by Francis - TO THE HILT

I don't think my stepfather much minded dying. That he almost took me with him wasn't really his fault.

My mother sent me a postcard - 'Perhaps I'd better tell you your stepfather has had a heart attack' - which I read in disbelief outside the remote Scottish post office where I went every two weeks to collect my letters. The postcard had lain there unread for approximately ten days.

Somewhat distractedly, though my stepfather and I were hardly intimate, I went back into the cluttered little shop and begged use of the telephone.

'You'll be reimbursing us as usual, Mr Kinloch?'

'Of course.'

Dour old Donald Cameron, nodding, lifted a flap of counter and allowed me through to his own jealously protected and wall-mounted instrument. As the official public telephone, thoughtfully provided outside for the few surrounding inhabitants, survived vandalism for roughly thirty minutes each time it was mended, old Donald was accustomed to extending to customers the courtesy of his own phone. Since he charged an extra fee for its use, I privately reckoned it was Donald himself who regularly disabled the less profitable technology on his doorstep.

'Mother?' I said, eventually connected to her in London. "This is Al.'

'Alexander,' she corrected automatically, not liking my abbreviation, 'are you in Scotland?'

'I am, yes. What about the old man?'

'Your stepfather,' she said reprovingly, 'is resting.'

'Er where is he resting?' In hospital? In peace?

'In bed,' she said.

'So he is alive?'

'Of course he's alive.'

'But your postcard'

'There's nothing to panic about,' she said calmly. 'He had some chest pains and spent a week in the Clinic for stabilisation and tests, and now he is home with me, resting.'

'Do you want me to come?' I asked blankly. 'Do you need any help?'

'He has a nurse,' she said.

My mother's unvarying composure, I sometimes thought, stemmed from a genuine deficiency of emotion. I had never seen her cry, had never heard tears in her voice, not even after her first husband, my father, had been killed in a shooting accident out on the moors. To me, at seventeen, his sudden loss had been devastating. My mother, dry-eyed, had told me to pull myself together.

A year later, still cool at the ceremony, she had married Ivan George Westering, baronet, brewer, pillar of the British Jockey Club, my stepfather. He was not domineering; had been generous, even; but he disapproved of the way I lived. We were polite to each other.

'How ill is he?' I asked.

'You can come if you like,' my mother said. 'It's entirely up to you.'

Despite the casual voice, the carefully maintained distance, it sounded closer to a plea than I was used to.

'I'll arrive tomorrow,' I said, making up my mind.

'If you're sure?' She betrayed no relief, however; no welcome.

'I'm sure.'

'Very well.'

I paid the phone call's ransom into Donald's stringy outstretched palm and returned to my laden, ancient and battered four-wheel drive outside. It had good gears, good brakes, good tyres and little remaining colour on its thin metal flanks. It contained, at that moment, food for two weeks, a big cylinder of butane gas, supplies of batteries, bottled water and insect killer and three brown cardboard boxes, parcel delivery, replenishing the tools of my trade.

I painted pictures. I lived in a broken down long-deserted shepherd's hut, known as a bothy, out on a windy Scottish mountainside, without electricity. My hair grew to my shoulders. I played the bagpipes. My many and fairly noble relations thought me weird.

Some are born weird, some achieve it, others have weirdness thrust upon them. I preferred solitude and paint to out-thinking salmon and shooting for food; I had only half inherited the country skills and courtesies of my ancestors. I was the twenty-nine-year-old son of the (dead) fourth son of an earl and I had no unearned wealth. I had three uncles, four aunts and twenty-one cousins. Someone in such a large (and conventional) family had to be weird, and it seemed I'd been elected.

I didn't mind. Mad Alexander. Messes about with paints. And not even oils, my dear, but those frightfully common acrylics.

If Michelangelo could have laid his hands on acrylics, I said, he would have joyfully used them. Acrylics were endlessly versatile and never faded. They out-virtued oils by furlongs.

Don't be ridiculous, Alexander.

I paid my uncle (the present earl, known as 'Himself') a painting a year as rent for the ruin I inhabited on his estate. The painting was done to his choice. He mostly asked for portraits of his horses and dogs. I quite liked to please him.

Outside the post office, on that dry cloudy cold morning in September, I sat in my old jeep-type jalopy and did my paperwork, opening my letters, answering them and sending off the replies. There were two cheques that day for work delivered, which I despatched to the bank, and an order from America for six more paintings to be done at once - like yesterday. Ridiculous, mad Alexander, in his weird way, actually, quietly prospered; and I kept that fact to myself.

The paperwork done, I drove my wheels northwards, at first along a recognisable road, then a roughly gravelled stretch, then up a long, rutted and indistinct track which led nowhere but to my unnamed home in the Monadhliath Mountains. 'Between Loch Ness and Aviemore,' I usually explained, and no, I hadn't seen the monster.

Whoever in the mists of time had first built my bothy had chosen its position well: it backed straight into an elbowed granite outcrop that sheltered it from the north and east, so that winter blizzards mostly leapfrogged over the top. In front lay a sort of small stony plateau that on the far side dropped away steeply, giving me long views of valleys and rocky hills and of a main road far below.

The only problem with the road, that served to remind me that an outside world existed, was that my dwelling was visible from it, so that far too often I found strangers on my doorstep, hikers equipped with shorts, maps, half-ton walking boots and endless energy. There was nowhere left in the world unpenetrated by inquisitive legs.

On the day of my mother's postcard I returned to find four of the nosy species poking around without inhibitions. Male. Blue, scarlet, orange backpacks. Glasses. English regional voices.

The days when I'd offered tea, comforts and conversation were long gone. Irritated by the invasion I drove onto the plateau, stopped the engine, removed my keys from the ignition and walked towards my front (and only) door.

The four men stopped peering into things and ranged themselves into a ragged line ahead of me, across my path.

'There's no one in,' one of them called. 'It's all locked up.'

I replied without heat, 'What do you want?'

'Him as lives here,' one said loudly.

'Maybe that's you,' said another.

I felt the first tremble of something wrong. Their manner wasn't the awkwardness of trespassers caught in the act. There was no shuffling from foot to foot. They met my eyes not with placating apology, but with fierce concentration.