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incessantly, often with questions that needed highly detailed answers. Number 3 used few words, never gossipedand seldom asked questions. Being unused to long silences I found hers disconcerting at first and tried to fill them with entertaining chatter but she murmured, “You don’t need to talk to me.”
    Before I left next morning we had come to one of the unexpected understandings that have changed my life.
    â€œI want to live with you,” I told her. “I am going straight home to tell my wife that. Have you room for me?”
    â€œThat depends on how much you bring with you,” she said with a Mona Lisa smile.
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    She lived south of the river, not far from Queen’s Park. Returning by bus I had plenty of time to plan what to tell number 2 and to imagine the hideous emotional explosion it would cause. My courage completely failed. I saw I hadn’t the guts to be so cruel and ended by inventing a lie to explain my overnight absence. I found 2 moodily working at her computer. She did not look up or turn round when I explained to her truthfully how, the previous night, I had met the friends who said they would not clype on me, adding only that I had gone homewith them for a nightcap and fallen asleep. But she knew the addition was untrue because very early that morning she had phoned them while phoning everybody else she knew in search of me. She asked if I had spent the night with a woman.
    â€œYes, but nobody you know,” I said. The result was less violent than I had feared. She switched off the machine, bowed her face into her hands and in a muffled voice said she could do no more work that day, though it was Saturday, usually her busiest day. She behaved, and I acted, as if she was suffering from something like the death of a parent, something that left her too numb for outrage. I took her for a walk through the Botanic Gardens and up Kelvindale to the canal towpath. It was a mild, very pleasant spring day. We exchanged a few words about unimportant things, dined in a pub near Anniesland Cross and were returning home before she said, “Do you want to leave me for this woman I don’t know?”
    â€œYes,” I said.
    â€œIf you had said no,” she told me mournfully, “and begged and wept and pleaded like I sometimes do we could have gone on living together. But now I can’thelp seeing that you really don’t want me, so it’s goodbye.”
    She then wept a little, but very quietly, and that was the end of that because divorce by mutual consent was now as easy in Scotland as in England.
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    Number 3’s home (where I still live) was the basement and former kitchen quarters of a large Victorian terrace house divided into flats. The front windows looked into a sunken area and a back door opened on to a long narrow garden, a garden number 3 looked after beautifully for she preferred gardening to housework. I never knew a woman who seemed to care less for her home.
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    It was sparsely furnished with few of the ornaments and knick-knacks most women accumulate. She had lived there fifteen years, long enough to pay off her mortgage on it, but wallpaper and linoleum had obviously been inherited from earlier tenants, while a cumbersome gas cooker and huge earthenware sink with brass taps seemed as old as the building. I wanted to pay for having the kitchen completely modernised but shesaid firmly, “No, I’ll pay for that. I promised myself a new kitchen ages ago and I know someone who will do the job cheaply.”
    I refrained from saying that all jobs done cheaply are done badly. Instead I offered to put in double-glazed windows and have the whole place re-painted, re-papered and carpeted. She agreed to this and let me choose colours and patterns because she wasn’t interested in these things. I was intensely interested because I had decided, with her permission, to make this flat the headquarters of a new business. I was