第17章 The Two Fathers

They waited under the eaves of the mill yard for forty minutes with the rain coming off the gutter in a rope, and then they went back down to the top of the bank and the bridge was empty. "He has gone up to the shed," Miles said. "Your father?" "My father." Miles was looking at the boards, all eleven of them, wet and shining. "He will go in there and put the fire on and he will not touch it until it is out, and then he will go out and look at the sky and do a job, because that is what he does with everything, and I have watched him do it my whole life with a broken gearbox and once with a dog." They came back down the bank at nine, when the light was gone, because the light went at eight thirty on the last of April and neither of them could think of one single reason to be on that bridge earlier than that and every reason in the world to be there later. It was a clear night, the first clear night in four days, and the ice that had come off the river in March had left the whole reach full of drift wood, and the new deck was dry and the new ropes were tight and the lamp under the deck was where it had been for fifty years, with the wick trimmed short and the glass intact, and neither of them lit it because it was not theirs to light and had never been theirs to light and they were both extremely aware of that. They heard the two men at about the same moment, from opposite directions, and they did not have to look at each other to work out what had happened. Two sets of boots on gravel, one coming down the mill road at the west end, one coming off the east path where the ground was soft and took them slower. "There," Wren said. "Both of them." They could have gone. It had been arranged that they would go: get off the bridge, go up the bank, wait at the top, that was the whole of the instruction, and they had forty minutes and a mile of empty bank to do it in. Instead they went up four or five steps each to where the boat sheds were, on the west side, behind a boat that had been there so long the moss had come up over the gunwale, and they got down on the wet boards of the slipway with their backs to the wall, out of the light, eleven feet below the level of the bridge deck and about twenty feet from it. From there they had a clear view of the middle of the bridge and nothing else. The welder arrived first, which Wren had not expected, and he came down the last of the mill road and stopped at the west end and did not step on. He stood there for perhaps twenty seconds with his hands in his pockets, and then he put one hand on the rail at the west end, and he went out onto the deck, and he crossed it at the same slow walk his son used, and he stopped in the middle. The other one came out of the east path at about ten past nine and stopped at the east end of the bridge, and stood there, and did not come on either. So they stood at the two ends, in the dark, twenty feet apart, with the eleven feet of new oak between them, and neither of them would go first, and the two of them at the slipway watched two men who could not work out how to meet on a bridge. Then the welder took his hand off the rail and said something, and the wind came round off the weir and took most of it, and all Wren got was the shape of it, low, four words, the second one turned into a word she could not make out at all. The man from the east bank moved then. He came out onto the deck, slowly, one board at a time, the way you walk onto ice. He got to about the fourth board and stopped and put his hands in his pockets too, and stood there facing the man who had said the thing. "My father never told me there was a bridge," the welder said. He said it loudly. He said it at the volume of a man who has said something out loud for the first time in his life and needs to be sure it arrived, and it arrived, and it went out flat over the water the way all shouting goes out over water, and it was perfectly clear. The man from the east bank did not answer it straight away. He came the rest of the way out and stood in the middle, two yards off, and they stood side by side then, both of them facing the same way, both of them looking down the reach at the weir where the water came up out of the bottom and the drift wood turned over and went. "There was one," the man from the east bank said. "In the spring of the year of the big water, before your father ever laid a plank on it, there was a house at that bend with a garden and a girl in it, and when the water came the road went and the council put a map on the table, and the map has not had a bridge on it since. There has not been a house at that bend since my father was a boy." He stopped, and started again. "Your father knew the name. He said it to me once, at a table, in 2011, when he had a chest open and a bottle in his hand, and I did not ask him what it was, and that is the single thing I have done in this town that I would take back if anybody ever let me." "Say it," the welder said. "Rose." The wind came off the weir at that moment, the way it did, and Wren heard it through eight inches of wet boat planking and eleven feet of cold air: her father's voice, saying a name, in the middle of a bridge, out loud, for the first time in the house in thirty years. The welder stood very still. She could not see his face from the slipway; she could only see the shoulders, and the shoulders did something she had no word for. "Two inches of paper," he said. "He sat on a bench for fifty years and never said a word, and it took him four inches of paper and a dead man in a chest to make him say it, and he said it to me in 2011 and I said nothing, and I have been standing at that bench since 1997 and I have had a whole chestful of him in the corner of a shed for eight years." "You could not have known." "I could have opened it." "That is the last thing anybody has any business saying to anybody," said Wren's father, "and I have been saying it to myself in this kitchen since the twenty-second of March, so you can put it down." Then they sat down. Both of them, at the same time, on the middle two boards, in the rain, with their boots hanging over the side and the water running black past underneath them, and the sound of the weir and the sound of the rain. The two teenagers on the slipway did not move for a long time. Wren got a headache from the cold and did not care about it. She watched her father's back, which she knew, and she watched a set of shoulders she did not, and every few minutes one of the men would put a hand out and touch the new rail, the way you touch a thing to check that it is still there. They were on that bridge for three quarters of an hour. Toward the end of it the welder got up and went to the west end and picked up his tool roll from where he had left it on the bank, and stopped there, and Wren's father got up as well and went to the east end and stopped, and the two of them stood at the two ends of the bridge not looking at each other and not leaving, in the way of men who have agreed on something and cannot find the words to sign it with. Then the welder said, "I will bring her up on Sunday. I have not told her about the book." "You tell her what you have been told and let her make her own face," the man from the east bank said. "She has been making her own face since she was seventeen and she has been getting it right." Miles turned his head and looked at Wren, and in the dark, twenty feet away, under a boat, he could just make out her face, and she could just make out his, and neither of them moved, and neither of them said one single word, and the welder went up the mill road with his roll under his arm and the man from the east bank went up the east path, and the bridge was empty and dry and new.