having a husband who was his own boss and Joseph had always been happier as a farmer than a builder. Maybe they’d managed to save some money when Joseph was working for Hunter.
Recently Perez had taken up with Hunter’s ex-wife and Sandy didn’t know what to make of that. He teased Perez about having a woman in his life again and Fran seemed a fine woman, but in his opinion anyone who’d been involved with Hunter was trouble.
It was lambing time and Joseph had been up on the hill to check his ewes. Many of the islanders didn’t bother so much. Mostly the hill ewes could manage on their own, and now there was no subsidy for headage it didn’t even matter if they lost a few lambs. But Joseph was conscientious and this time of year he walked miles.
His father had heard the car on the track and waited for him outside the house. ‘Aye, aye.’ This was Joseph’s form of greeting to the whole world. Sandy thought if the Prime Minister arrived on his land he’d say the same thing. He stood at the kitchen door watching as Sandy crossed the yard. He was wearing a blue boiler suit splashed with creosote.
Sandy couldn’t think what to say. He wished he had Perez’s gift with words. Now phrases floated around in his head and all he could come up with was ‘We’ll miss her. I’m sorry.’ He touched his father’s shoulder, which was as close as they got to physical contact. He knew Joseph had adored Mima. Once Sandy had heard his mother say to his big brother Michael, exasperated because of something Mima had done, ‘She’s a poisonous old witch. I’m sure she’s put a spell on your father.’ And sometimes that was how it seemed. Joseph would drop everything to fix a slate on her roof or hoe her vegetable patch.
A brief moment of pain crossed his father’s face, then he made an attempt at a smile. ‘Aye well, maybe that’s the way she would have chosen to go. She never minded a bit of drama. It would have been quick. She’d never have been able to stand illness, hospital.’ He paused. ‘I thought she had a good few years yet in her though.’
That was his father’s way. Things he couldn’t change he made the best of. He said there was no point in taking on the world. He’d never win. Besides, he had Evelyn to do that for him. All Joseph needed to keep him happy was football on the television and a few beers in the evening. He’d worked all over Shetland for Duncan Hunter. Now he’d be quite content if he never left Whalsay again. Evelyn had always been ambitious on his behalf, with her plans for the house, the croft and her sons. Sometimes Sandy thought she might be happier if she moved away, to Edinburgh maybe, to be close to Michael and his family, that Whalsay was just too small for her.
Inside the house she seemed content enough now. Perhaps like Mima she enjoyed a bit of drama, needed it to make her feel useful. She was sitting in the old chair, feeding the lamb from a bottle. Before she realized they were there, she was talking to it in nonsense language as if it was a baby. When she saw them she put it back in the box, ran her hands under the tap and stood at the Rayburn to stir a pan of soup. ‘Reestit mutton,’ she said. ‘I had some in the freezer and I know you like it. I was thinking of Mima while I was heating it through. It was her favourite too.’ Joseph went to wash at the sink. She came up behind him, turned him to face her and pecked his cheek. Sandy was still taking his shoes off. ‘Are you ready for some lunch too, son? Has that nice inspector of yours gone?’
‘He’s away back to Lerwick to see the Fiscal. I’ll take a small bowl of soup.’
‘He thinks a lot of you, I can tell. I’m proud of both my boys.’
‘Have you told Michael about Mother?’ Joseph sat himself at the table, laid his hands flat on the oilskin cloth. The fingers were fat and red. Sandy remembered again the day they’d struggled to kill the pig, the noise that seemed to drill into his skull before the poleaxe silenced the animal, the blood.
‘I rang him at home this morning but he’d already left for work. Some early meeting. I caught Amelia as she was on her way out and left a message with her for him to call me. He was on the phone a few minutes ago. She’d only just managed to get through to him.’
His mother was still talking. ‘He wanted to know when the funeral was. I said we couldn’t make plans until we know when your Inspector Perez will release the body. Michael will definitely come. He’s not sure about Amelia and Olivia.’
Sandy knew fine well Amelia and the baby would stay in Edinburgh. She had her work for one thing, and that mattered more to her than the family. She’d brought Olivia to Whalsay once when she’d been just a couple of months old and she was still on maternity leave, and then there’d been nothing but complaints and anxieties. She’d gone home earlier than expected. ‘Oh, I couldn’t dream of missing baby massage. It’s the best way there is to bond.’ Sandy couldn’t understand how his mother, usually so clever and on top of things, could be taken in by it all. But he made no comment. This wasn’t the time for a row.
He watched his mother ladle out three bowls of soup and his father stand to cut the bread. Suddenly he couldn’t bear the thought of Setter without his grandmother. He wasn’t optimistic like his father. Despite what he’d said to Perez, he couldn’t believe it was for the best.
His mother wouldn’t stop talking. She got that way at times of stress. Now she was rattling on about Setter and pushing Joseph to make plans for the land and the house. Sandy wasn’t really listening to her and he wasn’t sure his father was either. He was eating the soup, lifting his spoon with mechanical regularity, chewing and swallowing as if his life depended on tipping the steaming liquid into his mouth.
‘I’ve told the lasses from the Bod that they can carry on with their work once the police say it’s OK. That’s all right, isn’t it, Josie?’ No answer. None needed or expected. ‘I wondered if the Amenity Trust might be interested in buying the house, in renting it at least. The boys won’t want to live there.’ Her voice continued, but Joseph’s spoon was still. ‘Michael won’t leave Edinburgh now and Sandy has his flat in Lerwick. It would make a fine visitor centre once the excavation’s finished.’
Now Sandy was listening too. He was about to protest when he caught his father’s eye across the table. Joseph gave a brief shake of the head unnoticed by his wife. A look that said,
Chapter Twelve
After the midwife went, Anna Clouston sat in the window of the living room and looked out over the water. She carried James with her and sat with him lying lengthways along her knee. It was unusual for her to be alone with him and she felt that he was a stranger; she couldn’t believe it was the same child she’d been carrying in her body for nine months. Perhaps that was because they’d had so little time on their own since they’d come back to Whalsay from the hospital. The house had been full of well-wishers, people bringing presents and cakes and casseroles. And then, this morning, the police had come.
Anna had struggled to adapt to living on Whalsay. It wasn’t the isolation that was the problem; that she relished. She liked the drama of living on the island. It was the feeling that she had no privacy, that her life was no longer her own and she was crowded with people telling her how to run it. What was most difficult was finding that she’d become attached to a family so entirely different from her own.
Her parents had started a family in middle age. Anna’s father was a junior civil servant, bookish, reserved and a little distant. She had the feeling he’d been bored at work and had felt undervalued. His work had been routine and he wasn’t the sort of man to put himself forward for promotion. Her mother taught in a primary school. Anna and her sister had been brought up in a family where money was saved, thrift was encouraged and academic achievement was valued but not flaunted. Treats were only obtained after hard work. It was a suburban, respectable life of church-going, music lessons and weekly visits to the library. Nobody put their elbows on the table at mealtimes. Restraint was taken for granted.
Of course at university she’d met people from different backgrounds but she’d come out at the end with her view of the family intact – represented by the smell of the Sunday meal as her mother lifted it out of the oven, the sight of her father dead-heading roses in a late-summer garden, her sister dressing the Christmas tree with the faded baubles brought out each year. Anna had imagined that she’d replicate it in her turn, with a few minor changes: certainly she’d be more assertive than her mother – you wouldn’t catch her cooking a roast dinner every Sunday – and she’d marry someone a bit more exciting than her father. But the basic pattern would be the same. What other was there?
