So we did.

  ‘You probably can’t actually kill yourself in a tent in complete silence, can you?’ asked Catriona, as we walked not very quickly up the hill.

  ‘Depends what you’ve got,’ said Ben. ‘I should think an overdose doesn’t get noisy till later. If at all. It’d probably be hard to slash your wrists without a murmur. But I think she’s reading. It’s tomorrow I’d be keeping a suicide watch. If the plane doesn’t come.’

  ‘We ought to stop talking about it,’ I said. ‘Assume it is coming.’

  ‘I was assuming,’ said Ben. ‘Look what happened.’

  We found Ruth and Yianni making a final fingertip search of the hall floor. ‘Hi,’ said Ben. We stood there.

  ‘Hi,’ said Yianni. ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that.’

  ‘It’s not us you need to apologise to,’ said Catriona.

  Yianni knelt up. ‘Partly it is. It shouldn’t have happened. I just snapped. Sorry. How’s Nina?’

  ‘She went into her tent,’ I told him. ‘And she’s been completely silent ever since. You need to go down and talk to her.’

  ‘I will.’ He started stroking the ground again.

  ‘Soon,’ I said. ‘We’re worried about her.’

  He rubbed earth through his fingers. The same movement as Mom making pastry. Ruth continued her brisk progress.

  ‘So, what do you want us to do?’ asked Ben.

  Yianni allocated tasks – Catriona and Ben to make a final search of the chapel, me and Ruth to check and refill the grave, lunch, packing and then a final survey of the site.

  ‘It’s got to be pristine, remember. As if we were never here. Or the fines are terrible.’

  ‘We know,’ said Ben.

  Then the three of us stood and watched while he got up and went down the hill to Nina.

  ‘Do you think they’ll be OK?’ asked Catriona.

  ‘I don’t think he’ll hit her again,’ I said. ‘I don’t know if she’ll talk to him. They’ve known each other a long time. They’ll have to sort it out. Go on, you go down to the chapel. I’ll help Ruth finish here. He’s right, you know, we’ll struggle to finish by dusk.’

  I began to crawl across the floor. Did you ever hit anyone, Dad? In anger? I remember you smacking Holly once, Mom, after she pulled a pan off the stove and it nearly hit Hannah, and I guess that was anger. I had to haul Harris away from a fight one time. I’d never seen a man hit a woman before, certainly never seen two articulate adults reduced to violence. At least when you two started fighting you did it with words. As far as I know. I remembered the way Yianni took her wrist so she couldn’t shield her face and I shivered. Let us not come to that. Deliver us from our instincts.

  I looked round. Ruth was crawling across the floor as if she were doing a yoga exercise. She looked composed as a statue, even her hair unmoved by the wind whistling monotonously through the stones. She seemed too calm.

  ‘You OK?’ I asked.

  She stopped and looked round. ‘What?’

  ‘Are you OK?’

  She turned back to the earth under her fingers. ‘Of course. Why not?’

  I could think of at least five reasons without making any effort at all, or indeed getting onto any of her particular difficulties.

  ‘I was thinking it won’t be easy for you to go home.’

  ‘It’s not clear it’s going to be possible for any of us. I’ve probably got least to lose.’

  ‘Your family. Friends. Your thesis.’

  Your life itself. You’d have thought she’d know more than any of us about the preciousness of life.

  ‘I’m not worrying. There’s nothing we can do now, anyway.’

  I ran my hand across the floor. It was cold and gritty, and the feel of it on bare skin reminded me of the playhouse outside the church and Mom telling me not to rub my hands in the dirt when we were about to go over to the Lockies’ for lunch.

  ‘I guess that’s what’s worrying Yianni,’ I said. ‘He can’t do anything about it.’

  ‘Well, some things are like that, aren’t they. We’ve all got to live with it.’

  She came to the wall and turned back. Like a machine, a mower or a vacuum cleaner.

  ‘Some things aren’t,’ I said. ‘We do have some power for change.’

  She crawled past me. ‘Oh, shut up, Jim. Keep it to yourself, OK?’

  I clenched my hands. Grief is not an unlimited license to be rude.

