The Bridge

Eocene

... is the microphone on?

Ah! There you are! Yes, well then... nothing to worry about, not really confused here at all, no way, honestly. Everything totally fine and wonderful, completely under control. Absolutely wunnerful, total command; all aspects. Knew the thing was on all the time. Just quoting the immortal - what's that? OK, OK - sorry, the mortal Jimi Hendrix there, honest. Now then, where was I? Oh yes.

Well, the patient's condition is stable; he's dead. Can't get much more fucking stable than that, can you? Yeah, all right, decomposition and so on; I was only kidding anyway; just my little joke. Christ some people have no sense of humour; calm down at the back there.

Mobile again, chaps. From where to where? Damn good question.

Glad you asked me that. Anybody know the answer? No?

Shhhit. Oh well.

Where are they taking me? What did I do to deserve all this? Who asked me, you bastards? Anybody ask me? Eh? Anybody think to say 'Mind if we move you, what's-your-name?' Hmm? No. Maybe I was happy where I was, ever think of that?

Well you can move my bowels and turn me over like an omelette and reach inside me and muck about and repair bits and pump God knows what into me and press bits and tweak bits and all the rest of it, but you can't catch me, you can't find me, you can't get through to me. I'm up here; in charge, in command, invulnerable.

And what a filthy trick, what a typically dirty piece of underhand undercover underclothed misunderstanding by the evil queen herself. How could she stoop so low? (Well, yer just bends over like this -) Rousing the goddamn barbarians against me; ha! Was that the best she could think of?

Probably. Never did have much imagination. Well, except in bed (or wherever) I guess. No, that's not true. I am being petulant; fair's fair (often with a slight, just a tinge, just a wee hint of red, usually, I've found ... but never mind that).

What a caddess, though, raising a rebellion like that. No chance, of course but there

you go. Now what? Good grief can't a fellow have a little talk with himself without

being - again!

What the fucking hell's going on here? What do you think I am you clumsy bastards? This part of the

- will you stop that! No more bumping! It hurts! This part of the treatment, is it? If I really wanted to I'd get up and give you cads a jolly good biffing, let me tell you! Butt! Get that stitched, Jimmy.

Thank God, stopped at last, just a little lateral motion here, nothing to worry about; could be in a boat or something maybe. Hard to tell.

No, not a boat, the rocking's damped; something with suspension, shock-absorbers. Squeaking? Do I hear voices? (All the time, doc. They told me to do it. Not my fault. Perfect alibi, impregnable defence.)

Raped! What a bloody nerve! I'll sue (so, get that stitched Jemima; sue? I'll stitch her up. No, sorry, that's not funny, but I mean! What a dia-fucking-bollockal liberty, eh?)

Never meant a thing to me. Or her, probably. She was a woman of letters, you know. Oh yes. I told her once and she laughed and we worked it all out. Not just letters either; signs, I'll show you.

Behind each knee an H, from behind her behind a +, her nostrils were ,s (hope this isn't getting too confusing for you), her waist was )(, and pride of place went to V (in plan, prone), and ! (front elevation). Then of course she digested all this and pointed out she also had a : and regular .s (though these were puns, not signs - like I say, she was a woman of letters). Never mind; at that ! I went i (she went O).

Oh well, here we go. Moving. Vroom vroom, part of the machine again, all hooked up and somewhere to go (Me-maw me-maw? Never sell ice-cream at that speed, Jimmy. Jam Sandwich please. Plenty of raspberry). Laugh if we crash. Not via the bridge I hope (Gee Charon, sorry about this, but what with the increased traffic flow recently ...). I don't know, maybe I'm dead already, or maybe they think I am. Hard to tell (no it isn't); kinda lost ma bearings round here. All a bit traumatic this (traum? Trauma? Just more letters; rev reve lation rse rence reiver o'lution bla bla bla ...

(what's he saying?

'bla bla bla'

o good an improvement)

Shoulda seen me before. I was impressive. Well, I thought so. Revs la reve; the docking's ramped you know; had two is too; I mean not one i but two: i i. Or ii (well come on you can have a roman nose why not roman eyes don't give me a hard time here I'm not a well man). Aye-aye. Just like that.

Damn it the thing squeaks. Might have known. Story of my fucking life. No bloody justice in the world (well, there is, but it falleth like the hard rain from the nimbostrata of the world; erratically, with occasional floods and droughts that last decades).

Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah, here we are in the machine, nicely contained an all that, wafting along. Let us hope not via you-know-what. Reminds me of a story, dontcheknow. Just an ordinary-like story; nothing special you understand; no shooting in it or exciting car chases or anything like that (sorry). Hardy even a real story in fact, if you want my honest opinion; more of a history really; a biography ... but anyway, that's -

She got

haud on, son; just doin the intro here; give us a break, eh? Cheese-us, canny even finish what yer sayin without -

She got her

you'll get yours in a minute Jimmy if ye don't shut

She got her degree

is it me, eh? Is it? Does ma voice no carry or something?

