Short story: The Unfortunate Fate of Kitty da Silva

She wanted to spend time in his company

He arrived before the agent did, and was standing there, on the pavement, for 15 minutes or so before the young man came round the corner. The agent was whistling, which surprised him, because one did not hear people whistling; there was something unexpected, something almost old-fashioned about it. And there was no birdsong, of course, or very little. At home there had always been birdsong, and one took it for granted. Here the mornings seemed silent; the air drained of sound. Thin air. Thin.

"Are you the doctor?" asked the young man, looking at a piece of paper extracted from his pocket. "You're Dr... Dr John. Right?"

He shook his head, and stopped and reminded himself that it was the other way round. In India one shook one's head for yes, which was the opposite of what they did here. It was rather like water going this way round as it drained out of the bath in the southern hemisphere, and that way round in the north, or so people said. Clockwise or anti-clockwise. Widdershins and deasil. Those were wonderful words - widdershins and deasil - and he had written them down in his notebook of fine English words, as he had always done since he was a boy. He had had an uncle who had taught English at a college and had impressed upon him the importance of a wide vocabulary. He had imitated his uncle's habit of writing down interesting words in his notebook. Pejorative, he wrote. Gloaming. Conspicuous.

The young man smiled at him. "You're Dr John Something, are you?" he said. "Or are you just Dr Something John? It's not very clear on this paper, you see."

"I am Dr John," he said. And he was about to say: "That is my good name," because that is what they said at home, but he stopped himself. One did not say good name here; one said surname, which was a strange word, like one of the words in his notebook. Surname.

"Oh," said the young man. "I see.'

"Where I come from," he said, "in my part of India, there are many people called John. It is a name that Christian people use. There are many Johns and Thomases, after St Thomas. They are south Indian names, you see. Kerala."

"India," said the young man, and tucked the paper back into his pocket.

He waited for him to say something more, but he did not, but gestured to the door, politely, and told him that the flat was on the second floor and that they should go in and take a look.

"After you," said the young man. And he went in, into the dark hallway, which had a strange smell to it, like chalk, or stone that has been kept from the sun, like the stone of a cave.

Upstairs, up the winding stone stairway with its iron balustrade and its polished mahogany handrail, he stood outside the dark blue door while the young man fumbled with the keys. And then they were inside, and the young man opened the shutters, which had been closed, and pointed out that from where they stood he might just see the Firth of Forth over the rooftops. There, did he see it? That strip of blue?

The young man smiled. "People like a view of the sea, you know. So I always try to see if we can see it from a window. It makes them happy."

He returned the smile. "I do not like to be on the sea," he said. "When the sea gets rough I get very seasick. I am not a good sailor."

"I have never been in a boat," said the young man, fingering a small blemish on his chin.

As a doctor, he wanted to say to the young man that he should not touch the spot, which could get infected. Fingers were such a source of infection, but most people did not understand that. As a student in Delhi, he had remembered peering down his microscope and seeing the colonies of life that the laboratory demonstrator had obtained from a swab taken at random. All those organisms, he had thought, so small and yet so purposeful, so busy with their lives. If he had been a Jain, then what would he have thought? Did they think about the daily slaughter they committed when they washed their hands and sent whole cities, whole dynasties of these invisible organisms swirling down the drain; for them a flood, a biblical scourge.

"Well?" said the young man. "What do you think?"

"Of course," he said. "It is very good. I will take this."

They went downstairs together and separated at the front door, after shaking hands. He watched the young man walk down the road. At the corner, he turned round and waved.

These were the people he worked with. There was the Professor, a tall man with a distracted air about him, the Professor's Senior Lecturer, a woman who said very little, the First Research Fellow and the Second Research Fellow. When he joined them on that first day, they had all assembled in the Professor's room in the university. From the Professor's room they could look out over the top of the trees onto the deserted infirmary windows, to the wards in which, if the light was right, he could see where the generations of beds had been. He did not like hospitals, which still frightened him, in spite of his having worked in them. He knew that was why he was going to spend his career in laboratories, away from what was happening in the wards and corridors of a hospital; here he was safe, just as an intelligence officer is tucked away from the front line, analysing reports of enemy activity. In the past he had spent time doing exactly that, analysing reports of the enemy, too, staring at the proliferating cells, the cross-sections of the tumours. These were just like the movements of forces across the battle ground; just the same.

