Chapter 76

Croft comes on the Saturday at eleven, as arranged, and Veira does exactly what she said she would.

She puts the visitor log on the kitchen table. She puts a glass of water beside it. She says, "Take as long as you want, the door locks behind you, there's a spare key under the plant," and she picks up her coat and goes out.

She walks to Holyrood and up the low path and does not go to the summit. She sits on the bench.

She is there ninety minutes. It rains twice. At half past twelve her phone buzzes.

I've finished. Where are you.

She types: Arthurs Seat. North face bench.

He finds her twenty minutes later, which means he walked, which at sixty in March is a decision.

He sits down on the bench without asking, the way Sebastien did, and she has a brief and disorienting sense of the bench accumulating people.

"Fourteen," he says.

"Fourteen."

"Never more than four months apart." He is holding the photocopy folded in one hand. "She kept a schedule."

"Yes."

"Do you know why?"

"No. I've spent three weeks on it and I've got nothing. There's no connection I can find between my mother and your family, no shared institution, no overlap in Aberdeen before 1994." Veira watches the Firth. "My father thinks she may have found out through a Tide-worker contact but he's guessing and he says so."

Croft is quiet for a while.

"Twenty-eighth of March, 1994," he says. "That's the first entry."

"Yes."

"I was at Braehead on the twenty-seventh of March, 1994. I signed the visitor book. Line above hers." He unfolds the photocopy and holds it out, and there it is: B. Croft, 27/03/94 and beneath it E. Ashcroft, 28/03/94, consecutive lines in the same receptionist's hand.

Veira takes the page.

"I went that day to tell Morna the Kin Assembly had refused me for the eleventh time," Croft says. "She hadn't recognised me since the previous autumn. I sat with her for two hours and I told her everything anyway, out loud, in a day room with four other residents and a television on." He looks out at the city. "And a woman came in to visit somebody else while I was doing it, and she sat three chairs away, and she heard every word."

Veira does not move.

"You don't know that," she says.

"I know that a stranger began visiting my sister the following day and continued for three years and that I have never been able to explain it." He takes the page back gently. "I don't need it to be certain. I've had thirty years of certain and it was the wrong answer. I'll take this."

The rain comes on again, lightly.

"She never told me," Veira says. "Not once. Not when I was old enough. Not when she was dying."

"Would you have understood it?"

"No."

"Then she made a judgement about what you could carry and when." Croft folds the photocopy into his inside pocket. "You have spent five months telling this compact that deciding what another person can carry is the original sin. I would be interested to know what you do with the fact that your mother did it too, and that you would defend her."

Veira sits with that.

"I'd defend her," she says slowly, "because she didn't do anything with the information. She didn't build a structure around me or steer my career or seal a file. She went and sat with a dying woman and told nobody for eight years and then gave me one sentence." She turns to look at him. "That's not managing someone. That's carrying something alone because there was nobody to hand it to."

"Yes," Croft says. "That is the distinction. I wanted to hear whether you could make it."

He stands, with some effort.

"Ms Ashcroft. On Monday the review committee will publish its first interim finding. I have seen a draft, because I have been in this system for thirty years and I know how to see drafts." He looks down at her. "The 1889 instruction is in it."

She goes still.

"They've found it too."

"They have found it and they do not understand it, and by Wednesday there will be four Elders publicly demanding to know what ordinal restoration means and why a Victorian Kin Elder banned it in perpetuity." He pauses. "You have until Monday to decide whether the answer comes from you, or from whoever else works it out first."