Читать книгу The Valley at the Centre of the World - Malachy Tallack - Страница 11

SATURDAY,

23^RD JANUARY

Alice looked up from her desk and out of the window at a snow-covered corner of the garden and a white stretch of hill beyond. This was the first proper snow in almost a year, and it didn’t look set to stay. It never seemed much at home here in Shetland and rarely lingered for long. But its presence, sometimes, felt like a blessing. This had not been a cold winter, but it had not been an easy one either. It had arrived in early November. The morning of Maggie’s funeral brought an angry fit of gales and horizontal rain, and looking back it seemed hardly to have let up since then. Week after week of wind and water, grey on grey. Now, near the end of January, this burst of clear, cold weather felt like a relief. Spring was still months away. Any brightness was welcome.

A car went past, heading out of the valley. From where she sat, Alice couldn’t see the road, but she recognised the sound of the vehicle, the whine of a loose fan belt. Terry, she thought, then went back to her work. She was distracted, trying to inspire herself to write by going back over what was already written, rereading her own words. The book in front of her was not really a book. Not yet. It was a stack of paper two inches thick, each page covered in black type, some overlaid with vermicular scrawl in two colours: red ink for edits, blue for additional notes and ideas.

She flicked through the pile, stopping at random, cutting it like a deck. She read a few lines aloud to herself – a paragraph about the carnivorous sundews that grew in the damp ground near the burn, Drosera rotundifolia, with their sticky red tendrils and lollipop leaves – and then she flicked further. This time she stopped on a passage about the social impact of the Crofters’ Holdings Act of 1886. Dry stuff, she thought. Important, but dry.

The book had started small. A few notes and observations about the valley made on scraps of paper. At one point Alice thought it might become a short history of Shetland. That would have been a simple job, really, which no one had yet bothered to do. Alice was no historian, but the details were already out there, they just needed to be thrown together over a few hundred pages. She could do that, no problem. But that wasn’t what happened. In the three and a half years she’d been working on it, the book had become something else, something bigger in scale and yet narrower in focus. Those initial notes just kept growing, but her attention hardly shifted beyond the confines of the valley. It wasn’t necessary to expand her view at all, she realised. This place was the story she wanted to tell.

The history, for the most part, had been easy. She had read everything she could find about the valley and the surrounding area, spoken to those who knew it best. She’d invited archaeologists out to walk with her along the edges of the burn, around the crofts and up over to Burganess. They had told her all they could tell her without digging the place up, and they had told her plenty. She trawled through the archives in Lerwick, noting down everything of relevance, filling files and folders with dates, names, events, causes and consequences. She began to see a picture of the place stretching backwards, rich and generous in its detail.

But the story of the valley couldn’t be told just like that, she understood. The story of the valley was much more than the chronology of what human beings had done here. It was everything that happened in this place, everything that belonged here and lived here. So she’d begun to learn, too, about the natural history, reading books on the islands’ birds and plants, then trying to find them for herself, describing and photographing them. And the more she learned, it turned out, the more there was to know. The book kept growing.

For a long time, she feared it would never be finished. There was too much to find out, she thought, too much to explore. She had taken on an impossible project. But now, finally, the end was approaching. The pile of papers no longer felt beyond her control. Most of the chapters were complete. The book had a shape; it was just a little blurred around the edges. Another six months, perhaps, and it would be done.

