She had no idea then, of course, that she would return nine years later and, standing in front of the same painting, have an idea for a dissertation. ‘Space and Emotion in Painting’ would be the title, and the subject would be exactly that: how a painter can reveal the emotion that space evokes. The visitor intrudes on the space – and the life – of the other man in the Wilkie painting; cold hostility leaps from the canvas. In other paintings, the slight attenuation of space underlines the emotion of a parting. There would be so much to explore, and perhaps an insight might come along. Surely it was not too much to hope for just one insight; even if only a small one.

11. Pat’s Flat

Pat had lived for the last year or so in a student flat on the top floor of a Warrender Park tenement. Her room overlooked the Meadows, and for this reason was the most sought-after bedroom in the flat. But it was not just the view that made it so attractive; it was the shape, which was perfectly circular, determined by the fact that the room nestled below one of the conical roof-towers gracing that eccentric piece of skyline. To live in a circular room, Pat felt, made one rather more interesting; after all, few of us knew people who lived in circular rooms, and there could be little doubt that the room in which one lived defined one in the eyes of others – to an extent.

The small community in which Pat lived – the four students who shared the flat in Warrender Park Terrace – had every bit as much a pecking order as any group of people will inevitably have. It was not a formally constituted pecking order – only a society with a fixed order of precedence will have such a thing formally laid out, and in no society will the official order of precedence represent the real order. So while Scotland has an order of precedence, it is never enforced and people may walk through doors in front of others who really should be allowed to go through the door before them. That, of course, is how things should be; who would wish to live in a society in which the order of walking through doors was something that anybody cared about? The important thing is that traffic through doors should flow freely, and that there should not be awkward moments when people hesitate, politely ushering another before them, who demurs, and invites the other to go before. Such a situation can result in small knots of people building up in front of a door, with very little through traffic.