We ate supper and drank, and as the evening darkened, Roy coughed and began to sing, croaking the corny laments and border ballads that were near to his expatriate heart. His voice was blurred as usual, and rough as a sailor’s, yet deeply charged with feeling; more than that, he sang with a poet’s care, renewing the worn, familiar words. ‘Scots Wa Hae’, ‘The Bonnie Earl of Murray’, sounded as if they’d just been written - with the blood of the slain still wet. To me, until then, they’d just been songs of the schoolroom, now I heard them fresh and bitter, while Roy sat with hunched shoulders, rocking backwards and forwards, often at the point of tears. Suddenly the maid, from somewhere down in the house, hearing his singing, started up too - not a brash interruption, but like a night-bird answering to the husky call of another. Sad Castillian airs, harsh but haunting, came floating up the well of the stairs. Each new song from Roy would call up another from the girl, rising like bubbles of grief in the darkness, not clashing with his but hovering round the edges, offering a compassionate echo. << less