Mary closed the catalogue and stood up, draining the last of the tea from her mug. Outside, the sky hung grey above the valley. The temperature was increasing – it was six degrees, according to the thermometer beside the window – and yesterday’s snow had almost gone. The forecast was for the wind to swing south and rise to a storm this evening. Everything could change so quickly here, always. She’d often wondered if that was why David looked for stability in the turning of a year, since it couldn’t be found day to day, or even moment to moment. Sometimes her husband seemed to her about the most stable thing she had known in her life. He never changed. Or hardly at all. Like the larch tree she’d planted twenty years ago in the corner of the garden, he grew so slowly it was hard to believe he was ever any different from one day to the next. Sometimes Mary felt frustrated and irritated by his inflexibility; other times gratitude welled up inside her until she had to cry just to let it out. She would lean against his shoulder and put her arms around his neck. He would ask, then, ‘Whit’s wrang?’ and she would say ‘Nothing’, and he would pull her close and tell her he was glad.
* * *
Since David’s visit the previous day, the question had hung in the air like a promise. Sandy wasn’t sure, though, if it was a promise of good or ill. The offer of the croft had been so unexpected, so entirely tangential to his thinking, that it had taken some time to establish itself as a question at all.
Where do I want to be? That was what it came down to.
For more than two months, he had stayed on in the Red House, living almost as though Emma were coming back. He’d done nothing to erase her from their home. He hadn’t moved furniture around or bought new pictures to hang on the walls. He’d not gone through each room, removing the traces of her that still lingered – the books and clothes she’d forgotten. He’d simply carried on as before, only without her.
It wasn’t that he expected Emma to return. He had not left a space for her deliberately, in the hope she might appear on the doorstep one morning, begging to be let back in. He knew that she would not. And though there had been days when he’d longed for her, when he’d checked her Facebook page obsessively, hour after hour, in search of anything – a new friend, a photograph – that might contort his longing, that might summon the sharp, bitter blow of jealousy, there had been many more days when he had not, when he had simply wished her well.
In truth, he had not felt the need to fill her absence because the space she once occupied in his life had already closed. It had closed before she left – squeezed, slowly, over months, perhaps years, as Sandy prepared himself for a loss he couldn’t help but anticipate. It was a loss he did not want, that he dreaded, but which was made inevitable by his very expectation of it.
‘Du’s shuttin me oot,’ Emma would say, as he stepped back in silence from yet another convoluted discussion. And though he denied it, to her and to himself, that was almost exactly what he was doing: shutting out not her but his need for her. He was closing himself down, retreating to a place he knew better than any other. Abandonment, Sandy understood, was more comfortable than the fear of it. Emma had chosen to leave because he had given her no choice.
Since the last time he saw her, a few days after Maggie’s funeral, when she’d piled the final boxes into her little Toyota, they’d had only irregular contact. A few businesslike emails, sorting out the practical side of things, and a few phone calls, one of them tearful, sorting out the rest. She was in Edinburgh now, living not far from where they had first shared a home. He was here.
By rights it should have been Sandy who left. This was Emma’s place, not his. At least that’s how it once had felt. But Sandy didn’t want to go. He was happy here. Or as near to happy as he needed to be. He didn’t want to lose what Emma had given him – this place, these people – he just couldn’t help but lose her.
He understood, without really needing to consider it, that the current situation was temporary. He was living next door to his ex-girlfriend’s parents, renting a house from his ex-girlfriend’s parents. He was a part of their lives, and they a part of his, to a degree that, sooner or later, might not be okay – for him, for Emma, for them. A couple of his friends had already asked, casually, when he’d be moving. His father, too. But he’d brushed their questions off. It hadn’t felt urgent, and for now there was nowhere else he’d rather be. He could wait until a decision was more pressing.
What he had not anticipated before David’s intervention was the possibility that he might not have to leave at all, that he might, in fact, remain here in the valley, alone. And what he had certainly never considered, not once, was digging himself in even deeper by taking on the croft and the house at the end of the road. Not without Emma, at least.
Now, though, he had been forced to consider it.
Thinking back to yesterday’s conversation at the kitchen table, Sandy had the feeling that David had not just imposed a decision upon him but had already made the decision on his behalf. From the moment it was raised it had felt like a plan to which his consent was expected. Maggie had decided Sandy’s fate, David said. But it was not her who had done so, it was him. Walking down the road now towards Gardie, where lights were blazing in almost every window, Sandy felt a kind of vacuum had opened in the space between David’s will and his own – a vacuum that had to be filled. What he felt, perhaps, was an obligation, though he wasn’t sure why or when such a feeling had emerged. Nor could he tell, yet, if it was a burden or a gift. It was, so far, only a complication.
The afternoon was darkening and straining towards a storm, like an angry dog on a lead. The sharp cold of yesterday had twisted into something wilder. Already the breeze was much more than a breeze. It had come on almost unnoticed, a gust that failed to subside, but now it whipped up the valley, snapping at his cheeks and in the corners of his eyes. Salt hammered his lips. Everything leaned inland.
Sandy had not always felt at home in this valley. It had taken him some time to settle, to feel part of the place. He had resisted that feeling at first, unused to it as he was, but he couldn’t do so for long. Now, he moved through it as one might move through the rooms of a familiar house, attuned to its changes, day to day, moment to moment. The light and the weather were always in motion, and these he registered first. The snow that yesterday had covered everything was now almost gone, the sodden ground, the heather and the rock disclosed. The sky was a bruised grey, rushing north.
David’s pickup was parked beside the gate at Gardie, with an old chest of drawers lying face-up in the back. Sandy went in the front door of the house and shouted.
‘Hi aye, it’s just me.’
‘Ah’m up da stairs,’ came the reply. ‘Come du!’
Sandy found him in the spare bedroom, among a dozen or so cardboard boxes piled up and spread out across the floor, most of them open at the top, and each filled with paper and notebooks.
‘Shu kept aathing,’ David said. ‘Letters, postcards, diaries, aathing. And I dunna ken whit’s worth keepin and whit’s no.’
Sandy looked around the room and absorbed the dismay that David must already be feeling. ‘Mebbie we should just leave it for noo and start wi the simple things. Just keep it packed up and we can come back tae it later. If we canna decide, we can just put it aa up in the laft.’
‘Aye, du’s right,’ said David. ‘Ah’m liable to git bogged doon afore Ah’m even started at dis rate.’ He stepped out from amid the pile of boxes and raised his hands in dismissal. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘let’s move on. Ah’m ordered a skip for Tuesday, so we can start heavin bruck doon da stairs for dat. But first Ah’ll gie dee da tour.’
The two men crossed the corridor into the larger bedroom. Everything was still as it had been three months before. The bed sheets – white with a string of cornflowers embroidered at the foot end – were neatly folded back. A small selection of creams, powders and bottles sat on the dressing table. In a wastepaper basket beside the door were a pile