Too ashamed to say.”

“I’m telling you, a miscarriage isn’t anybody’s fault, mate.”

Colin sighed again and took a deep breath. “I’m trying to tell you. There wasn’t a miscarriage. She was pregnant. When she died. What happened, see, I told her to get rid of it. The day before she died I told her she couldn’t have a kid and me as well, I said I’d leave.”

Ron stared at him. Colin’s face was pulpy and unwell-looking; his eyes had an off-center, uneven way of blinking. It occurred to Ron that remorse was, literally, a sickness. Colin was so sick, so unbalanced by it, he looked in danger of falling apart.

“She was my wife. She was going to be the mother of my kid, and I said that to her. I can’t believe I said that to her,” Colin said. “And now there is not one single reason I don’t want that kid. I want them both, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

Ron said quietly, “Do you have a photo of her?”

“No. To be honest, I can’t stand to see her face. Only had a few pictures, anyway.” Colin tapped his head. “She’s in my mind. I see her face in my mind. But only here, I only see her when I come here. She hated Huddersfield, she didn’t like the house. I didn’t really listen. I should’ve done a lot of things different.”

Ron let his breath out slowly. “We could all say that, mate.”

I think a lot about Col, lying here. Not anymore in the panicky, guilty way of a few months ago but with a strand of regret I follow right back to the day I chose to disappear, a day I now perceive as marked as much by regret as by catastrophe. Not that Col will be feeling that. I’m certain he is back sympathetically engrossed in the caregivers’ chat room, untroubled by ever having known me.

I think of our early days together, how to begin with I did not feel very much at all except embarrassment at living with a near stranger. But now I’m almost nostalgic for that early awkwardness, our misdirected attempts at endearments, my pursuit of some improved neatness in the arrangements of the house, his wordless, ritualized moves in bed. It touches me to remember the way every night he launched himself at me without speaking, his efforts to please, his mountainous heavings on and off. I forgive myself my mute acquiescence (I thought it sophisticated to have nothing to say at such times), which matched his lack of words. I can imagine the conversations we should have had, the conversations we lay so self-consciously not having afterward, in the dark, but our silence strikes me now as more like generosity tongue-tied than disappointment throttling itself before it can cry out.

Anyway, it will surely happen that one day I’ll be called upon to give some account to my child of its father, and by then words will have come to me and I shall have them waiting, as if written down and placed in an envelope, sealed and put by. I do not have them ready at present, but it will be years before I need them. When the time comes, I will know what to say, surely.

Ron comes into the cabin scraping his feet and dumps a heap of damp wood by the stove. This is what he does every evening; after he’s tied up the boat, he collects an armful of logs from the pile by the sawhorse he’s set up between the jetty and the cabin and trudges up with it and adds it to our store. He’ll make several more trips over the evening; against the thin cabin wall, on either side of the stove, an inner wall of logs is building up. It is shoulder-high already and rising in an uneven wave, and Silva keeps telling him not to make it much higher as we can’t stand on chairs to get logs down every time we need to stoke the fire.

“How are you doing today?” he asks me routinely, as he starts to stack the new batch of logs.

Silva appears from the kitchen with a knife in her hand. “She got too tired,” she answers for me. It so happens she is wrong; I was out of doors and out of her sight for over an hour, that’s all that too tired means. But I don’t contradict her, I just smile.

“I’m fine,” I tell him. “I went for a nice long stroll. I sat down and rested every five minutes,” I add, before Silva can lecture me again about drawing blood away from the baby.

She gives a snort. “Look at the color of her; she’s white like a sheet of paper. Ugh, don’t put that log on, it’s filthy. Don’t make it any higher there, the whole thing will fall over.” She returns to the kitchen, and Ron continues to stack.

When I’m resting here and watching him, I like to conjure animal faces out of the rings and whorls of the newly sawn log ends he puts in place: one looks like an owl, another is a baboon, another is a cat wearing spectacles. When this wall’s complete, Ron intends to start on the adjoining wall, and once that’s done he’ll replenish our stocks as they go down. Not only will we have good, dry fuel all the time, he says, but double wooden walls provide excellent insulation. It’s what they do in Norway, and there’s not much you can teach a Norwegian about insulation. I’m sure this is true, but of course as the wall goes up our room grows smaller. You might even say it’s closing in on us; it does smell blocked and earthy, with an end-of-year whiff that carries a note of decay. And the new wall is full of trapped, trembling insects. Whenever I lift a log to put on the stove, it comes away from the pile with a gauzy trail of tearing spiderwebs, gritty with rotting bark and mold and sawdust. Silva says mice will move in, and Ron laughs and says even mice need to live somewhere and at least the wood will stay dry enough to burn.

“So you are all right?” he asks, as he’s putting the last logs in place.

“Yes, I’m fine. I’m so lazy, I’m too heavy to do anything much,” I say.

“He was there again today, that bloke from Huddersfield. Colin. The bloke whose wife died.”

I pick up my knitting from the floor and fiddle with it. “How is he? Did he speak to you?”

“He says he’s going to keep coming. Every weekend.”

“What’s the point in that now the walks are finished? He should stay away.”

“There’s a point in it for him. They still haven’t found her. Have you ever been to Huddersfield?”

“No, never.” I haul myself up till I’m sitting on the sofa bed and I start on a row of knitting. “If I go for it, I think I could get this sleeve finished by bedtime.”

“Annabel, where is it you’re from?” Ron asks. He is breaking the rule. No matter that the rule is unstated, it has held us together for months. The rule is that the three of us ended up here by ways and means we don’t have to explain. Ron knows that.

“What does it matter?” I say. “I don’t ask you questions like that. I don’t have the right. There’s no need for me to know. And what about her?” I nod toward the kitchen, where the radio is blaring music. “Are you going to start asking her that kind of question? She’ll run a mile. You shouldn’t-”

Just then Silva walks in again, carrying a plate of bread. She looks tired in a way only a much older person should look. I can’t be sure what she heard or didn’t hear. She waits for me to finish what I was saying.

“You shouldn’t stack the logs so high. Silva’s right.” I put the knitting aside and get up. “I need to stretch my legs,” I tell them, and leave.

It’s too cold to stay out without another sweater, and in fact I am too tired to walk far. I go down to the jetty and look back at the cabin, its windows glowing with firelight, squares of soft yellow in the grainy, gray dusk. The baby’s weight makes me breathless. All I want is to go back inside, all I want is to carry on living by the rules that have served us well enough, but what awaits me in the yellow light is altered now. The door opens, and Ron steps out. I turn away and stare at the river, listening to his footsteps on the stones coming nearer and then the hard clump as he walks along the jetty and stands next to me. I am too angry to say anything.

He sighs, lifts a hand and strokes my hair. He is crying.

