The Unbearable Lightness of Scones: A 44 Scotland Street Novel

by Alexander McCall Smith

  ‘If you want a swim,’ said Elspeth drowsily, ‘then remember to shower before you get in. In this hot weather . . .’

  ‘I know that,’ said Matthew. Did she think that he would jump into the water all sticky with sweat? He felt slightly irritated by her remark; he was not one of those children of hers, and he did not need to be told what to do. But then he thought: she must be used to telling people to wash their hands, to do this and that; teachers couldn’t help themselves, but it would pass now that she had stopped being a teacher.

  And then he thought: what will that funny little boy be doing now? Bertie. With that dreadful mother of his and that ineffective father, Stuart. Why did Stuart not face up to that woman and tell her to leave Bertie alone? Of course, he would be scared of her, Matthew decided, as some men are terrified of their wives, and wives of their husbands.

  He gazed at Elspeth, whose eyes were still closed in the appearance of sleep, but who had moved her arms and was awake behind the shut eyelids. Matthew had been told that in every marriage there was a dominant partner - Angus Lordie had said that to him - and that if you looked closely enough you could always work out who this was. It was a subtle matter, Angus had said, but it was always there. But what did Angus know of marriage? If ever there was a bachelor by temperament, then it was Angus. At least he - Matthew - had some experience of marriage now, wore the ring Elspeth had given him, could write married the next time an official form asked for his status.

  They got up together and went outside for a swim in the hotel pool. Then, refreshed, they walked the short distance to the beach-side restaurant that had been recommended to them. The woman in the hotel had been as good as her word and had insisted on a table near the window, and now they sat looking down over the beach and the sea, a glass each of chilled West Australian wine at their side.

  Matthew raised his glass to Elspeth. ‘The beginning,’ he said.

  She reached for her own glass. ‘To the beginning.’

  ‘Shall we swim tomorrow?’ he asked. ‘I don’t mean in the hotel pool. Shall we swim down there, off the beach?’

  They had seen people swimming when they went for their walk earlier that day and also one or two people surfing, catching the waves quite far out and riding in until the waves collapsed in a maelstrom of sand and water.

  ‘I’ve hardly ever swum in the sea,’ said Elspeth. ‘I swam in Portugal once and then a couple of times when I went to Greece with a couple of girlfriends. We went to the islands. Corfu. Places like that.’

  ‘But you’d like to swim here?’

  ‘Of course I would. It looks very inviting.’

  Matthew smiled, reaching out to take her hand on top of the table. ‘Don’t you think that we could just stay here? I could run a gallery. You could . . . well, you could do whatever you wanted to.’

  She looked out of the window. ‘You can’t just go somewhere and not come back. Not these days.’

  ‘Yes, you can,’ said Matthew. ‘What about those football fans who went off to watch Scotland play in Argentina and never came back? They married local girls and stayed.’

  Elspeth sighed. ‘That’s different,’ she said. ‘People like that are very uncomplicated. They don’t think things through. They see that alcohol is cheap and they decide to stay.’

  She paused. ‘It would be very nice to be that uncomplicated. To live for the day - not to think about what lies ahead.’

  Matthew thought about this for a moment. ‘Goethe deals with that in Werther,’ he said. ‘He was interested in the question of whether we could ever be happy if we worried about things.’ He looked at her gently. ‘But of course there’s a world of difference between Goethe and the average Scottish football fan.’

  It was an observation that nobody could deny. Now the waitress appeared. As she handed them the menu, she looked out of the window, out towards the beach. The waves, whipped up by a storm somewhere far out at sea, were pounding heavily on the beach, producing a low rumbling sound.

  ‘Surf’s up,’ said the waitress.

  ‘I can’t wait to go swimming in that,’ said Matthew.

  ‘Be careful,’ said the waitress. ‘You can get rips when it’s like this. Carry you right out.’

  She opened her notebook, fiddling briefly with the tip of her pencil. ‘And then there’s the Great Whites.’

  ‘Great White whats?’ asked Elspeth.

