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Quite often at winter weekends Ray calls for Allan and they go up one or other of the low hills around Glasgow. Today it's to be Duncarnock Hill. Allan allows plenty of time for getting his hill-walking gear together so that he won't have to keep Ray waiting when the car horn sounds. As he packs his little rucksack with sandwiches and coffee for both of them, he enjoys planning how he will tell Ray that he has solved the mystery that has puzzled them for so long.

He will say, "By the way, I didn't stop research when I finished my PhD. I've made a very significant discovery." He will pause dramatically. "I have established the identity of the Delectable Mountain."

This is their name for an oblong height whose distant outline is raised
above the high horizon south of the Clyde. From some parts of the city - say, driving south from Bearsden into Anniesland - it draws the eye as though it's meant to. It attracts to itself all your dreams of a different life. Its faraway silhouette beneath a high radiant sky becomes the hill King Arthur sleeps beneath, the Mount on which the Sermon was preached, one of Housman's blue remembered hills. They've said this sort of thing to each other, about mountains as symbols of promise or revelation, as though they were still in their old tutorials. Their thrilling empathy shows in the fact that one day when Allan began, "Hey, it's one of - ," Ray read his mind and interrupted: " - the Delectable Mountains out of The Pilgrim's
Progress."

Unfortunately they've never been able to work out what hill it actually is.

"Probably it has no actual geographical location," Allan once said. "It
shifts around relative to where you are, always making you dissatisfied with where you are. Are there hills that move around?" He'd meant: in literature, in legend.

"Ekaterini okay?" says Allan brightly as he settles himself in Ray's car.

"Why wouldn't she be?" That's all the answer Allan gets. But he is
content to sit and be driven and refine the way he will tell Ray of his
discovery. He won-t make his announcement just yet. He will wait until, from the top of Duncarnock Hill, Ray starts squinting about, trying as usual to locate the Delectable Mountain. Ray will be saying things like: "Nothing the right shape... From the north it's higher on the left-hand side, maybe it's reversed from here... Byres Road aims straight down towards it so it's got to be around here somewhere..."

And Allan will say, "Actually, Ray, we're on the Delectable Mountain. Yes, Duncarnock Hill is it!"

Then, in the manner of the minister of religion he planned to become
until he heard about the minister who was called to account by a Glasgow presbytery for living with another man, Allan will joke: “And, you know, life is rather like that. We overlook what’s under our noses for some vague will-o’-the-wisp in the far distance. That is what the Bible means when it says the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand. We already possess it, did we but know. The Delectable Mountain is the hill right under our feet, not some enchanting mirage on the shimmering horizon.”

Ray will laugh approvingly, but however much he pleases Ray it will
never be more than his due. If Ray wants to stare at the road in silence today, without their usual chat and banter, that’s fine. When Allan’s career in the ministry crumbled before it began, his life was got back on the rails by this big, untidy, slightly weatherbeaten man whose eyes still have the capacity for intense personal connection.

“Do a PhD. You’re bright enough, and it’ll give you four years to decide afresh what you want to do with your life.”

Allan had never thought of a PhD, had had no idea of anything to do
research on.

“Right. Remember the bit in Mansfield Park where Jane Austen shows what the charming Mary Crawford is really like? When her brother runs off with another man’s wife, Mary can see it only in terms of folly, stupidity — it doesn’t cross her ‘corrupted, vitiated mind’ that he’s behaved wickedly. Well, there you are. The eighteenth-century distinction between, A, being foolish or imprudent and, B, being immoral. Dig into the way eighteenth-century philosophers and theologians made such a big deal of it. A distinction largely forgotten today, when ‘I did the right thing’ usually means ‘I did what served my own interests and I’d have been stupid if I hadn’t.’ Maybe give it a Scottish angle out of all those kirk ministers publishing their sermons. Home territory for you! Fordyce’s Sermons. And I think I can get some funding for you, too.”

Not only that — and this really had been going beyond a tutor’s duties — when Allan, not yet having abandoned the minister ambition, believed the Lord had called upon him to dump Kris, Ray brought them together again. He’d talked to Allan, to Kris, shuttled diplomatically between them. They got separate invitations to his wedding and at the reception their names were at adjacent places. Later he’d had just them to dinner. “Kris, he’s technologically hopeless, he’ll need someone to teach him how to word-process his thesis,” he’d said and left them together at opposite ends of his settee. When he returned, though Allan tried to withdraw his hand, Kris kept tight hold. The years working for his PhD and the years
since, sustained by Ray’s wisdom and Kris’s love, had enabled Allan to understand all he’d ever read about happiness.

