September

like an afternoon in a hazy, delicious dream. And then, I remember, Penelope and I left Ethel and Roger at the table, drinking coffee and cognac and smoking Gauloise cigarettes, and your mother took me around the garden and showed me all its delights. And as we walked, we talked, and never drew breath, and yet it is difficult to tell you what we talked about. I think she told me about Cornwall and her childhood there, and the house that they used to own, and the life that they led before the war. And it all sounded so different to my own. And when the time came to leave at last, I didn't want it to end. I didn't want to say goodbye. But when I finally came home again, back to Balnaid and Strathcroy, that picture, which I always loved, took on an even deeper meaning, because once I had met Lawrence Stern's daughter.'

'Didn't you ever see her again?' Alexa asked.

'No. So sad. I so seldom went to London, and then, I believe, she moved to the country. We lost touch. So silly and careless of me to lose touch with someone I liked so much, felt so close to.'

'What did she look like?' Alexa, naturally fascinated by this unexpected insight into Noel's family life, was avid for detail. Vi looked at Noel. 'You tell her,' she said.

But he couldn't. Features, eyes, lips, smile, hair eluded him. He could not have drawn them had some man put a gun to his head. What stayed, and remained with him, after four years of living without his mother, was her presence, her warmth, her laughter, her generosity, her contrariness, and her maddening ways, her endless cornucopia of hospitality and giving. Vi's recalling of that long-ago luncheon party, spontaneous and informal but infused with such style that she had not forgotten a single detail of the occasion, brought back the old days at Oakley Street so vividly that he found himself pierced with nostalgia for everything that he had taken so for granted and never found time to appreciate.

He shook his head. 'I can't.'

Vi met his eyes. And then, as though accepting and acknowledging his dilemma, did not press him further. She turned to Alexa. 'She was tall and very good-looking-I thought beautiful. She had dark-grey hair, drawn back from her face into a chignon pierced with tortoiseshell pins. Her eyes were dark, very large and lustrous, and her skin smooth and brown, as though she had always lived out of doors, like a gypsy. She wasn't in the least fashionable or chic, but she held herself so proudly, and that endowed her with a great elegance. She gave off an enormous charge of… enjoyment. An unforgettable woman.' She turned back to Noel. 'And you are her son. Imagine it. How strange life can be. At seventy-eight, you'd think that you'd stop being surprised, and something like this happens, and it's as though the world had only just begun.'

The loch at Croy lay hidden in the hills, three miles north of the house, and accessible only by a primitive track of great steepness that wound up onto the moor in a series of precipitous hairpin bends.

It was not a natural stretch of water. Long ago, this glen, encircled by the northern hills and the towering hulk of Creagan Dubh, had been a place of remote solitude, the habitat of eagles and deer, wild cat, grouse and curlew. At Croy, there were still to be seen old sepia photographs of the glen the way it had once looked, with a burn running through it, flanked by steep banks where the rushes grew, and by the burnside the ruins of a small dwelling-house, with byres and sheep-folds reduced to roofless desolation and tumbled granite walls. But then the first Lord Balmerino, Archie's grandfather, with a fortune to spend and trout fishing in mind, decided to create for himself a loch. Accordingly, a dam was built, sturdy as a bastion, twelve feet high or more, and wide enough to allow passage for a carriage to drive along the top of it. Sluice-gates were integrated to deal with any overflow, and when the dam was completed, these sluice-gates were closed, and the burn was trapped. Slowly, the waters rose, and the abandoned croft was drowned forever. Because of the bulk of the dam wall, any person approaching it for the first time did not see the water until the last rise was crested, when the huge expanse of the loch-two miles long and a mile wide-all at once was there. Depending on the hour and the season, it glittered blue in sunshine, was tossed with leaded grey waves, or lay still as glass in the evening light, with a pale moon reflected in its mirror surface, broken from time to time by the disturbance of rising fish.

