The Unbearable Lightness of Scones: A 44 Scotland Street Novel

by Alexander McCall Smith

  ‘I went there for dinner,’ she continued, ‘a couple of weeks ago, with my sister. Her husband was an agricultural machinery representative in the wheat belt, you know, and then he died. Men do, don’t they? They die.’

  Elspeth laughed nervously, uncertain whether or not she should do so, but unable to stop herself. Men did die; this woman was right, and in taking on a husband you increased your chances of becoming a widow from nothing to . . . well, to whatever the chances were. It was a morbid thought, and not one that you should think on your honeymoon, although it was inevitable, she felt, that happiness should prompt thoughts of how that happiness might end. It was the same with anything that you might have or might acquire in life: physical possessions might give pleasure, but ownership led to the anxiety - did it not - that somebody would take away from you that which you had. Or you might lose your possessions in some other way. Or your looks; they would go too, as certainly as the sun rose; everything was built on sand, was sand.

  She reached for Matthew’s hand and squeezed it. She wondered if such thoughts crossed his mind. Men, of course, were said to be less emotional, more matter-of-fact than women. Did that mean that they did not worry in the way in which women worried? Ever since Matthew had proposed to her and she had accepted, she had worried that he would change his mind. He had shown no signs of doing this, and had seemed every bit as keen as she was to get married, but she had still thought about this, several times a day, and in her dreams too. She had awoken from nightmares in which Matthew had suddenly said things like ‘What engagement?’ or, in one particularly distressing dream, had turned out to be married already, to three women.

  Elspeth could not imagine Matthew, nor any man perhaps, dreaming such things.

  ‘What do you dream about?’ she had asked him several weeks before the wedding.

  He had thought for a moment before he answered. ‘You, of course.’

  ‘No, I’m serious. Do you have . . . strange dreams?’

  This question had caused a shadow to pass over his face. He did have strange dreams, and some of them he could not relate to Elspeth because she would be shocked. Most people had shocking dreams, he thought; or rather, most men did. They did things that they would never normally do, or even imagine doing, and they never confessed to anybody about such matters; quite rightly, thought Matthew.

  ‘I have strange dreams from time to time,’ he said guardedly.

  ‘Such as?’

  He was nonchalant. ‘Oh, I forget. You know how it is with dreams. You don’t remember them for very long after you’ve had them. It’s something to do with how we don’t commit them to memory because we know that they’re unimportant.’

  ‘But they are important!’ she protested. ‘They tell us so much about what we really are. About what we really want to do.’

  Matthew was privately appalled, but his expression showed it. ‘Do they?’ he asked. ‘Do you really think so?’

  Elspeth was studying him closely. She had seen him frown when she had suggested that dreams revealed suppressed wishes, and that worried her. He must be remembering something that he had dreamed, some dark thing, and it was worrying him. It had not occurred to her that she might be marrying a man who had a dark thing in his life. ‘But you shouldn’t worry,’ she said. ‘All of us want to do things that we would never really do, not in a month of Sundays. I don’t think it matters really, because we know that we’ll never do it.’

  She was trying to make him feel better, and she succeeded. ‘Yes,’ said Matthew. ‘I agree. The important thing is what you’re like when you’re awake rather than what you’re like when you’re asleep.’

  He was not sure about this, although he expressed the thought with some confidence and authority. And it was a comforting thought, an aphorism of which one might remind oneself after a dream in which one is revealed in perhaps not the best of lights.

  ‘And I really have dreamed of you,’ he said. ‘I meant that when I said it.’

  It was true. He had dreamed of Elspeth a few nights earlier. They had been walking along Princes Street together, arm in arm, on the unspoiled side, and he had looked down into the gardens, to the Ross Pavilion, where there were flags all around the open auditorium and a Scottish country dance band was striking up. He had felt so safe, so secure, and had looked up at the Castle on its rock and felt even more so.