She -

yeah, she got her degree; we know. Well on you go, bash on; be my guest. Christ some people are just so fucking im

She got her degree and letters after her name; he made gentle fun of her new qualification, and found other symbols to describe her. He had given up the room in Sciennes Road and was renting a small flat in Canonmills. Andrea more or less moved in, though she kept on the flat in Comely Bank. A cousin of hers from Inverness, called Shona, stayed there while she went to the PE college in Cramond, the place where Andrea's family had originated.

He still had to work in his vacations, and she still spent hers abroad with family and friends, which made him both jealous and envious, but each time they met again it was as it had been before, and at some point - he could never pin down just when - he started to think of their relationship as being something that might last longer than just the next term. He even thought of suggesting they get married, but a sort of pride in him would not tolerate the idea of the state - far less the church - being appeased in this way. What mattered lay in their hearts (or rather in their brains), not in any register. Besides, he admitted to himself, she would probably have said No.

They were ex-hippies now, he supposed; if they'd every really been hippies in the first place. Flower power had ... well, people chose their own phrases; withered, gone to seed, blossomed and died - he once suggested the problem was petal fatigue.

She'd worked hard for a good degree, and after graduation took a year off, while he finished his own studies. She went on short holidays to visit people in other parts of Scotland and England, and in Paris, and on longer trips to the States, the rest of Europe, and the Soviet Union. She renewed acquaintance with her Edinburgh friends, would cook for him while he studied, visit her mother, sometimes play golf with her father - who, to his amazement, he found he could talk to quite easily - and read novels in French.

When she came back from the SU it was with a determination to learn Russian. He would arrive back at the flat sometimes to find her poring over novels and textbooks filled with the odd-looking half-familiar Cyrillic alphabet, brows creased, pencil poised over a notebook. She would look up, gaze incredulously at her watch and apologise for not having cooked him something; he'd tell her not to be daft, and do the cooking himself.

He missed his own graduation day, lying in the Royal Infirmary recovering from an appendectomy. His mother and father went to the ceremony anyway, just to hear his name read out. Andrea looked after them; they all got on fine. Even when the parents met he was amazed that they all seemed to chat like old friends; he was ashamed of himself for ever being ashamed of his own mother and father.

Stewart Mackie met Shona, the cousin from Inverness; they got married during Stewart's first post-grad year. He was Stewart's best man, Andrea was Shona's maid of honour. They both made speeches at the reception; his was the better planned, but hers was the best delivered. He sat watching as she stood speaking, and realised then how much he loved her and admired her. He also felt vaguely proud of her, though he felt that was wrong. She sat down to enthusiastic applause. He raised his glass to her. She winked back.

A few weeks later she told him she was thinking of going to Paris to study Russian. He thought she was joking at first. He was still looking for a job. He had vague ideas of going with her - perhaps he could do a crash course in French and look for a job over there - then he was offered a good position in a firm working on power station design; he had to take it. Three years, she told him. It'll only be three years. Only? he said. She tried to tempt him with the idea of holidays in Paris with her, but he found it difficult to be supportive.

He was anyway powerless, and she determined.

He wasn't going to see her to the airport. They went out instead, on the evening before she left, across the road bridge and into Fife, along the shore to a small restaurant in Culross. They took his car; he had bought a small new BMW on credit, on the strength of his new-found wealth as an employed man. It was an awkward meal and he drank too much wine; she was staying sober for the flight the following day - she loved flying, she would always have a window seat - so she drove back. He fell asleep in the car.

When he woke up he assumed they were back outside the flat in Canonmills, or her old place at Comely Bank; but lights shimmered far away, across a mile of dark water in front of them. Before she switched off the headlights he caught a glimpse of something vast towering over them, at once massive and airy.

'Where the hell's this? he said, rubbing his eyes and looking around. She got out of the car.

'North Queensferry. Come and see the bridge,' she told him, puliing on her jacket. He looked out sceptically; the night was cold and there was a hint of rain. 'Come on,' she called. 'It'll clear your head.'

'So would a fucking revolver,' he muttered as he got out of the car.

They walked past notices warning people about objects falling from the bridge, and others which claimed the land beyond as private, until they came to a gravel turning circle, some old buildings, a small slip, grass and whin-covered rocks, and the round granite piers of the railway bridge itself. The smir of rain inside the cold wind made him shiver. He looked up into the wind-moaning spaces of the structure above. The waters of the Firth of Forth shushed and slapped on nearby rocks, and the lights of buoys flashed slowly on and off, up and down the wide, dark river. She held his hand. Upstream, the road bridge was a tall web of light, and a distant grumble of background noise.

'I like this place,' she told him, and she hugged him, her body quivering with the cold. He held her, but looked up into the web of steel overhead, lost in its dark strength.

Three years, he thought. Three years in another city.