This was the first time Alice had attempted something like this, something real. It was also the first time she had written something for herself, without any other readers in mind. Crime novels: that’s what she used to write. That’s what she was known for. Those other books, five of them in total, she knew who’d be reading them. She could picture her readers as she wrote, and she had met them, too, at book signings and at festivals, back when she lived in York. Back when everything was as it used to be. They would tell her how much they loved her work, how much it meant to them. She couldn’t understand that. Not really. But that’s how it was. She was somewhat well known for a while, somewhat respected. She wrote stories of lone detectives: obsessive, flawed, angry and successful – at least in catching criminals. Gritty: that was the label they gave her, and that was fine. She enjoyed writing those stories, found it satisfying, mostly. She liked shaping the characters, moulding them, then pushing them around, moving them in their various directions until they reached the destination she had chosen, the fate she had decided. She felt, not powerful, exactly, but something like that. She had control, and she liked it. But then she stopped liking it. When Jack, her husband, became ill, everything changed. She had just begun her last book, Beggar Man, with a deadline in front of her, and a mortgage and bills and a reputation. She kept working, kept getting up each day and going to her desk, a cup of black coffee in front of her. But it was different. She no longer cared what happened next in the story. She no longer cared what her characters had done or what they were going to do. She no longer cared how the pieces fit together. None of it was real. It was all make-believe. What was real was Jack, and Jack was dying.

She finished the book, of course. She had to. She’d already been paid for it in advance, and paid pretty well. But it was hard. It took longer than usual. She missed her publisher’s deadline, then missed another. They were understanding, encouraging. They didn’t push too hard. Take your time, they said, we can wait. But she didn’t want to take her time. She wanted the book to be done and out of her way. What had once felt like her life now felt like an impediment to living. Each day was an uphill trudge. And then, when she reached the top of that hill, there was nothing to see. The path behind her had disappeared, and if there was a path ahead she couldn’t find it at all. She groped her way forward, stumbling with every step. She finished it two months before Jack died.

The book was a success. The reviews weren’t as positive as they once had been, but that didn’t matter. People still bought it. And the reviews were right. In fact, they were kinder than Alice would have been had she been asked for an honest opinion. She wasn’t embarrassed by what she’d written; she just didn’t want to think about it again once it was done. She refused the interviews and the public appearances. She needed some time out, she said, and nobody argued. Alice took the money and ran. She ran as far, almost, as she could think of going.

She found this house online a few weeks after Jack’s death, when she was searching for something that might make sense. She put in an offer, and that was that. She and Jack had come to Shetland on their honeymoon, at his insistence. He loved walking, loved the ocean, and neither of them had enough money back then to go any farther. Both of them had been entranced by the fortnight they had spent here, and they came back again three times in the years that followed. They talked, now and then, of coming here together, to live. This could be their place, they said, their home. But it never happened. There was always some reason not to go, some excuse to stay put. The distance, the inconvenience, the weather. So they talked about Shetland, thought about Shetland, but stayed where they were. And when Alice did finally move, she went alone. She boxed up Jack’s things, put them in storage, and shipped her own belongings north.

Their house in York sold for almost three times as much as this one cost, so she didn’t need to think about money again for a long time. It was a blessing not fully anticipated. It made everything easier. Sometimes the best decisions are made like this, she thought, in the weeks after her arrival. Just heart and gut and nothing more. This was a good decision. This was the right place to come.

The valley had fascinated her from the very beginning. She’d had a lot of time on her hands back then and spent much of it just walking and looking out of the windows at the place around her. She didn’t write at first. Not for several months after coming north. The urge had left her, and for a while she hoped it would not return. It seemed, in those months, an entirely false thing – a tragic distraction from the business of being alive. The hunger she’d always felt to put words on the page, to make stories, was replaced by a different kind of hunger, a different kind of need. Alice wanted to know this place in which she’d landed. She wanted to feel part of it and to belong to it. She joined clubs and went to meetings in town, she got to know her neighbours and made herself visible. She read and looked and learned.

Eventually, though, the words did come. But her appetite for invention did not. This time, when she started to write, the story was not one that Alice could control, only observe and record. It was an extension, a natural development of her need to understand where she was.

The thing about an island, she’d thought, as this project first began to take shape, is that you feel you can know it. You feel your mind can encompass everything in it, everything there is to see and to learn and to comprehend. You feel you can contain it, the way that it contains you. And a small valley on a small island . . . well, that’s what she was trying to do, to contain it in words and in thoughts, to describe the place and to encompass it, not just as it once was, or was believed to be, but as it is, here, now. The book was called, provisionally, The Valley at the Centre of the World. She liked that. It made her smile.

