A quarter of a century is a very little thing in this city’s thousand years,” wrote Pastor Boyd in Twenty-Five Years of St. Andrews, “but it is a great thing, and a long time, to us who have lived through it. It has changed those who survive.”

During Tommy’s lifetime, the most pivotal quarter-century in golf history, Tom Morris became the first true golf professional and Tommy became the game’s leading man. Now that time was past and Tom, walking uphill from the cemetery, felt the weight of his fifty-four years. He was often quoted in dialect in those days, once by an English writer who heard the mourning father say of Tommy’s death, “It was like as if ma vera sowle was a’thegither gane oot o’ me.”

Did Tom regret letting the North Berwick match go on while Margaret died? If so, he took solace in his faith. Thy will be done. And there was at last some good news for the Morrises in the first months of 1876. Lizzie was expecting a baby. Perhaps Tom would have a grandchild after all. He felt a pang when Lizzie sailed with her husband to America, but in March he received a telegram announcing the birth of his grandson, born to Lizzie and James Hunter in Darien, Georgia. They named their child Tommy Morris Hunter.

Lizzie’s son was never healthy. The baby died in May, only two months old. This news was another blow to Tom, but he carried on. What else could he do? Each morning he changed into his swimming long johns. He padded out to the dunes, hung his jacket with its black armband on a whin bush, steeled himself and waded into the bay, which was icy in May, merely frosty in June. After his dip he dried off, dressed for work, and spent another day supervising workmen (“More sand!”), inspecting caddies, tapping the club secretary’s window, replacing divots (a visitor was amazed to see the great man “taking up bits of cruelly cut turf and placing them in blank spaces with a press of his foot”), and partnering R&A golfers as if his soul were intact.

Tom played a leading role that fall when Prince Leopold drove himself in as captain of the R&A. This was the Royal and Ancient Golf Club’s proudest moment, the first royal visit to St. Andrews in more than 200 years. Crowds surged toward the prince’s royal railcar at every stop it made on its journey east through Fife; in one village a thousand people turned out to see the train speed by without stopping. On the night of the prince’s arrival in St. Andrews, townspeople lit every lamp in every building, giving the town a glow that outshone the half-moon that came out that night. At eight the next morning the hemophiliac prince, surrounded by his fretful retinue, stepped from his carriage to the first teeing-ground. Prince Leopold was terrified. How could he hit a golf ball with so many of his subjects watching—and so many caddies, hoping to grab the royal gutty, crowding so close to the tee? The greenkeeper came to his rescue. Tom Morris bowed, tipping his cap, and encouraged His Royal Highness to take a smooth, steady swing with his eye fixed on the ball. Tom teed up a ball, using a bit more sand than usual to add height to the shot. Prince Leopold waggled. He swung, the cannon sounded and the ball sailed over all the caddies—a drive worthy of the crowd’s delighted applause.

The prince blinked. “How was that done, Tom?” he asked. “I never got the ball off the ground before.” After luncheon and a fox hunt, he and Tom beat two R&A golfers in a six-hole match. In the gallery stood a dark-haired woman who had come from Oxford to see her friend the prince: twenty-three-year-old Alice Liddell, for whom Lewis Carroll had written Alice in Wonderland.

Later that week came the second Open ever held at St. Andrews. Davie Strath led for most of the day and had the Claret Jug within reach as he played the Road Hole. Unluckily for him, the R&A had failed to reserve the links for the tournament, leaving the professionals to share the course with the usual foursomes of gentleman golfers. Playing the Road Hole in semidarkness at the end of a long, slow round, Strath saw a crowd around the green. Spectators, he thought. He let fly and watched his approach shot bean a local upholsterer named Hutton who was lining up a putt. Mister Hutton keeled over as if he’d been shot. He was still rubbing his head as Strath, shaken, putted out for a six, which he followed with another six on the Home Hole to tie Bob Martin for first place in the Open. But tournament officials questioned Strath’s score. He may have played out of turn, they said, and skulling Mr. Hutton may have kept his ball on the green and saved him a stroke. If he won his playoff with Martin tomorrow morning, they said, they might still disqualify him.

Strath, who had defied another red-coated committee on the day he declared himself a professional, refused to play under such a threat. “Settle it now or I won’t be here in the morning,” he said. The officials refused, Davie stuck to his word, and Martin claimed the Claret Jug by walking the course the next morning.

