by Kait Jagger
Unfortunately, Malcolm Couper’s flock of black sheep was comparatively small, numbering around a hundred. And he was the only farmer on the ‘Mainland’ (Shetland being an archipelago of hundreds of islands, only sixteen of which were inhabited) who specialised in black sheep. Shetland sheep came in every colour from white to grey to brown, to various mixtures of them all. Because breeding exclusively black sheep required effort, and because black wool was less versatile than white, being impossible to dye, farmers were reluctant to breed them.
‘They see black sheep as a nuisance, or worse, bad luck,’ Malcolm explained during the tour of the area he gave her that very first day, his cherubic face creasing into a smile. ‘You’ve heard the term “black sheep of the family”? Well, it started in Scotland. Some folks up here still think that even one black sheep brings bad luck to the entire flock.’
Never mind that what Sören and Malcolm were proposing – a cooperative of sorts that would represent the farmers’ interests in selling both their wool and the meat from their lambs – represented a massive opportunity for these farmers, many of whom barely eked an existence working land owned by someone else. Never mind that it might result in the creation of a new industry, and jobs, on an island where fishing and tourism were currently about the only game in town.
They were mistrustful, these Shetlander farmers, of outsiders in general and folks who told them how to do their job in particular.
From her vantage point atop the cliff side, Luna could see heavy clouds rolling in from the west, across the Atlantic. With a little sigh, she pulled on her helmet and mounted her bike. The ewe had presented her with an opportunity, one she needed to act on.
Rules for living in Shetland
Rule 1 – Say yes to every offer unless there’s a really good reason for saying no.*
Five minutes later Luna pulled into a farmyard a few miles inland from the coast. With its whitewashed, two-storey stone farmhouse and adjacent corrugated iron barn surrounded by a variety of tractors in various states of repair, the Ollason property was a working farm. In the paddock adjacent to the barn were around thirty black and white Shetland cattle, and as Luna pulled to a halt outside the barn, several chickens ran squawking in front of her.
She jumped off her bike and removed her helmet just as Chris Ollason emerged from the barn. A thin, wiry man in his mid-forties, Chris reminded Luna of his livestock. Like them, his physique seemed to be perfectly adapted to the harsh environment of the island. All that was visible for miles around his farm was heather and peat bogs, punctuated by the occasional stretch of scruffy, blue-green grass. There were no trees, the poor soil and near constant wind on the Shetlands making them unviable.
Dressed in a well-worn blue boiler suit, he was wiping his greasy hands on a cloth and raising a hand to Luna when his wife Ruth stepped out of the house, drying her hands on a dishcloth herself. Luna made a point of greeting Ruth first, virtually turning her back on Chris.
‘I’ve just been down that track you told me about,’ Luna said, smiling at her.
‘The one down to the cliffs?’ Ruth asked, gesturing toward the sea in the distance.
Luna nodded. ‘You were right. That has to be in my top five coastal views ever.’
Ruth’s lips curved, her black eyes shining and dimples forming in her cheeks. ‘Well, we like it, don’t we, Chris.’
‘You manage to get that all the way down there?’ Chris asked, nodding toward her bike. Or, actually, what he really said came out more like, ‘Du menege to get dat all da wee down dere?’ It had taken Luna a while to train her ear to his local accent. Ruth, who hailed originally from near Edinburgh, was much easier to understand, with her genteel Midlothian accent.
Luna patted the saddle of the bike affectionately. ‘Oh, aye,’ she said, smiling at the bit of colloquial Scottish that had crept into her own vocabulary. Then, remembering the purpose of her visit, she said, ‘I found one of your sheep stuck in a fence up there. I got her out, no probs, and I tried to fettle the fence, but one of the posts has come out.’
‘Right, I’ll nep n tek a look at it later,’ Chris nodded, casting a final envious glance at the bike. Chris was an ex-biker himself who had only given up at Ruth’s insistence. He headed back into the barn.
‘You want to come in for a brew?’ Ruth asked. ‘I’ve just made some scones.’
Luna made a show of demurring, but her answer was never really in doubt.