Right now, she was finishing up her chapter on mammals. It would be the shortest of the natural-history chapters. There was not much of a list to work with, after all. There were lots of rabbits, and some mountain hares, which she saw most often in winter, in their smart white coats. Hedgehogs were here; as were field mice, known as Shetland mice, and perhaps house mice too. Stoats were probably around, though she’d never actually seen one in the valley, so a question mark still hung over those. There was another question mark over brown rats, which didn’t seem to live in this part of the island, though she hadn’t made up her mind to exclude them just yet. Ferret-polecats were definitely here – beautiful, horrible creatures – and otters were regular visitors. There were three of them at the moment, a mother and two cubs, that she saw often from the beach, and a fourth, possibly the father of the cubs, she’d seen occasionally. Then, finally, there were the seals, both common and, sometimes, grey, though it was questionable whether these were in fact part of the valley, since they didn’t actually breed on the beach, they just hung around in the bay. (The cetaceans – orcas and porpoises, mostly – had been excluded for that very reason.) The livestock were not part of this chapter. They were in the agricultural section of the book, which she’d finished, just about, at the end of last year.

Alice had gathered all the information she could find about these animals: details of their basic biology, diet, population size, rough date of introduction where available (since all, besides the seals, were introduced to Shetland by humans). She had also tried to document sightings of each species to allow her to describe more fully their habits and locations within the valley, which is why the stoats had proved problematic. Everything that seemed relevant would be included, and almost all of it had now been written. The chapter was nearly done.

Lifting her head again from her work, Alice rolled down the sleeves of her dark woollen jumper. She looked younger than her forty-five years but dressed older. She wore glasses when she was writing – wide-rimmed tortoiseshell glasses that were accidentally fashionable. Everything else was merely comfortable. The jumper, the jeans, the T-shirts, the fleece jacket: she liked not having to think about what to wear. It was one of those freedoms she had not even realised was missing until, coming here, she had found it.

Alice often became distracted around this time of the morning. She would rein in her straying thoughts for as long as she could until she was certain they would not come back into line. Then she would walk. Half an hour was all that was needed usually, unless there was something specific she had to find, observe or figure out. It was enough time for her to get partway up Burganess, then come back, or else to stroll, without hurrying, along the beach. Today, she had nowhere in particular to go, so the beach, probably, was where she’d end up. Putting down her pen, Alice straightened the pages on the desk, picked up a notebook, just in case, then went to get her coat. As she opened the front door, a curtain of cold air folded around her body, and she thrust her thick-gloved hands into her pockets.

* * *

At the top of the valley, where the road began its stoop towards the sea, David parked his pickup and got out. Sam, the collie, stayed behind in the passenger seat, keeping warm. Along the fence here, on a row of wooden pallets, small blue silage bales were piled, two high and three deep. In the field beyond the gate, the sheep were waiting. The sound of his arrival had brought them running in anticipation.

Though the snow was only shallow, the animals looked hungry and called out to him, impatient. David went to the far end of the row and reached up to a bale on the top. He scraped the snow away, then pulled the bale back towards him and rolled it slowly to the gate. He always took from the far end because he knew, as the winter went on, that his gladness at having done so would increase. The task would get a little easier each day.

He opened the gate and pushed the silage into the park, the sheep already gathered round him, their breath billowing. He split the metal feeding ring and pushed the bale inside, then took a knife from his pocket, slicing first in a circle around the top, then in four vertical lines to the bottom. He lifted the top of the plastic off and pulled the four strips down to reveal the silage. Carefully he peeled the netting away and bundled it into his boilersuit pocket, then began to unravel the bale, loosening and spreading it around the ring.

The sheep pushed their heads through the metal frame and chomped at the damp grass. The smell of it, and the lanolin of the animals, thickened the air like beer half-brewed. David counted them – two dozen – then watched as they forced their heads into the food. They were Shetlands, all of them, small and sturdy. He took a glove off and placed his palm against the cheek of one of the ewes and scratched. She pressed against his hand but kept eating. She’d been a caddy lamb, that one, four years before, abandoned by her mother then bottle-fed by David, so she had none of the jittery edge of the others. She still liked to be scratched sometimes, but she liked her food even more.

