Kenneth looked away then, to the windows, where the rain spattered and ran.
Conceived in a howling gale, Verity was born - howling - in one, too. She came into the world a month before she was due, one windy evening in August 1970, by the shores of Loch Awe - a birth-place whose title, Prentice at least had always thought, could hardly have been more apt.
Her mother and father had been staying at Fergus and Fiona Urvill’s house in Gallanach for the previous two weeks, on holiday from their Edinburgh home. For the last night of their holiday the young couple decided to visit a hotel at Kilchrenan, an hour’s drive away to the north east up the side of the loch. They borrowed Fergus’s Rover to make the journey. The bulging Charlotte had that week developed a craving for salmon, and duly dined on salmon steaks, preceded by strips of smoked salmon and followed by smoked salmon mousse, which she chose in preference to a sweet. She complained of indigestion.
Well - if in Charlotte’s case rather monotonously - fed, they began the return journey. The evening was dull, and although there was no rain a strong warm wind was blowing, waving the tops of the trees and stroking lines of white breakers up the length of the narrow loch. The gale increased to storm force as they drove south west into it, down the single-track road on the western shore.
The narrow road was littered with fallen branches; it was probably one of those that produced the puncture.
And so, while her husband struggled with over-enthusiastically-tightened wheel-nuts, Charlotte went into labour.
Barely half an hour later a stunning blue flash - the colour of the moon and brighter than the sun - burst over the scene from the hill above.
The noise was thunderous.
Charlotte screamed.
Above, on the hillside, stood the lattice forms of two electricity pylons, straddling the heather like grey gigantic skeletons wreathed in darkness. The black wind howled and there was another blinding flash and a titanic concussion; a line of violet incandescence split the night mid-way between the two huge pylons as energy short-circuited through the air between the wind-whipped power-lines.
Charlotte screamed again, and the child was born.
The tail end of Hurricane Verity passed over the British Isles that night; it had been born in the doldrums, cut its teeth flooding bits of the Bahamas, flirted with the coast of North Carolina, and then swept off across the North Atlantic, gradually losing energy; a brief encounter with the angle between a cold front and a warm front just off Ireland refreshed it unexpectedly, and it trashed numerous pleasure boats, rattled a few acres of windows, played frisbee with a multitude of slates and broke many a bough as it passed over Scotland.
The stretch of the national electricity grid down the western shore of Loch Awe towards Gallanach was one of the storm’s more spectacular victims, and Charlotte always claimed that it was right on the stroke of the final massive arc between the thrashing cables - which tripped circuit breakers in the grid to the north and plunged all of Gallanach into darkness - that her child (wrinkled, blood-flecked and salmon pink) finally slid out into her father’s hands.
They named her Verity, after the hurricane.
When she was eighteen, Fergus Urvill gave his niece Verity a very special present made from one of the exhibits in the museum attached to his glass factory. For the child born to the blaze and crack of human lightning, her entry into this world marked by the same brilliant arcs of short-circuited energy that plunged Gallanach into powerless gloom, he had a necklace fashioned which was made from fulgurite.
Fulgurite is a natural glass, like another of the museum’s minor treasures, obsidian. But while obsidian is born purely of the earth, formed in the baking heat and furious pressure of volcanic eruptions, fulgurite is of the earth and of the air, too; it is made when lightning strikes unconsolidated sand, and fuses it, vitrifies it in long, zig-zag tubes. God’s glass, Hamish McHoan called it.
The Gallanach Glass Works Museum contained a collection of tubular fulgurites, plucked from the sands of Syria by Walter Urvill - Fergus’s grandfather - on a visit there in 1890, and transported back to Scotland with great care and not a little luck so that they arrived intact. One of the crinkled, gnarled little tubes was over a metre long; another just a fraction shorter. Fergus had the smaller of the two