‘Well, if you’re sure you don’t mind…’
To which Ruth just laughed and said, ‘Come on, you,’ and headed back into the kitchen, Luna following in her wake.
* When the offer involves food, the answer is always yes.
Rules for living in Shetland
Rule 2: Spend no more than a quarter of your waking hours at home.
‘Home’ for the past two months had been Malcolm Couper’s small croft ten miles outside of Lerwick. Not quite as bleakly evocative as the Ollason farm, nor nearly as large at only twenty acres, the croft had been unoccupied for almost a decade before Malcolm moved in with his new wife three years ago, full of plans. He’d set about converting the dilapidated stone cottage with its ‘fael’, or turf roof, into holiday accommodation, built a kit home for himself, his Norwegian wife Liv and their little boy George, and most ambitious of all, started breeding his herd of black Shetland sheep, some of whom were grazing near the entrance to the croft as Luna pulled up the dirt track.
Malcolm’s two border collies, Castor and Pollux, stood together next to the farm gate, barking furiously at her approach, stopping only when Luna removed her helmet. Then the two brothers moved as one toward her, begging to be petted.
Entering the stone cottage through a doorway so low she had to duck her head, Luna quickly removed her biking jacket in the small front hallway, hanging it on a wooden peg behind the door, and removed her boots. She pushed open the oak tongue and groove door to the front room to find a tall, angular woman with short, strawberry-blonde hair sitting on the settee, working on her laptop – Dagmar Sandhorst, Sören’s lead buyer and Luna’s boss.
Luna thought Dagmar looked pleased to see her, but it was difficult to tell, given that her boss’s default expression was diffident bordering on gloomy.
Nodding to her, Luna said, ‘Hallå i stugan.’
‘Hej, Luna,’ Dagmar said. ‘Hur är det?’
Luna briefly gave a thumbs up, then added, ‘I’ll just go change and we’ll be off, yes?’
‘Okay,’ Dagmar replied. Somewhat dubiously, Luna thought. Dagmar was not yet convinced of the value of their Tuesday night outings.
She quickly bounded up the tiny, creaking stairs to the master bedroom. On Luna’s arrival two months ago, Dagmar, who only spent three days per week in Shetland, had graciously offered to move into the smaller twin bedroom on the ground floor. Not that Luna’s room was large – none of the rooms in the cottage could honestly be described as ‘roomy’ – but with its antique rosewood bed with a cast iron bath at its foot, and two skylights in the sloping ceiling, the loft was the brightest room in the house. And if you stood in the well of one of the skylights, it commanded a lovely view of nearby Lerwick, particularly at night.
Luna peeled off her Gore-Tex trousers and pulled on some jeans, then donned a t-shirt, followed by a long-sleeved shirt. She paused to consider which of her five Shetland wool sweaters she should wear that evening – the white, the dark grey, the light grey, the several shades of grey, or the black. The black, she decided, pulling it over her head.
She briefly studied her face in the mirror over the ancient porcelain sink in the corner of the loft. The woman in the reflection looked almost preternaturally pale, with blue eyes so milky they were practically opaque, and a pallid, heart-shaped face framed by long, dark brown hair. And sad, Luna realised. She looked sad.
Swiftly turning away from her reflection, she walked out of the bedroom and ran down the stairs, meeting Dagmar in the front hall. She thought she saw the ghost of a smile on D
agmar’s lips at the sight of her black sweater, but again it was hard to tell; it could just as easily have been a grimace.
The two women exited the cottage and made their way to the bungalow. When Luna had first arrived at the croft, she wondered why Malcolm hadn’t kept the quainter stone cottage for himself, but in the intervening weeks, shivering in her bed as the wind whistled across the loft, she began to understand. The cottage was fine for occasional visitors, birdwatchers and the like, who mostly came during the summer. In the winter months, however, the place was deadly cold.
Malcolm and Liv’s brand new ‘passivhaus’, by contrast, had solar panels and a ground source heat pump. Their open-plan kitchen practically oozed cosiness as Luna and Dagmar entered to find Liv sitting at the table coaxing George to eat his dinner, while Malcolm washed dishes in the sink.