'The Tallahatchie Bridge fell down,' he said eventually, more to the cold wind than to her. She looked up at him, nuzzled her cold nose into the presentable remnant of the fine beard he'd grown over the last two years and said,

'What?'

'The Tallahatchie Bridge. Ode to Billy Joe, Bobbie Gentry, remember? The damn thing fell down.' He gave a small, despairing laugh.

'Anybody hurt?' she asked, then put her cold lips on his Adam's Apple.

'I don't know,' he said, suddenly very sad. 'I didn't even think to look. I just saw the headline.'

A train rumbled over the bridge, filling the night air with the bassy voice of other people going to other places. He wondered if any of the passengers would pay heed to the old tradition and throw coins out of their nice warm carriages, spinning futile wishes into the uncaring waters of the cold Firth below.

He didn't tell her, but he remembered being here, in this very spot, years ago, one summer. An uncle who had a car took him and his parents on a ride through the Trossachs and then over to Perth. They came back this way. It was before the road bridge opened in '64 - before they'd even started it, he supposed; it was a Bank Holiday, and there was a queue a mile long waiting for the ferries. The uncle drove them down here instead, to have a look at 'one of Scotland's proudest monuments'.

What age had he been then? He didn't know. Maybe only five or six. His father had held him on his shoulders; he'd touched the cool granite of the piers, and reached, stretching, straining, small hands open and grasping, for the red-painted metal of the bridge ...

The queue of cars had grown no shorter when they went back. They crossed by the Kincardine Bridge instead.

Andrea kissed him, waking him from his memories, and hugged him very tight, tighter than he'd ever have thought she could hug, so tight he almost had difficulty breathing, then she let go, and they went back to the car.

She drove over the road bridge. He looked out over the dark waters to the dim night-shape of the rail bridge they had stood beneath, and saw the long dotted row of lights of a passenger train as it crossed high over the river, heading south. Lights like a row of dots at the end of a sentence, he thought, or at the start of one; three years. Dots like meaningless Morse; a signal made up of only Es and Hs and Is and Ss. The lights flickered through the intervening girders of the bridge; the nearer cables of the road bridge flicked past too quickly to make any difference.

No romance, he thought, watching the train. I remember when there were steam trains. I'd go up to the local station and stand on the foot-bridge over the tracks until a train came along, chuffing steam and smoke. When it went under the wooden bridge its smoke exploded on the metal plates put there to protect the timbers; a sudden blast of smoke and steam which surrounded you for what seemed like very long seconds with a delicious uncertainty, another world of mystery and swirling, half-seen things.

But they closed the line, they dismantled the engines, they tore down the foot-bridge and turned the station into an attractive, very unique and spacious residence with a pleasant southerly aspect and extensive grounds. Very unique. That just about said it all. Even if they'd got it right they'd still have been wrong.

The train flowed across the long viaduct and disappeared into the land. Just like that. No romance. No fireworks as the ashes and cinders were dumped, no flying comet-tail of orange sparks from the chimney, not even any clouds of steam (he would try to write a poem about it the next day, but it wouldn't work and he would throw it away).

He turned from the bridge, yawning as Andrea slowed the car for the tolls. 'You know how long it takes them to paint it, don't you?' he said to her. She shook her head, wound the window down as they came up to the toll plaza.

'What, the railway bridge?' she said digging in a pocket for the money. 'I don't know. A year?'

'Wrong,' he told her, folding his arms, looking ahead towards the red light at the far end of the booth. 'Three. Three fucking years.'

She said nothing. She paid the toll and the light turned green.

He worked, he got on. His mum and dad were proud of him. He got a mortgage on a small flat, still in Canonnrills. The company he worked for let him put some money towards his company car, once he'd ascended to such heights of bourgeois decadence, so he had a bigger and better BMW, rather than a Cortina. Andrea wrote him letters; he would make the same old joke whenever he referred to them.

John Peel played reggae on night-time Radio One. He bought Past, Present and Future by Al Stewart. 'Post World War Two Blues' very nearly made him cry, 'Roads to Moscow' actually did once, and 'Nostradamus' annoyed him. He played The Confessions of Doctor Dream a lot, lying with the headphones on, spreadeagled on the floor in the darkness, smashed out of his skull and humming along with the music. The first track on the eponymous second side was called Irreversible Neural Damage.

Things had a certain pattern, he observed to Stewart Mackie. Stewart and Shona moved to Dunfermline, across the river in Fife. Shona, having been trained to be a PE teacher in the Dunfermline College of Physical Education {located confusingly but cannily not in Dunfermline but across the river near Edinburgh); it seemed then singularly appropriate that she should become a teacher in Dunfermline itself; from one dispossesed capital to another. Stewart was still at the university, finishing post-grad work and probably all set to become a lecturer. He and Shona called their first child after him. It meant more to him than he could tell them.

