He looked round the Solar of the castle. The big new window at the gable end of the hall was still covered with a translucent plastic sheet which rustled in the wind and crackled as the rain blew onto it. A shifting grid of dark lines was the shadow of the scaffolding outside. The high-ceilinged hall smelled of paint, varnish, new wood and drying plaster. He walked over to one of the mullioned windows, and stood there, looking out at the low clouds as they drifted over Gallanach, soaking the dull town with the curving veils of rain they dragged beneath them, like the train of some vast grey gown.
"Daddy, daddy! Uncle Fergus says we can go up on the roof with mum if we're careful! Can we? Please can we? Promise we won't jump off!" Lewis skipped into the hall, dragging little Prentice behind him. Lewis had his anorak back on, and Prentice was dragging his behind him over the shining parquet floor.
"Aye son, I suppose so," Kenneth said, sitting on his ankles to pull the younger boy's jacket on and zipping it up. Lewis went leaping and whooping round the hall while this was going on. "Not so loud, Lewis," Kenneth said, without much conviction.
Prentice smiled at his dad. "Daddy," he said in his slow, croaky voice. "Need the toilet."
Kenneth sighed, pulled the child's hood up, then pushed it back down again. "Aye well; your mum will take you. Lewis!" he shouted. Lewis darted guiltily away from the paint pots he'd been examining at the other end of the hall, and came running over.
"This is great, daddy! Can we get a castle too, aye?"
"No. We can't afford it. Take your brother back to his mum; he needs the toilet."
"Aww," whined Lewis, staring accusingly at his young brother, who just grinned at him and wiped his nose on one cuff of his anorak. Lewis prodded Prentice in the back. "You're always spoiling things!"
"Do as you're told, Lewis," McHoan said, straightening. His knees complained as he did so. "On you go. And be careful on that roof." He waved them both towards the double doors they'd entered through.
Lewis made a show of plodding off, clumping one foot in front of another, body swaying exaggeratedly. He was pulling Prentice by one toggle of his anorak hood.
"By the hand, Lewis," Kenneth said wearily.
"You're a pest, boy," Lewis told his younger brother as they reached the doorway.
Prentice turned and waved to his dad with his free hand. "Bye, daddy," the wee voice said. Then he was pulled out of the room.
"Bye, son," McHoan said, and smiled. Then he turned back to the window and the rain.
"It's a bit damp still."
"Ach, yer no afraid of a bit a wet, ur ye? Yer no a girrul ur ye.
"No I'm not a girl. But if I get my clothes mucky —»
"Your dad's rich; he can buy you new clothes."
"Aye — yer paw's rich. You could probably have new claes every day if you wantit."
"Don't be ridiculous. All I'm saying —»
Kenneth could see both points of view; Lachy, in a grimy shirt held together by odd buttons and a safety pin, and tattered, patched short trousers that drooped below his knees and had probably belonged to at least two elder brothers, was already grubby (and sporting the vivid remains of a black eye no one had mentioned because it had probably been his dad who gave it him). Fergus had nice, well-fitting clothes on: grey serge short trousers, a new blue jersey and a tweed jacket with leather patches sewn on the elbows. Even Kenneth felt a little dowdy in comparison. His shorts had been darned at the back, though he was getting a new pair when the next clothes rations came through. The girls all wore skirts, blouses and jerseys; their socks were white, not grey. Emma Urvill had a coat with a little hood that made her look like a pixie.
"Are we playing this game or not?" she asked.
"Patience," Lachy said, turning to the girl, still standing holding her bike. "Patience, lassie."
Emma looked skywards and made a tutting noise. Beside her, Kenneth's sister, Ilsa, also on her bike, shook her head.
The castle stood on the side of the hill. The tall trees around it were still dripping, and its rough, uneven stones were dark and wet from the rain that had not long stopped. A watery sun gleamed on the dark leaves of the ivy that clung to one side of the ruin, and in the forest behind, a wood pigeon cooed softly.
"Oh, what the heck," Fergus Urvill said, and rested his bike against a tree.
Lachy Watt let his bike fall to the ground. Kenneth lowered his to the damp grass alongside. The girls propped theirs against the wooden rails at the start of the bridge. The short wooden bridge, about wide enough for a cart, crossed a steep, bush-choked gully about thirty feet deep. At the bottom of this tiny, dank glen a burn splashed and foamed; it rushed out of the woods, curled round three sides of the rock and grass knoll the roofless castle stood upon, fell over a small waterfall, then progressed gently afterwards joining the River Add near the main road, so that eventually its waters flowed through and beneath the town of Gallanach and into the bay near the railway pier.
