Salma paid for her ticket and entered the grounds of the castle. Lawns and clusters of ruined buildings. A map marked out the area: first on the right was the tower, strategically placed to survey all access to the castle by land, behind it were the smithy and the stables. Further inwards towards the sea and beyond the bowling green were the living quarters, the suites, dining and drawing rooms. Salma wandered around, the grass a bright green beneath her, the derelict buildings humble in their simplicity, solemn in their inner darkness. From the tourists around her, she caught the tones of foreign languages, a softness surrounded the place and the wind blew gently. From a porthole of stone, she looked down over the water. It was more purple than the sky, the waves uneven frills. To the left were high fields where bales of rolled hay looked like barrels laid down on their sides. This was the same view the inhabitants of the castle had gazed at long ago. The workers and ladies; the gardeners and stable boys. It struck her that Lady Evelyn must have come here as a girl in the late nineteenth century, as an adult in the twentieth. The woman who travelled in the Sahara and in Kenya would not have failed to visit the east coast of her own country. Once again Salma felt a closeness to her, an awareness that was more than curiosity.

In the chapel, she stood on consecrated ground, the sky above her withholding rain. In 1276, people knelt here and worshipped. They were not her ancestors and she did not share their religion, but she understood them because she herself believed and she herself lived each day knowing she would, after she died, be held to account. It suddenly dawned on her that this chapel perched on the edge of the sea was facing south-east, the direction of Mecca. It was parallel to every purpose-built mosque in the country! Lady Evelyn, who left instructions to be buried facing Mecca, would have delighted in this coincidence. Salma smiled, imagining bringing it to Lady Evelyn’s notice. The one to hear back, ‘Really?’ in a posh Scottish accent.

In the nearby kitchen, indicated by the wide arch of the fireplace, she heard the word ‘Really?’ in Arabic. Clear and intimate, a snap into her consciousness, coming after a lag in the conversation she had been imagining, a delay in reply like on a poor long-distance line. There was no one near Salma and she was sure, as she could ever be sure, that it was Lady Evelyn’s voice speaking to her in the Arabic she learnt from her nannies when she was a child growing up in Cairo and Algiers. Hearing the dead? Imagining, more likely. She knew what Lady Evelyn looked like from the photos – like Gertrude Bell, someone had described her, slim, active, snobbish and chatty with scrunched-up hair under a desert hat – and now Salma had her voice too. She looked up and saw a formation of grey clouds surrounding a sky-blue body of water. The loch was in her mind, where they were heading. How odd it had been to organise and reorganise this trip. The way it evolved from a day trip for the whole of the women’s group, to only the three of them but with the addition of the stay at the loch. She could not give up the visit to Lady Evelyn just because the majority were against it. Many of these women lulled themselves into believing they were in Britain temporarily; that somehow, someday, they would return ‘home’. Moni and Iman were different; they wanted to be here for the long haul. And Salma was the one with the Scottish husband, she was the one who must always be making the effort to belong. Digging deeper all the time, craving connections, self-conscious that her roots, despite the children, might not be strong enough.