  It had been a dream of contentment, and would no doubt have been forgotten on waking up, had it not suddenly changed. He had looked down below again and the band had gone, danced away, and the flags hung limp and dispirited, no Saltires, just alien, puzzling symbols - put there without a referendum, without asking the people! And he had turned to Elspeth for reassurance, but she was no longer there. The woman on his arm was his mother.

  He could not tell Elspeth this, of course, and he blushed even at the memory. Somebody had once remarked to him that men married their mothers, and girls married their fathers; or at least chose those who came as close as possible to these ideals. He did not think that true, though; it was just another piece of misleading folk psychology.

  ‘Let’s change the subject,’ said Matthew. ‘Let’s not talk about dreams. Tell me, Elspeth, what was your father like?’

  She thought for only the briefest moment before she answered. ‘You,’ she said.

  18. The Blind Biker of Comrie

  Matthew thought: perhaps it’s true, perhaps I really am like Elspeth’s father, and she, in turn, is like my mother. Perhaps we really have fulfilled the old saw that one marries one’s parents. And what had Freud said? That at the conjunction of two there are four other people present? That was an observation invested with great unsettling power: that we are not ourselves, our own creation, reduces us rather more than we might wish to be reduced. And yet there was the social self, was there not, which was undoubtedly the creation of others, of tides of history, of great sweeps of human experience over which we had exercised no control; and ultimately the creature, too, of tiny strands of DNA bequeathed, wrapped, handed over to us as a present at birth - a little parcel bomb to carry with us on our journey.

  What did he know about Elspeth’s father, Jim Harmony, whom he had never met, and who existed for him merely as a photograph on Elspeth’s table?

  ‘My father, Jim,’ she had said as they packed up the contents of her flat in preparation for her move to India Street.

  He took the small, silver-framed portrait and examined it. The frame was worn, with the silver-plating rubbed away across the top and sides, but the photograph inside seemed fresh enough.

  ‘That was taken in Bridge of Allan,’ said Elspeth. ‘Years ago. They lived there then, and I did too, of course, until I was eighteen.’

  ‘Bridge of Allan,’ muttered Matthew. It was the right place for her to come from; a reassuring small town of the sort that one found scattered throughout Scotland.

  ‘He worked for an insurance company,’ said Elspeth. ‘He was a loss adjuster, and he used to cover Stirling, Linlithgow, Falkirk - places round there.’

  ‘Loss adjusters have to be tough,’ said Matthew. He looked at the picture. Jim Harmony’s face was not a tough one. If one had to pick an adjective to describe it, then the best choice, he thought, would be kind.

  Elspeth shook her head. ‘He wasn’t tough,’ she said. ‘He was the kindest man I ever met. A most trusting man too. I think that he approved just about every claim.’

  ‘I’m sure that’s right,’ said Matthew, looking down at the picture again. ‘He has that sort of face.’

  ‘He had to retire early because he began to have problems with his eyes,’ said Elspeth. ‘So they went up to live in Comrie when I came to Edinburgh to do my teacher training. They sold the house in Bridge of Allan and bought a small house in Comrie. They were very happy there.

  ‘My father had always been a keen amateur mechanic,’ Elspeth went on. ‘My grandfather had been a diesel mechanic with MacBraynes, the ferry people. And he passed on some of that to my father, who
was always tinkering with old cars he bought. He did them up and then sold them, not at much of a profit, but enough to fund the next one.

  ‘His favourite car was a Citroën. You know the sort of old Citroën, with a wide running board, that Inspector Maigret used to drive? That sort. The Citroën Traction. Well he had one of those, which he had made from two old Citroëns that had had an accident. He grafted the front of one onto the back of the other - so it was really two cars. It didn’t drive quite straight as a result; it drove almost sideways.’

  Matthew listened, fascinated. He had known none of this, and he found the story curiously poignant: Jim Harmony, the kind loss adjuster, going to live in Comrie with his wife and his crab-like double Citroën . . .

  ‘He was a biker too,’ Elspeth continued. ‘He always had motorbikes. He had an old BSA 250 and a bike called an Aerial, or that’s what I thought it was called. It was painted grey and had a small badge featuring a pair of wings. I remember that badge from when I was a little girl.

