Читать книгу The Valley at the Centre of the World - Malachy Tallack - Страница 12

SUNDAY,

24^TH JANUARY

As she passed the hall mirror, on her way to the kitchen, Mary caught sight of herself and paused. She looked tired, and a shadow lay over the side of her face like a birthmark. She ran a hand through her short grey hair, neatened it, then rubbed her eyes. She turned away from the mirror.

Today was a difficult day. Weekends, always, were the worst. Emma’s leaving had been hard for her – harder, it seemed, than the last time her daughter had moved away, as a teenager, to university. Then, the loneliness had been offset by busyness, by pride and by hope. Now, it was offset only by routine. When there was nothing else that needed her focus, Emma’s absence would gnaw at her, nagging for attention like a puppy. She had got used to her daughter as a neighbour, got used to her dropping in without warning, and to her presence in the valley, her proximity. She would get used to this distance, too, but not quickly.

This morning she had called Emma, eager to hear her voice, but knowing, also, that it would not be an easy conversation. David had texted her after breakfast to say he’d offered the croft to Sandy. ‘Juist ta let her ken,’ that’s what he’d said, as though it were a minor piece of news. Mary waited until he went out to the shed, then she picked up the phone. Her job was to listen to the things she already knew that Emma would say. She already knew because she understood why her daughter would feel the way she was feeling, why she would flinch at the thought of Sandy moving to Gardie, of him becoming, without her, permanent.

David didn’t understand these feelings. Or at least he would not admit to understanding them. What he had done was the practical solution in the current circumstances. It was right for him, for the croft, for the valley, and hopefully for Sandy too. And that rightness would last longer than any hurt Emma might feel just now. After all, they had asked her first if she wanted it, and she had not. Mary knew that’s what her husband was thinking, and she knew that in essence he was correct. She didn’t disagree. She was just less able to weigh that rightness over their daughter’s immediate anxieties.

A photograph framed on the hall table showed Emma and Kate aged eight and ten, both wrapped in winter coats, scarves flailing in the wind. The picture used to hang on the living-room wall, until the colours faded in the sunlight, the girls’ red jackets paling into ochre. Mary had brought it through to the windowless corridor, fearing the image might disappear altogether. Looking at it now, the day came back to her, as it often did – a day not unlike other days except that it was caught and held by the camera. The two girls were laughing, fooling around down at the beach, on a morning when the waves pawed noisily at the stones.

Back then, the sisters had been as cheerful, as content, as quick to smile as each other. Emma used to follow Kate around, she used to idolise her, and wanted, always, to wear what Kate was wearing, to do what Kate was doing. They were close. They shared friends, even after Kate went to junior high school, leaving Emma behind at the primary school closer to home. Mary never would have guessed, back then, that the two would turn out so differently.

One of the hardest things about being a parent, she thought, was to watch discontent grow in your children. When they were young, their needs and desires could always be met by a mother or a father. There was food when they were hungry; there was a bed when they were tired; there were distractions from boredom. And then, without warning, would come a question for which neither mother nor father could provide an answer. ‘Why does Sarah not like me any more?’ Mary could still remember when Kate asked her that, aged five or six, after school one day, eyes polished with tears over a friendship temporarily lost. And she could still remember being struck, in those few pained words, by the realisation that her daughters would not always be cheerful and content, that the world would disappoint them, that friends, family, would let them down.

As they both went on to junior high school, the parts of their lives that were beyond Mary’s control continued to grow. Then, it was not just other people who caused them consternation, it was their own bodies. They seemed sometimes confused by themselves, by the changes they were going through, by the new pressures under which they found themselves. Mary did her best to reassure, to be open to questions and to offer what advice she could. But her advice wasn’t always welcome.

That was the point at which her daughters went in different directions. Whereas Kate, as school went on, seemed to settle into herself, Emma never quite did. Kate, it turned out, took after her father. Her desires were well defined, and never beyond her ability to achieve them. But Emma was different. She seemed always uncertain of exactly what she wanted, uncertain of how to get it, uncertain of who or where she wanted to be. That was hardly unusual these days, but it meant that Emma and David increasingly struggled to understand each other. They were always close, always sought each other’s company, but they argued often.

