He has a solicitor’s sceptical mind. Is she a gold-digger? It seems unlikely; environmental law is hardly the most lucrative or glamorous profession. Plenty of better-looking, wealthier men would count themselves lucky to land her.

There must, he thinks, be a catch.

* * *

The new archivist at Glasgow University Library has a reputation for aloofness. No one knows much about him, apart from the fact that he used to live down South. There are rumours that someone close to him, either his girlfriend or his mother, has just died. Some people say that he’s very well off and he doesn’t need to put in all that overtime. Other people say he’s taking advantage of the University’s resources to work on a project of his own, something huge and ambitious.

She sees him walking to work across Kelvingrove Park. One evening she sort of follows him home, but only because she was going in that direction anyway. The gossip was right: he lives in a beautiful Victorian townhouse just off Sauchiehall Street.

She brings him tea in the mornings and they get talking. The book is something to do with military history. She offers to help him hunt down some obscure documents he can’t get hold of.

As she twists her hair up, she thinks she can feel him watching her.

* * *

There is no catch. She is just happy that he shares her certainty that the world is heading for environmental apocalypse; that he is a vegetarian; that he is undemanding and unadventurous in bed; that when she tells him she doesn’t want children, he nods and says ‘fair enough’.

* * *

He guesses that the librarian is a few years older him, maybe forty-three or -four. She has a lot of green clothes and a way of pinning her hair up with a chopstick that he quite likes.

He takes her out for coffee with the intention of telling her not to waste her time on him, but ends up asking her out for dinner instead. Before he knows it, they’re in bed together.

He is just unhooking her surprisingly sexy bra (later he will learn that she bought it that afternoon, especially for their date) and wondering how to prepare her for the inevitable disappointment when she announces that she has something to tell him. She isn’t a virgin, but she has very little sexual experience; this will be the first time she’s slept with someone in over five years. He will have to be very gentle with her, and make allowances for the fact she is bound to be terrible in bed.

Perversely, they are each calmed by the other’s nervousness. He still finds sex difficult, but it is easier than it has ever been before.