And although the skies were almost clear - blue and bright above their heads - the early evening mild and temperate... yet, there was a movement in the garden, upon the breeze, that presaged coming frost and winter snows. An end-of-summer bee was idling quietly from flower to flower; but there was a sense of lives in passing, things returning back to earth. Everything seemed in movement now, and even the nonchalant drowsiness of a few short hours before had past, had fled.

They had entered through the billowy arch, its roses still in bloom, when Andrew stooped and reached behind some grass that needed cutting. He picked up a plastic frisbee and sent it spinning, drifting across the open space : it cleared the garden fence and vanished, spun from sight, still floating though unseen.

'You've had visitors, I hear' he grinned.

'Oh them!' she answered. 'Yes.' She sauntered on, crossing the shadowed lawn, her face in sunlight. 'Some parents with their children stopped a night. They must have played in here.' But where they'd gone, she did not know, and had not asked : just disappeared, their presence there no longer... only some chance belongings left behind.

They had walked, in glancing rays of sun, past the caged birds, that fretted and fussed; by the pretty summerhouse and over the bridge : across the stream, whose quiet waters warbled on, involved in constant flow, perpetual motion. Then round the weathered sundial to seclusion.

They sat across the table from one another, in the sequestered garden once again : tea-cups pushed aside an hour before - the tea long past - and shadows lengthening irreversibly.

Behind them, banks of flowers, a plethora of blooms, lurked and swayed like beautiful mist, reticent, drifting... breaking upon their awareness from time to time, and then receding. About them, the breath of the air so gentle, that twigs and leaves were hardly rousing from sunlit slumber; though always, the wilder creak and groan of the pines was somewhere just beyond, beckoning them when the cool wind stirred.

Streaks of sunlight caught their arms, outstretched upon the table. Andrew Douglas moved his forward, closer to hers : he sought the warmth and languid joy of summer. Yet the mood of the garden, its feel, was elegiac... The scent of the flowers mingled with the odour of damp earth : a subdued but lingering ache inside them both... a sense of departing beauty all around.

He looked at Caroline sitting there, with her cropped hair and steadier gaze, and tried to grow accustomed to her new-formed independence. The sun alighted on her face, flickering gently, and bestowed a grace, a fragile loveliness he longed to reach and softly touch. But he met, too, a new resolve : something stronger breaking through - which left him less secure.

She asked him how the children fared while he was with them on their trip. Not the drama, of course : she'd heard all that. But she wanted to catch a feel of the mood... a feel of their quiet exchanges. For something had happened on that journey, she knew. She'd noticed... a difference. Returning, they both had some other look in their eyes sometimes. As if, while they listened to her, their glance took in as well the movement of river and woods, of background and distance. She had seen it in them both.

'Oh, I don't know' drawled Andrew. 'I guess that's just what happens when you journey near to the heart of it all, near to the wild heart of it all.' He spoke in slow and measured tones. 'Ha! If you'd heard Roberta, screaming and calling to all the corners of the glen. She's a lovely kid, so wild and free!'

'That's where she's like her father' Caroline sighed. 'There's a wild streak in them both that can't be tethered. This journey will only have encouraged her...'

'That's no bad thing' laughed Andrew, trying to tease her. He stared, distantly. 'The object of your childhood and education : surely it's not conformity to some "higher" code of manners - but to grow wild according to your own good nature...'

'Oh, Andrew...'

'... and above all, to keep in touch with your feelings...'

'But I don't want her going jungly on me.' She always rose to his provocation. 'What about University? What about jobs? Careers, professions and getting on?'

Andrew smiled wryly. 'It's a shame that most of us have to end up so narrowly confined.' He leant forward. 'But by wildness, I mean awareness of your own brilliance, and bloom, and beauty.' He looked at her with narrowed eyes. 'I think, once, you must have been like her...' he surmised... 'at a precious time of awakening... when everything was prospect, everything bright, everything possible...'

Her eyes twinkled. She was beautiful.

'You could be right' she sighed.

'Strange, isn't it? We always think, as adults, that we've got so much to give our kids. Yet they have so much to impart to us... what we have lost.' He thought, his rugged hand turning a saucer. 'And their friend, you know, he needed their company so bad... they brought him out of himself, you see.'

Her eyes were wide, glistening, as she listened. Then she laughed.

'It was an extraordinary impulse, all the same...'

'I tend to think that what we do on impulse reveals the kind of people we really are.'

'Ho! You can talk, Andrew Douglas. You came over here to find a missing hare! And look where it landed you...'