The Professor had welcomed him and explained their work. He felt privileged to be part of this group, working at the edge of biology, studying the differentiation of stem cells, trying to tease out the mystery of the chemistry that triggered the growth of human life. The Professor said: "We're lucky to be doing this, you know. In some places people are hamstrung. They can't do it. We can."

He looked at the others, who were watching him. The Second Research Fellow, a man of about his own age, wearing a short-sleeved shirt and no tie, was staring at the ceiling while the Professor spoke. At one point he looked at his watch, almost ostentatiously, as if to imply that time was short. He himself would never have dared to do that at home, where professors made or broke careers, sometimes on a whim. Here it seemed different. He had noticed that the First Research Fellow had called the Professor by his first name, which he had even shortened. That would have been unthinkable in Delhi. He had referred to Professor Ghoshal by his first name but never to his face. Never. Not once. It was unthinkable.

He settled into his work. He watched the cells, monitored the medium in which they grew. He looked at them under the microscope and felt what he had always felt, that it was a miracle that he was witnessing; something to do with the breathing in of fire, the transformation of water, the striving of life itself. He thought of the people from whom these cells had come, and wondered about them and the yearnings that had brought this about; the passion, the desire for a child, the resort to the indignities of the fertility clinic. It was love that drove all that, as it drove everything really. We did not want to reproduce that which we don't love. Biology put love into the equation; love made us go to these lengths to perpetuate ourselves. Not that anybody here thought of that, he imagined. These were people of science, who had reduced all this to a matter of cell chemistry and scientific papers.

He looked out of the window in front of his desk. It gave out onto a street, a well-ordered street, so clean, it seemed to him, so controlled. There was a pub on the corner that he had ventured into once a few days previously. It smelled of stale smoke and alcohol, and he wondered why people should choose to spend their time in such surroundings. In India one might sit under a tree in a garden, in one of those white plastic chairs and talk to friends. Here you stood inside, with the alcohol, with these pallid people.

He was invited to the house of a family from Kerala who had lived in Edinburgh for 15 years. There was another guest, a student, a tall young man who wanted to talk only of the subject he was studying, something to do with artificial intelligence. The oldest son of the house, who was four years or so younger than he was, in his mid-twenties, showed him the car that he had just bought and which was parked out in the street. He was inordinately proud of it, and he showed him its special features. He could not help but smile; he had no interest in cars, but for this young man the car was proof in metal of what he had achieved. He was on the way to becoming a chartered accountant.

"You can do well in this country," the young man said, touching the highly polished bodywork of the car, "if you let your own people help you. Generally we keep to ourselves. Some people don't, of course. But I think it's safer that way."

"Safer?"

"You can get yourself beaten up," he said, rubbing at an imaginary scratch on the car door. "Or just put down, and sometimes there's not much difference. Don't be fooled by the rhetoric. And Scotland is as bad as anywhere else. They like to think that they're different from the rest of the country, but...'

He felt uneasy. He did not think it good manners to discuss people in this way. This was their country, after all, just as India was his.

He went into an Episcopalian Church, on impulse, because he was walking past the church and he saw that the service was about to begin. He had been brought up in the Church of South India, which was Anglican, and he knew that this was the local equivalent. He sat at the back, a row or two away from the rest of the small congregation. An elderly woman turned round and smiled at him, and he nodded to her in return. Then he studied the liturgy, and saw the familiar words which he had learned in his youth and which gave him a curious sense of belonging. He had lost his faith early. He remembered the day it had happened, when he was 16, and when the teacher in charge of religious instruction at school had spoken of the omnipotence of God. He had looked at the boy sitting next to him and had nudged him: "But if God can do anything, then why does he allow suffering? Why does he allow the wicked to get away with it?"

The other boy had raised a finger to his lips, to silence him. But he had persisted, and the boy had eventually whispered: "Don't you know? It's all lies. Everything they're teaching us in this place is lies. It's as much invention as the Hindu gods. Ganesh and all the rest. Just pretend to believe the lies until you're out of here and then you can stop."

He had pretended to believe but that was all. And he knew, later on, when he stood at the dissecting table in medical school and stared down at the body stretched out before him, the body of a street hawker, he suspected, or an indentured labourer, a body marked by labour and hardship; he knew then that he had made the right decision.

