Bruce liked Turkish baths; he liked sitting on the tiled benches, unclad apart from a pair of swimming trunks and a towel wrapped around his waist. He liked to flex the muscles that he had just put through their paces in the gym below, feeling the satisfactory ripple of tendon and muscle under his gently perspiring skin. He liked it when others in the Turkish bath, although mostly strangers, watched this display from the corner of their eye; the women in frank admiration, the men in barely concealed envy. He felt like saying to some of the men, ‘You could have a body like mine, you know, if you only spent more time on the rowing machine.’ But one could not say that; in fact, there was a strict etiquette about not talking in such circumstances; one sweated away in silence.

Bruce preferred to go to the gym by himself, and would usually call in for an hour or so each evening after he had finished work in the offices of Macaulay Holmes Richardson Black or, as Bruce called the firm, Mac and Co. After that, he would go to pick up Lizzie from her parents’ home in the Braids and take her out for a meal somewhere, or they would go to a restaurant or bar. Then they would go back to Bruce’s shared flat for coffee and to listen to music. That was what they did.

Recently, however, the routine had been disturbed by a new feature of their lives that Lizzie had insisted on introducing. She had joined a bridge class attended by her friend Diane, and had suggested that Bruce should join her. He had viewed the invitation with suspicion.

‘Where is it?’ he asked.

‘It’s in a room in the university,’ she said. ‘Buccleuch Place. They rent it out cheaply as a sort of community service.’

Bruce was silent. Community service? Cheap university rooms? This was not, as he put it, ‘part of the plan’.

‘Bridge,’ he said doubtfully.

‘Yes, bridge. Have you ever played it?’

Bruce shook his head. ‘My parents used to play,’ he said. ‘In Crieff.’ There was a lot of bridge played in Crieff, he thought. He drew some air in through his teeth – a habit that Lizzie had begun to notice in him; she would have to say something, she thought; but not just yet.

Bruce looked at her quizzically. ‘Excuse my saying this,’ he said, ‘but isn’t bridge a bit old?’

Lizzie knew exactly what he meant, but would not show it. ‘It was invented in the nineteenth century,’ she said. ‘Lots of the rules are twentieth century, though. So, no, I wouldn’t call it old. Chess is an old game. Did you mean chess?’

Bruce laughed politely. ‘No, I don’t think you get my meaning. I meant that the people who play the game tend to be … well, they tend to be pretty old, don’t they?’