Mike is at the bedroom window, taking in the view of the water, the road and the scattering of cottages along it, when he sees Murdo’s red van come round the end of the kyle. The van disappears for a few seconds, then begins to climb the hill. It slows, and pulls in at the gate. After a minute, as if he’s been plucking up courage or maybe just thinking something over, Murdo gets out and starts up the track. By the time he arrives at the back door Mike is there waiting for him. With a shy, almost sly grin Murdo proffers a plastic bag. Mike unwraps the newspaper bundle it contains and there are two rainbow trout shining in the morning sun.
‘They’re beautiful,’ Mike says.
‘Fresh from the loch last night,’ Murdo says. ‘Can you make use of them?’
‘Of course. I’ll cook them tonight. Will you come for your tea?’
‘Och, they’ll just do yourself nicely.’
‘Nonsense. There’s one each.’
‘They’re not that big.’
‘They’re fine. I’ll make plenty of tatties. Will you come?’
'I might at that. I have a few things to do first.’
‘Well, it’s only ten o’clock. You have all day. But come any time you like. I’m not going anywhere.’
‘I will then.’
The necessary negotiations over, they stand enjoying the sun, of which there has not been too much lately. Mike says, ‘Do you have a moment just now?’
Murdo looks down at the van and shrugs. ‘There’s nothing that won’t keep.’
‘I want to show you something.’
‘Aye, do you?’
Inside, Mike puts the fish in the kitchen sink. They go into the hallway, past the front door that’s never used, through the sitting room and into the sun lounge that Murdo’s uncle built at the side of the house thirty-five years ago for Mike’s father.
‘I was at my father’s archive again yesterday,’ Mike says, ‘trying to impose a bit more order on it. And going through the photographs for this exhibition, yet again.’
‘The one in . . . Edinburgh?’ Murdo makes it sound not just two hundred and fifty miles away but as if it’s on another continent.
‘Yes. I keep thinking I’ve made the final selection, and then I find I haven’t.’
‘And there’s to be a book as well?’
‘To go with the exhibition, yes. I’m trying to write the introduction, but it’s not going too well. Anyway, I was sorting through some boxes and I came across this photograph.’
He hands over the print. Murdo holds it by the edges with his calloused fingers and looks at it thoughtfully, as he might at a diagram of how to assemble a new tool.
‘I’d never seen it before last night,’ Mike says, ‘but as soon as I did I remembered everything about it. You’re looking at probably the only photograph in existence of the three of us together. My father, my mother and myself, I mean. Maybe my mother has some others secreted away, but I doubt it.’
‘It’s your father right enough,’ Murdo says. ‘A good-looking man. And is that your mother? She’s a bonnie woman. She doesn’t look very pleased though.’
‘She wasn’t very pleased,’ Mike says, thinking that being pleased hasn’t ever been one of Isobel’s strong points, not that he can remember. ‘That was the first time I was ever in these parts. July, 1964. We were on holiday. That’s Dounreay, of course, in the background.’
‘Aye. Awful-looking place, isn’t it?’
‘At the time we didn’t think so. It seemed clean and bright and modern.’
‘I never liked it, right from the start. They only put it there in case it blew up. Who’d care if it blew up there? It employed a lot of people over the years, I suppose, but what are they all meant to do now?’ He reins himself in. ‘But you surely didn’t spend your holiday at Dounreay?’
‘No, it was just a stop on the way. We had a week and we drove over to the west, then round the north coast, down to Inverness and home again.’
‘That’s a fair distance in a week.’
‘It certainly was then. There were no bridges. It was all ferries and some of them only took a couple of cars at a time.’
‘There wouldn’t have been so many cars though.’
‘No, not many. Anyway, I just wanted to show you. My family, such as it was. My father moved out later that year and they got divorced not long after that.’
‘And this is yourself. How old are you?’
‘I was nine.’
‘You have very thin legs,’ Murdo says. ‘In the picture, I mean.’
‘I look a bit delicate, don’t I?’
‘If you’d lived here we’d have toughened you up.’
‘Oh?’
‘We’d have been at the school together. I’d have beaten you up regularly.’
‘There’s three years between us. You wouldn’t even have noticed me.’
‘Believe me, boy, there was no way you could not be noticed. Everybody noticed everything about everybody.’
‘And do they still?’
‘Not so much. You incomers guard your privacy well. But people around here have always been pretty discreet, you know, whatever they notice.’
He hands back the photograph, and they go outside again, round to the front of the house, and there they pause before Murdo takes his leave, standing beside the rowan tree Mike planted for his father. Angus’s rowan. It is naked but looking resilient. It’s too early yet for there to be new growth.
‘I wonder how long this will last,’ Mike says, meaning the weather.
‘Ach, just until it’s over.’
The air is cold, but there’s hardly a cloud in the sky and the sunlight is catching every ripple in the water. Maybe Mike will go out for an hour with the camera after all. On the other hand, he has to get on with preparing for the exhibition and the book.
'I’ll see you tonight then?’
‘Aye, I’ll look forward to it,’ Murdo says, without a trace of anticipation in his tone. Mike is still not quite sure when Murdo is having a gentle joke at his expense.
‘We’ll have a dram or two after we’ve eaten.’
‘If you insist. Before, too, if you insist. Will you leave the gate open?’
‘I will.’
So Murdo can drive straight in and park at the back of the house. Mike puts out a hand and touches him lightly on the shoulder, and Murdo gives him a look that barely acknowledges the contact, as if it were accidental. But it is anything but that.