  By one thirty, we were making good progress. We’d been through the hall as if it were a crime scene (which I suppose it almost certainly was, one way or another, at least by modern standards), and were as sure as you can be that we had left nothing we meant to take from the grave. The wind had dropped. Heavy grey cloud smothered the hill a few paces above the grave and in the silence I could hear my heart beat and my stomach growl as if I had a blanket over my head. The greying grass and Ruth’s smooth hair were beaded with fog.

  ‘Ruth? Are we done here?’

  She was kneeling in the corner where we’d found the first man, holding a sieve full of earth in one hand and gazing at the dark soil she held cupped in the other.

  ‘What? Oh, yeah. I’d say so. Did you find anything?’

  ‘No,’ I said. I’d already told her that. ‘Got anything there?’

  ‘No.’ She trickled the soil from her hand into the sieve. ‘Nothing at all.’

  ‘Well, shall we have lunch then? I’m hungry. Yianni said one thirty. It’s past that.’

  She picked up another handful from the sieve.

  ‘Sure. Whatever. Go ahead. I guess we can fill in after lunch.’

  The soil ran through her fingers again. She bit her lip and looked away.

  ‘Ruth? You OK?’

  She blinked. ‘Go get your lunch. I’ll be down in a minute.’

  When I got back down, Nina had emerged. She was sitting in the entrance of the stores tent, mashing something in a bowl. The smell of canned tuna carries even through an Arctic fog.

  ‘Hi there,’ I said. ‘Feeling better?’

  She glanced up. ‘I’m OK. Yianni wants tuna again. I think we’d do better to save the protein. No harm in taking it home if I’m wrong.’

  ‘Did you sort things out with Yianni?’

  ‘He apologised. The next box is the last of the crackers.’

  I picked up the open box, still half-full. ‘Looks like Yianni calculated just about right, then.’

  She looked at me, not smiling, and then turned back to the tuna. We finished the mayonnaise last week and mashing it without makes it even more like cat food.

  ‘It doesn’t need to be puréed,’ I said.

  She put the bowl down. ‘You do it, then.’

  I picked it up, and saw that she’d added more of the thyme she finds in the turf.

  ‘When do you think the thyme dies? Or does it go on under the snow? They must have been able to use it right through the winter.’

  Her shoulders relaxed a little.

  ‘They probably used it in sheep’s and goat’s cheese. It goes well with game. If anyone could get one of those geese… And the Greenlanders would have had cloudberries, wouldn’t they? A bit like cranberry sauce. I suppose barley for the carbohydrate?’

  ‘I guess,’ I said. ‘We’re a bit far north, up here.’

  ‘You can cook it like risotto. Barley. Or I suppose make some kind of bannock. If you could grind it. I don’t think it would rise. Roast goose with barley bread, it’s probably better than stewing it. And they must have had some kind of veg. Angelica. Seaweed. Wild garlic? I haven’t seen any. They had gardens, didn’t they?’

  ‘Yes. I think there’s evidence for onions. And other roots.’

  She gazed into the fog and shivered.

  ‘Maybe it was all right then. Through the winter. I wish this fog would lift.’

  ‘It will,’ I said. ‘Call the others?’

  I couldn’t see any point in separate plates, which would have to be washed by someone with bare hands in cold water. At first all these picnics were fun and the blandness of the food meant we were serious archaeologists, sacrificing ordinary comforts for our work. Now I just want a hot meal at a table, with chairs and lights and enough warmth that I can take my gloves off and still control cutlery. I want good food as well, sweet, salty, spicy, fresh food. Food from that Vietnamese place I took you to, Mom, when you visited last time, salads with lime and chilli, seafood in crisp little parcels. Then I want serious desserts. Mom’s peach cobbler. Lemon cheesecake. I remember liking fudge sundaes but can’t, at the moment, imagine wanting anything colder than myself. Hot coffee. Hot soup, chowder with cream and bacon and clams and snipped chives floating on the top. I should stop this. I’m like a condemned man obsessing over his last meal when eternity begins at dawn.

  I watched the others’ faces when they saw the meal. Yianni’s glance flickered past the plates, up to the fog and out towards the veiled water. Without wind, the waves had fallen silent and nothing moved.

