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Chapter One

Far above us a train hurtled past and we raised our eyes to it in longing. If we had any sense we would be up there, sitting back in a carriage, instead of down here with everything clenched as the Bonnie Dundee climbed each crest and smacked down again on her plucky way across the Forth. The woman beside me sucked a breath in through her bottom teeth and shut her mouth firmly as we rose on a particularly lusty swell to tremble at its peak for a moment before walloping into the hollow beyond.

With a deep breath of my own, I tried to forget about the train, now huffing and hissing its way into the station, and concentrate instead on the bridge, since here we were toiling along at its base like Lilliputians on Gulliver’s beach with a better than usual chance to study it.

It is often called beautiful and it was certainly impressive from this angle but I have never cared for crochet-work and the colour is unspeakable, like the strips of dried liver one gives to dogs. Besides, I bear it grudges. For one thing, I could just remember being at its opening, four years old, and being smacked on the backs of my legs by Nanny Palmer for saying ‘Ugh’ in a loud voice when I saw it for the first time. Well, what colour would I have painted it, she had demanded when I – quite reasonably I thought – burst into tears. Primrose yellow, I had said, with touches of pink, and Nanny had laughed.

I could see now, more than thirty years later, that the touches of pink were not practical but I held to my primrose yellow – because really it had to be soul-destroying to the men who spent their lives painting the thing that the paint was the colour of rust.

In addition to that long-ago slap on the legs, however, I resent it because it would not be too far a reach of fancy to say that the Forth Bridge had sealed my fate. I had been present at its opening, as I say, on my way to visit my grandparents who had taken a house in the Highlands for the summer but after that I had not given it a thought until, years later, staying at a house party in Derbyshire during my coming out season, I had been unable to sleep. This was not, as one might expect, because of too much Champagne and Romance but rather out of sheer boredom. (And to anyone who has never been too bored to sleep I can only say it is as unpleasant as any other kind of insomnia and not helped by being quite ridiculous. ) Eventually, having planned my outfits for the following day – boring tweed for golf, boring cream voile for tea, only slightly less boring coral velvet and pearls for dinner – I gave in and turned up the gas. On my bedside table the selection of reading matter comprised Volume Two of a three-volume Victorian romance with those tissue-thin pages like a prayer book and print far too small to read at two in the morning, something initially enticing with a new and brightly coloured jacket which turned out to be a history of Nottingham and, finally, The Flower of Scotland: Great Engineering Feats of the Century. (I see now that the pitifulness of such a library at the bedside of a debutante doing her Season was not accidental. It was intended to send a gentle little message about getting married as quickly as possible or ending up an embittered spinster with a knowledge of Nottingham far beyond what could ever be needed. )