The Chair by the Fire

The guesthouse stood above the harbour with its door on the sheltered side, which on these islands is the side you build a door on. It was kept by a North Ronaldsay ewe, one of the shore sheep that live off seaweed at the north end of the archipelago. Polly stood in the hall with rain running off her. "Do you have any available rooms?"

There were rooms. There usually are in September. Polly said, "I would like a quiet room, please." The ewe paused long enough to be polite about it. The rooms at the back face the yard, the rooms at the front face the water, and the wind finds both. Nowhere here is quiet in the way a visitor means it. What the islands offer instead is a wind so constant that after two nights you stop hearing it.

"Could you assist me with my luggage, please?" The ewe carried the bag up herself and set it beside a chair by the fire, and the chair was the reason Polly stopped talking. Its frame was driftwood, because no tree grows here and every plank in the old houses came in on the tide. Its back was oat straw, coiled and stitched into a hood that curves forward over the shoulders. A joiner in Kirkwall named David Kirkness turned that farmhouse habit into a standard design in the middle of the eighteen hundreds.

"What time is check-out?" Polly asked, because the ferry decides everything here. Then she sat down in the chair. The straw hood cut the draught off the door, the fire went on doing what fires do, and for the first time since the boat she could hear herself breathing.