She thought about alternatives. She wanted to live with him, it was true – she was sure of her feelings in that regard. It would be possible. For them to live together in her flat – she thought her flatmate would not object, but it was cramped and barely large enough for two, let alone three. It was also dark, and a bit depressing, and there were neighbours whose strident arguments – and passionate make-ups – could be heard through the walls. Even if some garrets were romantic, hers was not one of them. This was her chance to get away from all that. It may not last, but she did not particularly mind impermanence.

  “What if I wanted a bath? What about the bathroom?”

  He replied that there were two bathrooms. The one in his corridor was used only by him and the two other men. “We call it the boys’ bathroom. You could slip in and out of that and nobody would notice.”

  She hesitated. “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s a crazy idea, but—”

  “But what?”

  She swallowed hard. “I don’t know if I feel up to it. I thought I’d like to live with the sort of people you’re sharing with, but they’re all so much more . . . well, they’re all students and I’m nothing more than a person who works in a hotel kitchen.”

  He gripped her hand. “Nonsense. You’re as smart as they are – easily.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Well, I do.”

  She moved closer to him. She kissed him gently, on the cheek. “All right.”

  Her acceptance came as a surprise. He had imagined that he would have to do more persuading, and even then, he was not sure that she would agree to what he proposed. It sounded almost absurd – the sort of thing that would be considered only to be laughed off.

  She said, “If you want me to, I will.”

  His voice was excited. “I do. Starting right now.”

  “Tonight? You mean tonight?”

  “Yes. You can get your things tomorrow.”

  She realised he did not mean that she should saunter in openly, carrying a suitcase.

  “Discreetly,” he added.

  He wrapped his arms around her. She closed her eyes. She thought: is this happening to me? Does he really like me, of all people, when there are so many more interesting girls in this city? He comes from New York. He’s got money. He shares with these students, and he’s asking me to live with him, in secret, and I have said that I will, because nothing else as exciting as this has ever happened to me, and maybe it really is my turn now.

  Thirteen

  Just a bunch of kids

  WHEN NEIL MENTIONED TO Angela that it was his birthday the following day, she asked whether she could make him dinner.

  “You’re probably going out,” she said. “But if you aren’t, I could make moussaka for you. I’m not a particularly good cook, but I’m proud of my moussaka.” She paused. “Or something else. Chicken Kiev? Do you like chicken?”

  “I love moussaka. And that’s really kind of you.”

  “So you weren’t going to do anything?”

  He shook his head. “One of the guys in my year said he was going to the pub, but I’m happy to opt out of that. Moussaka’s much better.”

  Angela showed her pleasure. “And ice cream for afterwards?”

  Neil said that he liked ice cream almost as much as moussaka. He would buy a bottle of wine. “Something Algerian?”

  She looked uncertain.

  “Not really,” he said. “Italian, I think. As long as you’re okay with that.”

  They sat down in the kitchen at seven the following day. Julie had just finished cooking something for herself, and was now washing up. She was going to a concert at the Queen’s Hall, and was in a hurry. She gave Neil a kiss on the cheek for his birthday and left.

  * * *

  “My father,” said Neil, “told me once that he had only ever designed one building that he was really proud of. One building – one – in thirty years as an architect. Don’t you think that’s sad?”

  Angela looked down at her plate. “Is the moussaka okay?” she asked.

  “Fabulous. But just think of that – one building out of hundreds, I suppose.”

  She looked thoughtful. “Most people have jobs that involve a lot of the same old same old. Architects are probably no different. My father did the same thing year after year. I don’t think there was any variety.”

  “Yes, but one building in all that time,” he persisted.

  She asked him what it was, and he told her that it was a small hotel. “It wasn’t anywhere in Orkney – he got the commission from a friend he’d been at university with. This guy wanted to build a hotel in Pitlochry. He asked my father to design it. He said, ‘You do whatever you want.’ Apparently, clients don’t say that to architects very often.”

  “So, what was it like? Did you ever see it?”

  Neil nodded. “He took me there last year. He was very keen for me to see it.”

  She asked what it was like.

  “I really liked it. It was a hotel, of course, and you know what hotels are usually like. But this was different. “

  She said that it would have been awkward had he not liked it.

  “Very,” he agreed.

  “Would you have told the truth, or would you have pretended to like it?”

  He thought for a few moments. “I don’t think that you have to tell the truth if it involves hurting somebody’s feelings and –”

  Angela interrupted him. “But then you would have to mislead people – sometimes badly. A friend comes to you and says, does this dress suit me, and if you look at her and think, It doesn’t go at all with your colouring, then you don’t say, Oh, it’s great. You don’t. You think of a way of getting the message across tactfully. You say, It’s not bad but I think a different shade of pink would work better with your hair . . . And you say, pretty quickly, Not that there’s anything wrong with pink. But your friend has incredible flame-red hair, I mean really the clash is extraordinary, but you still don’t say it.”

  He did not argue the point. “I didn’t have to make anything up. I told my father I thought his hotel was beautiful. I said it was the most beautiful hotel I’d ever seen. And he was really pleased. I could see that. No surprise, I suppose. If somebody tells you the hotel you designed is really beautiful, of course you’re going to be pleased.”

