As it turned out, I headed straight down to the school after leaving my girlfriend’s house. It was mid-afternoon and I didn’t relish leaving the rest of the day empty, especially since the beers had made me drowsy. Again.

I peered around the front door of the school house and shouted. Half a head appeared from a doorway.

‘I’m here! Who is it?’ her voice sounded strained, as if she was underneath something heavy.

I shouted my name and explained that Evie had suggested I come down for a visit before the kids came back. Her head disappeared back into the room and there was silence. I had barged in on her when she was right in the middle of something. I didn’t dare step beyond the threshold. Schools, no matter how used to them I had grown, still held that aura of discipline and rules. They could still turn adults into children.

She appeared from the doorway once more, and this time it was all of her.

‘I’m sorry, was just in the process of rearranging the classroom. I’ve been meaning to do it for months but never been sure if it was the right thing to do, and finally I’ve bitten the bullet, at the eleventh hour. Half past it. Typical of me. I hope it works. Anyway,’ she thrust out her alabaster hand, ‘very pleased to meet you at last. I was wondering when you’d drop by.’

She was young; younger than I had expected, and she was a vision, too. I realised that, since I had been on the island, no thoughts along those lines had stirred in me whatever. It was hardly as if I’d been very interested at all for a few years, but, since I arrived, not even a pang. Until I touched her hand. Her hair was a burnt copper: I was sure I’d run past a rhododendron of exactly the same hue at some point in the previous few days; and her eyes were the green of the sea in the shallow inlets on the west coast where the crabs climbed out of the water and onto the rocks to bask. Despite her dishevelled and slightly grimy state, which was quite possibly the real power at the heart of the feelings she had awoken in me, it was clear that she had been washed down from head to toe in something magical and transforming. I wouldn’t have been surprised at that moment if she had confided to me that she bathed every night in the beer I had been savouring over lunch.

I stuttered out my own greeting in reply. I was trying to stop myself dribbling, rather than forming words.

‘Fancy the tour?’ she asked, as if everything was perfectly normal.

‘Er, yes. That’d be great. If you’ve got time. I haven’t disturbed you at a difficult time, I hope?’

‘Oh, nonsense, don’t worry about that. Everything’ll get done. Let’s do first things first.’ And she slid her arm underneath mine and led me up the pristine wooden-floored corridor.

We walked past the room in which she had, until recently, been occupied, and made straight down the corridor to the far end, where there stood an identical door to the one through which I had just entered, except it was shut. We halted in front of it and she turned me round to look back down the thoroughfare.

‘I always start the tour like that,’ she said with a capricious grin. ‘You have now walked the entire length of the school, from south to north. The extent of my kingdom! Or queendom, I suppose. Pretty impressive, eh?’

‘Very,’ I agreed, which I wasn’t supposed to. I wished she would stop smiling like that. It was hardly in-keeping with the serious atmosphere of learning and disinfected discipline. I actually wanted to eat her. I had to say something that proved I was a real person and not just a figment of my own perverted fantasies. ‘But isn’t there another building outside, too? Quite a large one. Is that not part of the school?’

‘Oh, the outbuilding, yes. We’ll get to that. I still don’t really count it. The school’s soul is in here.’

‘I see,’ I replied. I did sort of see, too, but not as much as I made out. She laughed at my uncertainty, totally charmingly. I was getting used to people laughing at me. Equally charmingly, she took hold of me again.

‘This is the less glamorous end of the building,’ she began. ‘Changing rooms and showers and the like, down this end for easy access to the fields.’ Through the door behind us I could see the gravel path snaking away past the “outbuilding” towards those copious playing fields. I expected they would feature later in the tour.

She propelled me gently southwards and we went in through the next door on our right. The library. The walls were crammed full of learning. That was my kind of room.

‘This is the library,’ she informed me as I left her side like I was in a trance. I couldn’t help myself in a room like this. Each wall was filled, floor to ceiling, with books and I had to touch them, to pick them up, open them at a random page, flick through and familiarise myself with their secrets.

