She turns away from him and from William and from me and puts her hands up over her face.

CHAPTER 12 — BASRA ROAD

The little speedboat swings round the low island. The island is covered in whin and bramble and a few small trees, mostly ash and silver birch. Grey-black walls and roofless ruins and a few slanted headstones and memorials are visible through the bushes and trees, surrounded by ferns turning fawn, and yellowing grass covered by brown, fallen leaves. A gun-metal sky looks down.

Loch Bruc constricts here — amongst the low, bare hills near the sea — until it is only a hundred metres in breadth; the little funeral isle fills most of this bend in the narrows.

William guns the engine once, sending the speedboat surging ahead towards the little jetty which slants into the calm, dark water. The jetty's stones look old. They're unevenly sized, mostly very large, and on the top surface of smooth, dressed stone there are time-worn iron rings, set into circular depressions. On the shore behind us there is an identical slipway, angling out from the end of a track through the trees and the reed-clumped grass.

"Eilean Dubh; the dark isle," William announces, letting the boat drift in towards the island jetty. "Old family burial ground… on my mother's side." He looks around at the gently sloped hills and the higher, steeper mountains to the north. "A lot of this used to belong to them."

"Was that before or after the Clearances, William?" I ask.

"Both," he grins.

Andy sips whisky from his hip-flask. He offers me some and I accept. Andy smacks his lips and looks around, giving the impression he's drinking in the silence. "Nice place."

"For a cemetery," Yvonne says. She's frowning, looking cold even though she has her ski gear on: down-plump jacket and big Gore-tex mitts.

"Yeah," I say in an approximation of a down-home American accent. "Kinda morbid for a graveyard, isn't it, Bill, old buddy? Couldn't ya kinda liven it up a bit, know what I mean? A few neon gravestones, talking holograms of the departed, and — hey — let's not forget a flower concession stand featuring tasteful plastic blooms. A ghost-train ride for the youngsters; necro-burgers made with real dead meat in coffin-shaped polystyrene packs; high-speedboat trips in the funeral barge used in Don't Look Now, the movie."

"Funny you should say that, actually," William says, tossing his blond hair back and leaning out to fend the stone jetty off with his hand. "I used to run boat trips out here from the hotel." He puts a couple of white plastic fenders over the gunwales to protect the boat, then steps up onto the slip, holding the painter.

"Locals take to that all right?" Andy asks, standing up and pulling the stern of the boat closer in to the pier.

William scratches his head. "Not really." He secures the painter to one of the iron rings. "Funeral party turned up one day while one lot were having a barbie; bit of a fracas."

"You mean this place is still used? Yvonne says, accepting William's hand and being pulled up onto the slipway. She tuts and looks away, shaking her head.

"Oh, hell, yeah," William says as Andy and I get out too; a little unsteadily, it has to be said, as we weren't totally sober when we woke up — around noon — in William's parents" house at the top of the loch, and we've been getting stuck into the whisky in first my hip-flask then his on the twenty-kilometre journey down the loch. "I mean," William says, flapping his arms. "That's why I wanted you guys to see this place; this is where I want to be buried." He smiles beatifically at his wife. "You too, blue-eyes, if you want."

Yvonne stares at him.

"We could be buried together," William says, sounding happy.

Yvonne frowns severely and walks past us, heading towards the island. "You'd only want to go on top as usual."

William laughs uproariously, then looks briefly crestfallen as we follow Yvonne onto the grass and head up to the ruined chapel. "I meant side-by-side," he says plaintively.

Andy chuckles and screws down the cap of the hip-flask. He looks thin and kind of hunched. This visit to the west coast was my idea. I invited myself and Andy here for a long weekend with William and Yvonne at William's parents" place on the shores of the loch, not so much for my own enjoyment — I get jealous around William and Yvonne when they're in their weekend-horseplay mode — but because it was the first idea I'd had for a break that Andy didn't reject immediately. Clare died six months ago and, apart from a month of night-clubbing in London which seemed to leave him more depressed than ever and certainly less wealthy and healthy, Andy hasn't left Strathspeld since; I've tried a dozen different ways of getting him away from the estate for a while but this was the only one that sparked any interest.

I think Andy just plain likes Yvonne and is sort of morbidly fascinated with William, who spent a large part of the journey down the loch telling us about his non-ethical investment policy: deliberately putting money into arms businesses, tobacco companies, exploitative mining industries, rain-forest timber concerns; that sort of thing. His theory is that if the smart but ethical money is getting out, the dividends have to get bigger for the smart but unscrupulous money that takes its place. I assumed he was joking, Yvonne pretended not to listen, but Andy was taking him quite seriously, and from William's appreciative reaction I suspect the guy wasn't kidding at all.

We walk up between gravestones of various ages; some are only a year or two old, many date back to the last century, and some are dated in the seventeen and sixteen hundreds; others have been worn smooth by the elements, their text levelled and obliterated back into the grainy nap of the rock. Some of the stones are just flat, irregular slabs, and you get the impression that if the poor people who erected these — and could not afford a stonemason — could write, and did carve the names and dates of their loved ones on such slabs, the letters and numerals must only have been scratched onto the surface of the stone.

I stand looking at some long, flat gravestones set into the ground with crude depictions of skeletons chiselled into them; other carvings are of skulls and scythes and hourglasses and crossed bones. Most of the horizontal stones are covered in grey, black and light green lichens and mosses.

There are a couple of family plots, where more affluent locals have walled off bits of the little island, and grander gravestones of marble and granite stand proud, if they're not covered by brambles. Some of the more recent graves still have wee cellophane parcels of flowers lying on them; many have small granite flowerpots, covered by perforated metal caps that make them look like giant pepperpots, and a couple of these have dead, faded flowers in them.

The walls of the ruined chapel barely come up to shoulder-height. At one end, beneath a gable wall with an aperture like a small window at the apex where a bell might have hung once, there is a stone altar; just three heavy slabs. On the altar there's a metal bell, green-black with age and chained to the wall behind. It looks rather like a very old Swiss cow-bell.

"Apparently some people nicked the old bell, back in the "sixties," William told us last night, in the drawing room of his parents" house, while we were playing cards and drinking whisky and talking about heading down the loch in the speedboat to the dark isle. "Oxford students, or something; anyway, according to the locals the guys couldn't sleep at night because they kept hearing the sound of bells, and eventually they couldn't stand it and came back and replaced the bell in the chapel and they were all right again."