forgotten squares – Eccleston, Warwick, St George’s, Vincent – its floral roundabouts and roadside plantations. He seemed amiable enough, Lorimer thought, as he clambered up the stairs to his flat, realizing that he really should quell his instant suspicion of all those who worked for municipal parks departments. It was unjust: one rotten apple did not spoil the whole barrel, not every local authority gardener was like Sinbad Fingleton, after all.
54. The House at Croy. I went to Scotland to escape, to be alone and, I suppose, as convention dictates, to find myself. All I knew, after I left school, was that I had to go far away, far from Fulham and the family Blocj. So I sought out the most distant institution of higher education in the land that offered a course I was qualified to take and, after some research, decided that the North Caledonia Institute of Science and Technology provided me with the perfect geographical and academic conditions I required. I took the train north and travelled eagerly six hundred miles to the neat and tidy city of Inverness, with its castle, its cathedral and its clear, shallow river and the enfolding purple hills beyond. It was, for a while, everything I had asked for.
I lost my virginity in my second term at college to Joyce McKimmie, a mature student (mid-twenties) who sat in on some of the art history seminars I attended. Joyce was a fresh-faced, blowzy redhead who looked full of confidence but in fact was the opposite, her answers to questions in the seminar rooms beginning in an uncertain small voice and swiftly diminishing to a hushed whisper or sometimes even terminating in total inaudibility, leaving us all straining to hear, or creatively interpreting her almost–silence and rounding off her sentences on her behalf. She wore voluminous, improbable combinations of clothes, long, lacy skirts with cleated trainers and a nylon anorak, or in summer went bra-less beneath a man’s waistcoat with blue pedal-pushers and flip-flops on her dusty feet. She had a three-year-old child, a boy, Zane, who lived with her mother in Stonehaven during term-time. While she was at college she rented and sub-let rooms in a fair-sized house in a village called Croy to an odd selection of tenants.
Joyce, like many shy people, found liberation in alcohol and our first coupling took place – while we were both drunk – in a back room at someone else’s party. We bussed back to Croy at dawn and I spent the next three days there. Joyce seemed to have more money than the rest of us – child benefit? Zane’s absent father contributing? – and this had allowed her to rent the house, which she ran, surprisingly, as a kind of prissy, strict commune, introducing washing-up rotas, waste recycling, a partitioned fridge with prominently labelled milk bottles and coffee jars as well as permitting a tolerant attitude towards sexual activities, alcohol – and drug-consumption. At the centre of this routine was the evening meal, served promptly at eight o’clock, which all members of the house currently present beneath the roof were expected to attend. Amongst the shifting tenants was a hard-core of regulars, two genial, moon-faced brothers from the Isle of Mull, Lachlan and Murdo, a postgraduate Japanese girl called Junko (studying life sciences, to which mysterious end she spent many days out at sea on fishing boats quantifying and analysing catches), Joyce’s cousin Shona (thin, wiry, promiscuous) and Sinbad Fingleton, the feckless, gormless son of a local laird, recently expelled from his public school with one GCSE in biology to his credit, who worked for the Inverness Town Council Municipal Parks Department. To my vague surprise I found I liked Joyce’s uncomplicated company and the curious regimen in the House at Croy with its blend of licence and order and preferred to spend more time there than alone in my boxy cell in the college hall of residence, with its drab view of muddy football pitches and the dark, impenetrable green of the pine-clad hills beyond.
The Book of Transfiguration
Gale-Harlequin PLC resided in a new granite and polished steel building off Holborn. There was abstract art in the lobby and dark clumps of palm, fern and weeping fig. Uniformed security guards sat behind a rough-hewn ziggurat of slate. The harlequin logo was subtly present in the canvases on the walls, variations on its theme painted by eminent contemporary artists, two of whom Lorimer could identify through the plate-glass from the street. This was not