He sat through the service, and thought about home. There was no cure for homesickness - none. All that one could do was wait for it to subside. He had felt homesick in Delhi, in the first year of his medical course, when he had lived in a rowdy student hostel noted for its greasy food and loud music. My problem is loneliness, he thought. I need family life. I need to have somewhere to go back to, some place, where everything is familiar.

After the service, a woman came up to him and touched his sleeve. "You must join us for coffee," she said. "Downstairs. You'll be very welcome."

He was about to decline, when she said: "Are you from south India?'

He was touched that she knew. Some of the people in the lab had assumed that he was Muslim - which showed how much they knew about the world. But this woman, with her earnest invitation, knew.

"Yes," he said. "Cochi." He used the new name, but corrected himself; she might not know. And people still said Bombay, everywhere. "Cochin.'

"Ah, Cochi," she said. "We had somebody from there a few years ago. One of their bishops, I think. Such a colourful robe, as I remember.'

She led him down some stairs and into a hall where people were clustering around a trestle table on which a tea urn had been placed.

He stood with his cup of tea, talking to the woman who had invited him. Then suddenly she was distracted and he found himself alone. He glanced about him. He need not stay more than a few minutes - that would be enough to be polite. Then he could go back to his flat and wait there until it was evening and he could go and see a film somewhere or have a meal in a restaurant if he felt like splashing out.

On the way back from the church, he stopped for a cup of coffee in a coffee bar at the end of his street. As he stood at a high table, self-consciously blowing on his coffee to cool it, a young woman - she must have been a couple of years younger than him, or perhaps even his age - asked if he was reading the paper on his table. He handed it to her.

She said: "You live in the flat above mine, don't you? I've seen you."

He had not seen her. He had only seen one neighbour so far, a middle-aged man who lived with a younger woman on the ground floor.

She reached out to shake his hand. "One should get to know one's neighbours," she said, smiling. "You never know when you're going to want to borrow something from them."

"I am happy for you to borrow from me," he said. "Any time." But then he thought: I have virtually nothing in the flat, and smiled. "Not that I have anything to lend you. I mean, I have no food in the flat. No sugar or milk or the things that people like to borrow."

She laughed at the admission. "Then you must come and have a meal with me, in my place. Why don't you?"

He hesitated. He had been warned that people said things that they didn't mean in this country; he had been told that an invitation did not necessarily mean that you were invited.

"When?" he asked. He had blurted out the question without thinking. Now, if the invitation was not a real invitation, he would have embarrassed her. She could hardly say: never.

"Tonight," she said. "If you've got nothing better to do. Come tonight."

He accepted, and they agreed that he would come downstairs at 7.30. Again he remembered that times were not always meant. Seven-thirty might mean a quarter to eight, or even eight o'clock. He wanted to ask, but felt too embarrassed to do so. So he nodded, remembering to shake his head the right way for this country, to say no when he meant yes.

She was called Jennifer, but told him to call her Jen, as everybody did. "Nobody calls me Jennifer anymore, apart from my mother. Mothers stick to your real names, don't they, even when the whole world calls you something else."

She worked for a large insurance company, and had done so for two years, after leaving university. She had let out a room in the flat for a year after she had bought it, but had grown tired of her tenant, who smoked and never cleared up in the kitchen.

He told her about the flat that he had lived in in Delhi, as a doctor. It was next door to a Punjabi transvestite who would sit on his balcony and sing Bollywood love songs. "He sang the woman's part in his falsetto voice and then lowered it to sing the man's part. But his heart was in the woman's part. You could tell."

She laughed. "I can just see it."

He asked her whether she knew India. "I've been there once," she said. "I went to Thailand with a friend and we stopped for five days in Bombay on the way. We didn't know what to do. There was this vast city around us and we didn't really know how to get out of it."

"I wouldn't like to be trapped in Bombay," he said.

It seemed to him that she was hesitating over her next remark, as if she was wondering whether she could tell him what she thought of India. That was it. Nobody liked to tell you what they really thought, but he knew.

"You can tell me what you really thought," he said. "You were shocked by India, weren't you?"

She took a sip from her wine glass. They were sitting in her living room before going into the kitchen for dinner. "Yes," she said. "I was shocked."

"Tell me," he said.

