‘Why do you want to spend a summer on Fair Isle?’

Jane had anticipated the question of course; she’d worked in HR and had interviewed countless people in her time. She’d given an answer, something bland and worthy about needing a challenge, a time to take stock of where her future lay. It was just a temporary contract, after all, and she could tell that the person on the other end of the phone was desperate. The season was only a few weeks off and the cook who’d been lined up to start had taken off suddenly for Morocco with her boyfriend. The true answer, of course, would have been far more complicated:

My partner has decided that she needs children. I’m scared. Why aren’t I enough for her? I thought we were settled and happy but she says that I bore her.

The decision to come to Fair Isle had been the equivalent of hiding under the bedclothes as a child. She’d been running away from the humiliation, the dawning understanding that Dee had actually found someone else who was just as keen to have a baby as she was, that Jane was alone and almost friendless. When she was offered the job in the field centre, Jane had resigned from her post in the civil service and because she had holiday still to take, had left at the end of the same week. There was a small ceremony in the office. Fizzy wine and a cake. The gift of a book token. The general feeling there was one of astonishment. Jane was known for her reason and her reliability, a cool intellect. That she should pack in her career, with its valuable income-linked pension, and throw everything away to move to an island, famous only for its knitting, seemed completely out of character.

‘Can you cook?’ one of her colleagues had asked, incredulous that the respected HR manager might be interested in something so mundane. And in the shambles of the telephone interview Jane had been asked that too.