At Edinburgh, we change trains for the line to Inverness. The sun set long ago, and we might be rolling through Timbuktu for all I can tell. The compartment is empty except for the two of us. Margaret lights a cigarette and stares out the window at the passing shadows, black on black, while I settle myself against the corner and listen to the rhythmic clatter, metal on metal. Her eyes grow heavy, and so do mine. I summon up Thorpe’s face in my memory, as I do whenever the tedium of the journey sinks its teeth into me, his face drenched in the sunshine of Shangri-La, just before he kisses me.

To my despair, I can’t quite make out his features. Only the color of that golden light as the sun prepares to set.

I wake in a large, shabby room papered in blue toile and filled with sunshine. For a moment, I can’t remember where I am. I imagine I’m in Nassau, in California, in Texas, and the confusion’s so acute, I almost feel myself floating between the two worlds, the two sides of my life, before Thorpe and after him.

Then I become aware that the tip of my nose is frozen, and I recall I’m in Scotland, and the sunshine is not an ordinary feature but a miracle. I recall the night before—the arrival at the terminal in Inverness, the silent, gray-haired woman who met us there in an asthmatic Morris, the bouncing, skidding journey across what seemed to be the entire goddamned frozen Highlands before we arrived at what Margaret called the Pile, as if that were its name. I learned from the retainer, who showed me to my room, that it was really named Dunnock Lodge, and that this was where Thorpe was born, twenty-seven years ago. I can’t remember the retainer’s name, however. It’s escaped me in the night.

Already the image of Thorpe has started to crowd into my head, obliterating everything else, the certain knowledge of Thorpe’s milky, beautiful back crisscrossed by welts. Something leaps on my stomach and starts to purr. I reach out to clasp Tuxedo, but he has other ideas, probably to do with getting fed, and leaps back off. I throw aside the covers and hurry down the hall to the remembered bathroom, which seems to have been installed in the house before Thorpe himself. The water’s icy, and the smell of rust reminds me of blood. Through the walls comes the distant noise of voices, the clatter of plates. I wash swiftly, dress swiftly, throw on my coat for good measure, and head downstairs in the direction of these signs of humanity.