“Wee Fraser is no longer a patient,” said Dr. Fairbairn defensively. “He is a former patient with whom I have not had any dealings for some considerable time.”

That was not true, of course, and he knew it; but by dealings he meant professional dealings, and the punch to the jaw that he had administered – in a moment of madness, and in response to being head-butted by the now adolescent Wee Fraser – on the Burdiehouse bus did not count as a professional dealing.

Irene knew about his burden of guilt. She knew full well – because he had, in a moment of weakness, told her all about it – she knew of how he had gently smacked Wee Fraser when the boy, then three, had bitten him in the course of play therapy involving small farm animals. Dr. Fairbairn had suggested to Fraser that the miniature pigs with which the small boy was playing (or, more correctly, enacting his inner psychic dramas) were upside down. Wee Fraser had obstinately insisted that the pigs’ legs should point upwards and, when corrected again by Dr. Fairbairn, had bitten the psychotherapist. Anybody, even St. Nicholas of Myra, the patron saint of children, might be tempted to slap a child in such circumstances – and Irene conceded that; indeed there was an entire school of psychotherapy, Cause-Effect Theory, which held that people needed to know that unpleasant consequences flowed from unpleasant acts. This theory, however, had been widely discredited, and Dr. Fairbairn should never have raised a hand to the biting child. That was crystal clear. Psychotherapists did not slap their patients, and the metaphorical rucksack of guilt that Dr. Fairbairn carried with him was entirely his own fault.

“Well, Wee Fraser is neither here nor there,” said Irene, adding, “perhaps.” Irene’s knowledge of Dr. Fairbairn’s guilt gave her some leverage over him; she would not want Wee Fraser to be completely forgotten.

Dr. Fairbairn said nothing. He was looking out of the window, in the direction of Aberdeen, which lay several hours to the north. There would be a great deal of psychopathology in Aberdeen, he imagined, but people might be unwilling to talk about it very much. If Californians were at one end of the spectrum of willingness to talk about personal problems, Aberdonians were at the other. It was a form of verbal retention, he thought; one did not want to part with the words unnecessarily. Words needed to be hoarded, at least in the verbal stage. He thought of a possible title for a paper, “Verbal Retention in a Cold Climate.” That was rather good, even if not as good as Shattered to Pieces, a title of which he was inordinately proud. It was quite in the league of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas or Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Irene was watching him look out of the window. She had not imagined that Bertie’s psychotherapy would come to a premature end and that she would be deprived of these comfortable conversations with this fascinating man in his wrinkle-resistant blue linen jacket. Suddenly she felt very lonely. Who would there be to talk to now? Her husband?

Her words came out unbidden. “And what about Bertie? What about the Bertie project? Weren’t you going to write him up?”

Before he could reply, she added, “And then there’s Ulysses.”

Matthew and Elspeth had left their wedding party in Moray Place Gardens not in a car, but on foot, which gave their going-away not only an intimate, but also a contemporary conservationist feel. Matthew, of course, was modest and would have eschewed any ostentation; he ridiculed the appearance in the streets of Edinburgh of stretch limousines and had no car himself, instead preferring to walk or take a bus wherever possible. For her part, Elspeth had a car, but only a small one, which had a permanently flat battery and was therefore little burden on the environment.

They did not have far to walk. India Street, where Matthew – and now Elspeth – lived, was only two blocks away, down Darnaway Street and along a small section of Heriot Row. They were to go there when they left the wedding party, now winding down after the ceilidh band had packed up their instruments and the dancing had stopped. Then, on the following day, they were to leave for their honeymoon, to a destination Matthew had kept steadfastly secret from Elspeth.

When they reached the front door of his flat on the third floor, he fumbled for the key in the pocket of his kilt-jacket.

“You should keep it in your sporran,” said Elspeth, “along with all the other things that men keep in their sporrans.”

Matthew looked at her in surprise. “But what do men keep in their sporrans?” he asked. He had no idea, but he knew that his was always empty.

“Oh, this and that,” said Elspeth. She had only the haziest notion of what men did in general, and none, in particular, of what they kept in their sporrans. Indeed, as she looked at Matthew standing before the door of their new home, it occurred to her that she had done an extraordinary thing – or at least something that was extraordinary for her – that she had married a man, and that this person at her side – much as she loved him – was, in so many important ways, quite different from her. He would look upon the world through male eyes; he would think in a masculine fashion; he was something else, the other.

“You could look in my sporran if you like,” Matthew said.

She looked down at the leather pouch and very gently reached down to touch it.

She said nothing; both were somehow moved by what was happening; this sharing of a sporran was an unexpected intimacy; ridiculous, yes, but not ridiculous.

“I’ve found my key,” said Matthew, after a while. “Here.”

He slipped the key into the lock and opened the door. Inside, at Matthew’s request, and placed there by his best man a few hours before the wedding, a large bunch of flowers dominated the hall table, red and white carnations.

“Thank you for marrying me,” Matthew said suddenly. “I never thought that anybody…”

“Would marry you? But there must have been lots of girls who…”

“Who wanted to marry me?” Matthew shook his head.

She said, “I don’t believe that.”

“It’s true. Nobody. Until you came along and then we knew, didn’t we? We just knew.”

Elspeth smiled. “I suppose that’s right. I thought that I was on the shelf. I thought that I would spend the rest of my days teaching Olive and Bertie and… Tofu.” She gave an involuntary shudder: Tofu. “But you took me away from all that.”

Matthew took her hand, moved by the frankness of what she had said. These words, he felt, were like an act of undressing. “You took yourself away.”

He dropped her hand and walked across the hall to switch on a light. “Is your suitcase all ready?”

She nodded.

“And your passport?” Matthew asked.

She laughed. “Do we need that for Arran?”

“I wouldn’t mind going to Arran,” said Matthew. “We used to go over there when I was a boy. My uncle had a house near Brodick and we would go there in the summer. It was mostly Glasgow people and there was a boy there whom we called Soapy Soutar and who threw a stone at me because I was from Edinburgh. He said I deserved it and that if I came back next summer it would be a rock. I remember it so clearly.”

“So it’s not Arran. Why don’t you tell me?”

“Because I want it to be a surprise.”

She reached out and slipped her hand back into his. “You’re a romantic.”

“If you can’t be a romantic about your own wedding,” he said, “then what can you be romantic about?”

“So no clue at all?”

He thought for a moment. “A tiny one… maybe. All right. A tiny clue.”

She looked at him, searching his expression. She hoped that it would be Italy; that he would say something like “where there’s water in the streets” or “the Pope lives nearby” or hum a few bars of “Return to Sorrento.”