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houses, the oldest skyscrapers on earth—that had made her sit up, entranced by the higgledy-piggledy little streets that wandered here and there, tangling over the great wide ones, and the austere castle on a cliff that appeared to have been parachuted into the middle of the bustling city.
    And still they went on: north, ever north, the sky growing even larger as they crossed the great bridge, the iron railway bridge to the right of her, the traffic thinning out as they drove through rolling farmland and harsh, craggy landscapes and long moors under the wide, clouded sky.
    There were fewer people on the bus, too. There had been plenty of comings and goings at Newcastle and Berwick and Edinburgh, but now it was only her and a few elderly people and what looked like oil workers, sitting patiently, tough-looking men on their own, grunting at one another, their faces set to whatever lay ahead of them.
    One moment she would look up from her book to see a great brown plain, the golden light playing through the heather; the next, she was in time to see an osprey dive across the road toward a loch, which made her start; then, as they crested the next mountain, a ray of sunshine came out and she put her book down altogether.
    Perhaps if it had been rainy that spring weekend, everything would have been very different.
    Nina would have sat reading, huddled up in her duffle coat; she would have exchanged a few words with the sellers of the van, thanked them politely, gone home to think about it again.
    Had the wind been coming off the sea, had the bridge beenclosed to high-sided traffic because of strong winds. Had a million different tiny things happened.
    Because life is like that, isn’t it? If you thought of all the tiny things that divert your path one way or another, some good, some bad, you’d never do anything ever again.
    And some people don’t. Some people go through life not really deciding to do much, not wanting to, always too fearful of the consequences to try something new. Of course, that in itself is also a decision. You’ll get somewhere whether you put any effort into it or not. But doing something new is so hard. And a few things can help.
    That evening, as Nina arrived in Scotland for the very first time, it was not stormy and wet and overcast, with clouds so low they seemed to clip the trees. Instead it was as if the entire country was showing off for her. The evening was golden, the northern light strange and beautiful. Everywhere she looked, it seemed, were gray stone castles and long bright vistas, lambs gamboling in the fields and deer scattering away in distant woods as the bus rolled past. Two old men who’d gotten on in Edinburgh started speaking gently to each other in Gaelic, and she tuned her ear in, feeling as she did so that it was not so much talking as singing, and thrilled and astonished that while she was technically still in the UK, where she’d spent her entire life, it could still be so strange, so foreign.
    The road coasted higher, but never seemed to end in the untouched landscape, instead floating above the heathery fields, and Nina found herself urging the bus on and on, to where there were no cars, and even fewer towns and people.
    She had a guilty moment when she felt as if she was betraying her beloved Birmingham, with its highways and tower blocks and police sirens and jostling pubs and noisy parties anddense traffic. Normally she loved that. Well, she liked it. Well, she tolerated it.
    But up here, it wasn’t hard at all to understand why the Scots thought of themselves as different and apart. She’d traveled in the UK—to London, of course, to Manchester, on vacation in tended, manicured Dorset and Devon. But this: this was a completely different proposition, a far wilder land unfolding in front of her, so much larger than she’d ever thought of it, had she thought of it at all. Towns and villages appeared at a leisurely rate, with the