Sun came suddenly, making the grass bright and the ivy leaves sparkle; the wind pushed through the forest with a quiet roar, releasing drops of water all around. Kenneth watched a train on the viaduct at Bridgend, about a mile away; the west wind was keeping its noise from them, but he could see the steam rising quickly from the dark locomotive and whipping back over the half-dozen burgundy coaches in little white clouds that spread and were torn apart and flung away by the wind.
"Right," Lachy said. "Who's het?"
"Het?" Fergus said. "You mean 'it'?"
"You know what ah mean; who's goin het first?"
"Do One potato, Two potato," suggested Emma.
"Oh Goad, all right," Lachy said, shaking his head.
"And you shouldn't take the Lord's name in vain," Emma told him.
"Christ, Ah'm sorry," Lachy said.
"You did it again."
"You a Tim or sumhin?"
"I'm a Christian," Emma said primly. "And I thought you were, too, Lachlan Watt."
"Ah'm a Protestant," Lachy said. "That's what am are."
"Can we get on with this, please?" lisa said.
They all lined up, fists clenched; Lachy ended up being it, much to his own annoyance.
Kenneth had never been inside the old castle; you could just see it from the house, if you knew what you were looking for, and you could see it quite well if you used dad's binoculars, but it was on the Urvill estate, and even though their families had been friends for years — generations, dad said, which meant even longer — Mr Robb, on whose farm the castle stood, didn't like children, and chased them off his fields and out of his woods whenever he could, threatening them with his shotgun. He couldn't chase Fergus and Emma Urvill off though, so they were all safe. Kenneth had wondered if Mr Robb was secretly a fifth columnist or even a Nazi, and was hiding men washed up from a sunken U-boat, or preparing a place for paratroopers to land, but despite him and some of the other children watching Mr Robb very carefully from the woods a few times, they had never been able to prove anything. But they had explored the hidden garden a bit, and decided the castle looked worth investigating.
The castle had dark, intact dungeons at ground level, and a stone stair-case in a circular tower that rose to the open heart of the ruin, where a few jumbled stones and a floor of earth and weed looked up to the sky. The stairs wound further up inside the corner tower, pausing at each long-collapsed floor above, where a doorway looked out onto the central well. Another stairway pierced the walls themselves on the far side of the shell of the keep, rising through their thickness past another three doorways hanging like internal balconies, to a couple of small rooms at the top of dark chimneys which led to the base of the walls outside.
The castle held a variety of other dark nooks and shadowy crannies you could hide in, as well as windows and fireplaces set high in the thick walls, where you could climb if you were good at climbing, and if you were really good you could climb up from the circular stairs to the very summit of the ruin, where you could walk, if you dared, right round the thick tops of the walls, over the weeds and the ivy, sixty feet or more above the ground. From there you could look out to sea, over Gallanach, or into the mountains to the north and the forested hills to the south. Closer, there was the overgrown walled garden, across another bridge behind the castle, where tangles of rhodies crowded under monkey-puzzle trees and a riot of exotic flowers attracted buzzing clouds of insects in the summer.
The rules were that you could hide anywhere in the castle; Kenneth and the others left Lachy at the track side of the bridge, counting slowly. They laughed and squealed, bumping into each other and shushing each other as they tried not to shout too loudly while they dithered and giggled over where to hide.
Kenneth climbed up into a high window and crouched down. Eventually, Lachy came into the open hall of the castle, looking around. Kenneth watched him for a moment, then ducked back in, flattened himself down as close to the stone sill of the window as he could.
He was the last to be found, and for a while delighted in the fact that none of them could find him, even after Lachy had caught the rest and they were all shouting at him to come out so they could have another go. He lay there, feeling the damp breeze coming through the window and tickling the hairs on his bare legs. He listened to the shouts of the others, echoing in the castle's emptied shell, and to the voices of the crows and the wood pigeons in the trees, and he smelled the dark, wet smell of the moss and weeds that had found a foothold amongst the ruin's grey stones. He kept his eyes tightly closed, and as he listened to them search for him and call on him, there came a strange, tight, quivery feeling in his tummy which made him want to clench his teeth and bring his knees together and made him worry about wetting his pants.
I love this here, he thought to himself. I don't care if there is a war on and Fergus's uncle got killed in North Africa, and Wullie Watt got killed in the North Atlantic and Lachy gets hit by his dad and we might have to move to another house because Mr Urvill wants ours back and I don't understand trigonometry and the Germans do invade us; I love this. If I died right now I wouldn't care; wouldn't care at all.