Malcolm and Liv were a bit of a mystery to Luna. At age fifty-three, Malcolm was twenty years his wife’s senior, and temperament-wise, they couldn’t have been more different, Malcolm being an innovator and risk-taker, while Liv was fundamentally risk averse. Likewise, whereas Malcolm had been quick to welcome Luna, Liv had taken much longer to warm up.
‘Lulu!’ George shouted from his high chair, spattering what appeared to be pureed carrots on his mother in the process.
‘Hey, Georgie.’ Luna smiled at the toddler, whose plump, happy face was the spit of his father’s. Liv, meanwhile, took advantage of his momentarily open mouth to shovel in a spoonful of peas, before standing and adjusting her handmade wool smock.
‘Okay, Malkie,’ Liv began, ‘George needs to eat four more bites of his dinner, then he can watch CBeebies for a half hour. Then it’s story time and bath.’
‘Right, Liv, you get off,’ Malcolm replied. ‘George and I will be fine.’ But instead of following her husband’s advice, Liv began fluttering around George, who soon realised his mummy was going somewhere without him and began to cry. Dagmar looked at Luna impassively and cocked her head toward the door, indicating that she’d go wait in the car.
Rules for living in Shetland
Rule 3: Fake it till you make it.
It had been Luna’s idea to join the knitting club that met weekly at various houses in and around Lerwick. This despite the fact that she could not knit.
‘It’s a way of ingratiating ourselves in the community,’ she’d explained to Dagmar, and when her boss frowned her incomprehension she simplified, ‘A way of making friends.’
This week’s session was taking place at the home of Judith Andersen; at eighty-nine Lerwick’s oldest and most accomplished knitter. Not that any of the other twelve or so women in the club was a slouch, Luna reflected, looking around Judith’s small front room and adjacent dining room, currently pulsating to the sound of clicking needles. Dagmar herself was an excellent knitter – she’d made the black cable jumper Luna was wearing tonight – as was Ruth, from whose craft stall Luna had purchased her first, dark grey Shetland wool sweater on her third day on the island.
Luna, meanwhile, was sitting with Ruth’s nine-year-old daughter Maisie at a hastily installed card table next to the kitchen, laboriously working on a scarf, the simplest, most basic item of clothing she could make. And even that looked messy and uneven compared to Maisie’s sterling work; Luna hadn’t ‘learnt the trick of getting the tension right’, according to Judith.
But never mind. The knitting was secondary to Luna’s purpose anyway. With a show of sighing, she stood and walked over to Ruth where she sat with a trio of knitters on the settee.
‘What have I done wrong here?’ she asked, kneeling next to her. Ruth took her scarf and examined it, tsking under her breath.
‘We’re going to have to pull this entire row out to fix it,’ she said, starting to unravel Luna’s hard work of the past ten minutes. The women next to Ruth began to laugh and Luna cast them a guilty, slightly clueless look – a look that was not entirely her own.
Quite early on during her time on Shetland, Luna had realised that she would need help to accomplish what needed accomplishing here. No matter what Sören thought, at the end of the day she was just a PA. So when on her second day Malcolm had presented her with the bombsite that was his office, she’d been in her element, setting to on the stacks of paper, creating order out of chaos.
But the act of charming the locals, making friends with farmers, trying to win them over to her cause? That was another matter entirely. It required skills that Luna knew she lacked. So she had taken to pretending to be other people from time to time, as the occasion demanded.
For situations like this, where guileless sweetness was needed, she pretended to be Jem, the sweetest, most guileless person she knew. And when she was talking to builders at the site of the new wool processing building, or representatives from the local board of commerce, she pretended to be Nancy, her silver-tongued, hard-negotiating friend.
And then there was Stefan. She found that despite her best efforts, he would not stay in the drawer of her imaginary apothecary chest where she kept trying to put him. Some days he seemed to be with her constantly, a shadow standing just behind her shoulder, watching her. She remembered going to visit an old farmer named Petersen during her second week here, who practically chased her off his land.
‘Nae mair shargin!’ he’d screeched at her. ‘Feck off, du n dat Swedish wumman.’
