Before dinner Christopher and Marnie had gone to sit together on the white seat under the great beech tree overlooking the loch where they had started their friendship. Christopher lit a cigarette. He intended to try, not by any means for the first time, to give up smoking in the near future and thought that perhaps, if he had Marnie’s support, he might actually be able to achieve it this time. He didn’t want to risk making the attempt until a few imponderables in his life were sorted out.

They sat without speaking, but deeply aware of each other, watching the spinners from the previous evening’s hatch of flies doing their ephemeral, but spectacular, mating dance, rising and falling as though suspended in the air like mobiles hung from invisible wires. ‘All that dazzling courtship display – and then they only live for a day!’ said Christopher. They listened to the rhythmic lapping of the water below them and could hear the occasional faint plop and see rings spreading out across the calm surface of the loch where a trout had risen. Curlews bubbled and a woodpecker, hammering away in some distant tree, was clearly doing overtime. Both of them felt a sense of optimism that life was at a turning point.

‘Christopher,’ said Marnie, breaking the silence after a bit, tracing a pattern with her finger on the arm of the seat. ‘Could I make a suggestion?’

‘Of course. Anything. Just try me,’ he said, looking down at her in a way that made her catch her breath.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘on Sunday, when our week here ends, I thought I’d head straight up to Inverness in the car and go prospecting. Try to locate Eilean Dobhran and make some preliminary local enquiries. Stay in a pub or something. Today has literally been a dream come true. Would you . . . might you . . . consider coming with me? I’d just so love you to be there when I find the house. I’d love to know what you think . . .’ She looked up at him and the look of consternation on his face made her heart sink. She rushed on, ‘But you probably wouldn’t want to . . . .’

Christopher picked her hand up and locked his fingers through hers. ‘Shit,’ he said. ‘Oh, shit! Marnie, you must know it isn’t that I wouldn’t love to. There’s nothing I’d like more – but I can’t come then. I really, truly can’t.’

She swallowed, trying not to make her disappointment too obvious. ‘Oh well, not to worry,’ she said brightly, giving her shoulders what was intended to be a nonchalant little shrug, a backlog of past rejections making her wish she hadn’t mentioned it. ‘It was just an idea. Forget it.’ She tried to disengage her hand but Christopher hung on to it.