On the first day he’d been instructed to take the boat across and bring back the catering staff, but after he’d done that and made several more crossings for other work crews, they hadn’t known quite what to do with him. He’d driven up to the Highland Bounty Mini-Mart to buy stuff the other workers wanted: tea, coffee, cereal. Then he’d done a few more boat runs and waited out the day until it was time to collect Silva. On the second day he’d been busier. By the third day, his work was acquiring a pattern.
By half past five he would start the launch and set off to pick up the catering crew. Within half an hour they would be back, unloaded and preparing breakfast in the canteen unit, while he crossed the river again to bring over the first of the day’s relays of workers. In the course of the first week, the emergency teams faded away and were replaced by people recruited for salvage and urgent repair work. The boat held only twelve people; Ron would be busy for the next three hours or so, and then he would moor the boat and get a late breakfast at the canteen. At first he made do with tea and toast; by the fourth or fifth day, Jackson, the massive, tattooed cook in charge, knew Ron’s schedule and kept some hot food for him. Ron tried to thank him.
“Plate’s hot, mind,” was all Jackson said, passing it over in huge hands etched with blue-black thorns and wine-red roses that entwined all the way up his forearms.
Around nine o’clock each day Ron presented himself at the site office, and now either the younger man or Mr. Sturrock, neither of whom had mentioned Ron’s paperwork again, would assign him here or there to fill in for absentees or where an extra man was needed for unskilled labor. They would also give him a list of river crossings scheduled for that day; as well as contingents of workers, there were police officers and accident investigators, engineers, contractors, and dozens of officials whose role it was not Ron’s place to know.
Midafternoon, when the catering crew would be finishing with clearing after the lunch service and getting ready to return to the jetty for the trip back to the Inverness side, he would return to the canteen. That was how he found himself included in the distribution of the day’s leftovers to the staff; Jackson counted him in, he supposed, because he knew that the men who stayed on-site overnight had to microwave their own evening meals.
Small kindnesses such as these and the routine of work and sleep and waking up in the same place each day put Ron in a more even mood than he had known for years. He was friendly but remained a little reserved. He didn’t join in the daily, mainly obscene banter of the men; he never topped a dirty joke with one of his own. Nor did he care for the taunting that went on among the work teams, for almost every man was singled out for something-having red hair, no hair, being good at darts, unable to whistle-and given a nickname and a greater or lesser amount of teasing about it. Though the banter was not at heart malicious and Ron himself escaped it, probably because he was the boatman and not part of any one team, it sapped his energy to withstand the relentless camaraderie even as a witness. He dreaded being made conspicuous, for any reason at all.
That must be why, he decided, he looked forward all day to the peaceful company of the two women. He carried pictures of them in his head, and he thought about them carefully. The older one, Annabel, was the softer-natured of the two and at times even seemed the younger. Silva didn’t order them about, exactly, but she was always first to be clear about domestic matters, and there was an edge in her way of asserting that things had to be done thus and not otherwise: how long to boil potatoes, how to get their towels dry, which wood burned best on the fires she lit to heat water for washing and where in the forest to find it (about which she was often wrong). Annabel never tried to assert control, and so neither did he. Annabel appeared, actually, to welcome Silva’s bossiness, meeting it always gently, and over the course of an evening Silva’s ferocity would subside a little and slowly she would become less brittle.
All around him at the bridge site there was pilfering going on, not on a big scale but in so matter-of-fact a manner it was clearly, up to a point, tolerated. So on his tasks around the place he was always on the lookout for things Annabel and Silva might need. Being discreet, and keeping his acquisitions modest, he took small things: pallets for kindling sticks, canisters sloshing with the dregs of something useful-a good spoonful of lubricating oil, or bleach, or detergent-a handful of screws and nails, paltry amounts of sand and cement. What tools he needed for work on the cabin he borrowed, returning them always to the same places. With one thing and another, there was never an evening when he turned up empty-handed.
