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contrary to report, was rank and had been ruinous to him. He thought, and with bitterness, of that swaggering skip-kennel drawing his brows painfully together as he spelled his way through half a column of The Glasgow Herald , with no rich godfather to provide for him and no prospects, but, in having the whole town to swagger about in on Sundays, and so many girls to eye and make love to, and clean fingernails and an immaculate shirt, a thousand times more fortunate than he.
    Everything that presented itself to his gaze in this godforsaken place told him how mean his life was, how desolate and without hope. Nobody cared for him. He never heard an intelligent word from one day to the next. Africa, he believed, would have tempered his soul to hardness and discovered the man in him. No such demands were made upon him here. The place worked its defeats in a low way. It was on every side oppressive, in all its forms clammy and insidiously sweet – lushness and quick bloom followed by a dank putrescence, so that the soul was at one moment garishly excited, brittle, overwrought, and in the next slothfully laid low. Even the natives were of a dingy greyness. Thin-shanked, dusty, undignified, the life they lived was merely degenerate, so squalid and flea-ridden that it inspired nothing but a kind of horror at what human nature might in its beginnings spring from, and in such a place so easily sink back to.
    It was in this light that he considered the yammering, yowling fellow whose story he had taken down that day in his own schoolroom.
    He had thought himself very clever then in making his own additions to what he had been set to write down. His fear now was that in following that frivolous urge he had allowed himself to become contaminated, and in the same idle, half-sleepy way in which he did everything here, as if nothing had meaning or consequence.
    He forbad the McIvor children to let the fellow accompany them to school, and when his orders were defied – ‘We can’t help it Sir,’ they sang, ‘if he just tags along’ – took the matter up with the girls’ father. The boy, Lachlan, set out deliberately to provoke him. Instead of keeping Gemmy off, he encouraged him and a struggle ensued, of just the little niggling kind that reduced him, in his saner moments, to despair.
    He was the brightest of his pupils, this Lachlan Beattie, and might easily have become a favourite; took it for granted, in fact, that he must be. Quick-witted and free in his nature, full of a pert assurance that George recognised only too well, and hungry for praise, he had done everything he could at first to draw attention to himself and win approval; and for this very reason George was determined from the start to deny it. Very deliberately, in a way that the boy was certain to recognise, he ignored him, and Lachlan, perceiving that however quick he was with an answer, however vigorously he waved his hand in the air, he would not be chosen, grew disdainful, then disruptive, then dull. Now, to his usual pointed indifference, George added sarcasm, using the presence of his ‘shadow’ to mock the boy to his companions. It was Lachlan now who kept Gemmy away.

5
    W HEN THEIR MOTHER announced that a cousin was to come out and join them, the two girls were delighted. Kin at last, and a boy! From Scotland, from home. They were to be especially soft with him. His father had been killed in a pit accident, leaving five weans to feed; Lachlan was the eldest.
    His father, Rob, had been their mother’s favourite among her brothers. When she saw him last he had been a lad of nineteen just newly married. She had made the shirt he was married in out of pure sea-island cotton that cost her two shillings a yard; she had saved a whole six months for it.
    They knew all the details of their mother’s life at home, she had told it to them a hundred times, but now she told it all again: how her own mother, their grandmother, as a child not much older than they were,