might disappear altogether. Looking at it now, the day came back to her, as it often did – a day not unlike other days except that it was caught and held by the camera. The two girls were laughing, fooling around down at the beach, on a morning when the waves pawed noisily at the stones.
Back then, the sisters had been as cheerful, as content, as quick to smile as each other. Emma used to follow Kate around, she used to idolise her, and wanted, always, to wear what Kate was wearing, to do what Kate was doing. They were close. They shared friends, even after Kate went to junior high school, leaving Emma behind at the primary school closer to home. Mary never would have guessed, back then, that the two would turn out so differently.
One of the hardest things about being a parent, she thought, was to watch discontent grow in your children. When they were young, their needs and desires could always be met by a mother or a father. There was food when they were hungry; there was a bed when they were tired; there were distractions from boredom. And then, without warning, would come a question for which neither mother nor father could provide an answer. ‘Why does Sarah not like me any more?’ Mary could still remember when Kate asked her that, aged five or six, after school one day, eyes polished with tears over a friendship temporarily lost. And she could still remember being struck, in those few pained words, by the realisation that her daughters would not always be cheerful and content, that the world would disappoint them, that friends, family, would let them down.
As they both went on to junior high school, the parts of their lives that were beyond Mary’s control continued to grow. Then, it was not just other people who caused them consternation, it was their own bodies. They seemed sometimes confused by themselves, by the changes they were going through, by the new pressures under which they found themselves. Mary did her best to reassure, to be open to questions and to offer what advice she could. But her advice wasn’t always welcome.
That was the point at which her daughters went in different directions. Whereas Kate, as school went on, seemed to settle into herself, Emma never quite did. Kate, it turned out, took after her father. Her desires were well defined, and never beyond her ability to achieve them. But Emma was different. She seemed always uncertain of exactly what she wanted, uncertain of how to get it, uncertain of who or where she wanted to be. That was hardly unusual these days, but it meant that Emma and David increasingly struggled to understand each other. They were always close, always sought each other’s company, but they argued often.
Kate left school, got a job, met a man, got married, had children – one, then another. Mary worried about her, in that unavoidable way. She found reasons to worry even when there were none, and mostly there was no reason. Kate’s husband was good to her, they seemed happy together, the children were healthy, bright. But Emma . . . always Emma. She went to university, studied history and politics, and they thought perhaps she’d be a teacher in the end. But that wasn’t what she wanted. She graduated without a plan or a fixed intention. Mary could see that lack of direction weighing on her daughter, but she could do nothing to lift that weight, except to insist to David that he never ask Emma what she was going to do next. And he never did. He asked his wife instead. He sought reassurance from Mary, and Mary tried, when she could, to offer it.
They had both been delighted when Emma came home three years ago. Not just to have their daughter so close but to see her happy, to imagine her settled. Everything she had done up to that point had felt temporary, as if she were always in the process of deciding her next step. But moving home, that was different. Home was a destination. It was where you ended up. That’s what they thought.
When she’d spoken to Emma on the phone earlier, Mary had sat in the hall looking up at that photograph of her young daughters. She saw the face of a girl and heard the voice of a woman. What a distance lay between those two Emmas – the face, still laughing, the voice, holding back tears. Mary was mother to them both.
There was a time when she imagined this feeling might one day recede. That her maternal fretting might no longer fill her thoughts or keep her awake at night. But it didn’t work like that. As her children became adults, she simply found herself less able to help them, and therefore, if anything, more inclined to worry.
Mary looked at her watch. It was close to midday. She was meeting a friend in town in the afternoon, but she still had some time to spare. She reached into a drawer in the hall cabinet and took out two seed catalogues, then made herself a cup of tea and sat down at the kitchen table. The catalogues had both arrived in the past week, and Mary pulled the cellophane away and opened the first of them. She skimmed past the vegetables – that was David’s department – and began, slowly, to look through the flowers, pausing on every page to read the names and look at the photographs. Some of her favourites were close to the front: the aquilegias, strange and delicate, infinite in their variety; the frothy astilbes, white, pink and scarlet; the bleeding hearts, perhaps her favourite flower of all, so perfect and implausible.
In truth, Mary never ordered more than a few packets each year from the catalogues. She took cuttings and seedlings from friends, she bought plants at the garden centre, she propagated and divided what she already had. But buying was not the point. Looking was the point. To read the catalogues was to dream of summer. It was to be reminded that the winter would pass and that warmth would return. It was a ritual she needed more and more.
Flicking to the bulbs, Mary remembered with pleasure that before long the first snowdrops would emerge, unfolding themselves beneath bushes, alongside paving stones and at the edges of the lawn. Later, there would be purple and yellow crocuses too, then daffodils, ablaze about the garden. She had tried other bulbs over the years, though not always with success. Grape hyacinths grew in one of the borders, and Chionodoxas too, like tiny blue stars. Twice she had planted snakeshead fritillaries, longing for their purple checkerboard heads to fill the garden, but both times they had disappointed. On the most recent occasion, she’d buried fifty bulbs, but only four of the plants raised themselves above ground the following spring. Last year, just one plant remained.
Gardening in Shetland was an exercise in overcoming disappointment. Each year, Mary tried something new: at least one plant or one packet of seeds she had never grown before. She did her best to be sensible about these, to be modest in her ambitions. She looked for plants that didn’t need too much warmth or that were meant to thrive in ‘coastal climates’. But sometimes even modest ambitions were thwarted. Even when she took plants from friends’ gardens elsewhere on the island, life in this valley sometimes seemed to be too much for them. Facing southwest, as it did, there was little protection from the prevailing winds, little shelter from the gales and the salt that galloped up from the Atlantic, scouring everything in its path.
The worst were not the winter storms, though. Then, most of the plants were tucked up safe beneath the surface. The worst were the storms that hit in May or June, when everything was brimming into life. How many times had she opened the curtains on a spring morning to find her garden withered, burnt and shredded by the salt-filled air? And what else could she do but go out and tidy up the damage, do her best to make it good again, and hope that the summer would be kinder?
Mary needed the garden. Unpredictable and difficult though it was, it had become increasingly important to her over the past ten years or so. David had always seemed content to live within an endlessly turning circle, season following season, year following year. His hope was not for change but for continuation. Mary’s hope was different. She longed for growth and progress, a flourishing. That was how she felt able to live in this place, with all its cold and darkness. That hope made it possible. When the girls were young, it was easier – all energy and ambition could be focused on them, on their growth. In those years, the garden was hardly more than a place for her daughters to play. But now she needed more from it. She needed it to give something back, which occasionally it did.
Despite all of the disappointments – the seeds that came to nothing, the leaves that recoiled from the harshness of the wind, the flowers that opened then closed again, as though embarrassed by their pathetic display – Mary kept going. She dug and pruned and planted and weeded and waited; and for that work she was, to some degree, rewarded. Each year, in winter, the garden gave her something to hope for, something to look forward to. And each summer, no matter how terrible the weather, it would give her sporadic bursts