The Unbearable Lightness of Scones: A 44 Scotland Street Novel

by Alexander McCall Smith

  Matthew looked at her in surprise. ‘But what do men keep in their sporrans?’ he asked. He had no idea, but he knew that his was always empty.

  ‘Oh, this and that,’ said Elspeth. She had only the haziest notion of what men did in general, and none, in particular, of what they kept in their sporrans. Indeed, as she looked at Matthew standing before the door of her new home, it occurred to her that she had done an extraordinary thing - or at least something that was extraordinary for her - that she had married a man, and that this person at her side - much as she loved him - was, in so many important ways, quite different from her. He would look upon the world through male eyes; he would think in a masculine fashion; he was something else, the other.

  ‘You could look in my sporran if you like,’ Matthew said.

  She looked down at the leather pouch and very gently reached down to touch it.

  She said nothing; both were somehow moved by what was happening. This sharing of a sporran was an unexpected intimacy; ridiculous, yes, but not ridiculous.

  ‘I’ve found my key,’ said Matthew, after a while. ‘Here.’

  He slipped the key into the lock and opened the door. Inside, at Matthew’s request, and placed there by his best man a few hours before the wedding, a large bunch of flowers dominated the hall table, red and white carnations.

  ‘Thank you for marrying me,’ Matthew said suddenly. ‘I never thought that anybody . . .’

  ‘Would marry you? But there must have been lots of girls who . . .’

  ‘Who wanted to marry me?’ Matthew shook his head.

  She said, ‘I don’t believe that.’

  ‘It’s true. Nobody. Until you came along and then we knew, didn’t we? We just knew.’

  Elspeth smiled. ‘I suppose that’s right. I thought that I was on the shelf. I thought that I would spend the rest of my days teaching Olive and Bertie and . . . Tofu.’ She gave an involuntary shudder: Tofu. ‘But you took me away from all that.’

  Matthew took her hand, moved by the frankness of what she had said. These words, he felt, were like an act of undressing. ‘You took yourself away.’

  He dropped her hand and walked across the hall to switch on a light. ‘Is your suitcase all ready?’

  She nodded.

  ‘And your passport?’ Matthew asked.

  She laughed. ‘Do we need that for Arran?’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind going to Arran,’ said Matthew. ‘We used to go over there when I was a boy. My uncle had a house near Brodick and we would go there in the summer. It was mostly Glasgow people and there was a boy there whom we called Soapy Soutar who threw a stone at me because I was from Edinburgh. He said I deserved it and that if I came back next summer it would be a rock. I remember it so clearly.’

  ‘So it’s not Arran. Why don’t you tell me?’

  ‘Because I want it to be a surprise.’

  She reached out and slipped her hand back into his. ‘You’re a romantic.’

  ‘If you can’t be a romantic about your own wedding,’ he said, ‘then what can you be romantic about?’

  ‘So no clue at all?’

  He thought for a moment. ‘A tiny one . . . maybe. All right. A tiny clue.’

  She looked at him, searching his expression. She hoped that it would be Italy; that he would say something like ‘where there’s water in the streets’ or ‘the Pope lives nearby’ or ‘hum a few bars of “Return to Sorrento” ’.

  ‘It’s a big place,’ said Matthew at last.

  So they were going to America (or Canada, or Russia, or Argentina).

  ‘You’ve got to tell me more than that. You must.’

  Matthew looked at her teasingly. ‘I really want it to be a surprise. So that’s all I’m going to say.’

  ‘Texas. Texas is big.’

  Matthew frowned. If she insisted on guessing, sooner or later she would come up with the right answer and he was not sure that he would be able to remain impassive when at last she did.

  ‘So it’s not Texas.’

  ‘No. It’s not Texas.’

  She moved forward and kissed him gently on the cheek. ‘It’s Australia, isn’t it?’

  She knew immediately that she was right, and at the same time she immediately regretted what she had done; now she had spoiled it for him. They had been married for less than twenty-four hours and she had already done something to hurt him. How would that sound at marriage counselling?

  Mind you, there had been brides who had done worse than that. She had recently read of the wife of one of the Happy Valley set in Kenya all those years ago. She was said to have had an affair with another man on her honeymoon, on the boat out to Mombasa. That took some doing; took some psychopathology.