There were some pretty heavy looking astronomy and astro-physics volumes in the section I approached, nearest the door. Heavy in both senses of the word. I was shocked to see them in a school library. I turned to speak to her. She was standing in the doorway, looking very proud of her fiefdom.

‘What ages are the children you teach?’ I asked her.

‘The usual – they normally come here at four,’ she told me, ‘and most of them stay until 18. They don’t have to, but there’s so much to learn that not many of them feel they can escape before that.’

‘Wow. There’s some stuff here that I would have thought would be post-graduate standard,’ I replied as I passed sections on biology, bio-chemistry, agronomy, geology, geography, even anthropology. I noticed the polished wooden library steps, an identical set on each wall. They reflected what light was allowed into the room like a set of mirrors. I pushed one on its rollers and watched it float noiselessly towards the far wall. I had to scramble after it, at the cost of my dignity, to prevent it clattering into the shelves along that side. She laughed at me once more.

‘Everybody does that the first time,’ she reassured me. ‘Santino came pretty close to creating the perfect frictionless runners, but that was beyond even him in the end. Still, he made sure they’d stop before causing any damage. You didn’t actually need to intervene.’

Santino’s fingerprint was wherever I went on this island. Everything he produced was steeped not only in beauty but also in utility and practicality. I smiled weakly. She may well have decided by then that I was a complete buffoon.

The entire southern stretch was home to mathematics and physics, which overflowed to the final wall, bringing me full circle towards the door once more. There was just room for a small section on meteorology and less than a single shelf covering pottery and firing techniques, and some inexpertly-bound volumes, more like pamphlets, on local history. I looked at Penny, confused.

‘What is it?’ she asked me.

‘Is this the only library here?’ I wondered aloud. It was a small school, and two libraries would have been an extravagance, even for an island as individual as this.

She looked disappointed. ‘Well, yes. It is. Do you not think it’s well-stocked? I’ve always been rather proud of it. Maybe you’re used to slightly grander places?’

‘No, I didn’t mean that at all!’ I rushed to calm her fears of my displeasure. ‘It’s one of the most impressive collections I’ve ever seen in a school. Up to a point.’ I wasn’t entirely sure how to put it.

‘How do you mean “up to a point”?’ she replied suspiciously. ‘Up to what point?’

‘I mean almost all these books are science books.’ I paused. She looked at me quizzically. ‘There are no novels. There’s no poetry. No philosophy, even. Is there no study of the arts here? Or humanities, at least?’

‘Oh! I see what you mean,’ it did appear that she had only just caught my drift. ‘Yes. All of our books are based on knowledge. We don’t really encourage the arts here,’ she understated as effortlessly as a politician. ‘I’ve never really given it much thought. When you live in a place like this, you come to realise that there’s only one artist, who has created everything we can see and who continues to shape everything with every passing day or season. For us to try and pit our human endeavour against Nature’s work would be a little bit sad, I think. Don’t you? Especially when we’re talking about the sort of artist that wouldn’t think twice about wiping his creations off the canvas at the drop of a hat if that was what took his fancy. We’ve enough to worry about making sure that doesn’t happen. So we don’t tend to teach what you might call creative arts. I call it non-measurable flimflam. Quite without purpose.’

I wasn’t confident enough in my surroundings, or even my point of view, to take up the argument right at that time. The old girl was right: this was an artistic desert, at least in the way I would have previously understood the arts. But maybe staying alive under the constant hammer of nature, or Nature, was more of a challenge than I gave it credit for. I hadn’t spent a winter, a Winter, here yet.

We finished the tour of the inside. I asked polite questions and she responded. I helped to move the furniture in the main classroom; the job that she had been in the middle of when I arrived. For a moment I felt useful. To my surprise, there was a pottery lab and a kiln room across the corridor from the classroom. I imagined that only eminently useful items were to be produced there. No doubt the crockery I had been intermittently using began its life there. There was also a smaller classroom, dedicated to the four- and five-year-olds, where I was relieved to see some reading material that could have been referred to as fiction. Clearly, once they had learned to read, there were better ways to apply that skill.

