By the time he reached Setter, his father had finished with the animals. Sandy found him standing in the kitchen. He waited in the doorway and looked in. His father looked lost in thought and it seemed like an intrusion to blunder in, but he felt kind of foolish just waiting outside. At last Joseph saw him.

‘It’s hard to think of this place without her,’ the older man said. ‘I keep thinking she’ll come up behind me, full of mischief and gossip.’

‘How did she keep track of everything that was happening in the island?’ Sandy had wondered about this before. His grandmother knew about his friends’ escapades and love affairs before he did. No wonder Evelyn had talked about her as a witch. ‘She didn’t go out so much towards the end.’

‘She made it to the Lindby shop every couple of days,’ Joseph said. ‘People were always coming to visit her. Cedric called in every Thursday to chat, but it wasn’t only her own generation who liked her company. Besides, she could smell a scandal like other folk smell rotten eggs.’ He looked around the room, seemed to be scoring the details on to his memory. The postcard from Michael and Amelia’s last foreign holiday propped on the dresser, the religious sampler which perhaps she’d stitched as a child, that seemed out of place in any room where Mima had lived, the enormous television, the dirty glasses by the sink. The photograph of Joseph’s father that had been taken during the war, looking young in his Norwegian jersey. They both knew Evelyn wouldn’t rest until everything had been dusted and scrubbed and tidied away.

‘Do you still think of this house as your home?’ As soon as he’d spoken Sandy thought that was a daft sort of question. Joseph had lived in Utra since he’d married. Utra had been in Evelyn’s family and had been a tumbledown wreck when they’d moved in. Joseph had made a home almost from nothing.