The Bridge

by Stuart Prebble

  Henry and Margaret were married in 1990, and both were keen to start a family, but for several years nothing happened and they began to think that perhaps parenthood would not be for them. Eventually, though, they had three children: two boys just a year apart and then a daughter.

  For a while everything in their lives seemed happy. There were occasional incidents where the two small boys seemed jealous of the attention paid to their new baby sister, but nothing about them seemed untoward or out of the ordinary.

  Then, out of the blue, Henry fell in love with a secretary at the engineering firm and went away with her, leaving Margaret with three young children to bring up on her own. Deserted and impoverished, she had no choice but to move in with her parents, and for a few months the grandparents, their daughter, and the children lived together in the cramped town house in Hove. Her new situation threw Margaret into a depression. Her parents rallied round to give what support they could, and Margaret also welcomed the occasional break provided by the daughter of next-door neighbors. Elizabeth was only eight years old but, like many girls of her age, she was very fond of playing “house,” so she was glad to stage make-believe tea parties which entertained the two toddlers, giving some brief respite to their mother.

  One weekend, Rose suggested that Margaret should take a break from her responsibilities and the children and go away for a few days. She and George were perfectly happy to take care of their grandchildren, and Elizabeth from next door could always lend a hand in helping to distract them. Elizabeth’s mum and dad were only too pleased to allow her to help out.

  Rose had a few errands to run on the Saturday morning, but Grandpa George adored the kids and was perfectly able to cope with all of them for a few hours until she returned. He was restoring an old Morris Countryman, and an engine part he had been on the lookout for had just been delivered, and he was keen to get on with installing it. Three times that morning he had interrupted his work in the garage to go into the house to stand at the foot of the stairs to make sure the children were still playing nicely. On the last occasion he could hear Elizabeth asking the two brothers whether they wanted cake with their tea, and he smiled at the thought that one day the eight-year-old would make a wonderful mother.

  Rose was cross when she returned from the shops and found George occupied in the garage when she thought he should have been keeping a closer eye on the children. He assured her that they had been playing together quite happily, and so she put on the kettle before going upstairs to check whether they wanted anything to eat or drink. Elizabeth had helped Rose to make butterfly cakes the evening before, and they were looking forward to tasting them this morning.

  At first Rose could hear no sound as she started up the stairs, and she wondered whether the children had sneaked into the bedroom she shared with her husband. She used to allow Elizabeth to dress up in the old clothes that she kept in a trunk at the end of her bed, but the child had been told not to play in Rose’s bedroom when Grandma wasn’t present. Now Rose suspected that the silence was a sign that some mischief was afoot, and there was a smile in her voice as she called out Elizabeth’s name.

  There was no sign of any of the children in the bedroom they had been sleeping in, but still Rose felt only slight anxiety. She was never completely happy when she saw Elizabeth lifting the boys and the baby around, but she seemed to be capable and gentle enough for it not to be a problem. When she walked into her bedroom and found Elizabeth and Michael sitting next to the dressing-up box, her concern suddenly increased.

  “Where are Martin and the baby?”

  “I don’t know, Mrs. Williams,” said Elizabeth. “They were playing with the water, and Martin was going to give Amy a bath.”

  Less than a minute later, Rose started to scream.

  It was only at the inquest that the evidence of the family, the police, and the pathologist, all taken together, enabled the coroner to piece together the likely sequence of events. Elizabeth, it was stated, must have lifted the baby into the bath but had then gone to play with Michael, leaving Martin to take care of his little sister. The pathologist’s evidence was that someone had held Amy under the water until she drowned, and that since Elizabeth and Michael had been playing together in the bedroom at the time, the person responsible could only have been Martin.

  The inquest was adjourned for several weeks to allow a child psychologist to prepare reports on all of the three surviving children. She concluded that Michael was simply too young to have been left alone anywhere near the baby, but that whatever role he might have played, he could not be responsible for anything that had taken place. Though Elizabeth was older and perhaps might have been expected to know better, she, too, was declared to have had no malicious intentions towards Amy, and her involvement was accidental. The psychologist’s report on Martin, however, concluded that he was a child with no sense of right and wrong, who had become jealous of the attention being given to his newborn baby sister. She believed that Martin had been aware of the likely outcome of what he was doing.

  The court case provided newspapers with their lead stories for days on end. Though none of the children could be identified by name, they were widely labeled in mile-high headlines as “unnatural,” “evil,” and “baby killers.” Every columnist in every publication opined on every aspect of the story from the responsibility of the parents to the age of criminal culpability.

  No similar restriction of anonymity applied to the children’s grandfather, and when asked by journalists outside of the inquest whether he felt responsible for the death of his granddaughter, George replied with an unequivocal yes. If he had felt any doubt about his own guilt, the tabloid newspapers left little room for debate; his picture was splashed over every front page.

