Bertie wanted to say, maybe they feel better in a kilt, but something in his mother’s expression told him that this would not be helpful. He would wear a kilt when he was eighteen, he decided. His mother would not be able to stop him then, and anyway, he would be living in Glasgow by then. He would move to Glasgow on the day after his eighteenth birthday. He would stay in Edinburgh on the actual birthday, to lull his mother into a false sense of security, but on the very next day he would move to Glasgow. He would learn how to speak Glaswegian – he would buy a book to help him do that – and he would only come back to Edinburgh once a year, or once every other year perhaps. That all lay ahead.

Uniforms were anathema to Irene, but her objections to the cub scouts went deeper than that. These had not been expressed to Bertie – other than in a rather vague, disapproving way – but had been articulated very clearly to Stuart.

‘Your insistence that Bertie should be allowed to continue with this scouting nonsense is really very unhelpful,’ she had said to her husband. ‘You know my feelings on the matter, and yet you went and told him that it was all right. Well, it’s not all right, Stuart. It really isn’t.’

Stuart looked out of the window. The matter had been raised in the kitchen, where he and Irene were sitting with a glass of wine while they waited for a pot of potatoes to boil. Bertie was in his room, practising his saxophone.

‘But he loves it,’ said Stuart. ‘You’ve seen his face when he gets ready on Fridays. He obviously has a whale of a time.’