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living room, her own room, the bathroom, the kitchen and the dining room, and another spare bedroom which was as yet only sparsely furnished. The house had an almost spartan newness about it, lacking the clutter of ornaments in her own house, lacking, she thought, any warmth or colour, but giving an impression of whites and yellows and a plentitude of new wood. She could find no photographs, not even wedding ones: it was as if her son and daughter-in-law lived in a world totally free of the past, of relations, committed only to themselves and the reality of their own lives, spare of ancestry. Everything in the house was new, as far as she could see, and had a flawless automatic air about it: she would have been happier if she had found a broken or irregular clock, a squeaking floor board, an old sink. But no, there was none of these. It occurred to her that perhaps they had few if any friends, and that from choice rather than necessity. There were many books all of which seemed far beyond her, even if she had been a more voracious reader. There was a garden which as yet wasn’t in good order, and she thought that perhaps later she might help with that, though she wasn’t an especially good gardener. Outside the house there was a bench on which she could sit if she wanted.
    The two of them had told her that she could make her own light dinner if she wanted to as they wouldn’t be coming back for it, since it was more convenient for them to take their lunch in school. Thus for a good part of the day she was monarch of all she surveyed, and she found this both disquieting and liberating. She wondered too if she should approach them with regard to paying them some money. On Tuesdays she would have to go to the Post Office for her pension. She didn’t think that Tom would take any money from her but at least she wished to make the offer lest they should wonder why she hadn’t thought of it. The problems began to proliferate as she wandered about the house or sat in the living room. Throwing oneself on the mercy of others, surrendering one’s responsibility for oneself wasn’t so easy as one might at first think. In Edinburgh it had appeared simple enough, as if all she had to do was to take the train, enter their house and relax. But the reality was different. The reality was that the house was a certain distance from the town, not much, but not all that central: and that her freedom was very great indeed. She decided that she would go out, and this raised another problem, for what was she to do about a key? She agonised about this for a while and then resolved that as they had told her that there was no likelihood of the house being broken into she could probably afford to leave the door off the snib: she would get a key that night. The other possibility was to snib the door and stay down town till they returned from school which she assumed would be shortly after four o’clock. But on balance it seemed to her better to leave the door unlocked, since she didn’t think that she would be able to stay down town till four o’clock.
    She dressed not in her black coat but in her brown one and left the house walking briskly down the brae to the road in the cool air of the morning. She noticed that at the foot of the brae was a bus stop but decided not to wait for a bus, though she was glad that she had established that buses did run past the house: a bus would be useful on rainy days or when she felt tired. By the time she had reached the town she felt quite adventurous again and was delighted by its simple attractiveness. She walked to the pier and had a look at the boxes of fish, the fishing boats with their tangle of pointed masts, the seagulls in squabbling rings in the bay. Out in the distance she could see an island, long and green, with houses on it. The sun sparkled on the water, the smell of brine was in her nostrils, and the air was clear and clean and pure.
    After she had seen the pier she had a walk among the shops,