They had an effortless understanding - they knew each other - but deeper feelings were shimmering now between them, along the margins of conversation. They were skirting the real point, the central issues...

'Missing hare!' she mocked him. 'Missing heir, more like. You end up chasing a missing heir. You don't know what you're looking for...'

'Oh, you and your missing...' he was torn between the two... 'hair' he said, tugging his own in mild exasperation, but looking at hers. 'As for what I was looking for... Let's just say we were looking for treasure, that's all.'

'For your hidden feelings, you mean.'

'Which some folk bury, but don't like to acknowledge it. "Who has hidden this treasure" they complain, when in fact they hid it themselves in a deep or distant place...'

'Themselves!'

'They hide away their feelings - all their lost childhood feelings - then mythologise, externalise, their deep compulsions and hates and fears. Would rather believe in hobgoblins or banshees, than see themselves as they really are.'

Caroline sat back in her chair, her blue eyes flashing.

'So what you're saying is : Stop hiding your feelings, or blaming it all on everyone else?'

'I'm saying... Our love' - he threw down his hands before him, palms outstretched - 'the way we were all those years ago : has it just become a symbol of all the things you've lost along the way? Or was it real? Is it real again? And if it is, will you stop hiding, stop burying your might-have-beens, and all the feelings that are really you?'

'You've got no right to speak like that.' She shook her head.

'Will you ever set your feelings free!'

'Not because someone tells me to. I cannot ignore my children's needs.' He admired her courage. Her determination to get things right. Her new-found freedom and resolve. 'I can't ignore my children's needs' she said again.

'I understand,' he soothed more quietly. 'I've grown to know Alasdair and Roberta. I care about your children too.'

'Then perhaps you understand how much their father means to both of them. I could never take them far from him.'

'I realise that. Of course I do. It's right. But, as I've said before, if I rent a place not far from here... if we rent a place...'

She breathed in deeply, almost afraid of herself. She longed so badly for a place where she could totally belong... be loved and valued for herself... and yet she dared not acquiesce.

'Your home is in Montana, Andrew. It always was.'

He suddenly looked tired.

'It was. But perhaps the time has come to leave all that behind.' He frowned. 'To tell the truth, I don't look forward much to going back.'

Her heart beat faster and went out to him. He seemed so - lonely.

'Maybe all those years ago, that's what was wrong,' he carried on. 'I asked so much of you, but wasn't prepared to give it up myself.' Then his eyes looked younger again, as he smiled sadly. 'It's strange. This country's wildness haunts me with its emptiness and lonely glens. They seem to call the exile home. Maybe it's an ancestral thing? All over the world there seem to be Scots who have never severed the emotional link : for whom, Scotland is still a song-haunted wilderness... the sounding glens inviting them home. Come back, come back... like a wheel turning... the cycle awaiting the exile's return...'

Sunlight filtered through the leaves above their heads. He caught her hand. But she pulled away.

'I'm going to get a place of my own' she re-affirmed, in a quiet voice.

'We could do it together. It would work. You'll see.'

His disarming grin brought memories tumbling back : of how she used to feel, and how he'd always loved her so uncritically. She knew it all too well : it was seductive. His warmth and his acceptance made her feel young once again. But Caroline was no longer so compliant... her intent and purpose, to determine for herself her own true interests...

'It's too sudden,' she said. 'I'd just be fleeing one dependency for another, out of emotional need and loneliness.' So she didn't want him to come on so. Yet she felt battered. It hurt inside. The comfort of his love, of all they'd been, seemed so attractive and secure.

'Dependency? You wouldn't have to be dependent on me.'

'Don't you see, Andrew? All my life, I've done what other people told me to. I realise now. Each human being has the right to be really clear just what they want. Has the right to determine those things for themselves. Not just be told.'

Douglas backed off.

'I understand that. I want you to be really clear.'

'Well I'm not, Andrew.'

He bowed his head, and scratched his rough disordered hair.

She rose and stalked in the darkening garden, trying to defend her stance to herself. 'These feelings I have' she reasoned in silent thought... 'are just a yearning to get back to those early years when anything seemed possible. Isn't it just dissatisfaction with my present life that I really need to deal with?' Eventually she sat down again.

'I need time, Andrew. I need space as well. It hurts. And I hurt for my children too.'

He felt a surge of tenderness again, and longed to hold her.

'Believe me, Caroline dear. I know what it is like to hurt for your own kids.' He thought a moment, then conceded, 'I admit it would be hard on them, if you and I just found a place together.'

'Too hard, too soon.'