"Well, I couldn't get over the sheer poverty of so many of the people. Not just a few of the people. Millions and millions of them. People with nothing. People who lived in little shelters beside the road or on the edge of railway stations, with a few rags hanging from poles at the sides, and heaps of fetid rubbish and dogs crawling over the litter."

"You would not see that in the south," he said, and added, quickly, "but I know what you mean. We Indians tend not to see it. Or we see it and it doesn't register with us as anything exceptional, because we have always seen it. We have seen these poor people and they're always there, like trees or rocks or clouds in the sky. Just part of the scenery."

He watched her while he spoke. It was difficult to explain to people who did not* *understand, who thought that everywhere should be the same as their little part of the world. It was difficult to understand that things were just different because they were, because there was a very different history.

"Just part of the scenery?"

He shook his head. "You mustn't think that I'm unfeeling. I'm in favour of doing something about it at home. I vote for people who want to do something. But sometimes I wonder if anything can be done. Sometimes I think this is just impossible. There are too many people. There are swarms and swarms of people wanting a place in the lifeboat."

"You think that?"

"Yes, I do. There are too many Indians for India to support. That's why, if one wants to get anywhere, one tries to get out. Look at all the computer scientists and doctors and people who have gone to the United States. They go and they never come back. They advertise in The Times of India for a bride and they start their families over there."

He looked at his wine glass. "You know something?" he said. "I don't know whether people here understand how we feel in India. We look at your life - the life you lead in the West, where everything is clean and works and you have money, and we say to ourselves, me too. I want that too. I want to be there.

"And wouldn't you feel the same? If you were one of those people in Bombay, let's say a teacher, working for maybe 8,000 rupees a month and seeing that somebody in Sydney or London or somewhere like that is getting paid 10, 15 times as much for the same work, or less work even. What would you want to do?'

She smiled. "I'd want to get out of Bombay."

"Yes," he said. "You would."

She had cooked pasta, because that was what she had in the flat that Sunday. They talked as she served it onto his plate and refilled his glass of wine. She told him that she had been engaged, briefly, to an engineer in the oil industry. They had discovered after a few months that they were unsuited to one another and had parted good friends.

"I'm quite happy by myself," she said. "I find I appreciate the freedom. I can come in and go out when I like. At weekends I sometimes don't do anything, just eat out of a tin and read the papers. I don't have to feel guilty about that."

He said: "I prefer to be with people, and so it is very difficult for me here. I suppose that I will make friends, but I don't know how to go about it. Where am I going to meet people? If I go to the Indian community, they'll just try to marry me off. That's the first thing they think of. Marriage. And salaries. I mentioned The Times of India and its marriage supplement. It has columns just for doctors, you know. Doctors looking for doctors, or people looking for doctors to marry their daughters. That's how people think."

She said: "We have our equivalent. We call them lonely hearts columns. They're very funny."

"Why should they be funny?"

She shrugged. "Oh, I don't know. Don't you think that there's something really rather odd about people advertising themselves, saying that they've got a good sense of humour, saying that they like to go to the cinema, and so on. Funny and a bit tragic, I suppose."

He did not see what was funny about that. Why should people not describe themselves or what they did? Was it odd to enjoy going to the cinema, and say so?

"I can see that you're puzzled," she said. "Our sense of what's amusing can be a bit strange, I suppose. You'll get used to it, though. You'll soon be laughing at things that you never would have thought funny before. You'll get the joke."

He saw her again the next day, as he came back from work. He was at the bottom of the stair, and she was coming down. They greeted one another, and he moved aside for her to walk past him. She did so, smiling at him, and then, immediately afterwards, she paused. He had started to climb the stairs, but stopped after he had taken one step.

"That was kind of you to invite me last night," he said. "I enjoyed the meal."

She made a self-deprecatory gesture. "It wasn't anything special," she said. "Pasta was all I had. Next time I'll do something better. What would you like?"

"I'd be happy with anything," he said. "I'm not fussy."

"Good." She hesitated, and then said, "Well, goodbye."

He did not want her to go. "Or I could cook for you," he said hurriedly. "This bag here. It's got some rice in it and I can make a sauce. I could..."

She smiled encouragingly. "That would be very nice. When? Tonight?"

"Why not?"

She complimented him on his cooking, although he told her that what he had prepared was very simple. Then, after they had finished the meal, she looked at her watch and suggested that they might just make a film she was keen to see at the Filmhouse, if he was interested, that is. He accepted readily, and they walked round the corner to catch a bus.

