My dear, late wife used to tell me that love was the answer. My habitual and, no doubt, irritating response was always that I was not even sure of the question. But the older I grow, the more convinced I become that love, whatever it may be, is not the answer at all, or only part of it, and maybe friendship, enduring, unconditional and undemanding, is a better alternative.

Thomas.

There, I’ve written his name once more. And without flinching at all this time. Practice will no doubt make perfect. Doctor Thomas Brown was already married to Marion Jeffrey from Edinburgh when he began teaching at the college. I thought at first that she might be some relation of our Professor Jeffray, that the marriage might have been an astute step on the academic ladder. But when I knew him better, he pointed out that the names were spelled differently, that Marion Jeffrey came from an old Edinburgh family and there was no kinship between them.

I remember Marion – long departed this life – as a handsome and forthright young woman of decided opinions, and a good match for Thomas, or so I thought, although one can never really know what goes on between husband and wife. The most unlikely and mismatched couples can be blissfully happy, while those who seem made for one another can suddenly confide their misery in the marriage, or so I have learned over the years.

At some point in our acquaintance, Thomas invited me to make use of his library, to read whenever and whatever I wished. At first I was very reluctant to avail myself of this privilege and later, although I grew accustomed to visiting his house, I was always diffident about being there. Marion did her best to put me at my ease, but I was neither flesh nor fowl nor guid red herrin’ as my father would have put it, especially when there were visitors in the house. I felt as though I did not belong in that company, but only a few years earlier, the great poet Robert Burns had had something of the same problem. The Edinburgh nabbery, the gentry, found him to be a man of intellect, but were surprised and entertained by it, astonished that he had the accomplishment at all.

I often think Mr Burns and myself might have had a great deal in common if we had had the good fortune to meet and talk about our respective experiences. Burns wrote convincingly and lovingly about the flowers of his native heath. I cannot even now read the lines, oft hae I rov’d by bonny Doon, to see the rose and woodbine twine; and ilka bird sang o’ its luve, and fondly sae did I o’ mine, without it bringing a lump to my throat, which is a very daft notion after all this time.

But then, I believe the poet’s father was a gardener too, and it was that work which first took him to Ayrshire where Rab was born. How very like me, as my wife would have said, to notice this one fact about him, that he was the son of a gardener. But it would be true to say that whenever he wrote about enduring affection as opposed to the heartbreak of unrequited love, it was friendship, male and female, that he valued more than all else, and so – I think – do I.

Gardens and books. I cannot write without mentioning them. But of the two, books have played by far the larger part in my life. Books have, in some sense, been my life. But they have been my sorrow as well as my joy. It has taken me long enough to get to it, but here it is. On my writing table. This precious book, The Scots Gard’ner by John Reid, has come home to me at the end of my life, as was the intention of the sender. I hardly need to open it, for I find that I still have much of it by heart. The words come rushing back to me, as when we would recite the names of trees from it, or quote passages, turn and turn about, making a daft game of it.

‘Laburnum, horse chestnut and the bonny rowan,’ he would say and I would reply with, ‘dogwood and guilderose, sweet briar and turkey oak.’

Sometimes it would be the names just, because we both took pleasure in saying them aloud, but sometimes it would be whole passages.

‘Choose your seeds from the high, straight, young and well thriving,’ he would begin.

‘Choose the fairest, the weightiest and the brightest, for it is observed that the seeds of hollow trees whose pith is consumed, do not fill well,’ I would quote back at him.

‘Or come to perfection,’ he would continue. ‘Go on, William!’

‘It’s a mischief in many people that … that …’ and then I would hesitate, and he would finish for me, ‘that accompts all ridiculous that they have not been bred up with or accustomed unto.’

‘So it is with trees in some respects and so it is with men who think themselves superior,’ I would finish, triumphantly, and we would laugh, as though at the accomplishment of something quite wonderful, although what that could be, other than the foolish indulgence of our own high spirits, I do not know.

