The piping contests, held every autumn, took place from the far north all the way south to London. I had once or twice tried my hand in a piobaireachd competition, but it had been like a novice downhill skier taking on Klammer or Killy, an interesting experience memorable only for not having made an absolute fool of oneself.
Besides, I had political problems with some of the pibrochs, the ancient laments for the deaths and defeats of history. I couldn't - wouldn't - play 'My King has landed at Moidart', because the King that had landed was Prince Charles Edward, rightful King of England by descent, but disqualified (since Henry VIII's quarrel with the Pope) because of being Roman Catholic. Prince Charles Edward landed at Moidart in the Western Isles to begin his fateful march towards London, a thrust for the Crown, however understandable, that had led to the ruination of Scotland. In the wake of Prince Charles Edward's defeat at Culloden, the English, to remove the threat of a third upheaval (the 1715 and 1745 rebellions having been barely unsuccessful), had notoriously chased the Scots from their lands and had tried to wipe out nationhood by outlawing the speaking of Gaelic, the wearing of the tartan and the playing of the pipes. Scotland had never recovered. Sure, the tartan, the pipes and the slightly sentimental allegiances had crept back, but they were tourist attractions contrasting affectedly with the drab slab functional housing round the commercially regenerated modern city of Glasgow.
The direct descendant of Mary, Queen of Scots, had brought ruin, still unresolved, to most of Scotland - though even at Culloden, sixty per cent of those fighting against the Bonny Prince had been Scots themselves, not English - and although to please my uncle I guarded the lethal gift to my ancestor, I couldn't feel anything but fury for the inept, selfish, vain and ultimately faint-hearted Prince. I played laments for those he'd damaged. I played laments for the damage he'd done. I never felt love for the man.
Saturday evening passed in the chaos indigenous to James's family, and in the morning when I went downstairs in search of coffee I found Himself in the dining-room looking around him as if in bewilderment at an empty cardboard box, old faded leather-bound copies of Dickens, an empty black cube with white satin lining and a grey draw-string duster bag all lying about haphazardly on the floor.
The sideboard door stood open. The King Alfred Gold Cup had gone.
There were squeals from the kitchen next door. Children's voices. High.
Dazedly my uncle opened the connecting door and I followed him into the large unmodernised kitchen, an expanse of black and white tiling still called on old castle plans 'the cold preparation room'. Shades of old vegetables, I thought. Food nowadays mostly arrived at the castle in caterers' vans, wrapped in film and ready to heat and eat.
James was leaning against the sink, coffee mug in hand, indulgent smile in place.
His three unruly children - two boys and a girl - scrambled around on the floor, all of them wearing large saucepans on their heads with the handles pointing backwards. Spacewatch good guys, we were told.
The King Alfred Cup also stood on the floor, upside down. Himself bent from the waist and picked it up, finding it heavier than he expected.
'Hey,' objected his elder grandson, standing up to face him, 'that's the galactic core of M.100 with all its Cepheid variables in those red stones. We have to keep it safe from the black-hole suction mob.'
'I'm glad to hear it,' his grandfather said dryly.
The boy - Andrew - was eleven years old and already rebellious, hard-eyed and tough. If time took its normal course he would one day succeed James as earl. James might be open to soft persuasion but I wanted to know for sure about his son.
I said, 'Andrew, if you had a favourite toy, something you really valued, and someone tried very hard to take it away from you… suppose he even threatened to hurt you if you didn't give it to him, what would you do?'
He said promptly, as if he thought the question feeble, 'Bash his face in.'
My uncle smiled. James said with mild protest, 'Andy, you would talk it over and make a deal.'
His son repeated stalwartly, 'I'd bash his face in. Can we have the Cepheid monitor back?'
'No,' his grandfather said. 'You shouldn't have taken it out of its box.'
'We were looking for something worth fighting for,' Andrew said.
James defended them. 'They haven't done it any harm. What is it, anyway? It can't be real gold.'
Himself thrust the Cup into my arms, where its weight again surprised. 'Put it away safely,' he said.
'OK.'
'It's a racing challenge trophy,' my uncle explained unexcitedly to his son. 'I can't keep it for more than a year and I need to give it back without dents in.'
The explanation satisfied James entirely and he told his children to look for a substitute galactic goody.
On an impulse I asked him if he would like to spend some of the day playing golf. We both belonged to the local club where, with varying success, I quite often walked after the elusive white ball, but there were seldom days when we could go out together.
He looked pleased, but said, 'I thought you said your clubs were stolen.'
'I might buy some new ones.'
'Great, then.'
He phoned the club, who found a slot for us in the afternoon, and we drove over in good time for the pro shop to kit me out with better clubs than the ones I'd lost: and, for good measure, I acquired snazzy black-and-white shoes with spikes on, and gloves and balls and umbrellas: also a lightweight blue waterproof bag to carry things in and a trolley like James's to pull everything along on wheels. Thus re-equipped I went out with my cousin into the wind and rain, which had arrived as forecast, and got happily soaked to the skin despite the umbrellas.
'Will you paint this?' James asked, squelching on wet grass.
'Yes, of course.'
'You're not really as weird as we all think, are you?'
I putted a ball to the rim of a hole, where it obstinately stopped.
'I paint frustration,' I said, and gave the ball a kick.
James laughed, and in good spirits we finished the eighteen holes and went back to the castle for the nineteenth.
My hands-on relationship with golf was essential to my work, I'd found. It wasn't that I had much skill, but in a way the failures were more revelatory than success: and I particularly liked to play with James who laughed and lost or won with equal lack of seriousness.
The only really warm room in the whole castle complex (apart from the caretaker's quarters) was the home of the vast hot water tank, where ranks of airers dried out the persistent Scottish rains. James and I accordingly showered, changed, and left all our wet things steaming, including my sopping new shoes and golf bag, and then ambled back to the dining-room for tinctures.
James's children were in there. The King Alfred Cup, though still in its white satin nest, lay in full glorious view on the polished table under a chandelier's light.
'You didn't say we couldn't look at it,' Andy objected to his father's mild rebuke. 'We couldn't find anything else worth fighting a space war for.'
I said to James, 'What about the hilt?'
'Oh yes.' He thought it over. 'But we'd only see the replica, and anyway, I can't let the children through into the castle proper. I promised Himself I wouldn't.'
'Let's ask him,' I said. So we found him in his own room and asked, with the result that all of us, Himself, James, James's wife and children and I, walked the length of the Great Hall and stood round the grilled glass cage, staring down at its floodlit treasure.
'That,' Andrew decided, 'would be worth fighting a galactic space war for. If it was real, of course.'