Pictures

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 It was an evening a year and a half ago; my partner and I invited my nephew around for dinner and he came with a friend, while someone I’d known for years was there as well. Calum and Luke were in their early twenties and in third year at university; my partner and I, and Sam, were in our late-thirties. The three of us were enjoying a dinner party; the two of them while not indifferent to the food served, the wine drunk and the music playing, were nevertheless in a state of anticipation. They planned to continue the night long after they left our place, or more particularly Calum did. When I asked where they were going later, as Beth cleared away the plates and I promised to do the dishes, so we found ourselves discussing what constitutes decency. Calum initially offered it as an anecdote, extending what he thought would be no more than a casual remark about a possible assignation. As Beth and I asked for more details, and as Sam remained quiet on the issue, the conversation continued for so long that it looked like Calum might miss the very encounter the chat was predicated upon. 

                                 2

   Calum was going to meet someone over at her place after midnight. She was out with friends and they were all at a bar he named, but while they were going to go on to a club, she planned to return home and meet him there. Calum had been at hers the previous weekend though nothing happened, he said, because Ella wasn’t quite ready to betray a boyfriend in Germany, a boyfriend Calum became aware of when he found himself in the person’s room and as they began to kiss on the bed he looked up and saw on the bedside table a photograph of this other young man smiling at him. The girl saw Calum catch sight of the photo and pushed his hand away from the skirt it was working its way up, and said she couldn’t go any further. She picked up the frame and put it into a drawer, came back to the bed, and apologised for failing to tell him before that she had a partner. She added that things were complicated; that for a while now she had been saying to her partner that she wanted either to break up or to be in an open relationship. The boyfriend wanted neither to split nor for either of them to sleep with other people. But if the only way to keep her was to let her share her Scottish bed with others, that was a compromise he was willing to accept. Yet this was the first person she had taken back to her room, and she couldn’t pretend it felt odd. 

    Calum said they chatted for about an hour, as he initially thought he could persuade her back into bed rather than them both sitting on the edge of it; then realised nothing was going to happen and his priority was to get back home, sleep, and prepare himself for the next night’s possibilities. As he departed, though, she said that she would like to try again on another evening. She just needed more time, she believed. Sure, he said, she had his number. He offered the remark, he believed, without resentment but without much enthusiasm, and he didn’t expect to hear from her again. But she texted during the week and he thought for a while about replying when he remembered that Beth and I had invited him over for dinner. He knew we were unlikely to want to stay up as late as he did, and he could come over to ours initially before carrying on to this girls’ place. In her text, she said that he could head over after she was out with friends. I glanced at Luke who said that he would just go back to his girlfriend’s, who lived near our flat: she was having a bit of a gathering. We lived in Hyndland; she was on Byres Rd. Calum asked us what he should do. He still hadn’t replied.

                             3

   Over the next couple of hours, the discussion was chiefly based on whether Calum should take up her offer or ignore it. We all agreed he should have replied sooner, but now that he hadn’t, and was asking everyone for advice, he might as well wait until he had heard what we all had to say on the subject. 

   Luke said all week he’d been telling Calum to let it go; she either didn’t know her own mind or she wanted to mess with his. What sort of girl, he insisted, would take a guy back to her place and leave the photo of the boyfriend she was going to cheat on, next to the bed? Beth said that perhaps she didn’t expect to take anyone back but she really liked Calum, and she had been having doubts about her relationship for some time. If true, Beth added, this meant that she liked Calum a lot and, unless he felt likewise, he should send her a text saying that he liked her too but wasn’t ready for a relationship with someone just getting out of one. Calum briefly said he had no interest in her beyond a night of fun, and I reckoned that were he to reply, as Beth proposed, it would have made Calum sound very presumptuous. If he didn’t want to hurt somebody’s feelings on the assumption that she had some for him, he needed to do know more than say that he enjoyed the other night but didn’t want to pursue it further. As we argued over the intricacy of the situation, or the intricacies we were giving to it, Sam remained silent. Maybe he felt he was the outsider here, neither a friend, relative or surrogate aunt, but I suspected he did so because he had the most advice to give and the greatest warning to offer. 

