“I will have to get up more early. I’m sorry, it was silly to cry.”
“How’re you getting back tonight?”
I didn’t like that he was so nosy. “Same way,” I said in a sharp voice. “No problem. Like on the day the bridge fell. Walk to Netherloch, get a bus. Or maybe get a lift. People are kind.”
He was staring at me. “There’s nobody to help you? Nobody with a car? Where’s your husband?”
I was proud he had noticed my wedding ring. “He’s away. Just for a while. He has to be away, for work, he is looking for work,” I said. “But I am not alone. I have a friend. She stays with me.”
“But the friend hasn’t got a car.”
“No.”
“When do you finish?”
“At six.”
“Okay, well, here’s what we do. You finish at six. I come back here at six and take you over.”
“No! No, I can’t do that. I can’t. I don’t know you.”
“You really think I’d do you harm?”
I hesitated, and then I had to smile. “No.”
He nudged the things on the counter toward me. “Good. Now I need to get going. What’s this come to?”
I totaled it up, and he paid. “I’ll see you later,” he said, at the door. “Stop worrying. I’ll take you safe over the river.”
I got up and put away the bedding, and tidied up the trailer just as I had seen Silva do. But she was gone, and it was so quiet, and after a while I couldn’t bear the thought of the sounds of yesterday-our feet up and down the steps, a pan scraping on the fire stones, most of all, our voices-against the silence I would have to endure before I would hear them again. The gap of solitude that opened up between the memory and the expectation of her company was too great, so wide and dark I was afraid I would fall into it and never get out. Nothing but lonely sounds welled up from the river, the geese landing and feeding, the stray calls of gulls following the tide. In the salty, white stillness of the air, I thought I heard the faraway wash of sea waves. I couldn’t stay. I cleaned my face and did what I could with my clothes. Then I closed the trailer and set off up the track toward the road.
Not far along was the place I had stopped the car to look at the map. Had that been five days before? Now the jagged bridge ends stuck out from the far bank on the last bridge piers left standing, and the twisted lanes of the roadway, torn and still, dipped down to the river. The reflections of a line of emergency lights along the remaining edge of the pavement splashed in broken bars of blue and orange off the gray water and detonated behind my eyes in tiny explosive afterimages. The helicopters still roamed above, hovering low enough for gusts of air to blow flecked waves in circles around the wreckage sticking up from the surface. In the middle of the river, where three spans of the bridge had collapsed and vanished, the water was flat and empty. From here, the people struggling to save themselves would have looked like flies spinning in a puddle.
When I got to the service station, I didn’t go in. Instead, I cut across to the start of the track that led to the wasteland. All the cars had been cleared from that part of the car park, and the space was now the arrival point for trucks on their way down to the southern bridge end. There were policemen on duty, some with dogs, keeping spectators behind lines of tape on either side. I joined the back of the group and watched. The track entrance had been widened and a mobile office set up, its interior garish with strip lighting. Inside, boxes and computers and telephones were crowded on tabletops. Office chairs and filing cabinets, still wrapped in plastic, stood against the windows. Men in yellow hard hats went back and forth with flapping sheets of paper and two-way radios, checking trucks and sending them on, past two bulldozers and a digger that were leveling and pushing heaps of rubble into a low, loose wall at the site’s edge. Some of the trucks were covered, and most of the others carried machinery I couldn’t guess the use of, but I also saw two carrying more portable cabins, and on another a cluster of massive lights and chains and metal bars. The air was loud with droning generators and grinding wheels.
Across the river, upstream from the slanting northern end of the broken bridge, a muddy access road had been cut between newly felled trees down to the water’s edge. There, a long area had been leveled and a crane was at work, directed by salvage men stationed on the last slope of bridge road and in boats around the wreckage. A row of huge sheds was going up, and there was now an iron jetty with dinghies moored to it, lifting and falling in the slight swell of the ebb tide.
My attention was drawn back to my side of the river. Upstream and some way over to the left was a stretch of scrubby land where a few sheep grazed. Beyond the sheep, I could see some of the people from the wasteland coming and going around a fire they had just managed to light. Smoke swayed low and horizontal over the fields. Paused in a landscape in which only fire smoke and a few sheep moved, the human figures looked medieval, stranded out of their time and gazing across into another age in which a bulldozer was demolishing their already stooped and broken shelters. But their displacement was timeless, just another of the world’s arrhythmic visitations of calamity upon dispensable, unrecorded lives.
I turned away. I was hungry in a way I hadn’t been for days. I went first to the service station shop, bought soap, toothbrush, and toothpaste, and washed at a basin in the ladies’. In the café I ordered shepherd’s pie and a pot of tea and took them to a window table from where I could watch the trucks and workmen. As I unloaded my tray, I realized I was almost enjoying myself. I sat down, poured out my tea, and began to eat. These transactions with strangers, no more than a few words and a polite glance over the paying for things and the taking of change, were so easy. Nobody I encountered had bothered to look at me. In a few days, everyone would have forgotten the face in the papers of the woman tourist drowned in a rental car. Until then, invisibility, it was turning out, could be pleasurable.
I started to make plans. Now that I was getting my nerve back, renting a room somewhere as Annabel Jones wouldn’t be any more difficult than ordering a pot of tea and the lunch special. When Silva came back this evening, Stefan and Anna might be with her. In the morning we’d explain everything, Stefan and I. We’d divide the money, and I would be on my way, arranging my new life properly. I’d get a place to stay and a few clothes and look for a job like Silva’s, one that paid in cash. I could work for months before the baby was born, and by then I would be used to my new name. For the first time in days I was managing to look ahead. That was when, through the window, I caught sight of Col.
I did not know until that moment how well I had come to read his feelings from the hunch of his shoulders, the bowing of his thick head. He stood motionless and alone, close to where I had stood only minutes ago. I was surprised that he was there at all; my disappearance would have delayed his return home on Friday, our departure date, but once he learned that my car was in the water with my body inside it, what could he achieve by staying? There was nothing to wait for, nothing he could do here. What was to be gained by staring at the bridge with puzzled, blinking eyes, tipping his head back and scanning the sky in a gesture of endurance, looking so bruised and forsaken? I felt a flare of anger. How dare he appear in this way, as if some truly dreadful blow had been dealt him, when all he had lost was me? There could be no possibility he was truly suffering; he had made it perfectly clear he could take or leave me. I could hardly bear to look at him.
Yet I stayed at the window. He had only to turn his head and some invisible wire connecting us would have fizzed to life and directed our eyes straight toward each other’s, and my deception would have been over. For a moment I was so curious I almost wanted it to happen. Or, if he didn’t turn his head, I could just get up from here and go to him. But it was too late for any such move. If you want to make a go of it with me, fine, I’ll make a go of it with you. But not with a kid. I remained where I was. Then he took out his mobile phone, snapped some pictures, and trod heavily away.