At eleven o’clock on Saturday morning, Marnie and Louisa came into the kitchen in search of coffee, the bar being temporarily out of bounds while preparations were made for the buffet supper which was to follow the evening concert. Catherine had arranged for the second morning session to be taken by the editor of a well-respected poetry magazine who had agreed to talk about his own view of the rival merits of strict rhyme and metre versus free verse, air his own editorial prejudices and then preside over a discussion. As neither Marnie nor Louisa felt that writing poetry was quite her thing and there was to be a small local attendance too, they had decided to give this talk a miss, and each secretly welcomed the chance to get together and possibly recover something of the friendship they had been on the brink of discovering on their walk up the burn on the first full day at Glendrochatt – which seemed an age ago now. They were both conscious of the fact that during the next, less structured week, with a smaller group, they would be thrown together even more and there was an issue between them which might make this extremely uncomfortable if not resolved – or at any rate faced. Though Christopher was the only one of the group to have serious poetic ambitions, the others had all expressed themselves keen to attend the session, possibly more because they wanted to hang on to the comradeship engendered by the classes than from any real interest in the particular subject. No one was looking forward to saying goodbye the following day.

Edward was sitting on a beanbag, watching an old video without the sound on. Everyone in the family hated watching television with Edward who had the curious knack of being able to read books or look at films out of sequence and still follow a story line; he was always pressing replay or fast forward in a random way that drove everyone else mad.

‘Morning, Ed,’ said Louisa cheerfully. ‘Nice to see you again. Is it lovely to be home from school?’

Edward looked up at the two young women.

‘So,’ he said, ignoring this question and fixing both Louisa and Marnie with a challenging gaze. ‘So . . . what was the great event that happened in Thcotland last Thunday then?’

Louisa noticed that though he still had a trace of the speech impediment that had made him so difficult to understand as a small boy, he no longer spoke as if his mouth were impossibly filled with soapsuds and the remaining slight lisp was now rather endearing. Speech therapy and enormous family input had worked a miracle.

‘I’ve no idea,’ she said. ‘Something to do with football? Or was it that a band of literary geniuses arrived to stay at Glendrochatt?’

Edward gave her a quelling look and shook his head.