In the island, fifty years ago, a young man and a young woman came together. They had known each other all their lives up to then, f course – they had sat in the school room together –but on one day in early summer this boy from one croft and this girl from another distant croft liked at each other with new eyes.
After the midsummer dance at the big house, they walked together across the hill under the wide summer night sky – it is never dark here in summertime – and came to the rocks and the sand and sea just as the sun was rising. For an hour or more they stayed there, held in the magic of that time, while the sea and the sunlight danced around them.
It was a story full of the light of a single short summer. The boy and the girl lived, it seemed, on each other’s heartbeats. Their parents’ crofts were miles distant, but they managed to meet most days; at the crossroads, at the village shop, on the side of the hill. But really those places were too open, there were too many windows – so their feet went secretly night after night to the beach with its bird-cries, its cave, its changing waters. There they could b safely alone, no one to see the gentle touches of hand and mouth, no one to hear the words that were nonsense but that became in his mouth a sweet mysterious music … ‘Sigrid.’