Love Over Scotland

“Nice girl, called Annie.”

Big Lou’s tone was level. “Oh yes. And the other?”

“She’s sixteen, I think,” said Eddie.

Matthew watched Big Lou’s expression carefully. He knew, as did Lou, that Matthew’s bride in Mobile, Alabama – the one who had run away from him – had been sixteen. He would do anything to protect Big Lou from disappointment and sorrow.

But there was a certain measure of these things from which we cannot be protected, no matter what the hopes and intentions of our friends may be.

16. How To Let Down the Opposite Sex Gently While Matthew was at Big Lou’s, Pat remained in the gallery.

She regretted misleading Matthew about Wolf. It had been a lie, no matter how she might try to clothe it in the garb of 48

How To Let Down the Opposite Sex Gently kindness. There was something shoddy about lying, even if the motive for lying was concern for the feelings of another. She had wanted to protect Matthew from the disappointment of rebuff, but there was something else which had prompted her to lie, something else not so altruistic. Pat wanted to spare herself the embarrassment of telling Mathew that she did not want a deeper involvement with him. That was nothing to do with Matthew’s susceptibilities; that was to do with her own feelings.

She watched Matthew cross the road to Big Lou’s coffee bar.

He had been so chirpy in his new distressed-oatmeal sweater, and now he walked with his head down, staring at the ground in front of him. He looked disconsolate, and no doubt was. And yet, did she really owe Matthew anything? One could not pretend to have feelings that one did not really have. That, surely, was unkinder still: lying about an imaginary boyfriend might be considered cruel, but a precautionary let-down was surely less hurtful than a let-down after one has been allowed to cherish hopes.

Friendship, thought Pat, was for the most part straightforward, but the moment that friendship was complicated by sex, then its course became beset by dangers. One did not have to see every member of the opposite sex in a sexual light; quite the opposite, in fact: she had plenty of friends of the opposite sex with whom her relationship was entirely platonic. Such friendships, which rather surprised people of her father’s generation, were relaxed enough to allow sharing of tents on holiday or sleeping in the same room – on the sofa or the floor – without any suggestion of intimacy. That used not to be possible other than in exceptional conditions. She had heard from an aunt about the ethos of the Scottish mountaineering clubs in the past, when a form of purity allowed mixed bathing in Highland rivers without any suggestion of anything else. And she had read, too, that in Cambridge young men used to bathe in the river, naked, even when women passed sedately by in punts. Perhaps there was something about rivers that promoted this sense of purity; she was not sure.

How To Let Down the Opposite Sex Gently 49

But none of this helped her in her current predicament.

She felt the opposite of pure; she felt dirtied by her lie to Matthew and now, as she saw him, walking back across the road, she resolved to tell him that Wolf was only a friend, and that there was no boyfriend. And then she would go on to the delicate issue of her feelings for him. She would tell him that while she valued him as a friend . . . No, that really was too cliched. She simply could not bring herself to tell Matthew she did not think of him “in that way”; nobody wanted not to be thought of “in that way”; men, in particular, would prefer not to be thought of at all. And yet it was true that she did not think of Matthew “in that way”. Matthew was safe; he provided comfortable, unthreatening company, like the company of an old school-friend one had not seen for many years.

Wolf was different. From the moment she had seen him, in that tutorial in which poor Dr Fantouse wittered on about Benedetto Croce, she had thought of Wolf “in that way”. And he, looking at her across the table, had clearly reciprocated the perspective. He had that gaze which some people have of 50

How To Let Down the Opposite Sex Gently mentally undressing the person at whom they are looking, but Pat had not resented this. Rather, she had enjoyed it. And she had enjoyed, too, the short time she had spent with him in the Elephant House and walking across the Meadows until that moment of surprise that had occurred in Spottiswoode Street, when she had discovered that Wolf was heading for her flat, too, where his girlfriend, Tessie, lived.

They had gone upstairs together to the door of the flat on the third floor. Pat reached into her pocket for her key and let them both in.

“She may not be in,” said Wolf. “I didn’t tell her I was coming.”

“That’s her room,” said Pat, pointing to a closed door off the hall.

Wolf smiled. “I know that,” he said.

Of course he would, thought Pat, and looked sheepish. And at that moment, as Wolf knocked at the door, his back to her, she felt an intense, visceral jealousy. It hit somewhere inside her, in her stomach perhaps, with the force of a blow. For a few seconds she stood stock still, shocked by the emotion, rendered incapable of movement. But then, as the door opened slightly and she saw Tessie, half-framed within, she found it within herself to turn away and walk into her own room. There, she took a deep breath and closed her eyes. The force of the emotion had surprised her; it had been as if, on a dusty road to Damascus, she had been hurled to the ground. And the realisation that came to her this forcefully was that she had found in this boy, this Wolf, with his fair hair and his wide grin, one who touched her soul in the most profound way. Without him she was incomplete. Without him she . . .

But such thoughts were absurd. She had known him for a very short time. They had talked to one another for – what was it? – an hour or two at the most. She knew nothing about him other than that his mother had been an enthusiast for herbal remedies, that his father sold valves in the oil industry and had accumulated a vast number of air-miles, and that he had a girlfriend called Tessie. And that last piece of knowledge was the Anguish

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most difficult of all to confront. Wolf was not available. He was taken. And by one of her flatmates too! That horrid, horrid girl, Tessie, who even now, no doubt, was in Wolf’s arms, her fingers running through his hair. “Spottiswoode!” wailed Pat, as if the word had curative power, a verbal scapegoat for her misery, her sense of utter