Kate left school, got a job, met a man, got married, had children – one, then another. Mary worried about her, in that unavoidable way. She found reasons to worry even when there were none, and mostly there was no reason. Kate’s husband was good to her, they seemed happy together, the children were healthy, bright. But Emma . . . always Emma. She went to university, studied history and politics, and they thought perhaps she’d be a teacher in the end. But that wasn’t what she wanted. She graduated without a plan or a fixed intention. Mary could see that lack of direction weighing on her daughter, but she could do nothing to lift that weight, except to insist to David that he never ask Emma what she was going to do next. And he never did. He asked his wife instead. He sought reassurance from Mary, and Mary tried, when she could, to offer it.

They had both been delighted when Emma came home three years ago. Not just to have their daughter so close but to see her happy, to imagine her settled. Everything she had done up to that point had felt temporary, as if she were always in the process of deciding her next step. But moving home, that was different. Home was a destination. It was where you ended up. That’s what they thought.

When she’d spoken to Emma on the phone earlier, Mary had sat in the hall looking up at that photograph of her young daughters. She saw the face of a girl and heard the voice of a woman. What a distance lay between those two Emmas – the face, still laughing, the voice, holding back tears. Mary was mother to them both.

There was a time when she imagined this feeling might one day recede. That her maternal fretting might no longer fill her thoughts or keep her awake at night. But it didn’t work like that. As her children became adults, she simply found herself less able to help them, and therefore, if anything, more inclined to worry.

Mary looked at her watch. It was close to midday. She was meeting a friend in town in the afternoon, but she still had some time to spare. She reached into a drawer in the hall cabinet and took out two seed catalogues, then made herself a cup of tea and sat down at the kitchen table. The catalogues had both arrived in the past week, and Mary pulled the cellophane away and opened the first of them. She skimmed past the vegetables – that was David’s department – and began, slowly, to look through the flowers, pausing on every page to read the names and look at the photographs. Some of her favourites were close to the front: the aquilegias, strange and delicate, infinite in their variety; the frothy astilbes, white, pink and scarlet; the bleeding hearts, perhaps her favourite flower of all, so perfect and implausible.

In truth, Mary never ordered more than a few packets each year from the catalogues. She took cuttings and seedlings from friends, she bought plants at the garden centre, she propagated and divided what she already had. But buying was not the point. Looking was the point. To read the catalogues was to dream of summer. It was to be reminded that the winter would pass and that warmth would return. It was a ritual she needed more and more.

Flicking to the bulbs, Mary remembered with pleasure that before long the first snowdrops would emerge, unfolding themselves beneath bushes, alongside paving stones and at the edges of the lawn. Later, there would be purple and yellow crocuses too, then daffodils, ablaze about the garden. She had tried other bulbs over the years, though not always with success. Grape hyacinths grew in one of the borders, and Chionodoxas too, like tiny blue stars. Twice she had planted snakeshead fritillaries, longing for their purple checkerboard heads to fill the garden, but both times they had disappointed. On the most recent occasion, she’d buried fifty bulbs, but only four of the plants raised themselves above ground the following spring. Last year, just one plant remained.

Gardening in Shetland was an exercise in overcoming disappointment. Each year, Mary tried something new: at least one plant or one packet of seeds she had never grown before. She did her best to be sensible about these, to be modest in her ambitions. She looked for plants that didn’t need too much warmth or that were meant to thrive in ‘coastal climates’. But sometimes even modest ambitions were thwarted. Even when she took plants from friends’ gardens elsewhere on the island, life in this valley sometimes seemed to be too much for them. Facing southwest, as it did, there was little protection from the prevailing winds, little shelter from the gales and the salt that galloped up from the Atlantic, scouring everything in its path.

The worst were not the winter storms, though. Then, most of the plants were tucked up safe beneath the surface. The worst were the storms that hit in May or June, when everything was brimming into life. How many times had she opened the curtains on a spring morning to find her garden withered, burnt and shredded by the salt-filled air? And what else could she do but go out and tidy up the damage, do her best to make it good again, and hope that the summer would be kinder?