He tried to think it through. Those children he had lived with in the heather : they needed a period to adapt. And a chance to get to know him better... but he wasn't just exploiting them. He did care for the kids. He knew he did.

'I realise, in wanting to commit myself to you, I'm taking on a commitment to them as well. A true emotional commitment...'

'You see,' she answered. 'It's not like it was before. I'm not a romantic teenager. I'm a middle-aged woman with two children. Our old relationship seemed ideal because we never lived it out. Don't you see, Andrew, I'm not young and free anymore. It's not the same.'

'But it is, though, Caroline. For me, at least. I feel the way I did before.' He looked at her, still delicate, but she was drawing now from strength within. His love for her, undulled, unchanged... the years between just barely adequate, as if he had been out of touch with something that was part of him... a sense that he'd lost something that had never been recaptured. 'I can't let it all escape again. My feelings tell me I shouldn't...'

'Oh feelings, feelings...'

'Do you remember the time we drank Drambuie? The place of peace where we lay in the sun-swept heather, and the birds sang madly overhead?' She looked aside.

'Yes, I remember now. I remember well.'

'Those were feelings, sweet.'

She spoke very softly.

'Everything seemed so simple then, when we were young. But, Andrew, I want to move forward, not back.' She felt his love reach out to her. It shuddered through her body. 'Just give me time to understand myself. To be clear how I want to spend my life.'

Andrew sighed.

'With Fraser perhaps? You say he's changed.'

'That's not what I mean.'

'He has changed, though.'

'He's different, yes.' Her eyes looked out. 'He seems less restless, more at peace. He's spent more time with the children since they were released : picnics and outings and things like that. He never did that much before. And he sees a lot of Dominic West...' Andrew could not recall the man. 'Ellie's friend. You know, the golf-ball chap. He's over there this afternoon, in fact. He and Ellie have been having flying lessons.'

'Flying lessons!'

'What's wrong with that?'

'Nothing.' He whistled. 'Ellie's flying a plane?'

'Well, don't sound quite to stupefied.' She laughed at his good-natured shock. 'Ellie says she's getting the hang of it... And he's been seeing quite a lot of them...'

'Sounds like he's drawing near to heaven...'

'With Ellie in control, probably yes.' Her eyes were sparkling, and she felt his engaging warmth and friendliness. They were aware of one another, without straining : that was the thing... lingering in the failing light, in the moody dusk and its silent calm.

'Ah well' said Douglas in his drawl. 'Everyone needs to fly sometime. We need to fly or we never grow.' He looked deep into her. 'Maybe, now, he can be the father, the husband, you always hoped he'd be?'

'But don't you see?' she answered with conviction. 'It's not about him, or you, or even my children. I've got to respect my own needs too. Anything I do, I'll do because I want to.'

'That's all I wish for you' he said, though he felt unnerved... uncertain what she would decide... somehow left waiting once again... like he had been years before.

'And you must do the same' she said. 'Not be dependent on me.'

'Our futures belong together' he insisted.

'Don't tell me that,' she chastened him, waving her arm across her face - just wanting space.

'Alright, alright. I shouldn't tell you that. I don't have the right to dismiss your marriage.'

'No, you don't.'

'But I can wait.'

'Yes, Andrew. Yes, you can.' Then she softened in the face of his affable submission. 'If I didn't know you cared about my children, I'd fear for any future we might have, whatever I may feel.'

'I do care. You know I care for them as well.' She did.

The shadows were reaching right across the lawn.

'Will you go back to Montana in the fall?'

'I'll have to fly back sometime. There's a lot I'll need to straighten out.' He sounded vague. He was taking in all the beauty of the garden. Yet he sensed, beyond, the year's sad turning and seemed away, once more, in the distant hills.

'I thought I'd spend a few more weeks up here. I've been reading a book on the Highland Clearances, and something niggles me. Somehow I think I ought to visit a few of the places I've read about.'

'Oh, Andrew! You're such a dilettante!' she laughed, her eyes twinkling, fond...

'It's better than being a fanatic' he said. 'There are enough specialists around as it is; such experts in their narrow fields, but so rarely looking at the whole picture.'

'Excuses!' she said. 'You're so easily diverted, and insatiably curious...'

'No,' he pleaded. 'I'm just moved and disturbed by what I hear, and see. I never realised the aftermath to Charlie's great adventure. You have to walk the empty glens to feel it.

'I want to understand what followed, after Charlie's dream was crushed. The terrible aftermath, and the disconsolate people - left picking up the pieces after he'd departed.'

