44 Scotland Street - Alexander McCall Smith [3]
“I’m Bruce,” he said. “And I take it you’re Pat.”
He smiled at her, and gestured for her to come into the flat.
“I like the street,” she said. “I like this part of town.”
He nodded. “So do I. I lived up in Marchmont until a year ago and now I’m over here. It’s central. It’s quiet. Marchmont got a bit too studenty.”
She followed him into a living room, a large room with a black marble fireplace on one side and a rickety bookcase against the facing wall.
“This is the sitting room,” he said. “It’s nothing great, but it gets the sun.”
She glanced at the sofa, which was covered with a faded chintzy material stained in one or two places with spills of tea or coffee. It was typical of the sofas which one found in shared flats as a student; sofas that had been battered and humiliated, slept on by drunken and sober friends alike, and which would, on cleaning, disgorge copious sums in change, and ballpoint pens, and other bits and pieces dropped from generations of pockets. She looked at Bruce. He was good-looking in a way which one might describe as . . . well, how might one describe it?
Fresh-faced? Open? Of course, the rugby shirt gave it away: he was the sort that one saw by the hundred, by the thousand, streaming out of Murrayfield after a rugby international. Wholesome was the word which her mother would have used, and which Pat would have derided. But it was a useful word when it came to describe Bruce. Wholesome.
Bruce was returning her gaze. Twenty, he thought. Quite expensively dressed. Tanned in a way which suggested outside
Stuff Happens
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pursuits. Average height. Attractive enough, in a rather willowy way. Not my type (this last conclusion, with a slight tinge of regret).
“What do you do?” he asked. Occasions like this, he thought, were times for bluntness. One might as well find out as much as one could before deciding to take her, and it was he who would have to make the decision because Ian and Sarah were off travelling for a few months and they were relying on him to find someone.
Pat looked up at the cornice. “I’m on a gap year,” she said, and added, because truth required it after all: “It’s my second gap year, actually.”
Bruce stared at her, and then burst out laughing. “Your second gap year?”
Pat nodded. She felt miserable. Everybody said that. Everybody said that because they had no idea of what had happened.
“My first one was a disaster,” she said. “So I started again.”
Bruce picked up a matchbox and rattled it absent-mindedly.
“What went wrong?” he asked.
“Do you mind if I don’t tell you? Or just not yet.”
He shrugged. “Stuff happens,” he said. “It really does.”
After her meeting with Bruce, Pat returned to her parents’ house on the south side of Edinburgh. She found her father in his study, a disorganised room stacked with back copies of the Journal of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. She told him of the meeting with Bruce.
“It didn’t last long,” she said. “I had expected a whole lot of them. But there was only him. The others were away somewhere or other.”
4
Stuff Happens
Her father raised an eyebrow. In his day, young people had shared flats with others of the same sex. There were some mixed flats, of course, but these were regarded as being a bit – how should one put it? – adventurous. He had shared a flat in Argyle Place, in the shadow of the Sick Kids’ Hospital, with three other male medical students. They had lived there for years, right up to the time of graduation, and even after that one of them had kept it on while he was doing his houseman’s year. Girlfriends had come for weekends now and then, but that had been the exception. Now, men and women lived together in total innocence (sometimes) as if in Eden.
“It’s not just him?” he asked. “There are others?”
“Yes,” she said. “Or at least I think so. There were four rooms. Don’t worry.”
“I’m not worrying.”
“You are.”
He pursed his lips. “You could always