“Yet how rewarding,” Franklin said. He had never been to a classical concert in his life and certainly hadn’t listened to a Beethoven string quartet, late or otherwise.
Connie seemed eager to share the details of her life with him. She was twenty-eight years old, educated at St George’s and then at Aberdeen University and now worked as an account handler in an advertising agency in Leith. She was the second in a clutch of three girls, Patience, Constance and Faith. (“Mummy”, apparently, was a stalwart churchwoman who believed in virtue.) “No Charity?” Franklin said and Connie said, “No, and don’t mention Hope to Mummy if you meet her.
“My sister, Patience, is a cellist with the RSNO,” Connie continued blithely. “And Faith is a senior registrar at the Royal Infirmary. Daddy’s a heart surgeon and Mummy does—” at this point Connie made rabbit ears, something Franklin particularly disliked “—‘good works’. She’s a very keen gardener too. Her roses are legendary.”
Franklin in a nutshell. Ab ovo. English. Thirty-four years old, five foot ten, one hundred and fifty pounds. Eyes of blue, hair of brown. Born in a Swiss clinic beneath the benign and sunny sign of the Lion three weeks after his father was immolated in the Austrian Grand Prix. His much-married mother, the slovenly scion of a minor, ruined aristocratic family, was notorious for having been involved in a sleazy sex-scandal (Top Totty Brings Down Government, according to one tabloid headline at the time).
Franklin left London for Scotland, managing to scrape into Stirling University on a media studies course, and after graduation he joined a local radio station from which starting point he climbed, like a salmon up a ladder, to the dizzy heights of being a script editor on a Scottish TV soap, Green Acres — a violent yet couthy mix, as if The Sopranos had relocated to Brigadoon and all the script editors had media studies degrees from Stirling.
Franklin felt that one day he would be tested, that a challenge would appear out of the blue — a war, a quest, a disaster — and that he would rise to this challenge and not be found wanting. It would be the making of him, he would come into his own. But what if this never happened, what if nothing was asked of him? Would he have to ask it of himself? And how did you do that?
Franklin was also unbelievably unlucky, descended from a long line of bad luck, only child of an only child of an only child and so on, and had become reconciled to the fact that no matter how many times the wheel of fortune turned he would always find himself stuck on the underside like gum on a shoe. Connie seemed like the very person who might change his luck.
“What does your family do, Franklin?” Connie asked.
Franklin, unfortunately, had only his lone, infamous parent to offer.
“There’s just my mother, I’m afraid,” he said. “She’s” (he made rabbit ears) “a widow.”
Franklin was surprised when less than an hour after leaving the pub he found himself naked on the beech laminate flooring of Connie’s basement flat in Cumberland Street, kissing her grazed knees in an odd combination of first aid and foreplay. Their modest intake of wine, the Beethoven and her generally demure demeanour had led him to think that Connie wasn’t the kind of girl who kissed on a first date, let alone shed her clothes before she’d hardly got the key in her front door. He said something to this effect to her afterwards when they were lying in a tangled, sweaty knot on her “Beware of the Cat” doormat and she laughed and said, “Of course I’m not that kind of girl, but it’s not every day you fall — literally — head over heels in love.” Franklin felt both alarmed and flattered in equal measure by this statement.
It turned out that Connie had the easygoing nature of a girl who had never had a worry in her life greater than whether or not flat shoes made her calves look fat. She was “almost a vegetarian”, did Pilates twice a week and played for the Edinburgh Netball Club. She was thrillingly well-organized with no self-doubt whatsoever. For Franklin, a person continually in the throes of an apprehensive nihilism, this last was a compelling quality. Furthermore, Connie’s hair was straight and brown and never seemed to tangle, her breath was always slightly minty no matter the time of day and she was possessed of the kind of flawless complexion that you only got from a clear conscience.
Conversations with Connie tended to be based on an endless series of ethical dilemmas. Franklin knew it was a test he was bound to fail eventually. “If I was trapped in a burning building with a cat, which of us would you rescue?” Connie asked as they came out of the Cameo cinema.
“You, of course,” Franklin said without hesitation.
“What about the cat?”
“What about the cat?”
“You would just leave it to burn to death, Franklin?”
They pursued a hectic month of courtship. It was an exhausting and somehow very public chase — theatres, cinemas, museums, cafés, endless meals out in restaurants. On top of that there were race meetings in Musselburgh, walks in the Botanics and Holyrood Park, athletic ascents of Arthur’s Seat. Connie seemed particularly fond of the outdoors. Franklin would have preferred to have stayed home and had sex, although, thankfully, Connie’s diary managed to make room for a lot of that too.
Franklin found it difficult to keep up with Connie — literally — when they were out together, rather than being intimately coupled up, arm in arm, Connie was always shooting ahead (he’d never met anyone who walked so fast), leaving him trailing behind. He hoped the pace would slow down soon.
Barely a month after meeting Connie, Franklin found himself meeting “Mummy and Daddy” for the first time, invited for the weekend to their house in Cramond.
“Sherry?” Mr Kingshott asked, hefting a heavy crystal decanter. (“Daddy can be a wee bit gruff,” Connie had murmured, to Franklin’s alarm, as they made their way up the Kingshott’s impressive drive.)
“Thank you,” Franklin said. He felt acutely conscious of his manners in this delicate environment. It seemed inevitable that something would be broken. Drinking sherry before lunch — lunch itself — was just one of the many attractive things that Connie would bring to his life if he married her. He would swim in the Kingshott gene pool like a happy sun-kissed otter.
Mr Kingshott was smaller than Franklin had expected, a little gamecock of a man, strutting around his lovely Cramond drawing room, pecking at his brood. Franklin felt that if he were going to have his heart operated on he would prefer it to be done by a bigger man, a man whose hand was large enough to hold his heart firmly without any danger of it slipping from his overly petite fingers. He also felt that he would not like his heart to be tended by a man who continually grunted and sighed with irritation and impatience, Mrs Kingshott apparently being the usual beneficiary of this malcontent. (“Daddy’s a bit of a tyrant,” Connie said cheerfully.) Franklin thought that he would like the man operating on his heart to be singing, light opera, nothing too dramatic, Gilbert and Sullivan perhaps.
“Mummy!” Connie exclaimed as a rather large, soft woman entered the drawing room, holding a wooden spoon in her hand as if it were a wand. She had the distracted air of someone who had wandered into a room without having the slightest idea why she was there.
Mummy smiled sadly at Franklin as if she knew some terrible thing that was to befall him and then wandered out of the room again, spoon aloft.
All of Mummy’s brood had pitched up at the Cramond house. (“The nest full again,” Connie said.) “So we can meet the beau,” Patience said. Patience was both the eldest and the largest of the three sisters. (No Chekhovian gloom in the Kingshott household, no longing for a golden somewhere else, Franklin was relieved to note. Except possibly from Mummy.) Patience, in Birkenstocks and a paisley blouse, had a suggestion of heaviness about her, as if one day she would be in possession of the stout figure and bovine slowness of her mother. Faith, the youngest, on the other hand, had her father’s height and his bird-boned frame. Franklin was struck by the sight of the three sisters together, Patience was too big and serious, Faith too small and flighty, but Connie was, in the wise words of Goldilocks, just right. If he could love anyone, surely it would be her.