Somewhere, far away, was a sound that was either the lazy clucking of a hen or the clash of teacups being assembled. He listened for a little, hoping that it was a hen, but decided with regret that it was tea in preparation. He must get up. Pat would be home from school, and Bridget awake from her afternoon nap. It was quite typically Laura that she should not even have demanded from him a due admiration of her daughter; that he had not been asked to exclaim over her growth in the last year, her intelligence, her looks. Bridget had not been mentioned at all. She was merely a young creature somewhere out of sight, like the rest of the farm animals.

He got up and went to have a bath. And twenty minutes later he went downstairs conscious that he was hungry for the first time for months.

The family picture upon which the sitting-room door opened was pure Zoffany, he thought. The sitting-room at Clune occupied almost the whole of what had been the original farmhouse and was now a small wing to the main building. Because it had once been several rooms instead of one it had more windows than are usual in its kind; because it had thick walls it was warm and safe-feeling; and because it had a south-west outlook it was brighter than most. So all the traffic of the house was concentrated there, as in the hall of some medieval manor. Only at luncheon and supper was any other room used by the family. A large round table by the fire ensured the comforts of ‘dining-room’ meals at tea and breakfast, and the rest of the room was a fine free mixture of office, drawing-room, music-room, schoolroom and greenhouse. Johan, Grant thought, would not have had to alter one detail. It was all there already, even to the cadging terrier at the table and Bridget splay-legged on the hearthrug.

Bridget was a blonde, silent child of three who spent her days endlessly rearranging the same few objects into new patterns. ‘I can’t make up my mind whether she is mentally deficient or a genius,’ Laura said. But Grant thought that the two-second glance with which Bridget favoured him on introduction entirely justified the cheerfulness of Laura’s tone; there was nothing wrong with the intelligence of The Child, as Patrick called her. This epithet as used by Pat had no sense of opprobrium; nor even any marked condescension; it merely emphasised his own inclusion in the adult group, to which his six years seniority in his own estimation entitled him.

Pat had red hair, and a bleak and intimidating grey eye. He was wearing a tattered green tartan kilt, smoke-blue stockings, and a much-darned grey jersey. His greeting to Grant was off-hand but reassuringly uncouth. Pat spoke from choice what his mother called ‘clotted Perthshire’, his bosom friend at the village school being the shepherd’s son, who hailed from Killin. He could, of course, when he had a mind, speak faultless English, but it was always a bad sign. When Pat was ‘not speaking’ to you he was always not speaking in the best English.

Over tea, Grant asked him if he had yet made up his mind what he was going to be; Pat’s invariable answer to the question from the age of four having been: ‘A’m taking it into avizandum.’ A phrase borrowed from his J.P. father.

‘Ay,’ said Pat, spreading jam with a liberal hand. ‘A’ve made up muh mind.’

‘You have? That’s fine. What are you going to be?’

‘A revolutionary.’

‘I hope I never have to arrest you.’

‘Yu couldna,’ said Pat simply.

‘Why not?’

‘A’ll be good, man,’ said Pat, dipping the spoon again.

‘I’m sure that’s the sense Queen Victoria used the word in,’ Laura said, removing the jam from her son’s possession.

It was for that sort of thing that he had loved her. The odd glinting detachment that shot the texture of her maternalism.

‘I have a fish for you,’ Pat said, scraping the jam to one side of the slice of bread, so that it would, over at least half the surface, achieve the required depth. (What he actually said was: ‘Ah hiv a fush forrya,’ but Pat’s phonetics are no pleasanter to the eye than they are on the ear, and may be left to the imagination.) ‘Under the ledge in the Cuddy Pool. You can have a len’ of my fly, if you like.’

Since Pat possessed a large tin box full of assorted invitations to slaughter, ‘my fly’ in the singular could only mean ‘the fly I have invented’.

‘What is Pat’s lure like?’ he asked when Pat had taken himself off.

‘Actionable, I should say,’ said his mother. ‘A fearsome object.’

‘Does he catch anything with it?’

‘Oddly enough, yes,’ Tommy said. ‘I suppose there are suckers in the fish world just the same as in any other.’

‘The poor things just gape with astonishment at sight of it,’ Laura said, ‘and before they have time to shut their mouths the current has swept it in. Tomorrow’s Saturday, so you can see it in operation. But I don’t think that anything, even Pat’s unholy creation, will lure that six-pounder in the Cuddy Pool to the surface with the water the way it is just now.’

And of course Laura was right. Saturday morning was bright and rainless and the six-pounder in the Cuddy Pool was far too dismayed by his imprisonment, far too obsessed with his desire to go higher up the river, to be interested in surface distractions. So it was suggested that Grant should go trout fishing in the loch, with Pat as gillie. The loch was two miles away in the hills, a flat pool on a bleak bit of moor. When it was windy on Lochan Dhu the gale took your line out of the water at right angles and held it stiff as a telephone wire. When it was calm the midges made a meal of you while the trout came to the surface and openly laughed. But if trout fishing was not Grant’s idea of the perfect occupation, being gillie was obviously Patrick’s idea of heaven. There was nothing, from riding the black bull down at Dalmore to demanding threepence-worth of sweets from Mrs Mair at the post-office with the aid of a ha’penny and menaces, that Pat was not capable of. But the joy of messing about in a boat was still something that he could not provide for himself. The boat at the loch was padlocked.

So Grant set off up the sandy path through the dry heather, with Pat at his side and one pace in the rear like a gun dog on its best behaviour. And as he went he was conscious of his own reluctance and wondered at it.

Why should there be any qualification in his pleasure this morning, in his delight in going fishing? Brown trout might not be his idea of a sporting contest, but he was glad enough to be spending the day with a rod in his hand even if he caught nothing whatever. He was supremely glad to be out in the open, alive and at leisure, with the familiar spring of peaty turf under his feet, and the hills before him. Why the small unwillingness at the back of his mind? Why, instead of taking a boat out for the day on Lochan Dhu, did he want to hang round the farm?

They had walked for a mile before he had flushed the reason from the cover of his subconscious. He had wanted to stay at Clune today so that he could see the daily paper when it arrived.

He had wanted to find out about B Seven.

His conscious mind had dropped B Seven behind, with the tribulations of the journey and the memory of his humiliation. He had not consciously remembered him from the moment when he fell into bed on arrival until now, nearly twenty-four hours later. But B Seven was still with him, it would seem.

‘When does the daily paper arrive at Clune these days?’ he asked Pat, still silent and on his best behaviour one pace in the rear.

‘If it’s Johnny it comes at twelve, but if it’s Kenny it’s often near one before it comes.’ And Pat added, as if glad to have conversation introduced into the expeditionary routine, ‘Kenny stops to have a cup at Dalmore, east the road. He’s gone on the MacFadyean’s Kirsty.’

A world where the news of the nations’ clamour waited while Kenny had a cup from the MacFadyean’s Kirsty was a very pleasant one, Grant thought. In the days before radio it must have bordered on Paradise.