But despite their former connection as tutor and student, he and Ray
are now friends, with the equality that that implies. He is proud when
Ray, still looking at the road, says, “I need to explain why I’m not very good company today.”

He says, “Katya and I have gone our separate ways.”

The car has entered the surprised morning sunshine where the straggling city opens to real fields, real farms.

Ray is saying, “It was for the best. She hasn’t been happy for some
time.”

How typical it is of Ray, deserted by the elegant volatile Ekaterini, to
be concerned for her happiness. She, too, had been one of Ray’s students, a rootless Greek woman with plenty of money who dressed like a fashion model. She spoke of having come to study in Scotland as though it were just another whim indulged, and Allan had been surprised she’d actually completed her PhD.

Ray is saying, “So when she got home last night she found the locks
changed and her suitcases packed on the landing. It’s what she wanted. She just couldn’t bring herself to make the move. Sometimes people need someone else to engineer for them the thing that they want in their heart of hearts. As you may remember, Doctor Allan.”

“Yes indeed, Doctor Ray.” Allan marvels again at the utter seriousness with which Ray had treated his relationship with Kris, never a hint of: well, it’s only a gay relationship. He’d shown the same tact and patience in reuniting them that he’d exercised to soothe Ekaterini’s insecurities through every high-tempered withdrawal, to make it clear to her that he wanted no mere fling, he loved her, he would marry her.

“Oh no,” Ray is saying in a voice that elevates Allan as someone he has to answer to, “ she had somewhere to go. I booked her into a hotel and left the address in an envelope on the door, money too.”

Eventually Allan says, “Was it safe, leaving money like that?” He and
Kris have recently been burgled.

“I was in the flat, so I could tell whose footsteps were coming up the
stairs. Not that she knew I was there.”

As always, the shock of cold air through the open doors of the parked car as they sit putting on their boots makes a walk seem all too much of a bother. Allan says, “I don’t think I’d have had the strength of character just to sit there while she was banging the door and shouting and crying.” He can add, because they are friends, “You’re bloody lucky she didn’t get the police to break the door down.”

“She wouldn’t do any of that.” The quick look he gives Allan is the one he used to give him in tutorials when waiting to see him get the point, draw the deduction, see the implication.

Allan pauses in tying a lace. “Her dignity?”

“Good. Yes, her dignity. Or pride, if there is a difference. Discuss. Katya cause a scene, have the neighbours coming out to see what’s going on, call the police to get into her own home, reveal her shame to all and sundry? No, I know my Katya, she wouldn’t do that, she has a Greek woman’s thing about shame.”

There is an echo of love, no, an aspect of love, in this scrupulous
endeavour to ease Ekaterini’s path from the marriage in which she was unhappy by trading on her own most heartfelt traits. Allan sees her walking downstairs almost jauntily, suitcases balancing.

Now that they’re walking the cold is a spring of energy and delight.
But Kris could be a problem. Allan can almost hear him: “She’s no roots in this country, no relations, most of her friends are his, she gives up her nationality for him, and then he leaves her high and dry. And to do it like that, too!” After all Ray did for them, it’s puzzling that Kris has never really liked him. Perhaps it’s this: Allan dumped Kris and had to be steered back to him by Ray, but Kris being resentful towards Allan about all that wouldn’t help the relationship, so Kris’s resentment gets displaced onto Ray...

He will tell Kris, “It’s what she wanted. Just as he knew what we wanted — remember? It’s being cruel to be kind.”

Their breath is in clouds on the cold air, and the grass they’re trampling, every blade and seed-head, is coated with white rime that the sun is powerless to dissolve.

Allan says, “I can say it now. She was always friendly enough to me but, I don’t know, she always made me feel I was beneath her. Her friendliness was like something put on. Like her clothes. She was an accomplished dresser, and her friendliness seemed an accomplished act. Not from the heart.”

“No.”

It’s the decisive “No” that always heralded Ray’s putting Allan right on some point of scholarship. “ She respected you very much, Allan. I know what you mean about her manner seeming artificial but it always expressed what was genuinely there.”

