I feel so sad for him. The desire to possess him has gone, and in its place is a small ache. I think of how I taught my class the poets of the Great War and how everyone thought it was all posh Rupert Brooke with his blond curls and honey but how my favourite was Isaac Rosenberg, the East End Jewish boy who joined up because his family needed the money, the one who knew what was coming. Snow is a strange white word … It hasn’t snowed yet this year. I wonder if it will after Christmas. I watch Andrew, the ordinary young man of my dreams. Your body is a star, unto my thought … I thought it was lust, the desire to possess – that’s all lust is, after all, possession. You’re mine, Matty used to say. You belong to me. How charmed I was, without realising that no desire for possession can ever last – once the object of desire has been possessed, desire dies. Love isn’t ownership and that’s how I know I really love this troubled, fair-haired one, as I follow him. I still want to love him but if I can’t love him, then I want him to be loved.

He climbs the steps up to Cowgate but instead of turning towards home, he walks into town, then takes a left. He comes to a new building set back slightly from the street, a cheap-looking redbrick cube with a disabled access ramp and grey slatted blinds at the window. A small plaque next to the buzzer reads: The Branfield Centre. I know this place. Some of my more difficult students got referrals here. I wonder what he is doing here out of hours. Maybe they do evening appointments for grown-ups.

He pauses on the step and checks his watch. He looks from side to side, then he pivots briskly on one heel and strides round the corner where a small alleyway leads up to a row of low terraced housing. There are no shops in sight but a few metres down, set between two houses, is a tiny pub. Inside, it is no more than a sitting room, with a single bar and leaded, opaque windows. An old man sits in the corner, full-lipped and muttering to himself, a half of stout in front of him, nearly finished. At the bar stand two young men, Polish or Ukrainian possibly, who give Andrew a single blank stare then return to their conversation.

A bored-looking middle-aged man is behind the bar, his left arm a sleeve of tattoos, his green T-shirt a size too small. He gives Andrew an unfriendly glance.

Andrew says, ‘Gin and tonic please, and a packet of chilli nuts.’