David knew his mother had not wanted to get rid of his father. Life did. His father had never been able to tell the difference between the two.

“We’re lucky with the weather!” the Englishwoman with the potato shoes said to Louis as they settled in the boat.

“Are you?” said Louis. “Good for you.”

The woman gave a wry smile, then said to David, “Did you get to the top?”

“My son has a fear of heights,” said Louis.

“Vertigo,” said the woman’s husband, pointing to himself. They both had white hair that showed the pink of their scalps beneath. “Just found out. Hell of a way to do it.”

“You’re all right,” said the Englishwoman.

“I bloody well am not,” he said.

Staffa was a monumental lump of rock with a green top, vertically ribbed around the middle like a midcentury juice glass: spectacular, hard to make sense of. The boat came round and showed the maw of Fingal’s Cave, dark and glittering, accessible only by a narrow ledge with rope bannister. If you stepped wrong you would end up on the rock below. It looked like the first stop in the afterworld, the place you’d come to in order to get sorted.

“Oh no,” said David.

“No,” agreed the septuagenarian Englishman. “You know, a bloke died here a few years back.”

Again Robby leaned in close to David, to menace or joke man-to-man. “Just the one. German. Backed off a cliff snapping his camera.”

“Shall we go together?” the Englishwoman said to Louis, then to David, “I’ll take him,” as though this was what happened all the time: the fainthearted, the stumble-footed stayed behind, and a swap was made. The brave must go with the brave. The chickenshit sat with the chickenshit. For a moment David felt a wave of relief—when his father dropped from a height, as he’d been trying to do all day, it wouldn’t be his fault. I didn’t even see it happen, he imagined saying.

“You’ll be my husband,” said the Englishwoman to Louis, taking his hand.

“I’ll what?”

“No, no,” said David. “I’ll come.”

“Well done,” said Robby, in a voice of doom.

You walked the ledge on the side of a sheer cliff, till you walked around the corner, and there it was, Fingal’s Cave, a cathedral half-built by fairy folk. The ledge sloped up. Rock face to your right, a drop down to rocks on the left. The walls were built of basalt columns like polygonal organ pipes, gorgeous and threatening. The cave echoed. Some people balked going in, acrophobes and claustrophobes, and turned back and stepped down onto the hard rock beach, also made of the hexagonal rock but sawed off, the kind of geometry you wouldn’t be surprised to see under a microscope, startling when life-sized and out in the open.