Lachy climbed right up onto the top of the walls eventually, and only then did he see Kenneth. Kenneth came down, yawning widely and rubbing his eyes and claiming he had fallen asleep. He'd won, had he? Oh, jolly good.
They played some more, and made fun of Fergus after he'd won a game because Kenneth had worked out what the two little rooms at the top of the second set of stairs were; they were toilets, and that was why the chimneys led down and went out of the castle; it was so all the number one and numbers twos could fall down there. Fergus had hidden down a latrine! And him worried about getting his clothes dirty, too! Fergus denied they were toilets; they were completely clean and didn't smell at all and they must be chimneys.
"Chimneys, ma arse!" Lachy laughed. "They're shite-holes!"
(Emma tutted, but couldn't help smiling.)
"Chimneys!" Fergus insisted desperately, blinking hard. He looked at Kenneth as though expecting him to agree. Kenneth looked down at the tramped-down earth under his feet.
They're shite-holes, so they are," laughed Lachy. "And you're just a big jobbie!"
"Chimneys," Fergus protested, his voice rising, his face going red.
"Big jobbie, big jobbie; big smelly jobbie!" Lachy chanted.
Kenneth watched Fergus shake with anger while Lachy danced round the interior of the keep, singing out, "Big jobbie, big jobbie; big smelly jobbie!"
Fergus stared angrily at his sister and at Kenneth, as though betrayed, then just stood and waited for Lachy to get bored with his taunting, and as Kenneth watched, a blank, emotionless expression gradually replaced the anger on Fergus's face.
Kenneth had the fleeting, extraordinary impression of seeing something buried alive, and felt himself shake suddenly, almost spastically, shivering.
"… jobbie, jobbie; big smelly jobbie!"
In the last game, Kenneth hid with Emma Urvill in one of the dungeons, showing her how to turn her back to the light and put the hood of her coat up to hide her face, and sure enough when Ilsa came to the door of the dungeon — and he felt that quivering, scary, glorious feeling in his tummy again — she didn't see them, and they hugged each other once she had gone, and the hug was warm and tight and he liked it and she didn't let go, and after a while they put their mouths together and kissed. He felt a strange echo of that terrifyingly wonderful sensation in his belly and his heart, and he and Emma Urvill held onto each other for ages, until all the others were caught.
Later, they played in the tangling undergrowth of the walled garden, and found an old over-grown fountain with the stone statue of a naked lady in it, and an old shed at one corner where there were ancient tins and jars and bottles with Victorian-looking writing on them. The rain came on for a while and they all stayed in there, Fergus complaining about his bike rusting, his sister and Kenneth exchanging the occasional sly look, Ilsa staring out at the rain and saying there were places in South America where it hadn't stopped raining for hundreds of years, and Lachy mixing various sticky, treacley subtances together from the shelves of old bottles and tins, trying to find a combination that would explode, or at least burn, while the rain hammered then whispered then dripped on the tarred roof overhead, and plopped through holes onto the springy wooden floor of the shed.
"Of course, we haven't moved all the bottles yet," Fergus said, pointing with his pipe at the still unfilled racks that covered the wall of the cellar. The cellar was painted white, and lit by naked bulbs; wires hung and there were unplastered holes for cables and plumbing leading through the walls and up to other floors. The wood and metal wine racks gleamed, as did the two hundred or so bottles that had already been stored.
"Should keep you going for a bit, eh, Fergus?" he grinned. "Once you've filled this lot up."
"Mmm. We were thinking of touring a few vineyards next summer," Urvill said, scratching his thick chin with his pipe. "Bordeaux; the Loire, that sort of thing. Don't know if you and Mary fancy making a foursome or not, hmm?"
Fergus blinked. Kenneth nodded. "Well, perhaps. Depends on holidays and that sort of thing. And the kids, of course."
"Oh," Fergus said, frowning as he picked a little sliver of tobacco off his Pringle sweater. "We weren't thinking of taking the children."
"Ah, well, no; of course not," Kenneth said, as they went to the door. Fergus switched the lights out in the various cellars and they went up the stone-flagged steps towards the utility room and kitchen.
It was that cellar, he thought to himself as he followed Fergus's Hush Puppies up the steps. That was where I hid with Emma Urvill, and kissed her. That cellar; I'm sure it was that one. And that window I was looking out earlier; that was the one I hid in that day, nearly thirty years ago; I'm certain.
