‘Young love, eh?’ Thom shakes his head and his laugh has a bad edge to it. ‘’Course, you’d know all about that, Robert, with a pretty wife like yours, eh?’

I still know Thom Stewart no more now than I did nine months ago when I first arrived on the island, and it’s mostly deliberate. He’s only in his twenties, but he reminds me of the old men who trawled the islands for work where they could get it, ex-skippers who’d lost their boat to the sea or the bank, or black landers who’d been caught and had their licence taken away. They’d wait on the slip at Na Bàigh for the crews to come down from Àrd Shiadair and Èinis, and whenever my father gave them short shrift, they’d look at him with beady, hungry eyes and the same smirk that’s pretending to be friendly. I might not understand men like Charlie, but I understand men like Thom Stewart, all right.

‘Okay, Robert,’ Charlie says. ‘I’m dealer. Thom’s opened with the minimum bet of two quid. What’ll it be?’

Jimmy’s hand is shit: an ace of clubs and nine of hearts against the flop’s king, three, and five of spades.

‘I’ll raise. Two quid.’

‘Check.’ Bruce frowns, chucking coins onto the pile. ‘How’s the ewes doing?’

‘Good,’ I say. ‘Great.’

But I don’t know if that’s true. The vet will be coming over from Langabhat in two weeks, and only then will I know how many lambs to expect in March. The ewes seem tired and listless, but maybe that’s what happens when they’re pregnant. Since Bruce helped with the tupping nearly a month ago, I’ve been on a new kind of edge that feels far too fragile. Everything rides on a good lambing season. I don’t want to tell Mary how bad it is, how bad it could get, although she can look at the bank balance same as me. And I doubt she’d see much wisdom in raising bets on a shit hand of poker.

‘Listen,’ I say. ‘I’ve been meaning to bring you round a bottle—’

Bruce holds up a calloused hand. ‘Ach, no worries. Happy to help.’ But he looks away, as if suddenly reluctant to meet my eye.

‘Island life, eh, Robert?’ Thom says, giving me that sly, probing look he likely thinks makes him seem clever. ‘Quite a change from living in the city, I bet.’ As if I haven’t been living here for almost a year already; as if he doesn’t know that I was born as much a Western Islander as he was.

‘Thom was just telling us the Land Fund application’s about ready to go,’ Charlie says. ‘You seen it yet, Robert?’

‘No,’ I say, and my mood darkens even further at the obvious exclusion. When I look at Thom, he’s too busy glaring at Charlie to notice. ‘I would have been happy to help.’

‘Too many cooks and all that,’ Thom eventually says with a cold smile.

Alec snorts. ‘And probably best to get it filed before Euan changes his mind.’