                              4

  By the time Luke and Calum left, we had discussed chiefly the woman’s feelings and motives. Calum’s were of little interest: he said he was mildly attracted, wanted something to happen that evening, and why waste money on a club, a few expensive drinks and the possibility of failure when he was given an open offer? I wondered whether that offer was still there; she’d been waiting days for a reply. If she were to say yes this suggested a woman lacking self-esteem, desperate to break up with her boyfriend and any guy would do, or a keenness for Calum she would be expressing by saying yes promptly after waiting for so much longer for a text. Luke insisted that she wanted to mess with his head as we realised that perhaps he was talking about what he felt his partner was doing to his. When Luke announced that his partner only allowed him out that night because it was dinner at Calum’s uncle, we suspected the leash was short, and a comment by Calum confirmed it. There are prisoners on parole with greater freedoms, he said, and Luke shook his head ruefully. Before they left, Beth said the person whose feelings we hadn’t taken into account was the boyfriend’s. He clearly cared about her, she said, and what would a night of modest pleasure be for Calum next to what could be weeks, months of pain for this other man? Calum said Beth was overthinking it, and I wondered if Calum hadn’t been thinking of it enough. Calum insisted we had spent much of the dinner discussing it, and Beth said perhaps only because Calum hadn’t been thinking through its implications himself. We all agreed he should have sent a text days ago, and minutes before leaving he sent her one saying he was now free. As they went to get a drink before a pub on the corner closed, he was still waiting for a reply. He was showing signs of impatience that Beth and I said more than served him right. The poor girl had been waiting days and he couldn't wait ten minutes. Calum reckoned there was no reason for an immediate reply by him; now there was from her. 

                                 5

   As a boy Calum was sweet, always keen for a hug, agreeable to strangers, and yet also stubborn, even cruel to his parents. They brought their three kids up to be as middle-class as they were and wanted strict rules for bed, television viewing, and time on the computer. Calum would say they were trying to copy their own childhoods as children educated in a private day school in the south of England. Here he was a comprehensive boy in the highlands of Scotland and all his friends thought his parents pompous. To accept their rules, he said, was to become ridiculous in the eyes of his friends, and while Tamara and Ethan may have conformed, he had no intention of doing so. I remembered having this conversation with him when he was fourteen. Tamara and Ethan (twins) had just gone off to university in Edinburgh and this was proof, his mum and dad said, that playing by his parents’ rules worked. The proof of the pudding lay in the eating, they said to him, but even their food didn’t much appeal. While all the others liked Tofu and muesli, chickpea curries and vegetable lasagne, wholegrain breads and humous, Calum preferred pizza, burgers, chips and a properly made mince chilli, the sort his friends’ mums would make. 

     I asked whether he was creating coronary problems in the future just so that he could be part of the local community now, and he said he didn’t think so. He liked chicken with roasted veg; enjoyed pasta with a simple sauce, always ate some fruit every day. What he didn’t like was the lifestyle being pushed in the food his parents ate. Everything tasted sanctimonious he said, a word he’d come across in a book he was reading for school. He liked the word, he added; he liked words that made sense of the world; not those that made sense of your upbringing. Aren’t words just words, I said. Yes, he admitted. But his parents used them as if they belonged to them; that the poor didn’t have access to such words.

    I knew he wasn’t being fair to his parents but then unlike Calum I had no sense of them being unfair to the friends he had who were living in housing estates in Dingwall. He said they would have preferred his friends were from Strathpeffer, the village in which they lived, and where many of the houses were stone-built Victorian dwellings, bought often at a high price by incomers who moved from the south of England or the central belt, and whose search for the tranquil life was helped along by selling these southern properties at a profit, one that allowed them to buy bigger houses and still have money in the bank. Calum’s parents were amongst them, and who were they Calum believed to get snooty about the locals. Calum didn’t feel this snootiness he insisted because he was a local. His brother and sister were born in Edinburgh but he was a real Highlander, a child born in Raigmore hospital in Inverness. But he knew too that he benefited from his parents’ comfort and their financial shrewdness. They recommended a Scottish university that meant he had no fees to pay, and bought a flat with their savings meaning that he had no rent to find, and all the bills were covered by Luke’s contribution. He did two shifts a week in a bar, and for much of the summer he cut grass for the Highland council. He earned enough for the year and his degree wasn’t costing his parents anything. 

                              6

   Throughout that evening Sam said hardly a word, and yet I supposed of all of us he had the most advice to give to Calum; he was someone who in his twenties and thirties had affairs, flings and no long-term relationships throughout that time. We had known each other since first year at university and though some would wish to call him a ladies’ man, a womaniser, lothario or any number of other terms that could quickly conjure up an image, I would say it was more that he was a man women liked rather than a man who liked women. They enjoyed his company since he was a good listener, didn’t brag about his accomplishments, and was a sympathetic lover. Of course, if this is what he told me, he would have been bragging, but over the years he had slept with several of Beth’s friends after they were coming out of relationships and he would offer more than a sympathetic ear. He wasn’t inclined to take advantage of them. Perhaps these friends expected more from Sam than he could offer but from what Beth told me it was more they were looking for someone to alleviate their loneliness rather than searching for a new relationship. Sam often gave anybody he was seeing the impression of the temporary in the comments he made, the travels he would soon be embarking upon, on the importance of his work. 

     Sam was an ecological engineer, someone who concentrated mainly on sustainable housing and over the last decade has focused more on the affordable aspect. Clients would come to him with a budget, usually a locale, and he would build with a team of three others a home that would meet those requirements. The client often had no more than a few vague notions and a capital sum, either their own or borrowed from a bank, and Sam would go into all the possibilities available given the money they had, the areas in which they were willing to live, and the practicalities that could save them money later on. Many clients were coming to him with expensive rents on properties they couldn’t get a mortgage on, and Sam would show them how with a home he could build for them, they would be living in a property that was closer to their needs, at a price they could afford, and with saving to be made in the future since the house would be so well insulated they might not need to put on the heating in winter. 

