Todd laughed – nervously. ‘Of course we’re not grand. We’re perfectly ordinary Edinburgh people.’ If Edinburgh people can be perfectly ordinary, he thought. ‘But I have achieved a certain – how shall I put it? – achieved a certain amount and we live in the Braids and there’s the firm …’ He trailed off. Lizzie’s glare had become more intense and he was feeling distinctly uncomfortable.

‘Are you saying that Bruce is after my money – such as it is? Is that what you’re saying?’

Todd waved a hand airily; the very thought. ‘Of course not. I’d never say that.’

‘Then what are you saying?’

Todd swallowed. His daughter had always been direct, and he should have known better than to be so oblique. ‘What I’m saying is this: sometimes people – and I’m not saying that Bruce is one of those – calculate what marriage will bring them in terms of a job and a house and so on. Bruce works for me – I’m his boss. You’re the boss’s daughter. Now it doesn’t take much imagination to see that a young man in his position might – and I say might – be thinking of what he could get out of marrying you. I just raise the possibility, that’s all.’

Lizzie stared at her father. Her angry expression was now more baleful than anything else.

‘But Bruce isn’t like that,’ she said. ‘He just isn’t. You’ve completely misjudged him.’ She paused; she was on the point of tears. ‘You don’t even begin to understand, do you?’

16. For Love or Money

Ideas planted in the mind may be rejected, pooh-poohed, and then unexpectedly and insidiously return to disturb our equanimity. Lizzie had rejected out of hand her father’s barely veiled suggestion that Bruce may be a fortune-hunter. Her father knew nothing about it, that was clear; Bruce had asked her to marry him because he loved her, and she had accepted his proposal for the same reason. It may be that people married for money in the past – Jane Austen had something to say about that – but who did that nowadays? Surely nobody.

And yet her father’s words continued to haunt her, and she decided to raise the subject with her friend Diane, whom she met every Friday in a coffee bar near Holy Corner. Diane could spare the time for long coffee breaks – she was a freelance interior decorator with a largely empty diary, a diary that had potential, certainly, but not a potential that was being achieved. No matter; Diane was convinced that the big commission, the one that would change her life, would come in, and she would feature in Scottish Home or House Beautiful.