history, for the most part, had been easy. She had read everything she could find about the valley and the surrounding area, spoken to those who knew it best. She’d invited archaeologists out to walk with her along the edges of the burn, around the crofts and up over to Burganess. They had told her all they could tell her without digging the place up, and they had told her plenty. She trawled through the archives in Lerwick, noting down everything of relevance, filling files and folders with dates, names, events, causes and consequences. She began to see a picture of the place stretching backwards, rich and generous in its detail.
But the story of the valley couldn’t be told just like that, she understood. The story of the valley was much more than the chronology of what human beings had done here. It was everything that happened in this place, everything that belonged here and lived here. So she’d begun to learn, too, about the natural history, reading books on the islands’ birds and plants, then trying to find them for herself, describing and photographing them. And the more she learned, it turned out, the more there was to know. The book kept growing.
For a long time, she feared it would never be finished. There was too much to find out, she thought, too much to explore. She had taken on an impossible project. But now, finally, the end was approaching. The pile of papers no longer felt beyond her control. Most of the chapters were complete. The book had a shape; it was just a little blurred around the edges. Another six months, perhaps, and it would be done.
This was the first time Alice had attempted something like this, something real. It was also the first time she had written something for herself, without any other readers in mind. Crime novels: that’s what she used to write. That’s what she was known for. Those other books, five of them in total, she knew who’d be reading them. She could picture her readers as she wrote, and she had met them, too, at book signings and at festivals, back when she lived in York. Back when everything was as it used to be. They would tell her how much they loved her work, how much it meant to them. She couldn’t understand that. Not really. But that’s how it was. She was somewhat well known for a while, somewhat respected. She wrote stories of lone detectives: obsessive, flawed, angry and successful – at least in catching criminals. Gritty: that was the label they gave her, and that was fine. She enjoyed writing those stories, found it satisfying, mostly. She liked shaping the characters, moulding them, then pushing them around, moving them in their various directions until they reached the destination she had chosen, the fate she had decided. She felt, not powerful, exactly, but something like that. She had control, and she liked it. But then she stopped liking it. When Jack, her husband, became ill, everything changed. She had just begun her last book, Beggar Man, with a deadline in front of her, and a mortgage and bills and a reputation. She kept working, kept getting up each day and going to her desk, a cup of black coffee in front of her. But it was different. She no longer cared what happened next in the story. She no longer cared what her characters had done or what they were going to do. She no longer cared how the pieces fit together. None of it was real. It was all make-believe. What was real was Jack, and Jack was dying.
She finished the book, of course. She had to. She’d already been paid for it in advance, and paid pretty well. But it was hard. It took longer than usual. She missed her publisher’s deadline, then missed another. They were understanding, encouraging. They didn’t push too hard. Take your time, they said, we can wait. But she didn’t want to take her time. She wanted the book to be done and out of her way. What had once felt like her life now felt like an impediment to living. Each day was an uphill trudge. And then, when she reached the top of that hill, there was nothing to see. The path behind her had disappeared, and if there was a path ahead she couldn’t find it at all. She groped her way forward, stumbling with every step. She finished it two months before Jack died.
The book was a success. The reviews weren’t as positive as they once had been, but that didn’t matter. People still bought it. And the reviews were right. In fact, they were kinder than Alice would have been had she been asked for an honest opinion. She wasn’t embarrassed by what she’d written; she just didn’t want to think about it again once it was done. She refused the interviews and the public appearances. She needed some time out, she said, and nobody argued. Alice took the money and ran. She ran as far, almost, as she could think of going.
She found this house online a few weeks after Jack’s death, when she was searching for something that might make sense. She put in an offer, and that was that. She and Jack had come to Shetland on their honeymoon, at his insistence. He loved walking, loved the ocean, and neither of them had enough money back then to go any farther. Both of them had been entranced by the fortnight they had spent here, and they came back again three times in the years that followed. They talked, now and then, of coming here together, to live. This could be their place, they said, their home. But it never happened. There was always some reason not to go, some excuse to stay put. The distance, the inconvenience, the weather. So they talked about Shetland, thought about Shetland, but stayed where they were. And when Alice did finally move, she went alone. She boxed up Jack’s things, put them in storage, and shipped her own belongings north.
Their house in York sold for almost three times as much as this one cost, so she didn’t need to think about money again for a long time. It was a blessing not fully anticipated. It made everything easier. Sometimes the best decisions are made like this, she thought, in the weeks after her arrival. Just heart and gut and nothing more. This was a good decision. This was the right place to come.
The valley had fascinated her from the very beginning. She’d had a lot of time on her hands back then and spent much of it just walking and looking out of the windows at the place around her. She didn’t write at first. Not for several months after coming north. The urge had left her, and for a while she hoped it would not return. It seemed, in those months, an entirely false thing – a tragic distraction from the business of being alive. The hunger she’d always felt to put words on the page, to make stories, was replaced by a different kind of hunger, a different kind of need. Alice wanted to know this place in which she’d landed. She wanted to feel part of it and to belong to it. She joined clubs and went to meetings in town, she got to know her neighbours and made herself visible. She read and looked and learned.
Eventually, though, the words did come. But her appetite for invention did not. This time, when she started to write, the story was not one that Alice could control, only observe and record. It was an extension, a natural development of her need to understand where she was.
The thing about an island, she’d thought, as this project first began to take shape, is that you feel you can know it. You feel your mind can encompass everything in it, everything there is to see and to learn and to comprehend. You feel you can contain it, the way that it contains you. And a small valley on a small island . . . well, that’s what she was trying to do, to contain it in words and in thoughts, to describe the place and to encompass it, not just as it once was, or was believed to be, but as it is, here, now. The book was called, provisionally, The Valley at the Centre of the World. She liked that. It made her smile.
Right now, she was finishing up her chapter on mammals. It would be the shortest of the natural-history chapters. There was not much of a list to work with, after all. There were lots of rabbits, and some mountain hares, which she saw most often in winter, in their smart white coats. Hedgehogs were here; as were field mice, known as Shetland mice, and perhaps house mice too. Stoats were probably around, though she’d never actually seen one in the valley, so a question mark still hung over those. There was another question mark over brown rats, which didn’t seem to live in this part of the island, though she hadn’t made up her mind to exclude them just yet. Ferret-polecats were definitely here – beautiful, horrible creatures – and otters were regular visitors. There were three of them at the moment, a mother and two cubs, that she saw often from the beach, and a fourth, possibly the father of the cubs, she’d seen occasionally. Then, finally, there were the seals, both common and, sometimes, grey, though it was questionable whether these were in fact part of the valley, since they didn’t actually breed on the beach, they just hung around in the bay. (The cetaceans