A boat-house was built, strongly constructed, and large enough to shelter two boats, with an extra apartment to one side where picnics could be enjoyed in inclement weather. But it was not only fishermen who made their way to the loch. Generations of children had claimed it as their special place. Sheep grazed on the surrounding hills, and the closely cropped grass that sloped to the water's edge made splendid places for setting up tents, playing ball games, organizing cricket matches. Blairs and Airds, with attendant young friends, had learned to cast for trout from the shores of the loch, and mastered their first swimming strokes in its icy waters; and long happy days had been spent in building rafts, or makeshift canoes, which, paddled intrepidly out into the deep water, inevitably sank.

The overloaded Subaru, in four-wheel drive, and with Virginia at the wheel, thumped and bumped up the last stretch of the track, its bonnet pointing skywards. Noel, after half an hour of total discomfort, decided that, going back, he would make the journey on foot. Virginia had opted to drive because she said, quite rightly, that she knew the way, which he did not, and Violet-also quite rightly- had been given the seat next to Virginia, with her birthday cake, in its large box, to hold on her knee. In the back, things were not so easy. Edie Findhorn, about whom Noel had heard so much, proved to be a lady of ample girth, and took up so much space that Noel was forced to take Alexa upon his knee. There she crouched, her weight growing heavier by the moment and threatening his thighs with incipient cramp, but as every bump in the road caused her to clout her head on the roof of the car, he felt that it would be churlish to add his complaints to hers.

They had made two stops. One at the great house of Croy, where Virginia had alighted to see whether the Balmerino party had already left. But the door was locked and they obviously had. The second stop was to open and shut the deer gate, and here Alexa had let out the two spaniels, who had run the rest of the way behind the slowly moving car. Noel wished that he had been let out to run with them, but by now it was a little too late to make such a suggestion.

For, it seemed, they were nearly there. Violet peered through the windscreen. 'They've lit the fire!' she announced.

Alexa screwed herself around to look, causing Noel even more discomfort. 'How do you know?'

'I can see smoke.'

'They must have brought their own kindling,' said Edie.

'Probably used burnt leather,' said Alexa. 'Or rubbed two Boy Scouts together. I hope Lucilla's remembered the boat-house key. You can go fishing, Noel.'

'At the moment, all I want to do is get a little feeling back into my legs.'

'I'm sorry. Am I frightfully heavy?'

'No, not heavy at all. It's just that my feet have gone numb.'

'Perhaps you're getting gangrene.'

'Probably.'

'It can happen in the wink of an eye, and then it spreads like wildfire, all through your body.'

Edie was indignant. 'For heaven's sake, Alexa, what a thing to say.'

'Oh, he'll survive,' Alexa told her airily. 'Besides, we're very nearly there.'

Which they were. The fiendish track levelled off, there were no more jolts, and the Subaru rolled onto smooth, sloping grass, coming to a halt. Virginia switched off the ignition. At once Noel opened the door, bundled Alexa gently out, and gratefully followed her.

Standing, stretching his aching legs, he found himself assaulted by a blast of light, air, brightness, blueness, water, space, scents, wind. It was cold… colder than it had been down in the shelter of the valley, but so dazzled was he by all that he saw that he scarcely noticed the chill. As well he was impressed, as he had been impressed by the grandeur and apparent magnificence of Croy. He had not thought that the loch would be so large, so beautiful, and found it hard to come to terms with the fact that this immense tract of countryside, the hills and the moors, all belonged to one man. Everything was on such a huge scale, so lavish, so rich. Looking about him, he saw the boat-house, intricately gabled and windowed, the Land Rover already parked only a few yards away, the roughly constructed barbecue fireplace where smoke already rose into the clear air.

He saw two men down on the pebbly shore, searching for driftwood, He heard a grouse call high on the hill above him, and then, far distant, from some farther glen, the crack of guns.

The others were now all out of the car. Alexa had opened the back door and let out her little dog. Virginia's two spaniels had not yet turned up, but probably would in a moment or two. Violet was already making her way down towards the boat-house, and as she did a girl emerged from its open doors.

'Hello,' she called. 'You've got here. Happy birthday, Vi!'