My first priority, though, was more physiological in origin. Something dull in the back of my head was reminding me that everything was not quite perfect. Of course: the previous night’s Barolo, a whole bottle of it. On an almost empty stomach in a musty room among a poor frame of mind.

I had come here to write and to run. Writing without a desk wasn’t an option, but now came the opportunity to blow away any cobwebs that had survived the crossing and, at the same time, start to recce the landscape.

Out of the back door from the kitchen, I stretched my unwilling muscles alongside the erstwhile (and future) vegetable beds and surveyed the lie of the land. The network of snaking paths was seemingly no more than random, and to attempt to map out a route would have been pointless. Instead, I cobbled together a mental model built around the most obvious landmarks. It was a beautiful clear day and I figured my cottage would be visible anywhere this side of the mountain.

Under so much sky, GPS signal was as good as anywhere I had known. How far should I go? Five miles? Ten? It was early, and I didn’t exactly have a full day planned. My legs felt light and my lungs had never been cleaner. I forked left at the first junction, north-westward towards the previous night’s ringside seat.

I followed the path along the headland, past the spot I had chosen for the sunset and around the end of the island’s elongated nose. The path ran perilously close to the cliff edge in places and I picked gingerly along those parts of it, not wanting to beat a new path further inland on my first day. But I kept far enough from the edge that my attention was free to roam over the never-ending ocean. It seemed perfectly natural that all life had begun under that fearless surface. At times surely to come while I lived on the island, it would appear only interested in claiming back everything it had given away.

My route took me down and up anything from hollows to deep depressions, but I never once lost the spring in my gait, never changed my breathing or cadence. That air. So pure and clean and energising that it mollified gravity. This really was what the world could be like if I were to allow it to be. I was angry with myself for my childish strop of the night before. One distant glimpse of a well-adjusted family enjoying each other’s company, each other’s achievements, and I had come over all maudlin.

It had been that sort of self-centred attitude that had been at the heart of my previous difficulties. I had known that for a long time and had even spoken to myself about it when on the mainland, waiting for the ferry. I didn’t have it any worse than anybody else; I had no monopoly on bad luck, tragedy or grief. And the world wasn’t programmed to function in such a way that I, out of all the people on Earth, would be OK. I knew all that, yet still it had taken surprisingly little to sink me back into the self-pity that chose Robert Schumann as its soundtrack. The most devastating thing about the whole episode was that it had as good as ruined a great bottle of wine.

Abruptly, I arrived back at my immediate surroundings. The path was wide and flat and undamaged and it was a joyful section to run, but that was all about to change. I stopped and stood at a junction. Away to the right, a similarly benign path headed inland, directly towards the mountain. But to carry on along the coast path I would have to head down a precipitous shale drop. At the bottom, a straight, muddy track seemed to cut off a stubby, thumb-like peninsula, almost black with thick vegetation and, it seemed, protected by a pretty serious barbed-wire fence. Beyond that, the way climbed out of the valley to a rocky plateau that provided a macabre backdrop, like a gravestone. Even in the bright and nurturing morning sun, no warmth came off that far north-western corner of the island. The turbines stood silent behind it, glancing nervously at each other, no wind now to stir their gargantuan sails. Idle hands do the devil’s work, I thought to myself.

Ahead of me, at the top of the taunting neck-breaker of a path, was a painted sign. The letters were so beautifully formed that I had to examine it up close to establish that it really was hand-painted. It simply read “Sanctuary”.

Shit.

Sanctuary from what? Which sanctuary? What, exactly, was the Sanctuary? I looked again and figured it was probably just the fenced-off area at the bottom of the path rather than the whole view, but if that were the case, why put the sign at the top of the hill? To warn against making the descent?

The sun had stopped warming me. I didn’t need to be discouraged by any sign. The path down was not exactly tempting for someone in running gear. I turned to the right and continued along the more welcoming route towards the centre of the island. The further I ran from that spot, the warmer I became, and the calmer. The sun was rising higher and strengthening in its futile rage against the dying of the summer. The mountain cast a shortening shadow to its western side, cooling the path I now pounded. I figured I could run almost the whole way around it, to add a mile or two to my route and save having to explore anywhere further north on my first jaunt.

It was worth it, too. Mostly under the cool shadow, surplus sunlight overflowed around the edges of the Mountain like water in a forgotten bath and dripped a hint of life into the hibernating landscape. The previous night’s light frost melted away happily and joined the frolicking streams descending from various higher strata. The path itself seemed to define a boundary between the lower tufty sedge and the bare rock rising to the right, creating a mix of the two which was surprisingly comfortable to run on.

