was there at the centre of it. She stood with her hands pressed into the pocket of her apron. Everything was in or on or ready. There was nothing left to do but wait. Five minutes, ten minutes, maybe more, she could just be still.
For most of her life, free time was something she never had. Bringing up two girls, working, feeding everyone: no time had ever felt free. And if she did pause, which of course sometimes she had to, those moments were always tainted with guilt, as though they were not rightfully hers but were stolen from someone else, someone more deserving. Stopping to sit down, with a cup of tea in her hands, she would be assailed at once by the thought of everything she could and should be doing instead. A list wrote itself around her. The living room needed hoovered, the bathroom needed cleaned, food needed cooked, laundry needed washed. She never resented the work she had to do – she had chosen this life, after all – but she hated the way it directed her thoughts, like a policeman inside her.
When she married David, they’d agreed: he would work the croft, she would work the house. It wasn’t a business deal, exactly, but it was an understanding. Both of them had their own jobs besides that – he at the oil terminal, she at the primary school in Treswick, ten minutes’ drive away – and that suited them fine. The animals didn’t interest her much. Not while they were alive, at least. She helped in the vegetable garden when she was needed, lifting potatoes or whatever it was that had to be done, and she tended to the plants in the flowerbeds. But otherwise, most of her work had been indoors. And for twenty years or so it had seemed endless, a list from which nothing ever could be crossed.
Then Kate left home, and Emma moved south for university, and everything changed. Unclaimed time sneaked up on her, as though it had been hiding in the house all along. Without warning, she would find herself with nothing in particular to do, and she would search, then, for something useful to occupy her. The house became cleaner than it had ever been. The garden more free from weeds.
But when Mary retired, last summer, the shape around which her life had turned dissolved. Her days became broad spaces in need of filling. She was still learning how to do that, learning how to enjoy it. Perhaps she was happier now than she’d ever been, it was difficult to say. She couldn’t remember how she’d felt when the children were younger. Maybe she’d been too busy to feel much at all. She was just there, living, being the things that she did.
The potatoes began to bump and rumble in the boiling water. Mary reduced the heat, then sat at the table, chewing at her fingernails. She was thinking about Emma, her thoughts swooping and circling around this brand-new absence. Until last night, her daughter had lived next door. She had been right there. Now she was in Lerwick, and soon, it seemed, she would be much further – a flight, a sea-crossing away. The thought of Emma gone was difficult. The thought of her unhappy, alone, was difficult. Emma’s sadness was indistinguishable from her mother’s. Mary wanted to reach out and hold her as though she were six years old again, as though she’d fallen and hurt her knee, as though there were something, anything, that a mother could do. But there wasn’t. Her daughter was not a little girl, and she didn’t need Mary’s assistance. Not now. She made her own decisions, her own mistakes, and her mother had to sit back and watch, as helpless as a child beside a sobbing parent.
Mary had seen Sandy arrive this morning, but she hadn’t gone out to say hello. She’d stayed inside all the time he was there. Not because she was angry. But because she was afraid, somehow, to involve him in her sadness. The sympathy she felt for him hadn’t yet extricated itself from her own sense of loss, and there were questions of loyalty still to be answered, or at least to be asked.
She stood up to check the potatoes again. She was worrying too much. She always worried too much. She took it all on, these doubts and fears. David would shake his head when he saw her like this, frowning, fretting, wasting her time. She was always fearing the worst, he said, and perhaps he was right. The worst hardly ever came to the worst. Today was a bad day, and tomorrow might be too. But there would be better days soon, she knew that.
The front door closed again, and she heard David in the porch, taking off his boots, hanging up his jacket, unzipping his boilersuit. Now he’d be rolling up the sleeves of his jumper in preparation for washing his hands. She heard him sigh, then the bathroom door closed. She took the potatoes off the hob and drained them into the sink.
They didn’t speak much during the meal, and they didn’t say a word about Emma. They just ate and were grateful for each other’s company. They would talk later, Mary knew, when the day was over and tiredness drew them closer together. She stood up and took the plates away. David sipped at the glass of water in front of him.
‘Do you want tea?’ she asked.
‘Aye, dat’d be splendid.’
Mary set the kettle on and opened the fridge. She paused, gazing in the door, bothered by something. It took a few seconds to return to her. ‘Oh shite! I forgot! Maggie phoned at lunchtime. She was running out of milk, and I promised to take a pint down to her. That was hours ago. She’ll be cursing me now.’
‘No lik dee ta forgit,’ said David.
‘No, it’s not.’ Mary shook her head and grabbed a carton of milk from the fridge. ‘I’ll go now,’ she said. ‘I won’t be long. Can you do the washing up, please?’
David nodded. ‘Aye. An Ah’ll put da kettle on ageen when du gits hame.’ Mary smiled and headed for the front door. She picked up her gloves from the table in the porch, then went out to the car. The night was clear and cold, and as good as could be hoped for at the end of October. An ocean of stars turned above the valley as Mary drove down towards Maggie’s, at the end of the road. Her headlights carved through the darkness, hiding everything beyond their reach.
Maggie was old – she was coming on for ninety now – and had no family close enough to look after her. A sister, Ina, lived in New Zealand, and a niece, too. But she’d had no children herself, and her husband, Walter, was long dead. She did well for her age. Her health had mostly been good, and she didn’t need much help day to day. But she was not as independent as she wanted to be. David had taken on her croft more than fifteen years ago, when she lost the heart and the strength for it. He’d known Maggie for as long as he’d known anyone. He grew up in the valley, as she had done, and he looked on her not exactly as a parent, Mary thought, but as much a part of his own life as if she had been, in fact, his mother. Most days, one or other of them would look in on her, check that she was okay, see what she needed. David kept her updated with his work on the croft, and Mary related any gossip she could find worth sharing. Maggie still liked to hear ‘da news’, as she called it. She liked to know that lives were encircling her own.
With her thoughts still elsewhere, Mary didn’t notice until she pulled up outside the house that something wasn’t right. Usually it was lit up like a ship after dark, since Maggie never turned anything off as she went from room to room. But tonight it looked empty. Mary was relieved when she stepped out of the car to see a single lamp glowing through the living-room window. Maggie would be there, she thought, asleep in her chair beside the fire. But when she opened the front door and went in, shouting, as she always did, ‘Hi aye, it’s only me,’ she found the living room empty. She turned on the main light in the hallway and climbed the stairs. She knocked quietly on the bedroom door, then opened it to look inside. The room was empty, the covers turned neatly down. She went through the house, opening each door in turn, but Maggie wasn’t at home.
Mary tried to think of the possibilities. When they’d spoken earlier, everything had been fine. There had been no talk of anyone coming to pick her up, and no car had driven down the road in hours. Maggie herself gave up driving years ago, so she couldn’t have gone anywhere herself. It seemed inexplicable. Mary went out the front door again and looked up towards Terry’s house. The light was on there, and she drove the hundred yards or so, knocked and walked in. As