He felt a terrible weight of time and loss settle on him then, and a slight feeling of resentment at the Urvills in general and Fergus in particular, for having — with so little thought — stolen part of his memories from him. At least malice might have acknowledged the value of his nostalgia.
"Ferg, this dishwasher's like a Chinese Puzzle," Fiona stood up from the recalcitrant machine, then saw her brother and smiled broadly, came towards him, hugging.
"Hiya, Ken. Been getting the guided tour, have you?"
"Yes; very impressive." Kenneth kissed his sister's cheek. How old had she been when he'd come out here with Fergus and the rest? About two, he guessed. Not old enough to come all this way on a bike. He must have been eight or nine. He wondered where Hamish had been; ill, maybe. He'd always been taking colds.
Fiona Urvill, nee McHoan, wore old flared Levis and a loose green blouse knotted over a white T-shirt. Her copper-coloured hair was tied back. "How're you?"
"Oh, I'm well," Kenneth nodded; he kept an arm round her waist as they walked over to the dishwasher, where Fergus crouched, consulting the instruction booklet. The door of the dishwasher was hinged open like a drawbridge.
"Appears to be written in code, my dear," Fergus said, scratching the side of his head with his pipe. Kenneth felt a smile form on his face as he looked down at the man. Fergus seemed old before his time: the Pringle jumper, the Hush Puppies, even the pipe. Of course, Kenneth could remember when he used to smoke a pipe; but that had been different. Looked like Fergus was losing his hair already, too.
"How's school?" Fiona asked her brother.
"Och, getting on," he said. "Getting on." He had been promoted to Principal Teacher in English the previous autumn. His sister always wanted to know how things were going at the high school, but he usually felt reluctant to talk about work around her and Fergus. He wasn't sure why, and he suspected he probably wouldn't like acknowledging the reason, if he ever did work it out. He was even more chary about revealing he was writing down some of the stories he'd told the kids over the years, hoping to publish them some day. He was worried people might think he was trying to out-do Rory, or — worse still — think he hoped to use him as a contact, an easy way in.
"No, I tell a lie," Fergus admitted. "Here's the English bit. Well, American, anyway." He sighed, then looked round. "Talking about English-speaking furriners, McHoan; you still all right for the International next Saturday?"
"Oh aye," Kenneth nodded. They were meant to be going to the Scotland-England rugby game in a week's time. "Who's driving.
"Umm, thought we'd take the Morgan, actually."
"Oh God, Fergus, must we? I'm not sure I can find my bobblehat."
"Oh, come on man," Fergus chuckled. Thought we'd try a new route: down to Kintyre; across to Arran, Lochranza to Brodick; Land Ardrossan and then the A71 to the A of the N. Strikes and power cuts permitting, of course."
"Fergus," Kenneth said, putting one hand to his brow. "It sounds enormously complicated." He refused to rise to the bait about strikes and power cuts. He guessed that "A of the N" meant Athens of the North. "Are you sure the Lochranza ferry runs outside the high season, anyway?"
Fergus looked troubled, stood up. "Oh, it must, mustn't it? Well, I think it does."
"Might be best to check."
"Righty-oh, will do."
"Anyway, couldn't we take the Rover?" Kenneth wasn't keen on the Morgan; its stiff ride hurt his back and gave him a headache, and Fergus drove too fast in the ancient open-top. Maybe it was the sight of all that British Racing Green paint and the leather strap across the bonnet. The Rover, 3.5 though it was, seemed to calm Fergus a little.
"Oh, come on man, where's your sense of occasion?" Fergus chided. The hotel won't let us into the car park if we show up in the Rover,"
"Oh God," Kenneth sighed, and squeezed his sister's waist. "The Morgan it is then." he looked at Fiona. Those green eyes sparkling. "I'm getting old, sis. Do you think I'm getting old?"
"Positively ancient, Ken."
"Thanks. How're the twins?"
"Oh, glowing."
"Still taking them to Windscale for their hols then, are you?"
"Ha! Oh, Ken, you're still so comparatively witty."
"Have you tried switching it on?" Fergus suggested, squatting on the floor in front of the dishwasher again. His voice echoed inside the machine as he tried to stick his head inside amongst the racks.
"Don't be catty, Ferg," Fiona told him. She smiled at her brother. "Haven't seen young Rory out here for a while, and he never calls us; he okay?"
"Still in that squat in Camden, last we heard, living off his ill-gotten sub-continental gains."