Luna had driven off in her car, hands shaking, until imaginary Stefan, sitting just behind her in the back seat, observed, ‘Sometimes it goes not so well, this first encounter.’ She could practically hear him laughing as he added, ‘Maybe not as bad as that, but…’
When she saw Petersen standing at the bar of her local pub the following night, and Luna’s first instinct was to give him a wide berth, it was Stefan who whispered in her ear, ‘Go on, give it a try. What is the very worst thing that could happen, flicka?’ So Luna walked over and in the millisecond after he turned his sour gaze on her, she tried to act like Stefan, to do what he would do. Lifting her hands, she said, ‘I know, I know, but your glass is empty, and I’m buying. I insist.’ To her surprise, the old man let her, and when she’d briefly put her hand on his shoulder and made to move away, he asked her to sit and apologised for his behaviour the previous day.
She came home that night full of the joys, though she was careful not to share her triumph with Dagmar, for Mr Petersen had had a few choice words to describe her Swedish boss. But that night, for the first time, she saw how it might be possible to win men like Petersen over.
From then on, she pretended to be Stefan most of all when she was talking to farmers, asking them questions, trying to gain their confidence. She began to hear his calm, rational voice in her own, and it made her feel stronger. So she stopped trying to stuff him into a drawer, and learned to live with his wraith.
Rules for living in Shetland
Rule 4: If and only if you comply with rules 1, 2 and 3, you can relax your guard at home.
It was gone 9pm before Luna and Dagmar got back to the cottage, running from the car to the door in the driving rain. Luna paused in the doorway to wave at Liv as she entered the bungalow, then entered the hallway and immediately stripped off her sweater, resisting the omnipresent urge to scratch her neck and chest where the wool had come into direct contact with her skin.
Dagmar went straight to the front room to check her emails, so Luna headed to the kitchen to tend to the Rayburn. The old cast iron cooker also served as boiler and water heater for the cottage, and it required regular fuelling. As much out of fear of cold showers as anything else, Luna had become an expert at keeping it running. She squatted in front of the dark green range now like a practised hand, opening the fire door and loading it with anthracite from a basket next to the kitchen door.
Going to the small Smeg fridge, she poured two glasses of sparkling Swedish water, for which she’d developed a taste while she was dating Stefan and which Dagmar had started bringing over from Stockholm in her checked luggage. The irony of the fact that, despite having
parted with Stefan, she was drinking Swedish water, and religiously removing her shoes when she entered the house, and learning to speak basic Swedish wasn’t lost on Luna, but these gestures had been a point of warmth between her and Dagmar, something she was keen to foster.
Luna went into the front room and placed Dagmar’s glass on the table next to the settee, then tended to the fire, throwing a few bricks of peat onto it before sitting in an armchair next to the hearth. Dagmar acknowledged none of this, but Luna was used to that and took no offence.
Back in February, after she’d completed her first tour of the farm and surrounding area with Malcolm, Luna’s initial, overwhelming temptation on entering her new home was to go straight up to her bedroom, climb under the duvet and go to sleep. Anything to escape the lingering, pervasive sadness that had followed her all the way to Shetland.
Only the thought of Sören’s faith in her and her dread at the prospect of disappointing him had stopped her from becoming a hermit in those early days. She’d learned to make deals with herself, come up with rules for living here, timetables to stick to, things she could and couldn’t do. And largely, it had worked. There had been no public crying jags and few private ones, and the combination of pretending to be other people and strictly limiting the time she spent alone had reaped benefits.
When Luna was little, her father used to sing a song about a woman who had a face she kept in a jar beside the door. That, Luna thought, was what she was like now. Out in public, she smiled and chatted and charmed, but at home melancholy clung to her like peat smoke. Luna fancied the cottage preferred her when she was sad; Dagmar, too, being a naturally taciturn person, seemed to respect her for it. So Luna allowed herself that, her little ration of sadness.
As Dagmar continued typing on her laptop, Luna stared into the fire, trying to empty her mind. She listened to the wind howling outside and the rain beating down against the small leaded window that overlooked Malcolm’s beleaguered vegetable patch, drifting into such a fugue state that when her phone vibrated in her jeans pocket, she actually jumped. It was Jem.
