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and he would not force his company upon her. And after a while that awkwardness passed, and there seemed to be no tension in the air when they coincided in the kitchen, or when they passed on telephone messages to one another.
    Bruce was pleased that things had not become more fraught. His life over the past couple of months had not been particularly easy, and he would not have enjoyed having to deal with domestic difficulties on top of what he had been experiencing elsewhere. To begin with, there had been the problem with the job. He had been planning to leave the firm and to move on to something more satisfying even before the show-down with his employer, Raeburn Todd, joint senior partner with his brother, Jock Todd, of Macauley Holmes Richardson Black, Chartered Surveyors and Factors. But it was unfortunate, from Bruce’s point of view, that this departure should have been on Todd’s terms rather than on his own. That had been extremely irritating.
    What annoyed Bruce in particular about that episode was that when he was asked by Todd’s wife, Sasha, to lunch with her in the Café St Honoré, he had agreed to do this only out of charity. He had no particular interest in her, and he had certainly not been planning any involvement with her, although it had been perfectly obvious to him at the South Edinburgh Conservative Ball that she found him attractive. That was understandable, of course, but he had not expected her to do anything about this, and indeed that fatal lunch was hardly a romantic encounter at all. It was true that when Todd walked into the Café St Honoré unexpectedly, he had found his wife holding Bruce’s hand in hers, over the table, but that had been purely in the context of their discussion about tennis prowess and the importance of having a strong wrist. If he were going to hold hands with a married woman in an Edinburgh restaurant, then he would do so under the table, not above.
    And of course Todd had behaved in exactly the way one would have expected of him. He had fired him on the spot, right there in the Café St Honoré, using as his pretext the fact that he had put in a false report on a roof-space inspection some time back. That was typical of the man, in Bruce’s view–to keep a little thing like that up his sleeve, waiting for his chance to use it. No harm had been done by that slight cutting of the corner. The client had been perfectly happy with the purchase, he had heard, and the seller was happy too. Everybody was happy, apart from Todd, who parroted on about professional standards and integrity. Blah, blah, blah, thought Bruce. If everybody behaved in such a retentive way, he reflected, then would anything in this world ever get done? It would not. The world needed people of spirit–people of decisiveness; people who were prepared to see beyond the narrow rules, as long as they kept to the general spirit of things. That’s me, Bruce said to himself.
    Bruce remembered very clearly each detail of that fatal afternoon. Todd had stormed out, closely followed by Sasha, who had run after him up the narrow cobbled lane outside the restaurant. From his table near the window, Bruce had seen the two of them standing on the corner of Thistle Street, yelling at one another, although he could hear nothing of what was said. Presumably she was explaining to her husband that things were not as he imagined, and indeed after a few minutes Todd appeared to calm down. They began to talk more calmly, and Sasha then leant forward and planted a kiss on her husband’s cheek.
    The sight of this brought relief to Bruce, who concluded that the matter had been sorted out and that Sasha would return to the rest of her lunch and he would in due course return to his job. However, this did not happen, as Sasha merely walked off in the opposite direction, leaving Bruce to pay for his ruined lunch. This outraged him. She had invited him, after all, having recently inherited