David thought back to the other caddies he’d had, generations of sheep hand-reared, some of them mothers and grandmothers of those in front of him now. When the girls were young, they’d looked after them. Emma, in particular. She would get up early to do the first feed, holding the bottles to their little mouths, two at a time, her face glowing in delight as they sucked and slurped and gulped the milk. Then, after school, she would rush home to see them again, carrying them like teddy bears, squirming, around the garden. For those first few months, the lambs were perfect pets. They were cute, they liked company, they played. But it was perhaps their neediness that the children responded to most of all – their utter dependence upon people. No child can resist being needed.

David let himself out of the feeding ring and walked back towards the gate, stopping once to look again at the sheep tearing their way through the grass as though they hadn’t eaten for a week. He felt tired, exhausted even, though he had no need to be, and as he sat down in the pickup again he allowed himself a long sigh. From the passenger seat, the dog sighed too, then shifted to rest its head in David’s lap. Sam raised his eyes, waiting for something or nothing to happen.

With Maggie gone, David was now the oldest person in the valley. And with Emma now gone, too, he was the only one left who’d grown up here. He wasn’t sure what that meant, exactly, but it seemed to mean something. It felt like a responsibility, a weight that couldn’t be lifted.

He had never lived anywhere else. Not really. He’d gone away to work after school was done, labouring in Aberdeen, but he’d come home again after only a year. He didn’t want the money enough to be away any longer. He came back to his parents’ house – now Terry’s house – then found a job at the oil terminal in the late seventies. Since then he’d never considered living anywhere else. This valley shaped his thoughts. Often it was his thoughts. The slope of it, the tender fold of the land. Somehow it was mirrored inside him. It was part of him, and he could no more leave this place than he could become someone else. That realisation had never once troubled him. Quite the opposite, in fact. It gave him a clarity of purpose, the lack of which he recognised in others. Life would be so much simpler, he thought, if people dreamed only of one place.

He sat in the driver’s seat, looking out over his place: his present, past and future. From there, at the edge of the upper park, he could see nearly all of the valley. Only the dip, south of this field, where the two little burns melted together, was hidden. Alice’s house, Bayview, was the closest, just up the road; then his own house, Kettlester, if you didn’t count the Smiths’ place up on the hill, which he did not. That was accessed from another track altogether, which came off the main road half a mile away, and neither looked nor felt like part of the valley. It had been built more than ten years ago now – a big, showy house with windows everywhere – but David had not yet fully accepted its presence.

Beyond Kettlester, the road curved southwest as it descended, until it reached the Red House, where Sandy now lived. There had been an old stone cottage there until the 1970s, when it was knocked down and replaced by the wooden one that still stood, which itself was not much more than a chalet. Willie, a cousin to Maggie’s father, had lived there all his life and agreed only reluctantly to the rebuilding, which Maggie herself had insisted on. He seemed to take the plan as an affront to his ancestors – to their ancestors – who might or might not have constructed the house. But his stubbornness was nothing compared to hers, and so the plan was eventually accepted. His only condition, to which Maggie consented but for which no one ever received a proper explanation, was that the new house should be painted a startling shade of red.

Willie lived another twenty years in that house. When it was first rebuilt, he had seemed old before his time, as though worn out by his own company. But when he died he really was old – almost a hundred – and had seemed to enjoy those final years as much as any he ever experienced. David bought the house, then, in part because he had the money and saw it as an investment, and in part because of what had happened to Flugarth, his parents’ house. Flugarth lay another few hundred yards down the road. That was where he had grown up and where he had lived until moving to Kettlester with Mary after they married.

