Clear

John looks around the room and sees Ivar. He tries to talk to Ivar in either English or Scots, but Ivar doesn’t understand him. Ivar says his name while gesturing to himself, and John says his name while doing the same before closing his eyes again.

John can barely keep his eyes open, as he’s exhausted and the pain throughout his body is great. He cannot remember anything after waving goodbye to Mary at the quay as the Lily Rose began moving away from shore. He sees Ivar and knows Ivar is important, but he cannot remember why.

John finds it peaceful watching Ivar knit, and the spinning wheel reminds him of the fairy tales his aunt’s housekeeper would tell him when he was a child. Ivar, however, finds John’s consciousness uncomfortable, as he keeps Mary’s calotype hidden in his sweater. He wants to look at it, but he doesn’t want John to catch him. When he wants to be alone with her, he takes her outside and looks at her.

John remembers wishing he could swim and thinking the life vest on the Lily Rose was too flimsy. He thinks of Mary’s workbasket that holds her different colored threads. He imagines the parts of himself as the different threads, and some of the threads are connected and some are not. He lies down with his eyes slightly open and surveys the room, seeing the wicker chair in which Ivar sits and the shelf behind with a blue-and-white teapot and his coat, with red knitted sleeves added.

John realizes he’s naked and wonders where the rest of his clothes are. He sees his satchel and his Gospel papers drying by the hearth, but he doesn’t see the calotype of Mary. He worries about it and imagines it on the ocean floor, and it feels to him as if Mary is really drowning. He tries to point and ask Ivar for his satchel, but he falls unconscious again.

John wonders what his old university friend Adam Grant, who studied medicine, would think of his amnesia. He knows Adam would say it’s likely caused by temporary brain swelling and will resolve with time. On the fourth day, John wakes up with all his memories, knowing he must evict Ivar from the island.

In a flashback, when John finds the Orkney schoolteacher, he’s disappointed to find that the schoolteacher doesn’t think there’s anyone alive who can speak the island’s ancient language. The schoolteacher’s own dialect has similarities, but it’s not the same. John is disappointed and cannot hide it, as he’s been seasick and anxious aboard the Lily Rose. Still, the schoolteacher writes out a simple speech for John in his own dialect, hoping the man on the island will be able to understand it.

John sees that the speech is gone, as the pages drying by the hearth are empty, the ink washed away. His translations of the Gospels are gone, as is the Summons of Removing that gives him the right to remove Ivar from his home. John doesn’t know how to proceed, and he slightly wishes he had his gun with him for security and to give him authority, especially now that he’s lost his speech and his Summons of Removing.

Ivar can’t say when it happens, but his affections shift from Mary’s calotype to John. When John looks at him, Ivar is overcome by emotion. When John gestures for Ivar to hand him the papers drying by the hearth, Ivar does so and watches him. Ivar does his own chores, and as he does so, he studies the parts of himself he can see and feels overwhelmed by the sensation of being seen by another person.

Ivar returns from his chores and warms up corn and milk porridge for dinner. By the time Ivar props John up, John is asleep. Ivar tucks him in with a knitted shawl and freshens the fire with peat. Ivar returns to his knitting, and he feels that if he looks away from John, he’ll be gone.

He no longer looks at Mary’s calotype, nor does he keep it in his collar. He hides it on the shelf behind the teapot. She seems like a ghost to Ivar now, either dead or far away, further than his mother, grandmother, and Jenny in Canada, and further than Hanus and his other brothers who drowned before adulthood.

After seeing John off in Aberdeen, Mary returns to Perth, to the cottage on the Lowrie estate that belongs to her and John while he works for Henry Lowrie. She plans to stay a week or so before going to visit Andrew and Isobel in Penicuik, because she doesn’t want to spend an entire month alone.

Mary is surprised by how much she craves John’s presence. She’s only known him for four years, yet it’s as if her life has moved at a different pace with him. Mary never thought she would marry. She never thought she’d fall in love with a man, as she was certain she’d never be happier than she was with her friend Alice Monk, and she imagined a life in which she could live with Alice in a house of their own. Alice then married a man and sailed with him to Calcutta, where she died. Mary was then happy to live alone until her father died, and his debts became public.