They alighted at the end of Princes Street, walking round the corner to Lothian Road. Although it was a Monday, and quite early, there was a small crowd of people, fired up with drink, standing outside a bar, arguing about admission. One of the crowd turned and looked at him as they walked past.

She muttered: "Don't make eye contact." But he had already met the man's gaze. He turned away quickly, and looked across the road to the imposing financial building; glass and stone, rational, reliable. And behind him that sudden glimpse of what seemed to be hatred, or anger perhaps. Why? Did he think he was a Muslim? Was that it? Was that man, with his look of loathing, one of those people who hated Muslims because of everything that had happened? And what if I really was a Muslim and knew that the hate was real and was directed at me for what I was, not a mistaken hate like this?

A few yards farther on, she said: "This is a pretty disgusting place at night."

"Why do people drink so much?" he asked. "In India..." He did not complete his sentence. It was rude to criticise; he was a guest.

"They don't drink as much in India? I'm not surprised. It's our national failing." She paused. "We've turned into a country of foul-mouthed louts. Aggressive. Pickled in alcohol. Welcome to modern Scotland."

He was not sure whether he was meant to take this seriously. He looked at her and she nodded. "It's true," she said. "It really is."

The trouble is, he thought, that one never knows whether what they say is what they mean. A person could say it's true and mean the direct opposite, and the person to whom the remark was made would know what was meant. His uncle, the enthusiast for English, had said: "English is very clear. That is why it is such a useful language. It is clear and precise." But that particular uncle had never been out of India. The sort of British people he had spoken to all his life were probably those who had lived in India for some time. Those were people who usually believed in something; old-fashioned people, who meant what they said.

The following Saturday, she offered to take him for a drive.

"My car is rather old and it doesn't always start," she said. "But it should get us there and back. Just."

They followed the road south and turned off just before Tranent, heading for the coast of East Lothian. It was a fine late autumn day, one of those days in which the weather seemed to apologise for its behaviour over the summer, when the sun returned, but was more distant, weaker, and made the light seem so clear. He looked out across fields that had been cut back to stubble, over the Forth which was dark blue and slightly choppy. The light foreshortened distance, and made the huddle of hills that was Fife seem barely a mile or two away. A ship, a tanker, rode at anchor, wavelets breaking white against her bow.

He searched for words that would describe what he saw. The word clean came to mind, but Kerala too, or parts of it, was clean. Scrubbed, perhaps. No, that was not it. And then he realised that the word he was looking for was northern. He had seen light like this up in Himachal Pradesh, near Shimla, when he had gone with a group of young doctors for a conference on infectious diseases. They had stayed in a cheap hotel perched on a mountainside and when he had gone back to his room one afternoon and opened the shutters, he had seen light like this. It had brought the distant mountains, briefly revealed, so close that one might feel one might walk to them.

They drove through North Berwick and down a road that ended in a small parking place under a circle of tall trees. There was a path which she seemed to know quite well, and she led him confidently down this towards the sand dunes. Since they had left the car, the wind had risen, and he felt it against his brow and in his hair. He had only a thin pullover and he was feeling chilly, in spite of the sun, which was on the wind-bent grass, making it gold.

His hand brushed against hers, briefly, but she looked up at him when it happened. He pretended not to notice. He had not planned that anything like this should happen, that he should walk, by himself, along a beach in Scotland with a woman who was his neighbour, and that his hand should brush against hers.

She said: "We can walk along as far as those rocks over there. You see them? Those ones. Then we can go back to the car along another path."

He smiled. "I'm getting a bit cold," he said. "I should have brought my jacket.'

"Yes," she said. "I told you, didn't I? You can't trust this country. Everything changes, just like that. You think it's warm and then suddenly it's cold."

Over the next few weeks, they slipped into an easy routine. She would come and knock on his door in the early evening and they would decide who would do the cooking. Sometimes they went out and ate in a restaurant a couple of streets away. They watched films together. She sometimes just called in to talk, to unburden herself of some office row, some misunderstanding. He told her about the people at work, and the things they said. He tried to explain the project, in non-scientific terms, and she tried to understand. But the picture that she had in her mind was of him bending over his microscope, turning the focus button. She could not imagine what it would be like to look at cells all day. But he seemed to her to be a hero, locked in a battle to discover the building blocks of life.

