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I stood drinking it at the window, looking out across the rooftops, an endless vista of chimney pots and TV aerials with a distant glimpse of Tower Bridge. I was thinking of my brother, of how I’d loved him and hated him, of how there had been nobody else in my life who had made up for the loss I’d felt at his going. And yet at the time I’d been almost glad. It had seemed better that he should die like that – in the sea, a casualty of war.
    I turned away from the grubby window, glanced at the jacket design lying on the table amongst a litter of paints and brushes, and then fell to pacing my studio, wondering what this fellow Lane wanted digging up the past that was dead these twenty years and more. Surely to God they weren’t going to rake over the whole wretched business again. I could still remember the shock when the Military Police had come to interview me at the factory. Did I realise he’d deserted? Slinging questions at me until they’d discovered my father was dead and my mother alone and ill at Ardnamurchan. ‘We’ll pick him up there then.’ And my bursting into tears and shouting at them that whatever my brother had done it was justified and why the hell did they pick on him and not the officer. And that M.P. sergeant with the big ears and the broken nose – I could have drawn his face even now – snapping back at me in a, grating Glaswegian voice, ‘The officer was unconscious, laddie, with machine-gun bullets spraying him as he lay on the ground with a broken jaw. Aye and damn near twenty men dead who needn’t have died. Justified? Christ, it was plain bluidy murrder.’
    The jacket design stared at me, the lettering of the book title already pencilled in – THE PEACE THAT FOLLOWED . I had read it, thought it good, but now I dropped a rag over it, remembering the wartime passages, the sense of futility the writer had invoked. Sounds from the street drifted up to me, the bustle of London’s East End. My studio was just an attic over a butcher’s shop. It was all I could afford. Bed, table and easel took up most of the space, and the canvases stacked against the wall, all the work I’d done on Milos – there was hardly room to move. A cupboard in the corner held my clothes and above it was piled the camping equipment I’d bought from the proceeds of the only two pictures I’d sold – Milos at Dawn Seen from a Caique and Greek Galley Under Water . That was when I planned to paint on Laerg, before I’d been refused permission to go there.
    I crossed to the window, thinking back over my life, back to the carefree days on Ardnamurchan and Iain in the glory of his youth fighting imaginary battles among the rocks below our croft, always in defence of Laerg with myself cast in the role of invader – a Viking, a pirate, a marauding trawlerman, anything that had recently captured his fancy. And in the evenings, sitting by the peat fire listening to the old man talking in that thick burr – tales of the Lovers’ Stone, of cliff-crawling in search of puffins, of boat journeys to Fladday for the gannets which he called solan geese; wild tales of gales and ships being wrecked.
    So long ago and yet so vivid, and Iain tall and handsome with his dark face, and his black hair blowing in the wind; a wild boy with a streak of melancholy and a temper that flared at a word. He could have done something with his life. I pushed up the window, leaning out to feel the warmth of the sun, thinking of my own life, stuck here in this dirty back street doing hack work for a living. I should be painting on Laerg, getting the lost world of my grandfather down on canvas. That would be something, a justification. Eleven years at sea, followed by the years learning to paint, and it all added up to this miserable little room and a few pounds in the bank.
    A taxi drew up in the street below and a man got out. All I could see of him was his