     The others in the team were an electrician, a plumber and a joiner, and between them they could build a house quickly and make enough money to live well, if simply. Two of them were married but none of them had children, and all of them lived in eco-houses in Scotland. With no mortgage and few bills, they could all work for a profit that needn’t be exorbitant, but it was clear that Sam was the one for whom it was a vocation. He would speak about it with far more feeling and interest than of any women he ever knew, and yet Beth said her friends reckoned he was never indifferent to their needs. He somehow managed to convey to these women that if it weren’t for how absorbed he was in his work, he might have been able to devote more time to them. 

     However, I always sensed a melancholy in Sam that could be easily enough explained but one that seemed so obvious that there was no need for us ever to discuss it. Sam never knew his parents and when adopted at six after years with various fosterers, he never became close to his new parents. When he turned eighteen he would write to them occasionally but have no other contact. He told me this when he was twenty-one, in our first year at university, and I’ve always assumed that contact with them has remained minimal. I have sensed in Sam someone who has respected other people’s feelings rather than expressing his own, and I was intrigued what he made of Calum who seemed to be doing the opposite. Yet there was also an invigorating energy to Calum that Sam never had, even if both of them were equally agreeable to women. There was nothing to suggest that Calum’s interest in the girl getting out of a relationship with her boyfriend had anything to do with comfort or solace: it was predatory pragmatism, a term I offered to Calum that night and he shrugged, as though this is the way the world works and it would be naive to think otherwise. 

    Sam also left when Calum and Luke departed, and next time I saw him a few weeks afterwards, it didn’t occur to me to enquire whether he chatted to Calum after they all left the flat. It probably didn’t seem of much importance or may have seemed too impertinent. I knew to make it of any significance would have been to say a few words about his past if I were to draw out a distinction between himself and my nephew. Instead, we talked about the subjects we often focused upon and yet I wouldn’t call it shop talk. He discussed his work usually in a way that emphasised the visionary over the practical aspects, and if he did talk practically it was usually about how he could source materials from less exploitative suppliers, how he managed to negotiate with landowners to negotiate a fairer price. He would sometimes tell them that selling some of their own land fairly to an eco-dwelling would enhance the general value of the rest of what they owned. Perhaps in the future if they sold a dozen plots to eco-housing, then this could lead to subsidies for the land they still possessed. Was he lying to purchase cheaper land? He didn’t know; nobody did when it came to governments investing in a greener economy, and so it would probably be more accurate to say he was assertive over the future that should have demanded more doubt. Governments were constantly promising and then reneging. All Sam knew was that if in all this overpromising he could try and convince some landowner to lower their prices, then all to the good. The worst that would happen was that the owner would lose a bit of money on a purchase, and yet money had been saved in the process of moving towards a greener future. For some reason when he said this it didn’t occur to me that he was also practising predatory pragmatism, but it might have been fair to compare an aspect of his thinking with Calum’s: perhaps we are all given to such thinking when we are passionate about our interests. 

                            7

    It was six months after that earlier dinner when Beth and I invited Calum out for a meal. He was planning to go north for dinner at a restaurant in Inverness but there had been heavy snowfall, the roads had been closed, and the train couldn’t get through either. My sister phoned in the morning, asking if I could take him out in Glasgow instead. There had been only a light snowfall in the city and I recalled Calum mentioning a couple of restaurants he’d eaten in with his parents that he liked. I phoned one of them and booked a table for four, thinking he might again want to invite Luke, and then sent a text to Calum saying that he was still going to get a birthday dinner after all. Waiting for the reply, I realised I should have asked him first — someone as actively social as my nephew may have arranged alternative plans promptly after the disappointment of the cancelled trip. But no, he was free, and yes — it would be great if Luke could come also. It was the sort of diner Beth and I would have been disinclined to visit, but before booking we looked at the menu, saw that this eat-as-much-as-you-like meat buffet had a vegetarian one as well, and agreed it was to please the birthday boy. What sort of sacrifice was it to watch two burly lads tear away at flesh, while we poked away at our leaves and hoped the halloumi was fried properly so that it had a firm rather than just chewy texture?

    The salad was fresher than expected; the vegetarian grilled options surprisingly broad, and they somehow managed to make a nut burger that was firm enough to be grilled. Calum and Luke went up to the buffet bar three times and between them may well have gone through a smallish mammal. They put some vegetables on their plate but ate only a few potatoes; some sprouts. I was reminded of the phrase that eating is cheating when you’ve started consuming alcohol — why dilute it with food? The guys offered a variation of it with food consumption — why waste all that stomach space with veg? As Calum gritted his teeth on a spare rib, I looked on and saw someone who devoured it like he probably devoured life, with an enthusiasm that knew he was on the winning side. That was perhaps why I gave up meat after I finished university. I didn’t want to be a winner or loser but to settle for a score draw in life and thought somehow that meeting Beth in my final year was a little like an emotional version of it. It wasn’t that we didn’t love each other (of course we did). It was equally that we couldn’t leave because that would cause pain, as though our love was based on the same principle as our vegetarianism. 

