“Who's that?” I asked.
“That's Mr. Sutherland. He teaches classics at our school.”
“You're not really Deirdre's brother, are you?”
“No, it's a joke between us. We've known each other for years, ever since teachers' training, and we were lucky enough to end up at the same school. What brought you to Edinburgh?” he asked.
“I was offered a job here.”
“You mean you moved here just on the strength of having a job. You didn't know anyone?”
I nodded.
“That's very courageous,” he said. “I don't know if I could stand living in a city of strangers.”
I asked Stephen how long he had lived here and where he grew up. I thought he must realise that every one of my questions was really the same question, and next day, when he claimed that he had not known whether I liked him, I was incredulous. Because he was so much taller than I, and
soft-spoken, because of the music, perhaps because my emotion like a high wind whipped his words away, there were all kinds of gaps in my understanding of that first conversation. If we had, at that moment, been swept apart, I would have been hard-pressed to describe him.
Later I discovered he was tall, loose-limbed, with light brown hair and eyes. He had fine, straight hair which flopped over his forehead, his nose was small, his skin was smooth and even in midwinter looked slightly tanned. Everything about him, including his horn-rimmed glasses, was sweetly rounded, he even had a dimple in his chin, and I was amazed to learn that he was several years older than I.
Suddenly the music stopped. Above the crowd I saw Deirdre standing on a chair. She stretched out her hands in a gesture of silence. “Quiet, children,” she shouted. On the radio Big Ben began to chime, everyone joined hands and sang “Auld Lang Syne.” As the noise crescendoed, Stephen kissed me.
For a brief interval the room, the noise, the music, the people, all dropped away. Then I heard Deirdre's voice saying, “Save some for me.” Stephen released me, picked Deirdre up and swung her round. Meanwhile the man on my right seized his chance to give me a whiskery kiss. By the time I emerged, Stephen had disappeared into a round of embraces.
I went in search of a drink. The kitchen was deserted. I found a glass, rinsed it, and poured myself a substantial measure of Glenfiddich. I was suddenly exhausted. It was hard to believe that only that morning Eve had come into my room at seven A.M. to demand a story. I felt a kind of vertigo at the immense distance I had covered in the course of the day. I closed my eyes and swallowed some Scotch. Then I went into the hall, paused for another quick drink, and prepared to brave the living room.
As I stepped forward, Stephen hurried through the door.
He saw me, stopped, and smiled. “Celia,” he said, “I was afraid you'd left. All hell's breaking loose here. I was wondering if you'd like to go for a walk.”
My fatigue vanished. I ran upstairs to fetch my coat. In the bathroom mirror my cheeks were flushed and my eyes slightly red from drinking, but I did not linger over my appearance. I gathered up various toilet articles and put them in my bag.
When we stepped out into the street it was immediately apparent that the people of Edinburgh were celebrating the New Year. The air was filled with the sounds of car horns, shouting, and the wailing of bagpipes. As we waited on the pavement, a man stopped his car and blew me kisses through the window.
We crossed the road into the Meadows. It must have rained earlier in the day. On the wet grass our footsteps made a squelching sound and I could feel the water seeping into my boots. “It would be nice to go up Arthur's Seat, but I think that's a bit ambitious,” Stephen said.
“I've never been.”
“Never?” he exclaimed. “And how long have you lived here? The next fine day, I'll be your guide. I mean if you'd like.”
“That would be lovely.”
As we walked, the noises of the city faded, and soon even the bagpipes were barely audible. We were halfway across the Meadows when Stephen stopped. “I haven't been paying attention to where we're going,” he said, “but I think if we head over there we'll get to some benches. Don't those look like trees to you?”
Dimly I could make out the dark shapes. “I think so.”