“He wants you back” is all he says before he unties the boat and climbs in, starts the motor, and moves off into the tide flowing down toward the bridge. I wait until I’m shivering before I go back to the cabin. Silva is coming out of the kitchen with three plates, and when I tell her Ron has left she thinks it is because she spoke sharply to him about the logs. She is peeved and irritable all evening. In truth she exhausts me. Later I go to bed, and although the baby kicks and kicks, I fall asleep. I’m glad I’m too tired to dwell on the strange truth that now that Ron may know who I am, I feel more unknown than ever.

She lies there. She lies there breathing with her mouth open while the stove burns low and the knitting comes apart in her hands, because her hands feel nothing, not the metal knitting needles that are hot from the fire or the stitches slipping off past her fat finger ends or the unraveling wool settling over the creases at her wrist. The hands don’t move. The fingers look boneless, like stuffed tubes; her nails are sunk into the tips like flat baby buttons pushed into dough. She’s on her back like a sleeping sow, her breath whistling in her throat, eyelashes twitching on her pink face. Her chest moves up and down, her breasts lift and collapse over her bulging stomach. Her giant bare feet look too lumpy to walk on. They still carry semicircular ridges across the fronts where the swollen flesh has bulged from her overtight shoes, which lie splayed and distorted on the floor beside her.

I watch her for more than an hour.

“I told you you were too tired,” I say in a loud voice, and I go to the table and make a noise clearing our plates and taking them to the kitchen. Her phone is also on the table, and I clear that away to the kitchen, too. I have to do everything. Every evening I check that it’s charged and working. She can’t be trusted to.

When I come back, she is awake and sitting up with the knitting in her lap, trying to push her feet into her shoes.

“You’ll split them,” I tell her. “You can’t get them on anymore. They don’t fit.”

“I know they don’t,” she says calmly. “But it’s not worth getting new ones now. They’ll fit me again as soon as the baby’s born.” She smoothes a hand over her belly and picks up the knitting, frowning at it.

“Oh dear, you shouldn’t have let me fall asleep,” she says, yawning, picking at the yarn with the needles. “Look at this mess.”

“Don’t blame me,” I say. “I told you you were too tired.”

She pauses with the knitting and looks at me, then gets up, sighing. “I’m not blaming you, Silva. I’m going to bed.”

“I suppose I’ll clear up, then,” I say.

Another sigh. “I’m happy to do it in the morning, but I’m very tired now. Please leave everything. I’ll do it in the morning.”

“Leave everything dirty all night? No. That’s not how I am. You can go to bed if you like.”

“Just leave it, Silva, it won’t matter. I’ll do it in the morning. Good night.”

She shambles off without another word, bent over with her hands on the small of her back, her fat feet half out of her shoes. She doesn’t walk like that when Ron is here. I want to tell her I know about them. Does she think I’m stupid? I see their faces, I know they whisper away together. I heard them at it this evening, and when I appeared she pretended she was talking about the logs. I want to tell her Ron is as much mine for the taking as hers, I could have him if I chose to. Then it would be me he gives whatever I ask for on a plate, it would be me he’s ready to drop everything for, take anywhere I want. She has everything, and she deserves nothing.

She must be making all her plans. She must be feeling very clever. I am so angry I am going to have to cry. But I can’t bear to go to my room, where I have nothing of you but your photographs, while she lies on the other side of the wall stroking that belly of hers, thinking of that baby, smiling to herself. I go back to the kitchen and pick up her phone. I check it, and it’s just as I suppose: she’s got it on silent. That will be so she can carry on text conversations with him all day, even while I’m around. Making all their plans for after the baby. How and when they are going to leave me.

I look at the In box, and yes, of course there’s a message from Ron, and in the Sent box is her reply.

Held up in queue. See you car park 4:30. Did you get bandage for s?

Thx OK. Yes. Also getting savlon + aftersun.

Both messages are from a Sunday in late August, not long after she tried to see the doctor in Inverness and I’d made her start carrying her phone again. On the Sunday morning I’d cut my hand with a chisel, chipping stones for your memorial. It was baking hot by the afternoon, and I came back to the cabin with my shoulders and nose red and sore and my hand wrapped in the bloodied folds of my skirt. Annabel patched me up using small bandages and tissues and asked Ron to take her to the pharmacy in Netherloch. Ron said he needed some white spirit anyway, so they went together, and she bought bandages and also lotion for my shoulders.

When they got back, she cleaned the cut and dressed it, then she dabbed the sunburn lotion on me. She put the bottle in the refrigerator so it would be extra cold and soothing for the next time I needed it. She thought I was crying because my skin was sore, but I was crying for her kindness and how cared-for I felt. How long ago that is.

There are no other text messages from Ron since then, and only three or four from me. That means the ones they’ve been sending each other since, she’s been deleting as she goes, in case I find them. If she’s doing that, I must be right to worry. Maybe it started longer ago than I think. Suddenly I recall the day in July when Ron brought the paper with the photographs of your chain and Anna’s giraffe. They sat up that night together, waiting for me to sleep. Was that when they began to say to each other they would be better off without me? How long have those looks between them being going on, those conversations that stop the moment I come into the room?

There is nothing on her voice mail. Now I scroll through the call records, and since late August there are no numbers either received or dialed except mine. There is nothing recorded between then and the eighteenth of February.

But on the eighteenth of February she called another number. On the nineteenth, she missed and received calls from the same number. It’s a number so familiar to me but so out of place and time that at first I don’t believe what I’m seeing. I get my own phone and look. Of course I know I am right, I am merely putting off the moment of acceptance. For a time I look from one number to the other, a phone in the palm of each hand, checking every digit, until I cannot deny it.

The person who called her on the nineteenth of February was you. Were you replying to her calls to you on the eighteenth? There are none before that and, of course, none since. My mouth is dry, and a kind of creak comes from my throat. Something is robbing me of the strength to call out. I drink a cup of water, and another.

Less than three hours before you and Anna were thrown off the bridge in a car rented by a woman whose body has never been found, you spoke to Annabel. This Annabel who lies in the next room, who that night wandered the choked roads with nowhere to go and came knocking on our trailer door. Annabel who collapsed sick and helpless in front of me the next morning and after that never left, and has never said who she is. She attached herself to me as if her arrival did not need explaining, and by the time I thought to ask her about it, she told me that she stayed with me to help me. If I shook her awake now she would say the same thing, in her flat, lazy way. She says she found the trailer by accident. But the trailer was not in a place she could have found by accident. I calculate quickly.

