But who is she? A student embroiled in an affair with an old wanderer and academic, attracted by a fierce intellect and its unconventional tastes? He can hardly see her dancing in nightclubs or enjoying the company of a regular circle of girlfriends. Beth is no ordinary girl. There is a wisdom in her. Something older than her years wrapped up in something childlike, like tenderness. A combination of maturity and vulnerability. And wasn't that what he saw and craved in Imogen too? But Beth goes beyond his fixation with Imogen. And Beth sweeps aside the tired attitude he's adopted toward girls since that disappointment. He feels as if, after only a brief introduction, she's reinvigorated something meaningful inside him, made him rediscover an intensity of feeling he's either forgotten or given up on.
But is there not the danger of disappointment also? She'll demand the finest clothes and eat special foods; she'll rocket across the sky in first class, and wear sunglasses by rippling turquoise waters, while palm leaves shudder above her. She's the kind of girl he's seen in London, with that cold, focused beauty, who strides across airport marble, indifferent to admirers, or sits alone at a café table, listening to some exclusive whisper from a chic mobile phone. Beth will want an extraordinary man; age will be of no consequence. How can he compete? Maybe she'll experiment with a musician for as long as he proves interesting and his scene stays valid, and then she'll be gone to a painter in Milan, or a terrorist in Paris. She has choices and lovers, her leather cases are full of expensive clutter, her windows are watched by drawn faces, sapped of blood by the rents in once confident hearts. The very thought of her past, her expectations and moods, makes him feel acutely fragile; he can almost taste the beginnings of his own despair.
Toward the end of their brief contact, in the shadow of an old church, she seemed distracted too. He remembers the flutter of ecstasy on the child-queen's face the moment she left him. Something he's occasionally seen captured on a model's face in a fashion shoot, featured in a copy of Tatler or Vogue, when he's leafed through pages reeking of opened perfume samples outside a doctor's surgery. What was she looking for in the Quad? What did she sense with her divine face? Was it a friend she planned to meet? Eliot said something to that effect. But who can say how these strange circles of Sloanes operate? They live in a different world. He guesses he would only come into contact with them in places like St Andrews, the Oxford of Scotland, where the students have money and boarding-school peers with unbelievable names. This is an alien place, with its cool air, hidden interiors and stone crevasses. He is still so far from learning its language.
Warm and relaxed, he lies in the crater his body has moulded around itself on the sofa cushions. While his mind brims with doubts and promises of something extraordinary that Beth might provide, he uses these impressions of her to obscure the fright he's received but still fails to explain to himself. Drawn from the first cigarette of the day, smoke curls about his flat belly and hangs over the green glass of the ashtray, placed between the golden belly ring and his tattoo of the Def American record label, inscribed around his navel. Cold glass feels good in the centre of so much warmth. Smiling, he wonders if Beth will ever trace a long fingernail around the fine lines of the tattoo. Most of his girlfriends have been fascinated with it.
But caution is everything. He is a hard-luck champion who eats chips with a tarnished fork; he belongs in bedsit land and on nightservice buses. A man who has made his choices and now lies in a different bed. So what does Eliot want with him anyway and why should Beth care? Some high-brow undergraduate would have been more suited to assisting Eliot with his work — not a man who lives in biker bars and plays Faster Pussycat covers for drinks.
And as he idles in the strong sunlight that falls across him from the garden windows, Dante wonders if they are toying with him. Is he a new curiosity to be tossed between sharp claws? Is he crazy for travelling so far, hastily setting sail in a rusty boat with the closest approximation to a male prostitute for a companion — his best friend, to the end?
Beyond the windows, the new world continues to glow, trapped in its infinite summer. The sky is blue again, and the country a lush green around the clump of majestic architecture perched on this jagged harbour. Amongst the rush of emotion and thought that fires through him, and then suddenly changes course and alters into fresh feelings and contradictory notions, Dante can identify excitement. This is an adventure he's fallen into, and the thrill-seeking part of him relishes it all. St Andrews, with its bickering academics and bloody history, is waiting to be discovered. He feels like a warrior from a Robert E Howard novel, wading ashore on some forgotten isle to tremble before the sight of distant black spires.
But despite his ecstatic first impressions of the town, when he was overwhelmed by the sea and the sunlight, he's become aware of something else. Although the place radiates the elegance and romance of any well-preserved site of antiquity, there's another feature so well hidden he only catches flashes of it, when particularly alert. A quality not entirely pleasant, if he is honest. Perhaps that taints his impression of the town, affects his feelings for Beth, heightens his suspicion, and gives him nightmares. It is possible. Because St Andrews possesses its own peculiar brand of darkness. It is hard to define while he gorges his senses on the freshness of a new and spectacular environment. But, all the same, it is there. Every monument to a martyr burned slowly for heresy speaks of injustice, and every skeletal ruin of church and tower hints at death. Nights have shadows deeper than any city and the impenetrable, almost oppressive, grey stone reminds him of a great and ornate mausoleum slab, dropped into place to cover forgotten plagues and unrecorded tortures. Here exists another threat, an old and clever one, like organised religion, he thinks, remembering the teachings of Banquet.
Whistling drifts into the lounge from the bathroom and breaks his train of thought. Dante sits up in bed, alert to the sound. Impatience in the performer spoils the melody he can hear Tom whistling. It's the tune for Sweet Child of Mine, which Tom always recites when trifled. When Tom joins him in the lounge, he stands in the middle of the room and lashes the lid off his Zippo against the seam of his jeans, before striking the flint down his thigh to create fire. 'Where did you piss off to last night?'
Dante stretches his legs out and mumbles through a fake yawn. 'Oh, I got tired. I was just like a fish out of water. How about you?' he adds, to change the subject.
'Don't change the subject. You never even said goodbye. I saw you with this fat guy and then you were gone. Was that Eliot?'
'No, it was the Hebdomidar, and you were busy with that blonde.
I only saw Eliot for a minute.'
'I wanted to meet him.'
'Busy man, Tom. Not a scratcher like you.'
Tom raises two fingers at Dante before disappearing back into the kitchen to rummage for milk.
'You dehydrated?' Dante asks.
Tom nods on his way back to the lounge. His eyes go wide over the rim of a plastic one-litre bottle of semi-skimmed milk.
'Did you cop off with that lass?'
Tom sneers, then burps.
'Well?'
'Been here three days, and already I'm the strike-out king of Scotland.'
Dante starts to titter. He knows what's coming. 'Tom, you cannot expect every girl to shag you on the first night.'