  For Elizabeth’s parents, the stress proved too much to bear. After three weeks of lurid headlines, they abandoned the girl dubbed by one newspaper as their “devil-daughter” into the care of the local authority, where she grew up and never saw her mother and father again. Martin was sent to a secure unit for children for an indefinite period until he was determined not to be a danger to others.

  Two days after the verdict, Rose, Margaret, and George went for a walk to try to clear their heads. George said he felt unwell and went back to the house, closed the doors of the garage, turned on the newly restored engine of the Morris 1000, and asphyxiated himself.

  * * *

  Once, when he was a small child, Michael had been playing a game with friends in the school playground. Alongside the playground was a football pitch where a group of older boys were playing a match. One of the bigger boys had kicked the leather ball high in the air and, without any warning, it had hit Michael hard on the side of his head. The explosion caused a bright light to flash and an immediate screaming sound in his eardrums, and when he had come to in the headmaster’s study, he felt as though his brain had been loosened and was rattling around within his skull. That, as nearly as he could have described it, was how Michael felt now. These astonishing revelations all but knocked him sideways. When, after a few moments, his head cleared just a little, he looked up to see that his mother was still speaking.

  “One minute I had been a wife, daughter, and mother; the next minute my husband had left me, my father had committed suicide, my baby had drowned, and my elder son had been held responsible.” Margaret had been telling the story for twenty minutes, almost as if on autopilot, having turned over these events in an almost constant stream for much of the past eighteen years. “The only people I had left in the world were you and Rose, and so she and I decided that the best thing we could do was to try to find a way for you to start a new life, and to do whatever we could to erase every aspect of those terrible events from anywhere in your memory.”

  And that, Michael’s mother now continued, was what she and Rose had determined to do. They had gone through all the formalities of changing their names, they moved from the south coast to Kingston in west London, and began a new life in a place where no one kn
ew them. All their family documents were replaced with new ones bearing their adopted names, and the idea was to try to start afresh. That had been the plan, except that what she had not reckoned on was that she found herself unable to cope with the enormity of everything that had happened, and gradually she had resorted to drugs and alcohol. Eventually incapacitated and in a state of constant torment, she left the family home, wandering for many years all over Britain and Europe. She had lived in squats and communes and become involved with a number of unsuitable men.

  “But then finally, just about a year ago, I managed to clean up my act and eventually had sufficiently come to my senses to reestablish contact with Rose. I came to see her, and she was happy to know that I was safe, but by that time her only concern was for you and your well-being. She said that you had apparently no memory whatsoever of the things I have described and insisted that the worst thing that could happen was for me to come back in your life and raise a lot of questions in your mind. I took her at her word and got myself a rented place not far away in Wimbledon, and from that day to this I have kept in touch with her from a distance, just close enough to ensure that you were all right, but I would never go anyplace where there was a chance that I might bump in to you. Except that I did exactly that, by accident, a few weeks ago at Greenacres.”

  Michael sat quietly on the cushioned bench seat with his back against the wall and watched the staff and patients perambulating backwards and forwards with their trays of tea and coffee. The mix of cooking smells filling the air was dominated by the odor of frying bacon, and the familiar clatter of plates and cutlery seemed strangely reassuring. At one moment, it seemed as though the extraordinary story he had just been told offered a resolution to all the unanswered questions which had provided the background of his life so far. At another, the sheer horror of this personal history felt so violent and wretched that he could scarcely find a way to begin to address it. And all the time, fleeting fragments of single images stole out of the depths of his recall and vied for ascendancy in the forefront of his consciousness. Suddenly he had a vision of a tiny baby cooing and gurgling on a plastic mat. The image was instantly replaced by the sound and smell of an old man leaning into the engine compartment of a dilapidated car. Then both were whisked away as he recalled a vivid memory of throwing his tiny arms as tightly as he knew how around the body of another human of about the same size and shape as himself, and clinging for dear life as four strong men pulled at each of his limbs and dragged his brother away. The screams of terror and pain echoed down the corridor and through time and space until they filled Michael’s brain up to and beyond its capacity and right to this moment.

  Slowly his head began to clear, and Michael focused once again on Margaret. She was gazing back at him and contemplating for the ten-thousandth time all the important moments between mother and child which had never been. The bruised knees and the hurt pride, the days out and the first day at school, the first girlfriend and the graduation ball. She had missed all the milestones of his life, and now she sat opposite her son, confronting her loss. Michael stretched out across the table and closed his hands around hers.

  “So what happened that led to us so close to meeting at the care home?” Michael felt that he had a hundred questions to ask, but before he did so, he wanted to come up-to-date with recent events.

