to Abigail Coyle and say what do you know about the different winds? a new wind would appear, as she answered. A fast, unending rush of air would come from between her gums: the different winds? Oh! So many … Where do I start? The wind that brings in fitful sleep? The first gale of the autumn? With the east wind, her husband swears that he can smell the mainland – heat, diesel, milk, spices, perfume, human breath.
But it’s the north wind that she’ll speak of, above all other winds.
The changing wind, Abigail told me. It never blows without changing the island in some way … For better, or worse? Who knows. It can do either, and that’s the truth. For the north wind has both mended hearts and broken them. It has brought both beauty and misfortune, restlessness and sleep. It has carried in babies but it has also taken lives and so the islanders worry when they hear the north wind blowing. They fear death – actual, physical, permanent death, but also the non-literal, where the heart has kept beating but its wish to keep doing so is small, very small if there at all.
* * *
It is past midnight.
In the house called Wind Rising, Leah is awake. She lies in bed and looks at the ceiling she has known all her life. The same paint on the same walls.
Leah is thinking of men. She thinks of Sam Lovegrove who ran into their kitchen five hours ago, saying Ian? Ian? She’d heard him. She’d put down her book, padded out onto the landing and looked down through the banisters. Ian? Listen – a man’s come ashore … She’d seen his blond head.
Then they had left, gone outside. And Leah had stayed on the landing. She’d listened to the sounds of a house quietening – the fading of footsteps, the slop inside the kettle, having been poured.
And she’d heard a tut-tut. A pause; then a rapid tut-tut-tut-tut-tut.
Leah had known what it was. She’d turned, walked into the bathroom where the sound was louder, looked up. Tut. The air vent – white, with the strands of cobwebs on it. It only ever rattles when the north wind blows.
A man’s come ashore …
Leah sits up now. She kneels by the window, pushes the window up so that air pours in like water. Her hair stirs; her nightdress does.
I could be nowhere else. This is a Parlan night. It is a night in her Parlan bedroom – with the pink walls of her childhood and the known, old sound of a book’s pages being turned by the breeze, one by one. It is a night like a thousand other Parlan nights in which she has listened to the sea’s constant sound – not a breathing back and forth as might be imagined but a low roar that does not change pitch or volume. Tonight could be like all the other nights.
But it isn’t quite.
She’d loved that tut-tut-tut. She’d smiled at it, in the bathroom – and she is smiling now. A change … How Leah has longed for a change. For years, she has watched the same sights, on Parla – how the lighthouse turns, how sheep kneel to graze, how the Star’s gangplank drops onto the quayside at the precise time it’s meant to. The mainland’s shape does not alter; the rising damp in the downstairs loo does not fade. And for years she has heard the same conversations – about ferries, wool, if the hens are laying, if Milton has fresh milk in stock, whether she’s had breakfast yet, so that Leah has rolled her eyes, thought it is always the same, always the same. Why is it always the same? Or at least, she used to think it. In time, the island made her heavier. It made her lie in her bedroom and think of nothing – nothing at all.
This slow, salty sameness – day in, day out.
But now? Tut-tut. And a man has come. The sea and the north wind left a man at Sye for Sam, of all people, to find. And as Leah had stood on the landing and looked down onto his red-blond hair she’d felt … what? Hope. That’s what. She’d barely recognised it. She has not been hopeful – for what good could it ever have done? How might hope have helped her? And so to have it now, in a dark bedroom, feels tender and lovely and absurd. It is a green shoot amongst the snow.
A man’s come ashore …
There will be an explanation, no doubt, and it will be plain and disappointing when it comes: he is a drunk or a lost guest or a man who fell off a passing ship or a swimmer who grew tired. It will be dull, and the green shoot will be lost, trodden on. I’ll go back to the old feelings – the old weighing down. But tonight, for now, Leah hopes that he is something better; she hopes that he is not merely a man who fell overboard, or a prankster.
Hope. It is the frailest of words.
Others are awake, too.
There is a man in the island’s Old Fish Store who lies, far from sleep. He also knows the wind is northerly. He knows this because of the sounds he can hear – the clear ting of halyards and the wire fences’ song. He can hear the sea saying stash … stash … He is Jim Coyle and he knows his winds.
In a farmhouse with rusting cars outside, Nathan sits in the dark. He has a glass in his hand; he waits for the lighthouse’s beam to whiten the curtains, lighten the room.
The widow at Crest is also awake. She squeezes a camomile tea bag against the side of a mug with a spoon, carries that tea bag to her compost bin. The kitchen light illuminates the night-time grass by her window and she watches it, spoon in hand. The grass flurries. She notes the wind’s direction – northerly? She stands in her pyjamas with her unbrushed hair.
After this, she climbs the stairs. And she sleeps; she sleeps under a white cotton sheet, and what she does not know – how could she possibly? – is that when she next sees that camomile tea bag, dried out and paler in her compost bin, everything will be different. She will look at it and think when I last saw that, I didn’t know … This is Maggie, and she knows how the smallest of things can take on new meanings, how a lifetime can change in a second or less. That used tea bag which is settling on the bottom of a plastic tub will, within a few hours, remind her of before – of a time when she knew less, felt less, and when Sye was a cove and nothing more. It will come to have a thousand meanings. In the hours ahead, Maggie will stare at that tea bag as if it can solve it all. But for now, it is only a tea bag. It sits in its own damp dark.
The lighthouse turns, as always.
Far out, a whale surfaces. Nobody sees it, but it does.
Three
The sky begins to lighten a little after four. In the east, there is a feathered grey, the softest of yellows. The daylight moves across the sea.
At nearly five, it comes to the eastern cliffs – the half-moon harbour, the towers of rock. The seabirds that roost here – fulmars, herring gulls – blink as the sunlight finds them. They bring their beaks down to their chests, and preen.
At the island’s south-eastern point is the main harbour. Slowly, its water turns from black to blue. Light moves along the old sea wall, the railings of the Morning Star and the smaller boats that are moored there – Calypso, Sea Fairy, Lady Caroline. Their ropes shine with hanging weed. The windows of the harbourmaster’s house glint, so that the child who sleeps behind them sniffs and turns onto her side, away from the light. There is a young man in this house who has not slept. He lies on his back, stares.
Above the harbour, on its south side, lies the Old Fish Store. It has a black slate roof – the sunlight strikes the nearest side of it. This is a squat, rectangular house. It is cold, too, as it needed to be in the days when the fish were kept here, laid out in a line. No fish in it now. Instead, two people lie in their bed with two blankets on. She sleeps, but he is stirring. He can hear the house creak, as it warms.
On with the sunlight.
A lane heads west, inland.