He travelled. Round Europe on a rail-pass before he got too old, across Canada and America by train, too, and by hitch-hiking and buses and trains down to Morocco and back. That trip he didn't enjoy; he was only twenty-five, but he felt old already. He had the beginnings of a bald patch. Still, there was a wonderful train journey towards the end of it, travelling for some twenty-four hours through Spain, from Algeciras to Irun with some American guys who had some of the finest dope he'd ever encountered. He'd watched the sun come up over the plains of Mancha, listening to the tram's steel wheels playing symphonies.

He always found excuses not to visit Paris. He didn't want to see her there. She came back every now and again; changed, different, somehow more steady and ironic and even more sure of herself. Her hair was short now; very chic, he supposed. They had holidays on the west coast and the islands - when he could get the extra time off - and once went to the Soviet Union; his first trip, her third. He remembered the trains and the journeys on them, of course, but also the people, the architecture and the war memorials. It wasn't the same, though. He was frustrated, unable to speak more than a few words of the language, and listening to her chattering away quite happily with people made him feel he'd lost her to a language (and to a foreign tongue, he thought bitterly; he knew there was someone else in Paris).

He worked on refineries and rig design and made money; he sent some home to his mum now that his dad was retired. He bought a Mercedes and changed it soon afterwards for an old Ferrari which kept fouling its plugs. He settled for a three-year-old red Porsche, though really he wanted a new one.

He started seeing a girl called Nicola, a nurse he'd known since he'd had his appendix out at the Royal Infirmary. People made jokes about their names, called them imperialists, asked them when they were going to claim Russia back. She was small and blonde and had a generous, allowing body; she disapproved of him smoking dope and told him - when he splashed out and bought some coke - that he was insane to waste that sort of money stuffing it up his nose. He felt very tender towards her, he told her once, when he suspected he was supposed to tell her he loved her. I feel tender every bloody morning, you animal, she said, laughing and snuggling up to him. He laughed too, but realised it was the only joke she had ever made. She knew about Andrea but didn't talk about it. They drifted apart after six months. After that, when asked, he said he was playing the field.

The phone rang at three o'clock one morning, while he was screwing an old school pal of Andrea's. The phone was by the bedside. Go on, she said, giggling, answer it. She held onto him while he inched across the bed to the ringing machine. It was his sister Morag ringing to tell him that his mother had died of a stroke an hour before in the Southern General, in Glasgow.

Mrs McLean had to get back home anyway. She left him sitting on the bed, holding his head and thinking. At least it wasn't Dad, and hating himself for thinking it.

He didn't know who to ring. He thought of Stewart, but he didn't want to wake their latest baby; they'd had problems with the kid sleeping anyway. He rang Andrea in Paris. A man answered, and when her sleepy voice came on the phone she hardly seemed to know who he was. He told her he'd had some bad news ... She hung up.

He couldn't believe it. He tried calling back but the phone was engaged; the international operator couldn't get through either. He left the phone on the bed, engaged tone beeping mindlessly while he dressed, then took the Porsche on a long, frosty, starlit drive north, almost to the Cairngorms. Most of the tapes he had in the car at the time were Pete Atkin albums, but Clive James's lyrics were too thoughtful, and often too melancholic, for a good, fast mindless drive, and the reggae tapes he had - mostly Bob Marley - were too laid back. He wished he had some Stones. He found an old tape, one he'd almost forgotten, and turned the Motorola up to maximum volume, playing Rock and Roll Animal over and over, all the way up to Braemar and back, a sort of knowing sneer on his face. 'Allo?' he whined nasally to the headlights of the occasional passing car, 'Allo? Ça va? Allo?'

He went to that place on the way back; he stood under the great red bridge which he had once thought looked the same colour as her hair, while his breath smoked and the Porsche idled clatteringly on the gravel turning circle and the first streaks of dawn outlined the bridge, a silhouette of arrogance, grace and power against the pale flames of a winter morning sky.

The funeral was two days later; he'd stayed with his father in the pebble-dashed council house after quickly packing a bag in his flat and slamming the whining phone down. He ignored his mail. Stewart Mackie came through for the funeral.

Looking down at his mother's coffin he waited for tears that did not come, and put his arm round his father's shoulders, only realising then that the man was thinner and smaller than he used to be, and quietly, steadily quivering, like ajust-struck iron rod.

As they were leaving, Andrea met them at the cemetery gates, getting out of an airport taxi, dressed in black and carrying a small case. He couldn't speak.

She hugged him, talked to his father, then came to him and explained that after they were cut off she'd tried to call him back. She'd been trying for two days; she'd sent telegrams, she'd had people go round to his flat to look for him. In the end, she'd decided to come herself; she'd phoned Morag in Dunfermline as soon as she got off the plane, found out what had happened, and where the funeral was.

All he could say was thank you. He turned to his father and hugged the man, and then cried, crying more tears into his father's coat-collar than he thought his eyes could ever have held; for his mother, for his father, for himself.

She could only stay for one night; she had to go back to study for some exams. The three years had become four. Why didn't he come to Paris? They slept in separate rooms in the pebble-dashed house. His father had been sleepwalking and having nightmares: he would sleep in the same room, to wake his father if he had nightmares, stop him hurting himself if he walked in his sleep.

