‘What is it?’ His first thought was one of the grandchildren, but then their roles would be reversed. She wouldn’t be coming to him, consoling and soft, if one of her Ishbel’s kids had—

‘Donald, it’s that lassie. Malcolm’s girl. Cliodhna.’

The main picture the paper had used was an old one, how he liked to think of her. Young, red, on fire. She never smiled in pictures back then. In an inset, the lassie’s face older, grey flecking at her hair, tired. DEPRESSION it said underneath. Campbell had battled the illness for years.

There was a strange, low noise in the air, like an animal, and it was himself making it. He pushed the paper away from him along the table. Then he reached his arms up and wrapped himself round Morna’s waist, resting his head on her big, warm stomach. What would she have been? Forty-five? Fifty, the paper said. A year older than Morna had been when they’d married. A grown woman. A woman with half her life behind her.

Donald blamed Malcolm, but Donald had been blaming Malcolm for over forty years, silently. Malcolm never knew while he was alive, and blaming him hadn’t done any good then, had it?

He’d not been there when Malcolm had met Eileen Johnstone. His father had insisted he help out on the boats, never mind that the band had been taking off, so they’d headed off down south without him, picking up some greasy fool from Inverness who’d said he could play but couldn’t. Maybe if he’d been there, he would have been a steadier influence, got them to take it a wee bit more slowly. Ach, maybe not.

Malcolm had stepped off the ferry with this small, strange woman, her hair a grabby colour of blue-black Donald had never seen in nature, her mouth a grim slit in a hard face, and introduced her as his wife. All red-gold and glowing, Malcolm was, bending down a whole foot to listen to his tiny bride, and folk nodded, gave them two weeks’ grace as a pair of lovesick fools. Malcolm was keen to push that story as he felt it suited him: being in love, marrying in a flight of passion, marrying to do the right and honourable thing by his woman. That was the way he’d always been – working out the story that showed him in the best light, then sticking to it until it became his history, until he’d convinced himself of it.

‘It’s a good thing for a man to be married,’ Malcolm had said in the pub that first night, new wife safely stowed with his sister-in-law. ‘It’s about bringing the right balance to life. You need to do it, Donald. And she’s smart, this one. Thinks about things. She’ll be the one to find a living for us.’