In the winter stillness there is the snug sound of cattle lowing.

Ray’s determination to defend her is a shaming contrast to the way he, Allan, trashed Kris when he believed he was under a divine command to discard him. “He’s not relationship material anyway. He doesn’t see the difficulties, he just utters clichés like, ‘Love will find a way. He reads detective novels all the time. And this stupid business,” he’d said to Ray, “of calling himself Kris, K-R-I-S, when his name’s just the ordinary Christopher. Chris, C-H-R-I-S, that’s okay of course. But K-R-I-S! He can’t explain it, doesn’t see anything to explain. It’s unstable, somehow. It’s like a false persona, like he can’t settle to be who he actually is.”

Ray had said, “Perhaps he doesn’t love himself enough, and with your love he’ll learn how to do it.”

Now Allan says, “Perhaps her artificial manner was because she doesn’t love herself enough. I mean, if you don’t like yourself, you’d always be sort of acting with others, wouldn’t you?”

“Well, as our old chum Joseph Butler used to say, it’s not that there’s too much self-love in the world — there’s too little of it.”

“Loving yourself is the greatest love of all — Whitney Houston.”

Allan looks for an answering smile at the scholar-like exchange of references, at the lovely incongruity of an eighteenth-century philosopher-bishop being echoed in a modern pop song.

Ray is saying, “I wondered whether you and Kris were free next Saturday. To come for dinner. With me and Debbie. You’re going to have to get to know Debbie.” Ray has given him what Allan recognises with delight as a blokeish grin.

“At the flat?”

“Yes.” Puzzlement at the question.

“Great,” says Allan. One of his bootlaces trails loose, but there’s no
need to tie it this instant. He hears Kris: “We ought to be giving Ekaterini support.” Answer: it doesn’t have to be next Saturday night.

“Right. That’s settled then. You may actually have met her. With Jim
Garry in the department.”

It doesn’t take them long to reach Duncarnock Hill’s top. The reservoir in its lee, which looks perfectly natural, not at all man made, is steel-blue fringed with white ice. Despite midday sun in a clear blue sky, the country around is almost smoky with cold, as though light were being frozen from the air. Here and there among the fields are houses, farmhouses they will be, but there’s no sign of the people who live in them. They will be safe indoors around the fire. Allan’s eyes fix on a farm whose yard is stuffed with squalid junk: piles of obscure pieces of metal, tires, garish plastic bags heaped up, three or four wrecked-looking cars, a general air of rundown. His picture of Ekaterini’s poised descent of the stairs becomes one of her stepping elegantly through the filthy yard in a pale suede coat, her loose black hair flying despite the windlessness. She still has her suitcases. The farm people invite her in out of the cold to rest. She has the manner of visiting royalty, all gracious interest, but once she has left she will not remember them at all.

Ray is waiting. Allan kneels to take out their sandwiches and coffee,
hands Ray a plastic coffee-cup.

Ray says, “The fact is, I made a mistake. Marrying Katya. But it’s all
sorted.”

He says, “I’ve done the right thing now.”

Allan has halted in pouring coffee into the glowing scarlet cup Ray’s
holding out. He resumes.

Ray is saying, “I’d have been a fool to miss my chance of happiness. Just like you’d have been a fool if I’d let you. And now — his voice puts care aside — “let’s see what there is to be seen.” He turns from one questing direction to another. “You’d think we’d have a grandstand view of the bloody Delectable Mountain from here.”

Allan turns in parallel with him. Allan is manoeuvring his lips so that he can sip his coffee while keeping from his mouth the slimy skin on it that has already formed in the biting cold. The coffee steams over his glasses, making it hard to keep track of the slimy skin. Allan decides Ekaterini’s graciousness to the farm people would be heartfelt and genuine: she would remember such simple hospitality with gratitude for the rest of her life.

Ray is saying, “It must be a perspective thing. From the north it looks a really big looming height that would stand out, but maybe we’re too high up here to recognise it.”

Success! — Allan has kept the slimy skin out of his mouth. He pours
out the dregs. The fragile rime-patterns melt in a widening ring. He says, putting undue emphasis on the last word, “You could be right.”

Allan says with tremendous fondness, “I bet Kris isn’t even up yet, the lazy sod, he was still sound asleep when I left.”