Pulse

On the shoreline, ringed plovers and pipits. But it was the seabirds he loved best, the cormorants and gannets, the shags and fulmars. He spent many a docile, wet-bottomed hour onthe clifftops, thumb and middle finger bringing into focus their whirling dives, and their soaring independence. The fulmars were his favourites. Birds which spent their whole lives at sea, coming to land only to nest. Then they laid a single egg, raised the chick, and took to the sea again, skimming the waves, rising on the air currents, being themselves.
    She had preferred flowers to birds. Sea pinks, yellow rattle, purple vetch, flag iris. There was something, he remembered, called self-heal. That was as far as his knowledge, and memory, went. She had never picked a single flower here, or anywhere else. To cut a flower was to speed its death, she used to say. She hated the sight of a vase. In the hospital, other patients, seeing the empty metal trolley at the foot of her bed, had thought her friends neglectful, and tried to pass on their excess bouquets. This went on until she was moved to her own room, and then the problem ceased.
    That first year, Calum had shown them the island. One afternoon, on a beach where he liked to dig for razor clams, he had looked away from them and said, almost as if he was addressing the sea, ‘My grandparents were married by declaration, you know. That was all you needed in the old days. Approval and declaration. You were married when the moon was waxing and the tide running – to bring you luck. And after the wedding there’d be a rough mattress on the floor of an outbuilding. For the first night. The idea was that you begin marriage in a state of humility.’
    ‘Oh, that’s wonderful, Calum,’ she had said. But he felt it was a rebuke – to their English manners, their presumption, their silent lie.
    The second year, they had returned a few weeks after getting married. They wanted to tell everyone they met; but here was one place they couldn’t. Perhaps this had been good for them – to be silly with happiness and obliged into silence.Perhaps it had been their own way of beginning marriage in a state of humility.
    He sensed, nevertheless, that Calum and Flora had guessed. No doubt it wasn’t difficult, given their new clothes and their daft smiles. On the first night Calum gave them whisky from a bottle without a label. He had many such bottles. There was a lot more whisky drunk than sold on this island, that was for sure.
    Flora had taken out of a drawer an old sweater which had belonged to her grandfather. She laid it on the kitchen table, ironing it with her palms. In the old days, she explained, the women of these islands used to tell stories with their knitting. The pattern of this jersey showed that her grandfather had come from Eriskay, while its details, its decorations, told of fishing and faith, of the sea and the sand. And this series of zigzags across the shoulder – these here, look – represented the ups and downs of marriage. They were, quite literally, marriage lines.
    Zigzags. Like any newly married couple, they had exchanged a glance of sly confidence, sure that for them there would be no downs – or at least, not like those of their parents, or of friends already making the usual stupid, predictable mistakes. They would be different; they would be different from anyone who had ever got married before.
    ‘Tell them about the buttons, Flora,’ said Calum.
    The pattern of the jersey told you which island its owner came from; the buttons at the neck told you precisely which family they belonged to. It must have been like walking around dressed in your own postcode, he thought.
    A day or two later, he had said to Calum, ‘I wish everyone was still wearing those sweaters.’ Having no sense of tradition himself, he liked other people to display one.
    ‘They had great use,’ replied Calum. ‘There was many a drowning you could only recognise by the jersey. And then by the buttons. Who the man was.’
    ‘I hadn’t thought of that.’
    ‘Well, no reason for it. For you to know. For you to think.’
    There were moments when he felt this was the most distant place he had ever come to. The islanders happened to speak the same language as him, but that was just some strange, geographical coincidence.
    This time, Calum and Flora treated him as he knew they would: with a tact and modesty he had once, stupidly, Englishly, mistaken for deference. They didn’t press themselves upon