‘Indeed. I have no idea how he did it. He was a very wealthy man, a millionaire in today’s money. Piershill is a private cemetery and I think they made him promise that when he eventually died he would be buried in Edinburgh beside his dog, and he agreed. They probably thought it would be a tourist attraction, and he probably thought it would be decades away. But because of the fire, he died four days after the dog did. His memorial stone is huge, right at the front near the gates. Annie told me that the funeral was on a Sunday and half of Edinburgh turned out. There were black horses with big plumes on their heads and it was quite a spectacle. The whole family went and stood at the roadside to watch it.’ Georgia took a sip of wine. ‘But she didn’t tell me she was at the theatre on the night of the fire until many years later. I still have her bag, green suede with purple lining and a white pocket. Suffragette colours, you know? And inside it there are some things; some coins, and a handkerchief, and there’s a programme from the show. She showed it to me when I was doing the project and there’s a burn mark in the middle of it.’ She laughs. ‘Of course, I wanted to take it to school and show it to my friends but she wouldn’t let me. I remember being rather cross about that.’

She puts her right hand on the table and walks her first two fingers across the surface. ‘The thing is, she counted the stairs too. Not once, but every time she went up them here in the house, even when she was quite old. You could see her lips moving. I thought she was quite the most fascinating person I had ever known, and I wanted to be like her, so I counted too. Everyone here counts the stairs.’

2022

Chapter 81

May 2022

It’s early evening and still warm in the garden. Joanna and Lucy have gone to a friend’s house, and Ben sits at the picnic bench with a pencil in his hand and an open notebook in front of him. He taps away at the calculator app on his phone and writes down the results in a long column of figures. His soft two-week-holiday beard has more than a sprinkling of white, and he strokes it as he concentrates.

Tess, grass-stained after emptying armfuls of lawn clippings onto the compost heap, plonks herself down on the bench opposite him.

‘Georgia and Stan are coming for lunch on Sunday. They’ve been vaccinated and Georgia told me that nothing but an edict from the First Minister herself would stop her from being here – and even then she would be inclined to be disobedient. It’s Stan’s birthday, so I want to make sure there’s a good spread.’