Chapter Nine
That morning Hattie had woken early. She was lying curled, foetus-style, inside her down sleeping bag, but she still felt cold. They’d lit a fire in the Bod the evening before to warm up when they got back from the dig, but then they’d gone to the Pier House Hotel and by the time Hattie got back the fire was out. She had gone to the Pier House to be sociable, but soon felt uncomfortable and she’d left Sophie drinking with a couple of the local lads. Sophie could drink as much as the men, stumble back to the Bod in the early hours, fall into a deep sleep and be wide awake and hangover-free ready to start work on the dig the next day. Hattie had never got the knack of either holding her drink or sleeping. Ideas and plans seemed to swirl around in her head. She’d been awake when Sophie came in the night before. She’d lain still on the hard wooden bunk but she saw the swinging beam of torchlight, heard the whispered oaths as Sophie tripped, climbing out of her clothes, then almost immediately afterwards her regular deep breathing. Sophie sounded like a child when she was sleeping, or an animal.
She could hear the same sound now. Sophie’s sleeping bag wasn’t as good as hers but the cold never woke her. Hattie flicked on her torch. Six o’clock. Still dark outside and still misty. She could hear the regular moan of a foghorn far in the distance. Since they’d returned to the dig at Lindby, it seemed to her that Whalsay had become her entire universe. It was as if the fog cut the island off from the rest of the world. Her mother was a politician, a junior minister, and growing up Hattie had been surrounded by discussion of current affairs. The latest policy on healthcare, education, overseas aid, had governed their daily lives. Here she rarely read a newspaper, only saw television if it was on at Mima’s house or in Utra where Evelyn lived. World affairs had no relevance to her here. Digging away the layers of soil from the buried house at Lindby, she found herself engrossed in political concerns – the decline of the Hansa, the emergence of wealthy men in Shetland – but ones that had nothing to do with the present.
Sophie thought Hattie was driven on by ambition, and it was true that at one time the only future she saw for herself was as an academic. That meant a good PhD and a reputation as a solid and intelligent archaeologist. Now another, more personal obsession had taken over. She wanted to stay in Shetland.
The site had been a merchant’s house, much grander than she’d first thought. Whalsay had been an important port in the Hanseatic League – the medieval trading community of towns along the Baltic and the North Sea coasts – and she’d assumed that the owner had been a trader. But there were no records, no name for the owner. The university had been working in Shetland for years and Hattie had come first as an undergraduate, working on the dig at Scatness. She’d come across the site at Setter by chance and had found herself tantalized by the mystery. How could such a substantial house have disappeared so completely from Shetland’s history? It didn’t show up in any of the early maps or the records. She hoped the dig might provide an answer. Paul, her supervisor, had first thought that there might have been a fire to wipe away traces of the dwelling, but they’d found no evidence of that.
Hattie, who had been given to obsession since she was a child, found herself haunted by the place. In her imagination she lived there, in fifteenth-century Shetland, when the islands were still culturally closer to Norway than to Scotland and Whalsay’s loyalties were to the other Hanseatic ports, to Lubeck and Hamburg rather than Edinburgh or London. She saw the sailing ships arriving into Symbister and her husband, the merchant, counting out gold coins to pay his men for the goods he was importing from Europe, and the money he was paying the islanders for their salt fish and dried mutton. In her daydreams it was spring, but the sun was shining and the island was green.
Did the skull Evelyn had found belong to the merchant or to his wife? They were starting to find more bones in the second trench and perhaps they already had enough evidence to know. There were times in the early morning, as the damp penetrated her body, when she thought the dreams were driving her mad.
And it’s not just me
, she thought.
The dig’s getting to Mima too
. Their last conversation had been pretty weird.
At seven o’clock she began to get dressed, still sitting in her sleeping bag, pulling on the layers of clothes she would need to stay comfortable during the day. On top of the Tshirts she wore the hand-knitted sweater Evelyn had made for her birthday.
