Edinburgh is the setting of a beginning and a later act of remembrance: it is where Emma Morley and Dexter Mayhew spend their first night together, and where Dexter returns years afterward with his daughter to find the address Emma once called home. The city is not a static romantic backdrop. For Emma, it shifts from beloved university town to a place she feels she has outgrown; for Dexter, its streets eventually lead back to a life and a relationship he cannot recover.

City and changing attachments

Emma’s Edinburgh is first identified through Rankeillor Street, where she lives during her university years. The city has been beloved, but affection does not protect it from changing circumstances. After graduation, Emma finds herself still there while her friends and the momentum of student life seem to have moved on. The mismatch is captured in her sense of living in a university town like someone who has stayed at a party after everyone else has left.

The sense of stasis sharpens during a year of abandoned possibilities. Emma has tried a succession of projects, including a band that cannot settle on a name or musical direction, an alternative club night that attracts no one, two abandoned novels, and a circus-skills course that proves fruitless. She has also worked summer jobs selling cashmere and tartan to tourists. None of these efforts gives her a direction that can compete with the expectations attached to her double-first degree. Edinburgh, once cherished, begins to bore and depress her as these disappointments accumulate.

In October, she gives up her Rankeillor Street flat and returns to her parents’ home for a long, difficult winter. Her mother repeatedly asks what happened to the promise of her degree, while her younger sister, Marianne, visits with a new baby and a settled married life. The move turns the end of Emma’s Edinburgh period into more than a change of address: leaving the city coincides with confronting the gap between what her education seemed to promise and what she has managed to make of her life.

Rankeillor Street in 1988

The novel returns to Rankeillor Street on Saturday, 15 July 1988, the morning after Emma and Dexter have spent the night together. In Emma’s room, Dexter dresses quietly, trying to keep the coins in his pocket from rattling. Emma sees him preparing to leave and wants him to stay, but recognizes that he seems equally intent on going. Her decision to speak interrupts the silent departure. The address thus becomes the intimate setting for a small but consequential choice: Emma refuses to let their night end without asking Dexter to acknowledge her.

The same morning extends from Emma’s room into the flat’s shared kitchen. Dexter joins Emma and Tilly Killick for breakfast beneath a large poster of Jules et Jim. The meal is awkward: brown toast with soya spread and muesli, followed by oily coffee from an espresso maker Emma has washed for the occasion. Dexter listens to the flatmates’ self-consciously playful conversation and feels out of place among them. The room holds both the closeness of the previous night and the immediate difficulty of turning that closeness into a private moment; with Tilly present, Dexter wonders how he could kiss Emma.

The chapter titled “Arthur’s Seat” connects this morning in the flat with the city’s wider landscape. Even in these scenes, Edinburgh is presented through domestic detail rather than grandeur: a shabby, mildewed bathroom, Emma’s old wooden chair, the shared kitchen, and the flatmates’ breakfast. The physical setting makes the encounter feel provisional and everyday. Its significance lies not in a formal declaration but in the contrast between Dexter’s instinct to leave and Emma’s wish to make the connection last beyond the night.

Revisited with Jasmine

On Sunday, 15 July 2007, Dexter is in Edinburgh with Jasmine Mayhew. They are staying in a hotel in the Old Town, just off the Royal Mile. He takes Jasmine on a familiar tourist walk through alleyways and hidden stairways, but their route carries him away from the sightseeing circuit and toward a different past. Once they reach Nicolson Street, he remembers it as busy and hazy with bus fumes; on this Sunday morning it is quiet and a little sad. Jasmine is growing restless as the walk leaves the tourist trail, and Dexter feels her hand grow heavy in his while he continues.

Dexter has found Emma’s old address in one of her letters. He turns into Rankeillor Street with Jasmine and looks for number seventeen. Outside, he peers up at the third-floor window. Its curtains are drawn, and the window appears blank and unremarkable. The search brings him to the precise address where the novel’s 1988 scenes have placed Emma’s room and their shared morning, but the building offers no visible access to that earlier life. The child beside him and the letter that guided him there make the return an act of remembrance as well as a walk through the city.

Narrative significance

Edinburgh gathers two different kinds of movement. Emma’s departure from Rankeillor Street follows a period of stalled projects and disillusionment; Dexter’s later arrival reverses the direction, carrying him back to the place through Emma’s correspondence. The contrast makes the address more than a marker on a map: leaving it belongs to Emma’s attempt to move beyond an unsatisfying phase, while finding it again belongs to Dexter’s effort to approach a past he can no longer enter.

The novel also gives the city different textures according to who is moving through it and when. The shared flat in 1988 is intimate but socially awkward; the 2007 route from the Old Town toward Nicolson Street shifts from tourist atmosphere to a quieter, more personal search. The Rankeillor Street window, seen from outside with its curtains closed, is the last image of that search in the supplied scene. Edinburgh consequently holds both the beginning of Emma and Dexter’s physical intimacy and the distance that time places between that beginning and Dexter’s later life with Jasmine.