In the aftermath of Mum’s death he had been able to focus on only one thing. She’s buried in the cemetery just outside Dirleton and, after the funeral, he would walk there and back, a four-mile round trip. He could have driven, he could have used his bus pass, but no, he walked, hail, rain or shine . . . no snow; we haven’t had snow at sea level in Scotland for fifteen years.

  The rest of his time was spent in isolation. He shut himself away in the apartment with his memories, his misery and with too much booze. He grew a beard. His hair became thick, shaggy, and tousled. He took to dressing in jeans, and T-shirts with logos of all the places he and Mum had visited. That was against the golf club dress code, but since his clubs lay untouched in their locker, it made no difference. He rarely answered phone calls: friends and former colleagues, notably Maggie Steele and Mario McGuire, rang me frequently, anxious, and asking how he was. Any business he did for InterMedia was over a video-link, for he never went into the office in Edinburgh that he had maintained for over twenty years. Xavi Aislado, his friend, had given him indefinite leave of absence from InterMedia, but he had decided that he would resign from the board altogether rather than face the monthly trip to Spain for its meetings. Nothing I could say deterred him; it took a full-scale bollocking from Alex to make him change his mind.

  Worst of all, though, he took little or no interest in Alexandra. Eventually Priti and I stopped taking her across to the apartment; although her skin is darker she has a strong resemblance to my mother. My fear was that looking at her was only adding to his pain. Mark’s fear was that he would lose all interest in Roland, since he has no biological connection with the boy. And our overriding fear was that one day his grief would prove too much for him; one of my nightmares saw me staring at the apartment door for a few days before breaking it down and finding him behind it, the booze, the pills, the note . . . no, maybe not the note; Dad never was one for stating the obvious.

  He was pathetic, that’s the truth of it, in his behaviour and in his obsession. ‘You don’t care about the rest of us!’ I heard Alex screaming at him one night when she visited him, more or less forcing her way across his threshold. ‘Keep this up and we may stop caring about you!’ She was in tears when she left, slamming the door shut behind her.

  Maybe it was that exchange that made him think twice about refusing to come to Spain. He did make a pass at it though; ‘Your mother will miss me,’ he pleaded to Seonaid, Dawn and me. It was Dawn, the youngest of us, who squashed that. ‘Alex was a part of your life before Mum or any of the rest of us,’ she pointed out. ‘She’s missing you too, and she’s still alive.’

  He made a show of glaring at her, then sighed. ‘Okay, I surrender. I’ll come.’

  It was the start of his re-emergence, although it didn’t happen overnight. None of us relaxed completely until we boarded the hyperloop that took us to London to meet up with Mark, Luisa and Roland for the rest of the journey to Figueres. ‘We used to drive down to Spain,’ Alex said, as she strapped herself into the pod for the second leg. ‘Remember, Dad? Just you and me.’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ he grunted. ‘I’m surprised you do,’ he added. ‘Most times you slept most of the way. Pee-ed yourself once or twice.’

  He didn’t say another word until we were in the terminal in Spain. Even then he ignored the rest of us, speaking only to the grandchildren he was holding, safe in the crooks of his arms. He’d had his hair cut, but the beard was still there; Alexandra was running her fingers through it, tentatively, for it was thick

  ‘When we came down here, Granny used to make me fly to Barcelona,’ I heard him tell them, and I knew it to be true. She couldn’t stand the hyperloop; we didn’t know it at the time but it was the start of her illness. ‘There’s a hotel she likes there,’ I winced at the present tense ‘on a big square, the Plaça Reial. Coming this way’s much faster, but I liked the old planes better. I even liked driving better, with Auntie Alex.’

  ‘Even though she pee-ed herself?’ Roland ventured. Kids, they soak up everything.

  ‘Even though. It wasn’t too bad; she’d grown out of doing that by the time she was ten.’ He said it deadpan, but I realised that it was the first time in a couple of years, since Mum was diagnosed, that I’d heard him venture anything resembling a joke. That’s if it was; my father has always maintained that his favourite comedian is an old-timer called Chic Murray. Since I was a boy, he’s made me watch his stuff on YouTube, and with his archaic Scots vocabulary sometimes I can’t tell if it’s a gag.