  She put her arms round Matthew. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to spoil it for you. I shouldn’t have asked. It’s just that . . .’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s just that you should have asked me where I wanted to go, Matthew. What if I didn’t want to go to Australia? What then?’

  Matthew turned away. It was spoiled - already.

  12. Of Love and Lies

  But by the time they were in the taxi on the way to the airport, travelling through the well-set neatness of Corstorphine, past the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland’s zoo, they had forgotten about their minor tiff over the secrecy of their destination. And the night had brought self-forgiveness, too, and reassurance that marriage would be an arrangement of delight and enhancement, not one of doubts and quibbles.

  Matthew, who, like many young men, imagined that he could never be loved, not for himself, now at last thought: I have found the one person on this earth, the one, who loves me. And Elspeth did love him, and had proved it by drawing a heart in lipstick on his stomach, with their initials intertwined - that most simple, clichéd declaration that the love-struck have always resorted to: carved on tree trunks with penknives; traced in the dust on the back of unwashed cars; furtively scribbled on walls in pencil; and which, for all its simplicity and indeed its naiveté, is usually nothing but believed-in and sincere. It had been a strange thing to do, but Matthew had been touched, and when he looked out of the window the next morning - he was up early, to bring her a cup of tea in bed - India Street itself seemed transformed, as a lover’s eyes will do to any landscape; will do to any company. The prosaic, the quotidian are infused with a new gentleness, a new loveliness, by the fact that one senses that there is love in the world and that one has glimpsed it; been given one’s share.

  The taxi driver, looking in his mirror, said, ‘So, where are we off to today?’

  ‘Australia,’ said Matthew, and turned to smile at Elspeth.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said the driver. ‘Honeymoon?’

  Neither Matthew nor Elspeth replied immediately. They were passing a large computer shop, painted in garish purple, a building of great aesthetic ghastliness, and their eyes were drawn to that. The taxi driver glanced into the mirror again. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘People come in along this road - visitors - and they’re thinking I’ve heard Edinburgh’s one of the most beautiful cities in Europe and what do they see? That place.’

  ‘Then, when they get to town they see the St James Centre,’ said Matthew. ‘Who inflicted that on us?’

  ‘Oh well,’ said the taxi driver. ‘At least they’re trying to disguise it now. So it’s your honeymoon. We went to Florida, you know. Six years ago. That’s when we got married.’

  ‘Florida is very . . .’ began Matthew, and then stopped. What could one say about Florida, particularly if one had never been there?

  The driver waited for a moment, but when the sentence was not completed merely added, ‘Yes, it is. It’s a great place for golf. They have these highly manicured golf courses, the Americans. They go round them with nail scissors.’

  ‘Well, at least you never lose the ball,’ said Matthew. What did one say about golf when one has never played it? Did one ask somebody if he had ever got a hole in one?

  ‘Did yo
u ever . . .’ he began.

  ‘We went on British Airways,’ continued the taxi driver, waving to another taxi coming in the opposite direction. ‘We were in the back of the plane and the purser happened to ask us right at the beginning how we were doing. He was Scottish, and when we told him we were on our honeymoon, he indicated that we should get up out of the seats and follow him, bringing our hand baggage.’

  ‘Upgraded?’ asked Matthew.

  ‘Yes,’ said the driver. ‘There was hardly a soul in business class and so we settled in there. Champagne. Feet up on those stools they have. It was a great start to our marriage. One Scotsman doing a good turn for another.’

  ‘The so-called Scottish Mafia,’ said Matthew.

  ‘It exists,’ said the driver. ‘Thank goodness.’

  They were now approaching the airport turn-off; close by, a plane climbed up into the air, as if from a mustard-yellow field.

  ‘The following year,’ the driver continued, ‘when we went back to Florida, I thought that I might try the same thing. I told the attendant that we were on our honeymoon and she smiled. I’ll see what I can do, she said. And then I looked further down the plane, and there was the same man, the one who had helped us.’

  Matthew and Elspeth exchanged glances. An act of kindness had been repaid with an act of dishonesty. Suddenly, the whole story soured.

  The taxi driver looked in his mirror and laughed. ‘I’m only joking. I didn’t. But I thought that’s what would happen if you did something like that. That would be the result, wouldn’t it?’

