An Orkney Hearth

He was drying a cup when he saw her.

Torfinn was through in the other room with the football on, and Erland was at the sink with a tea towel in his hands, not looking at anything in particular.

There was a car at the top of the road.

Sheena Muir's Fiesta, sitting at the gate with the engine running, and somebody getting out of the passenger side.

A woman.

She stood there while the car turned and went back down the road, and Erland stood at the sink with a cup in one hand and a towel in the other.

She was too far off for him to have picked out one feature of her face, and the light was going. 

She had her hands behind her back.

The cup went down on the drainer.

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***

 

She looked at that door for a long time.

Come down.

His hand had gone flat on the edge of the sink and he did not know when he had put it there.

Come down. Knock the door.

She did not come down.

She turned and opened the gate at the top of the field, the one with the orange twine on it that he had been meaning to fix since October, and went through it, and started up the hill.

Erland stood at his uncle's sink and did not move. 

She had come seven thousand miles and gone past a lit window, and she was going up a dark field on her own, and she was going to do it in whatever she had on her feet.

He knew exactly why. He had known that woman since May.

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***

 

He got the eggs out of the fridge.

Six of them, and the bread out of the crock, and the milk, and after a second the tea as well, because he had a kettle up there and nothing else at all. He took two clean towels off the rail and put that in too. It took him about forty seconds and he did not make one sound he could avoid making.

"There's a fella here says it's a penalty," said Torfinn, from the other room.

"Aye."

"It is not a penalty."

Erland got his coat off the peg.

"I'm away out."

"At this hour? There's weather sitting out—"

But he was already through the door.

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***

 

The wood was in the byre.

He went out the back with the canvas bag and the rain arrived while he was filling it, going from nothing to a wall of it inside about fifteen seconds with the wind behind it.

He stood in the byre door with the bag half full.

Wet logs are no fire, and there was a woman up that hill in a house with nothing lit in it.

There is a roll of plastic sheeting in that byre. He had put it somewhere sensible in November and he spent ninety seconds throwing things about looking for it while the rain came off the eaves in a sheet two feet from his face.

It was not there.

He took his uncle's old wax jacket off the nail by the door, the one that had not been on a man's back in ten years, and wrapped the bag in it, and got both arms round the whole arrangement, and went out into it.

​

***

 

It is ten minutes up that field.

He did it in six, and every step of it he was working out whether she would have taken the track instead, because the track is twenty minutes and if she had gone round that way she was still out in this.

There was no light in that house. Not one. The whole shape of it black on the top of the hill with the sky going over it, and the rain coming across sideways, and every step of the way up the same thing.

She'll be gone.

She'll have looked at it and turned round.

She'll have got to the top of that field and seen it and thought, what is this. What has he done.

And what if she took the track. Twenty minutes round in this and I'm going up the field and I'll not even pass her.

Or she's off it somewhere with her ankle and there's not a soul on that hill to hear her.

Hurry.

And where's the ship?

The ship sailed at five. I watched it go past the point myself with a cup of tea, and she was on it. She was on it and now she's not.

So she's done something.

And what if she's been standing in the dark in an empty house for twenty minutes working out what she's done.

Hurry.

He came round the gable with the bag in both arms.

The door was shut.

He put his hand on the stone for a second.

Then he turned the handle.

​

***

 

She was on the floor.

In front of the hearth with her arms round her own knees and a Captain's jacket on and her feet bare, and she was making a sound he hoped never to hear again as long as he lived. 

She got herself round.

And every word Erland Isbister had put together on the way up that hill went out of him like water out of a bath.

You came.

You came and you went past the door.

I have not once picked up the telephone since the twenty-first of September, because I said I would not, and it has been the hardest thing I have ever done.

I built the window you told me about. I did not mean to. I stood in that gable in November and I could not put a wee one in it.

I bought a bed I have never slept in.

Nora.

He did not say any of it.

He was not going to make that woman explain herself on a floor.

He put the wood down, and hung his coat on the peg, and took his boots off.

Then he knelt at the hearth and lit the fire.

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Book Two, Marco and Evie's story, is coming in Autumn. You can preorder An Italian Harvest now.

 

Fair winds,
Sara Romera