I’ll never know all the small turns in the story that brought you to be in her car, but I can work out enough of it. I know her dates. Did she pick you up in the White Hart, over New Year? Was she there for the holidays, with the husband? There is an argument with the husband, is that it? Then she flirts with you and you’re drunk and angry with me, angry enough to give her what she asks for, a fuck against the wall? That’s what happened. I know what you can be like. That’s why she came back in February, it’s why she’s been hiding from the husband who can’t keep away from the bridge. She came back to get you for herself, and when she couldn’t, she made you give her money instead. The money she’s so generous with is our money. Maybe you took her car, left her stranded somewhere, I don’t care. You wouldn’t have been in it at all but for her. What happened is her doing. She killed you, and she killed our daughter. She left me with nothing. And she is carrying your child.

Now there is a wet, smug snoring coming from her room. This fat and greedy taker of all the space and air and all my careful provisioning in this place also took you from me. My legs shake, and vomit rises from my stomach. My baby girl in that car, you twisting and trying to reach her, the pocket of air bubbling away while you push at the door against the weight of the river, the dense water swallowing you. You were too late to hold my baby in your arms.

There’s a cough, the bed creaks. She’s heaving the great bulk of her body around, shifting the living flesh of your child inside her. My child is dead, and this one is alive. It kicks and squirms and presses down on her; she whispers to it, she pats it, she tells it she loves it.

I stand in the kitchen and think of the times we sat by the river and spoke of the next child we would have and, God willing, the children after that. We talked of Anna being a big sister to them all, how they would go to school and squabble and play and grow up. Now this woman who stole my child lies with another in her belly. It, too, is a child stolen from me, and from you.

I remember all the other nights when Ron was here, the soft shufflings at Annabel’s door, their voices, a needle of candlelight gleaming through a split in the partition wall. They must think I am stupid. Then utter darkness and stillness within the cabin, and outside, the river under the moon running silently seaward on the ebb tide.

On Sunday, Ron was on call for extra transport runs. Two weeks ahead of the bridge’s completion date, more workers were being brought in to work more shifts, seven days a week. He was pleased to have a real reason not to see Annabel that day; he needed some time to think. He sent her a text message to explain why he could not come. Then he sent another saying he would no longer be able to come to the cabin every evening, but he would be there whenever he could. There was no reply. He sent another message reassuring her that he would still go off-duty the moment he was needed, to get her to hospital. She or Silva had only to call and he’d be at the cabin within minutes. Even from the farthest point on the opposite bank, it would take him less than half an hour to reach her. He ended the message with “Hope you’re ok. Don’t worry about anything.”

She didn’t reply. He called her number. Silva answered and said that Annabel was resting. An hour later, he got a text message from her.

Missed yr call sorry. If evenings busy no problem don’t come. Will call you when it’s time for the hospital. I’m fine. A.

On Monday, Silva called him. “She’s fine, but she’s got to that stage, she doesn’t really want a man around her. She doesn’t want anyone to see her, she doesn’t want to go out. It makes her feel awkward. It’s how women are, just before. She needs to be with other women. When the labor starts, that’s when she’ll need you.”

It was the natural way of things, Ron believed, that no man was capable of understanding this fully, and it would be pointless for him to try; it was important only that he accept it. This was a time for Annabel, for any woman, to be as fickle as she chose. The only proper response was to hope for nothing more than to be of service to her, on her terms, when the time came. He had never before been so close to this most female and ancient mystery, and was, in fact, a little afraid of it; the secrecy surrounding a woman soon to give birth both entranced and repelled him. He understood now, he felt, the sentimentality and awe of fertility worship. Though Annabel with her slatternly ways was unlikely goddess material, he was not really surprised to find that he was ready to do absolutely anything for her.

“I can still come,” he said to Silva, “just not so often. I’ll talk to her and see what she wants.”

“No. She said she doesn’t want to tell you herself, she doesn’t want to hurt your feelings. But she definitely just wants me around, for the last few weeks. Maybe it’s because I’m a mother.”

“Well, but what will you do for food? You’ll need to go shopping.”

“We’re fine. I can get up to the road and into Netherloch. I’ll let you know if we need anything.”

“Well, okay. I’m on call for anything, all right? Tell her that. Tell her she can call any time, just for a chat. Or text. And if she changes her mind-”

“I’ll tell her. Must go, bye,” Silva said and hung up.

I have no shoes.

I got up late and couldn’t find them, even though I knew I’d taken them off sitting on my bed, as usual. I must have kicked them underneath, I thought, and the size I am now I couldn’t go scrabbling about hunting for them, so I went on bare feet to the cabin door, which was open. From there I smelled burning and saw Silva a little way down the shore poking at a fire in the barbecue, and I yelled at her I’d lost my shoes and would she come and help me find them. She turned away, took the tongs, and lifted one of my shoes out of the fire. She was laughing. She held it up high to show me. Flames were licking through the rope sole and canvas. Ashy shreds and melting drops of rubber were falling off it.

Even though it was really too late to save it, I had to get down there to stop her. But I couldn’t get farther than the concrete at the doorway. The stones surrounding it were sharp and cold, and slippery. I yelped and stepped back and burst into tears. “What are you doing? Those are my only shoes!”

“They don’t fit you,” Silva called. “And they stink!”

She dropped the shoe she’d been holding back in the fire and lifted the other. There was less than half of it left, only a blackened piece of the sole with a rag of burnt fabric attached.

“You’re insane! What am I supposed to wear?”

She dropped it, too, and stirred the fire around, then put down the tongs and walked calmly back. “They’re not worth crying over. They were bad for your feet. And you lie around all day, you don’t need shoes,” she said, walking past me.

“Of course I need shoes! I can’t go out without shoes!”

“Well, there might be flip-flops in Netherloch. I’ll get you some. If I go.”

That was four days ago, and she hasn’t been anywhere except to her place along the river. I’ve put my phone somewhere and I can’t find it, so I asked her to call Ron and get him to buy sneakers or something for me and bring them next time he comes. But he hasn’t come.

“Where’s Ron? When is he coming, did he say?” I ask.

Apart from anything else, my feet are cold most of the time, and I can hardly reach my toes to rub them. There were some thick socks of Ron’s around someplace, but I can’t find them now, either.

“He’s busy, he said. There’s a lot going on to get the bridge ready in time.”

“But he hasn’t been here all week. He never misses more than a day. Ask him when he’s coming.”

“He’s extra busy. He’ll come when he can.”

“I’m going to find my bloody phone and call him and see if he’s all right. It must be somewhere. Have you seen it?”

“I haven’t seen it for days.”

I look for it again all morning, but I don’t find it. These days everything’s in a muddle and things do go astray. It’s somewhere around, no doubt. But Silva’s never far away, so it’s not essential for me to have it at hand. I ask her to send Ron another message, asking him to come as soon as he can, with some shoes.

“I still can’t find my phone. And I do need shoes,” I tell her when we have lunch, which is pasta again with something out of a tin. “I have to get out. I’m supposed to walk every day! Please ask him if he can get something size 9.”