Before long I came across the first sign of human habitation since closing my kitchen door. A few yards above the confluence of two adolescent rivulets, hemmed in by well-worn footpaths which followed their progress in reverse, uphill, sat an attractive compact yellow-brick building with a reddish door, small windows and a variety of dormant chimneys emerging from the breasts on either side of a steeply-pitched roof. In front of the building, narrowing as it led down to the meeting point of the streams, was an immaculately-grassed garden area dotted with round wooden tables. Slap-bang in the middle of the garden stood a tall pole, atop which swung a sign. Underneath a stern-looking portrait of what I presumed was the military man in question, the words: The General Gordon.

It was a pub. A pub designed to provide sustenance for walkers, I figured. I made a note of it in my mental atlas and moved on. It would be a shame not to visit before the weather closed in.

Clockwise around the Mountain, the scenery changed by the minute as the sun continued to edge higher and the countless micro-climates morphed into each other in strict turn. I thought, as well as I could, of botany. I knew next to nothing of the subject, but imagined that a dedicated exponent could spend the majority of that career botanising at the base of this mountain and never grow bored. I was moving, with every few pneumatic paces, from damp to windswept arid, sheltered to sun-kissed, springy turf to harsh rock. It was impossible to take my eyes off it. Colours and shapes refused to stand still and I began to feel a little dizzy. My hands had started to ache in the cold.

Finally, I emerged onto the eastern side, and found the sun’s direct rays consistently on my skin once again. I had run further than I thought around the massif and it was a relief to be back in uninterrupted daylight. This side of the Mountain seemed much more daunting than the other; no paths had been beaten by feet to the summit here: anyone wanting to take this route up would need more specialist gear than just a pair of hobnail boots. It was so smooth that it shimmered in the sunlight. It looked a little like a mirror, but I couldn’t make out any reflections.

Directly opposite the harsh rock face stood a tall, derelict watchtower, just like the one I had had a view of from my kitchen. The path thinned and I felt physically squeezed towards the perimeter fence of the demilitarised zone. I could feel the cold stone foundations rise up out of the ground as I passed close by. Dusty flakes of ancient paint lingered in the air, and my breathing became laboured for the first time since I set out.

To my delight, the mountain soon fell back behind me and the perimeter fence veered away to the left, while the permitted path continued ahead. A line of increasingly distant watchtowers showed the way to the rocky eastern coast and I gambolled along a summer meadow directly into the sun. A few minutes of pleasant open-air jogging brought my breath back and the whole southern quarter of the island opened up before me. If I looked to my right I could clearly make out my cottage, at the top of an impressive rise. I would have to tackle that before I finished this run. It was by far the highest point in sight, and I realised why my earlier views had been so spectacularly far-reaching.

I ran alongside the vast school playing fields. Quite an impressive set-up for a small island community, I thought. Were there even enough students to form a rugby XV? If so, who would they play against? Not for the first time, my earlier research, which I had considered thorough, was proven to be hopelessly inadequate. The old school house itself seemed tiny, but homely, and was dwarfed by the modern hall next to it, unapologetically inspired by function rather than emotion.

Not a hundred yards past the school house the path reached the coast again, for the first time since turning inland by the Sanctuary sign. The sea was still millpond flat, and the mainland sat inscrutably, far away under the blazing sun. Even the ripples from the early morning ferry crossing were no longer discernible. I guessed the boat had long since docked. I paused for a few seconds, then turned right to follow the path into the town.

Through the harbour, where a few men were absent-mindedly preparing some light freight that was due to go out on the afternoon crossing, and another was applying coats of weatherproof black paint to whatever metal surfaces he could find, I reached the bottom of the main street. I slowed to a gentle stop. I recognised Bobby, the landlord of the Shipbuilders Arms, from whom I had collected my key the day before.

‘Good morning!’ I panted, hands on my hips and shoulders drooping forward. I had been covering the ground at quite a pace since coming around to the sunny side of the mountain.

‘Morning,’ he replied. ‘How far’ve you come?’

I looked at my training watch. Satisfied, I pressed the stop button. ‘Around nine miles,’ I showed him the watchface, without thinking. He had no reason to disbelieve me.

‘Turn inland at the Sanctuary, did you?’ he asked. It wasn’t such an outrageous guess, but I was taken aback. ‘Heh, heh! Don’t look so freaked out,’ he said. ‘It’s your first day here – stands to reason you’ll stick to the main paths until you find your way around. Turn in at the Sanctuary, around the Mountain, follow the fence for a bit, past the school and back in here. Almost exactly nine miles. You’re not the first.’

I smiled. I guessed I wasn’t.

‘You got yourself plugged in yet?’ he changed the subject.

‘How do you mean?’ I was a bit embarrassingly slow on the uptake still.

