Love Over Scotland Read Free

keeps going on and on about some girl called Jean he met in Glasgow. Apparently she’s got the most tremendous voice and is studying opera at the Academy there. He can’t stop talking about her. You watch. He’ll probably bring her name up in the seminar: ‘Jean says that Benedetto Croce…’”
    There were other snippets of gossip, and then he enquired about what Pat had been doing the previous year. She told him about the job in the Gallery, which she still had on a part-time basis, and about Scotland Street too.
    “It’s more interesting in the New Town,” he said. “Up in Marchmont everybody’s a student. There are no…well, no real people. The New Town’s different. Who did you share with?”
    Pat wondered how one might describe Bruce. It was difficult to know where to start. “A boy,” she said. “Bruce Anderson. We weren’t…you know, there was nothing between us.” But there had been, she thought, blushing at the memory of her sudden infatuation. Was that nothing?
    “Of course not,” said Wolf. “People you share with are a nono. If things get difficult, then you have to move out. Or they have to.”
    Pat agreed. “And I knew everybody else on the stair,” she said. “There was this woman called Domenica Macdonald. She lived opposite. And a couple called Irene and Stuart who had a little boy called Bertie. He played the saxophone and I used to hear ‘As Time Goes By’ drifting up through the walls. And two guys on the first floor.”
    They had now crossed Melville Drive and, having walked up the brae past the towering stone edifice of Warrender Park Terrace, with its giddy attic windows breaking out of the steep slate roofs, they were at the beginning of Spottiswoode Street. A few doorways along was Pat’s stair, with its communal door and list of names alongside the bell-pulls. She assumed that Wolf would be going on, perhaps to Thirlestane Road, where so many people seemed to live, but when she indicated that she had reached her destination, he stopped too, and smiled.
    “But so have I,” he said.
    Her heart gave a leap. Was there some other meaning to this? Did he expect her to invite him upstairs? She would, of course. She did not want him to go. She wanted to be with him, to be beguiled.
    “I live here,” she said, hesitantly.
    “What floor?”
    “Second. Middle flat.”
    Wolf swept back the hair that the wind had blown across his brow. “But that’s amazing,” he said, his eyes wide with surprise. “So does my girlfriend, Tessie. You must be sharing with her.”

4. At Domenica’s Flat
    Angus Lordie, portrait painter and occasional poet, walked slowly down Scotland Street, looking up at the windows. He liked to look into other people’s houses, if he could. It was not nosiness, of course; artists were allowed to look, he thought–no artist could really be considered a voyeur. Looking was what an artist was trained to do, and if an artist did not look, then he would not see. The evening was the best time to inspect the domestic arrangements of others, as people often left their lights on and their curtains open, thus creating a stage for passers-by to see. And the New Town of Edinburgh provided rich theatre in that respect, especially along the more gracious Georgian streets where tall windows at ground floor allowed a fine view of drawing rooms and studies. Of course curtains could have been pulled across such windows, but often were not, and Angus Lordie was convinced that this was because those who lived within wanted people to see what they had, wanted them to see their grand pianos, their heavily-framed pictures, their clutters of chinoiserie. Heriot Row and Moray Place were good for this, although the decoration of most Moray Place flats was somewhat dull. But there was a particularly fine grand piano in a window in Ainslie Place and a Ferguson picture of a woman in a hat in Great Stuart Street.
    As he walked down Scotland Street, Angus Lordie reflected on the