Morag Joss - Among the Missing aka Across the Bridge

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.