Later she took up her knitting. She was working on an all-over jersey, a commission from an American woman, who’d wanted natural colours and traditional patterns. By now it was dark outside and she had the curtains closed. She switched on the television to hide the sound of the digger, but the headlights were so bright that they shone through her curtains, making weird shadows on the wall. Then the lights went away and everything was quiet, and for the first time that day she could concentrate on her work.

She knitted as her mother had done with a leather belt, padded with horsehair, and three pins pointed at both ends. One of the pins she’d stick into the belt and the garment grew as a tube. There were three colours, Shetland black, grey and mourrit, a natural reddish brown, and she kept the tension even as she wove the wool into the back of the pattern. She was working on the anchor motif and that reminded her of her father, who’d had his own fishing boat and had been lost at sea. Soon she was so lost in her memories that when there was more noise on the building site she hardly noticed it.

They’d been three sisters. Half-sisters in fact, because Joan’s mother had died when she was a bairn and her father had remarried. Joan was the oldest by ten years, and then there’d been Annie and Edie. Now Edie was away and Annie was dead, taken by cancer just two years before. None of them had found a man. The nearest any of them came to it was in the Seventies when the oil had first come into the islands. Then men had flocked to Shetland, like the seabirds arriving on the cliffs in the spring, jostling for space on the rocky ledges. Men were everywhere, and girls could take their pick. Joan was in her thirties then, already considered something of an old maid, but Annie and Edie had been young and wild and looking for husbands. It was a while since Joan had remembered that time, but now, her fingers busy with the knitting, stopping occasionally to follow the pattern she’d made by plotting tiny crosses on graph paper, she relived those months in the summer of 1974.

She’d watched from the sidelines as her sisters made fools of themselves at dances and parties. There was one particular man from the Scottish mainland. He was an engineer with the construction company and he had digs with Margaret Hay, who lived just down the road from Holmsgarth. He’d hired a car and set off to work every morning looking very smart. Both Edie and Annie had thought he would make a fine husband and often found excuses to drop in on Margaret when they knew the man was at home. Joan paused for a moment and rested her work in her lap while she struggled to remember his name. James Mackie. How could she have forgotten it, when he had caused so many arguments in their house? So much disruption to their lives.