‘I need to know where you both are the whole time, okay? Or I’ll get scared.’ I put my hand out to him and he touches the pads of his fingertips to mine. ‘Okay?’

‘Okay,’ he agrees and I realize he was expecting far worse.

‘Good.’ I hand him the packet of biscuits I’d brought from home.

‘So how was it?’

‘Fine.’

‘Come on, tell me what you did.’

Jack shrugs and bites into an Oreo.

‘They didn’t let me climb the rock,’ Emmy says from the back seat. ‘It’s so unfair. Everybody else got to.’

‘Maybe they thought you couldn’t climb.’

‘Of course I can climb,’ she says scornfully. ‘All children can climb.’

‘One of the other boys only has one arm,’ Jack says.

‘What happened to the other?’

‘Got caught in the reaper.’

‘God. I look at him, horrified. How awful.’

He shrugs again. ‘It happens.’

I study his profile for trauma from the day’s events, but his expression is hard to read. I try to remember the last time my son really emotionally engaged with me and feel depressed when I can’t. Maybe Jack’s a particularly bad case but up to a point it’s true of most children. Think of all the worry, panic and guilt you endure in the first years of a child’s life. Think of all the boundless patience, understanding and love you pour into the bottomless hole of their need. But say you were to die before they were seven or eight, would any of it really have made a lasting impression on them? Case in point, my mother left when I was six and I don’t really remember her. Oh, I know that she had short hair and delicate features but only because I’ve looked at the photograph book my father keeps in his bookshelf. The day I was born, my father gave my mother a plover’s egg. It was pale green and dappled, almost perfect except for the tiny pin hole in the top. She hadn’t wanted an egg as a birthing present, though. She had wanted lilies. Something that smelt nice in the hospital, something that made her feel beautiful and special, but the thing is, you can’t get fresh-cut lilies in the Orkneys.

8

Emmy has taken to school like a mongoose to crocodile eggs. Geography seems to be the only subject she’s taught, but she can’t get enough of it. Within the space of a week, she is impressively well informed about erosion and rock formation and piously instructing me in her new Margaret Thatcher voice not to tread on certain types of desert top soil (contains valuable oxygen) lest I irreversibly damage the earth and doom us all to never-ending drought and destruction.