“See you then, Vi,” I said. “Take care.”
Just at that moment I had an idea. I reached under the counter and picked up the bag of stuff I’d kept for the man who hadn’t come back. We’d manage through the weekend all right. Probably you would want to get us some fish as well. Those times we were down to nothing, you always tried fishing. Hours and hours you spent at it, without the proper lines or anything, and usually you got nothing. Mainly you did it because you liked it-not the fishing itself, the trying. But I’d stop you this time. I couldn’t eat fish from the river now.
I turned and walked out into the night air. Cars trickled past me, their headlamps shining in a silvery curve out of the trees bordering the road, sparkling ahead into blackness. The night was damp and cold. Suddenly I felt I was down there at the bottom of the dark river with the fish, their thick, flat, muscular sides quivering past me, swimming right past those poor drowned people and flicking their dead faces, sending pulses of dark water into their open mouths and pulling silky fins through their waving, frondy hair.
On the day the bridge collapsed he’d been standing in a shop, a dingy roadside place called the Highland Bounty Mini-Mart, where he’d stopped a number of times before. It was run by a pathetic old drunk and a skinny blond woman, foreign, who as far as he could see did all the work. He wasn’t good at small talk, but he’d found out gradually he was better at it than the blond woman, and she seemed always sad, and that made him want to speak to her. He would have liked to cheer her up a little. He was taking his change when the roaring and crashing began and they rushed outside and a moment later someone was shouting about the bridge, and without wanting to be, he was swept along in a group of people all racing up through the forest to the head of Netherloch Falls.
Long before they got there his heart was hammering in his chest, partly from the noise and shock and the physical exertion of climbing up the dark, rooty path between the trees, but partly also from a rush of excitement. Here he was, talking away to people unknown to him, all of them struggling through the forest together, helping one another, listening to breathless theories and speculations about causes and casualties. The others seemed to assume he was somebody just like them. Even in the wake of a catastrophe, perhaps because of it, they accepted him without question.
At the top, the ground opened onto a flat patch of smooth rocks and clumps of bracken and heather, and the group halted by a low wall at the tourists’ lookout point. Conversation dropped away to silence as they gazed at the stark, fractured bridge ends, already sparkling with emergency lights and divided now by the torrent of the river. For a long time nobody moved; a kind of an impotent acceptance, a subdued awe at the sight of the wreckage, weighed upon them all. Then two or three who stood close by Ron began to cry quietly. The rest moved to and fro, talking softly again or just looking; some took photographs, some gathered round a man who was picking up live news on his mobile phone. Slowly, most drifted away. Ron stood apart and wept, his whole body shaking. His companions, if they were taken aback by his sobbing, did not show it, and one of the women squeezed his arm as she turned to go.
He lingered for a long time after everyone else had left, sitting on a low rock and watching the white sky deepen to gray. Down at the bridge, the lights sharpened and winked brightly through the dusk, and as he watched he became calmer. It sank into his mind slowly that the blame for this was not his to bear. This was greater destruction even than that he had caused seven years ago, and although the enormity of that would never lessen, before his eyes those seven and a fraction deaths were multiplying. He felt grievously helpless, but out of his distress was arising a gratitude that he was not, he really was not to blame for this suffering, too. He was innocent, and for that he was both relieved and ashamed of his relief.
And it filled him with an urge to do something to help, as if he were being granted permission at last to make amends, to involve himself somehow in the righting of this calamity as a way of uncoupling himself from the dragging guilt of the last one. There must be work he could do that would bring about some little good; he could volunteer. They would be setting up assistance for casualties and families, there would be people down there now, stranded and needing help. He would go and make himself available to do whatever was needed. There would be, at the very least, people wanting rides home.
While there was still enough light to see by, he made his way down through the forest path and back across to the Highland Bounty Mini-Mart. When he saw that the place was dark and closed up he remembered about his bag of shopping, but he didn’t care about that now. Outside the shop the road was now choked with barely moving traffic in both directions. There would be chaos at the bridge; in the Land Rover he would not get even near it. He would have to forget about driving anywhere tonight and see what he might do in other ways. He thought for a moment about waiting until morning, but the urge to act at once was too strong. He set off, walking toward the bridge against an oncoming line of vehicles. It was the nearest to happy he had felt for seven years.
When I got back to the Invermuir Lodge, it was that dead time of afternoon in small hotels, after lunch and before the bar opens, when all the staff disappear. I went straight upstairs and lay down to rest, and when I closed my eyes, pictures from the day loomed at me, a day of brightness and darkness, and of distant views of the wilderness of the forest seen from the city side of the river.
Soon I was wandering along a path of linked half-dreams where fog curled through unrecognizable trees and lifted across a mirrored loch and sunlight snapped between the spans of a bridge, and I stood within the imprisoning mesh of a forest, waiting for something. To be found, I thought, or maybe just to be seen; if by some magic twist I were able to be in two places at once, to be standing where I was and also seeing myself in the place I was looking toward, would I behold a less shabby me, transformed, reinvented, valid? It came to me, as I fell asleep, that that was what I was waiting for, and that I had always gone about my life in this way, looking with yearning across distances. I had reached out from my father’s sickness-bound house in Portsmouth toward a far-off, more authentic self as Col’s wife; now I was reaching from the flatness of our marriage for the distant picture of us as parents. I heard again the cry and the scrape of rocks as Stefan stumbled and fell, casting Anna away from him toward her safe, soft landing. I saw them as they had sat in the trailer, looking at each other, and when they turned to me, their faces wore frayed smiles, full of sadness because they knew I was incomplete in some way, lacking something specific, like money or an important fact, but something that they didn’t have a word for. And for all they could not say quite what it was, it was something definitive and tremendous, and they were regretful that by not having it I was excluded and set apart from them. I pulled a pillow across the bed and held it in my arms against my stomach. I watched the red numbers of the alarm clock at the bedside wink in the gloom, and I fell asleep again.
I was awakened by a text message from Col.
Soaking freezing. Going for drink their hotel F Aug. Back at 7.
I turned and stretched out on my back, relieved. I was still groggy, and the square of light from the window showed a sky silvery with cold and fading toward evening. Fort Augustus was twelve miles farther west of Invermuir. It was just after four o’clock. Now I could stay warm and rest for at least another hour, which would be time enough to get used to the thought of going out again.