But Eileen started showing too quickly, and the scandal began clanking. A number of women, including Malcolm’s own sister, suddenly refused to talk to her, not that she’d ever had that much to say to them. As though no one on the island had ever married for a baby before. Eileen seemed to fold their silent anger in on herself; when she was four months gone, they caught the last ferry on a Friday night off the island, didn’t come back. Everyone shrugged, because they expected nothing better of Malcolm Campbell, sure they didn’t. Donald received the summons three weeks later, a postcard with an Inverness address and the unsigned sentence: Could use a better fiddle player …

In Inverness, Eileen talked. She talked as she moved around Donald’s bed on the floor of their one-room flat, while she got ready for work and Malcolm snored through in the press. She talked while she served up their dinners in the evenings before they went off to play. She talked about how important it was that she got all of the girls on her factory floor to join the union before she left to have the baby. She talked about whatever book she was reading – one of the first things she’d done, after they’d found this place, was become a member of the library – explaining the plot of a whodunnit or a Labour Party pamphlet with the same serious tone and weight. She talked about how dull it had been on the island where no one read anything. Her voice was a harsh caw, nothing musical about it, and even as Donald grew to like her, like their conversations, he wondered again what had attracted Malcolm to her. She talked only to Donald, even when Malcolm was awake; at night, though, waking up, he’d seen them wrapped around each other, a tangle of limbs, faces pressed together and Malcolm’s hands strapped over her stomach, as though their sleeping selves were stuck deep in a secret love affair they couldn’t let the conscious bodies know about. It calmed him to watch them, sometimes for hours, till dawn broke. One morning he didn’t move to feign sleep quickly enough. ‘Getting a good eyeful, are you?’ she said, but her voice was peaceful.