“Yes.”
“Aye. Took a bit of finding, that, but I got it. And I’ve got a plasterer coming out to sort out all the bits of the interior wall that need fixing.”
I told her I owed her. “Not at all,” she said brightly. Then, turning to get back into her car, she added, “Why don’t you come over one night? Bring the girls.” She winked. “We can have that coffee with a dram of whiskey.”
IV
I registered the girls at the local school, a small joined-up primary-through-secondary school with a hundred kids. It was very relaxed, with a lot of focus on the outdoors, and I tried not to think about where I would register them once I finished the mural.
I decided to keep the girls at home for a week longer so we could spend some time together before I started work, and specifically to try to get myself back into Saffy’s good graces. The weather played nice for us, those grim scenes of lashing waves and witchy trees we’d been met with on our first night ripening to lush vistas of emerald fields, golden beaches, and rich blue ocean. The wildlife, too, was something else—we came to recognize the seals that seemed to reside on the rocks behind the Longing, the big gray one who shuffled and grunted in response when Clover called hello to him each morning, and the two slim black ones who often played together in the water, slick and quick as missiles.
“Sharks!” Luna shouted one morning. I raced outside to find her pointing at a dorsal fin moving slowly through the water, only twenty feet or so from where we stood. A fishing boat was nearby, and I saw a man leaning over the side, sliding a pole into the water. The dorsal fin turned and began heading toward him. Clover clapped a hand to her mouth.
“The sharks are going to eat him!” she squealed.
The man was shouting something.
“What did he say?” Luna said.
“It’s Basil,” he said, waving his arm at us. “Basil!”
“Basil?” I called back.
“Oh, the basking shark,” Luna said. “Remember? Isla told us about him when we arrived.”
We watched, speechless, as the shark lifted its snout out of the water to the fisherman’s pole. And instead of feeding it, the fisherman used the pole to rub up and down the shark’s body.
“He likes a good scratch,” the man shouted.
And every morning after that, a similar scene—the fisherman, whose name we learned was Angus McPherson, stopped off at the bay on his way back from his morning catch to say hello to Basil, our friendly neighborhood basking shark.
We visited Camhanaich, the ancient standing stones set in a circle, which, according to Saffy, was likely used by Neolithic settlers for ritualistic slaughter. We drove through a sea fret, which was like driving through milk, and watched coal-black storm clouds roll in like traveling mountains. We explored the forests, spotted otters and kingfishers by the rivers, and the clock-round face of an owl in flight. We picked wildflower bouquets and took them back to the bothy, identifying each plant using an old encyclopedia of Scottish flowers: fair-grass, fool’s parsley, bog myrtle, hop-clover. We dried and hung them from the windows of the bothy.
We took old tin trays that I’d found in a cupboard at the bothy and went sledding down the grassy slopes of Braemeith, the tall hill in the middle of the island, until we got told off—Braemeith was a fairy hill, a farmer told us crossly, and it was bad luck for any human to step on it. The girls thought this was fascinating.
And at the Neolithic museum we learned that the Longing was built on an old broch, a fortified dry-stone tower dating back to 500 BCE. The guide at the museum gave the girls a leaflet each and flinched when I said we were staying in the bothy.
“You’re staying at the Longing?” he said, raising an eyebrow. “Quite a history, that place.”
“I can see that,” I said, flicking through the leaflet, my eyes falling on an artist’s rendition of people being burned at the stake.