     Over dinner, I asked Calum about his degree, in environmental planning, and he said it was going well — he wasn’t sure whether he wanted to pursue it but remembered a few things Sam said when we last met up, and that made him more enthusiastic about finding work in the field than anything his teachers had offered. He admitted he was half-hoping that Sam was going to come along as well. I said he was building a house in Germany, though it might not have occurred to me to have invited him anyway, for culinary reasons, and neither had I thought much about how close to Sam’s work Calum’s degree happened to be. I said I didn’t recall that he and Sam talked much about his degree or Sam’s work but Calum said after Luke went to his girlfriend’s, the pair of them carried along Byres Rd, through the university and onto Woodlands Rd. They talked for twenty minutes and in just that time Sam managed to convince Calum that what he was learning was useful, even if some of his professors weren’t capable of conveying that importance to him. 

   After the chat, Calum wondered if in the future he might be able to join Sam’s team, and hoped he would have been there at the dinner so he could get to know Sam better. As Calum said this I could have seen it as another example of Calum’s pragmatism, that he saw in Sam a chance for a decent job in a couple of years. But that would have been to suggest cynicism on Calum’s part that may have required a deeper cynicism on mine. I might not quite share Calum’s pragmatic approach to life but Beth has always told me that she likes that I am not idealistic either — that I tend to look at situations with respect for their integrity rather than my own belief. This means that whether an act is idealistic, pragmatic or cynical, I often, if Beth is correct, see it as it is. If Calum had been cynical or pragmatic, I would have noticed. But in this moment he didn’t seem anything other than awed; that his meeting with Sam had changed how he saw the subject he was studying. I promised next time to invite Sam as well, though it might not be for an eat-as-much-as-you-like, meat-based buffet. Sam was vegan. When I said this, Calum appeared to chew on his meat more slowly, as though ruminating as much as masticating. 

                              8

    After finishing the meal, with Calum and Luke on another beer and Beth and I drinking a weak black tea after our request for camomile was met with confusion, Beth asked whether anything more came out of his encounter, the one with the picture and the boyfriend. Calum said it had indeed, though not as he might have expected. He admitted one reason why he was willing to take none too meaningfully Ella was that for several months before this he had been friends with an Estonian who didn’t want anything steady with him. Lenna told him that a serious relationship meant serious money and that was something he lacked. She said it while taking a photo of him in an outside cafe, saying that the light suited him and she couldn’t resist taking a snap. She explained how much her degree in pharmaceuticals (the same degree as Ella) was costing her, how little her parents earned in civil service jobs back home, and how she wanted to live far less frugally than they did. What was the point of taking out a huge loan to fall in love with a man who was going to remain relatively poor? She didn’t come to Britain to find a rich husband, she said, but she definitely didn’t do so to find one with an earning capacity lower than her own. He admired her honesty, couldn’t help but admire her beauty, and accepted that while she occasionally invited him out, he was careful not to turn it into an expectation. It was partly why he was always looking out for other assignations. Beth looked at him a little sternly and all but said Calum seemed happy to hurt others if it meant protecting himself. He shrugged, looked around the restaurant, and said he was a carnivore. He admired vegans, vegetarians and fidelity — but he wasn’t there yet. Yet he thought he was moving in the right direction; if he wasn’t, he would consider switching degrees and become a financier or work in pharmaceuticals. Then he could hook up permanently with the Estonian and they might become a power couple. Instead, the power that interested him was in renewables, and that is why he would like to speak to Sam. 

   He argued his point well, and always with humour, and Beth admitted she had been a bit spiky. Not at all Calum insisted — it was amazing of them to take him to the restaurant. He said he did meet up again with Ella but not that night; he went home and looked up Sam’s business online and found himself staying up till four in the morning, looking on the internet at sustainable housing and how he might get involved in building them. He met Ella a few days later though and there was no longer the photo of her boyfriend next to the bed. Instead, he suspected the boyfriend was equally present this time but in her mind rather than on the bedside table. It made things awkward and when he left he could see that she thought she had betrayed her boyfriend. When they hugged as he departed it was more out of consolation than desire, and he knew he wouldn’t be going back. He just hoped that he was the necessary evil who allowed her to break the ties with her ex, or they would become a couple again realising that she wasn’t as polyamorous as she thought. He said this with no humour, and yet I wondered if there was more to the story than he was telling me. I understood some people might respond to this incident with lots of compassion, but not Calum. It wasn’t that he was insensitive; he just wasn’t at all overly sensitive. I found his empathy mildly confusing and attributed it to this greater concern in sustainability and saving the planet.     

