44 Scotland Street

Wholesome was the word which her mother would have used, and which Pat would have derided. But it was a useful word when it came to describe Bruce. Wholesome.

Bruce was returning her gaze. Twenty, he thought. Quite expensively dressed. Tanned in a way which suggested outside

Stuff Happens

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pursuits. Average height. Attractive enough, in a rather willowy way. Not my type (this last conclusion, with a slight tinge of regret).

“What do you do?” he asked. Occasions like this, he thought, were times for bluntness. One might as well find out as much as one could before deciding to take her, and it was he who would have to make the decision because Ian and Sarah were off travelling for a few months and they were relying on him to find someone.

Pat looked up at the cornice. “I’m on a gap year,” she said, and added, because truth required it after all: “It’s my second gap year, actually.”

Bruce stared at her, and then burst out laughing. “Your second gap year?”

Pat nodded. She felt miserable. Everybody said that. Everybody said that because they had no idea of what had happened.

“My first one was a disaster,” she said. “So I started again.”

Bruce picked up a matchbox and rattled it absent-mindedly.

“What went wrong?” he asked.

“Do you mind if I don’t tell you? Or just not yet.”

He shrugged. “Stuff happens,” he said. “It really does.”

After her meeting with Bruce, Pat returned to her parents’ house on the south side of Edinburgh. She found her father in his study, a disorganised room stacked with back copies of the Journal of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. She told him of the meeting with Bruce.

“It didn’t last long,” she said. “I had expected a whole lot of them. But there was only him. The others were away somewhere or other.”

4

Stuff Happens

Her father raised an eyebrow. In his day, young people had shared flats with others of the same sex. There were some mixed flats, of course, but these were regarded as being a bit – how should one put it? – adventurous. He had shared a flat in Argyle Place, in the shadow of the Sick Kids’ Hospital, with three other male medical students. They had lived there for years, right up to the time of graduation, and even after that one of them had kept it on while he was doing his houseman’s year. Girlfriends had come for weekends now and then, but that had been the exception. Now, men and women lived together in total innocence (sometimes) as if in Eden.

“It’s not just him?” he asked. “There are others?”

“Yes,” she said. “Or at least I think so. There were four rooms.

Don’t worry.”

“I’m not worrying.”

“You are.”

He pursed his lips. “You could always stay at home, you know.

We wouldn’t interfere.”

She looked at him, and he shook his head. “No,” he went on.

“I understand. You have to lead your own life. We know that.

That’s what gap years are for.”

“Exactly,” said Pat. “A gap year is . . .”

She faltered. She was not at all sure what a gap year was really for, and this was her second. Was it a time in which to grow up?

Was it an expensive indulgence, a rite de passage for the offspring of wealthy parents? In many cases, she thought, it was an expensive holiday: a spell in South America imposing yourself on a puzzled community somewhere, teaching them English and painting the local school. There were all sorts of organisations that arranged these things. There might even be one called Paint Aid, for all she knew – an organisation which went out and painted places that looked in need of a coat of paint. She herself had painted half a school in Ecuador before somebody stole the remaining supplies of paint and they had been obliged to stop.

Her father waited for her to finish the sentence, but she did not. So he changed the subject and asked her when she was going to move in. He would transport everything, as he always did; the Stuff Happens

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bundles of clothing, the bedside lamp, the suitcases, the kettle.

And he would not complain.

“And work?” he asked. “When do you start at the gallery?”

“Tuesday,” said Pat. “They’re closed on Mondays. Tuesday’s my first day.”