was well short of touching the ceiling.
Fifteen minutes later, perspiring, shivering a little, she padded over to the wardrobe and selected her clothes for the day, the same clothes as yesterday. The choice, in any case, was from among six identical low-cut tops in different colours, and two pairs of flared trousers, both green velvet. She possessed only one pair of shoes, a custom-made pair which she’d had to return to the shoemaker eight times before she could walk in them. She did not wear underwear, or a bra. Her breasts stayed up by themselves. One less problem to worry about, or two.
Isserley walked out of the back door of her cottage and sniffed the air. The sea breeze was especially spicy today; she would definitely go to the firth as soon as she’d had breakfast.
And afterwards, she must remember to wash and change her clothes, in case she came across another clever guesser like the vodsel with the mollusc in his pocket.
The fields all around her house were shrouded in snow, with patches of dark earth poking through here and there as if the world were a rich fruit cake under cream. In the western field, tiny golden sheep stood marooned in the whiteness, shoving their faces into the snow in search of buried sweetness. In the northern field, a giant mound of turnips on a raft of hay shone like frosted cherries in the sun. To the south, behind the farm steadings and silos, loomed the dense Christmas firs of Carboll Forest. To the east, beyond the farmhouses, churned the North Sea.
There were no farm vehicles anywhere to be seen, and no workers.
The fields were all rented out to various local landowners, who would bring along what was needed at ploughing time, harvesting time, lambing time and so on. In between times, the land lay silent and untouched, and the farm buildings rotted, rusted and grew moss.
In Harry Baillie’s time, several of the steadings had housed cattle through the winters, but that was in the days when there was money in it. The only cattle now were a few of Mackenzie’s bullocks in the field near Rabbit Hill. On the cliffs at the sea-bound rim of Ablach, a hundred or so blackfaced sheep grazed their cheap and salty forage. They were lucky there was a small stream flowing out to sea, as the old cast-iron water troughs were overflowing with the dark spinach of algae, or rusted nutmeg-brown.
No, Ablach’s current owner certainly wasn’t the pillar of the community Harry Baillie had been. He was some sort of Scandinavian, the natives thought, and a mad hermit besides. Isserley knew he had this reputation because, despite her policy of never giving lifts to locals, she’d had hitchers twenty miles up the A9 suddenly start talking about Ablach Farm. The odds against such a thing coming up in conversation with a stranger, even allowing for the sparse population of the Highlands, must be phenomenal, especially since Isserley was careful always to lie about where she lived.
But it must be a smaller world than she thought, because once or twice a year, a talkative hitcher would get onto the subject of incomers and how they were ruining Scotland’s traditional existence, and, sure enough, Ablach would be mentioned. Isserley would play dumb while she heard the story of how a mad Scandinavian had gobbled up Baillie’s farm and then, instead of turning it into one of these European money-spinning ventures, had just let it fall into decay, renting out the fields to the same farmers he’d outbid.
‘It just goes to show,’ one hitcher had told her. ‘Foreigners’ minds don’t work the same as ours. No offence.’
‘No offence taken,’ she’d said, trying to decide if she should dispatch this vodsel back to the place he claimed to know so much about.
‘So where are you from, then?’ he’d asked her.
She couldn’t remember now what she’d replied. Depending on how well-travelled the hitcher seemed to be, she had a number of places she might claim to be from. The former Soviet Union, Australia, Bosnia … even Scandinavia, unless the hitcher was saying nasty things about the mad bastard who’d bought Ablach Farm.
Over the years, though, it was Isserley’s impression that the man she knew as Esswis was slowly winning the grudging respect of the community. To the other farmers he was known as Mr Esswis, and it was accepted that he would conduct all his affairs from inside ‘the Big House’, a cottage twice the size of Isserley’s in the centre of the farm. Unlike her cottage, it had electric power in all its rooms, heating, furniture, carpets, curtains, appliances, bric-a-brac. Isserley didn’t know what Esswis did with these things, but they probably impressed visitors – few though these were.
Isserley didn’t actually know Esswis very well at all, despite the fact that he was the only person in the world who’d been through what she had been through. In theory, then, they had lots to talk about, but in practice they avoided each other.
Shared suffering, she’d found, was no guarantee of intimacy.
The fact that she was a woman and he was a man had nothing to do with it; Esswis rarely socialized with the other men either. He just stayed holed up in his big house, waiting to be useful.
He was, to be honest, virtually a prisoner in there. It was absolutely crucial that he be available twenty-four hours a day in the event of any emergency which might collide Ablach Farm with the outside world. Last year, for example, a carelessly driven pesticide sprayer had killed a stray sheep, not with pesticide or even under the wheels, but in a freak accident, braining the animal with the tip of one of its winglike booms. Mr Esswis had promptly negotiated an arrangement between himself, the owner of the sprayer and the owner of the sheep, nonplussing the other two farmers by accepting full blame for the straying of the animal, as long as unpleasantness and paperwork could be avoided.
That was the sort of thing that earned him his measure of respect in the area, foreign incomer though he was. He would never show his face at a ploughing championship or a ceilidh, everyone knew that now, but maybe it wasn’t because he couldn’t be bothered; there were sympathetic rumours of arthritis, a wooden leg, cancer. He also understood better than most wealthy incomers that times were tough for local farmers, and regularly asked for straw or surplus produce in lieu of rent. Pillar of the community Harry Baillie may have been, but he was a bugger when it came to contracts. With Esswis, a word muttered over the telephone was as good as his signature. And as for the way he tried to discourage tourists from trespassing, confronting them with barbed wire and threats, well, more strength to his arm. The Highlands were not a public park.
Isserley walked to the main path and, sighing with relief at being rid of her glasses for a while, peered across at Esswis’s house. The lights were on in all the rooms. The windows were all shut and opaque with condensation. Esswis could be anywhere in there.
The sensation of fresh snow crunching underfoot was deeply satisfying to Isserley. Just the idea of all that water vapour solidifying by the cloudful and fluttering to earth was miraculous. She couldn’t quite believe it, even after all these years. It was a phenomenon of stupendous and unjustifiably useless extravagance. Yet here it lay, soft and powdery, edibly pure. Isserley scooped a handful off the ground and ate some. It was delicious.
She walked to the largest of the steadings, the one that was in the best, or least shabby, condition. A dilapidated tile roof had been replaced by sheet metal. Whenever stones crumbled out of the walls, the cavities were promptly filled in with cement. The total effect was less like a house and more like a giant box, but these aesthetic sacrifices were necessary. This building must be protected from the elements and from the prying eyes of outsiders. It was the entrance to a much larger secret just below the ground.
Isserley stood in front of the aluminium door and pressed the buzzer underneath the metal signs saying DANGEROUS CHEMICALS and AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. Yet another warning sign hung on the door itself, a stylized picture of a skull and two crossed bones.