He slowly found out more about her; that she had been born in Penicuik and had gone to school there; that her father was a civil servant who had something to do with agriculture and grants for farmers; that her mother cut people's hair at home; that she had a sister who had gone to live in London and worked for a commercial radio station down there. She told him about her time at Napier University, when she lived in a student flat above a pizza parlour, and that the flat smelled permanently of mozzarella and basil, but that nobody minded, but got used to it.

One of the people at work, the research fellow who was rudest to the Professor, said to him, as they drank coffee in the small staffroom at the end of the corridor: "I see you have a girlfriend now. She looks nice.'

He had looked at him in puzzlement, and then realised.

"I saw you at that restaurant," his colleague went on. "Somebody you met here?"

He looked down at the floor. He had always felt bashful about these things. Was there something wrong with him? Other people spoke about these matters very openly, but he had never done that. He had been shy.

"She's my neighbour," he said. "Her flat is downstairs from mine."

The colleague nodded. "Good. Maybe bring her round some time. Helen and I would like to have you round for supper. You can bring your friend."

He waited for the invitation to become more specific, but it did not, and he concluded that this was one of those invitations that were really not meant to be taken seriously. It was a friendly way of talking; that was all.

When he went home that day, he thought about her. He wondered what it was that existed between them. Nothing had happened, nothing in that sense, but he found that he had no desire for anything like that to happen. She was a friend, a neighbour; she was not a lover. He tried to imagine her as his lover, but could not. She was like a sister, really. It was a platonic relationship, a friendship between a man and a woman of the sort that sometimes blossoms in exactly these circumstances, between neighbours. He remembered how, on that Saturday in East Lothian, his hand had brushed against hers, and that he had seen her looking at him, as if expecting him to do something, which of course he did not. He did not do anything because he felt that it would be like touching a male friend. He did not want to do it; the desire to do so was simply absent.

He thought that it might be different for her. She seemed fond of him; she wanted to spend time in his company. But if she felt attached to him in that way, then he would have somehow to make it clear that this was not the way he felt. That could be difficult. He could hardly say to her explicitly that he was not interested in her; she might laugh at him and ask him whatever gave him the idea that she felt anything like that for him. That was the way many girls would react to that; and understandably so; they had their pride. He felt flushed and uncomfortable just to think about it, and later that evening, when she came to his door to ask him if he wanted to share dinner, he toyed with the idea of pretending to be out, but his hall light was on and she would have seen it shining from under the door. That night she asked him whether he would like to go to Glasgow with her the following Sunday. She would drive and they could visit the Burrell Collection. He hesitated. He wanted to decline, but he could not find the words, and he said that he would like that. She seemed pleased.

When he had gone down to Cochi to see his family before he came to Scotland, his mother had given him a large album, bound in artificial red leather. On the cover were the words, engraved in gold, My Family.

He had opened it in front of everyone and turned over the stiff black boards that were the pages of the album. On each page she had mounted a colour photograph of some member of the family, starting with his grandparents, his grandmother in a red sari, his grandfather in grey trousers and a plain white kurta. And then his parents at their wedding, a photograph he knew well, standing outside the tiny church with its large wrought-iron gate on which the words "The Church of St Thomas, God be with You" had been worked. And there was his favourite uncle, the one who so loved the English language, sitting on his verandah, a book, appropriately enough, in his hands; and he could make out what the book was, Palgrave's Golden Treasury.

He was vaguely embarrassed about the album. It seemed so sentimental to have something called My Family, and he could not imagine any of the people at work having such a thing. But now he took it out from the cupboard in which he had placed it, wrapped up in a plastic bag, and opened it.

Towards the back was a picture of his cousin Francesca. The photograph had been taken in a photographer's studio, against a background of what appeared to be painted clouds. It was as if Francesca were flying and had been chanced upon by the photographer. Even her hair seemed to be swept back, as if by the wind of her flight.

Francesca was an attractive girl, a couple of years younger than he was. They had been friends throughout their childhood and he was pleased when she became engaged to a boy he had known at school, the very same boy who had given him that theological advice all those years ago.

He looked at Francesca and smiled. She could do him a service now, and he did not think that she would mind. Carefully he edged the photograph out of its restraining corners. Then he measured it and noted down the measurements. There was a store round the corner that he had noticed sold picture frames. It was run by a woman who sat behind the counter, reading a newspaper. She was always there, and he had never seen her do any business, not once. Tomorrow he would go in and buy a frame.

