He missed his own graduation day, lying in the Royal Infirmary recovering from an appendectomy. His mother and father went to the ceremony anyway, just to hear his name read out. Andrea looked after them; they all got on fine. Even when the parents met he was amazed that they all seemed to chat like old friends; he was ashamed of himself for ever being ashamed of his own mother and father.

Stewart Mackie met Shona, the cousin from Inverness; they got married during Stewart's first post-grad year. He was Stewart's best man, Andrea was Shona's maid of honour. They both made speeches at the reception; his was the better planned, but hers was the best delivered. He sat watching as she stood speaking, and realised then how much he loved her and admired her. He also felt vaguely proud of her, though he felt that was wrong. She sat down to enthusiastic applause. He raised his glass to her. She winked back.

A few weeks later she told him she was thinking of going to Paris to study Russian. He thought she was joking at first. He was still looking for a job. He had vague ideas of going with her - perhaps he could do a crash course in French and look for a job over there - then he was offered a good position in a firm working on power station design; he had to take it. Three years, she told him. It'll only be three years. Only? he said. She tried to tempt him with the idea of holidays in Paris with her, but he found it difficult to be supportive.

He was anyway powerless, and she determined.

He wasn't going to see her to the airport. They went out instead, on the evening before she left, across the road bridge and into Fife, along the shore to a small restaurant in Culross. They took his car; he had bought a small new BMW on credit, on the strength of his new-found wealth as an employed man. It was an awkward meal and he drank too much wine; she was staying sober for the flight the following day - she loved flying, she would always have a window seat - so she drove back. He fell asleep in the car.

When he woke up he assumed they were back outside the flat in Canonmills, or her old place at Comely Bank; but lights shimmered far away, across a mile of dark water in front of them. Before she switched off the headlights he caught a glimpse of something vast towering over them, at once massive and airy.

'Where the hell's this? he said, rubbing his eyes and looking around. She got out of the car.

'North Queensferry. Come and see the bridge,' she told him, puliing on her jacket. He looked out sceptically; the night was cold and there was a hint of rain. 'Come on,' she called. 'It'll clear your head.'

'So would a fucking revolver,' he muttered as he got out of the car.

They walked past notices warning people about objects falling from the bridge, and others which claimed the land beyond as private, until they came to a gravel turning circle, some old buildings, a small slip, grass and whin-covered rocks, and the round granite piers of the railway bridge itself. The smir of rain inside the cold wind made him shiver. He looked up into the wind-moaning spaces of the structure above. The waters of the Firth of Forth shushed and slapped on nearby rocks, and the lights of buoys flashed slowly on and off, up and down the wide, dark river. She held his hand. Upstream, the road bridge was a tall web of light, and a distant grumble of background noise.

'I like this place,' she told him, and she hugged him, her body quivering with the cold. He held her, but looked up into the web of steel overhead, lost in its dark strength.

Three years, he thought. Three years in another city.

'The Tallahatchie Bridge fell down,' he said eventually, more to the cold wind than to her. She looked up at him, nuzzled her cold nose into the presentable remnant of the fine beard he'd grown over the last two years and said,

'What?'

'The Tallahatchie Bridge. Ode to Billy Joe, Bobbie Gentry, remember? The damn thing fell down.' He gave a small, despairing laugh.

'Anybody hurt?' she asked, then put her cold lips on his Adam's Apple.

'I don't know,' he said, suddenly very sad. 'I didn't even think to look. I just saw the headline.'

A train rumbled over the bridge, filling the night air with the bassy voice of other people going to other places. He wondered if any of the passengers would pay heed to the old tradition and throw coins out of their nice warm carriages, spinning futile wishes into the uncaring waters of the cold Firth below.

He didn't tell her, but he remembered being here, in this very spot, years ago, one summer. An uncle who had a car took him and his parents on a ride through the Trossachs and then over to Perth. They came back this way. It was before the road bridge opened in '64 - before they'd even started it, he supposed; it was a Bank Holiday, and there was a queue a mile long waiting for the ferries. The uncle drove them down here instead, to have a look at 'one of Scotland's proudest monuments'.

What age had he been then? He didn't know. Maybe only five or six. His father had held him on his shoulders; he'd touched the cool granite of the piers, and reached, stretching, straining, small hands open and grasping, for the red-painted metal of the bridge ...

The queue of cars had grown no shorter when they went back. They crossed by the Kincardine Bridge instead.

Andrea kissed him, waking him from his memories, and hugged him very tight, tighter than he'd ever have thought she could hug, so tight he almost had difficulty breathing, then she let go, and they went back to the car.

She drove over the road bridge. He looked out over the dark waters to the dim night-shape of the rail bridge they had stood beneath, and saw the long dotted row of lights of a passenger train as it crossed high over the river, heading south. Lights like a row of dots at the end of a sentence, he thought, or at the start of one; three years. Dots like meaningless Morse; a signal made up of only Es and Hs and Is and Ss. The lights flickered through the intervening girders of the bridge; the nearer cables of the road bridge flicked past too quickly to make any difference.

No romance, he thought, watching the train. I remember when there were steam trains. I'd go up to the local station and stand on the foot-bridge over the tracks until a train came along, chuffing steam and smoke. When it went under the wooden bridge its smoke exploded on the metal plates put there to protect the timbers; a sudden blast of smoke and steam which surrounded you for what seemed like very long seconds with a delicious uncertainty, another world of mystery and swirling, half-seen things.

But they closed the line, they dismantled the engines, they tore down the foot-bridge and turned the station into an attractive, very unique and spacious residence with a pleasant southerly aspect and extensive grounds. Very unique. That just about said it all. Even if they'd got it right they'd still have been wrong.

The train flowed across the long viaduct and disappeared into the land. Just like that. No romance. No fireworks as the ashes and cinders were dumped, no flying comet-tail of orange sparks from the chimney, not even any clouds of steam (he would try to write a poem about it the next day, but it wouldn't work and he would throw it away).

He turned from the bridge, yawning as Andrea slowed the car for the tolls. 'You know how long it takes them to paint it, don't you?' he said to her. She shook her head, wound the window down as they came up to the toll plaza.

'What, the railway bridge?' she said digging in a pocket for the money. 'I don't know. A year?'

'Wrong,' he told her, folding his arms, looking ahead towards the red light at the far end of the booth. 'Three. Three fucking years.'