With the Russian manager’s help they secured the last two places inside the Glasgow coach. It was seven in the morning, the sky overcast. The coachman wore a cape of thick blue canvas. Only his head, hands and boots protruded, so that he appeared like an actor playing the part of the sea in a pantomime. Emily and Lacroix were the last to board. They had places opposite each other, one shoulder against the leather wall of the coach, the other against the warmth and restlessness of a stranger. The rain started before they had finished their slow climb out of the town. It washed the dust from the windows. It had the look of rain that did not intend to let up. Inside the coach people breakfasted from parcels of food in their laps. Food smells, human smells, then all indistinguishable. They spent an hour held up by cattle on the road. Some of the animals, climbing a bank, peered in through the window. One, with a purple tongue the size of a man’s handkerchief, licked the glass. Lacroix had hoped to find a newspaper in Oban but there had been nothing at the hotel, not even an old one. He studied the scenery, peeked down to fast rivers, looked at the walls of bare hills. He swayed against his neighbour, exchanged smiles with Emily, exchanged smiles with the wifely woman beside her who was, he thought, trying to decide who he might be and what he was to Emily. At least there were no military men in the coach. No one to make guesses about him in that way.

They stopped for lunch; stopped several times for the men to stand behind trees or for the women to shelter in a cottage, the cotters making a kind of living from the coins that were offered in exchange for a private place and a pot. The horses were changed, the old horses led away steaming, their heads low. On the roof, the outside passengers clung to their places; it was better not to think about them. Inside, the water dripped through a dozen split seams, seeped in past the ill-fitting windows, came up somehow through the floor. This wetness was discussed, then not, and they sat in the near-darkness of each other’s presences, asleep, awake, dull, silent.