  ‘When he lived in Comrie he stopped driving the Citroën so much and he took to using his bike. He used to go to rallies for veteran bikers. I went to one or two of those with him, and I remember the talks that they had in the evening. One which I particularly remember was: what sort of bike were you riding when President Kennedy was shot? That sort of thing. They saw the whole world through their bikes, you see.’

  She paused, gently took the photograph from Matthew, and slipped it into a packing case. ‘It was very hard for him, losing his sight. I thought that this would stop him from riding his bike, especially when it got so bad that he had to get a guide dog. But you know what he did? He trained the guide dog to run alongside the motorbike. That’s how he did it. That’s how he became the only blind biker in Scotland.’

  Matthew listened in astonishment. ‘Do you mean . . .’

  ‘Yes. The dog was called Rory and he used to run alongside the bike, with my father holding his lead in one hand and the other hand on the handlebars of the motorbike. Of course he couldn’t go all that fast, as Rory used to get tired after a while, but he once went all the way from Comrie to Crieff and back again.’

  ‘But surely it was illegal?’ Matthew stuttered. ‘Surely you can’t use a guide dog to lead a motorbike . . .’

  Elspeth shrugged. ‘I didn’t think it was very wise. My mother and I tried to persuade him to give it up, but he was very independent in his outlook and he loved biking. He really loved it.’

  Matthew did not know what to say. ‘Well . . .’

  ‘And it worked all right for about a year,’ said Elspeth. ‘Then . . .’ She left the sentence unfinished. ‘He was such a good man,’ she said, her voice faltering.

  Matthew reached out and took her hand. ‘I’m sure he was,’ he said. ‘I would have liked your father very much. I’m sure I would.’ Even if I would not have ridden pillion with him - the unexpressed rider: no rider. He thought he knew how she felt. He thought he knew how it was to lose a father, although he had not lost his, not entirely. And what, he might have asked himself, but did not, what is it like when a whole society, a whole culture, loses father?

  19. Heavenly Thoughts

  For Bertie, the departure of Elspeth Harmony from the Steiner School was the first real loss of his life, just as it was for many other members of the class. The child yearns for things to remain the same. He knows that this cannot be; that his little world contains within itself the seeds of its transformation into something else; but awareness of what is coming rarely softens the blow.

  Of course there was a great deal in Bertie’s life that he would have liked to change and, had he made a list of these things, his mother would have headed it. Not that he did not love his mother; he loved her deeply, as every small boy must do, but he wished that she could somehow be a different person. That is not to say that he wished that he had, for instance, Tofu’s mother, or Olive’s mother, as his own mother; he wanted to keep Irene in her external particulars, but nevertheless completely changed in attitudes, voice and register. He wished, then, that Irene would become a completely different person. And once that happened, this new person, this new mother, would not see the need for psychotherapy, would not converse in Italian, would not insist on yoga, and would rarely, if ever, mention the name of Melanie Klein.

  Bertie wondered how this transformation might be achieved. He was a little boy of wide reading, and had come across several examples of complete change. There was St Augustine, for instance, who had, Bertie understood, been a bad man and had become a good one. But that entailed religion, and Irene had never shown any signs of religious belief; in fact quite the opposite. When Bertie had innocently asked her where she thought heaven was, Irene had replied that it was here and now, and that we could create it if only we brought into existence the right social and political arrangements, as advocated, she indicated, by the leading articles in the Guardian.

  ‘Heaven, Bertie,’ she explained, ‘is not a place like . . . like Edinburgh or even Glasgow. Non c’è nessun paradiso esterno. Heaven is potentially within each of us. Don’t look for heaven anywhere else, Bertissimo.’