We continued outside, leaving the building by the front door and turning right to skirt the school house, past the enormous picture windows of the classroom and the long library wall with its high gleaming fanlights beneath the eaves. I stood for a while and took in the sports fields, in which my guide seemed less interested. Notwithstanding that, she waited patiently for me.

‘How many children do you have in the school?’ I asked, turning to look at her.

‘I know what you’re getting at,’ she grinned. ‘Why on earth would we have such enormous sports fields for a school with only one and a half classrooms? The answer to your question is 44, by the way. There are round about three babies born each year here that make it to school age. Sometimes four. Never more than that.’

‘Yes, that was exactly what I was thinking,’ I confirmed.

‘Well, I admit we don’t really need such facilities,’ she sounded like a bank chief defending his bonus, ‘but they do get used.’ I wondered how, exactly, but kept my silence. ‘We host big events in the summer quite often. Schools from the mainland come over and play tournaments. And, it’s not widely reported, in fact it’s not reported at all, but we have lots of visiting international teams come here and practice before they go to the mainland. It’s a perfect place for them to relax and do whatever it is they need to do, safe in the knowledge that nobody is spying on them. They can’t get that over there. Sometimes we even get them in the autumn and winter, too, but we’ve had them stuck before. For weeks, some of them. It was a bit awkward.’ She giggled at the memory.

‘The thing is,’ she continued, ‘we have these fields, which we don’t strictly need, but we don’t need the land for anything else either. We have more than enough space for livestock and produce, and things don’t get changed around here unless there’s a real need to. It’s not like we have a government whose job it is to interfere and create progress where none is called for. The playing fields were instated during the war, when they were needed, and well used. Until someone comes up with a better use for the land, they’ll stay here. Besides, they earn us a little bit of money. No matter how hard we try, we still need to import some things, and we need money for that.’

Such a simple thing it was, what she had just said, but straight away it lifted an enormous weight from my shoulders. Things weren’t changed unless there was a real need for it. Until that point I don’t think I had truly appreciated exactly how much of life was spent on the nervous edge of some life-altering change, or at the very least in constant fear of it. Even looking back on that moment now, I feel lightened and invulnerable. Embarrassingly, I fell a little bit more in love with her. Don’t fall in love with the messenger, no matter how heavenly the message.

She turned to address what she called the “outbuilding”. Architecturally it was uninteresting, apart from the fact that it towered over the school house and probably told a socio-educational story merely through its size and matter-of-fact form. She began as if from a script. ‘The outbuilding is fairly new. Almost six years since it went up. The far end,’ she pointed, stewardess-style, to the far end, which was by far the more liberally windowed wing, ‘is dedicated to science labs. Mostly pure chemistry. Old Mr Robertson from the brewery does a few hours a week with the younger ones and takes experimental seminars several times a month with the really advanced children. It’s wonderful to watch, when I get the chance. Such enthusiasm, and some spectacular results. You might even have drunk some of those results since you’ve been here.

‘Next to that, in the middle section, is the building and joinery workshop. It’s not used as much as we had hoped it would be. Santino agreed to take classes and host working groups when we first set it up, but he’s been called away so can’t come very often. He still manages to get back sometimes, though, so we keep it running. Nobody else is willing to step in. If you’re living in his cottage, you’ll understand why.’

‘Yes, quite something to live up to,’ I murmured. Nobody had said so up to then, but I had assumed that Santino was dead. It seemed not. It also seemed like the wrong time to ask about him.

‘Then, at this end, we have the gym and changing rooms, the professional standard ones that the visiting teams use. It wouldn’t be right to cram them into our little facilities in the house. And that,’ she gave me her best full-stop look, ‘is about the size of it. Split into three equal parts. Science, art and sport. Even you can’t deny the developmental even-handedness of that.’

