I had been in Edinburgh – “Auld Reikie” as the eighteenth-century poet Robert Fergusson referred to the city in his eponymous 300-line poem – for three months when, on a chilly but clear-skied December Saturday afternoon, I set out for the village of Duddingston, about a half hour’s walk from my student Hall of Residence. Not being aware that unassuming beginning-of-winter days could end in snow and sleet, I fell victim to the commonest of human errors – not thinking of storms ahead when the weather appears fine.

By the time I reached the village, it had transformed into the monochrome beauty of a snow land. As the night came in, I headed back to the Hall, the wind punching the air from my lungs and peppering my face with thick snowflakes that caught my eyelashes, then fell on my cheeks as tears.

We almost bumped into one another under the sudden glare of neon light in the Hall’s foyer, I going in, she rugged up in an ankle-length coat and woollen scarf and about to leave.

“Och! Look a’ yue. Yer covered in snow. You’d be freezin’,” she said in a lilting lowlands accent. In an instant, she set about brushing caked snow off my hood and shoulders. I had no idea who she was.
“Turn aroond!” and she spun me around, sweeping away the white crusts from my back with quick broad strokes.

“There! That’s betta,” she smiled.

I turned back towards her and felt her eyes rest on my icy cheeks and lips. Without a word, I reached for her hands. They were slender, almost fragile and, of course, cold. She gave the slightest response, her fingers holding mine, a tiny gesture I devoured. In those few seconds, our hands gave us an unspoken pact of solidarity against the common foe of coldness and a fleeting access to each other. Then it was gone.

“Och, yer cannae do that. Ma boyfriend’s waitin’!” She pulled her hands away and turned towards the door. Then, as if having second thoughts, she turned back. She leaned towards me and I caught the faint, sweet smell of alcohol on her breath. She put her hands up to my face and kissed me hard on the mouth.
“Dinny forget aboot keepin’ warm toneet!” She laughed and skipped away, disappearing into the darkness.

That dreich evening, “keepin’ warm” alone in my room, I made little progress with an essay on calcium metabolism. I kept recalling her hands and, yes, her mouth too. The vagabond lightness of the sweep of her hands betrayed a carnal ease, a carefree sweetness. The confidence, albeit aided by a dram or two, with which her hands held my face revealed a fearless tenderness full of promise. I knew they signified something of her inner self, an unconscious expression of a need for intimacy. Years later I found this same sentiment in Emily Dickinson’s Poem 657: “This – / The spreading wide of my narrow Hands / To gather paradise –”.

David M. A. Francis