“I’ll ask him,” she tells me. “There’s no need to be upset. You’re getting yourself in a state.”

“No wonder! I haven’t been able to get farther than the door!”

“It’s quite normal to feel restless at this stage. But you should be doing less, not more.”

“And ask if he can bring some apples or something. Or oranges. Tomatoes, anything fresh.”

“I’ll ask him. But he’s very busy. Go and rest.”

This is how it goes every day now. She’s always telling me I’m too restless, and probably I am, but never for long. After a while a terrible listlessness will creep over me and I have to give in to it. I lose things and get annoyed with myself (the phone still hasn’t turned up), and I’ll try to settle to some knitting or tidying, but very often I just sit or lie looking at the ceiling. My back aches constantly.

I miss Ron. He has told Silva he’ll be here any day, but still he doesn’t come. She feeds me in the middle of the day now, big, hot platefuls of spaghetti with tomato sauce, or macaroni and cheese, and I eat from boredom, not knowing where I have room to put so much food. Afterward I’m even more sleepy. When I’ve rested, I often feel bloated and itchy, so I’ll go out and stand on the freezing damp concrete for a few moments to breathe in cool air and look at the river. The scent of pine from the forest has turned brackish, and every day the sky is full of geese, circling in wide, fluttering arrows, preparing to migrate. If it’s not raining, I drag a chair to the doorway and sit and watch them for a while, wretchedly sluggish, wondering if even after the birth my distended, straining body will ever feel or look like mine again. But my feet are always freezing, and it’s too cold to stay there, even wrapped up, and anyway soon Silva complains I’m letting cold air in, or blocking her way.

Ron went back to sleeping every night in the mobile unit with the other men. His reappearance went without comment because neither his presence to begin with nor his many later absences had been noticed particularly; the unit was a place where the men went just to sleep, and there was a high turnover as shift patterns became more complex.

In the canteen a squabble erupted over all the extra men Jackson the cook was now expected to cater for; he stormed out and was replaced by a young man called O’Dowd, who went through his workday saying as little as possible. His sullenness spread, somehow, or maybe it was just a deeper concentration now that the end of the project was in sight, or maybe it was simple fatigue that had set in among the men. In any case, there was less banter, and that suited Ron. He felt some of the old talent return to him, acquired after his release from prison, of concentrating only on what was in front of him, on the immediate task in hand, no matter how trivial. He made himself notice frivolous details: the tiny whoosh of a cascade of sugar from the packet into a mug of tea, the smell of rain on concrete, the color of toothpaste. He moved from job to job in this way, trying not to think about Annabel, refusing to bring to mind Colin’s face and voice, and still less his words. Suppose he was wrong about it all? Suppose Annabel wasn’t the missing wife? Why had he interfered? If she was his wife, and she wanted to keep away from him, why shouldn’t she? It was none of his business. Yet the thought of it-a father grieving unnecessarily for his unborn baby and its mother-nagged at him.

He couldn’t stop himself sending Annabel messages every day to tell her he’d come as soon as she wanted him to. Only occasional, meaninglessly breezy answers came back. He called her a number of times, but she never picked up. He tried Silva several times also, and she answered once. Her reassurance that all was well was terse. He wasn’t wanted. He decided to go on forcing the small things to absorb him, immersing himself in a private world deliberately shrunk to leave little room for hurt.

Do you remember Anna’s birth? I never saw you so scared, before or since. I can still see your face, and I can hear her first squeezed-out, mewly cry. I hardly remember the pain.

I’m watching Annabel carefully, but not in the way she thinks. She can’t think, actually. She’s lost the power of thought. She’s had only three contractions and it’s nearly two hours since the first one, but she’s been fretting and hefting herself around as if she’s got a bucking bull in there. Weeping, now.

“Try him again! Why isn’t he answering? He promised, oh, he promised,” she wails.

“Don’t worry,” I say. “Don’t worry, you’ve got hours and hours yet. I’m sure he’s still busy and can’t pick up his voice mails, that’s all. He must be busy at the bridge. It reopened today, you know.”

She does, of course, know. We watched it all from here. The bridge reopened at noon, and traffic has been streaming along it for four hours. Now the afternoon is fading and the bridge lights sparkle in strings in the sky across the river. Headlamps are gleaming through the dusk, and again the constant groan of traffic is in the air. The last time I heard that I was in the trailer, lying with your arm around me, and Anna asleep between us.

I’m making a show of timing the contractions. Thirty minutes. I’ll keep her thinking they’re at thirty minutes even as they gradually crowd together and come at her every twenty-five, twenty. I don’t want her to panic. We have to spin this out for hours. I do want the child born alive, and her alive to see it.

“Why not go and make sure all your things are together?” I say. “It helps if you move around. I’ll make a cup of tea and try Ron again.”

She has packed and repacked her overnight bag a number of times already, but at least doing that occupies her. She gnaws her bottom lip, nods, and hauls herself to her feet.

In the kitchen I put on the kettle, and while she wanders around picking things up and putting them down, I stand in the doorway and say loudly, with the phone at my ear, “Hi, Ron, me again. You got my other messages? It’s coming, she’s started, it’s all going fine. But will you get here as quick as possible? Can you call me back? We’re okay, but we need you here now. She really needs to be in hospital soon, okay? Call me back, okay? Soon as possible!”

Annabel appears from her room, looking brave. She pulls in a long, deep breath and lets it out slowly. She thinks I dialed Ron’s number before I spoke.

“He’ll be on his way the minute he hears that,” she says, trying to keep her voice smooth. “Won’t he, Silva? Nothing to be worried about. Is there? And it’s all going fine! It takes hours, doesn’t it?” She glances at the door. “I heard something! I heard the boat! I’m sure it’s him, go down and see! Go and wave, make him hurry!”

I pretend excitement. “Maybe you’re right! Quick, come on!”

We go outside. While she dances at the doorway on her bare feet, I run down to the jetty and scan the water. There’s a heavy drizzle falling, and the river and sky are the same gray. Of course it’s not the boat. It was probably a truck on the bridge. I haven’t spoken to Ron for days and days. I’ve replied to maybe one in ten of the messages he sends to Annabel’s phone. Anyway, he thinks the baby’s not due for another two weeks.

But for several minutes I wait there gazing across, allowing her to think it might be him. Of course it’s cruel. But she deserves cruelty. Don’t you know what she did to you and Anna? I walk back to the cabin shaking my head. Oh dear, it wasn’t the boat.