  “Rose told me a while ago about the plan you and she had made for her to move to Greenacres. I had been to visit her a few times when I knew you would not be there. I used to sign in using the name Rawlinson, Eileen Rawlinson. It was the name of my first teacher at primary school, but heaven knows why I chose it. Luckily nobody bothered to check. Sometimes Rose was like her old self, and sometimes she seemed to be in terrible distress and was unrecognizable. But she and I were beginning to get used to each other, and I think she was starting to forgive me. Then one day I got a message from her to say that she needed to see me urgently. Something had happened that had upset her very badly, which she said she needed to talk to me about, but I had no idea what it was. I assumed it can only have been something to do with you. When I got to the hospital, I got the shock of my life when I nearly bumped into you in Rose’s bedroom, and then events took over and I never did find out what it was that she needed to tell me.”

  Michael remembered that day at Greenacres and thought how extraordinary it is that a person could literally bump into his own mother but have no clue of any relationship. So strange that two people who had once been part of the same being could later meet up but experience no feeling of recognition.

  At this moment, however, the only thing he could be sure of was that he was incapable of any considered or even coherent response, and that above all else he needed some space to take in what he had heard. At the same time he had an inkling of the appalling emotional trauma which his mother must have gone through in relating her story and felt a need to try to give her whatever reassurance he could. He did not know what he was going to say next until he found the words forming in his mouth.

  “I’m sure I will never begin to understand what you’ve been through. I’m also sure you’ll understand that this is an extraordinary story for me to try to get my head around. I’ve got so many things to think about.” As he spoke, Michael gently shook his head, a mix of incredulity and denial. “But meanwhile, you obviously know what’s been happening to me in the last few days with the police and this false arrest, and what you’ve told me has triggered a train of thought in my mind which I have to work through before I decide what I need to do next. So I need some time to myself. I guess you can see that?”

  Tears were streaming down his mother’s face. “Of course I understand,” she said, “and I wonder if you can understand how terrified I have been of this meeting. You’re entitled to be angry with me for having walked out on you, and I wouldn’t blame you if you don’t want to see me again. But what you’ve said confirms what Rose has told me about you—that you are a young man with a big heart, and I can see for myself that you are a credit to what she has done for you.”

  Once again Michael found himself in danger of being completely overwhelmed and felt the need to get away before the breakdown which was threatening overtook him. He squeezed his mother’s hands and walked out of the hospital and into the street, where he stood on the pavement for a moment, wondering in which direction to walk. The swarm of extraneous thoughts and ideas crowding into his head seemed likely to swamp his ability to process them, and he needed space to try to find some access point into his new reality. He was just about to turn away when he heard someone calling his name and looked up to see that Esme was heading quickly towards him.

  “Is it Rose? Has something happened?” Michael’s first assumption when he saw her was that his grandmother had taken a turn for the worse and there was some kind of emergency. Unable immediately to regain sufficient breath to speak, Esme simply shook her head by way of reassurance.

  “No, it’s nothing like that,” she said eventually, still trying to catch her breath. “Can we sit? I know that your head must be spinning, but there is something more that I need to talk to you about.” Still in turmoil from the story he had just heard from his mother, Michael wondered how on earth he would be able to deal with anything more right now. In the half hour or so since he had heard her account of things, his mind had been racing, but if there was more to know, then he felt glad that it was from Esme that he was going to hear it.

  After she had regained herself sufficiently, they walked for a few hundred yards until they reached a bench on the riverside between Lambeth Bridge and the hospital. Both of them stood for a moment and looked out upon the water, which today seemed to sparkle in the sunlight.

  “I guess you’ve now heard from Margaret the story of what happened when you were a baby?”

  Michael nodded. “How long have you known yourself?”

  “Only just a very few days,” said Esme. “One day, when she was doing well and in a good frame of mind, I asked Rose what was troubl
ing her, and she ended up telling me the whole thing. But she swore me to secrecy and insisted that I should never tell a soul unless she gave me permission.”

  Esme looked as though she was getting ready to tell the rest of what she knew but perhaps had been rehearsing it all and felt the need to follow the narrative she had been forming in her mind. They sat together on the bench, and she reached across and took Michael’s hand. “You already know your grandmother is an extraordinary woman. When you think of what she went through on her own account—losing her grandchild in those circumstances, and then her husband. And then to decide to spend the rest of her days taking care of you, and having to change her own name and every aspect of her life—just so that you could be protected as much as possible.”

  Michael turned to face Esme full on and smiled. “Thank you, Esme, but I promise you that whatever else I am in doubt about, I don’t need to be persuaded of any of that.”

  Esme was happy to hear it. If she had any concerns that Michael would be angry at everyone for having kept all these secrets, she now felt comforted. After a few moments she went on.

  “But, Michael, in view of what you’ve had to deal with in the last few days, I don’t even know how to start what I have to say. I’ve agonized over it, because when she told me the full story, Rose swore me to secrecy; but in view of what’s now happening, I’ve decided that you need to know.” She paused, waiting for this new thought to sink in. “It’s the reason why Rose called Margaret into the hospital urgently. She wanted to tell her something that she had realized for herself only in the previous few days; something she didn’t know how to handle. But by the time Margaret got to her, Rose was beyond being able to communicate, and so she was never able to tell her daughter that one of their worst fears had come to pass.”