Among the Missing (23 page)

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 been a long haul to get from the past all the way to here, and their friendship (if it was that—friendship was another word they didn’t use) was not rooted in curiosity about what that past had been. Soon conversation would return to practical concerns: how to fix the rattle on the door, how deep the water was around the jetty. Would the matches stay dry longer in tin or in plastic, would it rain again before morning.

Ron liked to watch the two women together across the failing light and the smoke from the fire, saving up the images for when he was alone again. Later, as they walked him down to the jetty, he would always manage to mention what tasks he could do next, what he would load
into the boat that night: borrowed tools, water containers for refilling, rubbish for disposal, to be sure they were expecting him back. And as he turned to wave to them standing there, he liked not knowing which of them he found more touching and beautiful, nor whose approval gave him more pleasure, nor of which of them he was growing fonder.

Within a few weeks of being at the cabin, my sickness vanished and I noticed a firming and swelling of my stomach. The weight of my fear had begun to drop away, like a stone somehow melting, and a different, pleasing heaviness gradually took its place. My breasts acquired a high, proud outline. I wondered every day about Col, testing over and over in my mind the possibility of going back and trying to explain what I had done and asking him to forgive me, leaving aside any thought that he might need to be forgiven for anything himself. Any affront I might have suffered for the apparent misdemeanor of carrying his child did not enter the equation; I assumed that even a notional reconciliation would be on his terms only. In my head, I heard myself plead with him to understand that I could not give up my baby; I begged him to let us become a family. And that was where I always stalled, for no reply came. I could not conjure up his voice framing any words of acceptance.

I realized I had to allow Col his silence. I resolved to let him become a distant regret, to turn my concern for him into a conviction that he was better off without me. It was not that difficult. I needed only recall what he had said that day at breakfast to be convinced again that by staying away I was saving him from the sight of a child he didn’t want growing in the body of a wife he didn’t love.

His loss, I told myself, although it was some time before I really believed it. Several times a day I would run my hand over my body, slipping it under my clothes to touch my naked skin. I was touching myself and also my child. Col didn’t love either of us and so I would have to, and I did. I loved us both.

With that love came elation, and amazement, too, for I had never associated
love, certainly not self-love or love of the unborn, with happiness. Yet it took me only a short while to trust in it. And as must be common enough in pregnant women, I grew reflective of my own mother, and of myself as a child. I had been a teary, clingy little girl, always scared by my mother’s brisk, dutiful care of me. The patting on of talcum powder after my bath, the tying of hair ribbons, the cutting of birthday cakes—all were guiltily rushed along and done with before there was time for me to experience pleasure small or great or, indeed, to cling. (And as must also be common, I made whispered little vows to my baby that we would do all these things differently.)

But if love is blind, happiness is kind. I felt no longer bitter but merely sad and generous toward both of us, my mother and me. I saw now that the reason for her roughness and hurry must have been that she had not wanted to give herself time to dwell upon the anxious, ashamed frugality of her affection. I saw that she must have regarded my being born to her at all as a bewildering miscarriage of justice. For her, it must have been beyond comprehension that she of all people should be granted a live baby girl, let alone one who survived babyhood. But what could she do about a moral error that could be only God’s? Since I was alive and remained so, she discharged her obligations as a mother with ruthless attention (being nothing if not conscientious), but she refused herself any joy in my upbringing.

On the Friday five days after the photograph in the garden was taken, on an identical, shriveling hot afternoon after everybody had stopped saying the weather was lovely, my mother went next door to mind baby Annabel while Marjorie popped out to pick up the developed film from the pharmacy. Annabel had been difficult all day—too much sun, probably—but she had gone down to sleep in her cot at last, and Marjorie didn’t want to risk setting her off again by putting her in the pram and lugging her on and off the bus in the heat. But she was desperate to get into town that afternoon for the pictures because the pharmacy was closed on Saturdays. There were lots of new ones of Annabel, as well as last Sunday’s tea party in the garden.