"A squat?" Fergus said, words muffled. "Thought he made a packet on that… travel book thingy."
"He did," Ken nodded.
"About India, wasn't it?"
"Yep."
"Ferg," Fiona said, exasperated. "You bought the book, remember?"
"Of course I remember," Fergus said, reaching into the dishwasher to fiddle with something. "Just haven't read it, that's all. Who needs to read a book to find out about India? Just go to bloody Bradford… What's he doing living in a squat?
Ken ground his teeth for a second, looking appraisingly at Fergus's ample rear. He shrugged. "He just likes living with the people there. He's a social animal, Ferg."
"Have to be a bloody animal to live in a squat," Fergus muttered, echoing.
"Hoi, don't be horrible about my brother," Fiona said, and tapped Fergus's backside with her foot.
Fergus glanced quickly round and glared at her, his plump, slightly reddened face suddenly grim. Kenneth felt his sister stiffen next to him. Then Fergus gave a little wavering smile, and with a quiet grunt turned back to the opened machine and its instruction booklet. Fiona relaxed again.
Kenneth wondered if things were really all right with the couple. He thought he sensed a tension between them sometimes, and a couple of years earlier, not long after the twins had been born, he'd thought Fergus and Fiona had seemed distinctly cold towards each other. He had worried for them, and he and Mary had discussed it, wondering what might have caused this unhappiness, and if there was anything they could do (they had decided there wasn't, not unless they were asked). Still, he had tried broaching the subject with Fergus once, after a dinner party, while they nursed whiskies in the conservatory of the old Urvill house and watched the lights of the navigation buoys and lighthouses scattered around and through the Sound of Jura as they winked on and off.
Fergus hadn't wanted to talk. Mary had had no more success with Fiona. And anyway it had all seemed to come gradually right again.
Maybe I'm just jealous, he thought to himself, as Fiona pulled away from him and went to the big new Aga, sitting squat, cream and gleaming against one wall of whitewashed stone. She put a hand over part of the cooker's surface, gauging the heat. The silence in the kitchen went on.
Kenneth had never given Freud much credence; mainly because he had looked as honestly into himself as he could, found much that was not to his taste, found a little that was even just plain bad, but nothing much that fitted with what Freud's teachings said he ought to find. Still, he wondered if he did resent Fergus, at least partly because he had taken his sister away, made her his.
Well, you never knew, he supposed. Maybe everybody's theories were right, maybe the whole world and every person, and all their relationships within it were utterly bound up with one another in an intricate, entangled web of cause and effect and underlying motive and hidden principle. Maybe all the philosophers and all the psychologists and all the theoreticians were right… but he wasn't entirely sure that any of it made much difference.
"Mary and the kids with you?" Fiona said, turning from the Aga to look at him.
"Taking in the view from the battlements," Kenneth told her.
"Good," she nodded. She glanced at her husband. "We're getting an observatory, did Ferg tell you?"
"No." He looked, surprised, at the other man, who didn't turn round. "No, I didn't know. You mean a… a telescope; an astronomical observatory?"
"Bloody astronomically expensive," Fergus said, voice echoing in the dishwasher.
"Yes," Fiona said. "So Ferg can spend his nights star-gazing." Mrs Urvill looked at her husband, still squatting in front of the opened machine, with an expression Kenneth thought might have been scorn.
"What's that, my dear?" Fergus asked, looking over at his wife, an open, innocent expression on his face.
"Nothing," his wife said brightly, voice oddly high.
"Hmm," Fergus adjusted something inside the dishwasher, scratched above his ear with his pipe again. "Jolly good."
Kenneth looked away then, to the windows, where the rain spattered and ran.
Conceived in a howling gale, Verity was born — howling — in one, too. She came into the world a month before she was due, one windy evening in August 1970, by the shores of Loch Awe — a birth-place whose title, Prentice at least had always thought, could hardly have been more apt.
Her mother and father had been staying at Fergus and Fiona Urvill's house in Gallanach for the previous two weeks, on holiday from their Edinburgh home. For the last night of their holiday the young couple decided to visit a hotel at Kilchrenan, an hour's drive away to the north east up the side of the loch. They borrowed Fergus's Rover to make the journey. The bulging Charlotte had that week developed a craving for salmon, and duly dined on salmon steaks, preceded by strips of smoked salmon and followed by smoked salmon mousse, which she chose in preference to a sweet. She complained of indigestion.
