contrived, and fatuous condolence of outsiders, people uninitiated in loss.
“It’s not like that,” he said.
“No,” Colin said, his voice faltering. “They don’t know how stupid it is. They don’t know how cruel.”
“They don’t mean to be cruel. Nobody understands what it’s like to lose somebody until it happens to them.”
“I don’t mean that,” Colin said. Then his face collapsed and his shoulders started to shudder. The used tissue went up to his eyes, but huge, splattery tears were already dropping on the front of his clothes. Ron watched them roll like raindrops down his barrel chest. “I mean, don’t they think I’d be glad if there was a kid? Don’t they think I’d
“The kid?” Ron said. “You mean you lost one, you lost a baby? I’m really sorry. That’s really tough.”
Colin nodded and cried noisily into his hands. “I never thought I’d want them both so much. They’ve both gone, and it’s my fault. Nobody knows. Nobody knows.”
“It’s not your fault, mate. Listen, it happens. Miscarriages happen. Nobody’s to blame.” Ron now wanted to offer comfort to this large, off-putting man, but his words were having no effect. “Here,” he said, pushing Colin’s mug toward him. “Here, go on, take a swig of that. You need to calm down.”
To his surprise, Colin meekly swallowed some tea, then took another mouthful.
“No point falling apart, is there,” Ron said. “Doesn’t get you anywhere.”
“Sorry. Gets to me, that’s all.” Colin drew a hand over his face.
“Nobody’s to blame,” Ron said again. “Miscarriages aren’t anybody’s fault.”
Colin drank more of his tea in silence. After a while, he said in a flat voice, “She was pregnant. I didn’t tell the police. Nobody knew but me.”
“Why not? Why make a secret of it?”
Colin let out a massive sigh. “I felt guilty. Ashamed. Too ashamed to say.”
“I’m telling you, a miscarriage isn’t anybody’s fault, mate.”
Colin sighed again and took a deep breath. “I’m trying to tell you. There wasn’t a miscarriage. She was pregnant. When she died. What happened, see, I told her to get rid of it. The day before she died I told her she couldn’t have a kid and me as well, I said I’d leave.”
Ron stared at him. Colin’s face was pulpy and unwell-looking; his eyes had an off-center, uneven way of blinking. It occurred to Ron that remorse was, literally, a sickness. Colin was so sick, so unbalanced by it, he looked in danger of falling apart.
“She was my wife. She was going to be the mother of my kid, and I said that to her. I can’t believe I said that to her,” Colin said. “And now there is not one single reason I don’t want that kid. I want them both, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”
Ron said quietly, “Do you have a photo of her?”
“No. To be honest, I can’t stand to see her face. Only had a few pictures, anyway.” Colin tapped his head. “She’s in my mind. I see her face in my mind. But only here, I only see her when I come here. She hated Huddersfield, she didn’t like the house. I didn’t really listen. I should’ve done a lot of things different.”
Ron let his breath out slowly. “We could all say that, mate.”
I think a lot about Col, lying here. Not anymore in the panicky, guilty way of a few months ago but with a strand of regret I follow right back to the day I chose to disappear, a day I now perceive as marked as much by regret as by catastrophe. Not that Col will be feeling that. I’m certain he is back sympathetically engrossed in the caregivers’ chat room, untroubled by ever having known me.
I think of our early days together, how to begin with I did not feel very much at all except embarrassment at living with a near stranger. But now I’m almost nostalgic for that early awkwardness, our misdirected attempts at endearments, my pursuit of some improved neatness in the arrangements of the house, his wordless, ritualized moves in bed. It touches me to remember the way every night he launched himself at me without speaking, his efforts to please, his mountainous heavings on and off. I forgive myself my mute acquiescence (I thought it sophisticated to have nothing to say at such times), which matched his lack of words. I can imagine the conversations we should have had, the conversations we lay so self-consciously
Anyway, it will surely happen that one day I’ll be called upon to give some account to my child of its father, and by then words will have come to me and I shall have them waiting, as if written down and placed in an envelope, sealed and put by. I do not have them ready at present, but it will be years before I need them. When the time comes, I will know what to say, surely.
Ron comes into the cabin scraping his feet and dumps a heap of damp wood by the stove. This is what he does every evening; after he’s tied up the boat, he collects an armful of logs from the pile by the sawhorse he’s set up between the jetty and the cabin and trudges up with it and adds it to our store. He’ll make several more trips over the evening; against the thin cabin wall, on either side of the stove, an inner wall of logs is building up. It is shoulder-high already and rising in an uneven wave, and Silva keeps telling him not to make it much higher as we can’t stand on chairs to get logs down every time we need to stoke the fire.
“How are you doing today?” he asks me routinely, as he starts to stack the new batch of logs.
Silva appears from the kitchen with a knife in her hand. “She got too tired,” she answers for me. It so happens she is wrong; I was out of doors and out of her sight for over an hour, that’s all that
“I’m fine,” I tell him. “I went for a nice long stroll. I sat down and rested every five minutes,” I add, before Silva can lecture me again about drawing blood away from the baby.
She gives a snort. “Look at the color of her; she’s white like a sheet of paper. Ugh, don’t put that log on, it’s filthy. Don’t make it any higher there, the whole thing will fall over.” She returns to the kitchen, and Ron continues to stack.
When I’m resting here and watching him, I like to conjure animal faces out of the rings and whorls of the newly sawn log ends he puts in place: one looks like an owl, another is a baboon, another is a cat wearing spectacles. When this wall’s complete, Ron intends to start on the adjoining wall, and once that’s done he’ll replenish our stocks as they go down. Not only will we have good, dry fuel all the time, he says, but double wooden walls provide excellent insulation. It’s what they do in Norway, and there’s not much you can teach a Norwegian about insulation. I’m sure this is true, but of course as the wall goes up our room grows smaller. You might even say it’s closing in on us; it does smell blocked and earthy, with an end-of-year whiff that carries a note of decay. And the new wall is full of trapped, trembling insects. Whenever I lift a log to put on the stove, it comes away from the pile with a gauzy trail of tearing spiderwebs, gritty with rotting bark and mold and sawdust. Silva says mice will move in, and Ron laughs and says even mice need to live somewhere and at least the wood will stay dry enough to burn.
“So you are all right?” he asks, as he’s putting the last logs in place.
“Yes, I’m fine. I’m so lazy, I’m too heavy to do anything much,” I say.
“He was there again today, that bloke from Huddersfield. Colin. The bloke whose wife died.”
I pick up my knitting from the floor and fiddle with it. “How is he? Did he speak to you?”
“He says he’s going to keep coming. Every weekend.”
“What’s the point in that now the walks are finished? He should stay away.”
“There’s a point in it for him. They still haven’t found her. Have you ever been to Huddersfield?”
“No, never.” I haul myself up till I’m sitting on the sofa bed and I start on a row of knitting. “If I go for it, I think I could get this sleeve finished by bedtime.”
“Annabel, where is it you’re from?” Ron asks. He is breaking the rule. No matter that the rule is unstated, it has held us together for months. The rule is that the three of us ended up here by ways and means we don’t have to explain. Ron knows that.
“What does it matter?” I say. “I don’t ask you questions like that. I don’t have the right. There’s no need for me to know. And what about her?” I nod toward the kitchen, where the radio is blaring music. “Are you going to start asking her that kind of question? She’ll run a mile. You shouldn’t-”
Just then Silva walks in again, carrying a plate of bread. She looks tired in a way only a much older person
