"Up to a point," I said, non-committally, I hoped.

"It was old Hugh, then your grandfather, then it was me, and then it got all confused with Kenneth and Rory and Hamish; they each seem to think they were it, but…»

"Dad certainly seems to think he's paterfamilias."

"Aye, and maybe Kenneth has the strongest claim, though I still think Rory was more clever. Your Uncle Hamish… " She looked troubled. "He's a bit off the beaten track, that boy." She frowned. (This «boy» was nearly fifty, of course, and himself a grandfather. It was Uncle Hamish who'd invented Newton's Religion, and who had taken me in when my father and I had fallen out.)

"I wonder where Uncle Rory is," I said, hoping to divert my gran from areas that sounded portentous and daft with the familiar game that anybody in our family can play; making up stories, conjectures, lies and hopes about Uncle Rory, our one-time golden boy, professional traveller and some-time magician, whose most successful act had been his own disappearance.

"Who knows?" My gran sighed. "Might be dead, for all we know."

I shook my head. "No, I don't think so."

"You sound certain, Prentice. What do you know we don't?"

"I just feel it." I shrugged, threw a handful of pebbles into the waves. "He'll be back."

"Your father thinks he will," Margot agreed, sounding thoughtful. "He always talks about him as though he's still around."

"He'll be back," I nodded, and lay back in the grass, hands under my head.

"I don't know, though," Grandma Margot said. "I think he might be dead."

"Dead? Why?" The sky was deep, shining blue.

"You wouldn't believe me."

"What?" I sat up again, swivelled to face her, looking over the much-scribbled-upon grey-white cast (as well as signatures, get-well-soon messages and silly drawings, there were at least two shopping lists, a recipe copied down from the radio and detailed instructions on how to get by car to the flat I shared in Glasgow).