And then the stranger at the counter spoke: ‘I am Domingos. From Colombia. I will be working on my thesis at the university. You too are a student, right? We can have high tea together this evening.’

They soon became friends. They shared a table for meals served by young Scottish girls wearing bright red tartan skirts, their golden brown hair in clustered curls, with a high colour on their fresh-skinned cheekbones. They carried pots of tea and the lavish portions of food which Margaret the cook turned out in her kitchen—pans of thick pea soup, Scottish pies, chips and baked beans with ice cream for dessert.

Domingos loved food. He was welcome to eat most of Marcia’s at Duncan’s Hotel. After the enormous meals served at Willowby Hall, at the University of Nottingham, she had lost her appetite completely. The meals there had been gargantuan, exquisitely prepared, cooked by the Nottingham women. Tables groaned with platters of roast beef and chicken, new potatoes, salads with exotic fruit and vegetables, fruit flans. Here, too, food was plentiful. Breakfast was piles of toast and butter, good, nourishing oatmeal porridge, cereals, fruit juice, pots of tea. High tea was again hot soups, and raised pies with crisp pastry filled with meat and potatoes. Marcia toyed with her food while Domingos buttered piles of toast and ate her share of ice cream too.

They spoke about their families. Back home Domingos lived with Carmencas. Marcia began to feel her presence. She emerged strong and dominating from his description. She began to feel the presence of other human beings too, people with their own strong identities. The hotel had its own mystery occupants like the elderly lady who lived upstairs all by herself. It was home to her. Her sister, with whom she had shared her room, had just died, and she felt that living there, in the same room, in the same hotel, she could commune with her spirit. Almost all her meals were taken up to her by the sympathetic young waitresses. Marcia remembered the beautiful and dignified widow of one of the Scottish lords living in a hotel room in Glasgow many years ago. Her husband had been Loch Leil, the head of his clan. He was dead, and she could no longer live in the great echoing rooms of her Scottish castle and so found refuge in that hotel with the spacious rooms and rococo-style ceilings, where she was to live out the rest of her days.