The Bod was one of a string of bothies spread across the islands, places for backpackers to stay. This was an old croft house and it just contained four beds, a table and a camping stove. There was a shelf with some pans, cutlery and crockery, an open peat fire. The Bod had one cold tap and they had baths and washed their clothes at Mima’s house, or more often at Evelyn’s. Evelyn was almost as passionate about the project as Hattie, and often invited them to Utra for dinner. She mothered them. Hattie thought she had her eye on Sophie as a potential daughter-in-law. Sophie was easygoing and pleasant, she ate everything Evelyn put in front of her and she laughed at Sandy’s jokes. Hattie knew Sophie would never marry Sandy – she had wealthy parents and ambitions of her own, which didn’t include being a policeman’s wife in Lerwick – but she might have sex with him for her own amusement. That was the way Sophie was.
Sophie didn’t wake until Hattie had lit the camping stove and made coffee. Then she stretched extravagantly, blinking in the light of the Tilley lamp. Hattie watched her through the open bedroom door. Sophie always slept naked and now sat quite comfortably, apparently not feeling the cold at all, with her breasts exposed, her long tawny hair falling around her shoulders. Hattie envied her.
I was never that comfortable with my body
, she thought,
not even as a child
.
Why would any man want to sleep with me
? Sophie, her legs still encased by the sleeping bag, looked like a mermaid or the figurehead of one of the sailing ships that in Hattie’s imagination had brought goods to trade with her merchant husband.
Hattie would have liked to ask who was in the Pier House the night before.
Who did you stay up drinking with?
But as usual the words stayed inside her head.
‘Is there anything for breakfast?’ Sophie asked. ‘I’m starving.’
Sophie was always starving. She ate like a horse without putting on weight. A natural athlete, she loped across the island at a pace that left Hattie breathless and panting, and she could work all day without seeming to get tired. Recently she’d been recruited by Anna to take her place in the Whalsay women’s rowing team. Hattie had watched her practising with the group, bending and pulling on the oars, collapsing in laughter at the end of the session.
Why can’t I be like that?
Hattie thought now.
I’m scared of the world and I always have been. I can’t blame Paul Berglund for that.
The image of her supervisor slid into her brain, filled it with his size and his strength. She felt a return of the old panic and forced herself to breathe slowly, to retreat to her dreams of the merchant house and her island lover.
‘I’m starving,’ Sophie repeated.
‘There’s bread,’ Hattie said. ‘Some of Evelyn’s marmalade.’
‘That’ll keep us going until elevenses at Mima’s.’ Sophie stepped out of her sleeping bag. Hattie was embarrassed by the sight of the girl’s naked body, but fascinated too. She couldn’t help looking at it, at the flat belly, the golden pubic hair, the muscular shoulders. She turned away quickly and began to slice bread.
Usually Sophie was full of chat about what had happened in the bar the night before, the island gossip, news of any overseas trawlers that had put into Symbister during the day, men she fancied, but this morning she seemed subdued and got dressed in silence. She opened the main door of the Bod and looked outside.
‘God,’ she said. ‘Do you think this fog will ever clear? It’s getting me down. Don’t you long for sun and a clear blue sky? It’s spring. In the south there’ll be green leaves and primroses.’
‘At least it’s not pouring with rain. I left my spare coat at Mima’s last night and the other one is still wet.’ But Hattie found the mist disturbing too. It slid across the island, changing her perspective and challenging her ideas about the landscape and its history.
She spread marmalade thinly on to a slice of bread, folded it in half and forced herself to eat it. There’d been a stage in her life when food had become a source of conflict between her mother and herself. Her mother had decided Hattie was anorexic, panicked and dragged her off to a specialist clinic. Being Junior Minister for Health made Gwen James sensitive about things like that, sensitive at least about what the press might write if they got the idea that Hattie was unnaturally thin and her mother doing nothing to address the problem. Hattie hadn’t been able to understand the fuss; not eating had been a symptom of her problem, not the root of her illness. Occasionally she got engrossed in her work and forgot to eat. So what? Now she remembered meals as a duty – like taking regular medicine – to keep her mother off her back. She was never hungry and seldom took any pleasure from food, even after a day’s work on the dig when Sophie was ravenous. It astounded her that people could waste time planning what they would cook, that a meal out was considered a treat.
