And then he told her that he came from Aberdeen. His father, he said, was in the oil business. He had a company which supplied valves for off-shore wells. They sold valves all over the world, and his father was often away in places like Houston and Brunei.
He collected air miles which he gave to Wolf.
“I can go anywhere I want,” he said. “I could go to South America, if I wanted. Tomorrow. All on air miles.”
“I haven’t got any air miles,” said Pat.
“None at all?”
“No.”
Wolf shrugged. “No big deal,” he said. “You don’t really need them.”
“Do you think that Dr Fantouse has any air miles?” asked Pat suddenly.
6
A Picture in a Magazine
They both laughed. “Definitely not,” said Wolf. “Poor guy.
Bus miles maybe.”
Inside the Elephant House it was beginning to get busy, and they had to wait to be served. Wolf suggested that Pat should find a table while he ordered the coffee and the sandwiches.
Pat, waiting for Wolf, paged through a glossy magazine which she found in a rack on the wall. It was one of those magazines which everyone affected to despise, but which equally everyone rather enjoyed – page after page of pictures of celebrities, lounging by the side of swimming pools, leaving expensive restaurants, arriving at parties. The locales, and the clothes, were redolent of luxury, even if luxury that was in very poor taste; and the people looked rather like waxworks – propped up, prompted into positions of movement, but made of wax. This was due to the fact that the photographers caked them with make-up, somebody had explained to her. That’s why they looked so artificial.
She turned a page, and stopped. There had been a party, somebody’s twenty-first, at Gleneagles. Elegant girls in glittering dresses were draped about young men in formal kilt outfits, dinner jackets and florid silk bow-ties. And there was Wolf, standing beside a girl with red hair, a glass of champagne in his hand. Pat stared at the photograph. Surely it could not be him.
Nobody she knew was in Hi! magazine; this was another world.
But it must have been him, because there was the smile, and the hair, and that look in the eyes.
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 Renaissance and Victorian people, pushed back their chairs and got up.
At the door, Wolf said: “Which way are you going?” and Pat replied: “Across the Meadows.”
“That’s cool,” said Wolf. “I’ll walk with you. I’m heading that way too.”
They walked together, chatting comfortably as they did. They talked about the other members of the class, some of whom Wolf knew rather better than Pat did. Wolf was a member of the University Renaissance Singers and had been on a singing tour with one of the other young men. “He’s hopeless,” he said.
“All he wants to do, you know, is go to bars and get drunk. And he keeps going on and on about some girl called Jean he met in Glasgow. Apparently she’s got the most tremendous voice and is studying opera at the Academy there. He can’t stop talking Co-incidence in Spottiswoode Street 9
about her. You watch. He’ll probably bring her name up in the seminar: ‘Jean says that Benedetto Croce . . . ’”
There were other snippets of gossip, and then he enquired about what Pat had been doing the previous year. She told him about the job in the Gallery, which she still had on a part-time basis, and about Scotland Street too.
“It’s more interesting in the New Town,” he said. “Up in Marchmont everybody’s a student. There are no . . . well, no real people. The New Town’s different. Who did you share with?”
Pat wondered how one might describe Bruce. It was difficult to know where to start. “A boy,” she said. “Bruce Anderson. We weren’t . . . you know, there was nothing between us.” But there had been, she thought, blushing at the memory of her sudden infatuation. Was that nothing?
“Of course not,” said Wolf. “People you share with are a no-no. If things get difficult, then you have to move out. Or they have to.”