Rankeillor Street

Rankeillor Street is the Edinburgh setting of Emma Morley’s university-era flat and the address Dexter Mayhew later names as the place where they first met. Its significance lies in the contrast between intimate beginnings and an exterior that offers no visible sign of them: a quiet residential street, an ordinary third-floor window, and a past that becomes legible only through memory. The novel returns to the address decades after the events of 1988, making the street both a physical location and a test of what places can retain.

Setting and Identity

The address is Number 17 Rankeillor Street, a flat Emma used while she and Dexter were at university in Edinburgh. The available scenes place it within an everyday domestic world rather than a grand or distinctive landmark. Emma’s old wooden chair, a radio alarm clock, a shabby bathroom, and a kitchen with a greasy wall-sized poster of Truffaut’s Jules et Jim make the flat tangible through its furnishings and routines. The rooms matter because they are inhabited: they hold the aftermath of a night together, the awkwardness of sharing breakfast, and the beginnings of a relationship whose later importance could not be read from the address alone.

Rankeillor Street is also situated within a cityscape that changes with the purpose and pace of a visit. When Dexter later walks there with Jasmine, their route begins in the Old Town, just off the Royal Mile, and continues through alleyways and secret stairways to Nicolson Street. Dexter remembers that street as hectic and hazy with bus fumes, but on the Sunday morning it is quiet and a little sad. The walk moves away from the tourist trail and into a residential street where the remembered past is concentrated in one address.

The Flat on 15 July 1988

The novel’s dated Edinburgh scenes return to Rankeillor Street on Saturday 15 July 1988. In the morning after their first night together, Emma wakes to find Dexter sitting precariously on her old wooden chair, pulling on his trousers as quietly as possible. The radio alarm clock reads nine-twenty; they have slept for perhaps three hours. He tries to leave without waking her, keeping the rattle of loose change quiet with his hand in his trouser pocket. Emma watches him, wants him to stay, and speaks before he can slip away. The scene locates the relationship’s new closeness alongside the impulse to retreat: in the small room, affection and uncertainty occupy the same few minutes.

The address recurs later that morning as Dexter joins Emma and Tilly Killick in the kitchen. He has showered in the shabby, mildewed bathroom and put on the previous night’s shirt, which smells of sweat and cigarettes; he adds his suit jacket to hold in the odour. Breakfast is brown toast with soya spread and muesli, accompanied by oily black coffee from an espresso maker Emma has washed out for the occasion. Tilly’s presence and the flatmates’ self-conscious banter make the meal awkward for Dexter, who has stayed but now has no easy privacy in which to kiss Emma. The domestic scene extends the night’s tentative intimacy into the ordinary social space of Emma’s shared home.

Dexter and Jasmine’s Return

Much later, Dexter finds the old address on one of Emma’s letters and takes Jasmine to see it. He tells her that Emma used to live in the flat when they were at university and that it was, in a qualified sense, where they met. They stand outside Number 17, and Dexter peers up at the third-floor window, its curtains drawn. The building is blank and nondescript; nothing distinguishes it from the terraced houses on either side. Jasmine looks where he points, but the street offers her no visible explanation of why this particular window matters to her father.

The visit does not produce the recovery Dexter might have hoped for. He questions the wisdom of the expedition, recognizing it as indulgent, morbid, and sentimental. There is nothing at the address that he can recall, and nostalgia gives him only slight, futile pleasure. He considers abandoning the tour and calling Maddy to arrange an earlier meeting. Instead, Jasmine points toward the granite escarpment at the end of the street. Dexter identifies Salisbury Crags and explains that it leads up to Arthur’s Seat. The scene shifts attention from the inaccessible private past to the landscape beyond it, without making the old flat any less central to his reason for coming.

Memory, Place, and Narrative Structure

Rankeillor Street is presented twice in sharply different modes. In 1988, the narrative enters the flat and follows small physical actions: the quiet handling of change, the attempt to leave, the shared breakfast. On Dexter’s later return, the story remains outside, looking up at closed curtains and an indistinguishable façade. The change in access is significant. The reader has seen the rooms and their immediate emotional stakes, while Jasmine encounters only an ordinary house and Dexter must supply its meaning through explanation.

The street therefore functions less as a monument than as an address that connects separate times. Its repeated appearance links the young Emma and Dexter at the beginning of their intimacy with the older Dexter who carries Emma’s letter and introduces their daughter to the place. Yet the setting cannot restore the earlier moment: the flat’s outward appearance gives no evidence of what occurred inside, and Dexter’s own recollection yields little comfort. Rankeillor Street holds the story’s beginning in a precise location while exposing the distance between lived experience and what can later be recovered from its surroundings.