He drove her through to Edinburgh; they had lunch at her parents', then he took her to the airport. Who was your friend, the one on the phone in Paris? he asked her, then wanted to bite his tongue. Gustave, she said, easily enough. You'd like him. Have a nice flight, he said.

He watched the plane take off into the aquamarine skies of a crisp winter afternoon; and he even followed it a little way by road as it turned south; he leant forward over the steering wheel of the Porsche, staring up through the windscreen to watch the aircraft as it climbed into the immaculate blue of the cloudless sky, driving after it as though he could catch the jet. It was just starting to make a vapour trail when he lost sight of it, glinting and disappearing over the Pentland Hills.

He felt tugged by age. For a while he took The Times, balancing it with the Morning Star. Now and again he would look at the logo heading The Times, and think he could almost catch the pages of Times Present as they flicked over, almost hear the rustle of the dry leaves turning; Future became Present, Present became Past. A truth so banal, so obvious and accepted that he had somehow managed to ignore it before. He combed his hair so that the bald patch - barely the size of a two-penny piece - would not be so noticeable. He changed to the Guardian.

He spent more time with his father now. He would drive through on some weekends to the small new council flat and regale the old man with tales of the wonderful world of engineering in the seventies: pipelines and crackers and carbon fibres, the use of lasers, radiography, the spin-offs from space research. He described the furious force, the incredible energy of a power station undergoing a steam purge, when the newly completed boilers are fired up, water is fed in, the pipework fills with superheated steam, and any bits of loose weld spatter, dropped gloves or tools or nuts and bolts or decaying apple cores or whatever are exploded through the great pipes and blasted into the atmosphere, cleaning the whole system of debris before the final pipework joins the boilers to the turbines themselves, with their thousands of delicate and expensive blades and fine tolerances. Once he'd seen the head of a sledgehammer thrown quarter of a mile by a steam purge; it went through the side of a parked van. The noise put Concorde to shame; a noise like the end of the world. His father smiled, nodding thoughtfully from his chair.

He still saw the Cramonds; he and the advocate would sit up late every so often, like two old men, and discuss the world. Mr. Cramond believed that law and religion and fear were necessary, and that a strong government, even if it was a bad one, was better than none at all. They argued, but always amicably; he was never able to explain quite why they got on, or how. Perhaps because in the end neither of them took anything they said themselves seriously; perhaps because neither of them took anything at all entirely seriously. The did agree it was all a game.

Elvis Presley died, but he cared more that Groucho Marx died in the same week. He bought albums by the Clash and the Sex Pistols and the Damned, glad that something different and anarchic was happening at last, even if he listened to the Jam, Elvis Costello and Bruce Springsteen more. He still knew people at the university besides Stewart, including some in a couple of small revolutionary parties. They'd stopped trying to get him to join after he'd explained he was utterly incapable of following a party line. When China invaded Vietnam and they had to try and prove that at least one of them wasn't socialist he found the resulting theological contortions wildly amusing. He knew some younger people through a poetry writing group at the university which he attended sporadically; he knew a select few of Andrea's old crowd and there were a couple of men in the new company he worked for who he liked. He was young, he was well-off, and although he would rather have been taller and his hair was an undistinguished brown (and with a bald spot the size of a fifty-pence piece - inflation), he wasn't unattractive; he lost count of the number of women he'd slept with. He found himself buying a bottle of Laphroaig or Macallan every two or three days; he bought dope every couple of months and usually had a joint to put him to sleep. He gave the whisky up for a few weeks, just to make sure he wasn't becoming an alcoholic, then rationed himself to one bottle a week.

The two men he liked in the company tried to persuade him to come in with them, partners in their own business; he wasn't sure. He talked to Mr Cramond about it, and Stewart. The advocate said it was a good idea in principle, but it would mean hard work; people expected things too easily these days. Stewart laughed and said 'Well, why not?' Might as well make money for himself as anybody else; pay your taxes under Labour and hire a very smart accountant indeed if the Tories got in. Stewart had his own, more severe problems though; he hadn't been really well for years, and he'd been finally diagnosed as diabetic. He drank bottles of Pils when they met, and looked longingly at other people's pints of Heavy.

He still wasn't sure about joining a partnership. He wrote to Andrea, who told him, 'Do it.' She would be coming back soon, she said, studies complete, Russian mistressed to her satisfaction, he thought: I'll believe she's back when I see her.

He had taken up golf - Stewart had persuaded him. He balanced this by joining Amnesty International after years of dithering, and sending a large cheque to the ANC after his firm had worked on a South African contract. He sold the Porsche and brough a new Saab Turbo. He was driving out to Gullane one bright Saturday in June to meet the advocate for a game at Muirfield, playing a tape which consisted solely of Because the Night and Shot by Both Sides recorded back-to-back time after time, when he saw the advocate's crumpled blue Bristol 409 being dragged up onto a breakdown truck. He drove on a little way, slowing but still heading for Gullane, telling himself the car with the stoved-in front and smashed windscreen wasn't Mr Cramond's, then turned round in a side road and went back to where two very young-looking policemen were measuring the road, the scarred verge and a shattered stone wall.