'Quite' said Caroline. 'The end of romance... and the start of practicality...'

'Lochiel and the Prince sailed off for France. Left Cluny waving on the shore. One thing I couldn't figure out...?'

'What made Cluny stay behind?' She read his mind.

'Exactly. What makes a man stay in hiding in the mountains, winter after winter, for so long?'

'The hope that the Prince would return one day.'

'But he never did. And that was the end of the Prince's youth. After that, what? Forty years of falling away : ostracised by foreign courts; his marriage a sham; from time to time philandering; falling deeper and deeper into debt; drinking heavily, and only then recalling in tears his loyal Highland friends. At the end, death as an alcoholic.'

'It's as though the rest of his life just couldn't live up to the high romance he'd longings for,' Caroline reflected. 'His dreams had all been pointless.'

'I don't know. Perhaps he died a drunkard's death in Rome, and his life was a falling away from the days of his youth. Maybe his bones were buried in a faraway land, overtaken by age...' They rose to go. Andrew's eyes were glinting, quiet and lambent. 'But the best of him lives in the Highlands forever : the man in his prime, the breeze in his hair, when - for a little while - he threw all caution to the wind, and followed the feeling heart in the living present... ventured all. And in those hills... that's where you should hie to find Charlie, my dear... still on his wanderings.'

'But you said you wanted to understand what followed?'

'I do. It's strange. The aftermath and the reprisals reach down the years. So many thousands of families were sent away from their homeland, like exiles cast from paradise. My family was among them. They set out with such loss and desolation. And yet, in those wild mountains, you seem to enter a younger world, a world that still renews itself.'

They walked slowly along the lawn.

'The salmon will return, and the migrant birds; everything in its cycle - but where are the exiles? Where are the vanished people? Gone like a dream. I can't help thinking,' he said in measured tones, 'if one day the clans will gather again. Will the hearth be rekindled one day among the ruined shielings? Will the glens be once more inhabited? I... can't help wondering...'

'Oh Andrew Douglas, you're such a romantic! You just love loitering in the past!'

'I know. But this country : it's so full of disappearances!'

'Strange you should say that...'

'Oh?'

Caroline raised her eyebrows.

'Rona Malcolm's friend, MacFarlane. He simply disappeared. He just cleared off. No sign or trace has been seen of the man in three weeks.'

'And Rona herself?'

'I gather she's gone to France for a while.'

'Maybe they went together then?'

'Perhaps. In an odd sort of way, I can't help feeling sorry for the woman. She wasn't treated well, at all. She desired his love so very much, you see. Much more than I did.' Furrows cut across Andrew's brow.

'That kind of desire rarely leads to contentment' he sighed.

'But it's still feelings. That's what you always say.'

'I don't know. Desire sometimes uses feelings detached from their real source : to placate the repressed passion that rages below. But when your feelings are truly and freely released, then you unlock the real desire of your heart. It's something different.

'At least...' he laughed at himself, for he was not sure... 'I reckon that's how it works!'

'So the pure flow of emotion - you recognise it in your heart as from the heart - and it satisfies you and brings you peace.'

He looked at her, pleased that she understood.

'I hope so' he said. 'So much of what we feel is just fragmented. But sometimes a feeling of wholeness breaks right through in our fragmented lives, if we let it freely flow. Maybe what is whole, what is really us, proceeds from a deeper being, from somewhere else...?'

'From somewhere else' asked Caroline freshly. 'Wherever can that be?'

'In the blue beyond' laughed Andrew. 'I expect. In the place we dream and suspect and feel.'

'The everlasting universe of things...'

'I'm sorry?' She had her back to him, leaning against the rough wall of the bridge, watching the stream. He, at the sundial.

'Shelley' she said. 'We used to read that poem together.'

'Ha! Is that so? What were those words again?'

The last frail threads of light winked on the little burn, and the girl in her looked charming, sinuous, dreaming there. She did not turn.

"The everlasting universe of things

Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,

Now dark - now glittering - now reflecting gloom -

Now lending splendour... with the mysterious sound

Such as a feeble brook will oft assume

In the wild woods, among the mountains lone,

Where waterfalls around it leap for ever,

Where woods and winds contend, and a vast river

Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves."

Douglas felt swells of tenderness as he listened : great tenderness breaking and bursting upon him. She swung around, so open and alive.

'That's our beauty, isn't it...' she said... 'lovely, consecrating the things it shines upon; breaking in from another world.'

