But what was that character? Energy, yes, determination, but all fueled by a kind of resentment, I thought. She’d come out of England, heavily resenting her own flawed family and whatever had happened to her there. She certainly resented my dad, and the way their marriage had broken down, and even the fact that he had died leaving her with various complications to sort out, not the least her two sons. She resented the slow drift of the climate, which had left her under pressure here in the family home in which she had always hoped to die. She was one against the world, in her head.

Her eyes, though, her beautiful eyes belied the harshness of her expression. They were clear and still that startling pale gray. And they revealed a surprising vulnerability. My mother had built a kind of shell around herself all her life, but her eyes were a crack in that shell, letting me see inside.

Not that she was about to let up on me. “Look at you. You’re round-shouldered, your hair’s a mess, you’re overweight. You look like shit.”

I had to laugh. “Thanks, Mom.”

“I know what’s wrong with you,” she said. “You’re still moping.” That was the only word she ever used to mean grief. “It’s been, what, seventeen years? Morag died, and your baby son died, and it was terrible. But it was all those years ago. It wasn’t the end of your life. How’s Tom? How old is he now?”

“Twenty-five. He’s in Siberia, working on a genetic sampling of—”

“Siberia!” She laughed. “Could he get any further away? You see, by mourning your dead son, you’ve pushed away the living.”

I stood up, pushing back my chair. “And your amateur psychoanalysis is a crock, as it always was, Mom.”

She closed her eyes for a moment. “All right, all right. Your old room is made up for you.”

“Thanks.”

“You might fill a few sandbags. The tide’s out.” She pointed to the cupboard where she stored empty sacks.