  She asked why it was so beautiful.

  He replied with a question of his own. “How do you define beauty?”

  She thought, impermissibly, You.

  And so she looked away. If she held his gaze, she would end up saying it, and she was sure that would embarrass him. Women tended to enjoy compliments of that sort, but she was not certain that men did. Perhaps vain men did – those narcissistic types who were always glancing at their reflection in the mirror or a shop window, who had their eyebrows trimmed when they went to the barber. Her cousin, Billy, had objected to that she remembered with a smile. “There was this barber, you see, who asked me whether I wanted him to do something to my eyebrows. Eyebrows? I thought, Mind your own business, pal.” Neil, she thought, was indifferent to his eyebrows, and probably did not care too much about his appearance. There were some who did not have to bother about the angle from which they were looked at, having nothing to hide. That was natural beauty.

  “So,” prompted Neil. “What is beauty?”

  “Something that strikes us as being . . .” She struggled to find the word.

  He helped her. “Harmonious? Is that it?”

  “Yes, along those lines. Julie was talking about something like that the other day. You weren’t in. I was here with Julie and Georgia, and Julie told us about a lecture she’d gone to on aesthetics.”

  Neil smiled. “So that’s what women talk about among themselves.”

  “Sometimes. What do you think we talk about, anyway? Clothes?”

  He assured her he would never suggest that.

  “And men?” she said. “What do you think we think you talk about?”

  He had a ready answer. “You think we talk about sport. Football and so on. And cars. You think we chat about that sort of thing.”

  “Well, don’t you?”

  Neil sighed. “Sometimes. But it depends on the men. I never talk about football. I find football tedious. You know which way it’s going to end. Somebody’s going to kick the ball into the goal and everybody will jump about and shout their heads off. Frankly, that bores me.”

  “Which leaves cars.”

  He said that he did not mind cars. “But there’s not all that much you can say about them – unless you get really technical. And I’ve never had a conversation with anyone about acceleration or suspension or torque.”

  “Perhaps you’re missing something.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

  She toyed with a forkful of moussaka. “Are you sure this is okay?”

  “I told you,” he replied. “It’s really good.”

  She took a sip of wine. He had spent slightly more than he had intended, and had drawn her attention to the label. “This is Bordeaux, you see. Look. Saint-Estèphe. We went there once, when I was fourteen. My dad likes wine. He thinks he knows a lot about it, but I suspect he doesn’t really. I once poured him a glass of Italian wine – it was dirt cheap – and he said, ‘This is a very nice claret.’ ”

  She thought he might just have been being polite. “Perhaps he knew straight away, but didn’t want to hurt your feelings.”

  “I don’t think so. My dad is fairly direct. If he doesn’t like something, he says so. He’s lost clients that way. They tell him what they have in mind, and he says that it’s a rubbish idea. They get offended and go to another architect. Or should I say, the other architect, as there is only one other in Orkney.”

  Now she tasted the wine again and said, “Portuguese.”

  He laughed. “Wrongly labelled? Maybe.”

  She wanted to know more about the hotel, the one which had started their conversation about beauty. Neil was easy to talk to – one topic led on to another quite naturally. She could talk to him for hours, she thought. It would be like a stream that seems to be going nowhere in particular, but just continues to flow.

  “That hotel,” she said. “The one your father designed, and which you said you liked so much – what was so special about it?”

  He looked thoughtful. “He followed a language.”

  She looked puzzled. “Sorry, I don’t quite . . .”

  “Buildings talk a language, you see. They have a grammar that you can see at work in the way the various elements hang together.” He paused. “Am I making sense?”

  She understood what this was about. “Back to harmony,” she said.

  “Yes, but there’s more to it than that. There was a professor of architecture called Christopher Alexander. He was at Berkeley, in California, and he wrote a book that I really love. It was all about the principles of humane architecture. That’s the opposite of brutalist architecture. Brutalist architecture says wham! It’s in your face, or it’s a kick in the solar plexus. No concession to subtlety or ambivalence. Nothing. Flat surfaces. No relief. Impersonal. No ornament.”

  She said she knew what he was talking about. There were brutalist flats not far from where she had been brought up. The people who lived in them mostly hated them. There was nothing for the soul in such buildings.

  Neil agreed. “No connection. No sense of neighbourhood.”

  “And people are trapped if the lifts don’t work.”

  He winced. “The planners who commission such buildings never live in them, do they?”

  She looked thoughtful. “Just like the people who close mines down – they don’t live in mining villages.”

  He looked up. There was a note in her voice that reminded him this was a painful subject. “I’m sorry about the strike. I know you come from West Lothian. I know there are mines there.”

  He wondered whether to say more, but decided against it. He sympathised with the miners and had been dismayed by the pictures he had seen in the papers of the fights on the picket lines. He understood that they were trying to preserve a way of life, but at the same time he saw a certain hopelessness in their cause. Deindustrialisation was a fact of life. If there was less need for coal, then was there any point in continuing to mine it? He sensed that this was not the time to raise that doubt.