He looked at the photograph of his cousin and on impulse kissed it. Francesca was different from Jen. He had always wanted to kiss his cousin, right from the time they were small children. But he had never done it, although one evening, while they were sitting together on the verandah playing cards, she suddenly leaned over and kissed the top of his head.

"You smell of coconut oil," she said.

He was not sure, at eleven, if that was a compliment, but it left him burning. And even now he remembered it with all the delight with which one remembers an illicit pleasure, a moment of intense erotic excitement. That was what he wanted. He wanted somebody like her, like Francesca, who would remind him of those days, and who he really was. It would just have to be somebody like that; not somebody who came from this place, with its lack of colour, and its cold evenings, and its thin light.

The following day, he bought the frame and slipped the picture inside it. The frame was silver, or plated with something that might have been silver, and it gave the photograph of Francesca a certain dignity. He spent some time finding the right place for the photograph. It should not be too prominently displayed, because that, he thought, would look odd, almost as if he were trying to convey a message. He settled for the kitchen, on the shelf above the sink. She went there to fill the kettle or to help him wash up. If he pushed it back a bit, it would look natural.

He looked at Francesca. Her gaze met his, and he felt a momentary pang. She would not have done this herself. "Why can't you just be honest?" she had said to him once, about something or other, and he had been silenced by the question. Was he dishonest? He did not think he was, but if she saw him now, she would surely laugh and say: "There you are! And now you're making me dishonest too."

Two days later he rang her doorbell and invited her to join him for supper. He felt his heart beating hard within him as he spoke. She smiled at him and accepted. "I've brought you something about the Burrell," she said. "You can look at it before we go over there. Here."

She handed him a soft-covered book with a picture of an imposing vase on the front. He looked at it, ashamed that he was doing this. Art was all about truth, was it not? And here he was trying to mislead her; to mislead a friend. But he did not want to hurt her; he did not want that. This was the easiest way.

She arrived for the meal. She came into the kitchen to help him carry the plates through, and he thought for a moment that she had seen the photograph, but she had not.

In the sitting room, a small room with only three chairs and a small table, they ate with the plates on their lap. She spoke about something that had happened at work, a row between her supervisor and a new employee that had resulted in an exchange of insults.

He found it strange that somebody could speak to an employer like that and get away with it. He remembered the rudeness of the research fellow, who had now taken to sighing audibly when the Professor spoke.

People were less respectful here, he thought. No, they were rude. That was all it was, rudeness. And he had expected everything to be so correct, so clean, so well-run. It was clean and well run, he thought, but it was not correct.

"You're quiet this evening," she said. "Is everything all right?"

His reply came quickly. "Yes. Yes. Everything is all right."

She looked at him sideways. "I'm not sure if I always know what you're thinking," she said. "You go quiet like that. You frown. You look like this. Like this. See."

She laughed, and he could not help but smile. He knew that he had a tendency to frown, and that others might find that amusing.

Suddenly she reached out and placed her hand on his, gently. "You see, I think of you as being... as being an exotic, I suppose. Does that sound odd? That's how they describe plants that are from somewhere else. Exotics."

He stared at her. The pressure of her hand on his was light, but he felt his skin becoming hot. He wanted to move his hand, to take it away from her, but he did not. He did not look down at her hand. He said nothing. He was quiet.

From outside, on the stair, there came the sound of voices. There was a man upstairs who was a bit deaf. He spoke to his wife in a raised voice, like a drill sergeant giving an order. She shouted back at him, her voice rising shrilly with the effort.

"There they go," she said. "I suppose they don't know that we can hear every word."

He smiled weakly and moved his hand away, to pick up the plates. "I have a dessert for us," he said. "It's an Indian dessert. I think you will like it. It has ice cream and a sort of nut sauce. Do you like both of those?"

She rose to her feet. "I love them," she said.

They walked through to the kitchen and he put the dirty plates down beside the sink. He moved to one side, to let her get past, and he knew the moment that she saw the photograph.

At first she said nothing. She was holding the kettle, which she was about to fill at the sink. She poised, her hand upon the tap but not turning it. Then slowly she took off the kettle lid and began to fill the kettle with water. She turned round,* * and saw that he was watching her. He should have looked away, in order to make it less obvious, but he was unable to move. It was as if he had set a trap for a small, defenceless creature, and the creature had fallen in. And now it was too late to do anything about it.

