You're a lucky woman Andrea Cramond, he thought, as she took his arm, there in the airport lounge. Not because of me, and not as lucky as me in one way, because I have more of your time than anybody else, but otherwise ...
Let it go on, he thought. Don't let the idiots blow up the world and don't let anything else terrible happen. Steady, kid; who are we talking to here? He sold the bike soon afterwards. His father fell and broke his hip that winter. He looked very small and frail when he visited him in hospital, and much older. In the spring he needed a hernia operation, and fell again, not long after he'd left hospital. He broke a leg and a collar bone. 'Have tae take mair waiter with it,' he told his son, and refused to come and live with him in Edinburgh, because his friends were here. Morag and her husband also offered to take him in, and Jimmy wrote from Australia to say why didn't he come out for a few months? But the old man didn't want to move from his own area. He was in hospital for longer this time, and when they let him out he couldn't put back on the weight he'd lost. A home-help came round every morning. She found him, apparently asleep, by the fire one day, a small smile on his face. It had been his heart, too. The doctor said he probably hadn't felt a thing.
He found himself organising everything, not that there was very much to do. His brothers and sisters all made it to the funeral, even Sammy, on compassionate leave, and Jimmy all the way from Darwin. He had asked Andrea if she minded not coming; she said no, and understood. Once it was all over, it was good to go back to her, back to Edinburgh and work. He never did entirely lose the feeling of numbness which crept over him when he thought about the old man, and though he shed no tears, he knew he'd loved him, and did not feel guilty about that dry grief.
'Ah, my poor orphan,' Andrea said, and was his comfort.
The company expanded; more people joined. They bought grand new offices in the New Town. He argued with the others about their employees' salaries; they should all have a share, he said; they should all be partners.
'What,' the other two said, 'a workers' collective?' They smiled tolerantly. 'Why the hell not?' he said. They were both SDP supporters; worker participation was one of the ideas the Alliance liked. They said no, but started a bonus scheme.
Then one day Andrea got off a Paris flight and she wasn't smiling, and his guts seemed to lurch. Oh no, he thought. What is it? What's wrong?
She wouldn't talk about it, whatever it was. She said there was nothing wrong but she looked very solemn and thoughtful most of the time, laughed little, and would often look up, distracted, say sorry and have to have repeated to her the last thing somebody had said. He worried. He thought about phoning Gustave in Paris and asking what the hell was wrong with her, what had happened, there?
He didn't call. He fretted, and tried to entertain her, taking her out to dinner to see a film or over to see Stewart and Shona; he tried to organize a nostalgic evening, eating at the Loon Fung, near his old flat in Canonmills, then taking a taxi to the Canny Man's, but nothing worked. He couldn't decide what it was. Mrs Cramond and he worried together, and individually tried to get the truth out of her. It was the mother who did, though only after three months and another two visits to Paris. Andrea told her mother what was wrong, then went back to France again. Mrs Cramond rang him up. MS, she told him. Gustave had multiple sclerosis.
'Why didn't you tell me?' he asked her.
'I don't know,' she said, listlessly, eyes dull, voice flat. 'I don't know. And I don't know what to do; he's got nobody to look after him, not properly ..." When he heard those words, a chill settled in him. Poor guy, he thought, and meant it; but once found himself thinking, It's so slow, why couldn't he die quickly? And hated himself for the thought.
Another argument; during the '84 strike he refused to cross a miners' picket line; the company lost a contract.
Andrea spent more and more time in Paris; less people came to the house at Moray Place now. She looked tired whenever she came back from France, and though she was still slow to anger, and still easy with people, she was slow to laugh now as well, and guarded about taking any enjoyment at face value. When they made love, he thought he could detect an extra tenderness in her, and a sense of how precious and impermanent such moments were. It was less fun than it used to be, but somehow the act had gained an extra resonance, become in itself a sort of language.
Sometimes when she was away in Paris he would get lonely sitting in the big house by himself, reading or watching the television or working at the drawing board; if he'd had less than the legal limit to drink he would take the Quattro out and drive to North Queensferry to sit beneath the great dark bridge, listening to the water lap against the stones and the trains rumble overhead; he would smoke a joint or just breathe the fresh air. If he felt pity for himself, it was only one timid, tentative part of his mind that felt so; there was another part of him which seemed like a hawk or an eagle; hungry and cruel and fanatically keen-eyed. Self-pity lasted a matter of seconds in the open; then the bird of prey fell on it, tearing it, ripping it.
The bird was the real world, a mercenary dispatched by his embarrassed conscience, the angry voice of all the people in the world, that vast majority who were worse off than he was; just common sense.
He discovered, to his knowing, almost righteous dismay, that the bridge was not painted end-to-end over a neat three-year period. It was done piecemeal, and the cycle lasted anything between four and six years. Another myth bites the dust, he thought; par for the course.
Andrea was away in Paris almost half the time now. She had another life there, another set of friends; he'd met some of them when they'd come over to Edinburgh; a magazine editor, a woman who worked in UNESCO, a lecturer who taught at the Sorbonne; nice people. They were all friends of Gustave, too. I should have gone over, he told himself, I ought to have gone, made friends. Too late. Why am I so stupid? I can design you a structure to withstand hundred-foot waves for thirty years or more and make it as sturdy and safe as any other designer could for the weight and the budget, but I can't see my hand in front of my face when it comes to doing sensible things with my own life. If there is a design to my own existence it escapes me. What was that old Family song? The Weaver's Answer. Yeah, well; where's mine, Jimmy?
He bought a Toyota MR2 as well as the latest model Quattro, he started flying lessons, he built up a sound system based on Scottish-made components, he bought the Minolta 7000 camera as soon as it came out, added a CD player to the hi-fi and thought about buying a power boat. He went sailing with some of Andrea's old pals, from the marina at Port Edgar, on the south bank of the Forth, upstream from the two great bridges.
He grew restless with the Quattro and the MR2. There was always some better car; a Ferrari or an Aston or a Lambo or some limited edition Porsche or whatever ... he decided to stop competing and go for timeless elegance instead. He found a well-looked-after MK II Jaguar 3.8 through a local dealer; he sold the Audi and the Toyota.