“I started making plans for the future. I’d always wanted to go to agricultural college, but I thought that if I worked hard and got my exams I might get to university in Glasgow, too. I could study agriculture there. I imagined being sophisticated, too.

“Then, well before the end of the holiday, she went. She didn’t tell me that she was going. A plane came in very early and she went out with it. There was no letter, nothing.

“It turned out that there was a man in Glasgow, and that she was pregnant, though I didn’t know that then. The baby wasn’t mine. There was nothing between us but passionate kisses in the moonlight and the occasional grope in the barn. Later she got married. It was a quiet wedding and I wasn’t invited.

“After she left I went a bit wild. There didn’t seem any point in working for exams anymore. I was still staying with Maggie’s auntie on Baltasay for my last year of school, but I got in with a different crowd—lads who’d already left school. I went out drinking with them. Then I got thrown out of the lodging. There was some trouble with the police. I made a fool of myself.

“All the time I was writing to her, trying to find out what had happened. Kenneth and Annie wouldn’t say anything. I even went down to Glasgow once.

“Then she wrote to me and told me what had happened. I remember the letter coming. I was home for the Christmas holidays. She explained about the baby. It was a peculiar letter, but she said that she was happy. It was full of all the things she was doing at college—parties, rehearsals. She carried on there although she must have been quite pregnant by then. She didn’t tell me anything about the baby’s father.

“They let me stay on at school but I didn’t do very well in the exams.”

All the time he was talking he was staring out of the window. He turned to face his wife.

“I was obsessed by the fact that she must have been pretending for the whole of that summer.”

She stretched out and took his hand.

“I’m glad you told me about her.”

“I should have told you before. I didn’t know that she’d be here.”

“I realized that. What happened to her husband?”

“They’re divorced. There’s just her and the child.”

He had never talked to her so intimately before. She felt very close to him. With the same ridiculous, romantic impulse which had made her dream of Kinness as paradise, she was certain that now everything would be happy between them.