knew how to fix. No matter, no matter. Each year he
worried, until the time came. Then, until it was over,
he was calm.
He’d been the same way before their girls – now grown
and gone – were born. In the eighth month, he’d stopped
sleeping. He would lie awake for hours, then get up to pace
the kitchen f loor, until exhaustion brought him back to bed.
He’d imagined complications that didn’t come. He’d
planned their half-hour drive to the hospital, though there
was only one road, only ever one way out. Then, when it
was time, he’d sat behind the wheel, solid and composed, as
if their journey were no more than a weekend trip to town.
This morning, light had drenched the valley, found each
part of it like the first rainfall after drought. Mary had come
outside to clear weeds from the garden, to make space in
the f lower beds for the summer to come. The sun wasn’t
warm, not even close, but wrapped up as she was, in coat
and scarf and gloves, it was warm enough. She had worked
for an hour, while her husband was in the shed, then turned
as he came down the drive. She’d sat, then, on the bench by
the wall, and leaned back.
There is a kind of absurdity to the coming of spring, Mary
sometimes thought, that was clearer as each year passed.
Or perhaps absurdity wasn’t the right word at all. Perhaps
tragedy was better. That season of eternal regeneration felt
at times like a taunt. The world renewed itself after winter;
the people you loved did not.
Her husband, who’d turned now towards the house, was
getting old. He walked slowly, and limped just a little – his
right hip hurt, though he tried to disguise the fact. His face,
like hers, was an old person’s face, the skin loose around his
eyes and neck. Each year the work they had to do grew
harder. It would not take many more springs before it was
too much for them: this garden, these fields. She couldn’t
help but think of that sometimes.
David opened the gate beside the house and came
towards his wife. He sat beside her on the bench and sighed.
“Everything OK out there?” she asked, pressing her hand
firmly into his.
He grinned and nodded. “Everything is perfect,” he said,
squeezing her fingers tight. “Everything is perfect.”I
t wa s never a n a r r iva l, exact ly, more a slow accumulat ion
of evidence. The rumours could be brushed aside at first- false hopes or plain untruths. But in the end the signs
were there: innumerate, and impossible to ignore.
Spring came not with the curlews, nor the wheatears,
nor the skylarks. It came not with the daffodils, nor the
primroses at the roadside. It came in the noticing of these
things, in the acknowledgement of them, and the
understanding, then, that another winter had passed.
It came, always, late.
Mary sat in the garden, against the south-facing wall of
the house, watching her husband. He was fifty yards away,
at the end of their drive, and he too was watching. Beyond
him, the sheep milled close to the fence, their bellies round
and swollen. The lambs were still weeks away, but David
had begun to feel anxious. He’d begun to keep an eye out.
It happened like this every year. No matter that he’d done
it scores of times, that he’d seen generation after generation
of lambs born in these fields, that he’d been midwife to
many of them, and that most of what could go wrong he
ILLUSTRATION: HANNAH WARRENMalachy Tallack was born in Shetland and lives in Glasgow. His
latest novel, The Valley at the Centre of the World (Canongate),
set in Shetland, explores how an age-old way of life struggles to
survive the modern. He says his simple pleasure is “Books,
followed by more books, occasionally followed by a walk.”THE NOTICING
AshortstorybyMALACHY TALLACKBEDTIME STORY