and other small creatures, and had begun almost immediately to feel overwhelmed.
She’d known all along that things would get tricky at this stage. The task she’d set herself with this book was a big one: ambitious but achievable, she thought, at least within certain parameters. But it was here, in the realm of the invertebrates, of the beetles, the flies, the worms, spiders, bees and wasps, moths, molluscs, mites, midges, caddisflies, hoverflies and lacewings, that those parameters reared up and threatened to capsize her entire project. For these creatures, these tiny, insignificant creatures, were enormous in number, and Alice didn’t yet know what to do about them.
Recently, on her daily walks, she’d been exploring parts of the valley that hadn’t previously held her attention: the shadowed nooks, the burn banks, the ground beneath the heather stalks, the dirt and the damp corners. That experience had proved enjoyable in its own way. She liked to see this place from new angles, to look at it from ground level or even deeper. She’d bought a little magnifying glass, a loupe, that she now wore on a string around her neck at all times. She carried tiny plastic boxes to bring specimens home for identification, though she hadn’t actually brought anything back yet, as she wasn’t sure where to start.
February was not the season for insects. There wasn’t much in the air at least, though down on the ground there was still plenty to see. More, in fact, than she knew what to do with. From the window of her front room, this project had always looked achievable. The place, she thought, could be contained satisfactorily in words. There were just a handful of houses, plus the ruins of two more on the southern slope of the valley – abandoned in the nineteenth century. The history could be learned from books and from observation, at least as far as was necessary for her purposes. Most of the natural history also seemed within grasp: the mammals, the birds, even the plants. But here in the mud Alice felt the weight of her own ignorance, and the enormity of all she could not put a name to. As she lifted another stone and saw the inhabitants of its shelter shrink away into the darkness, she knew that she could never learn even a fraction of what was here. The closer she looked, the more the valley would expand. Whatever she held a magnifying glass to would grow to fill the lens, whatever was minute would become momentous. Here, she was struck by the vertiginous thought that the world beneath her was in fact infinite, that the more she looked at it, the more there would be to see, and that everything she saw, every atom of it, was its own centre.
Alice was not easily deterred by detail. Research was the part of writing she had always most enjoyed, and getting to know this place as well and as closely as possible had been, in large part, the purpose of this book. Back when she was writing fiction, she would spend months in preparation for each novel, reading up on subjects necessary to bring the books to life. She studied forensics, analysed police procedures, learned about the science of decay – the little details that made the big picture complete. She wanted to write books a detective could read without becoming irritated and frustrated by inaccuracies. Secretly, she wanted to write books a criminal might read and wonder, Why didn’t I think of that?
Reviewers often assumed that, because she wrote crime fiction, plot was her primary focus. But that had never been the case. For Alice, the detail always came first. She gathered information, gathered facts and photographs. She wrote everything down, then let it brew and meld together. The narrative emerged later. It germinated from the material she collected. It grew almost organically out of that material. She built a world, piece by piece, until, within that world, a story became possible, or even inevitable. It doesn’t make sense to ask, Where am I going?, she once told an interviewer, until you’ve first asked, Where am I now?
And that was precisely what she had asked herself when she began writing this book. What kind of place is this? Of what does it consist? Those were the questions that had got her writing again, after Jack’s death, and those were the questions that had led her, after four years, to be crouching in the mud, with rain soaking her back and cold stiffening her fingers.
She sat down on a rock and tried not to think for a moment. She closed her eyes. It was easy, there, to blank her mind. The fussing of the burn on its way to the sea, the rush and giggle of the water, was all that she could hear. It wasn’t loud – the land wasn’t steep, and the burn was narrow – but it was enough to cover the usual noises of the valley. She couldn’t hear the waves on the beach or the rain hitting the earth. She couldn’t hear the sheep in the beach park. Nor could she hear David start his pickup outside Gardie and begin the short drive up the road. Alice only heard him a minute or so later, as the vehicle came parallel with where she sat, then pulled into a passing place and stopped. She opened her eyes as David got out of the pickup and slammed the door.
He waved. She waved back. He shouted something, but she couldn’t make it out, so shrugged her shoulders and lifted her palms skyward. Anybody else, thought Alice, would have driven on and phoned her later if they needed to speak. But David wasn’t like anybody else. She watched as he pressed his hand on a fence post and stepped over the wire, then began striding down the field in his boilersuit, towards the burn.
‘Aye aye,’ he shouted from thirty yards away. ‘Du’s meditatin, I see.’
‘Something like that,’ Alice called back, smiling.
‘Well, dunna git up. I winna buther dee for lang.’
He reached for the peak of his cap and pulled it lower against the rain, turning his head one way then the other, not speaking or looking at Alice again as he walked, though Alice didn’t once take her eyes off him. She was fascinated by David, and always had been. He was like an invented person, a character, and yet was somehow more real than anyone else she knew.
‘Hit’s a fine day for a picnic,’ he said, as he stopped a few metres away, on the other side of the burn.
‘It might not look like it,’ grinned Alice, ‘but I’m actually doing research.’
‘Aye,’ David nodded seriously, ‘dat’s whit I tell Mary sometimes when I hae a peerie sleep in the efternoon.’
Alice could hardly imagine anyone less likely to sleep in the afternoon than David, but she laughed out loud at the joke.
‘So, what can I do you for?’ she asked. ‘Or is this just a social call?’
‘No, I normally do aa me socialisin oota da rain,’ David said. ‘But I saa dee and I thoght I might just hae somethin at would interest dee. For dy book, lik. An I didna want ta forgit.’
Alice wasn’t entirely sure what David or her other neighbours thought about her writing, or about the book itself. She’d told them about it, of course, and explained what she was trying to do, but the response had been muted. Nods of heads, a polite question or two, then the subject changed. Either they disapproved or they weren’t interested, she thought. Or both. She was aware that it might seem patronising, this project, or presumptuous. She was an incomer here and, to them, a newcomer. She was aware, too, that her neighbours might worry what exactly she was writing about the valley – about them, for instance. She had done her best to reassure, in her explanations, but it was hard to tell if she’d done enough. So Alice was pleased and relieved to hear David’s offer.
‘Well, du kens Ah’m clearin oot Maggie’s hoose eenoo, fir Sandy to move intae, hoopfully. Shu’s left ahint a few things at micht be o interest ta dee. Things at shu wrote, I mean.’
‘Okay. What kind of things?’
‘Diaries, journals, dat kind o thing. Dere’s letters an so on at shu haed fae idder fok, but dat’s probably nae use ta dee. But shu wrote a lot, it seems. Just recordin whit was been happenin. Some o it’ll be braaly dull, I reckon, but du micht fin some o it ta be o use. I dunna ken. Unless du can fin oot