Mr Cramond had died at the wheel; a heart attack. He thought that wasn't such a terrible way to go, providing you didn't hit anybody else.

The one thing I mustn't say to Andrea, he thought, is, We can't go on meeting like this. He felt slightly guilty about buying a black suit for Mr Cramond's funeral when all he'd had for his own mother's was an armband.

He drove out to the crematorium with butterflies in his stomach; he was hung-over after finishing most of a bottle of whisky on his own the previous night. He felt he had a cold coming on. For some reason, as he drove into the place through a grey impressive gateway, he just knew that she wasn't going to be there. He felt physically sick, and ready to turn around and go; drive away anywhere. He tried to control his breathing and his heart and his sweating palms, and he drove the Saab on into the wide immaculate grounds, towards the cluster of parked cars in front of the low buildings of the crematorium.

He hadn't felt like this at his mother's funeral, and he hadn't really been all that close to the advocate. Maybe they would think he was still drunk; he'd had a shower and brushed his teeth but he probably smelled of whisky from his pores. Despite his new suit he felt grubby. He wondered if he should have brought a wreath; he hadn't thought.

He looked round the cars. Of course she wouldn't be there; it made a warped sort of sense; expected here she somehow wouldn't be able to show; given up for ever at his mother's grave, she had suddenly appeared. All part of life's rich pattern, he told himself, straightening his black tie before approaching the opened doors. Just remember son, he thought. This is bat country.

She was there, of course. She looked older but more beautiful; under her eyes there were little pucker-marks he'd never noticed before; tiny fleshy folds which made her look as though she'd been brought up for ever squinting into some desert storm. She took his hand, kissed him, held him for a second then let go; he wanted to say she looked beautiful, that she looked beautiful in black; but even while he was telling himself what a cretin he was, his mouth was mumbling something equally but more acceptably inane. He could see no tears in her perfectly made-up eyes.

The service was brief, surprisingly tasteful. The minister had been a personal friend of the advocate, and listening to his short but obviously sincere eulogy, he felt his eyes tingle. I must be getting old, he thought; either that or drinking too much of the hard stuff and getting soft. The man I was ten years ago would have sneered at me for being moved almost to tears by words spoken by a minister in praise of an upper-middle class barrister.

Nevertheless. He talked to Mrs Cramond after the service. If he hadn't known her better he'd have thought she was on drugs; she seemed to glow, her eyes wide, her skin shining with an energy born of death; a tearless astonishment, a state of shock produced by the taking away of the man who for more than half her life had been half her life; something beyond the immediacies of grief. He thought of the instant after some injury, when the eye saw the hammer crush the finger, or a slipping blade cut flesh, but before the blood flowed or the pain signal reached the brain. She was in that penumbra now, he thought, surfaced in the oily calm seas of the storm's eye. She was leaving the following day, for a holiday with a sister in Washington DC.

The last thing she said to him was, 'Will you look after Andrea? They were so close; she won't come with me. Will you look after her?' He said, 'If she'll be looked after ... There's somebody in Paris, anyway, she might-' 'No,' said Mrs Cramond, and shook her head once, quite definite (a gesture the daughter had inherited; he suddenly saw one in the other). 'No, it's you. You,' she said, and squeezed his hand before getting into her son's Bentley. She whispered, 'You'll be the closest now.'

He stood, puzzled, for a while, then went to look for her. She was outside, in the car park, slouched against an undertaker's black Daimler limousine. She was lighting up a menthol More as he walked up, frowning. 'You shouldn't do that,' he told her; 'think of your lungs.' She regarded him with crushed-looking eyes. 'Solidarity,' she said bitterly. 'My old man's smoking at the moment too.' A small muscle in her jaw trembled. 'Oh, Andrea,' he said, suddenly filled with pity for her. He put his hand out towards her but she flinched away, turning from him and pulling her black coat tighter about her. He stood still for a moment, knowing that a few years ago he would have been hurt at this instant of rejection, and probably turned on his heel. He waited, and she came back to him, throwing the More down into the gravel and stepping on it with one black, swivelling shoe. 'Get me out of here, kid,' she said. 'Beam me up Scotty. Where's the Porsche? I was looking for it.'

They took the Saab to Gullane; she wanted to see the place where he'd died, so they stopped at the still ripped-up trench of verge and the not-yet repaired wall. He watched her in the rear-view mirror, standing looking down at the torn piece of turf as though expecting to see the grass grow back before her eyes. She touched the gashed ground and the stones of the farm wall, then came back to the car, rubbing stone-dust and earth from her pale, manicured fingers. She told him that her brother thought she was morbid for wanting to come here. 'You don't think I am, do you?' He said no, no, she wasn't. They drove on to the cold, empty house on the dunes overlooking the firth.

