It had rained hard for most of the night but Marion, seeing patches of blue outside their Mansfield [?], finally gave in. “Don’t worry, Mum, only as far as the park,” Willie said watching her, [?] in fox pelt, straightening her hat in the mirror. There was no getting film on a Sunday even in Glasgow, but the young man took his camera, a gift from his sister in Canada, anyway. A click of the [?] showed maybe one exposure left and Willie hadn’t taken pictures of his old mum in ages. As he [?] the day's paper on a damp bench, he [?] on how well she looked. “Sit down here, love,” he said, “this is a nice [?].” It wasn’t, but Willie wasn’t about to make his [?] mother walk any further either. There were just two street benches on their side of the park. At the opposite end of the bench where Marion had [?], a young couple embraced, to her right stood another left half-charred by vagrants. As he [?] the woman in the viewfinder, Willie took care to compensate for the displacement of the image as it would actually appear; he wanted the hill in back and perhaps the trees and sky [?] as well. Then, if he got it right, he might even [?]. Marion slipped off her gloves and sat patiently watching her son as he [?], then knelt on the rough pavement. Taking pictures was no [?] now. She remembered the day she and William had to stand like statues in the studio on Sauchiehall, how Em and Susie had [?], and how when William, spotting the blurred figures on cardboard, insisted, cost be [?], that they be retaken. “The wee ones are growing so fast,” his voice rose, “they’re disappearin’!” It had been seventeen springs and there wasn’t a day the woman did not miss him. Marion had [?] out the morning in Corrie that she had awoken next to her husband’s lifeless body and her [?] loss of speech; only the good times remained, and dear Willie, the one who’d stayed behind. A passing cloud darkened the sky. The couple rose and left and, as her son turned to change [?], heavy drops began to fall. Willie paused, looked upward and then back into the [?]. Just over his mother’s hat a man had suddenly appeared on the bench at the top of the hill. He wore a blue cap and [?] moustache and, hunkered forward as he was, seemed to peer out at them from beneath his lowered [?]. Willie squinted at the figure for several moments as drops splashed onto his [?]. In a photo taken in the garden behind the Corrie Hotel shortly before his death, Willie’s dad had worn a similar cap. He lowered the camera to [?] his eyes; when he looked up, the man in the viewer had gone. Only Marion remained now, beaming, hands folded, [?] to the rain as it spattered upon her hat and fur. She nodded and Willie, rubbing the lens on his elbow, raised the camera again and quickly pressed the [?]. As he threw his coat over his mother’s shoulders and helped her to her feet, the sun once more emerged [?] a pale arc upon the receding clouds.

Three quarters of a century later, a young man sits [?] at a gentleman in cap and shirtsleeves. The latter leans forward stiffly, his rugged face [?] in turn-of-the-century whiskers, a garden hoe [?] in his hands. Could that be him? He gently bends the cardboard image till it [?] from the four corners glued to the page of a black, leather-[?] album, one his grandmother received from the old country and lay unopened for years under her bed. Not so much as a date. Several loose photos have [?] out and when he thrusts them back between the pages, a snapshot catches his eye. It is [?], and meticulously hand-coloured. He studies it for a few moments. It must have meant a lot to somebody, he thinks, and then, for safety, [?] it behind that of the gardener. Later, in darkness, as water [?] down the gutter outside his window, he thinks of the old woman on the bench in the rain. He [?] that despite her smile she is intimate with loss, that the picture-taker is someone dear to her, that she once wrote a poem about a moth and a spider and that (he feels [?] now) she knows there are no more photographs to be taken.

The young man rouses with a [?]. Instead of predawn shadows, sunlight floods the room. Late again! He pulls on his clothes, pours tap water into a [?] of powdered coffee, and races out the door to his van. It isn’t until he is reversing down the drive that he begins to remember his dream. Above the letters “Warning: objects may be larger than they appear” a landscaper in shirtsleeves is [?] dirt. The young man pulls out and, shifting gears, is quickly on his way. At the edge of his neighbour’s garden, the landscaper, unseen now in the side view mirror, raises a hand to his blue cap and [?].