Malcolm nodded. The men drained the last of their coffee and got back to work on the fence. But Malcolm thought he could feel what was happening. With Tommy’s return, people were beginning to look at Malcolm and remember. It hadn’t felt like this for years. After Tommy had left, Malcolm had felt himself and Heather drifting loose from the connection. They would never break it entirely, but it had slackened. As the years passed, he felt himself become in the eyes of the others simply Malcolm again, not John’s brother. Still, though. Just every once in a while he’d feel Davey’s gaze on him in the bar, Kathy hesitating fractionally as she handed over his change, and he’d realize they were wondering what he knew.

Heather would tell him, of course, that he was being too sensitive, manufacturing worries where there were none.

They’re your friends, she would say. Nobody’s thinking of it.

The first part was true, Malcolm accepted. But that didn’t mean the second part was as well.

“Need some more wire,” Robert said, lifting a sagging piece with the end of his hammer.

“I’ll get it,” Malcolm said, heading for the pickup. Hefting the roll in his arms, he wondered how Tommy was spending his morning. He felt uncomfortable now at the idea of having left this stranger alone in his house. But for God’s sake, what was he afraid Tommy might do? Burn it down? There was certainly nothing worth stealing.

He and Robert stretched out the new wire between the fence posts, and Malcolm held it taut while Robert tightened it.

“Gearing up for tupping time now,” Robert said. “We’ll move the ewes in a week or so. You’ll be around?”

“Of course.”

They would be moving the ewes down from the hills and into fields Malcolm had once owned. This fact would never be mentioned between them. Malcolm thought this was due less to any particular sensitivity on Robert’s part than to his immense pragmatism; for Robert, things were as they were, and there was no use looking back at how they had once been, or at how they might have been. Malcolm had known Robert a long time and had always respected him. But he couldn’t share his attitude, however hard he tried. He himself spent far too long looking back.

Malcolm’s father had been a crofter, and his father before him, and his father too, and so on several generations back, all these Baird men working the same swathe of land, give or take a few acres, to the west of the island. Seventeen acres, comprising six acres of covetable in-bye in a shallow green valley, and the eleven acres lying across windswept moorland stretching inland. In addition to this, there was the common grazing, most of it rocky hill terrain, shared by all the crofters in the township.