  When we got to L’Escala there was nothing to do but drop off our luggage and go out to eat, in a restaurant called La Caravella on the sea-front. Dad seemed to relax there just a little, but even then his focus was mainly on Roland and Alexandra, making sure that they flanked him at the table and helping his granddaughter wolf down her macaroni.

  He stayed there after we left, he and Alex. I don’t know what they talked about, but when he came in he was calm, and sober. He even kissed Priti and Luisa good night before going to bed.

  Next morning, when he emerged for breakfast, the beard was gone, and he was clear-eyed, with an air of purpose. ‘I have decided,’ he declared, as he rubbed tomato and garlic into a thick slice of bread, that I had brought in earlier ‘that my grandchildren and I are going on a mission, if that’s all right with their mothers.’

  ‘What sort of a mission?’ Priti asked.

  ‘Secret. We’re going to my friend Xavi’s estate outside Girona. He’s shown off his grandkids to me for long enough, and now it’s my turn.’

  The two women exchanged glances, then nods. I was less certain, but for the first time in a while, the man before me was someone I recognised, someone I’d always trusted absolutely, and so I kept quiet as he loaded the kids into the big SUV that lives in the garage out there. The two of them were as high as kites when they set off, as their parents strove to conceal our nervousness.

  That grew with each passing hour, five of them, until they returned . . . with a bloody enormous tree lashed to the roof rack, and boxes of decorations in the space at the back. Our worries had been needless; the children were as excited as I’d ever seen them.

  So was Dad. It was as if he had decided to step back into the world.

  My secret dread, as I passed through my teens and into my twenties, had always been that one day my parents would diminish, fade with age, become mere shadows of what they had been. Mum had forestalled that by dying in her prime, her early sixties, something my worst dreams had never foretold. But in the months that had followed her passing, I had watched my resolute, rock-hard, immutable father begin to grow old before my eyes.

  It had scared me, no question; as well as my fear that he might end himself. I woke up more than once in the middle of the night, wide-eyed from a vision of him sitting in a window of the village care home. And so, when the old Bob Skinner jumped out of the SUV, laughing and full of life, with a wriggling armful of Roland as he unclipped Alexandra from her car seat, I felt light-headed, positively dizzy.

  I must have looked it too, for he grinned at me, eyebrows raised with the old scar above the bridge of his nose becoming deeper and more obvious as it does when he smiles. ‘My God, Jazz,’ he boomed. ‘What a face you’ve got on you! Cheer up, son; get that tree off the car and bring it inside. It’s bloody Christmas, for God’s sake!’

  He left me to it as he followed the kids indoors, past Alex, who had emerged to see what the fuss was about. ‘What the hell?’ she gasped when they were gone. ‘Has he been drinking?’

  ‘If he didn’t have the kids with him, I might have thought that too,’ I confessed. I shrugged. ‘Come on, let’s get this monster unpacked. There are boxes of Christ-knows-what in there.’

  As I lugged the tree into the hall, I heard Priti’s voice from the kitchen. ‘Bob, have the children eaten?’

  ‘Of course, they have!’ he retorted amiably. ‘Paloma fed them fries and fish while Xavi and I were cutting the tree. It came from his plantation; it’s a beauty, isn’t it? They are expecting hot chocolate and marshmallows, though. It’s their reward for helping me pick the decorations. They’re from Girona,’ he added.

  He left the two mothers to calm their over-excited children and re-joined Alex and me, Seonaid, Dawn and Mark. He had been working on the design theme of a new production . . . my brother is a workaholic . . . only to have his concentration shattered by the noise of our dad’s return.

  The tree was too big to fit in the house, but we were able to secure it in a big garden tub, and position it between the front terrace and the pool. We had a hell of a job decorating the thing; I’m six four and I needed the set of steps from the garage to fit the fairy on top. Dad, to Dawn’s unspoken annoyance, had ignored the British Twenties-Thirties trend towards gender-neutral fairies; his . . . it was Alexandra’s choice, he said, but none of us believed him . . . was blonde, with a sparkly dress, wings and a star-like wand.

