Питер Мэй - I'll Keep You Safe

Now she could see, sitting out on the promontory ahead, the ruins of the house built there more than a century before by a man from Ness, John Nicolson — or Iain Fiosaich in Gaelic. Known simply as Taigh ’an Fiosaich, the house of Nicolson, only the gable ends still stood. The broken-down remnants of side walls revealed empty spaces where windows had once looked out over the edge of the cliffs. Two hundred feet of granite and gneiss that gave on to one of the most spectacular views anywhere on the island.

It was the remote beauty of this place that had tempted Niamh and Ruairidh to make their home here. They had built a state-of-the-art house on the near promontory, looking across towards Taigh ’an Fiosaich. Beyond it stood the ruined church where Nicolson had once preached his own brand of baptist theology to the crofters who came out here for the summer.

The house that she and Ruairidh built had been designed to withstand the gales that blew in off the Minch or down from the Arctic. Stone and brick, thickly insulated to retain the warmth from a geothermal ground source heat pump sunk deep into the nearby bog. Windows were triple-glazed, cutting down on noise as well as keeping in heat. The whole house was finished to a high anti-corrosion spec, to counteract the constant assault of the sea that would rise on stormy days in salt-filled spray from the waves that broke over the rocks below.

There were freshwater springs all around, and so supplying water to the house had not been a problem. Electricity had presented a greater challenge. They had been forced to pay for the laying of a cable from Skigersta, providing a power supply that proved unreliable in stormy weather. It had been Ruairidh’s idea to install their own wind turbines as a backup. There were two of them at the far side of the house. They were supposed to kick in when the mains power failed, but it rarely worked out like that. The power supply was, at best, erratic. Television, internet and mobile-phone signals were provided by satellite, a huge dish firmly bolted to a concrete platform behind the house.

Beyond that was Ruairidh’s workshop, where he had installed his own Hattersley loom, spending hours in there, weaving, thinking, singing along to the music he loved to listen to as he worked.

Both buildings were single-storey, presenting a low profile and minimum resistance to the incoming weather.

Niamh drew her Jeep into the gravelled parking area at the front of the house. The main door was set into the south curve of the building, facing away from the prevailing weather, although out here the weather could come from anywhere at any time. She took her suitcase out of the back, and looked for a long time at Ruairidh’s case, and the brown cardboard box, before deciding that she would bring them in later. After closing the tailgate she carried her case to the front door. She paused for a moment before pushing down the handle and swinging the door into the house, knowing how painful it was going to be to walk in here without him. Of course, the door was not locked, just as they had left it. Just as they always left it. Most people on the island never thought to lock their doors. And out here there was even less reason to turn the key in the lock. Niamh smiled as she remembered Ruairidh telling her about an uncle who had sold his house after twenty-five years. When the new owners asked for the keys he realized he didn’t have any. He had never once locked the door in all that time.

She closed the door behind her, shutting out the sound of the wind. In here a thick silence permeated the house, a silence only invaded from the outside by the worst of storms. Light fell into a wide hallway from Velux windows set into the angle of the roof. Bedrooms to left and right were served by en suite bathrooms. At the far end, the hall opened out into the centrepiece of the house — a semicircular open-plan room built around a curvature of enormous windows that looked out over the cliffs to the ocean. The architect had been concerned by the size of the windows that Niamh and Ruairidh demanded. In the end he had come up with a design that divided the view into five still-life paintings which together framed the panorama. Except that these paintings were never still. They spooled an ever-changing movie of seascape illuminated by sunlight or moonlight, dramatized by a sky that sometimes raged, sometimes smiled, and often glowered. On clear days you could see the mountains of the mainland, so close you could almost touch them. Three layers of reinforced glass protected the interior from whatever the outside world might throw at it physically, but let in light and sea and sky to fill the eyes.

On one side, a long breakfast bar divided the living and dining areas from the kitchen. On the other, a settee and armchairs gathered themselves around two of the five windows, as if around giant TV screens. The dining table itself was set into a sunken area of floor, with a view straight out over the sea through two windows that rose from floor to ceiling.

To the side of the kitchen a passage led off to Niamh’s office. Her private and personal workspace, from which she conjured orders for Ranish from around the world, an arc of cluttered desk space with its own view south-east across the Minch.

Niamh took the suitcase into their bedroom and heaved it on to the bed. She would open it later. For now she looked around the plain white walls that they had hung with the paintings and framed photographs they had chosen together on jaunts around Lewis and Harris, chasing down tiny galleries at the end of impossibly narrow single-track roads.

She walked out into the big room and stood gazing for several long moments at the view that she and Ruairidh had so often shared, marvelling at the changing light and mood of the world beyond. His reading glasses sat on the coffee table where he’d left them. A scarf lay draped over one of the armchairs. Slippers were pushed beneath his seat at the dining table. He was everywhere in here. Even the familiar scent of his aftershave lingered faintly in the still air.

There was an ache in Niamh’s throat, her eyes dry and stinging. She went to the fridge and brought out a bottle of Olivier Leflaive burgundy, Les Sétilles, brought back from a visit to Puligny-Montrachet during a holiday the previous year, when they had met Olivier himself. The eighteenth generation of his family to make wine. They had savoured each of the bottles, and this was the last, destined to be drunk only by Niamh. But not now, she decided. She did not want to filter her memories through alcohol, and she poured herself, instead, a large tumbler of sparkling water.

It misted the glass as she poured, then she closed her eyes as she sipped it and remembered the touch of Ruairidh’s lips on hers. The thrill of that first time; the last time lost in a cloud of mourning and shattered memories. She had read in books, and heard people speak of breaking hearts. She’d always thought it a facile metaphor. Only now did she fully understand how it felt. As if a piece of her heart had been broken off. And even if she could find it knew she could never put it back. She recalled the awful image of Jackie Kennedy clawing her way across the rear of the car that fateful day in Dallas, trying to catch the pieces of her husband’s brain detached by Oswald’s bullet. As all the king’s horses and all the king’s men had found out, there were some things you could never put together again.

It was late afternoon and the wind had dropped when Niamh crossed the gravel to Ruairidh’s loom shed. The cloud had thinned and was starting to break up, sending short and long shards of sunlight darting across the moor, lingering sometimes in pools and purple patches where the heather was still in bloom. The Minch seemed at peace with itself, eddying in a series of white rings around hidden rocks just below the cliffs.