‘You are busy hiding.’ I can hear him smiling and I smile too, despite the tremor in my limbs, the strange electricity flickering under my skin.
‘I think I have upset you,’ he says. ‘I think I have hurt you.’
‘No!’ I say, turning to him.
His eyes are dark; his expression is pained. I look away. ‘You haven’t hurt me,’ I say. ‘I just –’
At that moment, the air-raid siren screams out from over the water in Kirkwall.
Cesare quenches the lamp immediately and pulls on my hand, dragging me under the concrete altar. My breath is tight in my chest, and his body, so close to mine, feels solid. Comforting and terrifying all at once.
The door to the chapel is open and, down the hill, I can see the lights in the camp being extinguished one by one. The island becomes a mass of darkness, with bone-white moonlight shivering on the sea.
We’ve had so few air raids: after the submarine attack, an order came from London for gun batteries to be built all along the coast, protecting the naval vessels moored around the islands, protecting the barriers, protecting us.
Over the sound of the siren, I strain to hear the noise of a plane’s engine.
‘What does a falling bomb sound like overhead?’ I ask, my voice high-pitched. ‘Will we hear it before it hits us?’
‘They will not be bombing us,’ he says, and he sounds steady, certain.
‘Oh, Con is by herself! In the bothy. I should go to her.’
I try to stand, but he says, ‘She is safe.’
‘She will be terrified.’
‘It is dangerous for you to walk out,’ he says. ‘When the siren is stopped, it is safe to walk.’
I know he’s right but I feel sick. I try to steady my breathing.
He says, ‘You want to go? Then I will walk with you.’
I shake my head, then realize he can’t see me in the dark. ‘No. It’s not safe.’
‘When I am in the desert in Africa,’ he says quietly, ‘I am frightened. So many men shooting and dying. I do not want to fight. I must. But I am scared. War is made for fear.’
He still can’t see me, but perhaps he feels me nodding; perhaps he hears my breathing slow slightly as I strain to catch the sound of his voice.
‘I must be calm,’ he says. ‘If I am not calm, then perhaps I make a mistake. Perhaps I die. So I make myself calm like this.’ My hand is motionless in his. He turns it over between his own and places his finger on my palm.
My stomach jolts. I don’t dare to move.
‘I think,’ he says, ‘what is the shapes of the mountains in Moena? I remember this.’ And he traces his finger in a curve over my palm. The hairs on my arms rise, but I am not cold.
‘And then I think,’ he says, ‘what is the shapes of the birds and the trees? I remember this.’ With his finger he sketches towering trees with arching branches; on my arm, he picks out the outline of a soaring bird. ‘Albero,’ he says, ‘uccello.’ And I know these must be the words for ‘tree’ and ‘bird’.
Then I feel him hold out his own palm for me. ‘Draw something. A thing you are remember.’
So, hesitantly, I trace the outline of the caves to the north of this island. I sketch the path that leads to them. I draw the sea that crashes around the cliffs below them.
I can’t hear the air-raid siren any longer, and I don’t know if it has stopped, or if everything has disappeared apart from us. His skin is warm. I reach for him. His neck, his face.
His breath brushes my cheek. In the darkness, his mouth finds mine.
‘Dorotea.’ He exhales my name against my lips.Constance
In May, each day stretches out longer than the last. The sun rises high in the sky and the light touches everything. Even the bothy is bright, the dark shadows banished, so that I can no longer doze my way through the days, even if I barely move from the bed.
And the lighter days seem to draw Dot out more often, too, and for longer. Even when I ask her to stay with me, she waits until I’m asleep – or until she thinks I am – and then she slips from the bothy, like a shadow. I watch her from the window, pulling the old sailcloth to one side to see her going towards the chapel. And I know that she must be going to see him.
Sometimes I pretend to wake up as she’s leaving and I cry out so that she will stay, at least for a while. It’s not only that I feel safer when she is with me, not simply that her presence exorcizes the darkness or softens the glare of the sun. It’s also that if she’s with me I know that no harm has come to her. I used to watch our mother feigning illness if a storm was coming so that our father would stay with her rather than going out on the boat. She would be doubled over, clutching her stomach, but if she caught my eye, she would flash me a brief smile and I would know: she was keeping him safe. She was keeping all of us safe.
That was when Dot and I were young, before our mother truly became ill. Before the pain kept her confined to her bed. Before she had to go out on the boat with our father to try to reach a bigger hospital, to try to find some stronger medicine.
If I could lock Dot in the bothy with me, I would. If I could make her follow me to some deserted island further north, I would.
One May morning, after Beltane has passed, the fires unburned, I pretend to be asleep, so that she will leave quietly, so that she will not suspect anything. As soon as she has shut the door,