                             9

    When I next saw Sam, I told him of Calum’s interest in his business, that he was hoping in the future there might be an opportunity for him to be involved. He asked me how he was doing, laughed, and wondered whether Calum managed to resolve his dilemma with Ella. I was surprised he remembered the specifics and I told Sam that Calum went through with the assignation but he didn’t feel so good afterwards. Sam said he would have offered a few words of advice when they walked together after the meal but Calum was more interested in Sam’s job, and so he wasn’t surprised he was keen to seek employment in his area. Sam was however a little perplexed that he wanted to work with him. Did he know how low the salary would be? I said it didn’t seem to bother him and mentioned to Sam a young woman Calum met who wasn’t interested in a serious relationship with Calum because she didn’t think he would ever earn enough for her to justify spending her life with him. If Calum worked for him, there wouldn’t be much spending beyond the necessities of life, Sam said, laughing — and he said that is the thing, sometimes our lives don’t create the chance for us to exist as emotionally fully as we would like. 

   It was a more deliberate expression than I’d usually expect Sam to offer, and it was as though he offered it having thought a bit about Calum’s enthusiasm for women, and what seemed now increasingly an enthusiasm for a vocation. I suspected this was never a tension for Sam, and wasn’t really for me either — though for opposing reasons. I knew when I met Beth that I would love her and nobody else, and as I‘ve noted it wasn’t just about falling in love, though we did, it was also that when I looked at her, and she looked at me, we saw in each other’s eyes a vulnerability that we didn’t want to exacerbate. Most humans have this, but if we choose to love someone, or love chooses us to love someone, then those eyes we look into are ours to protect, just as if we are lucky enough to have a baby, we will both do the same for our child. I’ve had a few conversations over this with Beth but never tried to discuss it with Sam, but that day we did, after I claimed Beth was my vocation, while he seemed to find it in his work. Sam wouldn’t deny it, but when I talked of protecting Beth, and Calum perhaps having no interest at least for the moment in protecting anyone, he said perhaps that in time, like Sam himself, Calum would want to protect the planet. This was a platitude, of course, but that didn’t mean for some it possessed a validity equal to the love I might have for Beth. Sam tried to explain it; saying that he didn’t differentiate much a sad plant and a sad person: both needed tenderness and care. 

   He said it as though he could have offered any number of other examples but I found it interesting that he gave that one. It would be close to the way Beth described how Sam had treated her friends — and if they didn’t feel loved, as Beth did by me, that was because he loved something far more than them. They didn’t feel at all hated — which had happened before. Sam suspected Calum was trying to find a way of loving more generally, as though caring about a person seems too narrow and this can lead to anything from a dissipated life to a concentrated one: from diluting his energies into one woman after another, or to finding a purpose that could make his life meaningful in a way that could allow him to find a focus.  

   I suppose I could have taken his remarks as a slight; there Beth and I were after university wondering what to do with ourselves and both went on to teacher training and have been English teachers ever since. Sam wandered around for several years before realising that his travels weren’t aimless but exploratory and interrogatory — many ideas since put into practice came from visiting sites around the world, sometimes seeing in architecture from the distant past possibilities in modern development. But I knew when Sam spoke about loving one thing or loving many, this wasn’t to dismiss Beth and me; perhaps he could see in Calum some similarities with himself. It seemed now ironic that while Beth and I offered advice that night when he was round for dinner, Sam, who was silent, might have been much more useful. Perhaps Calum sensed this too, and why they talked intently on the way home. 

                             10

       It would have been about three months since I last saw him when I received a text message from Calum. I supposed he asked to meet so that he could enquire more about Sam, and indeed at one moment during the chat he did ask whether there was any chance of working even voluntarily with Sam for a year after he finished his degree. He’d been talking to his parents about it, saying they would let him stay for a year in the flat for nothing, and he could perhaps keep working in the bar. They agreed straight away, and he seemed moved when he told me this, as if he could see all his belligerence towards them was empty bluster and that he was more fortunate than many. But what he mainly wanted to talk about was an incident that happened some weeks earlier, not long before the meal at the meat buffet restaurant. He had still been in contact with Lenna, and still felt that there was a desire there that hadn’t been satisfied. He knew when he was around her it was different from how he would be when around other women. When he knew she was in a bar, he couldn’t but look across, or try and gravitate in her direction. Even if he was chatting up someone else, he would always wonder where in the bar or nightclub she was. If she was talking to a guy, he would feel jealous; if he couldn’t see her anywhere, he got mildly anxious. 

