The land is green and painfully bright. I squint as I walk over the next hill, in the direction of those huts they are using for a chapel. If she isn’t there, I will go down to the infirmary.
When I round the hill, I gasp.
The last time I saw the chapel, it was two ramshackle metal buildings, half rusted, looking as though they would blow away in the next storm. Now, the huts are part of a new creation, something entirely foreign and beautiful. The chapel is smooth-backed, as if it has grown out of the earth, and with a concrete frontage that looks as though it has been taken from a fine sanctuary in another country. It reminds me of pictures I’d seen in newspapers of churches in lands to the south; the same churches that the radio tells us are being bombed now, and are in flames or crumbling, but this is whole and elegant. Some of the men are painting it white and, in the bright summer sun, the building radiates light.
I can’t see Dot, but I can’t make myself leave. Instead I find that I am walking towards this shining building, walking towards the men who are outside, painting, talking to each other in Italian.
They have no reason to harm you. I remind myself of the prisoners in the infirmary – not one had tried to hurt me. But then I’d been around other people. Now, I’m alone.
My shadow falls across the white-painted wall and the two men stop talking and turn, dropping their brushes. They squint, the sun in their eyes, and, for a moment, their faces are full of fear.
Then they relax into friendly recognition.
‘Bella!’ one says. ‘You are well? Where have you left Cesare, eh?’
‘I . . .’ I don’t know what you mean. The words die in my throat as I realize that these men must believe that I’m Dot and they seem pleased to see me: their smiles are welcoming, their faces open as they push a brush into my hand.
‘We have not painted the tiles by the door,’ one of the men says, still grinning. ‘You are doing this very fine.’
Then they shove open the door to the chapel and, brush in hand, I walk inside.
The sight knocks the breath from me. I’d expected the drab cold grey of the men’s sleeping huts – the glimpses I’d caught before they arrived had been of chilly corrugated metal and bare boards. An icy breeze had whistled through some unseen crack and every hut had smelt of rust and damp.
But the chapel is full of light. Sun pours in through the four windows to reflect off the white walls near the altar, and the painted tiles near the doorway. Around the altar itself are splashes of colour in half-finished paintings: a peach-skinned cherub is wrapped in blue cloth; a crow cradles an open book in its outstretched wings. On the ceiling, the outline of a white dove soars through an impossibly blue sky.
‘It’s beautiful !’
The men look at me strangely, and I remember that they think I’m Dot, and that she must be used to seeing all this wonder. And, suddenly, it’s too much: the thought of all the life that is passing me by while I stay locked in the bothy, locked in my own memories. I don’t know how to escape myself.
Footsteps outside the door and Dot is there, Cesare behind her. When Dot sees me, her jaw drops. ‘Con! What are you . . .’ She glances at Cesare and flushes. There are blotches of colour on her neck and chest and, for a moment, they look like fingerprints. But her eyes on mine are lively; she looks happier than I can ever remember seeing her.
I may vomit.
The memory envelops me like a wave. It is the moment that returns to me in the dark when I try to sleep and in the morning when I wake. The memory that lurks in the silence between heartbeats. Time folds in on itself.
I’m back with Angus, his hand in mine. He had taken me for dinner and then for a walk along the beach in Kirkwall in the half-dark. For weeks, I had been grieving for our mother and father and had refused when Angus asked me to walk with him. I didn’t know him well. In school, he had been two classes above and popular, but prone to wild outbursts and touches of cruelty towards younger boys. His sudden interest in me was as baffling as it was flattering. I didn’t know then how drawn he was towards people who seemed broken.
Dot had asked me, time and again, not to go. But the Kirkwall house was heavy with memories and my grief felt crushing. So that evening, when Angus knocked on my door and asked me to walk with him, I said yes. What could be the harm?
As we walked, he gave me a gold chain. He fastened it around my neck and then touched the point where the clasp touched my skin. My blood jolted and I didn’t dare to move. But when he asked me to walk along the beach, I felt I couldn’t say no. I didn’t want to upset him, or to be ungrateful, when he’d been so kind to me.
The beach was dark and empty away from the harbour. Angus took his shoes off and jumped down onto the sand.
‘Come on.’ He held out his hand and I didn’t know how to say no. So I didn’t.
He put his hand around my waist. I was intensely aware of the pressure of that hand, so it was hard to swallow, hard to focus on anything else. But I felt it would be rude to push him off.
We walked away from the harbour lights and further along the beach, where the only sound was the rush of the waves, and the only illumination on his face, when he turned to me, was the
