sure what I’m basing that on. Also, psychiatrists in films look old as wizards. Wait, which are you, and what’s the difference?’
‘I’m a counsellor-psychologist. In essence, the difference is that psychiatrists prescribe drugs. I don’t prescribe drugs. Lucrative, it depends,’ Fin says. ‘If you go into private practice and you’re successful. I got a lucky break early on.’
‘What sort of lucky break?’ I ask, sipping my drink.
‘Hmmm …’ Fin says, appraising me. ‘I have these thoughts about what I want going back to Susie, then realise it can’t.’
‘Me too,’ I say.
‘What, you’d have ever worried I’d talk to her?’ he says, raising an eyebrow.
‘No, in general. The impulse to refer back to her and realising you can’t, any more.’
‘OK. Please don’t repeat this anyway, but … when I first began treating people at my own practice, after my residency, a friend sent someone with a profile to me.’
‘With a profile?’ I repeat, blankly.
I think of Finlay as sharing a lexicon with me, and every so often he sounds like an NYT Long Read. As if he’s going to start using words like storied and preposition and luscious plums.
‘They were working on a big-budget film and not able to carry on and needed therapy, someone to talk to.’
‘Oh God, you mean they were famous?’
‘I did sessions with them, they felt able to return to work, the studio saved a lot of money and the film won Oscars.’
‘Shit!’
‘Then the person I helped told their friends about me. That formed the basis of a very strong client list.’
Fin drinks the last of his coffee.
‘You’re the head doctor to a bunch of neurotic A-list actors, so can set your prices at “totally mad bilk” level? And you know all their secrets?!’
‘I’m good at what I do, my clients are human like you or I, and my prices are competitive, thank you,’ Fin says, rolling his eyes, but with no real ire. ‘Patient confidentiality is inviolable.’
‘What made you want to go into it?’
‘I had some therapy myself,’ Fin says, and I feel like his background plus his Statesideness meant I should’ve anticipated this. ‘It was really interesting to me, unravelling why we behave the way we do. I wanted to help people in the same way. Not to sound too Miss Universe.’
‘Susie never knew this thing about being “doctor to the stars”? You really wouldn’t tell her?’
‘I tried to tell my family as little as possible,’ Fin says, and the shutters visibly come down, in his tight expression.
I push my luck with Finlay, but I can feel the danger well enough to not joke or poke any more.
‘Can I ask something?’ he says, putting the spoon in the cup. ‘What was the Twin Peaks music about at the end of Susie’s service?’
‘You didn’t like that?’
‘I didn’t dislike it, I thought it was a curious choice, that’s all.’
‘Why? She loved the show and its atmosphere fitted somehow, I guess. She liked to say she was Laura Palmer.’
The Laura Palmer they couldn’t kill. That has aged badly.
‘A series about a blonde homecoming queen with a demonic side who died tragically young?’ Fin says. ‘Her life a seething mass of sex, drugs and dysfunction behind the apple pie, charity bake sale surface? It honestly didn’t occur it might look like some sort of … comment?’
I open my mouth and for once I’m lost for words.
‘For it to be a comment, any of that would have to resemble Susie?’ I say.
Fin sits back, and contemplates me.
‘Ready to head off?’ he says, eventually, with a nod at my glass, and I say yes and neck my drink.
What on earth …? Did he know about Susie’s few grams of coke, or what?
‘I never thought of Edinburgh as having a seaside,’ I say on the fifteen-minute drive, adding: ‘Despite it being a port, obviously,’ in case Finlay thinks I’m full airhead.
Fin ordered an Uber to take us to Portobello, saying he doesn’t fancy city-centre motoring on what feels like the ‘wrong side of the road’, for the time being, which seems fair enough to me.
‘Apparently, Sean Connery worked as a lifeguard at the swimming baths out here,’ Fin says, as we emerge from the car into the freezing grey of a wintertime promenade.
‘You’d want to be covered in whale grease to do that in Scotland, wouldn’t you?’ I say, shoving my balled hands deeper in my parka pockets.
‘I’m an idiot, aren’t I,’ Finlay says, as we wander down the street, past the railings and the band of pale deserted sand that must