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.