Well — if in Charlotte's case rather monotonously — fed, they began the return journey. The evening was dull, and although there was no rain a strong warm wind was blowing, waving the tops of the trees and stroking lines of white breakers up the length of the narrow loch. The gale increased to storm force as they drove south west into it, down the single-track road on the western shore.
The narrow road was littered with fallen branches; it was probably one of those that produced the puncture.
And so, while her husband struggled with over-enthusiastically-tightened wheel-nuts, Charlotte went into labour.
Barely half an hour later a stunning blue flash — the colour of the moon and brighter than the sun — burst over the scene from the hill above.
The noise was thunderous.
Charlotte screamed.
Above, on the hillside, stood the lattice forms of two electricity pylons, straddling the heather like grey gigantic skeletons wreathed in darkness. The black wind howled and there was another blinding flash and a titanic concussion; a line of violet incandescence split the night mid-way between the two huge pylons as energy short-circuited through the air between the wind-whipped power-lines.
Charlotte screamed again, and the child was born.
The tail end of Hurricane Verity passed over the British Isles that night; it had been born in the doldrums, cut its teeth flooding bits of the Bahamas, flirted with the coast of North Carolina, and then swept off across the North Atlantic, gradually losing energy; a brief encounter with the angle between a cold front and a warm front just off Ireland refreshed it unexpectedly, and it trashed numerous pleasure boats, rattled a few acres of windows, played frisbee with a multitude of slates and broke many a bough as it passed over Scotland.
The stretch of the national electricity grid down the western shore of Loch Awe towards Gallanach was one of the storm's more spectacular victims, and Charlotte always claimed that it was right on the stroke of the final massive arc between the thrashing cables — which tripped circuit breakers in the grid to the north and plunged all of Gallanach into darkness — that her child (wrinkled, blood-flecked and salmon pink) finally slid out into her father's hands.
They named her Verity, after the hurricane.
When she was eighteen, Fergus Urvill gave his niece Verity a very special present made from one of the exhibits in the museum attached to his glass factory. For the child born to the blaze and crack of human lightning, her entry into this world marked by the same brilliant arcs of short-circuited energy that plunged Gallanach into powerless gloom, he had a necklace fashioned which was made from fulgurite.
Fulgurite is a natural glass, like another of the museum's minor treasures, obsidian. But while obsidian is born purely of the earth, formed in the baking heat and furious pressure of volcanic eruptions, fulgurite is of the earth and of the air, too; it is made when lightning strikes unconsolidated sand, and fuses it, vitrifies it in long, zig-zag tubes. God's glass, Hamish McHoan called it.
The Gallanach Glass Works Museum contained a collection of tubular fulgurites, plucked from the sands of Syria by Walter Urvill — Fergus's grandfather — on a visit there in 1890, and transported back to Scotland with great care and not a little luck so that they arrived intact. One of the crinkled, gnarled little tubes was over a metre long; another just a fraction shorter. Fergus had the smaller of the two sent to a jeweller in Edinburgh, to be broken, the pieces graded and ground and polished and threaded together like dark little pearls, to create a unique necklace for his niece.
He presented the result to the lightning-child during ner birthday party, at her parents" house in Merchiston, in Edinburgh, in August 1988 (it was, perhaps unfittingly, a perfectly fine, warm, clear and calm night, on that anniversary). Fergus — always a rather dour, prematurely elderly figure, characterised by those collar-contacting jowls — improved immensely in the eyes of both Kenneth and Prentice McHoan with that single, elegant, and rather unexpectedly poetic act.
Verity had the grace to accept the necklace with a particular gratitude that acknowledged the thought behind the gift, and the taste to make it a regular, even habitual, part of her wardrobe.
The upholstery of Fergus's Rover was cleansed of the debris and stains associated with Verity's birth and the car continued to serve the Urvill family for another five years or so until 1975, when it was traded in (for what Prentice would thereafter maintain was a scandalously small sum, considering that the thing ought to have been preserved as some sort of internationally-recognised shrine to Beauty) for an Aston Martin DB6.
It was once Prentice's dream, shortly after he'd passed his driving test, to find that old Rover — lying in a field somewhere, perhaps — and to buy it; to own the car his beloved had been born in; to drive it and to cherish it. He realised, of course, that it had almost certainly been scrapped long before, but that had not prevented him harbouring the perhaps irrational notion that somehow a little of its recycled metal must have found its way into at least one of the three old bangers he'd owned.
The defiantly thunderous and lightning-fast Aston Martin DB6 was the car that Fergus and Fiona Urvill were travelling in on the night they were involved in a crash at Achnaba, just south of Lochgair, in 1980.