Love Over Scotland - Alexander Hanchett Smith [37]
Pat slightly resented this question, and there was a tetchiness in her voice when she replied. “Of course I will,” she said. “I always do.”
If Tessie picked up the irritation in Pat’s voice, she did not reveal this. She looked at Pat over her shoulder as she filled the kettle. “That’s just one of the rules about sharing a flat with other people,” she said. “Naturally, there are others.”
Pat stared at her. “But naturally.”
“Noise, for example,” went on Tessie. “Some people think that if they close their door, then other people can’t hear them playing their music. They’re wrong. Noise travels through wood quite easily. It also travels through stone walls.”
“I know,” said Pat. “In Scotland Street there was a saxophone that . . .”
76
Pat Gets to Know Tessie a Bit Better
“And then there’s the telephone,” said Tessie, cutting short the rest of Pat’s sentence. “Some people are dishonest when it comes to the telephone. They use it and they don’t write their calls down in the book. And then when the bill comes they say that it should just be split equally four ways or whatever it is. I hate that sort of thing.”
Pat felt her irritation grow. This was unambiguously a lecture on how to behave, and she resented Tessie’s assumption that she needed to be told these things. “I have shared before,” she said.
“I had quite a difficult flatmate, in fact, a boy . . .”
“And that’s another thing,” said Tessie. “Boys. If anybody has a boyfriend, then the rule is that the boy is off limits to others. That’s the rule.”
For a few moments there was complete silence. Pat looked at the floor. She tried to look at Tessie, but the sight of the other girl’s eyes glaring at her from either side of the broken nose was too disconcerting. What on earth did Wolf see in her?
she wondered. Did he not mind those fat calves? Was he indifferent to the broken nose – and the split ends? She decided to speak.
“Of course that could be a problem, couldn’t it?”
Matthew’s Friends
77
Tessie gave a start. “A problem? Why?”
Pat took a deep breath. She thought that she might as well continue. She hadn’t started this, after all. “Well,” she said, “what if the boy in question fell for somebody else – and that somebody happened to live in the flat? What if the boy in question suddenly went off his girlfriend because . . . well, because he decided that she had fat calves or something silly like that –
what then? Why should the other girl turn him down if she felt the same way as he did?”
Tessie reached for the kettle and began to pour the hot water into the coffee pot. “There’s a very good reason why the other girl shouldn’t allow that to happen,” she said quietly. “And that is because the first girl would kill her if she did. She could kill her, you know. Really kill her.”
25. Matthew’s Friends
Matthew had not planned to go to the Cumberland Bar that evening, but when six o’clock came round, he realised that he had nothing else to do. He could go back to the flat in India Street and make a meal for himself, but what could he do after that? The crowd, as Matthew called his group of friends, had not met for at least two weeks. One member of the crowd was on holiday, another was on a course in Manchester, and one had recently become engaged to a woman who not only was not a member of the crowd but who had little time for it. It had never entered Matthew’s head that the crowd would disintegrate, but that was precisely what it appeared to be doing.
Matthew had other friends, of course, but he had rather neglected them over the last year or so. There was Ben, with whom he had been at the Academy. Matthew saw him from time to time, but now found his company somewhat tiresome, as Ben had become an enthusiastic jogger and spent most of his spare time running. He had finished in fifty-second place in the 78
Matthew’s Friends
previous year’s Edinburgh Marathon and was now talking about competing in the next New York Marathon.
He had met Ben for a meal at Henderson’s Salad Table, and the conversation had largely been about calories, energy levels and the benefits