  The tension dissipated. ‘People don’t think it wrong to lie any more,’ said Elspeth. ‘They don’t see anything wrong.’

  ‘Too right,’ said the taxi driver.

  They turned off the main road and started to negotiate the series of traffic roundabouts that preceded the terminal.

  ‘I was only joking back there,’ said the driver. ‘That bit about doing the same thing twice. Only joking.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Matthew.

  ‘I count the air strokes on my golf card,’ the driver went on. ‘Put them all down. Which is more than some do.’

  ‘Naturally,’ said Matthew.

  They paid and got out of the taxi. ‘I’m afraid that I don’t believe him,’ said Matthew, as they walked through the doors into the terminal.

  Elspeth disagreed. ‘Why?’ she asked. ‘Why disbelieve him?’

  ‘I bet that he tried it twice.’

  Elspeth shook her head. ‘You have to believe people,’ she said. ‘You have to start off by trusting them.’ She felt that, of course, but then she thought for some reason of Tofu, and Olive, and of the facility, the enthusiasm, with which they distorted the truth. Bertie was the only completely truthful child she had known, and perhaps Lakshmi. The rest . . .

  They went to the check-in and handed in their suitcases. The woman behind the desk smiled at them. ‘Honeymoon?’ she asked.

  Matthew showed his surprise. ‘How did you know?’

  ‘Because you have that look about you, and . . .’ she paused for effect, ‘you didn’t say that you were on honeymoon. So many others do. Looking for special treatment. And then you look at the finger, and what do you see? No ring.’

  Matthew glanced at his left hand. So strange; it was so strange, this public declaration of commitment, this announcement of love, made gold in this modest band.

  ‘We’re going to have such a marvellous time,’ he whispered to Elspeth, who looked up at him and said, ‘Yes.’

  He was thinking of life; she of Australia.

  13. A Poser for Bruce

  Bruce Anderson, erstwhile surveyor and persistent narcissist, had not been invited to Matthew and Elspeth’s wedding, although he had heard about the engagement and had congratulated Matthew - in an ostentatiously friendly way - when they had bumped into one another in the Cumberland Bar one evening.

  Bruce himself was now engaged, to Julia Donald, the daughter of a wealthy hotel owner and businessman, a man who understood Bruce extremely well and had realised that money, and an expensive car, were just the inducements required to get him to marry his daughter. And for her part, Julia understood Bruce too and had realised that what was needed to trap him was not only her father’s inducements but wiles of her own; female wiles involving her unexpected pregnancy - ‘Such a surprise, Brucie, but there we are!’

  For Bruce, the idea of marriage was not completely without appeal, but it was an appeal that depended on its being distant; imminent marriage, followed by fatherhood, was not what he had had in mind. But when Julia’s father made clear the terms on which he would welcome Bruce into the family - generous ones by any standards - Bruce’s misgivings had been allayed. Perhaps being married to Julia would not be so bad, he thought. He could switch off in the face of constant wittering. Most men did that, he thought, with their wives. And he would never have to worry again about buying a flat - Julia owned a perfectly good flat in Howe Street, worth, Bruce had calculated, at least six hundred thousand pounds at current market prices; and she had no mortgage. In fact, Bruce was not sure if she even knew what a mortgage was; whereas Bruce, like most people, knew very well what a mortgage was and understood the difference between those who had a large mortgage and those who had no mortgage at all. They walked differently, he thought.

  He would also never have to worry about a job now that Julia’s father had made him a director of his property company and given him sole charge of the wine bar he owned in George Street. If Julia came with all that, then the least he could do, he decided, was to be civil to her.

  ‘We’re going to have to decide about names, Brucie,’ she said at the breakfast table that morning.

  Bruce looked up from his bowl of muesli. Since he had taken to reading a magazine called Men’s Health, he had become quite health-conscious and broke a series of nuts and antioxidants into his plate each morning. A body like mine, he thought, one takes care of it. And he could look at the bare-torsoed men pictured in Men’s Health without feeling inadequate; he could look them in the pectorals.

  ‘Names?’

  ‘For . . . for you know who,’ said Julia, looking down at her stomach.