In a few minutes we had found a bench. We sat down. It was cold, hard, and slightly damp. Side by side we looked out across the Meadows. Even above the grassy expanse the sky was tinged with the orange light of the city. “One of the things I hate about living in a city,” Stephen said, “is that you
can never really see the sky. Where I grew up, you only had to walk a short distance in any direction and you'd be out in a field. You could even see the small stars in Orion's belt without a telescope.”
I followed the gesture of his hand. The Milky Way lay like a ribbon of gauze across the sky, and directly in front of us the seven stars of the Plough shone brightly. “Do you remember the part in
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
where she looks at the stars and imagines herself transported to one of them?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. “Poor Tess.”
I gave a tiny shiver, so small, I thought, as to be imperceptible, but Stephen noticed. “You're cold,” he said, and put his arm around me.
We had forgotten to draw the curtains, and on the morning of New Year's Day the sunlight coming through the window woke us. Stephen's flat, like mine, was on the top floor, and from the bed I could see the outlines of slate roofs and chimney pots. In one corner of the window sill two blue-grey pigeons were cooing vigorously, filling the room with their soft rumbling.
When Stephen at last went to make us coffee, I studied the room. My first impression was of an almost feminine neatness. The bedside table was covered with a white cloth; there was nothing on it save a lamp and an alarm clock. The walls were pale yellow, and opposite the bed was a small cast-iron fireplace with blue tiles around the grate. There were a couple of photographs on the mantelpiece, and when I heard the bathroom door close, I went to look at them. One showed Stephen with a small girl, the other the same girl with an older man and woman. I presumed she was a relative: a niece or cousin.
Stephen returned, walking slowly, carrying two red mugs. He handed one to me, took off his dressing gown, and climbed back into bed. I sat up to drink some coffee. “Who's the little girl in the photographs?” I asked.
“That's Jenny, my daughter.”
Suddenly I understood the careful tidiness of the room. No wonder he had been pleased to find a stranger at Deirdre's party and had refrained from introducing me to people;
everyone else knew he was married. I should have guessed that he was too good to be true.
“The other people are my parents. Both the photographs were taken outside their house in Abernethy.”
I raised the mug to my lips and drank some coffee. I would have liked to leap from the bed and run out of the flat, but I was determined not to give him the satisfaction of seeing that I minded.
“Is something wrong? Are you having second thoughts about me?” Stephen asked. He was looking at me anxiously.
“You should have told me.”
“Celia, it wasn't as if I was trying to keep her a secret. I didn't get round to it. She lives with her mother, and I only see her on Saturdays. Helen and I have been living apart for the last four years.”
“So you're not married?”
“Legally I amâwhen you have a child, getting a divorce is complicatedâbut it doesn't mean anything. We only got married in the first place because we had to.”
Stephen went on, explaining and reassuring. Once I grasped that he and Helen were safely apart, I was pleased rather than dismayed. Lewis had cured me of the notion that people could change, and I saw it as a sign of promise that Stephen had been married and had a child; it showed that such a relationship was possible for him. We slid down under the covers again. The sunlight moved across the room.
When we roused ourselves for the second time, I remembered that Tobias needed to be fed. I told Stephen, and as soon as we were washed and dressed we drove to my flat. After the revelry of the previous evening the streets were deserted, and the journey took only a few minutes. We found Tobias in a wretched state. The sound of plaintive mewing reached us while we were still climbing the stairs, and he greeted me as if he had not seen a human being for days. After I had fed him, I left the room to collect some clean clothes.
When I returned Stephen was kneeling down beside Tobias, stroking his neck. “Why don't we take him with us?” he said. “It seems particularly horrid to leave him alone on New Year's Day.”
On our way back to Stephen's flat, the sight of a taxi reminded me of the previous evening. I told Stephen about the driver's prophecy.
“So I'm your tall, dark stranger,” he said. “What if I'd decided to dye my hair as a joke?”
“It wouldn't have made any difference. We were in the hands of fate. Originally I was going to come back on the third, and if I hadn't met Deirdre on the stairs, she wouldn't have known to invite me.”
