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.