‘And when your ammunition was all used up,’ Duncan jibed, ‘where would you find shelter?’

‘There’s shelter waiting in a cave in the rock above Loch Coulter,’ I said. ‘With a little work it could be made warm and tight. There are tons of peats and fir roots waiting to be dug just beside it. You could learn to use a bow and arrow. You could catch pike.’

‘How would you avoid scurvy?’ Terry asked. ‘Would you dig a garden? Where would you get seeds? As far as I can see you would require pots and pans and dishes and needles and thread—’

‘And a furniture removal van,’ Duncan laughed.

We laughed with him. How easy it was to make a joke then. To laugh now is to raise apprehension in our minds, for so many things that we smiled to think on have come true, have come true and no jest.

‘Trust the housewife,’ I lamented. ‘If ever you think of living the savage life, Duncan, consult Terry.’

‘Oh, I don’t think it’s impossible,’ she protested. ‘It would be a dreadful life, but one could live. After all, Hugh, we ourselves require very little to keep us alive except clothing and flour and salt, and we could manage with less. We grow vegetables, we dig peats.’

‘If living’s all,’ I said.

‘If living’s all.’

I used to think that these years of rumour, when war loomed, could never be remembered save with pain. Yet as I regard that decade, to-day, I wonder that I ever endured them, not because they were unhappy, but because they were futile and wearisome. I feel that custom alone made us live amongst the fears and murmurs of storm, and deferred our escape.

We started to speak once more about our cave in the autumn of 1943.

‘You were in France,’ I said to Duncan. ‘You’ve seen—’ I paused as a new thought came to my head. ‘Duncan,’ I said, ‘did you know—did you ever know that you killed any one?’

He turned his dark-lined melancholy face towards the horizon of the Monadhliahs and kept silent until I began to think I had said what I should not.

‘Once,’ he said, in a low voice, ‘the Jerries were coming over in the dawn, but light enough to see the sights of your rifle, a surprise attack, no guns, no noise, nothing but them—and us.’

He paused a moment.

‘You know how it is when you’ve lived with a gun in your hand as I’ve done,’ he appealed to me. ‘The sights come in line afore you know it—I had a bead on a Jerry. He was dead, Hugh, as sure as God I had him dead like the hind I got last week, before ever I pulled the trigger. I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t do it.’ His voice grew harsh.

‘Likely some one else did,’ he said.

‘Not you,’ Terry whispered.