  ‘Oh.’ Bruce stared down at the mixture of nuts and powdered flax seed on his plate.

  ‘I thought that for a boy we might go for Jamie,’ said Julia. ‘It’s such a nice name. Strong. Or Glen.’

  ‘Jamie’s all right,’ said Bruce. ‘But not Glen. I knew a Glen at Morrison’s, and he was a real waste of space. Collected stamps.’

  ‘Well, Gavin. There’s Gavin Hastings.’

  ‘It could be a girl,’ said Bruce.

  Julia shook her head. ‘I’ve got a feeling it’s a boy,’ she said. ‘Just like you, Brucie.’

  Bruce said nothing. Thoughts of Julia’s baby - and that is how he regarded it - had not been to the forefront of his mind. It was her baby, her idea, he told himself, and even if he had had a part in it, it was not something that he had intended or embraced. She wanted this baby - that was obvious - and so let her do the thinking about it.

  The problem with babies, in Bruce’s view, was that they spoiled everything. What was the point of living in this nice flat in Howe Street, with the money to do exactly what you wanted to do - to travel, to go out to all the best restaurants, to be seen - if you had a baby to think about? Babies tied you down; they demanded to be fed; they yelled their heads off; they smelled.

  He finished his breakfast in silence. There was no further discussion about babies, and Julia was absorbed in a magazine that had dropped through the letter-box with the morning post; one of her vacuous fashion magazines, full of glossy pictures of models and bottles of perfume; pictures which Bruce took a guilty pleasure in looking at while affecting to despise them.

  ‘This stuff,’ he said, pointing at the box of flax seed, ‘contains all the omega oils you need.’

  ‘That’s nice,’ said Julia.

  ‘I’m thinking of joining that gym up at the Sheraton
Hotel,’ Bruce went on. ‘You know the one, with all those pools. That one.’

  ‘I’ll come too,’ said Julia. ‘I need to get in shape.’

  Bruce said nothing. He was not sure if he wanted Julia tagging after him at the gym; and what would happen when her baby arrived? The gym was no place for a baby.

  ‘I was reading their magazine,’ Bruce continued. ‘There’s a trainer up there who takes groups of people to Thailand and detoxes them. They come back really toned up.’

  ‘Maybe we should do that,’ said Julia. ‘Daddy always wanted to take me to Thailand. We could go with him. We could all get detoxed.’

  Bruce ladled a spoon of muesli into his mouth and munched on it. He glanced across the table at Julia. There was something silly about her face, he decided. There was a quality of vacuousness; a quality that displayed no long-lasting emotion or thought, just flickering states. Talking to her, he thought, was like turning the dial on a radio; one heard a snatch from a station and then, in a second, it was gone. He sighed. I’ve done it. I’ve got myself hitched up with a really dim girl.

  And yet, and yet . . . there was the Porsche, and the flat, and the money. Money. That was all it came down to, ultimately. Money. And we shouldn’t deceive ourselves, Bruce thought; every single one of us makes compromises for money.

  He stole a glance at himself in the glass panel of the microwave. I’m still to die for, he thought; that profile, that hair, those pecs. Everything. But I won’t have that forever, in spite of the powdered flax seed, and then what sort of deal will I be able to negotiate for myself? Hold on to it, Brucie, he said to himself. And as he did so, he reached out to touch Julia’s hand and he smiled at her. You may be dim, he thought, but I’m not.

  14. From Arbroath with Love

  If Bruce was largely made up of braggadocio and narcissism, the character of Big Lou, proprietrix of the Morning After Coffee Bar in Dundas Street, was composed of very different stuff. Big Lou had been brought up in Arbroath, a town noted for those typically Scottish virtues of caution, hard work and modesty. She had the additional advantage of having been raised on a farm - not a large or a prosperous one, but one that consisted of a few hundred tenanted acres, an appendage to an estate which had never been very well managed and which, as a result, had had little money available for investment in the fabric of the place. The fences, some of which were made of rusted barbed wire dating back to the First World War, were patched up as best Big Lou’s father, Muckle Geordie, could manage; and the byres, rickety and oddly-angled, looked as if a good puff of wind off the North Sea, or even a flaff from the hinterland of Angus, would be all that was required to bring them tumbling down.