Mary lived humbly until her sister Isobel began inviting suitors over to their Sunday dinners. She avoided the men and stayed happily single until she was 43, when she had dental problems and met John in the same year. She was having tooth pain, and the dentist had to remove several of her front teeth. He made her fake teeth for cheaper out of an experimental substance that his cousin in the United States was developing. Mary was happy with her teeth until she lost them when she was sitting in a public hall in Comrie during an earthquake. She was upset until a man (John) approached her holding the fake teeth.

John contemplates how to talk to Ivar. He considers saying he’s come as a minister of the Free Church of Scotland, there to proclaim Jesus. He doesn’t want to use the church to lie about his visit to the island. He considers what other roles he could claim to fill (egg collector, map surveyor, census enumerator, etc.). He wishes Mary were there, then he realizes he can pose as an antiquarian, pretending to poke around the island for historical artifacts while waiting for Keane to come collect him and Ivar. He asks God to forgive him for acting like a cowardly liar.

The narrative shifts to one of Ivar’s flashbacks. The spring that Jenny gives birth to her baby, Strachan visits the island and decrees to the islanders that they must cook and stir the sea wrack that they collect in a new way for the Lowries to sell. Cooking the wrack is dirty, difficult work, and while the islanders do it, their crops fail, leaving them hungry. The third winter after Strachan’s announcement, with no dried mutton and corn left, they survive by drinking sheep’s blood and eating limpets and hen eggs.

Ivar’s brothers drown when their boat goes missing, and later his father and Jenny’s son Magnus die in the same week. The next year, Strachan returns and tells them there’s no more market for wrack, and the islanders can resume using their time and land how they please. Without Ivar’s father and brothers, there’s not enough hands to work the land, so his family leaves. Ivar says the island is enough for him. He was in his twenties when he made that choice, and now he’s over 40. Strachan hasn’t come back, though for the first few years of his solitude Ivar expected him.

Ivar occasionally felt lonely over the years, but he never labeled himself lonely. He doesn’t view staying as a choice for him to stay, as no part of him yearned for the life that Jenny, his mother, or his grandmother described. He sometimes wishes the people he loved were with him, like when he was ill over the winter and worried he would die without anyone to wash and bury his body. He did hate when people occasionally visited him in the past, men in boats just passing by.

Now, with John, he doesn’t feel that way. Ivar stands in the rain and thinks that he has the natural elements of the island, his house, his spinning wheel, his teapot, Pegi, and now, John.

John tries to use pantomime to explain his presence to Ivar, who doesn’t understand his gestures and assumes John is displaying gratitude. John wears his clothes again, as Ivar has repaired the damaged items and even recovered John’s missing left shoe from where he fell. John tries to dress himself, but he cannot because of his injuries. Ivar helps him dress and even has to help him urinate, which embarrasses John.

John sleeps so much during both day and night that he can hardly tell which is which. Ivar doesn’t speak much, but John begins to understand some of the words Ivar says as the days go on. Ivar gives John a crutch, as his ankle is not broken but badly sprained, so John can maneuver around the island. John makes mental notes about the topography of the island for Strachan. John takes physical notes of Ivar’s words for certain things on the sea-smudged pages that once held his Summons of Removing and Gospel translations. He learns many of Ivar’s words easily.

As John tries to sleep, he misses Mary and wishes he had a moment alone to miss her without Ivar watching him. He hopes Mary is safe with Andrew and Isobel. He admires Andrew for being a good husband and father and for being so generous that he seemed actually upset when John refused to take a loan from him, instead insisting on taking the Lowrie job. He hopes that Andrew doesn’t think him pompous and sanctimonious for refusing the money.

When John falls asleep, Ivar takes the pages John takes notes on and reads them. He cannot understand them, but he runs his finger down the column between the words in John’s language and his own language, feeling a connection between them. He thinks that he’s never understood his solitude before, and now he’s made new.