Tom Morris came in fourth, his best Open finish since 1872, and then went home to help tend his wife in the gray stone house at 6 Pilmour Links Road. Nancy, sixty-one years old, was in constant pain. A white bedpan called a “slipper” was a boon to her. The slipper was a ceramic wedge that slid under a patient who could not sit up. Nancy lamented her aches and the indignity of using such a thing. She lamented the loss of her children and grandchildren, and on the first of November, 1876, All Saints’ Day, she “joined them in heaven,” as Pastor Boyd put it, leaving Tom to arrange yet another Morris funeral. After which, as before, he returned to his duties in his shop and on the links. Old Tom was a marvel, people said. In little more than a year he had buried Tommy, Tommy’s wife and their stillborn son, grandson Tommy Morris Hunter, and now Nancy. Five dead and Tom still standing. When a writer asked about the cause of Tommy’s death, Tom said he didn’t believe that grief could kill a man. “People say Tommy died of a broken heart,” he said, “but if that was true, I wouldn’t be here.”

Two Septembers later Tom, Jimmy, and several hundred others gathered around the Morris plot in the Cathedral cemetery. Sixty Scottish and English golf societies had taken up a collection to pay for a Tommy Morris monument in the cemetery. It was a sign of golf’s growing importance that a representative of the Crown, John Inglis, Lord Justice General of Scotland, presided over the unveiling. The monument, which still stands in the south wall of the churchyard, shows Tommy in his tweeds and his Balmoral bonnet, preparing to drive a ball over the cemetery to the sea. “In memory of ‘Tommy,’ son of Thomas Morris,” reads the plaque at his feet. “Deeply regretted by numerous friends and all golfers, he thrice in succession won the Championship Belt and held it without envy, his many amiable qualities being no less acknowledged than his golfing achievements.”

“Ladies and gentlemen,” said Inglis, addressing the somber gallery standing four-deep around him, “we are met to inaugurate a monument to the memory of the late Tommy Morris, younger.” With that the Lord Justice General nodded toward the honoree’s father. “You will allow me to say that we have some consolation still, for we still have a Tom Morris left—Old Tom—and I may venture to say that there is life in that old dog yet.”

After Tommy died, Tom cut back on the money matches he had lived for. He devoted more time to promoting golf and making sure that golfers remembered what Tommy had done. Tom went on to lay out more than sixty courses, including County Down, Dornoch, Macrihanish, and Muirfield. Building a course—clearing whins, digging and filling bunkers, turfing greens—could cost £100 to £300, but Tom’s fee for designing one never varied: He charged £1 per day, often completing his work in a single day. And wherever he went in Scotland, England, Ireland, and Wales, he spun tales of his famous son.

Old Tom’s rustic charm played well on the road. After hiking some barren, windburned heath for half an hour he would turn to his hosts and say, “Surely Providence meant this to be a golf links.” Each course he laid out was “the finest in the kingdom, second only to St. Andrews,” at least until he laid out the next one. Tom showed novice greenkeepers how to top-dress and rake putting-greens. He pioneered inland golf by introducing horse-drawn mowers for fairways and push-mowers for greens. Beyond that his work as a course-maker consisted largely of walking and pointing. “Put a hole here. Put another over there,” he would say, leaving plenty of time for a free lunch before he headed back to the railway station. If he stayed all day it was often to be feted as a visiting dignitary. After a singer serenaded him at one lavish dinner, Tom said, “I did no’ think much of her diction.” No one had the heart to tell him she’d been singing in French.

Still the old greenkeeper was sly enough to have some fun with an Englishman who saw him rolling putts one day.

“What! Do you play the game?” the man said.

“Oh, aye,” said Tom Morris. “I’ve tried it once or twice.”