It is this same book, The Scots Gard’ner, that lies on my table now, alongside another volume, a manuscript book with yellowing pages covered in the neat handwriting that I still recognise as Thomas’s own. This was his commonplace book, the book in which he copied his correspondence, drafting out the letters he wished to send and sometimes copying down the letters that came to him in return, although often enough, to save time, he would simply slip the original letter between the pages. Besides that, he would make notes of important purchases or simply of things that interested him. It is a fat book, covering many years, because I think that there were long periods when he neglected it and others when he was at pains to record many things there. So I know what I will find. But also, I do not know what else I will discover there. And I feel my skin flutter in apprehension.

I half wish he had not sent me either of these books, but it must have been on his express instructions, else how would such personal documents have been included in the parcel? It was once a bonny book too, this commonplace book, but time has made a moger of it; there are many loose leaves and stains where some liquid has been spilled on it, and I can hardly bear to tease the pages apart because I know that the words will bring back yet more memories, perhaps more than I can bear.

There is, of course, yet one more book that I should mention. But I am not ready to write about that one yet. Do you know, when the parcel first came, when I guessed that he must be gone from this life, I commenced wondering which book it contained, what manner of book he had sent me? It was like standing in the teeth of a strong gale. I could not catch my breath for a moment or two and found myself trembling, my teeth chattering, even as I opened the wrapping. I cannot tell you how vastly relieved I was to find that it was not what I had feared. I should have known, for the parcel was not large enough to contain that book. All these years, and I have never seen another copy, thank God. But if I had, if it had come into my shop, in all its terrible beauty, I think I should have cast it into the flames, and I can never bring myself to destroy any book willingly, which explains why there is so little free space in the shop or this house. But it did not come. So here I sit with this unexpected gift from my one-time friend. Here I sit in the last sunlight of the day and run my fingers over the cover of first one volume and then the other, and wonder if I can bear to remember him.

* * *

I have avoided thinking about Thomas these many years past. Most days I sit here peacefully among my books and papers, reading or writing. When I look out of the window at the front of the house, I can see the naked stone figures that adorn the new building opposite, like a frozen imitation of sensuality. Their eyes gaze coldly outwards to the sky, not at each other, and there is no affection in them. Neither love nor hate, neither joy nor sorrow do they know, will they ever know. But they too have a quality of peace about them.

This parcel, with its carefully written direction, arrived only a few days ago. I recognised it immediately as his hand. I would know it anywhere, even after all this time. My son, Robert, placed it before me.

‘Look,’ he said. ‘This has come for you.’

He would have waited until I opened it, wishing to satisfy his curiosity, but I sent him off on some errand. I could not do it with anyone else standing by. And they are used to my eccentric ways now and do as they are told. Keeping the old man happy in his dotage. Humouring him.

‘Give him a good flower folio or a natural history and he’ll be occupied for hours.’

I know what they say of me, smiling, with a mixture of affection and exasperation. My sight is not what it was but my ears are quite unaffected. I have not yet turned foolish. Or no more foolish than I ever was.

What is the point, I wonder, at which friendship topples over into love? Can it be measured? Would it be a convenience to know with certainty, so that one could say, thus far and no further, because beyond this point, I will be in danger of an inconvenient madness? And how could it ever be measured? When I reflect upon these things, I still, after all this time, and all these years later, feel a sensation like a physical pain, somewhere in the centre of my chest, where the heart is said to lie. If I am honest it never goes away, this pain. It never for a single day leaves me.

There now, that’s said. And it is such a striking confession that it surprises even me. And yet I know that it is not real, or not real in the sense of being engendered in blood and bone, not real in the sense of being measurable, although the flesh responds as though it were. It is, I think, as frozen as the passion that remains locked into the breast of that stone god out there. But there is no physic will ever cure it now and, besides, that garden is dead and gone. It is an old malady and one that I must just go on living with, as I have lived with it this long time past.