   On his birthday weekend, he invited her out, saying his parents weren’t coming down and he would like to celebrate with her. She agreed to Friday evening, which worked because by the time she got back to him, Beth and I had invited Calum to the restaurant. They went to a bar near her place in Finnieston, and when it closed she admitted the conversation was engaging. They talked about their prospective professions and Calum accepted that he didn’t expect to make a lot of money, and maybe now even less: he had become fascinated with the idea of building sustainable homes. Lenna said that she wouldn’t claim she was cynical but she couldn’t afford to be idealistic. She pragmatically wanted to work in companies that improved people’s health while improving her family’s well-being, but she couldn’t pretend if one had to take precedence over the other it would be her family over everybody else. He told her that evening there was perhaps an irony: that she wanted a rich husband and he wouldn’t be the one to meet those ambitions because his family was comfortable enough. She needed either to meet someone whose family was already rich or to meet someone poor enough that they too wished to escape their impoverishment into great wealth. 

   She found what he said patronising, when he only meant it to be ironic, but he could see in her touchiness that perhaps it wasn’t so important that she was with someone with great ambition or great wealth, but someone who could understand her sensitivity to money. He apologised and he leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. By any other standards, if this had been a date, it would have been a success. He’d been invited back to other girls’ places with far less of a connection and, when they called last orders, he asked what they should do now. She didn’t want to go to a club, she said, and he concurred. They could have walked for a bit, but while it wasn’t as cold as in the Highlands, covered as it was in inches of snow that stopped his parents from making it down, he thought it might be too cold for a short stroll. Not at all, she insisted, this is mild weather for Estonia. Perhaps it was, but while she was wearing as she admitted a thermal vest, a jumper, a gilet and a woollen coat, he was attired in a T-shirt, a jumper and a jacket that was made of too thin a material to protect him from the cold for very long. He proposed they walk nevertheless, and they went around Kelvingrove Park, up by Park Circus, and back to Finnieston. By the time they arrived at her door, he was shivering, and she said that he could come in but only for a quick tea and to warm up. They should have stopped off at Woodlands and she could have found her way home. She said it with a smile and he met it with a bashful grin, though he didn’t expect anything much to happen. He was assuming he would have to keep his clothes on to stay warm; the chance of taking them off didn’t even have the excuse of the weather. If only it had been that rarest of Scottish things: a summer heatwave or, much more commonly, rainy weather. 

     Though he would have met Lenna maybe on a dozen occasions out in bars and cafes, this was the first time he’d been invited into her flat. She shared it with three others, she said, and they were luckier than many sharing: they had a dining kitchen and a sitting room. It was perhaps why he ended up so quickly in Ella’s bedroom, Calum said. Their kitchen was small and they had no other social space. Calum and Lenna settled into the kitchen. The central heating was on and she turned the radiator up full. After an hour, she said she was ready for bed, and he knew that meant alone, but he asked if he could use the bathroom. It was along to the left at the end of the corridor. Next to the toilet was what he assumed was Lenna’s room — she had on the door an Estonian flag — and it was slightly ajar. As he passed, he pushed the door open a little more and peeked in. The hall light illuminated a neat space, with a narrow double bed in the middle, a shelf of books, a few posters. What he also noticed was a photograph beside the bed. What he couldn’t work out was of whom, though it looked to his eye like it could have been him. He went into the bathroom and while standing there, wondered if he should take a closer look. It would be a violation, of course, but only if the photograph turned out to be someone else. Surely it was a brother, or her father, or possibly a boyfriend or ex-boyfriend she had no reason to tell him about. But if it were him, then he believed he had every right to look, and supposed the ethics of the situation hinged on a fact he needed to confirm. 

   I interrupted him briefly and said while many facts need no more than a search through a dictionary, a search engine, or a question to a friend, this was an ethical violation. He would be going into a woman’s room uninvited. He said he was well aware of that, but he asked me whether I wanted to know if he was in the picture or not. I admitted I was intrigued, and he proposed that I might have been a lot more so if I thought I was in the photograph. At that moment I knew I was relieved that I’d been for many years in a relationship with Beth. He said he had several options. He could go in and look. He could say to Lenna that as he passed her bedroom he noticed a photograph and wondered who it was. He could ignore it and assume he was being silly even thinking it might have been him. The last option would have left him no wiser than he was while in the bathroom; the second option could have led Lenna to lie, to regard him as impertinent, to see him as someone who shouldn’t have even been looking into her room as he passed. The first allowed for the categorical and so he chose it. He had closed the kitchen door to keep the heat in and was glad that he did: Lenna would be less inclined to hear him. He flushed the toilet and turned on the torch on his phone, ventured into the bedroom and, standing by the end of the bed, shined the light in the direction of the photograph. He could see it clearly and could see that it was him. It was the picture she took when they had months earlier been sitting outside on a cafe terrace.  

    What was he to make of this photograph? As Calum and Lenna talked for another forty minutes, he tried to pursue her more forthrightly than he had done before, but her rebuffs were equally assertive. He couldn’t understand why if she liked him enough to have a photo of him by her bedside she wouldn’t allow him into her bed. Perhaps she wanted a serious relationship and didn’t want to seem an easy lay, but they had met up on numerous occasions now and he knew that she had slept with others more casually. Again, this could be justified by seeking something more significant with him. Yet nothing suggested this except that photograph. She had made it clear on several occasions that Calum wasn’t ambitious enough, that he lacked the qualities she sought in a life partner. And so it was he went home that evening perplexed and came to the dinner with Beth and I preoccupied. He said the only thing in recent months that made him happy was his course, and especially talking to Sam about using his skills to work more specifically in that field.

