The man grinned. It was a pity, thought Lacroix, that no one was wearing a kilt, that there was not, in fact, any tartan to be seen at all. Even the singer was dressed as he might have been in Bath or Wincanton.

He ordered a last glass of whisky. This time when she served him he asked about a room. Did she know a good place? Somewhere respectable? The questions seemed to irritate her.

“There’s nae room here.”

“Somewhere near?”

“Wha?”

“Near here?”

“Aye,” she said. “Somewhere.”

He paid her, wondering if she would take English coins, if there would be some trouble, but she swept them off the table with barely a glance and tucked them into a pocket beneath her apron.

Outside, he breathed in the chill of the spring air; breathed in too the whiff of a nearby piss alley. Had he seen his way to open country he might have gone there, walked clear of the city and found some sheltered place to lie down under his cloak, sleep out like a hare in its form. But there was only the street, and beyond it the view of another. Nor could he quite remember the way he had arrived. Well, it hardly mattered. He did not know the city well enough to be lost in it. He set off, turned left, left again, traversed a square, walked past the black bulk of a church, past a statue of a warrior on horseback, sword to the sky. A knot of staggering men beckoned to him and he turned into a side street to leave them behind. He had hoped to come to the river again, had expected to. Now, he lost faith in his sense of direction and started to retrace his steps—if the river was not one way it must be the other—but what he began to pass did not seem to be what he had passed by earlier. Where was the statue? Where was the church? Where were the drunken men?

From a narrow street he stepped into a broader one. This new street was lit along one side with a line of lamps, ten or so, their globe heads shedding a blue light like the blue of a spark . . .

“But this is gas!” he said, out loud. In London, on leave, he had seen gas lamps in Pall Mall. Not many. Not many anywhere. None, to his knowledge, in Bath or Bristol. But here, in Glasgow, a little row of them, perhaps experimental!

He went to them and walked beneath them. You could close your eyes and still the blue was there, seeping through the skin or caught under the skin in a blue dissolve. The future, he decided, would be well lit. Light would be a moral force. Gas would do more good in the world than Jesus Christ or Mohammed. Imagine if there had been lights like these that night in Spain . . .