Sophie had already finished breakfast and was brushing her hair, her one vanity. It hung halfway down her back, the colour of a barley stalk. Now she tied it back into a long loose ponytail at the nape of her neck. ‘We ’d better go,’ she said. ‘I suppose we can’t really be late with the boss on the island.’
The boss. Their supervisor, Paul Berglund. Another obsession from an earlier period in Hattie’s life. Now she realized the obsession had turned into an unhealthy paranoia. Sophie knew nothing of this; she hadn’t picked up on the antagonism between them. To Sophie, Paul was just ‘the boss’, someone who turned up occasionally to lay down the law about their methods, treated them to a decent meal out in a restaurant in Lerwick if he was in a good mood, signed off their expenses. She couldn’t know that Hattie was counting the days until he left.
Hattie didn’t think Paul would have allowed her to set up the project if he’d been supervising from the start. But he’d only joined the department the year before. She remembered the meeting at which he’d been introduced to her and Sophie. ‘You’ll have heard of Paul Berglund,’ the head of department said. ‘You couldn’t wish for a better supervisor.’ Paul had shaken Hattie’s hand, said how pleased he was to be working with her and given no sign that they’d met before. His hand had been cold and dry; hers was sweaty. She’d muttered something about feeling unwell, fled the office and thrown up in the nearest ladies’ toilet. Perhaps he expected her to dump the project, find another subject for her PhD.
But she hadn’t left – the dig on Whalsay had been her idea from the start – and she had made sure that he had no excuse for excluding her. Now the merchant’s house mattered more to her than escaping from him. Her record-keeping was impressive and though she wasn’t as physically strong as Sophie, her fieldwork was deft and thorough. Whenever she was in Paul’s presence she felt tense. She watched him, always aware of the space he took up, of his position in the room.
‘Paul Berglund was in the bar after you left,’ Sophie said. They’d left the Bod and were on their way to Lindby. They couldn’t see much beyond the field on each side of the track. Sheep were darker shades in the mist.
‘Oh.’ Hattie tried to sound unbothered. She didn’t want to hear about him.
‘Yeah, he was drinking whisky. I’ve never seen him pissed before. Not that pissed.’
I have
, Hattie thought, and shivered inside her fleece. ‘Anything else happen after I’d gone?’ She wanted to move the discussion away from Berglund.
‘Not really. I was chatting to Sandy, but he left before I did. He had to get home to his mammy. I mean, what is he like? He still acts like a fourteen-year-old.’ She shifted the straps of the rucksack on her shoulders. ‘I do see him as a bit of a challenge, though. I’m sure he gets up to all sorts of mischief in Lerwick. It would be fun to see if I can get him to misbehave here, on his mother’s doorstep.’
Hattie didn’t know what to say about that. She supposed Sophie could look after herself, but in her opinion all games around sex were dangerous. She would be quite pleased though if Sophie and Sandy hooked up with each other for a while.
They’d reached the dip in the land that led to Setter, the most sheltered spot on the island. The merchant had chosen the land for his grand house well. Hattie wondered if it had the same name then, something similar perhaps which had become corrupted over the years. They always called in on Mima before they started work, both as a courtesy and because she’d put on the kettle and bring them out tea if she knew they were there. The house seemed unusually quiet. Mima liked Radio Two, the chat of Wogan and singing along to the ballads she recognized. Sophie opened the door and called in but there was no answer.
‘She’s not there.’ Paul Berglund appeared from the back of the house, squat, short-necked, looking more like a soldier than a professor of archaeology. Hattie couldn’t work out what he could be doing there. He didn’t usually arrive on site so early. And if he’d been drinking the night before, shouldn’t he still be in the hotel nursing a hangover? ‘Come into the house,’ he said as if he owned the place. ‘Sit in the kitchen in the warm.’
Something awful’s happened
, Hattie thought.
What’s he done now?
