Netta took the mending basket into the cool parlour with its dark treacle-coloured paintwork, black oak furniture and heavy moss green velvet drapes at the window. The china cabinet gleamed with china cups and saucers, souvenirs from Musselburgh and Largo Bay. On the walls were sepia portraits of the Nichols family in suits and black bombazine dresses with white mutches – stern, forbidding ancestors who had frightened her as a child. There was the smell of old soot and damp and disapproval in this room. She spotted two of Grandpa John Kirkpatrick’s watercolours of Kirkcudbright harbour and the Toll Booth. The two fishing boat sketches that had always hung close by were gone but she could see faint marks on the distemper where they’d left their mark. His paintings were becoming sought after. He’d been a colleague of Hornel and Jessie King and the other famous Kirkcudbright painters.

Stepping back into the parlour was like stepping back a hundred years. Nothing much had changed but the drawers of the cupboard were neatly tidied out, lined with fresh copies of the Galloway News. As she rooted round to find the old photograph albums she fished out sepia postcard scenes, rosette prizes from cattle shows, Sunday school attendance tokens. Nothing of interest to her here. Her world had turned and left this Stratharvar way of life far behind many years ago.

The first album was in the bottom cupboard: a heavy leather-bound book with a stiff gold clasp, full of yet more ancient Nichols posed in their finery, sturdy Galloway farmers with handsome faces. A smaller album was full of Peg’s old family photos: Peg MacBain, her stepmother, as a young girl in uniform, stiff and starchy even then. She was after all one of Mother’s distant cousins who’d come to nurse the invalid and stayed on to wed the widower. There was one unframed photograph of Peg and Angus on their wedding day outside the parish kirk porch, looking awkward in the sunlight. The photo was pristine, still in its cream folder with tissue paper lining. There was a blue leather album of Gus in his toddler days and Netta closed that quickly. Where was her picture taken with Mother at Ayr? Where were her own baby days kept? There was only one picture of her, grinning in pigtails; a line-up on the bench outside Stratharvar School when she was nine before Peg came and her world changed forever.

All that sixth day indignation rankled in Netta’s mind. Eventually she sought out Angus with a mug of tea as he was tidying up in the byre.

‘I was looking for a snapshot of myself when I was a bairn to show Gus and yon one of Mother to take back to Griseley with me. Where would I be finding them?’ Angus paused, looking at her square on with his blue eyes.