‘Certainly not!’ I laughed. Really, I wouldn’t have dreamed of it.

‘As it happens, it was nearly all very different,’ she added, ‘and it almost caused a bit of a local incident. We don’t really do those here, so that was quite disturbing for lots of people. But it’s all blown over now, all forgotten, mostly.’

Why had she stopped? ‘Go on,’ I encouraged her. She looked a bit discomfited. I got the impression that gossip was frowned upon here, but it wouldn’t have been fair to leave it at that.

‘Well, I suppose it won’t do any harm,’ she said. ‘It was Evie Donald, your friend. She was on the group that proposed and designed the whole scheme in the first place. Very passionate about the school, is Evie. She knows the importance of it to our self-sufficiency. But she had her own personal vision, and it didn’t meet with general approval. To be honest, it was always going to be a difficult one to sell here, and things got a bit fraught for a while.’

I was intrigued. ‘What kind of vision?’

‘She wanted the whole far end, where the lab is, to be dedicated to music. Like a recital room. I think she was even agitating for a recording studio in there. Everyone was a bit shocked when they saw her design. A few things were said, and she didn’t take too kindly to them. I think some old wounds might have been opened. Thing is, most of the island wouldn’t dare argue against her, so there was this hulking wall of silence built all around the central core of disagreement. It was quite eerie, I heard. I wasn’t living here at the time, so this is all second-hand. She knew it, though. She knew that those saying nothing didn’t agree with her either. So she withdrew totally from the scheme. Not like taking her bat home: it wasn’t as if she prevented anything from continuing, she just stepped away. It was very dignified. Although I heard she was fuming for a long while about the whole thing. Locked herself up in that cottage with her piano and didn’t speak to anybody for months, they told me.

‘The immediate result was that things progressed a lot quicker. More than anything, the whole architecture of the place got simpler, since there was no need to take acoustics into account any more. Nobody here had any experience of that, anyway, and Evie was having to bring someone over from the mainland to deal with it. She was going to pay for it out of her own pocket.’

I raised an eyebrow. That sounded expensive to me, and clashed with my understanding of the financial model on the island.

‘She had a significant payout from the shipyard after her husband’s accident.’

At this point, I sensed, we really were about to enter the realms of gossip. I asked if I could have a look around inside the outbuilding. She was happy to oblige, although warned me that it had little to recommend it in terms of interest.

We moved slowly through the three sections, all very impressively appointed, if, as suggested, a little lacking in inspiration. The joinery shop was scattered with some sublime pieces of wooden art, and reminded me of a less intense version of my cellar. It was all the highest quality, as good as you would see in any university on the mainland. That got me thinking.

‘Do the children, once they leave the school, go on to university on the mainland? Or do they just slot in to life here?’ I asked her.

‘Of course! Some do, some don’t. We’re just like any other community in most ways, you know. Island teenagers aren’t so very different from what you’re used to. They want to explore. I admit, most of them come back again, but not all.’

‘What about you? Did you go away?’ I didn’t consider it too personal a question.

‘Yes, I went to university, and then spent another year after that on the mainland. I even went to Brighton once.’

‘Brighton?’ Well, if she had been to Brighton, there wasn’t much I could tell her about life.

‘Just for a weekend. It was fun… But I had to come back. It just wasn’t what I was used to.’

‘Brighton wasn’t?’

‘No, silly. The mainland in general. Brighton included, I suppose, although I had a nice time there. No, everything was different. I’m not sure what it was. Maybe it wasn’t one single thing or set of things. Everything seemed too complex. Unnecessarily so. Nothing was straightforward, there was always shenanigans…’ she drifted off.

‘Do you mean life, study, jobs, or something else?’ I prompted her.

