Free Across the Bridge by Morag Joss Page B

quiet room and lie down, I had to sleep.
    The sign on the front of the bus said Wester Muir/Fort Augustus,
which I knew were some miles west, beyond our hotel, so I clambered
down to the driver and paid the extra to go on to Invermuir where,
he told me, the bus stopped at the postbox on the far side of the
village from the hotel. Col would not be back before six o’clock. I
could hide in our room for at least two hours, and later I would
get back somehow to Netherloch. If there wasn’t another bus I could
get a taxi, and if I didn’t get there until after six it wouldn’t
matter; in fact it would help, it would give Stefan even more time.
We would be safe. But I didn’t know what safe meant any more. I
opened my bag and flicked the money through my fingertips, powdery
soft paper amounting to three thousand pounds. Just paper, after
all, but I was trusting to it to buy me my safety.
    I stared through the bus window and tried to distract myself by
identifying the plants along the road. Gorse, bracken, patches of
rushes, and spongy, brownish pads of decaying nettles and saturated
moss. I was collecting observations that I could array before Col
one by one, to fill our evening before I mentioned the baby and the
money. Then I would tell him that I had solved the problem, that
there was now plenty of money, so there was no need to worry. He
would love his child when it arrived, and anyway, I would take care
of everything. Soon I found myself in a pitiful daydream in which
kindness and remorse and enlightenment washed over his face, and
henceforth we moved on together towards a sweetly melancholic,
poetic future as Mummy and Daddy. I modified the daydream; at some
later date, next year maybe, I would be pregnant again. If it
happened at forty-two, it could surely happen at forty-three, and
it would be different next time, because making the best of one
accidental baby was one thing, having a second quite another,
undertaken only by devoted and deliberate parents. By then I would,
as a mother, be well acquainted with anxiety about the world at a
level previously unimaginable, but I would be watchful and capable,
too, and our happy children would – I whispered the very words –
make our happiness complete. This was a manageable and familiar
dream to me, set in a future in which I was altered, having
blossomed in my husband’s eyes and acquired proper, wifely value as
a person whose wisdom and clarity about life were necessary to him.
I concentrated on it for the rest of the journey.

∨ Across the Bridge ∧
Nine
    T he store wasn’t
busy; lunchtimes never are. A few campers from the Lochside Holiday
Cabins were coming in at the weekends now, but still hardly any
during the week, and they usually stocked up early in the day. The
bus stopped outside at two o’clock, on time. Nobody got off. Around
the same time some fishermen came in to fill up their flasks from
the vending machine. They told me again we should be selling soup
and hot pies. Get a microwave and you could do it easy, you’d make
a fortune this weather, they said.
    I nodded over at Vi, who was sleeping behind the counter with
dribble going on her cardigan.
    Tell her, it’s her place, I said. She says she’s not running a
bloody restaurant.
    There was stuff from the Cash & Carry to price and put out,
so when the fishermen left, I woke Vi up and told her I was going
to the back room, not that she really heard. It was just cans and
cotton wool and firelighters and tinfoil, plus one of Vi’s impulse
buys, a bag of soccer shirts, so there was no hurry. I took a
sandwich past its sell-by from the chiller and made my tea, and
when I’d had my lunch, I sent a message to you, but you didn’t
answer. I thought you must be out of range, along the shore or
getting water from the car-wash tap at the service station. Then I
went back with a cup of tea for Vi and made her go across to the
house. I told her to have a lie-down and I’d see her later, but I
knew she’d