In 1886 Tom went to Dornoch, in the Highlands 110 miles north of St. Andrews, a cold whisper from the Arctic Circle, to extend the links there to eighteen holes. The Dornoch Golf Club’s junior champion was a boy named Donald Ross, a carpenter’s apprentice who tagged along while the old man hiked the dunes overlooking Dornoch Firth. Five years later Ross left home to work for Tom at St. Andrews. He may have helped Tom build a new course on the ancient links there. Called simply the New Course, Tom’s layout was in some ways better than the original, which has been known ever since as the Old Course. Ross returned to Dornoch for a stint as the club’s greenkeeper before moving to America in 1899, his head full of pictures of Tom’s links: elevated greens; grassy hollows and hungry bunkers; subtle deceptions that rewarded local knowledge. Over the next half-century he would design Pinehurst #2, Seminole, Oak Hill, Oakland Hills, and the more than 500 other courses that made Donald Ross the most important golf-course architect of all. Even if Tom Morris had never seen Prestwick or planted a flag at County Down, his influence on Ross would still make him a crucial figure in the game’s evolution. But Ross was only one of his disciples. Charles Blair Macdonald kept a locker in Tom’s shop before he crossed the Atlantic to build America’s first eighteen-hole course at the Chicago Golf Club and lay out the National Golf Links of America, a bit of Scotland in Southampton, New York. Alister Mackenzie studied Tom’s handiwork before designing Cypress Point in California, Royal Melbourne in Australia and, with Bobby Jones, Augusta National; Mackenzie titled his book on course design The Spirit of St. Andrews. Albert Tillinghast, who learned the game from Tom, went on to lay out Baltusrol, Bethpage, and Winged Foot. Harry Colt, who spent boyhood summers at St. Andrews, improved Tom’s Muirfield links before working with the American George Crump to fashion Pine Valley, a course many regard as the world’s finest. In the last analysis Tom Morris’s chief contribution to the game may have been in course design, a multibillion-dollar business that grew from the barrow, spade, and shovel he used at Prestwick and St. Andrews.

Not far from Alister Mackenzie’s locker in Tom’s workshop was another wooden locker, a relic that held Tommy’s clubs and club-making tools. “Undisturbed since he last touched it,” Tom often said. But he often disturbed it. While showing a visitor around the shop, filling the fellow’s ears with well-worn stories, Tom would open the locker and pluck out a club. “Tommy’s last putter,” he would call it, or “Tommy’s last niblick,” placing the stick in the visitor’s hand. “Take it—keep it.” Of course his workshop turned out putters and niblicks by the gross; this so-called relic, part of a growing supply of “Tommy’s last clubs,” could be replaced tomorrow. Cynics would call him a showboat, but Tom knew that every golfer who left with one of those clubs would spread the gospel of Tommy Morris.

Tom surprised himself by playing better as his beard turned white. He couldn’t drive the ball 180 yards anymore, or even 150—“I can no’ get through the ball,” he told Andra Kirkaldy—but his yips disappeared. Tom Morris was now the maker of short putts. “I never miss them now,” he said. After winning a tournament at Hoylake he celebrated his sixty-fourth birthday by shooting 81 at St. Andrews, only four strokes off Tommy’s famous course record. He did it with ten 5s, seven 4s and a trey—the only time Tom ever went around the old links without a 6 on his card. “No’ that ill for an old horse!” he crowed.

By then Old Tom had another nickname. He was golf’s “G.O.M.,” short for “grand old man.” The term was borrowed from Prime Minister William Gladstone, the original G.O.M. (whose rival Disraeli said the letters stood for “God’s only mistake”). Twelve years younger than Gladstone, Tom was no less grand to golfers, though his latest honorific puzzled one grumpy old Musselburgher. The aging, ailing Willie Park had outplayed Tom through most of their careers only to see his rival hailed as the game’s patron saint.

In 1879, at a tournament in haunted North Berwick, Tom and Willie had finished far behind younger professionals while drawing the day’s biggest crowds. Three years later Tom did his fellow warhorse a favor: He agreed to play Park for £200. Tom was sixty years old, Park was forty-nine. Their last battle was, in effect, the first senior golf event. “No match of recent years has created anything like the excitement attaching to this,” proclaimed The Field. Tom, who had little to gain, made the match because it would bring Willie one last week of headlines as well as a hefty fee. Still Tom’s sympathy ended at the first teeing-ground. With more than a thousand spectators following the match, he stung the hole with sharp short putts and beat Park by four.

Soon a man whose sole vice was his briar pipe saw his photograph on cigarette packages. Pictures of Tom Morris seemed to be everywhere. Thomas Rodger, the calotype artist who had photographed Tommy in the Championship Belt, superimposed an image of Tom over an image of a river to make a postcard showing Old Tom Morris “walking on water.” Tom wanted no part of such blasphemy, but the card was a bestseller.

