Many years later, after their mother’s funeral, he and John had got drunk together in John’s sitting room after the other guests had left. Katrina and Heather had come in from time to time to bring them offerings from the cold spread—sausage rolls, crisps, and sandwiches to soak up the whisky—but eventually they’d given up and left their menfolk to it.

This was one of the few times since they were in their early teens that Malcolm had felt close to his brother. They’d laughed as they remembered their mother’s obsession with washing the backs of their necks, her collection of crocheted doilies, her gentle eye-rolls in the face of their father’s temper (she had been a brave woman, in her way). Then Malcolm had said, sentimental in his drunkenness and trying to grasp at this thread of unity between them, “She wasn’t an easy person, I know. But I think she did her best.”

“She was an old bitch,” John replied, his words only slightly slurred. “I’m surprised Dad put up with it. All her bleating on, her stupid complaints.”

Malcolm was so shocked he couldn’t think of an answer. He would never again forget that although he and John had grown up in the same house, they had each had a different set of parents, an entirely different childhood.

Malcolm was already engaged to Heather when his father died. He wasn’t sure afterwards what he would have done without her steadiness and common sense, how on earth he would have managed the croft. There were times, in fact, especially in the difficult early years, when he had envied John, who had no responsibilities, nothing expected of him, and had escaped to Glasgow as soon as he could to train as an accountant. (Their father had, predictably, been scathing about this, although their mother, for once, had seemed impressed.)

But Heather had been far cleverer than any of the stubborn Baird men, had said straight out in her blunt, practical way, “We won’t earn nearly enough to scrape by from the croft, so we need a plan, Mal.” Heather had always been one for plans, and Malcolm never got in her way. But he was grateful, too, that she had never suggested, not even once, not even indirectly, that he shouldn’t take on the croft. In all else he would have given way to her, but not in that. And since continuing the croft was what he cared about, he was more than ready to listen to her plans.