Love Over Scotland - Alexander Hanchett Smith [4]
She looked up. Wolf was standing at the table, holding a tray. He laid the tray down on the table, and glanced at the magazine.
“Is this you, Wolf?” Pat asked. “Look. I can’t believe that I know somebody in Hi! ”
Wolf glanced at the picture and frowned. “You don’t,” he said.
“That’s not me.”
Pat looked again at the picture then transferred her gaze up to Wolf. If it was not him, then it was his double. Wolf took the magazine from her and tossed it to the other end of the table.
“I can’t bear those mags,” he said. “Full of nothing. Airheads.”
Co-incidence in Spottiswoode Street
7
He turned to her and smiled, showing his teeth, which were very white, and even, and which for some rather disturbing reason she wanted to touch.
3. Co-incidence in Spottiswoode Street
“Your name,” said Pat to Wolf, as they sat drinking coffee in the Elephant House. “Your name intrigues me. I don’t think I’ve met anybody called Wolf before.” She paused. Perhaps it was a sore point with him; people could be funny about their names, and perhaps Wolf was embarrassed about his. “Of course, there’s nothing wrong with . . .”
Wolf smiled. “Don’t worry,” he said. “People are often surprised when I tell them what I’m called. There’s a simple explanation. It’s not the name I was given at the beginning. That’s . . .”
Pat waited for him to finish the sentence, but he had raised his mug of coffee to his mouth and was looking at her over the rim. His eyes, she saw, were bright, as if he was teasing her about something.
“You don’t have to tell me,” she said quietly. He put down his mug. “But you do want to know, don’t you?”
Pat shrugged. “Only if you want to tell me.”
“All right,” said Wolf. “I started out as Wilfred.”
Pat felt a sudden urge to laugh, and almost did. There were more embarrassing names than that, of course – Cuthbert, for instance – but she could not see Wolf as Wilfred. There was no panache about Wilfred; none of the slight threat that went with Wolf.
“I couldn’t stand being called Wilfred,” Wolf went on. “And it was worse when it was shortened to Wilf. So I decided when I was about ten that I would be Wolfred, and my parents went along with that. So I was Wolfred from then on. That’s the name on my student card. At school they called me Wolf. You were Patricia, I suppose?”
8
Co-incidence in Spottiswoode Street
“Yes,” said Pat. “But I can’t remember ever being called that, except by the headmistress at school, who called everybody by their full names. But, look, there’s nothing all that wrong with Wilfred. There’s . . .”
Wolf interrupted her. “Let’s not talk about names,” he said. He glanced at his sandwich. “I’m going to have to eat this quickly. I have to go and see somebody.”
Pat felt a sudden stab of disappointment. She wanted to spend longer with him; just sitting there, in his company, made her forget that she had been feeling slightly dispirited. It was about being in the presence of beauty that seemed to charge the surrounding air; and Wolf, she had decided, was beautiful. They had been sitting in that seminar room, she reflected, talking about beauty – which is what she thought aesthetics was all about
– and beauty was there before their eyes; assured, content with the space it occupied, as beauty always was. She picked up her sandwich and bit into it. She could not let him leave her sitting there – that was such an admission of social failure – to be left sitting at a table when somebody goes off. It was the sort of thing that would happen to Dr Fantouse; he was the type who must often be left at the table by others; poor man, with his Quattrocento and his green Paisley ties, left alone at the table while all his colleagues, the