Sunlight flitted in and out of a sky grated by the wind, chaotic random patches of it chasing each other across the machair where headstones planted in the soft, sandy soil marked the passing of generations. A little way to the north, the top third of the lighthouse at the Butt was clearly visible. Fin supposed that in retirement Marsaili’s mother had followed some basic instinct that took her back to childhood. Remembered moments of unexpectedly sunny days, or violent storms, the wildest of seas crashing all around the rocks below the lighthouse which had been her home.

From the kitchen window at the back of the modern bungalow that the Macdonalds had chosen as their retirement home, she could see quite plainly the collection of white and yellow buildings where she had once lived, and the red-brown brick of the tower that had weathered countless seasons of relentless assault to warn men at sea of hidden dangers.

Fin glanced from the window as Mrs. Macdonald made them tea, and saw a rainbow forming, vivid against a bank of black cloud off the point, a dazzle of sunlight burnishing the troubled surface of the ocean, from here like dimpled copper. The peat stack in the small patch of garden at the back was severely diminished, and he wondered who cut their peat for them now.

He was barely aware of the old lady’s inconsequential babbling. She was excited to see him. So many years it had been since the last time, she said. He had been struck, the moment he entered the house, by the smell of roses that had always accompanied Marsaili’s mother. It brought back a flood of memories. Home-made lemonade in the dark farmhouse kitchen with its stone-flagged floor. The games that he and Marsaili had played amongst the hay bales in the barn. Her mother’s soft English cadences, alien to his ear then, and unchanged now, even after all these years.

“We need some background information about Dad,” he heard Marsaili saying. “For the records at the care home.” They had agreed that it might be better if they kept the truth from her for the moment. “And I’d like to take some of the old family photo albums to talk through with him. They say photographs help to stimulate memory.”

Mrs. Macdonald was only too happy to dig out the family snapshots, and wanted to sit and go through the albums with them. It was so rarely these days that they had company, she said, speaking in the plural, as if the banishing of Tormod from her life had never happened. A kind of denial. Or a coded message. Subject not up for discussion.