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.