Mary needed the garden. Unpredictable and difficult though it was, it had become increasingly important to her over the past ten years or so. David had always seemed content to live within an endlessly turning circle, season following season, year following year. His hope was not for change but for continuation. Mary’s hope was different. She longed for growth and progress, a flourishing. That was how she felt able to live in this place, with all its cold and darkness. That hope made it possible. When the girls were young, it was easier – all energy and ambition could be focused on them, on their growth. In those years, the garden was hardly more than a place for her daughters to play. But now she needed more from it. She needed it to give something back, which occasionally it did.

Despite all of the disappointments – the seeds that came to nothing, the leaves that recoiled from the harshness of the wind, the flowers that opened then closed again, as though embarrassed by their pathetic display – Mary kept going. She dug and pruned and planted and weeded and waited; and for that work she was, to some degree, rewarded. Each year, in winter, the garden gave her something to hope for, something to look forward to. And each summer, no matter how terrible the weather, it would give her sporadic bursts of pleasure, of joy, even. Coming home on a gloomy afternoon, a bag of shopping in each hand, she would be stopped by the sight of the little red rhododendron, which seemed sometimes almost to glow, or by the thicket of cobalt lupins beneath the kitchen window. Those moments, in which the stubborn beauty of the garden took her by surprise, were worth every disappointment.

Mary closed the catalogue and stood up, draining the last of the tea from her mug. Outside, the sky hung grey above the valley. The temperature was increasing – it was six degrees, according to the thermometer beside the window – and yesterday’s snow had almost gone. The forecast was for the wind to swing south and rise to a storm this evening. Everything could change so quickly here, always. She’d often wondered if that was why David looked for stability in the turning of a year, since it couldn’t be found day to day, or even moment to moment. Sometimes her husband seemed to her about the most stable thing she had known in her life. He never changed. Or hardly at all. Like the larch tree she’d planted twenty years ago in the corner of the garden, he grew so slowly it was hard to believe he was ever any different from one day to the next. Sometimes Mary felt frustrated and irritated by his inflexibility; other times gratitude welled up inside her until she had to cry just to let it out. She would lean against his shoulder and put her arms around his neck. He would ask, then, ‘Whit’s wrang?’ and she would say ‘Nothing’, and he would pull her close and tell her he was glad.

* * *

Since David’s visit the previous day, the question had hung in the air like a promise. Sandy wasn’t sure, though, if it was a promise of good or ill. The offer of the croft had been so unexpected, so entirely tangential to his thinking, that it had taken some time to establish itself as a question at all.

Where do I want to be? That was what it came down to.

For more than two months, he had stayed on in the Red House, living almost as though Emma were coming back. He’d done nothing to erase her from their home. He hadn’t moved furniture around or bought new pictures to hang on the walls. He’d not gone through each room, removing the traces of her that still lingered – the books and clothes she’d forgotten. He’d simply carried on as before, only without her.

It wasn’t that he expected Emma to return. He had not left a space for her deliberately, in the hope she might appear on the doorstep one morning, begging to be let back in. He knew that she would not. And though there had been days when he’d longed for her, when he’d checked her Facebook page obsessively, hour after hour, in search of anything – a new friend, a photograph – that might contort his longing, that might summon the sharp, bitter blow of jealousy, there had been many more days when he had not, when he had simply wished her well.

In truth, he had not felt the need to fill her absence because the space she once occupied in his life had already closed. It had closed before she left – squeezed, slowly, over months, perhaps years, as Sandy prepared himself for a loss he couldn’t help but anticipate. It was a loss he did not want, that he dreaded, but which was made inevitable by his very expectation of it.

‘Du’s shuttin me oot,’ Emma would say, as he stepped back in silence from yet another convoluted discussion. And though he denied it, to her and to himself, that was almost exactly what he was doing: shutting out not her but his need for her. He was closing himself down, retreating to a place he knew better than any other. Abandonment, Sandy understood, was more comfortable than the fear of it. Emma had chosen to leave because he had given her no choice.

