‘No, thank you, that sounds great. I’d love to have a look through some time, as long as you don’t think it’s too personal?’
‘Nah, I’m haed a peerie look, an it dusna seem ta be lik dat. Mair aboot da wadder an wark as aboot hersel, I think.’
‘Oh right, well that sounds like it might be useful. Do you want me to come and pick them up?’
‘Nah nah. Ah’ll drap dem aff at da hoose sometime. When I hae a chance.’ He turned and looked down the valley, his eyes following the burn towards the wedge of dark sea beyond. ‘Well, Ah’ll let dee git back ta dee research. Ah’m needin ta research me denner, I think.’
‘Thanks, David,’ she smiled. ‘Thanks for thinking of me.’
‘I could hardly no think o dee when du’s sitting oot here in da middle o da valley lik dis.’ He winked and nodded, then turned his back. ‘See dee later,’ he shouted, without looking behind him.
‘Cheers, thanks again!’
Alice watched him go back up the valley with the same unhesitating stride as he’d come down it. His hands, as always when he wasn’t carrying something, were clasped behind his back, as though he were merely out for a stroll. He paused at the fence. It wasn’t so easy to cross from this side, but lifting one leg then the other he stepped over without a problem. He started the pickup, then was gone.
Alice was aware of a pain in her backside. The rock she was sitting on was not ideally shaped for the purpose, and one sharp lump in particular was pressed into her right buttock. The other buttock seemed to be numb. She didn’t want to get up just yet, but an urgency and insistence had developed in her lower body. She stood and leaned backward, stretching, with her hands on her hips, then stopped. She felt, suddenly, exposed where she stood. Usually she didn’t think for a moment about who might be watching, but the conversation with David had left her aware. At this spot she could be seen from every house in the valley, if anyone was looking. She couldn’t see them, but everyone could see her.
Uncomfortable then with that thought, she began to follow the burn back upwards, almost parallel with the road, then cut across through the upper park towards the house. She kept her head down, watching her feet as they squelched into the damp soil, feeling the cling of wet trousers and the grip of wet boots. Back inside she stripped off, then switched on the shower. She stood beneath the hot water, eyes closed, until the chill had left her body, then dried herself, put on clean clothes and went in to the study. She sat down at the desk and looked at the pile of papers, the books and folders, then out of the window.
There were chinks in her thoughts now, after David’s intervention. Earlier, she was fretting. The problem of how this next chapter might be constructed, how it might be made to contain all she wanted it to contain, had consumed her. Sometimes, details amassed would take a form of their own, like piled sand. They would direct her and insist on choices without the need for choosing. But this time there was just too much, and it threatened to bury her within a vast, shapeless mound.
What the spiders and the ants and the flies were telling her, in their sheer volume, was that this project was indeed approaching some kind of conclusion. She simply couldn’t write about invertebrates in the way she had written about birds and mammals. There was no possibility of what she produced being anything like comprehensive. She could list those creatures she learned to identify, but what would that achieve? A register filled with holes. She could spend the rest of her life learning the names of insects and make a much longer list, but she still would not eliminate those holes entirely. This was the point, then, when her will for completeness came up against her acknowledgement of the impossible. This was the point when a limit imposed itself.
Her fretting had ceased. The recognition of this limit, which had come not as a moment of clarity but, like the dampening of her clothes through the morning, gradually and unignorably, had brought with it a feeling of relief. She knew now what she could not do. And that relief allowed other thoughts to nag.
Alice had always assumed that the final part of her book would focus on the contemporary human story of the valley. It seemed the only proper way to end. But she had not yet given real consideration to how it might be done. When the time came, she figured, she would know what to do. There would be plenty of information available from the past hundred years or so, from the local archives and from David, that would allow her to bring it to life. Photographs, names, dates: the specifics would be important.
She saw the book much as she saw the valley itself: consisting of many layers. The present day could not be understood – it couldn’t even be seen properly – without understanding the layers upon which it rested. Like a mountain, with its ribbons of shale and gneiss, and its seams of quartz and iron, each piece was necessary to the whole. If any piece were different, it would be another place altogether. But simply detailing the history, the geology and geography, the flora and fauna, was not enough. Alice wanted her final chapter to show the valley as it was, containing and comprising all those things, standing upon them. She wanted readers to see the place, finally, as one might see a clock properly for the first time, having watched it be taken apart and then reassembled.
But David’s offer had planted another thought: the thought of Maggie. Alice hadn’t known the older woman well, which had always disappointed her. They would say hello and chat sometimes, but these conversations were never as friendly or as intimate as she’d hoped. Maggie had lost the energy, perhaps, to make much of an effort in welcoming new people. She didn’t feel the need to bring them into her life. That was understandable, but Alice would have liked for it to have been different. She would have liked to have known her better.
When Maggie died, Alice tried not to be affected. She went to the funeral, of course – it would have seemed impolite not to – but she avoided talk of what had happened and did her best to push the old woman from her mind. After all, they had not been friends, not even close, so the great welling of grief inside her at the thought of Maggie seemed somehow insincere, somehow dishonest.
This had been the first death she was close to, physically, since she arrived in Shetland. It had been the first since Jack. After more than four years, that loss had loosened its throttling grip on her thoughts, but it was still there, always, like an ache, and to be once again in the presence of death had been difficult.
But grief is an untamed thing, and it rose, still, at unexpected moments. Alice found herself transfixed by it sometimes, not only when the memories came back unbidden or unwelcome but at the very process of memory itself – the gradual disappearance of things that once had been so clear. There were occasions when she’d tried to call her husband’s face to mind, for company and for comfort, and had found he was not there, like a book missing from a shelf. She was panicked then, and angered by the realisation that having lost him once she would now have to lose him a second time, piece by piece. In those moments she would close her eyes and shake her head, ransacking her thoughts in desperation, until, again, he would return.
Jack died of bowel cancer when he was thirty-eight, two years younger than Alice had been at the time. He was thirty-five when he was diagnosed, not long after they had started trying for a baby. ‘It’s now or never,’ she remembered saying, her uncertainty at the thought of motherhood finally overcome by his enthusiasm and her age. ‘Now or never.’
For almost three years, they lived with the disease between them, first with hope – the statistics and his youth were on their side – and then without. By the time he was diagnosed, the cancer had already spread to his lymph nodes and was on its way to his liver. Once there, the conclusion had been decided. The chemotherapy slowed but did not prevent it. He would end up on the wrong side of the statistics. He was ‘one of the unlucky ones’, the consultant said, when their fears were finally confirmed.
When
