I take the Land Rover today; I remember when I first drove it Jack laughed at how many times I stalled it, but now I prefer it to our car. I like its height and the view it gives of the island, and how it doesn’t mind being roughly driven up and down our heavily pitted track that leads to the main island road. It still feels strange to have Lorna so close beside me, just inches apart, but also somehow comforting too. I guess I hadn’t quite realised how lonely last night’s exchange with Jack has made me feel. And with the girls out and about too … Well, it’s nice to have the company. As I drive she asks me about my background.
‘I grew up just outside Edinburgh, the youngest of three girls. You can guess what that was like for my old man.’
Lorna laughs and the sound almost makes me jump. I glance across at her. She looks completely different when she laughs. Her grey eyes sparkle, her lips spread into a warm smile. For a moment she seems relaxed, at ease with herself. She reminds me of my eldest sister Caitlin, who has always worn her body with such casual grace that it infuriated me when I was an awkward teenager with too-long limbs and knobbly knees. Lorna looks nothing like the woman who sat at my kitchen table last night, pushing food nervously across her plate and glancing at my husband every time he spoke, a look something like fear on her face.
‘I can imagine,’ she replies. ‘What are your sisters like?’
‘Oh, they’re brilliant. They’re both incredibly clever, they always have been. Caitlin’s the eldest and is a doctor. She could have been a surgeon but she chose to be a GP. They desperately needed GPs when she graduated – she’s now a partner at a practice outside Edinburgh. Shona teaches a branch of mathematicsat Aberdeen University that I’ve never totally understood.’
When I was young I wanted nothing more than to be like my sisters. But where words and numbers and scientific equations seemed to come naturally to them, often I felt like my brain had a puncture. As hard as I tried at school I was only ever average at most, praised for ‘trying my best’ but never excelling at any subject. As my sisters won school awards and then gained places at top universities I looked on from behind, admiring and envying them in equal measures.
‘I was always more outdoorsy,’ I tell Lorna. ‘I loved animals, hiking, swimming. I first came to this island on my gap year after my A-levels, as aWWOOFer.’
Lorna laughs again and I find myself grinning too, hearing for myself the absurdity of the word.
‘A what?’
The sun slants in through the Land Rover windows, warming my arm that rests on the windowsill, the other on the wheel.
‘It means a volunteer. There’s an organisation called World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms – they offer placements. I helped out here at Hilly Farm just after Mr and Mrs Halifax had died.’
‘I’ve been meaning to ask – how did you and Jack come to own the farm?’
‘It’s an amazing story really.’
And it so easily could have gone a different way, my life and Jack’s taking different paths.
‘Not having any children or close family they left the house and farm to the islanders as a community, to do with it what they thought was best. It was decided they wanted to make it into an organic farm, so they needed loads of volunteers – I saw an advert about it and decided to come and help. That’s when I first met Jack. He was just nineteen then, a year older than me, but was one of the islanders most involved in the project. He’d be down here every day, working the land, rebuilding the fallen-down walls. He didn’t know that much about farming back then but there were plenty of older farming families on the island to help him and to show us all what to do.’
‘What was he like when you met him?’
Her voice is so eager that it makes my throat tighten. She has missed so much. They both have. Last night’s argument melts away for a moment as I picture Jack as he was when I met him and how quickly he got under my skin and into my heart.
‘Oh, he was so scruffy! All messy curls and muddy hands. He seemed a little rude at first, but I soon worked out he was just shy. And he was so focused on his work, I think he didn’t necessarily want any distractions. But I eventually managed to distract him.’
I don’t tell her that as soon as I met him I saw the sadness in him too. Just from looking at him as a teenager you could tell that he carried a pain under the surface, a sense of loss.
‘Oh, I bet he didn’t mind,’ says Lorna, a smile in her voice. ‘So that’s when you two got together then?’
‘Not exactly.’ It wasn’t as easy as that. ‘My placement on the farm ended. By that point I was head over heels in love with Jack, and with the island too. But I had a place at university lined up. I wanted to do something academic like my sisters, even though I’d only just scraped the grades to get into my third-choice university. I came back home to my parents and got a job at a café until it was time to move and start my course. But I was miserable. I missed Jack and the farm. We wrote letters, we phoned each other, but it wasn’t the same as being together. I think my parents could tell how unhappy I was, because one day they sat me down and told me that I didn’t have to follow the same path as my sisters, that they loved me for me and they would be proud of me whatever I did.’
Lorna turns quickly away, but before she does I catch a glimpse at her face. She looks as though she is trying not to cry. What really went on behind closed doors when she and Jack were children? I have my own view about what it must have been like to grow up in that house, and it’s not a good one. Jack’s father was an alcoholic, although no one in the family ever used that word out loud. It was a quietly accepted part of who he was, that lingering smell of spirits as well as the anger that always seemed to simmer beneath his dark grey eyes. I tried my best with his mother, but there was a coldness and a quiet to her that made her difficult to connect with. My in-laws may have lived just minutes away from us but I never really felt comfortable leaving Molly alone with them even if I couldn’t have told you in words exactly why – it was more a lingering sense of unease, a feeling of wanting to hold my daughter tightly to me whenever we were around them.
But despite all that I’ve never managed to get Jack to truly open up about his past. I know that Lorna leaving the island hurt him deeply, but I’ve always thought she must have been hurting too in order to have left like that. Glancing across at her now I can’t help but feel a flash of disloyalty to my husband to admit it so readily, but I like her. There’s a quiet strength to her as well as a softness, the two sitting side by side like opposites so often do in us humans.
‘That must have been such a relief,’ she says, her face and voice composed again.
Thinking back about it now, it was such a strange time. I did feel so grateful to have that support from my parents, but it took me a while to let go of the plans I had made and to decide to return to the island. By choosing not to go to university I was turning my back on the life I thought I’d wanted and the life I’d seen my sisters achieve. In my heart I knew I would never quite be like them. I had to make my own way. But even now I still have moments when I wish I’d got a degree, if only to prove to myself that I could.
‘Eventually I made up my mind to go back to the island,’ I tell Lorna. ‘I rented an old crofter’s cottage at first, but saw Jack all the time. And then there was a big meeting at the village hall where Jack was told the islanders had decided to give him Hilly Farm, if he wanted it. Of anyone on the island, he’d put in the most work and seemed to love the place the most. We moved there together, got married and had Molly a couple of years later. And we’ve been here ever since.’
Looking back, I was so young when Jack and I got married. I may be the youngest in my family but my sisters were still studying when I had Molly. It was nerve-racking, falling pregnant so far away from my family. But in the end, I was overwhelmed with support from islanders I hadn’t known for long but who had quickly become firm friends.
‘Wow, that’s such a wonderful story,’ says Lorna.
‘I think so. I’ve been very lucky. But what about you? Is Ella’s dad still on the scene? If you don’t mind me asking.’
She hesitates for a moment. Perhaps I should have worked harder to dampen my curiosity about her. But after a moment’s pause she answers.