Golfers from as far off as India and America wrote to the venerable Morris, whose word was law wherever the game was played. One summer a St. Andrews lad named Freddie Tait, son of the professor who had painted golf balls with glowing phosphorus, hit a drive that tore a hole in a bystander’s hat. Tom told young Tait to buy the man a new hat. “Be glad ’tis only a hat you’ll buy,” he said, “and not a coffin.” It was a rare penalty for Tait, who was golden like Tommy, so lucky that when he dropped a hunting knife while wading in the bay, he found the knife by stepping on it—its blade sticking straight up between two of his toes. He grew up to be a gentleman golfer and soldier. After winning the Amateur Championship twice and getting shot in the leg during the Boer War in 1899, Freddie Tait rushed back into battle a month later and was shot in the heart. He was thirty. By then Prince Leopold had slipped on wet stairs at the yacht club in Cannes, France, cracking his knee and dying in a haze of blood and morphine. He too was thirty. Two years after that Tom’s son-in-law, James Hunter, died in Georgia at age thirty-seven. Lizzie brought her husband’s body and her four surviving children home to St. Andrews, where she helped look after Old Tom.

Davie Strath saw his money-match prospects dry up after Tommy died. The melancholy Strath became greenkeeper at North Berwick, then fled to Oz to preserve his health. “Oz” was what Scots called Australia, where warm January afternoons were thought to save consumptives’ lives. Davie had begun coughing blood by the time he booked passage to Melbourne, a trip that took eighty-four days. His throat closed on the way and he died speechless in 1879, three years before a German scientist identified the tubercle bacillus.

Jack Morris, Tommy’s paraplegic brother, worked late in his father’s workshop on the night of February 21, 1893. Jack, thirty-three years old, had been “making golf balls up to a late hour,” according to the Citizen, “and on retiring to rest was in his usual health.” He died in his bed. “It is understood death was caused by a spasm of the heart.” In fact Jack’s heart may have stopped after his pulmonary artery ruptured, just as Tommy’s had done.

“Tom has had his share of trial,” a friend wrote. “His wife and children are dead, save two—Jimmy and his only daughter, a young widow.” Still Tom kept his chin aimed toward heaven. Being gloomy was a bit of a sin, he said, because it suggested that we know the Lord’s business better than He does. All Tom knew for certain was that the game he and Tommy loved, the game poor Jack, Prince Leopold, Lang Willie, Colonel Fairlie, Lord Eglinton, Willie Park, and countless others all loved, was thriving. There had been only seven golf societies in Britain in 1800, and a dozen in Tom’s youth. By 1880 there were sixty. By 1890 there were 357. By 1900 there would be 2,330.

In the fall of 1895, twenty years after Tommy died, Tom played in his last Open. He was seventy-four years old, a deadeye with the putter but too weak to muscle the ball from a heavy lie in one of his bunkers. Attended by a crowd that had more than its share of gray whiskers, he came in seventy shots behind winner J.H. Taylor, the same Johnny Taylor from Devon who had mistaken Tom for St. Andrew thirty years before. And with that, Tom bowed out of the tournament he helped create. He had played in twenty-seven Open Championships, including the first fourteen, winning four times and striking more than 5,000 shots in Open competition. Now he was content to light his pipe and watch younger men play, though he still served as starter when the tournament returned to St. Andrews, giving each pairing a word of encouragement before nodding and saying, “You may go now, gentlemen.” He also teed up the incoming R&A captain at each fall’s Driving-In ceremony. Unlike Tommy, he never chafed at serving other men. “I’ve always tried—as my business it was—to make myself pleasant to them,” Tom said of his employers, “and they’ve been awful pleasant to me.”

In 1898, Lizzie Morris died at age forty-five and was buried in the Morris plot in the Cathedral cemetery. Her father mourned his only daughter, pulling a black armband over his sleeve yet again. He doted on her children, his only grandchildren. And he carried on, bunting a gutty around the links with provosts, professors, and statesmen including a pair of future Prime Ministers, Arthur Balfour and H.H. Asquith. No visitor escaped Tom’s promotion of the game and of what he called “my dear native town,” or his many tales of Tommy’s brilliance.

