down to the shore path at Pointhouse near the old cairns. I sat on the grass. A soft breeze disturbed the water; seagulls flew stiff-winged, and in the distance the occasional car or truck disturbed the air, making a lazy throat-clearing noise as they emerged from or disappeared into the channel the main road drove between the trees. ‘Hilda used to smoke,’ she said quietly, not looking at me. ‘My elder sister; she used to smoke. And I always wanted to.’ I picked up a handful of pebbles from the path-side and started throwing them at the waves, lapping against the rocks a metre below us, almost at high tide. ‘But your grandfather wouldn’t let me.’ My grandmother sighed.
‘But gran,’ I protested. ‘It’s bad for you.’
‘I know.’ She smiled broadly. ‘That was another reason I didn’t ever take it up, after your grandfather died; they’d found it was unhealthy by then.’ She laughed. ‘But I’m seventy-two years old now, and I don’t give a damn.’
I chucked a few more pebbles. ‘Well, it isn’t a very good example to us youngsters, is it?’
‘What’s that got to do with the price of sliced bread?’
‘Eh?’ I looked at her. ‘Pardon?’
‘You’re not really trying to tell me that young people today look to their elders for an example, are you, Prentice?’
I grimaced. ‘Well ...’ I said.
‘You’d be the first generation that did.’ She pulled on the cigarette, a look of convincing derision on her face. ‘Best do everything they don’t. That’s what tends to happen anyway, like it or lump it.’ She nodded to herself and ground the cigarette out on her cast, near the knee; flicked the butt into the water. I tutted under my breath.
‘People react more than they act, Prentice,’ she said eventually. ‘Like you are with your dad; he raises you to be a good little atheist and then you go and get religion. Well, that’s just the way of things.’ I could almost hear her shrug. ‘Things can get imbalanced in families, over the generations. Sometimes a new one has to ... adjust things.’ She tapped me on the shoulder. I turned. Her hair was very white against the rich summer green of the Argyllshire hills and the brilliant blue of the sky beyond. ‘D’you feel for this family, Prentice?’
‘Feel for it, gran?’
‘Does it mean anything to you?’ She looked cross. ‘Anything beyond the obvious, like giving you a place to stay ... well, when you aren’t falling out with your father? Does it?’
‘Of course, gran.’ I felt awkward.
She leaned closer to me, eyes narrowing. ‘I have this theory, Prentice.’
My heart foundered. ‘Yes, gran?’
‘In every generation, there’s a pivot. Somebody everybody else revolves around, understand?’
‘Up to a point,’ I said, non-committally, I hoped.
‘It was old Hugh, then your grandfather, then it was me, and then it got all confused with Kenneth and Rory and Hamish; they each seem to think they were it, but...’
‘Dad certainly seems to think he’s paterfamilias.’
‘Aye, and maybe Kenneth has the strongest claim, though I still think Rory was more clever. Your Uncle Hamish ...’ She looked troubled. ‘He’s a bit off the beaten track, that boy.’ She frowned. (This ‘boy’ was nearly fifty, of course, and himself a grandfather. It was Uncle Hamish who’d invented Newton’s Religion, and who had taken me in when my father and I had fallen out.)
‘I wonder where Uncle Rory is,’ I said, hoping to divert my gran from areas that sounded portentous and daft with the familiar game that anybody in our family can play; making up stories, conjectures, lies and hopes about Uncle Rory, our one-time golden boy, professional traveller and some-time magician, whose most successful act had been his own disappearance.
‘Who knows?’ My gran sighed. ‘Might be dead, for all we know.’
I shook my head. ‘No, I don’t think so.’
‘You sound certain, Prentice. What do you know we don’t?’
‘I just feel it.’ I shrugged, threw a handful of pebbles into the waves. ‘He’ll be back.’
‘Your father thinks he will,’ Margot agreed, sounding thoughtful. ‘He always talks about him as though he’s still around.’
‘He’ll be back,’ I nodded, and lay back in the grass, hands under my head.
‘I don’t know, though,’ Grandma Margot said. ‘I think he might be dead.’
‘Dead? Why?’ The sky was deep, shining blue.
‘You wouldn’t believe me.’
‘What?’ I sat up again, swivelled to face her, looking over the much-scribbled-upon grey-white cast (as well as signatures, get-well-soon messages and silly drawings, there were at least two shopping lists, a recipe copied down from the radio