Since the last time he saw her, a few days after Maggie’s funeral, when she’d piled the final boxes into her little Toyota, they’d had only irregular contact. A few businesslike emails, sorting out the practical side of things, and a few phone calls, one of them tearful, sorting out the rest. She was in Edinburgh now, living not far from where they had first shared a home. He was here.

By rights it should have been Sandy who left. This was Emma’s place, not his. At least that’s how it once had felt. But Sandy didn’t want to go. He was happy here. Or as near to happy as he needed to be. He didn’t want to lose what Emma had given him – this place, these people – he just couldn’t help but lose her.

He understood, without really needing to consider it, that the current situation was temporary. He was living next door to his ex-girlfriend’s parents, renting a house from his ex-girlfriend’s parents. He was a part of their lives, and they a part of his, to a degree that, sooner or later, might not be okay – for him, for Emma, for them. A couple of his friends had already asked, casually, when he’d be moving. His father, too. But he’d brushed their questions off. It hadn’t felt urgent, and for now there was nowhere else he’d rather be. He could wait until a decision was more pressing.

What he had not anticipated before David’s intervention was the possibility that he might not have to leave at all, that he might, in fact, remain here in the valley, alone. And what he had certainly never considered, not once, was digging himself in even deeper by taking on the croft and the house at the end of the road. Not without Emma, at least.

Now, though, he had been forced to consider it.

Thinking back to yesterday’s conversation at the kitchen table, Sandy had the feeling that David had not just imposed a decision upon him but had already made the decision on his behalf. From the moment it was raised it had felt like a plan to which his consent was expected. Maggie had decided Sandy’s fate, David said. But it was not her who had done so, it was him. Walking down the road now towards Gardie, where lights were blazing in almost every window, Sandy felt a kind of vacuum had opened in the space between David’s will and his own – a vacuum that had to be filled. What he felt, perhaps, was an obligation, though he wasn’t sure why or when such a feeling had emerged. Nor could he tell, yet, if it was a burden or a gift. It was, so far, only a complication.

The afternoon was darkening and straining towards a storm, like an angry dog on a lead. The sharp cold of yesterday had twisted into something wilder. Already the breeze was much more than a breeze. It had come on almost unnoticed, a gust that failed to subside, but now it whipped up the valley, snapping at his cheeks and in the corners of his eyes. Salt hammered his lips. Everything leaned inland.

Sandy had not always felt at home in this valley. It had taken him some time to settle, to feel part of the place. He had resisted that feeling at first, unused to it as he was, but he couldn’t do so for long. Now, he moved through it as one might move through the rooms of a familiar house, attuned to its changes, day to day, moment to moment. The light and the weather were always in motion, and these he registered first. The snow that yesterday had covered everything was now almost gone, the sodden ground, the heather and the rock disclosed. The sky was a bruised grey, rushing north.

David’s pickup was parked beside the gate at Gardie, with an old chest of drawers lying face-up in the back. Sandy went in the front door of the house and shouted.

‘Hi aye, it’s just me.’

‘Ah’m up da stairs,’ came the reply. ‘Come du!’

Sandy found him in the spare bedroom, among a dozen or so cardboard boxes piled up and spread out across the floor, most of them open at the top, and each filled with paper and notebooks.

‘Shu kept aathing,’ David said. ‘Letters, postcards, diaries, aathing. And I dunna ken whit’s worth keepin and whit’s no.’

Sandy looked around the room and absorbed the dismay that David must already be feeling. ‘Mebbie we should just leave it for noo and start wi the simple things. Just keep it packed up and we can come back tae it later. If we canna decide, we can just put it aa up in the laft.’

‘Aye, du’s right,’ said David. ‘Ah’m liable to git bogged doon afore Ah’m even started at dis rate.’ He stepped out from amid the pile of boxes and raised his hands in dismissal. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘let’s move on. Ah’m ordered a skip for Tuesday, so we can start heavin bruck doon da stairs for dat. But first Ah’ll gie dee da tour.’

The two men crossed the corridor into the larger bedroom. Everything was still as it had been three months before. The bed sheets – white with a string of cornflowers embroidered at the foot end – were neatly folded back. A small selection of creams, powders and bottles sat on the dressing table. In a wastepaper basket beside the door were a pile of tissues, scrunched up and discarded. Neither of them spoke for a moment; they just stood in the doorway, taking it in.