  ‘We’ll have to be careful not to miss anything,’ he said. ‘I was relying on being able to scan the site.’

  ‘Yes,’ I agreed.

  He sat down and sighed. The others came from the chapel. Catriona seemed to have lost her hat, and her hair was slicked over her forehead and dripping down her back.

  ‘Yianni?’ she asked. ‘Have you checked again? The phone and the computer?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Well then, can we? Please? Maybe you’ll get through.’

  ‘After lunch, OK?’

  She stood shifting from foot to foot, arms wrapped around herself. ‘Can I have a go on the computer, then? Now? I’ll only try to connect. I won’t change anything. I’m not hungry.’

  ‘I don’t want to use up the battery,’ said Yianni.

  ‘Why not?’ said Ben. ‘If we’re leaving, it doesn’t matter. You can plug it in on the plane home if you want. Though, personally, I’d rather watch the movie.’

  I looked up, trying to imagine that somewhere above the weight of cloud there were planes with people sitting in upholstered seats reading shiny magazines and eating salty snacks, fretting because the seats don’t recline far enough and the baby up front can’t get to sleep. (Worrying it might fall out of the sky, or worse. Scanning the other passengers between movies and sleep. I wish we’d flown when I was a boy, when the excitement of wheeling above the clouds made the check-in queue where we left Aunt May seem more glamorous than other queues, and even the cars in the airport parking lot wore a special kind of abandonment.) People who are too warm, waiting to be fed chicken and vegetables and fruit and bread and butter. I thought that if I get out of here, I’ll always remember what it feels like to be cold and hungry and I’ll never complain again, but I guess it’s more likely that if I get out of here I’ll tell other people who are pitying themselves what it feels like to be cold and hungry and to envy people strapped into airline seats for ten hours at a time.

  ‘It won’t work any better for you than for Catriona,’ Ruth was saying. ‘Give her ten minutes if you’re worried about the battery.’

  Catriona hugged herself.

  ‘Oh, OK,’ said Yianni. ‘Ten minutes.’

  Defeat. He closed his eyes and massaged his forehead with his fingertips. Catriona unfolded herself, took the laptop from his tent and sat on the wet ground at the entrance.

  ‘Keep it dry,’ said Yianni.

  She opened it and we all waited while it whirred and sang. At last it played a chord, the chime muffled by the eddying fog.

  ‘Look,’ she said. ‘It seems to be working.’

  She opened Internet Explorer and clicked connect. The machine cogitated audibly. We came closer. She typed in Edinburgh’s web address. The timer appeared, and stayed. And stayed.

  ‘Try refreshing,’ said Nina.

  ‘Not yet,’ said Catriona. Her fingers drummed beside the keypad. The computer said it was connecting to edinburgh. ac. uk. ‘See?’

  The window went blank, and then the ‘site temporarily unavailable’ notice appeared. Her shoulders rose and she typed in ‘guardian. co. uk’. We waited again, as if the computer might let us wake up and find that it had all been a dream. Virtual sand trickled.

  ‘Only a few minutes more,’ said Yianni.

  She clicked refresh. I pushed my finger through a hole in my glove. How much time do we spend waiting on machines?

  ‘We should be having lunch,’ murmured Yianni, but he didn’t move from the screen.

  Temporarily unavailable.

  ‘It’s not going to work,’ said Ben.

  ‘One more.’ Catriona swallowed and closed her eyes for a moment.

  She typed ‘hebrideanestateagents.com’.

  ‘What?’ I asked. ‘Real estate?’

  ‘Imaginary estate,’ said Nina. She rested her hand, blue and blotched in fingerless gloves, on my arm. ‘She’s thinking about buying a croft.’ She shivered and put her head to my shoulder. I wondered whether to put my arm around her, and as I lifted my hand something hit the tent behind her.

  ‘Fuck,’ said Catriona. ‘Fucking hell, what the fuck was that?’

  (Sorry, Mom. British women swear.)

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ said Ben.

  Nina raised her head, looking not at the computer but away up the hill, from where the missile had come.

  ‘Look.’ She pointed.

  Maybe something moved through the fog. Maybe the fog moved through the rocks. Fear hammered on my sternum. I told myself the psalm, more of a ritual than a prayer. The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?

