CHAPTER 8 OCTOBER                                              Two weeks later he got back to his digs from the sports centre and there was a new white Rover sitting outside the front door in the pool of light cast by a street lamp - an alien visitor from another planet. He remembered Jack's comment about the neighbourhood and looked for the piles of bricks but there were none. Perhaps they were an optional extra peculiar to BMW.          Mrs McCulloch objected to his bicycle sitting in the hallway so he carried it upstairs. She objected to his doing that too. Usually she came up the stairs after him examining the wallpaper for damage and making small but clearly audible clicks with her tongue. But that evening she just opened the kitchen door by a chink and looked at him through it as though she had recognised him from a photofit shown on Crimewatch.          He was surprised to find the light on when he opened the door and even more surprised to find Rosa sitting in his armchair.          ‘I don't think your landlady approves of me,’ she said in a whisper, ‘but I waved my micro at her and told her it was strictly work.’ She got up and closed the door quietly. She was laughing. A brown and cream micro lay on the table.          He leaned the bicycle against the wardrobe. There was not much room left. Rosa ran her hand along the mantlepiece and flicked the dust off her fingers.          ‘I've seen more salubrious dens,’ she said, ‘but at least you don't have pop music blasting your eardrums and Maurice's boring business colleagues droning on and on.’          ‘Coffee?’ he held up the pot. Rosa nodded and settled down at the table. She opened the case of the micro and looked for an electric socket.          ‘There's only one, I'm afraid and I've got the kettle plugged in to it.’          ‘No matter. I'll switch to battery. How do you manage normally?’ She was being very business-like and enthusiastic, setting out the cables, like a child packing for a picnic.          ‘Sometimes I swap with the kettle, but often I use the batteries and .......’ He froze in mid sentence. There was a pile of books on the window-sill beyond Rosa. Buried in the middle of the pile were the two tape cartridges he had got from Jack. Rosa was sitting beside them but did not appear to have noticed. She looked up from the micro.          ‘.... and ... and I recharge them overnight,’ he stammered.          He tried not to look in that direction, busying himself with the teapot and the cups. He put the cup down beside her.          ‘Here, I'll make more room,’ he said and lifted the pile of books. The top of the wardrobe seemed to be the best place.          ‘I though we might connect the machines back-to-back,’ she said. ‘It would save a lot of toing-and-froing with discs.’          They sat facing one another with the computers between them. They connected the cables so that the screens displayed the data from both. It was as though each was looking over the shoulder of the other. They began slowly, pausing to comment as they typed but the conversation died as the pace quickened. Ideas poured out and fingers flew on the keyboards. The coffee grew a skin.          *      *      *      *      *          There was a tap at the door - Mrs McCulloch with an invented story about someone behaving suspiciously with Rosa's car.          ‘Is that the time!’          It was 1 am. Rosa wouldn't wait for fresh coffee but made off hurriedly. Allan carried the micro for her downstairs. She put her hand on his shoulder and squeezed it as she took the machine from him at the door of the car.          Next morning he phoned in to explain that he would be delayed. Later, on the way to work, when the post office opened, he sent both the tapes in a padded envelope to himself at Jean's address.          *      *      *      *      *          Rosa came round to his digs quite often after that. Sometimes she brought food and cooked it for them in the microwave which she persuaded him to buy. The single electric socket made it difficult but he used some old camping tricks, wrapping a dish in pullovers to keep it warm while she cooked up a second one. Sometimes she brought a bottle of wine and apple juice for him in a wicker basket with French bread and cheese. She usually only had one glass and after a few visits she took to leaving the re-corked bottle with Allan for the next time. If he was not her secret lover then he was fulfilling some part of that role.          Once she had been for him a figure of immense stature, but although his respect for her did not diminish, she was now a real person with foibles and needs. She obviously enjoyed his company, for its own sake and not just for the intellectual excitement of their project although that was a good part of it. Sometimes, after they had eaten she did not want to rush straight into work but sat in his armchair talking about old times at Berkley and about Peter Tan and the trips they had taken into Yosemite. Sometimes she wanted to talk about him and drew out of him all about Jean and Uncle Roddy and his climbing.          ‘I must come and watch you at this sports centre,’ she said. ‘I don't think I could get up a mountain now-a-days.’          One evening Rosa had two glasses of wine. She seemed particularly relaxed and cheerful, joking a lot about Maurice and her step-children. Then she wanted to know what hills he had climbed recently.          ‘None at all. There hasn't been time.’          ‘That's no good,’ she said. ‘I'm taking up all your time.’ She laughed. ‘If you couldn't get to the sports centre you would go rusty. Where else could you go?’          ‘It's amazing what you can find if you are desperate.’          ‘Where would you go?’          ‘At home when I was a boy I used to climb around the flat. I could go from the front door across the hall, through the sitting room, into the broom cupboard and up through the trapdoor into the loft space without touching the floor.’          ‘You're joking!’          ‘No. Really. You wouldn't notice but there are all kind of holds and things around a house. I mean there's a ledge above every doorway and toe holds on the skirting boards. It's possible to get on to the top of a doorway and stay there.’          ‘I don't believe it!’ She was enjoying herself and poured a third glass of Sauterne.          ‘Honest.’          ‘Prove it! There's a doorway.’          So the gauntlet was cast and he had to do it. That meant stripping down to shorts and his hard narrow climbing shoes. The door was close by a corner of the room. He started by stepping up on to the edge of the skirting board at the point where it was wider by the door. He gripped the ledge above the door and pulled, walking up the face of the door as he did so, and then moving straight into a push-up with elbows akimbo. For balance he placed one foot on the wall with which the door made a right angle. Then taking his weight on one bent arm he snatched the other hand away and slapped it palm upwards on to the ceiling. The friction that provided stopped him falling over backwards as in the same flowing movement he brought up one foot and placed it on the ledge beside his left hand where his right had been. The ceiling was high so that there was just room for him to pull up the other leg and sit hunkered on the ledge with both hands on the ceiling and bottom sticking out like a back-to-front gargoyle and twice as ugly.          It was at that moment that Mrs McCulloch, attracted by the scuffling noises, tapped on the door and walked in. For a second she did not see Allan crouching above her, half naked, in simian pose, his bottom inches above her head, then she screamed hysterically and shot backwards out of the room.          The following day Mrs McCulloch told him that she would need the room.          *      *      *      *      *          Jean came to see him. She drove down from Glasgow that Saturday leaving a neighbour to look after Roddy. It was her first and last visit to Gairnock. She stood at the door of his bedsitter with her hands on her hips, ran her eyes round the room and said ‘I should bloody well think so’ when he said he was looking for somewhere else.          The business of looking for a new place solved the problem of what they would do for the day. They drove round and looked at a few places. After supper they extended the search to some outlying villages.          ‘This is daft,’ said Jean. ‘How'll you get get in and out?’          ‘Bike.’          ‘When are you going to realise that you're not a student anymore?’          On the way back she pulled in to a lay-by. The autumn colours glowed in gentle watery sunlight. The hedgerow was spangled brightly with red berries. Jean gathered up the sandwich packages and the apple cores and Allan dumped them in a roadside bin. That was when he saw the cottage.          On the other side of the road from the lay-by a farm track ran off between bushes. It was tyre-rutted and muddy but the gable end of a small building was also visible through the rust-brown and yellow foliage. Jean was reluctant to get her shoes muddy but she came with him stepping warily on the stones which projected through the mud.          It was a traditional but and ben with two small cracked and cobwebbed windows, a low paint-blistered door and a roof that sagged between the chimney stacks like a hammock. A rusted corrugated iron shed was stuck on the the far-away gable from which protruded the front end of a blue Fordson Major tractor.          ‘You can't be serious,’ Jean said doing her John McEnroe impersonation.          