'From another world' he repeated, 'or perhaps as Shelley put it the same summer : "The awful shadow of some unseen Power, visiting this world..." '

He knelt, in a reverie, at the sundial : tracing the date at its base with his fingers. 1731 he made it... the year of Corrieyairack... somehow, just past - and measured out in the ever-circling shadows of the sun. He felt as if the touch of his fingers on that crusted stone could almost cross the dividing years with their separate but all-present time. Somewhere in between, Charlie had come, and lived, and then departed. An emanation.

On the ground, draped round a corner of the base, he found a mislaid T-shirt, damp from days of rainfall or morning dew. He weighed it in his steady hands.

'I figure your visitors left this too' he laughed, holding the rumpled vest by the shoulders, so Caroline could read its printed message:

"Stop the Cover Up" was all it said.

'I gather from what the children say that they weren't too keen on wearing clothes.'

'So it would seem' she smiled and sighed.

They made their way across the lawn, dusk settling on the silent garden; and over the fence, the rolling sweep of grass and woodland, shadowy now. Beyond, the seaboard reaching west, the skyline cradled in fragile light.

As Caroline approached the arch, Douglas stopped and turned around.

'One thing I've meant to do since I came here.'

'Andrew?'

'Real beauty' he said. 'You can't hold onto it, call it your own, even in this garden - you see. These little birds...' he was fumbling with the latch of their cage. 'They're made to fly, so set them free.'

'Andrew...' she protested, without conviction.

He looked at her.

'You can't imprison beauty for ever - it has to find release...'

The door of the cage behind him swung wide open.

For a few moments they faltered, as if unwilling to escape their own captivity... uncertain of what might lie beyond. He bent and reached inside the cage, cupping a small bird in his rough-hewn hand... spoke softly to it... let it go... Next instance, the others followed through... flying free and soaring high... west toward the Hebrides.

'And you?' he pressed, and looked at her. 'Are you more free than you were before?'

'More free?' she laughed evasively. Then carried on, 'More angry, maybe, if I'm honest.' She met him face on. 'I'm angry, Andrew. That's the difference.'

'You never were before?'

'Oh, no. But I am now.' She looked at him with warning. 'That's the outcome of all of this.'

'Good' he barked. 'I'm glad you are. In all the times we had together you never expressed your anger once : now you've discovered some of your strength.' He stared at the garden. 'We all need life at the feeling level... and anger can be beautiful too...'

'A savage kind of beauty, I would say.' She drew closer. He caught a whisper of perfume on the air. 'What about you?' she said softly. 'What was the outcome of your trip? What did you find?'

'Oh...' he drawled, looking across at the serene evening... 'the sanity of kindness, and the sanctity of beauty... that's what we found together in the hills.' His face looked calm, reflecting the quiet around him. 'You know,' his deep words cracked the silence, 'below the surface of desire, the heart has one profound great longing...'

She blinked.

'... to find its true best self from out of a beautiful land of real being... that's what I felt so deeply on our journey. That's what he felt as well...'

'And after the journey ends?' she murmured.

'Ho' he laughed. 'The journey never ends. We travel on into undiscovered country...'

'Come on,' she said, 'let's take a walk.'

As they approached the darkening arch, still an abundance of blooms trailing from the floribunda round its posts, they did not notice movement beyond, through the castle windows high above. Two children's faces were looking down, shadowy, grey... somehow suppressed. They seemed cut off, beyond the glass : staring out unseen and dull. Two children, homes and lives caught up in a time of change, less joyful now : exiled forever from their childhood innocence.

A few nettles were lurking in the grass beneath the arch, but she passed them by, and they walked across the slopes towards the trees - leaving the garden, leaving the scowling castle walls, behind them.

It was that quiet moment of dusk - almost a moment out of time - the woods, shadowy, lurky, wild. She felt a chill and shivered to herself. Andrew Douglas, pulling off his jacket, moved to wrap it round her shoulders. But Caroline rejected the advance, walking ahead and leading the way.

The wind sounded through the leaves, as a sad voice... reminding him of the poet again. He looked up overhead and sighed, his deep voice resonant under the groaning boughs : 'Can you imagine where those spirits live, Which make such delicate music in the woods?'

Caroline didn't answer him.

All round there was a sadness in the movement and rhythm of things... a sense of departure... a shudder of feeling : pain as well as comfort... separation... love.

They were overshadowed in deep sylvan shade, that fringed the evening meadows : the rock-bow-heave-sway of the restless branches, gently stirring. He followed the woman around the sighing woodlands, skirting the trees toward the opposite hill. A broader peace, an unlimited beauty waited beyond, and he trailed in her chosen steps, leaving security behind.

* * *