Out here in the fading light, her face is blotchy. She’s shivering and sweating and trying very hard not to cry again. Naturally I’m moved by her distress, but I resist the wish to take her in my arms by remembering exactly why it is she’s in all this trouble. Why she is in even more trouble than she understands yet. Of course it’s cruel, but has she not been cruel, is she not being cruel even now? She let her husband believe her dead in the river, she lets him go on believing it. Every day since the bridge went down she makes him suffer for the loss of her, as I suffer my loss of you. What is happening, what is about to happen, are what she deserves.

We drink our tea. I make another pretense of calling Ron, and we wait by the light of the stove. Then the contractions stop. We wait. She shifts about, complains of backache, of gas, goes to pee. We wait, for an hour, and still no more contractions. Then she goes to lie down. When she gets up, it’s quite dark. She announces she is hungry and starts foraging in the kitchen. She comes back with a plate of crackers and cheese and, for God’s sake, beetroot.

“Aren’t you hungry?”

I shake my head and turn away from the sound of crunching and the sight of her tongue licking crumbs from the corners of her mouth. She is joking now while she shoves the food in and chews. Her gusts of laughter smell of vinegar. She says the baby was just practicing, keeping her on her toes, she’s heard this can happen several times, up to three weeks before the birth. I have to agree this is possible, and then I find I have nothing more to say. The thought of this not being her time depresses me unbearably. I sit staring at the stove with my arms tight around myself. I have no taste for what I must do, I simply want to get it over with. If it becomes any more drawn-out than this, I am afraid I may be unable to go through with it.

She slumps back to the kitchen with her empty plate, and it’s when she is calling out to me to let Ron know it was a false alarm that she has another contraction, one that stops her breath in her throat and produces a long, quiet moan. I wait, pretending I haven’t heard. After a quarter of an hour, she reappears.

There’s a look on her face now that wasn’t there before, a steadiness. She is going into battle. When the next contraction comes, nineteen minutes later, she’s ready for it, and for the next one, another nineteen minutes later. In between, she walks up and down and gibbers on about Ron, will he bring her some shoes when he comes, because without them how will she get to the jetty? After another hour and three more contractions, I tell her it’s time to forget about him. He must have lost his phone or something. The contractions are getting stronger, and we must handle this ourselves. I remind her about the little white boat. I tell her we’ll take it downriver, keeping close to our side of the bank, and land it at the bridge jetty. Ron won’t be far away, but even if he can’t be found, somebody there will call an ambulance and it’ll come straightaway now that the bridge is open. It will get her over to hospital in Inverness within minutes.

“And you’ve got at least twelve more hours to go,” I say. “Plenty of time.”

She looks at me in terror. “We can’t go on the river in that boat! You know what Ron says, it’s not safe. And it’s pitch dark!”

“Then you’ll have to have the baby here,” I tell her. “You couldn’t walk along the bank to the bridge jetty now, even with shoes. You can’t climb up through the trees to the road. Do you want to have it here? I’m not a midwife.”

“I can’t even make it down to our jetty like this, in bare feet,” she cries.

“Of course you can,” I say. “Come on, I’ll help you.”

I can’t offer her my arm, can I, because I’m carrying her bag in one hand and the oars (which I brought into the cabin weeks ago to keep dry) in the other. She’ll have to manage. It’s a drizzly night, but a fuzzy three-quarter moon shines down through the cloud. This is helpful because I haven’t thought to bring a flashlight. Annabel hesitates. She peers through the dark to find an easy way down to the jetty, but there isn’t one. I shout at her to hurry up. Soon she is sliding around on clumps of wet, warty seaweed and sharp stones, falling and cutting her feet and hands, gasping with pain. Every step is treacherous. After half an hour she is not even halfway, and she screams at me that she’s going back. I shout at her not to be stupid. She has no choice. On she goes, yowling louder as she treads on lacerated feet through freezing saltwater puddles. When another contraction comes, she stops and moans and struggles to stay upright. I walk ahead, listening to her as she snivels and stumbles behind me.

I turn and watch her. She slips again, falls sideways, and lands heavily on her hip. “Get down on your hands and knees,” I call out. “Safer for the baby.”

Down she gets, lifting her backside high as the next contraction comes. When it has passed, she begins to move forward, sobbing, lumbering on all fours and her belly hanging to the ground. I turn and keep walking to the boat. I wait for her there, watching her crawl after me.

When she gets to the jetty, she takes fright again at the size of the boat and how strong the river is, until I ask her if she wants to go back up to the cabin. Just as I get her in, she falls forward onto her hands and knees and nearly tips the boat over. Slowly she turns herself around and sits down in the stern. The boat is so low in the water it wouldn’t take a very big wave to capsize us. I hope I’ve timed this right. The river is at its lowest ebb, the flow tide is just starting to come in. It will be at its highest and strongest in about six hours.

I manage the rowing quite well, although we are going against the incoming tide. We don’t speak, to begin with. I’m busy keeping an even stroke, and she’s groaning and rolling about, almost hysterical. I tell her it’s dangerous to throw herself about like that and she’ll slow us down.

“But it hurts! Oh, God it hurts, it fucking hurts!” she sobs, rocking herself to and fro.

“Breathe the way you’re supposed to and keep still,” I tell her. I’m already exhausted. My arms are aching and my heart is pounding, and the bad thing is we have slowed down. Though the wind is blowing hard down the estuary, we are going against the tide and it is stronger than I expected. This is going to take much, much longer than I thought.

Out of my mouth comes a little cry, more of surprise than pain. It’s nothing sharp or stabbing. It’s like cramp, as if I’m being grabbed around the middle and squeezed by a great pair of toothless jaws that crush but don’t bite. I’m standing over a pan of water in the kitchen that I’m heating up for something or other, and suddenly I can’t remember what. Low down in my belly a hardening begins, the grab tightens. I wait, watching the trembling surface of the water in the saucepan with concentrated interest: a miniature ocean, wraiths of steam wafting off it, tiny waves beating themselves against the side. Taking a deep breath isn’t as easy as it should be. Suddenly I can picture my lungs hanging in my chest, two wrinkled, complaining old bellows pushing for room. Next I realize the floor is wet, my feet are wet from fluid that’s trickling down my legs. Another band tightens around me, squeezes, and lets go just in the split second before I’m going to cry out, this time in fear. Instead, I breathe. It is so absolutely simple. And I am so afraid.

I hurry to find Silva and blurt out that it’s starting, and she takes in what I’m saying with a level look, staring me in the eyes. She doesn’t glance even once at my stomach. She’s dismissive, in fact, and I try to absorb some of her calm, but at the same time her composure unsettles me. When she calls Ron, he doesn’t answer, and if this surprises her, she doesn’t show it. She leaves him a message and tells me there are hours and hours to go yet. The one thing we’ve got is plenty of time, she assures me, and I force myself to understand she is right. But although the gripping in my belly has subsided, my fear rises. The cabin is tiny and hot and even with just the two of us, crowded. I never did find my phone, so I have to pester Silva to keep trying Ron on hers. I get more and more afraid. I can’t keep track of time, either. There is no clock.