  Bertie had been puzzled by this answer to what he had thought was a simple question. He rather liked the idea of heaven being a physical place that one was let into if one deserved it. He thought that Miss Harmony would certainly get there, and Matthew, her new husband, as God would surely not want Miss Harmony to be lonely. And that nice lady who ran the coffee bar, Big Lou; she would go there, and maybe Mr Lordie too, if you were allowed to take dogs. Perhaps you could if the dog had been good, too, which would mean that Cyril would definitely get in. Olive, of course, would have to be turned away. It would be awful, he thought, to get to heaven and find her there, bossing everybody about - including God - for the rest of time.

  No, his mother’s transformation would never be achieved by any religious experience; for her there would be no blinding light on the road to Damascus, no sudden espousal of the Eightfold Way, nothing of that sort. There were other ways, of course, of changing, and Bertie had heard about these too. People sometimes changed, he had read, if they had some sort of shocking experience - if they saw something frightening, if they were kidnapped, if their hearts stopped, or something of that sort. Such people realised that they had wasted their time, or been wrong about things, and resolved that in future they would lead a better life. Not that it always happened that way: Tofu was a case in point. He had told Bertie that he had once received a strong electric shock when he had put a knife into an electric toaster, and that his hair had stood up straight for half an hour after the experience. But there had been no other changes, unfortunately, and he had remained very much the same.

  Irene, Bertie reluctantly concluded, led far too sheltered a life to encounter a transforming traumatic event. The daily round of taking Bertie to school on the 23 bus, of going to psychotherapy, of spending hours in the Floatarium - all of these were unlikely to lead to the sort of experience that would make his mother a different person. And so he was stuck with her as she was, and had decided that the only thing to do was to endure the twelve years that lay between him and his eighteenth birthday.

  When eventually he left home, on the morning of that birthday, he would be free and it would not matter any more what his mother was like. He would write to her, of course, every six months or so, but he would not have to see her, except when he wanted to. And there was no law, Bertie reminded himself, which stipulated that you had to invite your mother to your flat once you had moved out of the family home; Bertie, in fact, was not planning to give her his address once he had moved out.

  But twelve years seemed an impossibly long time for a boy of six; indeed it was twice the length of his life so far, an unimaginable desert of time. In the meantime, he realised that he would have to negotiate such excitement for himself as he could, finding a place for it in the interstices of the psychotherapy and yoga and Italian lessons that his mother arranged for him.

  Tofu, for
all his manifold faults, was a potential source of diversion for Bertie. His friend’s life was subject to constraints of its own - his father, the author of several books on the energy fields of nuts, followed a strictly vegan diet and insisted that his son do the same. This made Tofu extremely hungry, and explained his penchant for stealing other children’s sandwiches. But apart from that, Tofu was left to his own devices, and boasted of having gone through to Glasgow on the train several times with neither an accompanying adult nor a ticket. He had also attended a football match when he was meant to be at a Saturday morning art club favoured by his father and had spent the art class money on a pepperoni pizza. This was a heady example to Bertie of just what freedom might mean, as was his suggestion to Bertie that together they should join a cub scout pack which had recently been established in the Episcopal Church Hall at the head of Colinton Road.

  ‘They need people like us,’ Tofu said.

  20. Be Prepared for a Little White Lie

  ‘I can’t, Tofu,’ said Bertie. ‘I can’t join the cubs.’

  Tofu was dismissive of Bertie’s protestation. ‘You can’t? Why? Is it because you think you’ll fail the medical examination? There isn’t one. That’s the army you’re thinking of. The cubs will take anyone - even somebody like you.’

  ‘It’s not that,’ Bertie said miserably. ‘It’s just that . . .’

  ‘Well,’ Tofu pressed. ‘What is it? Are you scared or something? You can be a real wimp, you know, Bertie.’

  Bertie glowered at Tofu. It was typical of the other boy that he should jump to conclusions - and, as was always the case with Tofu, he was wrong. ‘No, it’s my mother,’ he said. ‘She found me reading a book about Mr Baden-Powell and she said that I could never join the cubs or scouts. She doesn’t like them.’

  Tofu frowned. ‘What a cow your mother is, Bertie,’ he said sympathetically. ‘But I suppose it’s not your fault.’