She turned and hugged him as soon as they were through the door; when he tried to kiss her, gently and softly, she rammed her mouth against his, her nails dug into his scalp, into his back through his jacket, into his buttocks through the black suit's trousers; she made a whimpering noise he'd never heard her make before and pushed his jacket offhis shoulders. He had just decided to go along with this desperate, anguished, erotic reaction, but to try to manoeuvre her into somewhere a little more comfortable than the draughty front hall with its cold tiles and bristly doormat, when such a decision became unnecessary. It was as if his body woke up to what was actually happening, as though some instantly transmissible fever spread from her to him. He was suddenly as consumed, as wildly, absurdly abandoned as she was, wanting her more than he could ever remember having wanted her before. They collapsed onto the doormat, she pulled him to her, without taking off coat or underclothes. It was over for them both in seconds, and only then did she cry.

The advocate had left him his golfclubs. He had to smile; it was a nice gesture. He left his wife - who had her own money - the house in Moray Place. The son got all his law books and the two most valuable paintings; Andrea was to have the rest, save for a few thousand to go to the son's own children and some nieces and nephews, and a couple of charitable bequests.

The son was busy with the estate, so he and Andrea drove Mrs Cramond to Prestwick for her night flight to the USA. He held onto Andrea's slim shoulders and watched the aircraft climb, curving over the dark Clyde, heading for America. He insisted on waiting until they could no longer see it, so they stood and watched its winking lights grow smaller and smaller against the last glow of the day. Somewhere over the Mull of Kintyre, when he'd almost lost sight of it, the jet climbed out of the shadow of the earth and into the retreating sunlight; its vapour trail blazed suddenly, glorious pink against the deep, dark blue. Andrea caught her breath, then gave a small laugh, the first since she'd heard the news about her father.

In the car, driving north by the side of the deep, dark river, he confessed he hadn't known the trail would suddenly appear like that, and after a moment's hesitation, he told her about trying to follow the Paris-bound jet a year earlier. Sentimental fool, she told him, and kissed him.

They went to see his father, then took a few days off; she had two weeks before she had to go back to Paris, and he had no urgent work so they just drove wherever they wanted for the next few days, staying in small hotels and bed-and-breakfasts and not knowing where they'd be heading when they got up each morning. They went to Mull, Sky, Cape Wrath, Inverness, Aberdeen, Dunfermline - where they stayed with Stewart and Shona - then by-passed the Bridges and the city to head via Culross and Stirling, Blyth Bridge and Peebles to the borders. It was her birthday while they were away; he bought her a bracelet in white gold. They were heading back to Edinburgh from Jedburgh, on the last day, when she saw the distant tower. 'Let's go there,' she said.

They could only get within half a mile with the Saab; they parked oil a narrow, deserted road, she put on her Kickers, he lifted his camera and they tramped across a field then up through a wood and thick bracken, uphill towards the tower which stood on a broad summit of rock and grass. He hadn't realised it was so huge, from the road. It was massive; a local laird's solution to local unemployment at the start of the previous century, as well as a monument to a man and a great battle.

Its dark stones seemed to rise for ever into the wind; a heavy grey superstructure of wood protruding at the top held what looked like an open viewing platform beneath a conical wooden spire. He'd have imagined there would be a road up to such a place, a car park, a souvenir shop, turnstiles; officials and tickets and commerce. There didn't even seem to be a path. They stood, craning their necks looking up at it. The view just from the hillside was impressive enough. He took some photographs.

She turned, grinning, to him. 'What did you say this place was called?' He looked at the map he was carrying, shrugged.

'Penielhaugh, I think,' he said. She laughed.

'Penile-haugh. Wonder if we can get inside.' She went to a small door. There were three large boulders resting against it. She tried to roll them away.

'You'll be lucky,' he told her. He pushed and heaved the rocks away. The little door opened. She clapped her hands and went in.

'Wow,' she said, as hejoined her. The tower was hollow, just a single tube of stone. It was dark, the earth floor was covered in pigeon droppings and tiny, soft feathers, and the noise of the disturbed, cooing birds echoed faintly in the darkness. Sudden flapping sounded like fading, uncertain applause. High above, a few birds flew across dusty beams of light shining from the wooden cupola. The air was rich with the smell of the birds. A single narrow stairway - stones set jutting from the wall - spiralled up into the light-capped gloom.

'Amazing place,' he breathed.

'How sweet the sound ... Tolkienesque, as they used to say,' she said, her head back, looking straight up, mouth open. He went over to the bottom of the spiralling stairs. There was a narrow metal rail set on spindly, rather rusted-looking rods. He thought: a century and a half old, if it's original. More. Even older. He shook it, dubious.

'Think it's safe?' she asked him. Her voice was low; he looked up again. It looked like a very long way to the top. A hundred and fifty feet? Two hundred? He thought about the rocks which had been rolled against the door. She gazed up too, caught a falling feather and looked at it. He shrugged.