‘Fuck’s sake,’ said David, almost whispering. ‘I kinda wish shu’d left da place ta someen else. Hit feels lik we hae ta dismantle her whole life.’

Sandy said nothing but nodded slowly. He’d never been upstairs before in Maggie’s house, and he felt, still, as though he were intruding.

‘Mebbie it was a bad idea askin dee doon,’ said David, still looking around the bedroom.

‘Why’s that?’

‘Well, it’s bad enough fir me, an I juist hae ta clear it oot. Du haes ta live in it.’

Sandy glared at him. ‘I dunna have to live in it. I can live wherever I want to live.’ He backed out of the bedroom, went along the corridor and down the stairs. He wasn’t angry, but he didn’t want the conversation to continue. He felt cornered.

In the living room, few of the pictures on the walls looked to be worth saving. Besides the family photographs, there were a couple of ugly paintings of boats, a framed postcard from Corsica and two small prints showing fox hunters on horseback, with hounds out in front. Sandy shook his head. He’d never noticed them before, and they seemed entirely out of place on this island without foxes. He wondered where they’d come from. At what point in Maggie’s life had they been bought or gifted? And by whom?

On the opposite wall was a wooden rack, a grid of tiny compartments, each one housing a faded porcelain figure – animals mostly. There were monkeys, cows, dogs, elephants, sheep, fish, a swan, a rabbit and many more. And no matter the true size of the creature, all had been reduced to a few centimetres in height. Sandy looked at each of the figurines in turn. Some were lifelike in their depiction – a cow with its head down, as though eating; a salmon mid-leap – while others were strange and ridiculous. On one shelf was a camel wearing a fez. Beside it, a cat on its hind legs, with a bow tie around its neck. Just as with the hunting pictures, it was hard to square these objects with the old woman Sandy had known for the last few years of her life. He couldn’t imagine her standing admiring these figures, let alone going out and buying them.

‘I made yon,’ said David, from the other side of the room.

Sandy hadn’t heard him come down the stairs, and he missed a breath in surprise. He only noticed when he turned around that David was standing in his socks, still following Maggie’s rules.

‘Made what?’

‘Da display case. When I wis at da school. Shu used ta hae dem oot on a shelf, aa cramped lik. So I made dat. I coonted da figures ee day when shu wis in da kitchen, an I built it for her. Shu was delighted.’

‘I canna imagine her collecting these. They dunna seem like her, somehow.’

‘Shu didna collect dem. Her sister did.’

‘Ina?’

‘Aye. But when shu giud ta New Zealand, Maggie said shu’d look efter dem. An shu did. For mare as sixty years.’

‘An Ina never wanted them back?’

‘No, why wid she? Dey’re shite. Dey meant mair ta Maggie wi Ina gone as dey ever did ta Ina.’ He laughed. ‘Fok are certainly peculiar.’

‘So, where are we goin to start?’ Sandy asked. ‘What do you want to keep?’

‘Well, most of dis stuff is no fir keepin. Da hoose is needin stripped back and repainted. It’s needin a fair bit o wark ta mak it right. The mair we git oot, da easier dat’ll be.’

‘Aye. Well, let’s start in here, then.’ Sandy looked around. ‘Do you ken aboot these pictures?’ he asked, pointing at the two hunting scenes above the television. ‘Whit’s their story?’

‘Well, I asked Maggie aboot dem, years ago. I hidna really thoght aboot dem, ta be honest, until dere was aa yon talk aboot fox-hunting on da news, when dey banned it. So I asked her why shu hid dem dan.’

‘And?’

‘And shu said shu liked da dugs.’ David laughed out loud. Sandy laughed too.

‘Right,’ David said. ‘We can put aa dat’s needin dumped in a pile, and dis picters are goin at da hert o it.’ He took them from the wall and set them down in the corner of the room, close to the fireplace. ‘Next!’

‘You can dump the ither pictures, too,’ said Sandy. ‘Mebbie no the photos, but the rest.’

‘I quite lik da boats.’

‘They’re horrible. Dump them!’

‘Okay, if du says so.’

