“Indeed yes, I should say he would. I’ll need your advice, Alan. And I want to get a little runabout, and you could drive it back to Knocknacolly after I’d had a busy day with plans.”

Alan blushed.

“I’m afraid I can’t drive a car.”

“What?” Myrtle exclaimed. “Oh, I’ll have to teach you, Alan. I mean Carrie and I will have to teach you. What’s the Gaelic for car?”

“They have a synthetic word which I can’t remember. But no Gaelic speaker ever uses it. They just say ‘car’.”

“Oh, well, I’ve learnt one Gaelic word anyway,” said Myrtle. “And now what about eating a little lunch? James looks terribly hungry.”

So they ate lunch, Carrie and Myrtle very sparingly because they wanted to leave as much as possible for the two young men, and after lunch Alan read a good deal of his poetry, which was not easy to follow: but he looked so attractive on his rostrum of heather that neither Carrie nor Myrtle bothered in the least about the words.

After a time, however, James Buchanan protested.

“I don’t see why you want to read poetry as if you were a stirk trying to silence a stirk on the other side of a dyke, Alan. When I read your poetry to myself I can make quite a lot of sense out of it here and there, but when you read it I can’t understand one word. It’s a daft way of reading.”

“I am reading in the way poetry should be read,” Alan asserted severely.

“Who said so?”

“It’s the traditional way of reading poetry.”

“I thought you were so modern.”

“My work is modern.”

“Then why do you read it like an ancient Druid?”

“What do you know about poetry, James?”

“I never will know anything about poetry if I have to listen to you hooting it at me like an owl in a tree. Suppose I were to get up in court and hoot at the sheriff like that, what would become of my case?”

“The parallel is ridiculous.”

“Do you or do you not want to make yourself intelligible?”

“It depends what you mean by intelligible.”

“Do you want your poetry to make sense?”

“Poetry is not intended to make sense. You’re confusing it with prose.”

“Then prose is sense and poetry is nonsense?”

“If you like.”

“And you’re going to spend your life writing nonsense? Losh, no wonder Scotland’s going downhill.”

“I think I understand what Alan means,” said Myrtle, remembering the secret of Peaty Water.

“That’s right, Myrtle. Encourage him. He’s been spoilt all his life by encouragement,” James groaned in disgust. “The only reason he’s learning Gaelic is because he wants to add a few more incomprehensible noises to the ones he can make already in English.”