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
