The Lewis Man by Peter May

She was excited to see him. So many years it had been since the last time, she said. He had been struck, the moment he entered the house, by the smell of roses that had always accompanied Marsaili’s mother. It brought back a flood of memories. Home-made lemonade in the dark farmhouse kitchen with its stone-flagged floor. The games that he and Marsaili had played amongst the hay bales in the barn. Her mother’s soft English cadences, alien to his ear then, and unchanged now, even after all these years.
    ‘We need some background information about Dad,’ he heard Marsaili saying. ‘For the records at the care home.’ They had agreed that it might be better if they kept the truth from her for the moment. ‘And I’d like to take some of the old family photo albums to talk through with him. They say photographs help to stimulate memory.’
    Mrs Macdonald was only too happy to dig out the family snapshots, and wanted to sit and go through the albums with them. It was so rarely these days that they had company, she said, speaking in the plural, as if the banishing of Tormod from her life had never happened. A kind of denial. Or a coded message. Subject not up for discussion.
    There were nearly a dozen albums. The most recent were bound in garish floral covers. The older ones were a more sombre chequered green. The oldest had been inherited from her parents, and contained a collection of faded black and white prints of people long dead, dressed in fashions from another age.
    ‘That’s your grandfather,’ she told Marsaili, pointing at a picture of a tall man with a mop of curly dark hair behind the cracked glaze of a faded and over-exposed print. ‘And your grandmother.’ A small woman with long, fair hair and a slightly ironic smile. ‘What do you think, Fin? Marsaili’s double, isn’t she?’ She was so like Marsaili it was uncanny.
    She moved, then, on to her wedding photographs. Lurid Sixties colours, flared trousers, tank-tops and floral shirts with absurdly long collars. Long hair, fringes and sideburns. Fin felt almost embarrassed for them, and wondered how future generations might view photographs of him in his youth. Whatever is à la mode today somehow seems ridiculous in retrospect.
    Tormod himself would have been around twenty-five then, with a fine head of thick hair curling around his face. Fin might have had difficulty recognising him as the same man whose glasses he had fished out of the urinal only yesterday, if it hadn’t been for the vivid memories he had from his childhood of a big, strong man in dark-blue overalls and a cloth cap permanently pushed back on his head.
    ‘Do you have any older pictures of Tormod?’ he said.
    But Mrs Macdonald just shook her head. ‘Nothing from before the wedding. We didn’t have a camera when we were winching.’
    ‘What about photographs of his family, his childhood?’
    She shrugged. ‘He didn’t have any. Or, at least, never brought any with him from Harris.’
    ‘What happened to his parents?’
    She refilled her cup from a pot kept warm in a knitted cosy, and offered refills to Fin and Marsaili.
    ‘I’m fine, thanks, Mrs Macdonald,’ Fin said.
    ‘You were going to tell us about Dad’s parents, Mum,’ Marsaili prompted her.
    She blew air through loosely pursed lips. ‘Nothing to tell, darling. They were dead before I ever knew him.’
    ‘Was there no one from his side of the family at the wedding?’ Fin asked.
    Mrs Macdonald shook her head. ‘Not a one. He was an only child, you see. And I think most, if not all, of his family had emigrated to Canada some time in the fifties. He never talked much about them.’ She paused and seemed lost for a moment as if searching through distant thoughts. They waited to see if she would come back to them with one. Eventually she said, ‘It’s strange …’ But didn’t elucidate.
    ‘What’s strange, Mum?’
    ‘He was a very religious man, your father. As you know. Church every Sunday morning. Bible