"That's a new photo," she said, her voice quiet and even.

He was sure that his nervousness showed. "Oh that," he said. "Yes. It was in... it was in a cupboard. I had been meaning to put it out."

She half-turned and looked again at the photograph. "Who is it?"

He swallowed. "It's a girl," he said.

She forced a laugh. "So I see. But who?"

He looked away; it was easier to lie if one looked away. "She's called Kitty da Silva. Those names - Portuguese names - are quite common in Cochi. The da Silvas are Indian now, but they have those names from back then."

She crossed the room to plug in the kettle. "What does Kitty da Silva do?"

He thought quickly. She was a nurse. No, she was not. She was a teacher, perhaps. It would be better for her to be a teacher. A nurse would be too obvious. "She teaches at a school," he said. "It's a small school for... for small children. That is what she does."

"Have you known her long?" she asked, and then added: "I assume that she is special to you. Having her photograph. I didn't know..."

He still could not look at her. "I must tell you more about her one day." And then, with forced cheerfulness: "That dessert I told you about. It's in the fridge. Let me get the plates. No, don't you bother. I'll get them.'

He did not see her the next day, nor the day after that. He went down to knock on her door, hesitantly and full of guilt, but there was no reply. He thought that he heard a sound within, but could not be sure. He wondered about looking through the letter box, but realised that if she were in and saw him, he would just compound their mutual awkwardness. And so he went up to his flat and sat there, unable to concentrate on the work that he had brought home with him, some scientific papers that he had to read. They had a team meeting in a couple of days to talk about the recent literature. But he could not absorb what he was reading, and sometimes he would get to the end of an article and realise that he had taken nothing in.

He had distanced himself from her, he reflected, and he had done it without anything being said. There had been no awkward exchange of regrets; nothing had been said. And, most importantly, she should not feel rejected by him. He did not want that.

But he missed her, and in the days that followed he found that he thought of her at odd moments. He knocked again on the door of her flat, but this time he was sure she was not there, and he went upstairs wondering what she was doing. He assumed that the projected trip to Glasgow and the Burrell was off. And who could blame her if she did not want to do that?

Then, the next day, when he went home, he found a note through his door. I have to go to Dundee for a couple of days, the note read. But I shall be back on Saturday, quite late. Is Sunday still all right for Glasgow? Let me know if it isn't. Leave a message at the office. They know where I am.

He finished reading the note and felt a sudden surge of joy. It was the feeling that he used to get when he saw his name on the pass list at medical school; a curious, light-hearted exhilaration. He went to the window and looked out on to the street. There were a few people about, and he felt a sudden, inexplicable affection for them, these people he did not know. One looked up and saw him. He wanted to wave, to call out, but they did not do that in this city. They must have their moments of joy, he supposed, but there were no processions here, no dancing in the streets, no flinging of coloured powder.

They walked about the Burrell. She had been quiet - not cold, but quiet. In the car on the way across she had talked about Dundee and about work.

There had been no silences, but she was still quieter than usual. He found himself happy just to be in her company. He wanted to say sorry, to explain, but he could not. He would think of something in due course. He could talk and tell her. One could always be honest.

They sat and had coffee together.

"How could one man collect all this?" she said. "Isn't it extraordinary?"

"He must have been very rich."

"He was. Ships. People with ships can be very wealthy. Those Greeks."

"There are ship-owners in Cochi too. Big men. Very big."

She traced a pattern with her spoon in the milky foam of her coffee. He strained to see what the design was. A flower, perhaps, or just a twirling like those Celtic intertwinings he had seen and which seemed to him to be so beautiful, like the border of a Mughal manuscript.

Artists are brothers, he thought; across the years, the centuries. Brothers.

"How is Kitty da Silva?" she asked suddenly. "How is she?"

He said nothing for a moment; a silence of the human heart.

"She is no more," he said.

She looked up with a start. "No more?"

"She went for a walk in the forest up in the hills," he said. "She was eaten by a tiger."

She looked at him in astonishment, and then, understanding, she began to laugh.

This story will appear in January in 'One City', a collection published by Polygon at £5.99. The collection also features short stories by Ian Rankin and Irvine Welsh and an introduction by JK Rowling