Every time he went, there was daylight a little longer into the evening by which he could work on the repairs. He brought scraps of timber and bitumen sheeting and sealant, and after he’d sawn back the tree roots that were forcing their way into the cabin’s back room, he replaced the split and rotten wood and secured the join between walls and floor. There was no glazing work going on at the bridge, so he took the window measurements and got one of the Inverness men he ferried across each day to have the glass cut there. If the man was curious about why the boatman needed a pane of glass, he didn’t say so.
As soon as the window was mended and the back room dried out after being leaky for so long, Silva, who had been sleeping in the main room while Annabel had the front room, moved her things in. She set out a mattress from the trailer on the floor and kept her own clothes in a couple of deep plastic tubs at the foot of it. Along one wall she arranged a bank of Anna’s and Stefan’s neatly folded clothes and shoes. Anna’s dolls and teddy bears perched atop the pile, staring into space.
On the first evening after she was installed there, while Annabel cooked, Silva wandered with Ron upriver. They were supposed to be collecting firewood, but she began to pick the sparse little wildflowers, really just flowering weeds, that grew in the narrow strip of soil and light between the forest and the bank of stones on the shore. Back at the cabin, she put them in a mug of water on the floor in one corner of her new room and surrounded it with photographs of her husband and daughter, propped up against the wall. Ron was surprised at the satisfaction this appeared to give her, arranging the mug on a clean white handkerchief like a votary at her altar.
“And look!” she said, when she brought him and Annabel in to admire. “See, there’s this as well.”
It was a drawing in crayon on a scrap of paper, childish but not done by a child. It showed a wobbly little house surrounded by trees. A mummy, a daddy, and a little girl stood smiling in front of it. Water flowed past their feet in snaking horizontal blue lines.
“Oh! That was on the wall in the trailer,” Annabel said. “I’m glad you brought it. You see?” she said to Ron. “It’s the cabin. It’s where we are now.”
“Stefan drew it for me,” Silva told them. “From across on the other side. It was a joke, then. Now it’s important. It doesn’t matter what guides him here. As long as something does, like this. This will bring them here.”
She propped the drawing up at the back of her shrine. The paper was flimsy, and it curled over and slid down the wall. The others watched while Silva fiddled with it until she just about managed to make it stay. Ron could see that with the least draft across the floor it would fold in upon itself again and float away.
“I could make you a frame for it, if you like,” he said.
Silva turned and thanked him, her eyes shining with such piteous gratitude he could think of nothing more to say except that it was nice for a picture to have a frame.
Most nights after supper they sat outside for a time, since Silva kept up her old habit of lighting a campfire. They watched the river and listened to creaks and rustles of the wind in the trees and the furtive scrabbling of animals, most likely squirrels and badgers, Ron said, or deer. The noises from the bridge had lessened, or perhaps they had gotten accustomed to them. For the first few days they saw on the far bank the trailer doors open and a fire lit nearby, and then one night there was no sign of life at all. Annabel told them that morning she’d watched from inside the cabin as the tramps had been escorted off the riverbank by policemen with dogs.
“Dumped back in Inverness, probably,” Ron said. He’d heard the men talk about it, too.
None of them said a word about returning to the trailer.
Each day Ron and Silva had bits of overheard news and gossip about the bridge, to which Annabel listened with patient interest, but she never craved information. They would sit at times in silence, and even when talk ranged more widely, they asked one another very few questions. Silva said nothing about Annabel’s luggage, supposedly still being kept for her by kind people in a house in Inverness. Nobody asked Silva about the country she was from, not even idle inquiries about language or food or customs. Ron once referred vaguely to losing touch with his family, and neither Annabel nor Silva followed it up. They all avoided speculation about when Stefan and Anna would return.
It was courtesy, not indifference, that kept each of them from probing into the others’ lives, a delicacy that prohibited the seeking of answers that might make it necessary for them to lie to one another. Even sincere answers would surely be imperfect and unreliable, anyway. Perhaps they could assume that for all of them it had