With Lewis any avowal of affection had been a mistake; he would disappear for one week if I said I liked him, two if I hinted at love. But Stephen took my hand and smiled. “And if I hadn't happened to go to the toilet at exactly the right moment.”
Later, when we were back in bed, he said, “I believe our meeting was fate too. I knew the moment I saw you that you were going to be important to me. There was something about the way you stood in the hall that made me want to put my arms around you. You were so uncertain, like an animal coming out of its burrowâyou looked as if the slightest alarm would make you go back into hibernation for another six months.”
Stephen had placed two candles on the bedside table, and from where I lay, I could see the outline of his face against the light. In the still air the flames hung golden and unwavering. “But I'm so ordinary-looking,” I protested.
He propped himself on one elbow and gazed down at me. “I was watching your hair in the sunlight this morning; there are reddish lights in it, a sort of Stewart colouring. It made me wonder if maybe you had Scottish ancestors.”
“Not that I know of.”
He pressed himself against me. “Anyway, when I said there was something about you, I didn't mean something physical. I felt that I recognised you in a deep way. And you have very beautiful eyebrows.”
For years I had plucked my eyebrows, thinking that they made me look like a sulky boy; only since I moved to Edinburgh had I let them grow naturally. I raised my head to kiss Stephen. Slowly I pushed my hand down his chest and over his belly. Then I followed with my mouth.
As I pieced together Stephen's history, I realised that he and I had arrived in each other's lives at exactly the right moment. My grief about Lewis had been magnified by my loneliness in Edinburgh, and I was more than ready to discard that shop-soiled emotion. In doing so, I discovered that being with him had not been a complete waste of time. Before I knew Lewis, I had always been passive, waiting for the man to make everything perfect; he had shown me how to be otherwise. Now, with Stephen, I found that I could be passionate in a way that I had never been before. I desired him and I felt free to act upon my desire. Part of the pleasure of being with him was the pleasure I took in discovering this new side of myself.
And Stephen seemed to feel something similar. Helen had been his equivalent of Lewisâbeautiful, successful, sexually unreliable. “It wasn't love exactly,” he told me. “It was a sickness. I never trusted her, and I never felt that I could be myself; being myself wasn't enough.” He had learned from Helen to think of female beauty as a snare and a delusion, and I suspected that it was a relief to him to be with a woman whom people did not turn to stare at in the street.
Â
Jenny had been staying with Helen's family in Reading for the Christmas holidays, and I had known Stephen for almost a fortnight before one of her regular Saturday visits occurred. When the alarm sounded that morning I was deeply asleep,
and at first I did not understand why we were being thus rudely woken. Then, as Stephen kissed me, I remembered his daughter. I ran my hands down his back; I loved the smoothness of his body. He kissed me again and pulled away. “Helen gets furious if I'm late,” he explained.
“I suppose this is her one free day.” I rolled back to my side of the bed. I was determined to be exemplary about Jenny. In view of the fact that they had not seen each other for several weeks, I had suggested that it might be better for me to leave them alone together, but Stephen had disagreed. “She likes meeting my friends,” he said. “Besides, I want you to meet her.”
He got out of bed and walked over to the window. As he drew the curtains, I heard the turbulent beating of wings. “The pigeons were on the sill again,” he said. “We should put out bread.”
“As long as we keep the door shut so that Tobias can't molest them.”
Even as I spoke there was a scratching sound. Stephen opened the door, and Tobias padded in and jumped onto the foot of the bed. He tucked himself against my legs. Stephen began to dress, picking up his clothes from the floor where they had fallen the night before. Behind him, through the window, the sky above the rooftops was the colour of wood ash. “It's freezing,” he said. “I'll put on the fires. Don't get up until it's warmer.” He bent down to kiss me goodbye.