The next contraction comes a long time after the first, and once it passes, my fingers and legs feel hopelessly weak and it’s hard to swallow. The evening is drawing in, and the day is turning lopsided, upside down. The light from the stove, the only light in the room, thrums with a bluish, fluttery gleam. I have to get away from here, and I can’t.

But Silva’s right. There is plenty of time. There are more contractions, at long intervals. Then they stop. Some more time passes, and I wonder if they were contractions at all. It could have been my stomach acting up, a confusion of the body brought on by not much more than heavy food and anxiety. Whatever it was, it’s stopped, thank God. And I’m glad I’ve gone through this, because when it happens for real, in a week or two, I’ll be more prepared. By then, we will have seen Ron and I’ll be sure there won’t be any difficulty reaching him next time. I’ve worn myself out with silly fretting. Silva has withdrawn into one of her moods; she would like to disappear off down the river as she usually does but can’t, I suppose, because of me. The air between us reminds me of a sky before a storm, charged with pent lightning. I’m still a little out of breath. I make excuses and go to my room.

Later I get up with the intention of making Silva more cheerful, but she has retreated too far. She isn’t hungry, she doesn’t want to talk, she’s too bored even to listen to anything I might say. And it turns out there is little time to spare for bringing her round, anyway, because it begins again, it really does begin.

There is no doubting it this time. The contraction is painful, and I tense myself against it, squeezing my eyes and mouth tight. The next one comes and I do the same, clenching all my muscles until it passes, and then I realize how tiring that is, and how futile. I cannot hold them away. I am going to be seized by another, and another, and many more, and worse, and I will not win any struggle to prevent them hurting me any more than, if I were walking into the sea, I could by force of will not be drenched by waves breaking over my head. It will be a case not of staying dry but of not drowning. I must adjust my expectations: I have to be delivered of this baby and we both must stay alive, but I will not escape injury. Now that I know this, I inform Silva that my labor has begun.

I am measuring time in spaces between the pains, and in waiting for Ron. My legs are shaking, and there’s a tinny taste in my mouth. Silva moves around quietly, talking to me about breathing. It must be her way of hiding her own anxiety, but her voice seems to have hardened. She is completely unhurried and practical. Still Ron doesn’t come, and when she announces we have to give up on him and go downriver by ourselves in the rowing boat, she becomes almost brusque. I daren’t think about the possibility that she is as frightened as I am, for I am in pain-worse than I ever imagined-and so I try to concentrate instead on what I must do to get away from here. I need to find people who can do something about the pain. I am not so out of my wits that I do not grasp that in order to do that, though it terrifies me, I will first have to cross the broken stones and slippery rocks in the dark. Then I will have to go in the tiny rowing boat onto the rushing black river. But however I get there, I have to get to a hospital.

By the time we reach the place, the tide is rising. I lift the oars, and we drift until the wind pushes us over close to the bank opposite the flat rock in the river. Annabel has been sitting hunched up with her eyes tight shut and doesn’t see what’s happening until the boat starts bumping against the half-submerged boulders close to the shore. I guide us through the maze of rocks while she gasps and peers around in the dark.

“What are you doing? Where are we?” she asks.

“Be quiet,” I say.

When I’m close enough to the shore, I jump out and try to haul the boat up. With her in it, I can’t get it more than halfway out of the water. “Get out,” I say.

“Silva, please!” She’s crying and clutching her belly. “What’s going on, where are we? We’re not at the bridge, this isn’t the jetty!”

“Get out,” I say.

She does as I tell her, protesting the whole time, and straightaway topples into the water. She begins to sink in the mud. When I drag her to her feet, she’s soaking wet and shivering and there’s weed sticking to her face. As soon as she has enough breath to speak, she starts on at me again. I tell her she’s getting hysterical and give her a good slap.

She follows me quietly enough after that, up the scree of stones to the place where the trees meet the shore. I sit down, and she collapses beside me on the ground a few yards from your memorial.

“Silva, please! Why are we here? Silva, please, what’s going on? Silva, listen! I’ve got to get to hospital-”

“Do you see that?” I say quietly, pointing.

“What? The stones? That pile of stones? What about it?”

“Pile of stones?” I reach over and grab a handful of her hair and turn her head. “Look at it. A pile of stones? Those stones, they are for Stefan and Anna. The people you killed. They are why you’re here.”

“Killed? I didn’t kill anyone! What are you talking about? Oh, God!” She grits her teeth and pulls away as the next spasm starts in her belly. I let go of her hair and stand up. She rolls with the pain, holding herself tight. She draws in her legs, moaning. When the contraction passes, she sits herself up. She begs me to take her to hospital, she tells me to calm myself. She tries to talk to me about the baby. Please, think of the baby, she pleads. For the baby’s sake, she has to get to hospital.

“The baby’s sake? Your baby?” I take her mobile phone from my pocket and fling it at her. It lands on a rock, and the casing splits. She scrabbles for it, picks it up, and another bit breaks off in her hand.

“Why have you got my phone? Where did you find it? Silva, what is going on!”

“My Stefan. You’re having his baby, aren’t you? My husband’s baby. That’s why he gave you our money.”

“What? No! Silva, no, I swear! It’s not his, of course it’s not!”

“You spoke to him before he died. It’s your fault they were in that car.”

“Oh God, no! Silva, listen. Listen, yes, I spoke to him, I met him. But only once. Please-”

“It’s because of you they’re dead. And you think that baby’s yours?”

“But Silva, listen! The car, and the money. I needed money. I wanted to tell you-”

I step forward, and making sure not to miss, I kick the phone out of her hand. As she screams, the phone flies away and lands somewhere in the dark behind us. She cradles her hurt hand in the other one and sits sobbing, pushing herself to and fro, telling me I have to believe her. I wander away some distance and find a place where I will be out of the wind. The next contraction will be coming very soon. I sit down to wait.

It’s very cold. As the hours pass, she calls out for me, urgently at first, with a note of hope in her voice that I might really come to her. Later she cries out in pure desperation. I hear her vomit. She tries to get up and come to me but collapses again and again. I grow used to the raging, gurgling cries and the teeth-gritted roars. The sound carries over the water and is lost on the wind. On and on it goes. I sit and watch the tide.

