Marcia’s feet were swollen with all that walking. He was so tall, walked so rapidly with his great strides that she had to take running steps to keep up with him.

‘Domingos, walk slowly,’ she cried out. To Marcia, walking was also gazing around, feeling the kaleidoscopic whirl of colours and bodies around her—the tall, solid stone-and-brick George’s Square with its brilliant tulips, the dray-horses trotting along as they dragged their carts through the heart of the city. She picked up conversations with people who, even in that brief moment, shed their strangeness and accepted her as one of them.

Marcia began to see less of Domingos as she began her own exploration of the mazes within herself, peopled with newcomers into her own life. She glimpsed him in a Greek food shop, at a film, and once he came to her room to talk. He was, he said, lonely, waiting to go home.

She felt that she had failed him as a friend. By this time she was making a life of her own and she only needed to know that his comfortable presence was there for her, whenever she needed him. But she could not forget how he had once stood at the threshold of her room at Duncan’s Hotel. She had been lying in bed, her books piled up beside her, listening to the voices from Glasgow Central, snatches of music and the hollow boom of echoes. At the knock on the door, she had opened it cautiously, to see Domingos. He had come to inquire whether she was settling in, to show her the way to the University library, to ask her about her permanent accommodation.

To him she had offered apples, those golden apples of the Hesperides. The wish humans have for those apples of illusion, those apples of eternal life which grow on the Hesperian trees of their private worlds, their private Edens. Apples too soon consumed, too soon to disappear. But this was the most tangible gesture of friendship that Marcia could make. It was an acceptance, as Domingos stretched out his hand to take the apples, of an eternal friendship. He did not venture beyond that door, but they were now no longer strangers to each other.

‘Come, let us go to Stirling Castle,’ Domingos once said. ‘Bring all your friends. All I want is to listen, to watch you talking. I’ll be there in the background. I will not disturb you. Let us go. I’ll come with you to church. Then we can go for long walks.’

Yet, Marcia did not pay enough heed to him. The pursuit of her own happiness made her selfish. And then the year was drawing to a close. It was again a time for departure, for moving on, for beginning to accumulate memories.