  As I secured it to the highest branch, he related his story of how the first fairy came to be on top of the Christmas tree. Although I had heard it before, when he reached the punch line, failing as always to contain his laughter at his own joke, my prosthetic leg betrayed me; Mark had to steady the steps or I would have fallen into the pool.

  When we were done, and night had fallen completely, Roland and Alexandra were given the task of switching on the lights, flashing LED in red and yellow . . . the colours of the Catalan flag, Alex pointed out, although it wasn’t lost on any of us. Dad never allows us to forget that in the crisis of Twenty Seventeen, InterMedia kept its corporate and physical base in Catalunya, and championed editorially the right of its people to determine their own future in the face of threats from the Madrid government to remove the broadcasting licences it held across Spain.

  With the children in bed, we dined as a family on the terrace, within the heated glass enclosure that makes it habitable in winter. We weren’t short of power; the solar roof had been charging the storage batteries throughout the year, with minimal use in our absence. Alex had hired kitchen staff for the duration of our stay. Her plan was that the only main meals we would cook for ourselves would be on Christmas Day and Cap d’Any, that’s Hogmanay to us Jocks. She also had a sommelier choose the wines. She’d have paid for it all too, but Mark and I vetoed that. Alex is at the top of her profession, but Dad told me that she earns less in real terms than she did in her twenties as a partner in a corporate law firm, before she switched to the Criminal Bar.

  I watched Dad carefully through the meal, looking for any sign of a return to his dour depression. He was quiet, reflective, as were most of us, I suppose, given the imaginary empty chair at the table, but there was a softness in his eyes and the faintest of smiles at the corners of his mouth and they reassured me. On the few occasions when we had dined together in the immediate aftermath of our awful bereavement, he had eaten too fast, drunk too much and become more and more withdrawn, until finally rising from the table and stalking off. Happily, and to my great relief, on that first in-house Spanish gathering he savoured each course and praised it, and studied the descriptions of the wines with which we were served, rather than thrusting a glower and an empty glass at the waiter, as he had done on one fraught evening at Greywalls Hotel, for which I had felt the need to apologise to the management next day.

  I held my peace until the dinner service was over, and the staff had left us with the coffee, the petit fours and a range of liqueurs. I knew that Alex had been studying him as carefully as I had, and so I waited, deferring to my big sister. When her mother had died she had been a pre-school child. If Dad had reacted in the same way to his first widowhood she would have been oblivious to it, although everything I had been told suggested that he had been forced to contain his grief, and remain functional for her sake.

  She said nothing, though, nor did anyone else. Maybe she was waiting for him, maybe we all were, but he kept as quiet as the rest of us, gazing through the glass at the tree outside, his smile more obvious than it had been.

  ‘Come on, Dad,’ I said eventually. ‘Say something; a toast, a eulogy, whatever, but out with it.’

  He looked at me. Those eyes that had been so cold for so long were warm again, as they had been throughout my childhood, throughout my life.

  ‘There will be no toast,’ he declared, raising his glass in apparent contradiction ‘and no more eulogies. We’ve all mourned the past enough. It’s time to embrace the future that is Sarah’s legacy to us all, and to do nothing but celebrate it, and her. I’ve been immured in my self-pity for long enough, for far too long. Today I realised that, and I was ashamed of myself, of how I’ve been to you all. I’m the fucking patriarch of this family.’ He chuckled, at the notion, I assumed, then looked around the table making eye contact with every one of us.

  ‘As such, I apologise to you all,’ he continued calmly. ‘I should have been helping all of you to handle your grief; instead I’ve been making it worse. I should have been reminding all of you of a fundamental truth, simply this. Our parents are meant to die before we do, it’s the natural order of things. Mine did, now it’s your turn.’

  He paused again, for a second or two. ‘But you know what?’ he ventured. ‘This isn’t more of my self-pity, it’s just a fact. You’re all luckier than I was. My mother was an alcoholic, and my father was a sad man so affected by things that happened to him in the Second World War that he was withdrawn and oblivious to her problems and to the other issues in our dysfunctional family. You lot, you’ve all had Sarah to bring you up,’ he glanced at my older sister ‘aye, even you, Alexis, although you were at university when she appeared on the scene. I hope you know how lucky you’ve been.’