The struggle approaches its end, as it must. When I finally go to her, she’s on her back with her knees drawn up, and between her legs she’s split and bloodied and gaping, like a half-skinned animal. I lean down, and she clutches my wrist and won’t let it go. She’s babbling, and on her face is a look of disbelief and outrage. She is panting and straining down mindlessly, and eventually from between her legs there appears a glistening mound. She writhes and pushes, digging her fingers deep into my arm. I wrench my arm away, and with the next push she lets out a scream and now the baby’s head bulges out and wobbles in my hand, and as she screams again one shoulder and then the other come slithering bumpily out of her, and then its flailing stick arms appear, and all the rest, all the warm, bloodied tangle of it. There’s so much of it, now the unfolding legs and the feet trailing strings of stained slime and wet, twisted cord and, also, a surprising amount of dark blood. I let all of it slide into my hands. I cup the back of the baby’s head and rub its scrunched face, and then comes a crackle of mucus from its open mouth and a rush of air, a splutter and a wheezing cry. Annabel’s hands reach out. She’s crying. I am, too, as I draw the child into my own arms. Its little head lolls; it turns its face to my chest. Annabel strains forward but can’t get up.

“Let me see! Oh, let me see! Is it all right?” she cries. “Let me see! Give it to me! What is it?”

“I have to wrap him up,” I tell her. “He’s shivering. It’s a boy.”

And to you I whisper, though there is no need to whisper for she does not understand a word, that we have a son.

I pull a towel and a cardigan from her bag and wrap the baby up and lay him on the ground. She falls back, exhausted. I wait until the cord stops pulsating, and then I cut it using the string and scissors I brought. The child is now separate from her.

“Please. Please let me have him,” she croaks. But before I can answer she cries out and gasps. “Oh, God! Oh, God, what’s happening? I’m bleeding! Help me, I’m bleeding! What’s happening?”

Sure enough, blood is pouring from her, along with ropes of steaming membrane.

“It’s the afterbirth,” I tell her. “Push.” She obeys, still moaning to be given the child, and eventually the flabby, dark, veined sack is delivered. She tries to wriggle away from it, leaving a heap of shining pulp and a slippery trail behind her on the stones. The air is thick with the smell of blood.

“Give him to me, please,” she weeps. She is shuddering with cold and shock. “Let me have him.”

I did not expect this to be the hardest part of all. I imagined myself having a lot to say. How jealous I was that she was carrying her child after mine was lost, that I didn’t know what I would do when it was born and she took it away, when she left me to be with Ron and the child forever. That I dreamed of stealing it. That for a while stealing it was all I dreamed of.

Then how I was shown that it would not be stealing but only taking what is mine. I thought I had those words ready, too. How I forgive you for the existence of this child, but I will never forgive her, how unthinkable it is that she should have it to love and keep for herself when she killed the child who was mine and yours. I was going to tell her how I promise every day to come back to you, that I have stayed alive just so that I can take this newborn baby with me out onto the black rock and wait there until the tide rises and carries us both back to you. I want to tell her that she is going to watch her child disappear under the river and when she does she ought to remember that that is what she did to my Anna. She is going to know my sorrow.

My love, I know you are with Anna, waiting for me and the baby boy, and when the flow tide sweeps over the rock, we won’t struggle. I shall let it bear us down to the riverbed, and we shall all be together.

But when I try to say any of this, the words sheer off and crumble against my chattering teeth and I feel myself getting dizzy, falling and breaking apart. It’s like demolishing a wall and discovering I also am the wall. Every blow I inflict I also take. I’m made of it, I’m a part of it. I get to my feet and walk away toward the river with the little thing in my arms, taking Annabel’s bag with me. The screams that follow me now are more agonized and urgent even than the sounds she made when he was forcing her body to open and expel him, and now his fists beat the air and from his mouth comes wave upon wave of a bleating cry that answers his mother’s.

All this while the river has been rising and the boat is now afloat. I wade in, place him on the bottom, and push off into the current. The rock is almost half under the water, so I will be able to climb onto it. But it will be difficult, as there is nowhere to attach the boat. I bring it alongside and wedge the prow in one of the rock’s jutting angles. But it won’t stay there long. I have to find a place where I can grab hold and get out of the boat and onto the rock. I will need both hands, so I sling the bag over my shoulder and pull the child in under my clothes, against my bare chest, and bind him to me using a sweater from Annabel’s bag, tying him close with the sleeves. From the shore she is screaming at me to come back. I want her to be watching, but knowing that she is makes me feel sick and empty.

I use one oar to steady the boat as best I can in the current, then I count to three, drop the oar, and throw myself at the rock. I land on all fours and hang on until I am able, carefully, to move one foot, then a hand, then the other foot. I crawl forward. It’s slippery, and I struggle to keep hold but not cling too close, lest I crush the child. I crawl to the middle of the rock and lie on my back for several minutes before sitting up and unwrapping him.

His head drops back on his useless, flimsy neck; his eyes are closed. I feel his face with the back of my hand. It’s cold. I cradle his head and wail. I intended to take him with me when I drown, but now he’s dead, and his death pierces me to the heart. I clasp him to me, and from the riverbank Annabel screams again. Then he stirs, and before I know what I am doing, I am weeping and laughing and covering the top of his head with kisses. The little thing was asleep! He fell asleep against my breast, his face bloody and gluey with birth slime stuck fast to my skin. I wrap him up warm again and hold him close, and rock him back and forth. His mouth turns to my nipple, and he latches on and sucks. After a moment he tugs himself away from me, his mouth opens again and he screams. I hear Annabel’s voice calling back to him. I have failed him, for of course my breast is dry. I do not understand why it distresses me that I have nothing to give him. Just then a high wave hits the edge of the rock and rolls like a cold, wet cloth over it, soaking my legs. I do not understand why I lift him clear, taking care to keep him dry.

Behind me there’s a scraping noise, and I turn just in time to see the tide nudge the prow of the little white boat clear of the rock. It clunks two or three times as it goes, then spins free and is borne away upriver. From the shore, Annabel pleads for her baby. Holding him tightly to me with one arm, I use my free hand to reach into my pocket for my phone. Another wave sweeps over the rock, and he cries and cries for his mother while the wind cuts into my back.

Colin had called Ron and asked if they could meet up sometime on the evening of the day the bridge reopened. He had something to show him. Something he was doing for his wife and the baby.

“What is it?” said Ron.

“Tell you when I see you,” Colin said. “It’s nothing spectacular. Just want to show somebody, if that’s okay.”

Ron agreed. He had no idea what, if anything, he might tell Colin about Annabel. I know a pregnant woman; that’s a coincidence, isn’t it? I know a pregnant woman, she turned up after the bridge fell down, maybe it’s your wife? Even supposing-supposing-Annabel was Colin’s wife, she must have had good reasons to stay away from him. What right did Ron have to interfere? And what would be the point, when the body of Colin’s wife was probably a clean skeleton at the bottom of the river, the boneless embryo of Colin’s child long disintegrated? That was what Colin-and he-had to accept. There was nothing he could say about Annabel that would not do more harm than good.