I had never been alone in Stephen's flat before, and there was a peculiar intimacy about the solitude; it made me feel that this was my home. Almost forty minutes passed before I persuaded myself to emerge from the safety of the blankets. Then the sharpness of the cold drove me to carry my clothes into the living room, where, fearing that I might be surprised at any moment, I dressed in front of the gas fire. The bracelet which Stephen had given me the night before was lying on the mantelpiece. I clasped it around my wrist. The silver band
was carved with wavy lines, like running water; I thought I would wear it always.
As I buttoned my cardigan, I wandered over to the window. Beneath me in the dark street a man and a small girl were waiting to cross the road. As I stared down at Stephen and Jenny, I was suddenly aware of my heart beating with uneasy rapidity. There was no need to be nervous, I reminded myself; she was only a child. I turned away from the window and began to tidy the room, picking up newspapers and plumping up the pillows in the armchairs, until I heard the front door open and Stephen call my name. I stepped into the hall. He came over and put his arm around me. “Jenny, this is Celia,” he said.
I smiled and said hello.
“Hello,” she said. She looked down to unzip her jacket.
I made a pot of tea, Stephen fetched a glass of orange juice for Jenny, and we settled down in the living-room. He and I sat on either side of the fire, and Jenny knelt on the rug between us. She was wearing a dark blue pullover, with a white shirt and new, freshly ironed jeans; her hair was held back by barrettes. The overall effect was so neat that it was almost as if she were in uniform. While she sipped her juice, I searched for signs of her kinship with Stephen.
Even allowing for the disparities of sex and age, they were very different: she was pale, he was warmly coloured; her eyes were dark as pickled walnuts, his were light as the water in a burn; her hair was dark and heavy, his was the colour of honey and wispy. But as I watched Jenny I began to notice that there were ways in which she did resemble her father. She had the same habit of using her hands when she talked, and her intonation of certain words was identical to his. Stephen had told me that he knew Helen was having an affair when Jenny started to say “preposterous”âa word that neither he nor Helen often uttered.
“What's an editor?” Jenny asked.
I looked at Stephen. “You're the expert,” he said.
“When people write books, I correct them before they're published so that there won't be any mistakes in them.”
“What sort of books?” she asked.
“Textbooks, like the ones you use in school.”
She giggled. “I never knew those were written by people. They're so boring I thought they came out of a machine.”
“Sometimes I wish they did,” I said. “Authors are difficult. They always think they know everything.”
“Teachers think that too. Miss Nisbet will never say she doesn't know the answer. Sometimes we ask her things no one knows, to see what she'll say.”
“Like what?” said Stephen. He had been sitting back in his chair, watching our exchange with a pleased expression on his face.
“Like,” she said, elongating the syllable while she gathered her thoughts. “Like who was the man in the iron mask, and where is Hitler buried. Anna asks her dad what we can say.”
“And what does Miss Nisbet tell you?”
“I don't remember.” She spread her fingers as if the answer might be hidden between them, then shook her head. “Different things.”
“I could help with this,” said Stephen. “There are lots of mathematical conundrums that have never been solved, like Fermat's last theorem. I bet that would flummox her.” He put down his cup. “If we're going to go to the library before the film, we should think about leaving.” He turned towards me. “Jenny wants to see
Ghostbusters
. Would you like to come?”
I looked at Jenny. She was tracing the pattern in the rug with one finger. Her lips were slightly pursed. “Are you sure?” I asked.
“Of course,” said Stephen. “We'd be delighted to have your company, wouldn't we, Jenny?”
“Yes,” she said.
I was so absorbed in deciphering Jenny's reaction that
when the telephone rang, I started. Jenny giggled. As Stephen left the room to answer it, she said, “You jumped.”
“I know. I was surprised.”
Through the open door we could hear Stephen saying, “Hello, Mum. How are you?”
“That must be Granny,” Jenny said, and scrambled to her feet. She went out into the hall. After a few minutes Stephen surrendered the phone to her and returned.
“That was my mother,” he said. “I promised we'd go and stay the last weekend in January.”