'What the hell.' He started up the stone steps. She started after him immediately. He stopped. 'Let me get ahead a bit first; I'm heavier.' He went on up another twenty or so steps, keeping his feet close to the wall, not using the iron rail. She followed, not coming too close. 'Probably quite all right,' he told her half-way up, looking down towards the small circle of dark spattered earth at the base of the tower. 'Probably find the local rugby team trains by running up and down this every day.'

'Sure,' was all she said.

They got to the top. It was a broad, octagonal platform of grey-painted wood; thick timbers, solid planks and a firm, secure set of rails. They were both breathing hard when they got there. His heart was hammering.

It was a clear day. They stood getting their breath back, the wind stroking their hair. He breathed in the fresh, cool air and walked round the airy circle, drinking in the view and taking a few photographs.

'Think we can see England from here?' she said, coming over to him. He was gazing north, wondering if a distant smudge on the horizon, over the other side of some distant hills, was above Edinburgh. He made a mental note to buy a pair of binoculars for keeping in the car. He looked round.

'Soitinly,' he said. 'Good grief, you could probably see your mother from here on a really clear day.'

She put her arms round his waist and cuddled him, her head on his chest. He stroked her hair. 'Really?' she said. 'How about Paris?'

He sighed, looked away from her, over the border countryside, across low hills, woods and fields and hedges. 'Yeah, maybe Paris.' He looked into her green eyes. 'I think you can see Paris from almost anywhere.' She said nothing, just hugged him some more. He kissed the crown of her head. 'Are you really coming back?'

'Yes,' she said, and he could feel her head nodding, rubbing against his chest. 'Yes, I'm coming back.'

He gazed at the distant landscape for a while, watching the wind move the tops of the serried firs. He laughed once, just a sudden shrugging motion of his shoulders, a noise in his chest.

'What?' she said, not looking up.

'I was just thinking,' he said. 'I don't suppose if I asked you to marry me, you'd say yes, would you?' He stroked her hair. She looked up slowly, an expression he could not read shown on her calm face.

'I don't suppose I would either,' she said slowly, her eyes flickering, switching from one of his eyes to the other, a tiny frown etched in between her deep, dark brows. He shrugged, looked away again.

'Well, never mind,' he said.

She hugged him once more, head on chest. 'Sorry kid. It'd be you, if anybody. It just isn't me.'

'Yeah, what the hell,' he said, 'I don't suppose it's me either. I just don't want to be apart from you for so long again.'

'I don't think we ever have to be again.' The wind blew some of her red, glossy hair up against his face, tickling his nose. 'It isn't just Edinburgh, you know, it's you as well,' she told him quietly. 'I need my own place, and I dare say I'll always be too easily led astray by a soft voice or a nice bum, but... well, it's up to you. You sure you don't want to look for a nice wee wifey?' She looked up at him, grinning.

'Oh,' he said, nodding, 'pretty damn certain.'

She kissed him, lightly at first. He leant back against one of the grey square posts of the tower's superstructure, clutching her buttocks and rolling his tongue round inside her mouth, thinking, Well if the damn post gives way, what the hell; I may never be this happy again. There are worse ways to go.

She pulled away from him, a familiar, ironic smirk on her face. 'Yi talked me inta it, yi sweet-talkin bestid.' He laughed and pulled her back.

'You insatiable hussy.'

'You bring out the best in me.' She fondled his balls through his jeans, stroked his erection.

'Anyway, I thought your period had started.'

'Good God man, not afraid of a little bit of blood are you?'

'No of course not, but I haven't brought any tissues or -'

'Oh why are men so fucking fastidious?' she growled, biting his chest through his shirt and pulling a thin white scarf from a pocket in her jacket like a magician producing a rabbit. 'Use this, if you must mop up.' She covered his mouth with hers. He pulled her shirt out of her trousers, looked at the scarf held in his other hand.

'This is silk,' he told her.

She pulled his zip down. 'You better believe it kid; I deserve the best.'

Afterwards they lay still, shivering a little in the breeze of a cool July day as it moved through the painted wooden structure. He told her her aureoles were like pink washers, her nipples like little marshmallow bolts, and the tiny puckered slits at their tips like slots for a screwdriver. She laughed quietly, dozily, amused at such comparisons. She looked up at him, a sort of ironical, roguish expression on her face. 'Do you really love me?' she said, apparently unbelieving. He shrugged.

''Fraid so.'

'You're a fool,' she chided gently, lifting one hand to play with a lock of his hair, smiling at it.

'You think so,' he said, lowering himself for a moment, kissing the tip of her nose.

'Yes,' she said. 'I am fickle and selfish.'

'You are generous and independent.' He brushed some windblown hair away from near her eyes. She laughed, shook her head.

'Well, love is blind,' she said.

'So they tell us.' He sighed. 'Can't see it myself.'