She stayed by the door while Allan threaded his way round the back. The ground rose sharply behind and trees and bushes grew close so that he had to push his way though. There was one small square window in the centre of the back wall. Jean was startled when he opened the door from the inside.          Allan was captivated. It was like the bothies he had slept in all over the Highlands but in better condition. The floor was stone. The front door opened into a narrow passageway. The kitchen was on the right and the other room on the left. A doorway from the kitchen to the tiny pantry. The pantry had two windows, one to the back wall and the other into the passageway directly opposite the front door. There was an old iron range in the kitchen and genuine fire-dogs like instruments of torture. There was a deal table with a drawer, two upright chairs and one armchair which looked and smelled as though it had mice nesting. In the bedroom the remains of blue floral wallpaper was damp and sagging. There was a big damp patch in the centre of the ceiling. The kitchen had a sink in the window The tap was dry. Running water came from a tap on the front wall by the door. Tiny round two-pin sockets showed that there had once been electricity. The toilet was a lean-to on the back wall.          He said, ‘Lets go down to that farm beyond the lay-by and ask who owns it.’          Jean said ‘You are serious, aren't you! Jesus what a midden!’          Andrew Jamieson had not really considered renting the cottage but he was delighted to find that there was someone who did not mind climbing on to roof to fix a slate or two, who had no need for a telephone, or electricity or an inside toilet let alone central heating or a jacuzzi. The fact that the building had been condemned as unfit did not worry him if it did not worry Allan and so long as no one else knew. His only requirement was that he should be able to get access to his tractor shed. The deal was struck.          Jean had her say. It's filthy! There are mice in that chair. There's no electricity. How are you going to wash clothes? How can anyone get in touch with you when there is no telephone? There isn't even running water for Heaven's sake. Can you imagine using that outside toilet in winter? What happens when you get a dose of flu?          After that she drove them back to Gairnock in silence. He imagined evenings with roaring log fire in the old range, a modern chemical toilet, bottled gas, a tin bath in the kitchen. Jean had no experience of such things. When she saw how cozy he could make it she would be .... amazed.          When she drew up at the door of his digs he got out and came round to the driving window which was open. With a hand on the roof of the car he bent to ask if she would like a final cup of tea or whatever, but she beat him to the punch. She said ‘You're stark raving mad’ and drove off leaving him leaning on nothing.                   *      *      *      *      *          For two weeks all other spare time activities were dropped while he breathed life into Burnside Cottage. Two weeks of hard work and uncomplicated pleasure. Jack and Rosa, at different times, gave him a lift out with his things. The auction rooms in Gairnock were prepared to deliver so he made a bonfire of the old armchair and the mouldering bedstead and installed furniture of a reasonable vintage. He transported a chemical toilet on the back of his bike, imagining the headline ‘Man knocked down by lorry, three die of asphyxia’. Mrs Jamieson the farmer's wife gave him an old bookcase and a chest of drawers. He found loose slates and nailed them back into position and added a few more from a disused quarry. The pipe to the kitchen sink was disconnected but he managed to re-establish the connection using plastic press-fit connections.          Masood Qureshi helped him sweep out the pantry and give the old pine cladding a coat of white emulsion. Jack helped him hang new wall paper in the bedroom. He hacked away some of the bushes which had overgrown the ditch on the far side of the cart track so that he could see the burn which ran there. In a junk shop he found a huge copper urn and installed that on the range as a source of hot water when the fire was lit. He bought a lorry load of logs. Mrs Jamieson brought him a huge home made apple pie. She stood in the kitchen, looked round wonderingly and said ‘My!’ Rosa came with more bottles and they had a celebration. She gave him a painting of the white sands of Arisaig and a distant view of Eigg and they hung it over the fireplace.          That night he lay cozily in his second hand bed (with a new mouse-free mattress) watching the flickering embers in the grate listening to the wind soughing in the chimney and the slates rattling. He thought about Jenny and of what might have been.