Pat looked thoughtful. What had she seen? A rugby shirt.
And a pair of trousers. Perhaps her mind had filled in the rest, filled in the hair with the gel, filled in the look of Bruce.
Dr Macgregor decided to get up from his chair. He stood, and then walked over to the window and looked out over the garden. The lawn was dry.
“Don’t get mixed up with that young man again,” he said quietly.
Pat looked up sharply. “I wasn’t planning to,” she protested.
“I really disliked him.”
Dr Macgregor nodded. “Maybe you did. But that type of person can be very destructive. They know how powerful their charm is. And they use it.” He paused. “I don’t want you to be hurt. You know that, don’t you? That’s all that a father wants for his daughter. Or most of them. Fathers don’t want their daughters to get hurt. And yet they know that there are plenty of men only too ready to treat them badly. They know that.”
Pat thought that her father was being melodramatic. Bruce was no danger to her. He may have been in the past, but not now. She was like somebody who had been given an inocula-tion against an illness. She was immune to Bruce and his charms.
And yet she had felt unsettled when she saw him; it had been exciting. Would one feel that excitement if one was immune to somebody? She thought not.
Her father was looking at her now. “Are you going to seek him out?” he asked.
14
“I think I’d like to see him,” she said.
The paper had been well-received. One of the referees for the journal had written: “The author demonstrates convincingly that a sense of being on the wrong side of history changes everything.
The social devices by which people protect themselves from confronting the truth that there is a terminus to their existence as a community are laid bare by the author. A triumph.” And now here it was, that triumph, in off- print form, with an attractive cover of chalk blue, the physical result of all that heat and discomfort.
When the box containing the sixty off-prints had been delivered by the postman, Domenica had immediately left the house and walked round to Angus Lordie’s flat in Drummond Place, clutching one of the copies.
“My paper,” she said, as Angus invited her in. “You will see that I have inscribed it to you. Look. There.”
Angus opened the cover and saw, on the inside, the sentence which Domenica had inscribed in black ink.
Domenica shrugged. “Well, you did, didn’t you? I went to the Malacca Straits, and you stayed behind in Edinburgh. I’m simply stating what happened.”
Angus frowned. “But anybody reading this would think that I was some . . . some sort of coward. It’s almost as if you’re giving me a white feather.”
Domenica drew in her breath. She had not intended that, and it was quite ridiculous of Angus to suggest it. “I meant no such thing,” she said. “There are absolutely no aspersions being cast on . . .”
“Yes, there are,” said Angus petulantly. “And you never asked me whether I’d like to go. Saying that somebody stayed behind suggests that they were at least given the chance to go along.
But I wasn’t. You never gave me the chance to go.”
“Well, really!” said Domenica. “You made it very clear that you didn’t like the idea of my going to the Malacca Straits in the first 16
“It would be a very strange dinner party where the hostess was not there,” said Angus quickly. “If one wrote a note to such a hostess one would have to say: ‘To one who stayed away.’ Yes!
That’s what one would have to write.”
Domenica bit her lip. She knew that Angus had his moody moments, but this was quite ridiculous. She was now sorry that she had come to see him at all, and was certainly regretting having brought him the off-print. “You’re behaving in a very childish way, Angus,” she said. “In fact, I’ve got a good mind to take my paper away from you. There are plenty of people who would appreciate it, you know.”