Love Over Scotland - Alexander Hanchett Smith [25]
“She may not be in,” said Wolf. “I didn’t tell her I was coming.”
“That’s her room,” said Pat, pointing to a closed door off the hall.
Wolf smiled. “I know that,” he said.
Of course he would, thought Pat, and looked sheepish. And at that moment, as Wolf knocked at the door, his back to her, she felt an intense, visceral jealousy. It hit somewhere inside her, in her stomach perhaps, with the force of a blow. For a few seconds she stood stock still, shocked by the emotion, rendered incapable of movement. But then, as the door opened slightly and she saw Tessie, half-framed within, she found it within herself to turn away and walk into her own room. There, she took a deep breath and closed her eyes. The force of the emotion had surprised her; it had been as if, on a dusty road to Damascus, she had been hurled to the ground. And the realisation that came to her this forcefully was that she had found in this boy, this Wolf, with his fair hair and his wide grin, one who touched her soul in the most profound way. Without him she was incomplete. Without him she . . . But such thoughts were absurd. She had known him for a very short time. They had talked to one another for – what was it? – an hour or two at the most. She knew nothing about him other than that his mother had been an enthusiast for herbal remedies, that his father sold valves in the oil industry and had accumulated a vast number of air-miles, and that he had a girlfriend called Tessie. And that last piece of knowledge was the Anguish
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most difficult of all to confront. Wolf was not available. He was taken. And by one of her flatmates too! That horrid, horrid girl, Tessie, who even now, no doubt, was in Wolf’s arms, her fingers running through his hair. “Spottiswoode!” wailed Pat, as if the word had curative power, a verbal scapegoat for her misery, her sense of utter loss. Its effect was mildly cathartic.
“Spottiswoode!” she wailed again.
There was a knock at the door, hesitant, tentative.
“Pat?” came a voice. “Are you all right?”
It was Wolf.
17. Anguish
“Why were you shouting out ‘Spottiswoode’?” asked Wolf, as he opened the door of Pat’s room.
Pat looked at him with what she hoped was a blank expression.
“Spottiswoode?” she said.
Wolf nodded, allowing a fringe of hair to fall briefly across his brow. This was soon tossed back. “I heard you out in the hall. You shouted out ‘Spottiswoode’. Twice.”
Pat clenched her teeth. Rapidly she rehearsed a number of possibilities. She could deny it, of course, and suggest that he had experienced an auditory hallucination. She was, after all, a psychiatrist’s daughter and she had heard her father talk about auditory hallucinations. He had treated a patient, she recalled, who complained that the roses in his garden recited Burns to him. That had seemed so strange to her at the time, but here she was shouting out Spottiswoode in her distress. No, she would not resort to denial; that would only convince him that there was something odd about her, and he would be put off. That would be the worst possible outcome.
“Spottiswoode?” she said. “Did I?”
Wolf nodded again. “Yes,” he said. “Spottiswoode. Very loudly. Spottiswoode.”
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Anguish
Pat laughed, airily (she hoped). “Oh, Spottiswoode! Of course.”
Wolf smiled. “Well?”
“Well, why not?” said Pat. She looked about the room and made a gesture with her hands. “I was just thinking – here I am in Spottiswoode Street at last. You know, I’ve always wanted to live in Spottiswoode Street, and now I do. I was just so happy, I shouted out Spottiswoode, I suppose.”
Her explanation tailed off. She saw his eyes widen slightly, and with a sinking heart she realised that this meant that he did not believe her. Desperate now, she thought, I must do something to change the subject in a radical way. She looked at her watch. “Look at the time!” she muttered.
“I’m sorry, I’m going to have to have a bath.”
She turned round and began to unbutton her top. Wolf did nothing. Turning