‘Got electricity?’ he said, grinning.

‘Oh! Of course! No, I realised last night. Nothing at all. Do you know what I need to do? Do I need to get in touch with someone? Or is there a meter or something?’

‘Meter. No, no meter. Not here. We charge them over there for our leftovers, though;’ he pointed across towards the mainland, ‘helps keep the coffers full, just in case.’

‘So all electricity is free? There’s not even a cost for maintenance of the equipment or distribution or anything?’

‘If maintenance is needed, it gets done. It gets distributed, as you put it, through a great big set of wires under the ground. Never heard yet of a wire needing money for anything.’

I felt as stupid as I could ever remember having felt. I tried to return to the point:

‘Of course. So, what do I need to do to sort out my connection?’

‘Ah, yes. It’s simple. Just switch on your sub-station.’

‘My sub-station?’

‘It’s a grand term for a simple thing,’ he chuckled. ‘Most of us here have learned these sorts of things from the mainland, or at least books designed for a mainland audience. While the concepts are the same, the scale is a bit less,’ he had on his best humble face. ‘Each property has its own sub-station which is plugged directly into the grid. Yours will have been switched off for a while. If I remember rightly, it’s in your cellar. Probably by the wall that’s furthest inland.’

My cellar? I had had a pretty good scout around my cottage, but hadn’t found a cellar. How exciting.

I had betrayed quite enough ignorance already in the short conversation, so thanked him and ran on up the main drag, exchanging brief greetings with the few people I found going about their business. They were polite enough, although hardly effusive. I had been prepared for some peculiar types on the island, but Bobby seemed about as normal as I could have expected. I replayed our conversation as I climbed the ever-steepening hill through and out of the town. Yes, quite normal. Helpful, too. A cellar?

By the time I reached my cottage I was sweating like a carthorse. The last mile or so out of town and along the top had almost done me in. I dragged myself under the showerhead and pumped with my foot. Soon, the crystal-clear warm water started to fall like a tropical shower, blatting great friendly drops and cleansing my skin of the years of grime. Of all the conflicting emotions I had had since arriving, and there had been uncommonly many, this was the closest, I reckoned, to genuine heaven.

 

I dried and dressed myself in almost half of the clean clothes I had brought with me. I felt so energised that I couldn’t stop myself unhooking the axe from the wall of my larder and heading out to the wood store.

Three cross-sections of tree trunk sat on a mesh of twigs, an inch or two above the ground. I looked at my axe. It was very small in comparison, although its gleaming newness counted in its favour. I sat on the largest of the chunks and plotted my attack on the smallest. At a rough estimate I thought it might provide around two weeks of fuel for my fire. The larger ones around three or four weeks. Two months in total, which gave me plenty of time to organise further deliveries. I stood, set myself and swung the axe on a corner. Not bad. It made quite an impression and took a fair while to extract. In went the blade again. I missed the original landing spot, but not by much, and somehow I had managed to cut myself a decent wedge out of the surface, which made for a much more manageable target. The next few strikes had the desired effect and I heard some welcome creaking of wood. Within a minute I had hacked off a workable chunk in which I could picture four or five ideally-sized logs. It took ten, twelve more swings to end up with four decent logs for the fire. Not thirty strikes of the axe and I had four logs. Already my biceps and shoulders ached; I was an old hand as far as running was concerned, but this work was a different matter. I sat and collected myself, preparing for a long shift with the weapon.

The sheer physical effort was clearly what I had been craving for some time. I swung through the pain and relished the growing fatigue in my underused muscles. I chopped far more logs than I immediately needed, or could even bring indoors in the two outsized baskets I had brought out from the fireplace. But I couldn’t stop myself.

In the past, repetitive and solitary disciplines had always led me into complex networks of self-analysis, or detailed mapping of potential future scenarios that I wanted to engineer. Occasionally those thoughts would end up in a coherent conclusion, neatly stacked and ready for immediate action once I returned to the land of the living, but too often they would lead into dark corners that just panicked me. Invariably what followed was a downward spiral, psychologically, although the physical effects partly made up for that. For a start, it was one of the reasons I could run so very far: many were the times I would be unable to stop until I had reached some kind of resolution, or at least a reasonable stepping off point in my increasingly maddening internal argument. My stamina had become almost superhuman.

But not this time. Just like during the morning run, my mind was blissfully clear of any self-reproach, hare-brained schemes, or indeed anything except the recognition of the burning muscles burdened with the responsibility of one of the most very basic human needs: the heating of one’s shelter. It was so beautifully simple a scenario that any attempt at complex thinking would no doubt have caused mayhem, especially with such a sharp edge flying around my head. I simply hacked and chopped inexpertly at the dead wood until I could no longer physically continue.

