Matthew blushed, but at the same time he felt a strong sense of satisfaction that Elspeth appeared to find him attractive. Nobody had ever paid him that sort of compliment before, and he had assumed that this was because nobody thought of him in that way. He was just good old Matthew, as he always had been, even back in his teenage years. He had been the boy that people liked having about them, but not with them. Nobody had ever said to him that anything looked good on him; nobody.

‘So you like them?’ he said, smoothing down the side of the jeans with his open palms.

Elspeth nodded. ‘I like you,’ she said. ‘That’s what I like.’

He blushed again, but felt grateful, too, for what she bestowed on him, this gift of love, that had been so unexpected.

He was not thinking of her, though, as he began his cautious journey down Big Lou’s steps; he was thinking, rather, of what these steps had seen. He had heard from Big Lou, who had in turn learned it from people who knew the coffee bar in the days when it was still a second-hand bookshop, that it was down these very steps that the poet, Hugh MacDiarmid, had stumbled one day; stumbled, but recovered his footing and made it to the bottom alive and in a position to write more poetry – whereas poor Lard O’Connor, that well-known Glasgow informal businessman, had failed to recover and had toppled, as a great Norwegian pine might in its native forest fall to the axe. Matthew remembered the sense of sudden loss as the ambulance men shook their heads; and he remembered how they had asked him whether Lard was his friend and he had hesitated – just momentarily, and shamefully, before he had replied that he was.

That was some time ago – last summer – and he had almost forgotten about Lard O’Connor, although presumably there were people in Glasgow who remembered him – his victims, certainly, Matthew thought grimly; those people with scars and scowls, like the mourners at Lard’s funeral in that soft West of Scotland rain.

Now, as Matthew entered the coffee bar, Big Lou looked up from her task of polishing the counter and moved over to her coffee machine.

‘The usual?’ she asked over her shoulder. She required no reply; Matthew always had the usual, and even if he had wanted something different, there was very little choice in Big Lou’s coffee bar, with or without milk being the only options.