'Isis!' Erin said, shaking me again. 'Stop!  You're only digging yourself in deeper!'

'No I'm not!  I'm telling the truth!  I'm not going to lie!'

Erin threw my hands down and walked off to the smaller desk.  She stood there, one of her hands up at her face, her shoulders shaking.

Yolanda patted my arm again. 'You just tell it like it is, kid.  You just tell the truth and the hell with them all.'

'Isis,' Allan said leadenly.  I turned to him, still with a sense that things were happening in some strange, slowing fluid that was all around me. 'I can't…' He took a deep breath. 'Look,' he said. 'I'll,' he glanced at the doors, 'I'll have a word with Salvador, okay?  Perhaps he'll have calmed down a bit, later.  Then maybe you and he could… you know, talk.  You have to decide what you're going to say.  I can't tell you what to say, but he is really really upset and… Well, you just have to decide what's best.  I…' He shook his head, stared down at his hands clasped on the desk. 'I don't know what to make of all this, it's just… it's like everything's…' He gave a small, despairing laugh. 'We must all just pray, and to trust to God.  Listen to Them, Isis.  Listen to what They say.'

'Yes,' I said, drying my eyes with my sleeve, and then with a handkerchief Yolanda produced.  I straightened. 'Yes, of course.'

Allan glanced at the office clock, high on one wall. 'We'd better give him till this evening.  Will you be in your room?' he asked.

I nodded.  'I may go for a walk first, but, later, yes.'

'Okay.' He raised his flat hands from the desk's surface and let them fall back again. 'We'll see what we can do.'

'Thank you,' I said, sniffing and handing my grandmother back her handkerchief.  I nodded to her and we turned to go.

Erin was still standing staring down at the desk by the door.  I paused, dug into my jacket pocket and took out a roll of pound notes bound with a little rubber band.  I placed the roll on the desk and added two one-pence pieces from a trouser pocket.  Erin looked at the money.

'Twenty-seven pounds, two pence,' I said.

'Well done,' Erin said flatly.  Yolanda and I left the room.

'I guess a lawyer wouldn't be appropriate,' Yolanda said as we went downstairs.

'I don't think so, Grandma.'

'Well, first thing we should do is drive to the hotel, or into Stirling at any rate, and have us some lunch.  I need a margarita.'

'Thanks, Grandma,' I said, stopping to face her as we got to the bottom of the stairs.  I squeezed her hand. 'But I think I'd just like to… you know, be by myself for a bit.'

She looked hurt. 'You want me to go, is that it?'

I tried to work out how to say what it was I wanted to say. 'I need to think, Yolanda.  I need…' I breathed in hard, gaze flickering over the walls, the ceiling and back down the stairs again until I looked at my grandmother again. 'I need to think myself back into the person I am when I'm here, do you know what I mean?'

She nodded. 'I guess so.'

'You've done so much for me,' I told her. 'I hate-'

'Forget it.  You sure you don't want me to stick around?'

'Really, no.' I gave a brave smile. 'You go and see Prague; go and see your red diamond.'

'Fuck the diamond.  And Prague will still be there.'

'Honestly; it'd be better.  I won't feel I've disrupted your life totally too.' I gave a small laugh and looked around with an expression that spoke of an optimism I didn't feel.  'This'll all get sorted out.  Just one of those daft things that comes along in a place like this where everybody lives on top of each other all the time; storm in a tea cup.  Storm in a thimble.' I fashioned what I hoped was a cheeky grin.

Yolanda looked serious. 'You just look out, Isis,' she told me, putting her hand on my shoulder and lowering her head a little as she fixed her gaze upon me.  It was a curiously affecting gesture. 'It ain't never been all sweetness and light here, honey,' she told me. 'You've always seen the best of it, and it's only now you're getting the shitty end of the stick.  But it's always been there.' She patted my shoulder. 'You watch out for Salvador.  Old Zhobelia once told me…' She hesitated. 'Well, I don't rightly know exactly what it was she was trying to hint at, to tell the truth, but it was something, for sure.  Something your Grandfather had to hide; something she knew about him.'

'They were… they were married,' I said, falteringly. 'The three of them were married.  I imagine that they had lots of little secrets between them…'

'Hmm,' Yolanda said, obviously not convinced. 'Well, I always wondered about her heading off, just disappearing like that after the fire; seemed kind of suspicious.  You sure she is alive?'

'Pretty sure.  Calli and Astar seem still to be in touch.  I can't imagine they'd… lie.'

'Okay, well, look; I'm just saying there might be more than one hidden agenda here.  You will take care now, won't you?'

'I will.  I swear.  And you mustn't worry; I'll be fine.  You come back in a week or two.  Come back for the Festival and I'll have everything running back on track again.  I'll sort it out.  Promise.'

'There was a deal to get sorted, Isis, even before this, like we were talking about in the car today.'

'I know,' I told her, hugging her. 'Just have faith.'

'That's your department, honey, but I'll take your word for it.'

One night in November 1979 a fire destroyed half the mansion house; it killed my mother Alice and father Christopher and Grandmother Aasni and it might have killed me too if my father hadn't thrown me out of the window into the garden fishpond.  He might have saved himself then, too, but he went back to look for my mother; they were eventually found huddled together in the room I had shared with Allan, overcome by smoke.  Allan had escaped on his own.

Grandmother Aasni died in her kitchen in the house, seemingly the victim of her own culinary experimentation.

The fire engine called from Stirling that night could not be taken across the already holed and tumbledown bridge by the Woodbeans' home; the Community put out the fire itself, mostly, with some help later on from a portable pump brought over the bridge by the fire brigade.  My Grandfather had always known that, with the number of candles and paraffin lamps we used, especially in winter, the risk of fire at the farm was high; accordingly he had always treated fire prevention with the utmost seriousness, had bought an old but serviceable hand-powered pump from another farm, and ensured that there were lots of buckets of water and sand stationed at various points throughout the farm, as well as carrying out regular drills so that everybody knew what to do in the event that a fire did break out.

Fire officers came the next day to survey the gutted wreckage of the mansion house and to attempt to discover how the fire had started.  They determined that the seat of the fire had been the kitchen stove, and that it looked very much as though a pressure cooker had exploded, showering the room with burning oil.  Aasni had probably been knocked unconscious in the initial blast.  Zhobelia - distraught, weeping, incoherent, hair-tearing Zhobelia - left off her wailing just long enough to confirm that her sister had been trying to develop a new type of pressure-cooked pickle whose ingredients included ghee and a variety of other oils.

I don't remember the fire.  I don't remember smoke and flames and being thrown from the window into the ornamental fish pond; I don't remember my father's touch or my mother's voice at all.  I don't remember a funeral or a memorial service.  All I remember- with a strange, static, photographic clarity - is the burned-out shell of the mansion house, days or weeks or months later, its soot-shadowed stones and few remaining roof beams stark black against the cold blue winter skies.