For several hours, the two men wandered about the house, making piles, filling black bags, inspecting and deciding. Sometimes they conferred, asking the other’s opinion, but mostly no questions were needed. The house was filled with the belongings of an old woman who was not their relative. What sentimentality they felt had been largely cast aside when they took the first pictures from the wall. Sandy wondered sometimes about his right to make decisions on the contents of this house, but David had brought him here and let him get on with it, and so he did.

In the kitchen he looked through drawers and cupboards, pulling out tins and dry food, leaving behind cutlery, plates, pots and pans. An ugly set of brown bowls was removed; another set, plain white, he left in place. Sandy paused for a second before opening the fridge, fearing what he might find inside. But when he did it was empty. He noticed only then that it was silent. David, hearing the door, looked over.

‘We emptied it,’ he said. ‘Da night shu died.’

Few people would have considered that, thought Sandy. But it didn’t surprise him that David and Mary had. He imagined them then, walking through the house, switching off plugs, checking each room, emptying the contents of the fridge and freezer into bags, with Maggie’s death surrounding them like a fog.

‘Mebbie we’ve done aa we can do da night,’ David said eventually. ‘Ah’ll come back on Tuesday eftirnoon and git some of dis bruck inta da skip. Will du be at wark?’

‘Aye, I’m drivin the taxi all week. I’ll be back aboot six, though, I think. So I could join you in the evenin ageen.’

‘Is du no stayin in toon fir Up Helly Aa? Hit’s Tuesday night, is it no?’

Sandy raised his eyebrows. ‘No. Vikings arna really my thing.’ In truth, Sandy could hardly think of anything worse than watching nine hundred drunk men in fancy dress march about the town, roaring and singing, waving their torches around. He had never felt the slightest attachment to those parts of Shetland culture that were supposed to make his heart balloon with pride. Particularly that one. And the fact that he had never once been asked to take part only seemed to confirm that Up Helly Aa was a festival for others, not for him. ‘Macho, chauvinist bollocks,’ he used to call it, when Emma was around. ‘I think I’ll skip it,’ he said now.

David laughed. ‘Aye, I dunna blame dee. Hit’s years since Ah’m been oot ta see the procession. No since da lasses was teenagers, I think. But, onywye, dunna buther wi Tuesday. We’re don a lot da night. Ah’ll let dee ken whan I need dee ageen, once dere’s bigger things ta lift an so on.’

‘Okay, well dunna be fairt to ask for help.’

‘Whin am I ivver been fairt o dat?’

Outside, the darkness was as thick as peaty water. Just three scraps of light – from Terry’s house, from David’s and from Alice’s – broke through. The wind was shrieking now into the valley, gathering what it could and dragging it away from the sea. Rain too was squalling sideways, in sputters and bursts, threatening to pour.

‘Ah’ll gi dee a run,’ said David.

Sandy opened the passenger door. ‘I’m glad you offered,’ he said.

‘Is du heard aboot da shop?’ David asked, as he set off up the road.

‘Which shop? What aboot it?’

‘Da wan in Treswick. Billy’s shop. He’s thinkin o closin up, he telt me.’

‘How come?’

‘No enough fok buyin no enough food, he said. Simple as dat. Dey come in fir milk an a loaf wance a week, den get da rest in toon.’

‘Aye, guilty as charged,’ said Sandy.

‘Wis too. Hit’ll be a shame if he goes, though. Been a shop dere as lang as I can mind.’

‘Aye, it’s a shame.’

David slowed at the driveway to the Red House, and Sandy got out.

‘Okay, I’ll see you soon,’ he said, then looked down without waiting for a response. He had to give a solid push on the pickup door to get it closed, and then hunched himself against the wind as he walked away. Up here it seemed even stronger, the air walloping his body, threatening to knock him sideways. Once inside, he could hear it groaning and screeching around the building, trying to find a way through the windows and walls.

Sandy picked up his phone from the kitchen table. There was only one message, from Terry, which he ignored. He poured himself a whisky and went through to the living room, then lit a fire and sat in the armchair by the window. He closed his eyes and listened to the storm, as the flames gasped and raged in the grate.