    He tried not to think about Lenna, but he couldn’t pretend that the perplexity had become an annoyance. He knew that he shouldn’t have looked into her room, still less entered it and shined a light at the photo, but she had no right to put his photo next to her bed. It was his image, he thought, before supposing that there were posters all over the world of well-known people who were part of a room’s aesthetic. For whatever reason, Lenna had made him part of that; he was part of her decoration. But this wasn’t really true either: if he had seen a framed picture of a film star or a musician next to her bed he would have found it very strange as well. The more he thought about it, the less he understood it, and he may have eventually given up expecting an explanation until a week ago he got it, he said, or at least assumed he did. 

                               11

      Luke’s girlfriend was also studying pharmacology. She was a year ahead of Lenna and Ella, but when Calum showed her photos of them on his phone, after Calum asked her for advice shortly after seeing himself on Lenna’s bedside table, she said she was as confused as Calum. She didn’t have Luke’s photograph next to her bed and they had been together eighteen months. It made no sense Lenna had Calum’s. 

   Yet some sort of explanation was forthcoming. Luke’s girlfriend now knew what Lenna looked like and she became interested to know what made her so interesting to Calum, so willing to say she was determined to meet a rich man, and at the same time have Calum’s photograph beside her bed. It would be an exaggeration Calum told me that she stalked Lenna, but she found herself in the same cafes and bars around Strathclyde on a few occasions, and on one of them overheard her chatting to a fellow student. She was discussing why she had a photograph of a person she was not seeing on her bedside table. She said that though she would often tell men that she wanted to marry for money and wasn’t interested in love, it wasn’t true. Yes, her degree was costing her a lot and her family was not wealthy, but she would be happy if her partner worked hard but needn’t be rich — if he had a purpose and could make a living out of it. But by having a photograph of someone she wasn’t dating, it meant that when she took a man back to her room, she could see if the man didn’t care she appeared to have a boyfriend he was good for a fling and nothing more, and if he showed great concern that she would be cheating and he wanted no party to it, then this suggested someone who might just be the sort of man she was looking to spend more than a night with. She’d been to bed with several men since the photograph had been placed on her bedside table, though never more than once. They either didn’t notice the photo or pretended they hadn’t and, either way, she saw it as the sign that this was reason for no more than a one-night stand. 

    This was the news Luke’s girlfriend conveyed to him, and he suspected that she had almost stalked Lenna, and also that this was a story Lenna told other females as though it was a useful test of a man's decency. It would have been quite a coincidence otherwise; was quite a coincidence anyway. While it resolved the most inexplicable aspect of the situation, it still left a few details ambiguous. Calum wondered first why was he the one whose photo was next to the bed, found himself wondering too if Ella never had a boyfriend either, and picked some random person to represent one as she would have men come back to her place and decide if they were worthy of boyfriend status or just fling material. Was this a device women were now adopting as a way of testing men’s affections? It seemed to him a possible aspect of Lenna’s character but not Ella’s, and he couldn’t believe this approach had become generally adopted and that he wouldn’t have heard about it. 

     Instead, he surmised that Lenna knew Ella, Ella had told Lenna about him, and that this gave Lenna the idea to use it as a test for the man in her life, and who better than Calum to choose as the litmus test for male lovers? He was a young man casually taking advantage of the confused Ella, possibly exaggerating his feelings with Lenna, and was known to sleep with whichever woman he could get around campus. 

                                12

   I supposed Calum’s interpretation of events was correct, but what was more important perhaps was that he was offering such speculation at all. Calum saw himself as someone who didn’t see things from different points of view but from his own. This didn’t make him a terrible person but it had always made him both a limited one and a very active one as well. He would often not think about what he was going to do but do it, and his instincts were usually good enough that he didn’t need to worry about the outcome. But there was in his desire for Lenna, and the messy situation with Ella, a burgeoning awareness of a world beyond his immediate comprehension that had become important to understand. I hoped this wouldn’t undermine his confidence, though it would inevitably change just a little his personality. 

    I explained all this to Sam next time I saw him, and used it as an opportunity to ask him a couple of questions about his apparent determination to remain single. I expected to meet some resistance, supposed he would say there wasn’t much to tell. But instead, he told me that while he envied what Beth and I had, he never expected he could become so at one with another person; that the best he could do was be sensitive to the feelings of others and be realistic about his own. He had desires, of course he did, but what he didn’t seem to have was need, distinguishing the two by saying in desire there was chemistry but in need there was companionship. He could see Beth and I needed each other and we showed it in the frequent affection, missing each other whenever we had been apart for even a few days, and in assuming we would be together for the rest of our lives. He had never felt this with anyone and so what he always tried to do was comprehend that this need was a normal reaction that he didn’t possess, while trying to treat those he was seeing who might be feeling that way and managing that expectation. He usually couched it in work; saying he was so engaged in it, so frequently travelling, that he didn’t have much time for a relationship. He rarely told people where this reluctance may have come from; what source there may have been for this lack of need. 