He trudged down from the sleeper unit through the mud toward the jetty and the new walkway leading under the bridge. The construction site had been emptying for days and was now deserted and almost cleared; the casting sheds downriver had already been dismantled and removed, and massive crisscrossed ruts and divots of earth marked the departure of the heavy plant. Only a few huts remained; a dozen dumpsters were filling up. The sleeper unit was due to be removed on Monday, and then Ron would be fending for himself again, bedding down in the back of the Land Rover, waiting for the baby’s birth. He was still needed for a while to run the boat, for inspectors checking the new sections of the bridge, and for journalists, but soon he would be gone himself. Where to, he had no idea. He could form no picture of a future for himself that did not include Annabel and the baby and if necessary, he quite willingly supposed, Silva, too.

The ground for the memorial garden, reached by the walkway under the bridge and stretching for an acre beyond it, had been pushed into a succession of improbable hollows and mounds and phony undulations. In the moonlight, it lay bare, whimsical and miniaturized; stone walls only inches high curved around elliptical flower beds full of bark mulch, and a path of crazy paving wound in and out, connecting places where the ground swelled randomly into small circles of cobbles. The path ended in a large and still unpaved circle overlooking the river. Nothing was finished, and nothing had been planted yet. The landscaping ended abruptly next to a padlocked and fenced enclosure full of upright saplings, their roots wrapped in sacking, and stacks of stone slabs and bags of sand. Ron turned and walked back the way he had come. He waited for Colin by the railings, where a flight of stone steps led down to a small landing stage; it was intended that visitors would be able to travel to the garden by boat from Inverness.

The strobing headlamps of cars on the bridge above him hurt his eyes; below the railings, the night wind chopped the surface of the incoming tide. From this angle, almost under the bridge, he could barely see the service station across the river, but the place would be full. There was a reception going on there to celebrate the reopening. High sodium lights over the car park and petrol pumps cast an orange haze into the sky.

Colin appeared, hands in pockets, and greeted Ron without a smile. “Hiya. Something going on over there, all right. I thought there would’ve been people over here, too,” he said.

“Not much to see, yet,” Ron answered.

“No,” Colin said, looking round. “You can see it better on the website. Come on.”

Ron followed Colin back into the garden.

“Here,” Colin said. They were at one of the places where the path became a circle before leading out and away again around the curve of another artificial hillock. “Here’s where it’s going,” he said. “Right here. I’m getting a memorial bench. She’s going to have a memorial bench with her name on it. What about that?”

“That’s a great idea,” Ron said.

“Sustainable hardwood, three hundred pounds,” Colin said proudly. “Expensive. They bolt them to the ground. Fifty for the plaque. And I’m sponsoring a rosebush for the baby, that’s another forty. Then fifty pounds a year after that for four years. All proceeds will go toward the upkeep of the garden.”

“And you’ll be able to come in the summer and sit here.”

“Yeah. Won’t bring them back, though.”

“But it’s a nice thing to do.”

There seemed little else to say after that. The sounds of the bridge reached them as a rushing noise, like approaching weather; the bare, unplanted earth and the briny estuary smelled of winter. They wandered back to the river and leaned on the railing. Ron wanted to get away, and he wanted to get Colin away, too. A vandal-proof bench surrounded by a furze of low-maintenance, municipal shrubs; even with a wife’s name on it, just how was that “a nice thing to do”?

“Your wife. Suppose she, if she-” Ron began, then hesitated. He nodded back toward the garden. “Never mind. It’s a very nice thing to do.”

Colin blinked and sucked in a deep breath. “Thanks, mate. Fancy a pint, if you’re not busy?” he asked, with so much hope that Ron couldn’t refuse. They were on their way up to the Land Rover when Ron’s phone rang. It hadn’t rung for days.

“Silva? What’s the matter?” He listened for a moment. “Christ. Oh, Christ. Silva!” He ended the call and began running down toward the jetty.

“Come on! Hurry up!” he shouted to Colin over his shoulder. “Come on!”

When they got to the boat, Ron set Colin at the prow with a flashlight. Then he turned the launch upriver, toward the cabin, straight into the flow of the still incoming tide.

When I try to move, blood gushes from me. It’s hot and thick, and there is far, far too much of it. My eyes are streaming with tears so I can hardly see her, but she’s sitting on the rock with my baby bundled to her, and she’s got her head tipped toward the sky as if she’s looking up at the bridge. Lights streak across it, white in one direction, red in the other. My throat is raw with screaming. I can see the white rowing boat out on the water bright in the moonlight, a little silver thing rocking in the black and silver river. Then I see a wave wash it loose from the rock, and now it is spinning away with the rising tide. Now my child is trapped. My child is screaming for me, but when I try to stand up, my head spins and I fall back. My heart thumps all through my body, and there is another gush of blood. I scream again and roll myself over, and crawl down to the shore. The blood pours. Though I’m almost down on the ground, it tilts up, turns black, and hits my face.

I open my eyes and manage to raise my head and spit some of the freezing grit out of my mouth. I hear a boat, a boat coming nearer and nearer, with the tide. There’s a darting light on the water. I know the sound of Ron’s boat. I hear his voice and want to call back, but with every breath I feel dizzy, and he wouldn’t hear me above the engine noise. He’s shouting to Silva. The river is swirling under me now as I lie on the shore. Somehow I drag myself to my feet and take a step forward. I scream and fall again into deeper water. The stinging cold steadies me, and I scream out again. Ron’s boat is on the far side of the rock now and I can’t see it, but he is on the rock, crouching down to her. She’s sitting in a flow of water, and he is taking the bundle from her arms. Another wave breaks over the rock and pushes at them. Silva slides away. I can’t see Ron clearly anymore. The boat’s engine surges wildly. I struggle to my feet again, ankle deep in water now, but I slip in the mud and can’t get up. I scream out again, and there comes another surge of the engine, almost out of control, and then the boat appears from around the rock, making for the shore. Ron is standing on the rock, and he has got Silva to her feet somehow and is holding on to her. The boat’s engine stalls. Then it stops.

In the sudden silence, the light on the boat turns a giddy half circle as the tide catches the prow and spins the boat upriver. I watch it drift away from me, the light bobbing and fading. I glance back at the bare rock. A wave washes over it. Ron and Silva have gone. With the next wave, the rock will vanish under the tide.

Then the engine coughs and roars, and the boat makes a crazy turn into a heavy wave. The light beam sways across the river and onto the shore. I close my eyes. For several moments, everything is quiet but for the chug of the boat and the running river. Blood warms the water lapping between my legs. The boat engine stops. I can’t scream, and I can’t open my eyes. I do not believe I shall open them again. I hear the splash of slow, wading steps coming toward me. I hear my baby’s cry, and I hear Col’s voice, calling out my name in the dark.