  ‘Now do you believe me?’

  ‘There is someone else here,’ said Ben. ‘Someone who doesn’t like us. Jesus.’

  ‘Yes.’ Nina was still gazing up through the fog. ‘They weren’t ready to die. And you’ve been robbing their graves. Of course they don’t like you.’

  ‘Shut up.’ Ruth stood. ‘Dead people don’t throw stones. It fell. Stones do fall, remember? On hills? That’s how they get into valleys.’

  Yianni bent and picked up the stone.

  ‘It’s from up the hill,’ said Ben. ‘It’s the right kind of stone.’

  Catriona buried her face in her hands. ‘I want to go home.’

  She sat there, shoulders heaving. I looked behind me, quickly, but there was only fog.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ I said.

  ‘Maybe a bird dropped it.’ Ben took the stone from Yianni. It was the size of a baseball.

  ‘Some bird,’ said Nina.

  Yianni went round and stroked the tent as if it were an injured animal.

  ‘Stones fall. You’ve all got so nervous you can’t think straight.’ Ruth knelt on the turf with her back perfectly straight.

  Yianni picked up the computer. ‘I’m going to put this away now. It’s got all our data.’

  ‘You’ve been backing up,’ said Ruth.

  ‘Always. But I’m not taking risks.’

  He took the machine on his lap, folded it into his coat and crawled into his tent.

  Ben stared in the direction Nina had pointed. ‘I don’t like this.’

  ‘We’re going tomorrow,’ I said. I think that was when I stopped believing it.

  *

  Yianni wanted us to use the remaining hours of daylight to search the site and the camp.

  ‘Pick up everything, OK? Any shreds of tissue paper, even tiny scraps of food wrappers. Pen lids, labels. I’m serious. Come spring, the rangers are going to be out here checking the site and it has to look as if no one’s spent a night here since the Greenlanders left.’

  ‘Yianni, we know. We’re archaeologists, remember? We know how hard it is not to leave traces.’ Ruth was swinging her arms. The fog was thicker and the temperature was falling. I couldn’t see across the river and I thought about how bush planes don’t fly in fog.

  ‘You removed six bodies and all their surviving possessions,’ said Nina. ‘I don’t think you can pretend nothing’s changed. You’ve only left the buildings.’

  ‘Whatever.’ Yianni looked away, up towards the screes where the big stones were. ‘That’s what we’re doing, OK? Think of archaeology as being like mining, Nina. Or surgery. Whatever you take out, you tidy up the surface so no one can tell. Please, Nina. Just help for the last few hours.’

  ‘Sounds more like burglary to me.’

  ‘Just do it.’

  Catriona stood close at my elbow. She kept glancing round. ‘Yianni? I’m really sorry but I’m too scared to go around on my own in this fog. When it seems there’s someone hiding in it.’ She shivered.

  Yianni looked at her for a moment, and then he too scanned the fog.

  ‘It’s better to work in pairs anyway,’ he said. ‘Less likely to miss something.’

  ‘I’ll go with you,’ said Nina. ‘We’ll stay away from the grave.’

  This didn’t seem at all reassuring, but Catriona nodded and joined her.

  ‘Nina, please,’ said Yianni. ‘You can shout if anything worries you, can’t you?’

  Stones do fall, of course, but usually something pushes them. There was no wind. I could think of a lot to shout about.

  The fog was still there when the dark came back. It was as if light was being blotted from the air around us, and when Ben and I came back to the tents I tripped over a cup which did not spill. Ice. It seemed worse, somehow, more alarming, in the domestic context of cooking and eating and drinking than down by the river. You expect the great outdoors to freeze, but not your kitchen. I remembered Grandma talking about having to melt water to wash her face in the mornings and waking that time in the new house to find snow on her quilt. Only two generations ago, and I guess in another few decades we’ll be out of fuel for the central heating anyway. Assuming global warming doesn’t see to it first. Grandma would have done just fine out here, and for all I’ve worked on the Greenlanders I bet she’d know more about what it was really like, cosseting the animals through the winter and going hungry in the spring, heating water on an open fire when you wanted to wash your clothes and going outside for the bathroom.

 

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