worked with David at Sullom Voe and who seemed, when he first came to view it, to love the house. The assumption had been that he would move in with his family, but his family never moved in. They came for weekends and summer holidays during the first couple of years, but that was about it. And then Terry began to come alone. Not for holidays, exactly, but to give his family a break. He came to drink or to dry out. Sometimes he’d arrive by himself on a Friday evening and stay until the Monday morning, hardly leaving the front door. Other times, his wife would drive him to the house and let him out at the gate, abandoning him until he was ready to come back home.
More recently, Terry had been staying for longer and longer periods, and for the past six months or so he had lived here full time. David wasn’t entirely sure of the story – he’d heard several versions – but it seemed that Terry’s wife, Louise, had finally given up and got rid of him. His employers, the council, had presumably done the same. Or at least they’d told him not to come back until he’d got himself sorted. Terry wasn’t drunk all the time. There were days when he was fully present – sensible, friendly and good company. But he was unpredictable. He couldn’t be relied on. And though David felt sorry for him, he’d always found it hard to see his parents’ home used like that. It was a disappointment that didn’t go away.
Beyond Flugarth was the house at the end of the road. Officially, it was Nedder Gardie, though no one had ever used its full name in his hearing, except the postman. There was no Upper Gardie from which it had to be distinguished, so the house, like the croft, was known as Gardie. When he was young, his father sometimes referred to it as the Peerie Haa. It was, presumably, a joke, though at whose expense David never knew. Most often, it was just called Maggie’s. But Maggie, now, was gone.
A straight line from that house to where he sat took in the greenest part of the valley, though at this time of the year it didn’t look very green, even without the snow. The fields on this side of the burn were used either for grazing or for silage, with one narrow strip below Kettlester where David grew potatoes, onions, neeps and carrots. The other vegetable plot was up beside the house. When he was young, there was more growing and less grazing in the valley. There were hay parks and sometimes oats; and Maggie and his father often had a cow and calf down in one of the lower parks, sharing both the work and the benefits between them. He missed seeing those things – that vision, deceptive though it was, of abundance – but he understood it had changed for a reason. Money had become easier to earn than food was to grow; it was as simple as that. And now, though he had retired and so had time, in theory, to do things differently, David found he had neither the energy nor the will, at least not on his own. Each of the fields in front of him belonged either to his croft or to Gardie. And for years now he had worked all of them alone.
David thought again about Maggie. That night when they’d found her, crumpled against a rock on Burganess, he’d been aware of a kind of urgency inside him, a recognition, tinged with panic, of something approaching an end. He had not really understood that feeling at first, had thought it merely grief and nostalgia – and perhaps it was both – but it was bigger than that. The thing he felt ending was not just one person, or even one generation; it was much older and had, in truth, been ending for a long time. It was a thread of memory that stretched back for as long as people had lived in this place. It was a chain of stories clinging to stories, of love clinging to love. It was an inheritance he did not know how to pass on. That recognition brought with it a fearful kind of responsibility, as though he had been handed something he knew he could not help but break.
For several weeks after Maggie’s death, David had felt himself to be at an edge, teetering, and his sadness about what was to come was almost as great as his sadness at what had already gone – at the loss of the woman he had known all his life. Three months on, it still rose inside him whenever he stopped to think of her.
He was not entirely surprised when the letter came, a fortnight ago, from the solicitor in Lerwick. Maggie had never said explicitly that the house and croft would be left to him, but he understood why she’d done it. In the end it came almost as a relief – an echo and a partial answer to his own worries. She had entrusted the land to David in death, as she had done in life. But not, he understood, for his own benefit. She had nominated him as a kind of executor, to do what was right, to make a decision about the future.
What was right was for someone to live in the house and to work the croft, as she would have wanted it worked; and three months ago, before Emma left, his decision would have been easy. David would have asked his daughter and Sandy if they would like to move from the Red House to Gardie, and he would have done so joyfully, certain of Maggie’s approval. That was, undoubtedly, what she’d had in mind. But with Emma gone, too, everything was more complicated. The sense of continuation he longed for was much harder to see. His connection to both past and future had been weakened at once.
For two weeks, on and off, he and Mary had discussed the options, had woken in the night to talk them through again, and they had dismissed or discounted all but one.
As he turned the key in the ignition, David realised he missed his wife. It had been only a few hours since they’d had breakfast together, but he missed her all the same, and he wanted, then, to be with her. In an hour or so he would be home for lunch, and there was nothing to keep him from being home all afternoon. But he had one more task to complete before then. He had a question that needed to be asked.
Stamping his boots at the doorstep and kicking hard against the wall, David cleared the snow from his feet before he opened the door and went inside. ‘Hello! Sandy! Is du aboot?’
There was a shuffling from the kitchen, and Sandy emerged in a thick blue woollen jumper, tattered at the cuffs. ‘Come in,’ he said. ‘I’m just made coffee. Du must be psychic.’
David grinned. ‘Well, I wouldna say no,’ he said. ‘A coffee micht git some life back inta me.’
Sandy nodded and turned back to the kitchen. ‘Come and sit doon,’ he said.
The two men sat across the table from one another, but both were looking out of the window, over the valley, at the whitened hill and the sea. Their hands clasped around the hot mugs in front of them.
‘Looks good fae in here,’ Sandy said.
‘Aye. Looks pretty good fae oot dere, too,’ David replied. ‘Juist a peerie bit caalder.’ He said nothing for a moment and then turned to Sandy. ‘I hae some news fir dee,’ he said, then paused a second longer, trying to find the right words. ‘It seems Maggie may juist hae decided dy future.’
‘What does du mean?’ Sandy spoke slowly.
‘Well, shu left da hoose an da croft ta me in her will. An since Ah’m quite happy eenoo in me ain bed, someen else’ll hae ta live doon dere.’
Sandy waited for more.
‘Shu was thinkin at dee an Emma micht want ta move in, I suppose, if du wanted to wirk da croft, an if du wanted ta hae a family. But, seein as du’s chased me dochter awa, I reckon I hae ta offer it ta dee, if du wants it.’
Sandy looked away.
‘Ah’d help dee wi da sheep an da idder wark,’ said David. ‘We can help each idder. Ah’d be happy wi dat.’
‘Has du offered it to Emma?’ Sandy asked.
‘Aye, I telt her da situation, but shu’s no thinkin ta come back eenoo.’
‘And Kate?’
David shook his head. ‘Dey’re no wantin to move oota da toon. An I dunna lik ta think o it juist sittin empty. So, if du wants it . . .’
Sandy
