The Island in Winter

The post was advertised in eleven words and a phone number: winter caretaker, small island, November to February, accommodation provided. Rowan read it twice on a Tuesday and applied on the Wednesday, having spent the intervening night deciding that she was not going to.

The island has nine buildings, of which seven are shut from October. In summer it takes forty guests, who come for the birds and the quiet and complain, in roughly equal numbers, about the wind and the price of the crossing.

Her job, as it was explained to her on the jetty by a reluctant man in a hurry, is to keep the generator running, the shutters closed and the damp out, to walk the fences after every gale, and to write everything down in the logbook whether it seems worth writing down or not.

The supply boat comes on Mondays and Thursdays if the tide and the forecast allow, which in December means roughly one week in three when it comes only once. Everything she eats after that is a decision she made a fortnight earlier.

The first fortnight was harder than she admits to people who ask. Not frightening: simply long. Nothing on the island required her at any particular hour, and she found that she had been relying on other people's timetables for most of her adult life.

So she made some. Fences on Tuesdays. Paraffin lamps checked and filled on Fridays, because the generator is turned off at eleven and the dark here is not the dark of a town. Bread on Sundays, badly at first.

The logbook turned out to be the useful part. Written for the owners, it is read by nobody until spring, and it slowly became the place where she noted the seals on the north beach, the door that swells in wet weather, and once, in December, a sentence about how quiet the gorse looked under frost.

Solitude, she has decided, is not a feeling but a schedule. It is bearable in the morning, difficult between three and five, and entirely fine again once the lamps are lit. Anyone who tells you otherwise has done a weekend of it.

In January the wind took eleven metres of fencing on the west side and laid it flat, posts and all. Repairing it took her three days and a book of knots, and the result, photographed for the owners, was described by the boatman as "not bad for a first go".

Had the weather been kinder that month, she thinks, she would probably have gone home in February and told the story twice at dinner parties and never thought about the place again. As it was, the fence was hers.

People on the mainland ask her what she does all day, in the tone of somebody who suspects the honest answer is nothing. She has stopped trying to explain that the day is full and that almost none of it would sound like anything if it were said aloud.

At the end of February the owners wrote to ask whether she would consider the same contract next winter, adding that the pay would be reviewed and that this was not a promise. The letter came on the Thursday boat and has been on the kitchen table since.

She leaves on the fourth of March. The shutters are already done and the logbook has been left open at the last page, as instructed. Whether she writes back is something she seems to be putting off until she has seen a street with cars in it again.