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