His parents died just a few years apart and a few years before Willie. He’d sold their house then because he had no need for it. He’d sold it to Terry, whose brother worked with David at Sullom Voe and who seemed, when he first came to view it, to love the house. The assumption had been that he would move in with his family, but his family never moved in. They came for weekends and summer holidays during the first couple of years, but that was about it. And then Terry began to come alone. Not for holidays, exactly, but to give his family a break. He came to drink or to dry out. Sometimes he’d arrive by himself on a Friday evening and stay until the Monday morning, hardly leaving the front door. Other times, his wife would drive him to the house and let him out at the gate, abandoning him until he was ready to come back home.

More recently, Terry had been staying for longer and longer periods, and for the past six months or so he had lived here full time. David wasn’t entirely sure of the story – he’d heard several versions – but it seemed that Terry’s wife, Louise, had finally given up and got rid of him. His employers, the council, had presumably done the same. Or at least they’d told him not to come back until he’d got himself sorted. Terry wasn’t drunk all the time. There were days when he was fully present – sensible, friendly and good company. But he was unpredictable. He couldn’t be relied on. And though David felt sorry for him, he’d always found it hard to see his parents’ home used like that. It was a disappointment that didn’t go away.

Beyond Flugarth was the house at the end of the road. Officially, it was Nedder Gardie, though no one had ever used its full name in his hearing, except the postman. There was no Upper Gardie from which it had to be distinguished, so the house, like the croft, was known as Gardie. When he was young, his father sometimes referred to it as the Peerie Haa. It was, presumably, a joke, though at whose expense David never knew. Most often, it was just called Maggie’s. But Maggie, now, was gone.

A straight line from that house to where he sat took in the greenest part of the valley, though at this time of the year it didn’t look very green, even without the snow. The fields on this side of the burn were used either for grazing or for silage, with one narrow strip below Kettlester where David grew potatoes, onions, neeps and carrots. The other vegetable plot was up beside the house. When he was young, there was more growing and less grazing in the valley. There were hay parks and sometimes oats; and Maggie and his father often had a cow and calf down in one of the lower parks, sharing both the work and the benefits between them. He missed seeing those things – that vision, deceptive though it was, of abundance – but he understood it had changed for a reason. Money had become easier to earn than food was to grow; it was as simple as that. And now, though he had retired and so had time, in theory, to do things differently, David found he had neither the energy nor the will, at least not on his own. Each of the fields in front of him belonged either to his croft or to Gardie. And for years now he had worked all of them alone.

David thought again about Maggie. That night when they’d found her, crumpled against a rock on Burganess, he’d been aware of a kind of urgency inside him, a recognition, tinged with panic, of something approaching an end. He had not really understood that feeling at first, had thought it merely grief and nostalgia – and perhaps it was both – but it was bigger than that. The thing he felt ending was not just one person, or even one generation; it was much older and had, in truth, been ending for a long time. It was a thread of memory that stretched back for as long as people had lived in this place. It was a chain of stories clinging to stories, of love clinging to love. It was an inheritance he did not know how to pass on. That recognition brought with it a fearful kind of responsibility, as though he had been handed something he knew he could not help but break.

For several weeks after Maggie’s death, David had felt himself to be at an edge, teetering, and his sadness about what was to come was almost as great as his sadness at what had already gone – at the loss of the woman he had known all his life. Three months on, it still rose inside him whenever he stopped to think of her.

He was not entirely surprised when the letter came, a fortnight ago, from the solicitor in Lerwick. Maggie had never said explicitly that the house and croft would be left to him, but he understood why she’d done it. In the end it came almost as a relief – an echo and a partial answer to his own worries. She had entrusted the land to David in death, as she had done in life. But not, he understood, for his own benefit. She had nominated him as a kind of executor, to do what was right, to make a decision about the future.

What was right was for someone to live in the house and to work the croft, as she would have wanted it worked; and three months ago, before Emma left, his decision would have been easy. David would have asked his daughter and Sandy if they would like to move from the Red House to Gardie, and he would have done so joyfully, certain of Maggie’s approval. That was, undoubtedly, what she’d had in mind. But with Emma gone, too, everything was more complicated. The sense of continuation he longed for was much harder to see. His connection to both past and future had been weakened at once.