  He had more to say about the hotel. “I loved it because it embodied so many of the principles that Christopher Alexander talks about. All the walls had recesses in them – places where there would be shadows breaking up the surface. There was a courtyard – and Christopher Alexander says that a courtyard is the space in which people feel most comfortable. Did you know that? We are at ease in a courtyard because we feel secure. Nobody can surprise us by creeping up behind us. It’s that simple.”

  “I suppose so. I hadn’t thought about that.” She paused, before continuing, “I like courtyards too. I’d like to live in a courtyard.”

  “The worst place to live,” Neil said, “is in a house that is in a long street of houses. People who live in places like that tend not to know their neighbours. It’s just the way we are. We can’t relate to people when we’re in a really long line like that. It’s the same as at a bar. When you see those pictures of the typical American bar, there are people sitting shoulder to shoulder not talking to one another – because they are all facing the same direction. Nobody is face-to-face. There’s a picture called Nighthawks. We looked at in our urban design course. It’s by an American realist artist called Edward Hopper. He painted loneliness. This picture shows a diner at night with people not relating to one another. That’s what you get, you see.”

  “I think I know it.”

  “His paintings have people in them,” Neil continued. “But they aren’t talking to one another. They’re all very lonely.”

  They was a silence, broken at last when Angela said, “I really like living in this flat, you know. I really like sharing with others. We seem to get on very well, don’t you think?”

  He agreed. “It’s a good mix. And we’re lucky that this flat is so large. I think it makes a difference having six people. Sometimes, if there are three or four sharing, you get issues. Perhaps it becomes too intense – I don’t know.”

  Angela hesitated. “I wasn’t sure about Georgia, to tell the truth. When I first met her, I thought that she was typical of some of those people you get in George Square – people from privileged backgrounds who have had it all handed to them on a plate. A lot of them think they’re a cut above the rest of us. Their sense of superiority grates with me, I’m afraid. They condescend.”

  “She isn’t like that, though,” said Neil. “Georgia has no airs. She might come from a well-off background, but that doesn’t mean she’s a snob, or anything like that.”

  “No,” said Angela. “I found that out when I got to know her a bit better. She came out to Armadale with Ian the other day. I could tell she was moved by what she saw. We went to hear Mick Johnston. I could tell she understood what he was saying. It was obvious. I felt a bit bad, actually, that I had written her off before.”

  “Well, we can all do that. We can all misjudge people.” He paused. “You went with Ian?”

  “Yes. The three of us. You weren’t around. Otherwise, I would have asked you.”

  He assured her that he did not mind. “We can’t live in one another’s pockets.” He looked at her enquiringly. “Did Ian enjoy it?”

  He did, she said. He had been quiet in the bus on the way back, as if he was weighing up what he had seen and heard.

  “He thinks a lot,” said Neil. “And he’s not one of these people who goes on and on. He chooses his words.”

  “I like him,” said Angela.

  She waited, as if expecting him to concur. Or differ, perhaps?

  “I like him too,” said Neil. He looked at her, and she realised he had something to add.

  “But?” she asked.

  “But I’m not sure I can be the friend he would like me to be.”

  She was not sure she understood. “You’re on different wavelengths?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “Not that. It’s just that there are some people who expect a bit more of their friends – that’s all. It’s not a big point.”

  It suddenly occurred to her that she knew what he was saying.

  “Do you feel sorry for Ian?” she asked.

  The question surprised him. “A bit, perhaps. There’s a sadness there, don’t you think. There’s something wistful.”

  From down the corridor, they heard a sudden burst of laughter. It was short, and it was almost immediately stifled. They looked at one another.

  “Was that James?” she asked.

  Neil shrugged. “It came from his room, I think.”

  She lowered her voice. “Has he got a visitor?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “We don’t see much of him, do we?”

  “Perhaps he’s reading something amusing and it made him laugh,” said Angela.

  “Could be.”

  “Do you think he likes us?” asked Angela. “I mean, there he is, a postgraduate, and we’re just a bunch of kids.”

  “He’s only two years older than most of us,” Neil pointed out. “That isn’t so much.”

  There was another noise from the end of the corridor. This time, it sounded like something hitting the floor.

  “Now he’s throwing his shoes about,” whispered Neil. “Maybe he’s reading something he disagrees with.”

  They both laughed.

  “Odd,” said Angela, looking slightly regretful. “Still, none of our business.”

  Fourteen

  Landscape with the Fall of Icarus

  JULIE LIKED TO ARRIVE early for lectures, even one like this, which started at five past nine. The five minutes was an academic tradition – a concession for the benefit of latecomers. She never availed herself of that, and was usually in her chosen seat, halfway up the lecture theatre, a good ten minutes before anybody else, a result, she admitted, of having been brought up in a household where meals were served at precise times and nobody lingered in bed in the morning. A friend once laughed at what she called her obsessive punctuality, but she was cheerfully immune to her criticism. “There’s nothing wrong with a mild degree of OCD,” she retorted, adding, with a smile, “And by the way, your collar’s not quite straight.”

 

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