  ‘Amen to that,’ Mark murmured, mistily.

  ‘You know what knocked the scales off me?’ Dad continued. ‘Spending today with my two grandchildren. Listening to them in the back of the car, enjoying their chat, realising finally the opportunity I have. When I woke up, even this morning, I had no ambition left in my life. Well, more fool me, for now I do.

  ‘Something I never told any of you,’ he continued. ‘I had a medical for InterMedia early last year in the Trueta Hospital in Girona, just before Sarah got ill. It had something to do with a key man insurance policy that the company maintains on its senior people, even those as old as me. They gave me treadmill tests, blood tests, urine tests, shit tests, a full body scan, the lot. And you know what? The consultant who supervised the show said that physically I’m twenty years younger than my passport says I should be. There’s a lot of mileage left in my engine, and I intend to put it to good use. I’m not just going to be Granddad to those kids, I’m going to be their mentor, theirs and any others you lot may produce. That doesn’t mean I’ll get in your way as parents, but as they grow, I will be there for them, unless God disagrees, right through to the day they graduate from whatever universities they go to. It’s a duty, it’s a challenge and it’s a pleasure, all rolled into one. By God, we’re going to have fun, them and me!’

  ‘Did you tell them this when you were away today?’ Priti asked him.

  ‘Nah,’ he replied. ‘I thought I’d leave that to you lot. Besides, we were too busy on the trip talking about other things.’

  ‘Such as?’ Seonaid peered at him over his shoulder from the seat on his right.

  ‘Santa,’ he announced. ‘Alexandra isn’t really up with the concept, being two . . . at least I thought she wasn’t, but Roland is, and as his parents’ son he is quizzical, even at four. He’s a real child of the Forties. “Is Santa real, Granddad?” he asked me. “Of course, he is,” I replied.’ He made an involuntary chortling sound. ‘Little bugger said he didn’t believe me. “I think Santa’s really you,” he said. I had to think fast, and I did. “No,” I told him, “but it is a very big world and, realistically, Santa has to delegate a lot of the practical stuff, so he can do his job after you’ve all gone to sleep on Christmas Eve. That’s where us Granddads come in; we do his leg work. Think of me as Santa’s agent.” And that’s where Alexandra blew my mind. From her seat in the back, she pipes up, “Papa, can Roland and I be your elves?”

  ‘I tell you all, I nearly put the car in a ditch. “Absolutely, my darling girl,” I declared. “From this day on you and your cousin are Skinner’s Elves, my personal assistants in everything related to Christmas, and anything else you like.” That’s a solemn promise that I intend to keep.’

  ‘Awww!’ Dawn exclaimed, as she reached for the decanter. ‘You deserve another drink for that, Dad.’

  He held out his glass. ‘Too damn right I do. My inertia is over. Tomorrow I go back to work, right across the board . . . in a very literal sense. Today Xavi asked me if I would return as Chairman of InterMedia while Paloma takes some maternity leave. I accepted and it will be announced tomorrow. As that happens, I’ll be reversing a decision I took two days ago, if it’s not too late, and accepting an offer I’ve had from the Scottish National Party to be its candidate for the Presidency in next year’s election.’

  ‘You what?’ Alex gasped.

  ‘You heard me, girl,’ he retorted. ‘You may wind up being First Lady. But before any of that, I’ll be going back to my old job, detecting, for I find myself facing another challenge right here.’

  In the seat on his left, Luisa gazed at him. ‘What’s that, Pops?’

  ‘You’ve been staring at it all night,’ he said, grinning again, ‘all of you, and none of you have noticed. Look at the tree.’

  We did, and I got there first. The gauzy, sparkling, old-fashioned sexist fairy that I had fixed in place, at risk to life and remaining limb, had disappeared.

  ‘How the hell did that happen?’ I called out, pointing at the branch where it had been.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Dad admitted. ‘It’s what we refer to in the trade as a Mystery. But tomorrow, I will set up an investigation, and be assured,’ he gave a quick sidelong glance at Dawn ‘with Skinner’s Elves to help me, the culprit will be found.’