“I hope I’m not getting in your way,” Tommy added.

“What do you mean?”

“Disrupting your life.”

This again. “Tommy, I’m not the social butterfly you imagine,” Malcolm said. “I don’t have much of a life to disrupt.”

Tommy laughed at this, and Malcolm thought that something in him seemed to shift. His nephew leaned forward and put his elbows on the table as he looked at Malcolm.

“There used to be a ceilidh in the hall every month,” Tommy said. “Maybe even every fortnight. Does that still happen?”

“Occasionally,” Malcolm said. “Every few months now. None of us are as young as we were. Nobody wants Ross dropping dead from a heart attack in our midst.”

“No young people to replace you.”

Malcolm shook his head, thinking this was rather a bleak thing to point out.

“But it’s still a social place, right?” Tommy said. “It always used to be.”

Tommy’s expression was more open now. Malcolm remembered what a chatterbox he had been as a child, how brightly and quickly he would talk when he got on to a favourite subject (dinosaurs, or was that Nicky? No, Tommy had liked history), how John would raise his eyebrows and adopt an air of forced patience, and how carefully Katrina would listen.

He said, “I suppose it’s still fairly social. Tiny place like this, you can’t exactly avoid each other.”

“Don’t you find it claustrophobic?”

Malcolm considered. “Sometimes, I suppose. But I grew up here, remember. Never known anything else.”

“You can’t do much here without other people noticing.”

“You can’t do anything here without other people noticing.”

“How long do you think I’d been on the island before every single person knew about it?”

“Oh, I’m not sure,” Malcolm said, pretending to think about it. “Maybe all of three minutes.”

“Three minutes of blissful anonymity,” Tommy said. “You’d find London strange. Caroline and I didn’t even know the names of the people living in the flats down the hall from us.”

“Now that does seem unfriendly.”

“I think I liked it. It was peaceful. But . . .” He paused a moment, then said, “I suppose it might be nice having people around you who know you. I remember when I was a kid, you and Heather came round all the time, didn’t you?”

“Every few weeks or so,” Malcolm said cautiously. It had been once a fortnight, probably. He couldn’t quite admit this to Tommy.

“Was my mother sociable?”

“I’d say so,” Malcolm said. “She liked people.”

“My father said she talked too much,” Tommy said. “I remember him saying that to her. Maybe more than once. I don’t remember when or why.”

Malcolm took this in. At last, he said, “She was fairly quiet, your mother. On the whole. Perhaps he sometimes told her she was too quiet, as well. He wasn’t easily pleased.”