None of these details was mentioned while my mother was alive. I heard them from my father afterward, over the years, in faint, unintentional allusions and references and little wisps of fact, never the whole story at once. And in retrospect, the thirteen years of my childhood before my mother died, before I knew a single thing about Annabel
Porter, seem to have been a strange kind of waiting time, when I was learning, without understanding what it was, to live half-drowned in the backwash of an old disaster. It was always there, never spoken of but still the reason why certain words and phrases could bring conversation to a halt:
Inquest. Heat wave. Died in infancy
. It hung around like a kind of eerie damp rising up from a long-ago flood that was now a stagnant pool in the cellar of a house where the words
flood
and
cellar
were unmentionable.

On that Friday afternoon, Marjorie wouldn’t, she told my mother, take so much as a peek at the photos before she got them home, she’d wait and they’d look at them together. I thought of all the pictures I would take of my own baby, and I could imagine Marjorie, glowing with the kindness of her gesture, sitting on the bus with the packet warm in her hands, the crackly waxed paper around the photographs still sealed. Brave, barren Irene, she was thinking, so disappointed and deserving and sweetly interested in Annabel, a perfectly sensible woman when she wasn’t going overboard on the religion. A book of illustrated Bible stories when the baby was a week old, honestly! She could be given at least this, a little share in the immaculate newness of the newest baby photographs.

Had Marjorie really thought all that, sitting on the bus? I didn’t know, and my father had no patience with that kind of conjecture, but in those early days at the cabin, I was certain that she had.

And now here she comes, openhearted Marjorie, through her own back door, calling out to Irene to get the kettle on and they’ll look at the photographs over a cup of tea. She drops the packet and her handbag on the kitchen table, kicks off the shoes that have made her feet swell, and peels away the chiffon head scarf from her soft tower of hair. Irene, looking frowsy and blue about the gills, walks to the sink with the kettle. She’s been feeling off since the heat wave, everything turns her stomach, it must be her age, once upon a time she would have been in the sun all day and loving every minute. Over the running of the tap, she says she looked in on Annabel twice and she’s sound asleep and there hasn’t been a squeak; the mite must have worn herself out this morning with her colic. Marjorie lights the gas, takes the kettle from Irene and sets it over the flame. She puts a saucepan of water on to a gentle simmer and lowers in the sterilized bottle of baby formula. She pulls at two or three escaping strands of hair and tucks them back into the nest of
her hairdo, then heads up the stairs in her damp stockinged feet to bring Annabel down for her feed.

It begins as a high keening, a wail that strangely comes and goes as if Marjorie’s whole body is spilling away into a place that’s bottomless and echoing, as if she is drowning in her own agony and also trying to struggle up out of it, screaming with terror. It rides over other sounds: the whistle of the kettle on the gas, the last bubble of water boiling dry in the unwatched pan, and the snap of glass as the feeding bottle bursts, the hiss of milk curds roasting on searing hot tin.

And Irene is rooted in the kitchen doorway and has no words to meet anything as fearsome as this, Marjorie with that look on her face, clutching her dead baby against her and screaming, Marjorie bursting her way out the front door and making off down the road still screaming, holding out her child to people who are now coming from their houses to see what the noise is about. Irene cannot follow. She is trying to stop her bones from shaking themselves loose inside their thin wrappings of muscle, she has set her jaw against letting her own screams escape; she holds on to the doorposts, but sudden pains are shooting inside her and she can’t control the noxious rocking in the cavity of her stomach, which now is slopping with vomit and disgorging it, without warning, all over the floor.

Though she survived another thirteen years, I am certain my mother was never free of the noise of that afternoon in her head, its heat on her skin, the taste of it in her mouth. It made no difference to her that the inquest concluded three weeks later it was a cot death. She had never heard of cot death. Babies sometimes just stopped breathing for no known medical reason, it was mercifully rare but becoming more common? That was no explanation at all. The doctor and coroner were merely giving a name to some newly invented peril for healthy babies. Cot death? The child had died in Irene’s care. She should not have touched her. She should have picked her up. She should have covered her, uncovered her, turned her on her side, not turned her, opened the window, closed the window. She should have kept her alive. In taking the blame on herself, she was not discouraged by the Porters nor, it seemed, the whole town. Nobody else had heard of cot death, either.