For two weeks, on and off, he and Mary had discussed the options, had woken in the night to talk them through again, and they had dismissed or discounted all but one.

As he turned the key in the ignition, David realised he missed his wife. It had been only a few hours since they’d had breakfast together, but he missed her all the same, and he wanted, then, to be with her. In an hour or so he would be home for lunch, and there was nothing to keep him from being home all afternoon. But he had one more task to complete before then. He had a question that needed to be asked.

Stamping his boots at the doorstep and kicking hard against the wall, David cleared the snow from his feet before he opened the door and went inside. ‘Hello! Sandy! Is du aboot?’

There was a shuffling from the kitchen, and Sandy emerged in a thick blue woollen jumper, tattered at the cuffs. ‘Come in,’ he said. ‘I’m just made coffee. Du must be psychic.’

David grinned. ‘Well, I wouldna say no,’ he said. ‘A coffee micht git some life back inta me.’

Sandy nodded and turned back to the kitchen. ‘Come and sit doon,’ he said.

The two men sat across the table from one another, but both were looking out of the window, over the valley, at the whitened hill and the sea. Their hands clasped around the hot mugs in front of them.

‘Looks good fae in here,’ Sandy said.

‘Aye. Looks pretty good fae oot dere, too,’ David replied. ‘Juist a peerie bit caalder.’ He said nothing for a moment and then turned to Sandy. ‘I hae some news fir dee,’ he said, then paused a second longer, trying to find the right words. ‘It seems Maggie may juist hae decided dy future.’

‘What does du mean?’ Sandy spoke slowly.

‘Well, shu left da hoose an da croft ta me in her will. An since Ah’m quite happy eenoo in me ain bed, someen else’ll hae ta live doon dere.’

Sandy waited for more.

‘Shu was thinkin at dee an Emma micht want ta move in, I suppose, if du wanted to wirk da croft, an if du wanted ta hae a family. But, seein as du’s chased me dochter awa, I reckon I hae ta offer it ta dee, if du wants it.’

Sandy looked away.

‘Ah’d help dee wi da sheep an da idder wark,’ said David. ‘We can help each idder. Ah’d be happy wi dat.’

‘Has du offered it to Emma?’ Sandy asked.

‘Aye, I telt her da situation, but shu’s no thinkin ta come back eenoo.’

‘And Kate?’

David shook his head. ‘Dey’re no wantin to move oota da toon. An I dunna lik ta think o it juist sittin empty. So, if du wants it . . .’

Sandy breathed in deeply, but said nothing.

‘Dere’s only wan catch, though,’ added David.

‘Aye?’ Sandy raised his eyebrows.

‘Well, Maggie was a bit o a hoarder, du sees. And since she didna plan ta be dyin quite sae soon, shu’s left aa o it fir wis ta clear up. I could dae wi a haand.’ He smiled, then tightened his lips. ‘Actually, I could dae wi a lot o haands. It’ll tak wis a while.’

‘Is her family no wantin some of it?’

‘I spak ta Ina, her sister, an shu’s asked fir een or twa things. But whit use wid maist o yon shite be ta her in New Zealand? I think shu was juist relieved at Maggie didna leave da hoose fir her ta sort oot.’

‘Okay, well I’ll hae a think aboot it,’ said Sandy. ‘It’s a bit o a surprise. I wasna thinkin to take on a croft. Certainly no by myself.’ He paused. ‘But I can help dee clear the hoose anyway. When was du plannin to start?’

‘Mebbie da moarn, or da day eftir.’ David took the last swig of his coffee. ‘If du sees da pickup doon dere, juist come alang if du’s able, an we’ll see whit’s needin don. Hit’s gonna be a hell o a job, I think. Ah’m ordered a skip, and we’ll need ta hae a bonfire or twa as well, I doot.’

Sandy nodded his head but was looking away again, distracted.

‘Well, Ah’ll laeve dee wi dat thocht,’ David said, standing up and setting his mug in the sink. He said goodbye and walked out of the house, leaving Sandy behind at the kitchen table.