She had some whisky at the flat. They listed to Stones and Dylan LPs, they sat on the floor together in front of the hissing gas fire as it grew darker outside, and after a while he found himself stroking her long red hair, and then kissing her, and then after that he called the neighbours again and said he had an essay to finish and couldn't come home that weekend, and she rang some people who were expecting her at a party to say she couldn't make it, and then they spent the rest of the weekend in bed, or in front of the hissing gas fire.

Two years went past before he told her he had seen her amongst the crowds of people on North Bridge that day, loaded with her shopping, and had already walked past her twice before deliberately bumping into her by the Steps. She had been thinking, not looking at the people around her, and he had been too shy just to stop her without some pretext. She laughed, when she heard this.

They drank, smoked and screwed together, and tripped together a couple of times; she took him round museums and galleries and to her parents' house. Her father was an advocate, a tall, grey impressive man with a powerful, resonant voice and half-moon glasses. Andrea Cramond's mother was younger than her husband; greying but elegant, and tall as her daughter. There was one older brother, very straight, also in the law, and whole circle of her old school friends. It was with them that he gradually came to be ashamed of his family, his background, his west-coast accent, even some of the words he used. They made made him feel inferior, not in intellect but in training, in the way he'd been brought up, and slowly he started to change, trying to find a middle-ground between all the different things he wanted to be; true to his upbringing, his class and beliefs, but also true to the new spirit of love, alternatives, and real possibility of peace and a better, less greedy, less fucked-up world ... and true to his own fundamental certainty in the understandability and malleability of the earth, the environment; ultimately everything.

It was that belief which would not allow him to accept anything else completely. His father's view - he thought at the time - was too limited, by geography, class and history; Andrea's friends were too pretentious, her parents too self-satisfied, and the Love Generation, he already felt - though he'd have been uncomfortable admitting it - too naive.

He believed in science, in maths and physics, in reason and understanding, in cause and effect. He loved elegance, and the sheer objective logic of scientific thought, which began by saying 'Suppose ...' but could then build certainty, hard facts from that unprejudiced, unrestricted starting point. All faiths, it seemed, began imperatively by saying 'Believe:' and from this ultimately fearful insistency could conjure up only images of fear and domination, something to submit to but built of nonsenses, ghosts, ancient vapours.

There were some difficult times in that first year; he was appalled to find himself jealous when Andrea slept with somebody else, and cursed the upbringing that had told and retold him that a man should be jealous, and a woman had no right to screw around but a man did. He wondered if he ought to suggest they move in together (they talked about it).

He had to spend that summer back in the west, working for the Corporation Cleansing Department sweeping leafy, dog-shit-spattered west-end streets. Andrea was abroad, first with her family in a Cretan villa and then visiting a friend's family in Paris, but at the start of the next year they were - to his surprise - back together again, relatively unchanged.

He decided to drop Geology; while everybody else was doing Eng Lit or Sociology (or so it seemed to him), he would do something useful. He started a degree course in Engineering Design. Some of Andrea's friends tried to persuade him to do English because he seemed to know something about literature (he had learned how to talk about it, not just enjoy it), and because he wrote poetry. It was Andrea's fault anybody knew; he hadn't wanted the stuff published but she'd seen some of it lying around in his room and sent it to a friend of hers who published a magazine called Radical Road. He had been embarrassed and proud in almost equal measure when she surprised him with the issue of the magazine, flourishing it triumphantly in front of him, a present. No, he was determined to do something which would be of real use to die world. Andrea's friends could call him a plumber if diey wanted; he was determined. He remained friends with Stewart Mackie, but lost touch with the other Rockers.

Some weekends he and Andrea would go out to her parents' second house at Gullane, along the firth's duned shore east. The house was large and bright and airy and stood the golf course, looking out across the grey-blue waters to the distant coast of Fife. They would stay there for a weekend, and take walks along the beach and through the dunes; occasionally in the quietness of the dunes they would make love.

Sometimes, on good, really clear days, they would walk to the end of the beach and climb the highest dune, because he was convinced they would be able to see the three, long red summits of the Forth Bridge, which had terribly impressed him when he was just a wee boy, and which - he always told her - were the same colour as her hair.

But they never did see it from there.

She sat cross-legged on the floor after her bath, pulling a brush through her long, thick red hair. Her blue kimono reflected firelight, and her face, legs and arms shone, newly scrubbed, in the same yellow-orange glow. He was at the window, looking out into the fog-filled night, his hands cupped on either side of his face like blinkers as he pressed his nose against the glass. She said, 'What do you think?' He was silent for a moment, then pulled away from the window, closing the brown velvet curtains again. He turned back to her, shrugging.

'Pretty thick. We could make it, but it wouldn't be much fun driving. Should we stay?'

She brushed her hair slowly, holding it out to one side of her tilted head and pulling the brush through it carefully, patiently. He could almost hear her thinking. It was Sunday night; they ought to be leaving the coast house and heading back to the city. It had been foggy when they woke that morning and they waited all day for it to lift, but it had just kept thickening. She'd called her parents; it was in the city too and all over the east coast according to the weather centre, so they would not run of it once they left Gullane. It was only twenty miles or so that was a long way in the fog. She hated driving in fog, and thought he drove too quickly whatever the conditions (he'd only passed his test - in her car - six months earlier, and he loved driving fast). Two of her friends had had car crashes year. Not bad ones, but still... He knew she was superstitious, and believed that bad luck ran in threes. She wouldn't want to go back, though she had a tutorial the next morning.

The flames flickered over the logs in the wide grate.

She nodded slowly, 'OK, I don't know if we've got much food in though.'

'Fuck the food, do we have any dope?' he said, coming to sit beside her, twisting some of her hair in his fingers and grinning at her. She clonked him on the head with the brush.

'Addict.'

He made a mewling noise and rolled around the floor, rubbing his head. Then, seeing this had no effect - she was still calmly brushing her hair - he sat up again, back against an armchair. He looked over at the old radiogram. 'Want me to put Wheels of Fire on again?'

She shook her head. 'No ...'

'Electric Ladyland?' He suggested.

'Put on something... old,' she said, frowning in the firelight, looking at the brown folds of the velvet curtains.