No. He would have to be pulled from the cave like a tooth. The only solution for fear was stubbornness. His mother had taught him that. She had raised him to believe in the power of obstinacy, and now, on an uninhabited island in a cathedral built by nobody, he clung to his faith. He was the only child of an old man. That had meant one thing when he was a boy, and meant new things now.

Then his father was there, leaning over, hands on thighs.

“Well,” said Louis. “What have we here?”

“I should get up,” admitted David.

Louis looked around them. On one side, a girl wearing binoculars regarded them. A bird-watcher, perhaps—those were good bird-watching glasses—and then Louis recognized her as one of Sidney’s countrywomen, her face round and flat and, at the moment, impressed at this peculiar behavior. He sat down.

“This is not progress!” yelled one of the Swedes.

“Come on, friend,” said Louis. “Let’s stand up.”

“I’m not your friend,” said David.

Louis nodded. No, his beautiful, pessimistic son—pessimism is a form of cowardice, but Louis knew better than to say so to his beloved pessimists. “Nevertheless.”

“I don’t know how.”

“The usual way, I think,” said Louis. Then, helped by a dozen hands, as in a child’s séance, they were lifted up, and the cave was filled with applause, genuine, sarcastic, dutiful.

Nobody mentioned anything on the boat home. “Subdued!” said Robby, appraising them as they boarded, one by one, then, to David, “You caught the Scottish sun. Rare but deadly. Should have worn a hat.”

Back in Tobermory they passed a poster for the Highland Games, held that day at the golf course. Already the cabers were being packed up. That’s what we should have done, David thought. By next month his father might not even remember the puffins. But around the world a story would be told, in Helsinki, in Devon, in Malmö: A man panicked. We saved him. Without us he would have died.

He would have to rearrange both their lives before the worst happened. But not yet. Together they would fly back to Boston. David would go on to Seattle; from a distance he could pretend his father was fine. It’s not an emergency, he told himself, though he knew otherwise, an emergency the way all of life was.

In front of the bank a teenage boy played violin for money; when David concentrated he recognized it as “Good Vibrations,” heart-lifting and strange. He put his hands in his pockets and found one fifty-pence piece, polygonal like the rocks of Staffa. He tossed it into the open violin case.

“Got any pound coins?” David asked, and his father dug in his pockets, produced two handfuls of broken things.