David thought back to the other caddies he’d had, generations of sheep hand-reared, some of them mothers and grandmothers of those in front of him now. When the girls were young, they’d looked after them. Emma, in particular. She would get up early to do the first feed, holding the bottles to their little mouths, two at a time, her face glowing in delight as they sucked and slurped and gulped the milk. Then, after school, she would rush home to see them again, carrying them like teddy bears, squirming, around the garden. For those first few months, the lambs were perfect pets. They were cute, they liked company, they played. But it was perhaps their neediness that the children responded to most of all – their utter dependence upon people. No child can resist being needed.
David let himself out of the feeding ring and walked back towards the gate, stopping once to look again at the sheep tearing their way through the grass as though they hadn’t eaten for a week. He felt tired, exhausted even, though he had no need to be, and as he sat down in the pickup again he allowed himself a long sigh. From the passenger seat, the dog sighed too, then shifted to rest its head in David’s lap. Sam raised his eyes, waiting for something or nothing to happen.
With Maggie gone, David was now the oldest person in the valley. And with Emma now gone, too, he was the only one left who’d grown up here. He wasn’t sure what that meant, exactly, but it seemed to mean something. It felt like a responsibility, a weight that couldn’t be lifted.
He had never lived anywhere else. Not really. He’d gone away to work after school was done, labouring in Aberdeen, but he’d come home again after only a year. He didn’t want the money enough to be away any longer. He came back to his parents’ house – now Terry’s house – then found a job at the oil terminal in the late seventies. Since then he’d never considered living anywhere else. This valley shaped his thoughts. Often it was his thoughts. The slope of it, the tender fold of the land. Somehow it was mirrored inside him. It was part of him, and he could no more leave this place than he could become someone else. That realisation had never once troubled him. Quite the opposite, in fact. It gave him a clarity of purpose, the lack of which he recognised in others. Life would be so much simpler, he thought, if people dreamed only of one place.
He sat in the driver’s seat, looking out over his place: his present, past and future. From there, at the edge of the upper park, he could see nearly all of the valley. Only the dip, south of this field, where the two little burns melted together, was hidden. Alice’s house, Bayview, was the closest, just up the road; then his own house, Kettlester, if you didn’t count the Smiths’ place up on the hill, which he did not. That was accessed from another track altogether, which came off the main road half a mile away, and neither looked nor felt like part of the valley. It had been built more than ten years ago now – a big, showy house with windows everywhere – but David had not yet fully accepted its presence.
Beyond Kettlester, the road curved southwest as it descended, until it reached the Red House, where Sandy now lived. There had been an old stone cottage there until the 1970s, when it was knocked down and replaced by the wooden one that still stood, which itself was not much more than a chalet. Willie, a cousin to Maggie’s father, had lived there all his life and agreed only reluctantly to the rebuilding, which Maggie herself had insisted on. He seemed to take the plan as an affront to his ancestors – to their ancestors – who might or might not have constructed the house. But his stubbornness was nothing compared to hers, and so the plan was eventually accepted. His only condition, to which Maggie consented but for which no one ever received a proper explanation, was that the new house should be painted a startling shade of red.
Willie lived another twenty years in that house. When it was first rebuilt, he had seemed old before his time, as though worn out by his own company. But when he died he really was old – almost a hundred – and had seemed to enjoy those final years as much as any he ever experienced. David bought the house, then, in part because he had the money and saw it as an investment, and in part because of what had happened to Flugarth, his parents’ house. Flugarth lay another few hundred yards down the road. That was where he had grown up and where he had lived until moving to Kettlester with Mary after they married.
His parents died just a few years apart and a few years before Willie. He’d sold their house then because he had no need for it. He’d sold it to Terry, whose brother 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