It usually started with an obsession, an inability to let go of one thought or idea. At eighteen it had all been about her schoolwork, the individual project that was submitted as part of the history course. She’d been relatively relaxed about the other subjects. She’d wallowed rather in T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’, but her English teacher had told her anxious mother that many adolescents did that. No, it was her work on a nineteenth-century almshouse close to her home that had taken over her life and her dreams. She’d stumbled on to the original records by chance through a friend of her mother’s, and from reading the first page of neat and tiny writing she’d been hooked.
The idea of the essay had been to set the records in their social context, to explore the conditions that had allowed the formation of the houses and how their establishment fitted in with the political debate of the time. But it was the individual stories that had captivated her. She had felt herself living under the humourless regime of the almshouse trustees, saw the world through the residents’ eyes. Before she became ill enough to need a doctor she had the sense to change her university application from history to archaeology. It was the specific and the human that fascinated her, not the political or strategic. What could be more grounded than digging in the earth?
Somehow she completed her examinations and submitted her dissertation. It was when school broke up for the summer and the familiar routine of revision and writing was over that she lost any sense of perspective. Then she heard the old women in the almshouse talking to her and couldn’t let them go.
The depression had come back big style at the end of Hattie’s first year at university. She stopped eating and her mother wheeled her off to see a specialist. But then it had been Paul Berglund rather than her academic work that had triggered the illness. At school she’d had no time for men or sex, watched the antics of her friends as if they were the mad ones with their dressing up and flirting, the parties and the desperation. Falling for a man seemed just as ridiculous to her as getting excited about food. Then in her first long vacation she’d volunteered on a dig managed by Professor Berglund. It had been a hot summer, day after day of clear skies and sunshine. They’d camped out in a barn quite similar to the Whalsay Bod. The team was full of oddballs and eccentrics and Hattie had felt wonderfully at home. Here, she was no weirder than the rest of them. In the evening they went to the pub and drank pints of beer and rolled home singing.
The site had been surrounded by fields of ripening corn and her first view of Paul had been of him striding down the side of a field towards them. He’d been wearing a yellow T-shirt, slightly ripped at the neck. Because of the angle of the field she hadn’t been able to see his legs. He was a bull-necked, blunt northerner quite different from anyone she’d ever met before. None of her mother’s friends were so forthright or so rude. So this is what all the girls at school were going on about, she’d thought. Paul Berglund had become her obsession. Later, when she returned to London she lost her mind completely. She found herself unable to sleep. The events of the summer continued to haunt her. Images flashed into her head with the jagged brilliance of a drug-induced trip. Again she couldn’t bring herself to eat.
She’d been admitted to an enlightened NHS psychiatric hospital that ran a residential unit for teenagers. She supposed her mother had pulled strings to get her in. By that time she was hardly aware of what was happening. The stated cause of admission was the eating disorder, which had become the focus of her mother’s concern. An eating disorder was fashionable, almost commonplace among the children of the high-powered women with whom Gwen James worked. But quite simply, Hattie thought she’d been mad. She developed paranoia, heard voices again, this time loud, controlling, battering into her brain. She couldn’t trust anyone.
The unit had twenty-four beds and had an old-fashioned emphasis on talking and shared activity. They took pills too, of course, but the other treatments seemed just as important. The place was run by a nurse called Mark who was a little overweight, with a soft doughy face and thinning hair. Perhaps his unappealing appearance was part of his strategy. He was so sympathetic that if he’d been at all good-looking all the young women would have fallen in love with him. As it was they could treat him as a favourite uncle or adored older brother. Hattie had regarded the unit as her sanctuary. She still considered some of the other patients as her friends. She had few others.
Mark had taught her strategies for avoiding stress and for taking control. He told her she wasn’t to blame for what had happened, but that she found harder to accept. He encouraged her to put her thoughts into words. When she first left home for university she’d developed the habit of writing a weekly letter to her mother. A letter was less demanding than a phone call, but it still kept Gwen off her back. Now, in the unit, she continued the practice. There was nothing of any importance in the letters – certainly she didn’t confide in Gwen as she had in Mark – but she enjoyed passing on the details of life in the hospital. Her mother replied with chatty notes about the House, anecdotes about the neighbours in the Islington street where Hattie had grown up. Letters seemed their most effective means of communication. In their letters they could persuade themselves that they liked each other. Stranded in the unit, Hattie looked forward to receiving them.
She was discharged from hospital in the middle of the autumn and came home to prepare for her return to university. Her tutor was understanding – she was so bright, he said that she’d have no problems catching up with the academic work. On the last day of October her mother drove her back to the hall of residence and left her there, Hattie thought, with some relief. Now Gwen could return to her real passion, politics. She convinced herself that the stay in hospital had cured Hattie for ever. The illness would never come back.
Now Hattie knew she had developed another obsession. She’d returned to Whalsay full of hope and dreams. Then Mima had died and everything had become more complicated. Perhaps she was ill again, though she didn’t recognize this as depression. She was suffering from the same symptoms as before – the difficulty in sleeping, a reluctance to eat, the inability to trust her own judgement – but it didn’t feel at all the same.
It had been very different when she’d first arrived back in Whalsay. Then the summer had spread ahead of her, full of possibilities.
Mima had realized how happy she was. Two nights before she’d been shot, she’d called Hattie into the house. She’d poured glasses of whisky, put them on a tray with the bottle and a little jug of water. It had been unusually mild and they’d sat outside on the bench made of driftwood that stood by the kitchen door, the tray on the ground between them.
‘Now what has happened to you over the winter? You look like the cat that got the cream.’
‘Nothing’s happened. I’m just pleased to be back in the island. You know how much I like it here. It’s the only place I feel quite sane. It’s the best place in the whole world.’
‘Maybe it is.’ Mima had gathered her cat on to her lap and given a little laugh. ‘But what would I know? I’ve never lived anywhere else. But maybe it would be good to see a bit of the world before I die. Perhaps you’ll dig up a hoard of treasure in my land and I’ll be able to travel like the young ones do.’