Even after his back bent under the weight of his years, Tom never lost his good humor. When a neighbor bought an expensive telescope, golf’s G.O.M. took a look at the moon and said, “Faith, sir, she’s terrible full o’ bunkers.” In 1902, the year Tom got a ride in the town’s first automobile, the R&A commissioned a portrait of him by Sir George Reid, president of the Royal Scottish Academy. Tom duly reported to Reid’s studio in Edinburgh, where he sat for the better part of a week. When the renowned artist asked him to strike a golfing pose, Tom stuck a hand in his pocket and stood frozen in place. Reid asked what he was doing. “Waiting for the other man to begin,” Tom said. After Reid’s portrait of him went up in the R&A clubhouse, where it still hangs, an observer described Tom’s reaction: “He gazed upon it mutely for some time, and then remarked, ‘The cap’s like mine.’”

In 1906, the year Tom turned eighty-five, Jimmy Morris died at age fifty-two. A good player but never a great one, Tommy’s golfing brother had led the 1876 Open with two holes to go only to take nine swings on the Road Hole. He led again at Prestwick in 1878, until Jamie Anderson pipped him with help from an ace at the penultimate hole, where Anderson’s ball struck a hill behind the green and rolled back into the cup. Nine years later Jimmy matched Tommy’s 77 on their home links and briefly shared the course record, but soon another golfer shot 74. After that, Jimmy lived quietly, managing his father’s shop. And after a grand funeral, with flags flying at half-mast all over town, he joined the rising queue of his kin in the Morris plot in the Cathedral cemetery. And still Tom lived on.

In his last years Tom wore a great black overcoat and leaned on a cane. He kept his shoes, heavy brown brogues, polished to a mirror shine. His walks on the links were now confined to the acres near his shop. A collie named Silver, his constant companion, would wait for hours outside the shop, then bound up when Tom emerged and fall in step behind him as he fired up his pipe and set off toward town or teeing-ground.

Tom’s visits to the Cathedral churchyard were his hardest work. His rusty knees made it a chore to find safe footing in the grass. Like any man of eighty-five he was afraid of slipping. Sometimes he leaned on a gravestone. Even in summer the stones were cool to the touch. Here was Allan Robertson’s head-high obelisk with its bust of Allan on top. Nearby lay Tom Kidd, the dapper long driver who had used his ribbed cleeks to beat Tommy at the watery Open of ’73. Jamie Anderson was here too, in a sad unmarked grave. Tom was surely glad that Jamie’s father, Auld Daw, had gone sooner and was therefore spared that knowledge. Auld Daw had often bragged of how he put Jamie through college with coin from his ginger-beer cart. But after winning the Open in 1877, ’78, and ’79, Jamie developed a thirst for fine whisky that became in time a thirst for whisky of any sort. He went into club-making, drank his meager profits, died poor and got a pauper’s burial.

Tom made his way to the cemetery’s south wall. By mid-morning the dew had evaporated. The turf was dry—good footing for his shiny brogues. Tom made his way between other families’ plots to the Morris plot and Tommy’s monument. The statue of Tommy that Lord Justice General Inglis had dedicated in 1877 was nearly life-size, now weathered with age, white paint chipping off the out-of-round ball at the statue’s feet. This statue of Tommy had been addressing that ball for twenty-nine years, five years more than Tommy lived.

Near the statue stood the white marker that Tom still thought of as Wee Tom’s stone. There were now five more names on it. Tommy, whose name was listed second, would have been angry to see the careless line devoted to Meg (“Margaret Morris or Drennen…who died 11th Septr 1875”), whose maiden name was Drinnen, not Drennen, and who had died on the fourth of September. By the time the stone was carved, no one noticed the errors.

There was no room for more names on Wee Tom’s stone. When Tom’s time came, he would need a new marker. He knew his time was near. Eighty-six-year-old Tom Morris had lived to see the future through his squinted eyes. He had lived to see the year 1908, when men flew in aeroplanes and sent their voices through wires at lightning speed, and he had read the Ninetieth Psalm enough times to see the words without opening his Bible: “The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.”

One day a reporter followed him home. Tom invited the man in for tea. Leading him up the gravel garden path between the shop and his house, Tom climbed a flight of stairs to his sitting room overlooking the links. “He lights a gas stove in his house, where he has stored lots of wood for clubs,” his guest wrote, “thorn and apple and lindenwood for heads, hickory and ash for shafts. Sits in his armchair and lights his briar-root pipe. A large window looks out over the putting green on the first hole, the teeing ground of the starting point, the rocks, the sea of which he says he ‘never wearies.’ He’ll still holler at local lads playing on the Home green: ‘Off that puttin’ green!’ with a roar like a wounded lion.”