‘Everything. I was always on edge, not knowing what people were thinking or what they had in store for me next. I felt a bit helpless, really. Relationships, money, status. All the lying that went on. None of it made any sense to me. I gave it some time – I presumed I was just a bit naïve, having been born here, where it’s all so different, but it got worse. I used to cry far too much. I never cried on the island. So, in the end, I packed everything in and came home. They were so pleased to see me. They needed a new teacher, so I spent a year learning the ropes from Lily and took over so she could retire.’

I looked around. We had arrived back at the front door. The sun was starting its final descent; afternoons at this time of year really were much more tranquil than the mornings. It was time for me to take my leave of the school and its enchanting mistress.

‘Thank you for the tour,’ I held out my hand.

‘Don’t be daft,’ she giggled, ignored my formal hand, placed both of hers on my shoulders and leaned over to plant a delicate kiss on each cheek. ‘If I can’t show off my school to my neighbours, what would be the point of being here at all!’

‘Quite right,’ I concurred. ‘You never know, maybe I’ll be able to come down and see you in action once you open up again?’

‘Now you really are being silly,’ she dismissed me. ‘You know as well as I do that, once the Winter starts, you’ll be as busy as I will. We won’t see you down this way for a good while.’

She was wrong: I knew nothing of the sort, and her uncomplicated statement of an apparently generally-acknowledged fact put me on the back foot once more. And I still hadn’t cleared up the question which had been bothering me more than anything else: ‘Can I ask, while I’m here? It’s something that I haven’t asked anyone else directly and I think I need to now, before it’s too late.’

‘Sounds ominous! Of course. What is it?’

‘It seems stupid, but when, exactly, does the Winter start? Everything seems to depend on it, but is there a specific date, or maybe an event, that signals its start? It’s already pretty cold, and there was some snow mixed in with the rain the other morning.’

‘Ha, ha, ha! I don’t believe it,’ she exclaimed. That start didn’t sound too promising for my already bruised confidence. ‘We’re so used to everything here that we assume everybody else knows it all, too. Obviously we don’t import enough new residents, so never learn our lesson. I’m so sorry.’ She straightened her face and composed herself generally. ‘Winter starts when the snow has settled on the top of the Mountain. It has to come as far down as the Overhang. It’s coming, surely, although only a few flakes have stuck so far. And it certainly won’t be until the moon has started to wane. Last night it was still full, so we’ve got a short while, probably a few days, yet. But don’t get too comfortable; even the old hands get taken by surprise most years.’

So that was it. Another mystery cleared up. Every day, life made just that little bit more sense. I thanked her again and trudged back up the hill, directly into the lowering sun. I turned to check out the Mountain. She was right: a few white patches on the summit seemed harmless and picturesque enough, but they shined self-confidently in the weak light as unshakeable portents of the season to come.

 

I woke violently while it was still dark, sweating and catching my breath. My heart was beating furiously, and I sat up on the side of the bed to let it calm. Outside the window, above the shimmering Mountain, stars were far away and quietly going about their astral business, defiantly detached and probably mostly oblivious to my state of distress. I watched them fraternally for a while and it relaxed me.

Once I had quieted that heart enough to lay back down, I turned to see if I had disturbed Penny, or if she was still sleeping. At first I couldn’t make out her outline. It seemed I had thrown my sheets over to her side while I was thrashing around, still asleep, since I had woken with nothing to cover my modesty. I pulled back the double layer of sheets carefully, one by one: I didn’t want to wake her if I could avoid it.

There was no denying it. She was nowhere to be found in the bed. It was a large bed, but I could easily cover every inch of it from my position almost slap-bang in the middle. Maybe she had gone to the bathroom. I listened for a long minute, but there was no hint of any movement anywhere, including in there. Confused, I leaned over and picked up her pillow. I took a deep breath of her scent. Even after only a few hours together, that sweet fragrance was seared into my consciousness. I almost choked: the unmistakeable odour of wood chippings and beery sweat.

The only head that had graced this pillow was my own. I sank down funereally, deep into my own realisation and shame. I was too afraid to close my eyes, and it took until the first striations of pink sun burst through the horizon before I could drop off into anything resembling sleep again.