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 – orcas and porpoises, mostly – had been excluded for that very reason.) The livestock were not part of this chapter. They were in the agricultural section of the book, which she’d finished, just about, at the end of last year.
Alice had gathered all the information she could find about these animals: details of their basic biology, diet, population size, rough date of introduction where available (since all, besides the seals, were introduced to Shetland by humans). She had also tried to document sightings of each species to allow her to describe more fully their habits and locations within the valley, which is why the stoats had proved problematic. Everything that seemed relevant would be included, and almost all of it had now been written. The chapter was nearly done.
Lifting her head again from her work, Alice rolled down the sleeves of her dark woollen jumper. She looked younger than her forty-five years but dressed older. She wore glasses when she was writing – wide-rimmed tortoiseshell glasses that were accidentally fashionable. Everything else was merely comfortable. The jumper, the jeans, the T-shirts, the fleece jacket: she liked not having to think about what to wear. It was one of those freedoms she had not even realised was missing until, coming here, she had found it.
Alice often became distracted around this time of the morning. She would rein in her straying thoughts for as long as she could until she was certain they would not come back into line. Then she would walk. Half an hour was all that was needed usually, unless there was something specific she had to find, observe or figure out. It was enough time for her to get partway up Burganess, then come back, or else to stroll, without hurrying, along the beach. Today, she had nowhere in particular to go, so the beach, probably, was where she’d end up. Putting down her pen, Alice straightened the pages on the desk, picked up a notebook, just in case, then went to get her coat. As she opened the front door, a curtain of cold air folded around her body, and she thrust her thick-gloved hands into her pockets.
* * *
At the top of the valley, where the road began its stoop towards the sea, David parked his pickup and got out. Sam, the collie, stayed behind in the passenger seat, keeping warm. Along the fence here, on a row of wooden pallets, small blue silage bales were piled, two high and three deep. In the field beyond the gate, the sheep were waiting. The sound of his arrival had brought them running in anticipation.
Though the snow was only shallow, the animals looked hungry and called out to him, impatient. David went to the far end of the row and reached up to a bale on the top. He scraped the snow away, then pulled the bale back towards him and rolled it slowly to the gate. He always took from the far end because he knew, as the winter went on, that his gladness at having done so would increase. The task would get a little easier each day.
He opened the gate and pushed the silage into the park, the sheep already gathered round him, their breath billowing. He split the metal feeding ring and pushed the bale inside, then took a knife from his pocket, slicing first in a circle around the top, then in four vertical lines to the bottom. He lifted the top of the plastic off and pulled the four strips down to reveal the silage. Carefully he peeled the netting away and bundled it into his boilersuit pocket, then began to unravel the bale, loosening and spreading