Tom was amused at the way writers practically queued up to visit him, filling notebooks with what they must have hoped would be his last words. “Let us look at him in his home,” Tulloch wrote in a magazine story. “Above his mantelpiece there is a large frame containing photographs.” The largest showed his golfing sons—Tommy on one side and Jimmy on the other, above the course record they had briefly shared: the magical number 77. “The walls of Tom’s sanctum are covered with photographs of famous golfers and great golf matches. His bedroom is similarly decked, and on his toilet-table and mantelpiece are heaps of golf balls. He always sleeps with the window open, and one morning he woke to find himself half-enveloped in snow.” Tulloch was already burnishing anecdotes for the biography he would publish within weeks of Tom’s demise. “His habits are very simple, and on a Sunday night you will find him, after having seen him officiate as an elder of the Town Church, quietly reading his family Bible with the big print. And if you ask him, he will rise from its perusal to show you the famous trophy, the champion belt of red morocco with rich silver ornamentations, bearing golfing devices. This became the property of young Tommy through three annual consecutive wins.”

Tom never had to be asked to show off the Championship Belt. “I have it in my house,” he told another writer. “In my eyes it is absolutely priceless.” Hefting the Belt became something of a rite of passage for visitors. He would guide their hands over its red leather and tarnished silver plates, pointing out the medal to the left of the buckle that read TOM MORRIS JUNR, CHAMPION GOLFER. Many were surprised at how heavy the Belt was. “Heavy with memories,” Tom said.

He was often asked about the golfers of the old days. Allan Robertson was the “cleverest little player,” he said. “Willie Park was a splendid driver and a splendid putter. I’ve been neither, yet I managed to beat him.” The Rook had his days, Tom said, and Davie Strath would be more remembered had he not played his best when Tommy played better. Yet they were small beer compared to the one who must never be forgotten.

“I could cope with ’em all” on the course, said Tom. “All but Tommy. He was the best the old game ever saw.”

After Tom retired as greenkeeper in 1903, the R&A kept him on full salary and renamed the Old Course’s eighteenth hole after him. The boneyard Home Hole has officially been the Tom Morris Hole ever since, though hardly anyone calls it that. The club also made Tom an honorary member—a bit of an afterthought after forty years’ service. Not that he would dream of exercising the unspecified privileges of honorary membership. Even as G.O.M. he was the same tradesman who had spent decades tapping on the club secretary’s window. He would have felt as uneasy in the hushed corridors of the R&A clubhouse as the gentlemen would have felt seeing him there. Tom made life easier for everyone by spending his days 300 yards away, in a sunny corner of the members’ lounge at the New Club.

Founded in 1902, the New Club incorporated a clutch of local golf societies including the Rose Club. Each chipped in £100 to buy a house beside the eighteenth fairway, which they turned into their clubhouse. The New Club’s members included merchants, professors, and a former town provost as well as grocers, tailors, hatters, fishmongers, and a confectioner. They had planned to call themselves the Tom Morris Golf Club, but Tom said he would bolt if they did it. Instead he became the club’s unofficial figurehead. Tom Morris spent long afternoons in a bright corner of the members’ lounge, sitting in a high-backed leather chair by the window, watching golfers bump balls through the Valley of Sin to the Home green while sun through the window warmed his bones. He would smile and nod when someone tapped his shoulder or squeezed his hand, but his memory was going; he greeted old friends as if meeting them for the first time.

On a Sunday in May, 1908, Tom made his way from church to his seat by the window at the New Club. From here he could see what he still called the Home Hole, with the R&A clubhouse and the sea beyond. To his left the course bent toward the River Eden as it had for centuries. His old enemies the whins were young again, bursting with spring blooms. Tom, feeling a bit bursting himself, climbed out of his chair and started for the toilet.

A short, dark corridor led from the members’ lounge to the loo. There were two doors at the far end. The one on the right was the toilet door. The other door opened onto a stone staircase that led to the cellar. Tom, coming from his seat in dazzling sun, fuddled and momentarily blind in the darkness of the corridor, opened the door on the left and stepped into space.