Scenes from the day’s events flashed before him. His best man’s joking. The church. The rows of ‘friends and relatives’ of the bride and groom. The wedding march – the deliberate turn of his head to see Carol, veiled and in white, escorted up the aisle by her father. His mouth twitched. How often in the early days of their engagement she’d sworn they’d never get her into that ridiculously primitive and outmoded outfit – anyway, it’d be a register office for her; she might go so far as to exchange jeans and shirt for a suit for the occasion. He let his foot ease up on the accelerator. God! It really was bleak outside.

The reception afterwards wasn’t too bad. He couldn’t really say he’d enjoyed the meal. The speeches were the expected mixed bag. Tim had gone a bit near the knuckle and he could have censored some of the telegrams, but everyone, even the maiden aunts, had taken it in good part. The dancing; the circulation among the guests – what an army of relatives Carol had – he’d have to get her to draw up some kind of family tree for him. He found himself grinning. She can do that at the cottage if we’re snowbound and have, as sister Jane said, nothing better to do. A core of warmth formed within him and he thought: Of course she’s right for us to press on.

Slipping away from the reception to change. The send-off. Not too riotous. The strange mixture of excitement and relief by the time they had driven out of Edinburgh on to the M9 for Stirling. They’d taken it in turns to drive, had something to eat at the Fort William Mercury Motor Inn. It had been raining hard even before they crossed the Rannoch Moor. And the snow had begun as they entered the outskirts of Fort William. It was utterly ridiculous. A blizzard in April.

The windscreen wipers were beginning to fail. By now inches of snow were caked on the screen in spite of the heater’s blast of hot air; the clear wedge-shaped area was smudgy, like territory succumbing to defeat when a defence crumbles.

It was dark now. The girl had taken a torch from the glove compartment to follow the map. The headlights’ beams lit flurries of snowflakes or picked out the stark black branches of trees. The car descended a slope, engine whining in low gear. The road twisted and they were edging along an even narrower section, not much wider than the car, with a black drop on the right – to the sea? – and a streaming wet, near vertical wall of rock on the left. The car rattled across a wooden bridge.