    He asked me if Calum was still interested in working with him. I said even more so — that all the emotional confusion of the last few months left him believing he would be better trusting in work than love. Sam smiled, saying that while he would like to help the young man engage in sustainable house building, he wanted to be sure that this is what Calum wanted to do with his life, at least for a few years of it. I said to Sam that it wasn’t so much what happened, but how Calum understood and talked about it. The last chat we had was both instigated by him and showed a level of inquiry, curiosity and perspective I wasn’t used to seeing. He was always smart enough but it was as though Calum predicated his personality on bravado and belligerence, to seeing himself as a young man women fancied and a son who disdained the middle-classes. If he weren’t so charming it would have been obnoxious, and maybe that was his achievement: he had passed through his teen years and his early twenties without entirely falling out with his parents, and without women growing to hate him. Maybe he sensed they would begin to do so, and that his modest reliance on his parents meant that he ought to show their life choices a bit more respect.

     Recently he started to work for Sam, on a small salary that meant he could give up his summer job in a bar and focus on a new project with Glasgow City Council, building two hundred eco homes. It has been Sam’s biggest project thus far; he was pleased he could do it in his home city and glad that he could employ my nephew as more than a favour — he needed more people and also hired an experienced safety engineer.  

      I see Calum more often now, and while he is still single, and still has the occasional one-night stand, he no longer sees his love life as the centre of his existence, and said that he even discovered more recently a little more of the puzzle that he had been trying to figure out all those months earlier. He was in a cafe on a Saturday afternoon, he told me when I last saw him, reading through a book on post-war housing developments, and he hadn’t noticed Lenna sitting at a table on the other side of the cafe. When she looked up he waved across, then continued reading. Twenty minutes later, as she was leaving, she asked him how he was. He was great, he said, and she sat down next to him as he explained the work he was doing, how motivated he happened to be. It was good to have a purpose he said — before, he supposed, he had an attitude; a difficult thing to live for, and others to be around, after a certain age. She said he spoke as if were old and then corrected herself and said mature. Calum said if maturity was relative, then yes, compared to a couple of years ago he was. He then asked her about the photograph as he admitted, when he was in her flat that night, he went to the bathroom and on the way saw a photo by her bedside and the person looked like him. On his way back he looked again with the torch from his phone, and sure enough it was. 

       He expected her to get angry but she simply blushed. Maybe we have all grown up a little since then, she said, as she reminded him of the first time they met. Friends of hers knew friends of his and they all carried on to a nightclub and after he insisted on walking her back since she was the only one living in Finnieston, while most of the others were in Denistoun or Woodlands. It wasn’t too much of a detour, he insisted. She admired his chivalry but noticed as they walked he discussed how he couldn’t be in a serious relationship; thought his university years were for fun, and that his mates were the most important thing. She didn’t know when she accepted his invitation to walk her home that she wanted to start seeing him, but she was intrigued and attracted. By the end of the walk, she was mildly repelled, and that was when, and why, she told him that she wished to be with a wealthy man and that Calum would be of no interest to her. It was an immature response, and one exacerbated by the photo of him that would work to repel or attract a man according to her needs. 

She’d read about someone doing this as a test and who better than one she potentially could have been attracted to but whose attitude put her off? It also meant she felt no guilt, thinking of all the male friends she knew, the one who deserved to be used for such a project was him. He didn’t know if he should have felt flattered or insulted, he said, and she insisted he ought to feel insulted. He asked if it had worked. She said that she reckoned it did; that the person she had been seeing for seven months saw the photograph and immediately said he had no interest in sleeping with another man’s girlfriend. How would he feel were he ever to meet that man; how could he look him in the eye? And how could he respect a woman who could sleep with him while her boyfriend’s picture was looking at them? 

  She explained to her present boyfriend it was a joke or a test, or just something stupid, but that the person in the photo was a friend, and she put it there to see if anybody she was getting close to would have any problem with it. She. She was very pleased that he did. It proved he was an honourable man. He wasn’t convinced, went home shortly afterwards, but then sent her a text several days later asking if everything she said was true. She said it was, and after that they started going out together. 

   And so Calum had the full story, or as full a story as he could expect, and yet he was momentarily worried that he might bump into Lenna again, with her boyfriend, and he wondered how he would react to a man who had acted with far more dignity than he had when confronted with a photo next to the bed, even if he also had been a man in the photo as well. Such thoughts might have troubled him more a while ago, but after a few minutes, he was back into his book and reading about the post-war years again. I smiled when he told me this and said it was still important enough for him to feel obliged to tell me. He shrugged, a little of his old self coming back, before saying “I know.”

© Tony McKibbin