I managed to drag inside one of the baskets and collapsed into a kitchen chair while I searched for any last scraps of energy I might have been hiding about my person. What a feeling, to be so totally physically drained and emotionally in complete equilibrium. Was that really true? It didn’t matter at the time.

I would sort out charcoal for the range soon: I had enough preserved food to get me through a few days in case there was a problem finding this Joshua character. I fished out some confit duck and potatoes, and a tin of white beans. I ate them right from the tin, there in that chair at the kitchen table. I opened a bottle of claret, poured a generous glass and sat back to admire my feast, letting out an enormous belch in the process. Even a wild dog might have had some pangs of shame at such a display, but I answered to nobody. A morning of hard, honest, uncomplicated physical labour and spiritual cleansing followed by a peasant meal complete with uncomplicated peasant manners. I felt no guilt for the first time since I could remember.

It didn’t take long to polish off my rude banquet. I topped myself up and dragged my unwilling body, along with the overweight log basket, into the living room. A new book was what I needed. I scanned the shelves until one demanded to be selected. I picked it out and lay back on the sofa, which appeared so much more comfortable than it had been the previous night. I opened it and began:

“Well, Peter? Cannot you see them yet?” asked a barin of about forty who, hatless, and clad in a dusty jacket over a pair of tweed breeches, stepped on to the verandah of a posting-house on the 20^th day of May, 1859.

I closed the book, laid it on my chest, took a drink of wine and shut my eyes. What was it they said? When you’re reading Tolstoy, you can’t put it down because it’s Tolstoy. When you’re reading Turgenev, you can’t put it down. Repeating that old aphorism always made me feel good. The only problem I had at that very moment was that my arms flatly refused to pick back up the Turgenev I’d just laid down.

 

By the time I woke, only the merest arc of cherry-red sun was left above the horizon, although the remnants of its haze explosion still lingered in the endless sky. I must have slept for six hours or more. And what a sleep it had been: calm, undisturbed, consistent, refreshing and dreamless. I felt as wide awake as I had ever been.

Among the last strands of natural light, I lit a candle and prepared a fire. This night was going to be more comfortable than the previous, I vowed, even though I was angry with myself for wasting the daylight when I still had a daunting list of jobs to do. One of them involved finding the electricity switch, which was going to be far more challenging in the dark. Stupid.

Still, I consoled myself with my firewood efforts. As the first flames began to lick around the edges of my logs (MY logs: it had such a gratifying ring), I mellowed a little. Who needed electricity? I caught sight of my book, abandoned when barely begun. That was no way to treat Turgenev’s masterpiece. But I couldn’t continue it by candlelight; I could eat and drink by the various flames I had engineered, and I was warm, but maybe I did need that extra boost that only electricity could provide. I decided to find that bloody cellar.

Where would you put a cellar entrance? There would have to be a stairway, and a door, was my opening gambit. But I had already investigated all the doors in the place. Nothing concealed such a staircase. Without moving from my sofa or putting down my wineglass, I cast my mind back through my whistle-stop tour of the morning. I had investigated all corners of the kitchen, the study, my bedroom, this living room. I looked around the room carefully to make sure I wasn’t missing anything obvious. Just walls.

My eye came to rest on the door to the spare room. I had spent just seconds in there. It was very possible I had missed something. I strode across with some purpose and burst in. More walls. No doors. In the corner, I took a closer look at the shower room. Just like in my own room, only even less spacious.

Of course! The penny dropped while I stood vacantly by an uncurtained window, half-watching the stars appearing one by one in the immaculate indigo canvas above me. Outside. I could just picture the stone steps descending to a flaking door. But where? I drained my latest glass and started my tour by the kitchen door, which is where I would have put them had it been up to me. My candle hardly flickered in the stasis of the night, but my careful lap of the property brought nothing to light. I even checked the wood store. The most inland point, Bobby had suggested. There was no rule to say that the cellar couldn’t be detached from the house. But no.

Unsettled, I sat back down and watched my logs doing their mesmerising business. I finished another glass and realised the bottle was empty. That was a habit I was going to have to snap out of. Finally, I flattened the calming embers and placed the guard in front, not that there was a carpet to ignite, but the boards were made of wood, and trudged slightly unsteadily to my bedroom. I tried not to catch the eye of my book as I passed.

At least I had a full set of bedclothes now. I made up the bed carefully and precisely, deliberately left the curtains open, climbed in, blew out my candle and watched for shooting stars. Despite my mammoth afternoon sleep, I was out within minutes. I dreamed of stairways, but none of them led down to a cellar – they all took me upwards. I followed them anyway.