"You're very quiet, Cameron," Yvonne says, smiling at me.

"Yeah," I say helpfully.

"I think Cameron," Clare says, sniffing, "disapproves." She draws out the «oo» sound in the word.

Clare is a tall, auburn girl with striking angular looks she shares with her brother, but whereas Andy is — at the moment — bulkily fit-looking and tanned, Clare is just thin, and luminously pale. I reckon she's overly keen on coke and spends too much time in clubs, but maybe I'm just jealous; my cub-reporter status on the Caley and the triumph-of-miniaturisation salary that goes with it make habits that expensive out of the question. Clare has always had rather more in the way of aristocratic pretensions than Andy, who has that aura of classless broth-of-a-boyhood that usually only the congenitally rich can carry off convincingly.

Clare works for an estate agent so far up-market it's mostly estates they deal in, not humble houses, no matter how extensive; if it doesn't boast a couple of salmon rivers, a few square miles of trees and a brace of hills, lochs or lakes, then they just aren't interested.

"Cameron," Clare continues, "is content to lurk here on the sidelines radiating self-righteous socialist disapproval and imagining how after the revolution we'll all have to pull ploughs, eat raw turnips and take part in interminable self-criticism sessions long into the candle-lit night on the collective farm, aren't you, Cameron?"

"You don't pull ploughs," I reply. "You push them."

"I know, dear — there is a farm next door to us back on the dear old homestead and Daddy does usually describe himself as a farmer — but I meant that we capitalist parasites would be taking the place of the oxen, not the horny-handed salt-of-the-earth types cracking the whip over them."

"Well, I'm sorry to disappoint you," I tell her, "but I'm afraid you're assuming a rather more lenient revolution than the one I had in mind. I had you down as bone-meal actually, come the day. Sorry." I shrug, watching Andy start to pour what everybody nearby seems to agree will be the last magnum required before the glass pyramid is finally full of champagne.

Clare looks at Yvonne. "Cameron always did take a hard line on these things," she tells her. "Oh well, might as well enjoy ourselves while we can before the commissars take their gloating revenge. I'm off to powder my nose; would you like to come?"

Yvonne shakes her head. "No, thanks."

"I'll leave you with young Hot-to-Trotsky here, then," Clare says, patting Yvonne on the shoulder and winking at me as she sidles off through the cheering crowd. The pyramid is still not quite full.

"One more bottle! One more bottle!" everybody is shouting.

I turn to Yvonne. "So, how's the venture-capital businesss these days?"

"Venturesome," Yvonne says, flicking back her shoulder-Ilength black hair. "How's the newspaper business?"

"Folding."

"Oh; ha ha."

I shrug. "No, I'm enjoying it. Money's not brilliant but someetimes I see my name on the front page and I feel almost successful for a while, until I come to something like this." I nod at Andy, taking yet another opened magnum and leaning out over the glass-stacked table. His task is almost finished; the pyramid is nearly full.

Yvonne glances at the pyramid with what might be contempt. "Oh, don't let your head get turned by all this shit," she says.

The tone of her voice surprises me. "I thought you'd love all this," I tell her.

She looks slowly around, at the people and the place. "Hmm," she says, and packs a disconcerting amount of cold equivocation into that single sound. She fixes her gaze on me. "But don't you just long for a neutron bomb sometimes?"

"Constantly," I tell her, after a pause.

She nods, eyes narrowed, for a moment, then she shrugs, tiurning to me and grinning. ""Hot-to-Trotsky"?" she asks, looking; after Clare, still heading, thinly majestic in the thick of the crowrd, for the ladies.

"I made the mistake of trying to get Clare into bed onoce," I confess.

"Cameron! Really?" Yvonne looks delighted. "What happenned?"

"She just laughed."

Yvonne tuts. She glances round. "I'd have given you a refearence, Cameron," she says quietly.

I smile and drink my champagne, remembering when Andy came to Stirling for Yvonne and William's party, five years ago. It seems like a lot longer.

"Did you ever tell William about that?" I ask her.

Yvonne shakes her head. "No," she says. She shrugs. "Maybe when we're older."

I think about telling her that Andy was there, in his sleeping bag, listening the whole time, but while I'm thinking about it something goes wrong; there must have been a flaw in one of the glasses, or the weight is just too much, because there's a cracking sound and one side of the pyramid starts to collapse, sending an avalanche of falling glass and frothing champagne spilling crashing down off the table and smashing, bouncing and splashing onto the mats and the floor below.

Andy goes, "Aww…" and holds his arms straight out.

People cheer.

Still thinking.

Four years later Clare and her latest fiance were spending a weekend at Strathspeld when she died of a heart attack. I heard the news from a guy I knew who still lived in the village. I couldn't believe it. A heart attack. Overweight male execs squeezing themselves behind the wheel of their Mercs; they died of heart attacks. Arthritic working-class guys raised on a diet of fish and chips and fags; they died of heart attacks. Not young women in their mid-twenties. Christ, Clare was even fit at the time; she'd given up doing coke and taken up healthy shit like running and swimming. It couldn't be a heart attack.

And that was exactly what the doctor thought; that was precisely what helped kill her. The local doc — the guy who'd helped save Andy after he almost died under the ice all those years earlier — was on holiday at the time and there was a locum, a deputising doctor in charge of the practice, except from what the locals muttered later it seemed he'd treated his stay in Strathspeld as a holiday, too, and spent more time on river banks with a rod in his hands than at bedsides toting a stethoscope. The family called him when Clare started to complain of chest pains in the late afternoon but he didn't come out; told them she'd just strained something; rest and painkillers. They called him twice again, and eventually he appeared that evening once it was explained the family wasn't used to this sort of treatment (and once he realised the best salmon stream in the area ran through the estate). He still couldn't find anything wrong, and left again.

They called an ambulance when Clare became unconscious and her lips turned blue, but by then it was too late.

Andy and his partner had sold The Gadget Shop chain the previous year; Andy was still thinking about what he wanted to do next — now he was rich — and was deep in the desert on a trans-Saharan expedition when Clare died. The funeral was private, family only; Andy got back just in time. I rang the house a week later and talked to Mrs Gould, who said Andy was still there. She thought he would like to see me.

A grey day in a cold April, one of those winter's-end days when the land looks exhausted and worn and it seems like all the colour is gone from the world. The cloud was thick and low and moving slowly on a damp, chilling wind, a lidding expanse hiding the sky and the snow on the distant hills. The trees, bushes and fields were all the same dun shade, as though a thin layer of dirt had been sprayed everywhere, and wherever you looked there seemed to be mud or rotting leaves or bare, dead-looking branches. I thought that, if I'd just come from the Sahara to here, I'd head back as soon as possible, family duties or not.