A Field Guide to Staying

Chapter One: The Call

The phone rang at twenty past four on a Tuesday, which was how Emilia Summers knew it was bad news.

Nobody called her in the afternoon. Her clients emailed. Her professor emailed. The heritage trust that commissioned her wildflower pamphlets sent letters, actual letters, on cream paper with a watermark, because the woman who ran it believed email was a passing fad. Emilia's phone lived face-down on the corner of her drawing table and buzzed perhaps twice a week, and both times it was usually a delivery driver who could not find the stair door.

She was working on a sea holly. Eryngium maritimum, in gouache, the third of eight plates for a seed catalogue in Perth. She had spent forty minutes on a single spined bract, chasing the exact grey-blue of it, and she had almost got it — that dusty, salt-bitten blue that looked like frost but was really just a plant's clever way of holding onto water. She had the brush loaded. She had her breath held.

The phone buzzed itself in a slow circle on the wood.

BETTE, said the screen.

Emilia set the brush down in the water jar, which was the first mistake of the afternoon, because the blue bled out of it in a small cloud and she would have to mix it again.

"Gran."

"Now, don't panic," said Bette Summers, in the voice of a woman who had never panicked in eighty-one years and considered it an affectation in others.

"That is an extremely alarming way to begin a conversation."

"It's my hip."

Emilia stood up. She did not decide to stand up; her body simply did it, pushing the stool back with a scrape across the floorboards of the flat she had lived in for nine years and never once hung a picture in.

"What about your hip."

"I fell in the back garden. Tuesday last. The path was wet and I was carrying the tray for the birds and I put my foot down where the flag has lifted — I've been meaning to get that flag seen to since your grandfather died — and down I went like a sack of coal."

"Tuesday last." Emilia's mouth had gone strange and dry. "That's eight days ago."

"Nine."

"You've had a broken hip for nine days and you're telling me now."

"Fractured," said Bette. "Not broken. There's a difference, the surgeon was very clear about it, and I've a pin in me now, and physiotherapy on Thursdays with a girl called Kirstin who has a nose ring and the patience of a saint. I'm home. I'm perfectly comfortable. Maddie's been in every day with soup I didn't ask for."

Emilia pressed the heel of her hand against her sternum. Outside her window, Edinburgh went about its grey business — a bus sighing at the lights, gulls arguing over something on a roof, the flat, indifferent noise of a city that never once required anything from her.

"Why didn't you call me?"

"Because you'd have driven up that same night at ninety miles an hour and slept in a chair and been no use to anybody, and I wanted to be able to make my own tea before you saw me." A pause. Emilia could hear the small clink of Bette's cup going down on the saucer, the sound of that kitchen, that table, that house. "There. I've said it. Are you going to shout?"

"I'm considering it."

"Shout, then. It's a long time since anyone shouted at me. It'd be a change."

Emilia laughed, and it came out cracked. She sat back down on the stool and looked at the sea holly on her board, the spines she'd drawn from a specimen in a botanic garden hothouse, and thought, absurdly, that she had never once painted sea holly where it actually grew, which was on a beach forty minutes' walk from her grandmother's front door.

"I'm coming up," she said.

"Good. That's the second thing."

"There's a second thing."

"There's always a second thing," said Bette. "The house needs tending. The gutters are a disgrace and I can't get up the ladder for obvious reasons, and the garden's gone to seed and the raspberries will be at me. And there's a project on at the lighthouse that wants an artistic eye."

Emilia frowned at the window. "The lighthouse."

"Aye."

"Cairnlee lighthouse. The decommissioned one. The one with the fence round it and the sign saying it'll fall on you."

"The sign came down two years ago."

"What kind of project?"

"Oh," said Bette, with a vagueness so studied it could have been laminated, "a restoration sort of a thing. There's a committee. They talk a great deal. Bring your good brushes."

"Gran—"

"The forecast's fair for the weekend. Drive carefully, don't stop at that dreadful place at Laurencekirk, and if you bring me flowers I'll put them straight in the bin, I've enough of those to open a shop."

And she was gone.

Emilia sat for a while with the phone in her hand.

Her flat had two rooms and a kitchen that was really an alcove with ambitions. There was a bed, a table, a drawing board by the window for the light, a shelf of reference books, a plan chest she had bought at auction and driven home strapped to a hired van. There were no photographs. There was one plant, a jade tree, which she had inherited from a neighbour who moved to Canada and which she watered with a precision that would have surprised anyone who assumed she was warm.

It was, she knew, the flat of a person who could be gone in four hours.

She had thought of this, over the years, as efficiency.

She made herself finish the sea holly, because she did not like leaving work half-done, and because if she stopped she would have to think about the fact that her grandmother had lain on wet flagstones in the dark with a fractured hip and had waited nine days before telling her only living relative in the country.

The only living relative in the country. That was the phrase, wasn't it. There was another relative. She was in Portugal, or had been, last anyone said, in a white house near Faro with a lemon tree, and she sent a card every December that said *Love always, Mum* in handwriting that had not changed since Emilia was nine.

Emilia washed her brushes, laid them on the cloth, tipped the blue water down the sink and watched it swirl away.

Then she got out the bag.

It was a good bag, canvas and leather, and she could pack it in eleven minutes. Two weeks, she thought. Sort the gutters, cut back the raspberries, bully Bette into a stairlift she would refuse, look at whatever nonsense was happening at the lighthouse to keep the peace, and be back in Edinburgh before the seed catalogue deadline.

She packed jumpers, because it was Cairnlee and it was June, which in that part of the world meant the wind came off the North Sea with a personal grudge. She packed walking boots. She packed, without letting herself examine why, her field kit: the collapsible stool, the small watercolour box worn silver at the hinges, the good sable brushes, three sketchbooks, a jar of pencils, the folding magnifier her grandfather had given her when she was eleven and had spent an entire summer drawing the same clump of thrift on the harbour wall because she liked how the flowers went papery when they died.

She stood in the doorway with the bag on her shoulder and looked back at the flat.

Nothing looked back.

The drive north took just over two and a half hours, up through the flat green farmland and then east, the land opening out, the sky getting bigger and lower at the same time, the way it did. She came over the last rise at half seven in the evening and there it was below her: Cairnlee, twelve hundred souls, a grey harbour town folded into a notch in the cliffs, its houses turning their gable ends to the sea like people bracing against a shove. The harbour with its two arms of stone. The kirk. The one long street. The gulls.

And on the headland to the north, above the black rocks where the water broke white even on a calm day, the lighthouse.

She pulled into the lay-by without meaning to, and sat with the engine ticking as it cooled.

It looked different. That was the first thought, and it made no sense; buildings did not change in ten years, or they changed only by falling down. But there was scaffolding around the upper third, neat and yellow-jointed. There was a green plastic sheet lashed over something at the base. The keeper's cottage beside it, which had been a roofless shell full of nettles for as long as Emilia could remember, had a roof. A new roof, slate, dark and even, with a chimney pot on it, and there was smoke coming out of the chimney pot.

Somebody was living up there.

"Gran," Emilia said out loud, to nobody, "what have you done."

The last light was coming in low from the west and hitting the lighthouse tower flat on, and the whitewash — someone had rewhitened it, some of it, in patches, so it looked like a map of a country nobody had named yet — went the colour of the inside of a shell. Above, the lantern room glass caught the sun and threw it back at her, a hard gold wink.

Emilia looked at it for a long moment.

Then she put the car in gear and drove down into the town she had spent ten years learning how to leave.