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returning to herself.
    In the living room beyond the door, those mourners who had not yet left slept in the places where they had at last succumbed. The doctor and minister were away. A familial intimacy carried from body to body. Nothing was ugly. In the creek below the kirkyard the boat lay up on the hard brown sand. The sea was only a white rumour beyond the rocks.

The Only Only
    The first ferry for a week was fast to the quay, the thick rope springs holding it to, looped fore and aft over iron cleats the height of children. The weather had been so hard and high that there was seaweed all over the island, brought in by the wind, and the east wall of each house was drifted up to the roof. The children dug in to these drifts and made blue caves to sit in, smoothing till the cave’s inner ice melted and set to a clear lucent veneer.
    Seven children lived on the island and attended the school together. Sandy was the only only among them; the rest had brothers or sisters. She was a girl of eight born to the teacher Euphemia and her husband Davie, who set and lifted lobsterpots for his main living, though the ferry company kept him on a retainer to attend the arrival and departure of the ferry, three times a week when the sea would let it through. Davie’d to hook up and untie the boat, watch for the embarkation of livestock and the safe operation of the davits on the quay. He had an eye to the secure delivery of post and to the setting in place of the gangplank so that it would hold in a swell.
    He liked his job. It involved him with everyone who lived on the island and he was careful to respect this. If he knew that the father of a child off just now inside its mother on the ferry to be born on the mainland was not the man with his arm around the woman as the ship parted from the land, he did not say. Davie was not an islander born, although Euphemia was; she could remember her grandmother skinning fulmars to salt them for the winter and she herself could feel if the egg of a gull might be taken for food or if it was fertilised and packed with affronted life. Davie had boiled up a clutch of eggs once and they had sat down to them with a salad and pink potatoes from outdoors; the tapping and the faint window of membrane had seemed right enough, but when he’d got through to the boiled halfmade chick with its eggtooth sticking out like a sail needle’s hook, he’d got sick. He still looked away when a seal heaved up the rocks to die after a gashing; the thickness of the blubber inside gave him a lurch, like seeing the legs above an old woman’s stocking tops. In death a seal keeps its enthusiastic expression; the human face falls to neutral peace, but the seal appears to trust even death.
    Because there had been no boat for some time, everyone was on the pier today. It was a social occasion although it was so cold. Something seemed to have slowed the sea, its salt particles surrendering to the grip ice has on water. On the Atlantic coast of the island, rockpools were freezing over, the crabs moving in under sea lettuce to escape seizure by the ice. Among the blue-brown mussels that clustered around the stanchions of the pier hung icicles at low tide. The sea was unusually quiet, hushed by the cold from lapping or thrashing the shingle or the harbour walls. Only the hardiest boats were still down in the water, fishing boats and a clam skiff that had been neglected and had taken in water that was now a hard slope of grey ice halfway up to the gunwales.
    On the slip where the smaller boats came alongside there was a tangle of nets and a pile of polythene fishboxes. Yellow, orange, mauve and electric blue, the nets were neatly trimmed with a white buzz of rime. The impression of a deserted, frozen harlequinade was emphasised by a pair of red heavy-duty gloves lying on the weed next to a single yellow seaboot.
    Sandy stood with Euphemia in a group of women. People asked the teacher about their children; in such a community