  The waitress looked at her pityingly; poor uninformed Pom. ‘Great White sharks,’ she said. ‘They’re out there, and sometimes they come in a bit too close for comfort. People get taken, you know. Right off the beach. Sometimes in water that’s no deeper than this.’ She held a hand at the level of her waist, watching the effect of her words. ‘My brother’s friend was taken a year or two ago. He was a surfer and the shark took a great bite out of his board. He almost made it back in on a wave, but the shark came for him again and that was it. It’s their element, you see. We’re the ones who shouldn’t be there.’

  Matthew gazed out over the water, over the darkness. The tumbling lines of surf were white, laced with phosphorescence against the inky sea beneath. Their element.

  24. The Sea, the Sea

  Outside the restaurant, when Matthew and Elspeth made their way out after their meal, the night had that smell of sea, of iodine and foam, of churned-up water, of air that was washed and washed again in salt.

  Matthew breathed in deeply, drawing the heady mixture into his lungs. ‘Let’s take off our shoes and walk along the beach,’ he said, nodding in the direction of the darkness. ‘And then we can go up onto the path above the dunes, later on, and get back to the hotel that way.’

  She took his hand. ‘Yes.’

  ‘I feel wide awake,’ he said. ‘It’s ten, or whatever, but I feel wide awake.’

  She had read about jet lag and printed out a chart which purported to prevent it. ‘We shouldn’t have slept this afternoon. They say that you should try to stay awake until night-time.’

  Matthew was not listening. He had run a few steps ahead of Elspeth, relishing the yielding of the sand beneath his feet. Now he turned round to face her, and she was a shadow in the darkness. There were lights off to their left, above the dunes, where the houses faced out to the sea, and there were the lights of the restaurant behind them. But for the rest it was dark, and filled with the sound of the waves.

  ‘The Southern Cross,’ called out Matthew, and pointed. ‘Look. Down there.’

  She turned her head. The lights of Perth yellowed the sky immediately above them, but towards the horizon the sky became darker and more filled with stars. She saw where he was pointing and identified the tilting cross.

  ‘That way,’ said Matthew ‘is nothing. Just the southern oceans and Antarctica. All that empty sea.’

  She shivered. We were tiny creatures on small islands of land; suddenly she felt vulnerable.

  Matthew had stopped walking and had dropped his shoes on the sand. Now he began to roll the bottom of his trouser legs up. ‘I’m going to get my feet wet,’ he said. ‘The water’s so warm. Have you tried it? It’s gorgeous.’

  She shook her head. She did not want to get her feet wet, not now; there would be plenty of time for swimming tomorrow, when the surf would be less boisterous perhaps. Matthew shrugged. ‘You don’t have to,’ he said. ‘Just see that my shoes aren’t carried away by the tide.’

  He took the few steps needed to bring him to the edge of the sea, where the waves, their energy spent, rolled in a final tiny wall of water up the beach. He felt the water sucking around his feet and the movement of the sand beneath his toes, as if the sea were trying to undermine him. They walked on, Elspeth in the moist sand above the water line, Matthew in the shallow rim of surf and spume, the water at its highest just below his knee.

  They were alone, or almost alone. A man walked past with a dog, a large black creature that tugged impatiently at its leash; they came out of the dark and disappeared back into the dark. Up on the path above the dunes an occasional
figure could be made out against the light from the houses beyond or caught in the beam of a passing car. There was a wind now, the ragged end of the storm out at sea, but unusually warm, like the breath of an animal.

  Matthew saw a piece of driftwood floating a few feet out, tossed about by the waves. Deciding to retrieve it, he pulled his trousers further up - and took a step towards it. As he did so, a wave, considerably larger than the others, suddenly swept in. From being in no more than eighteen inches of water, he now found himself in several feet, the water rising quickly up to his waist. Then there was another wave, also larger than the others, and he felt the water at his chest. He tried to turn but lost his footing and felt himself go down in the water. He looked towards Elspeth and shouted. She was waving her arms about. He shouted again. ‘I’m . . .’ But now he seemed to have lost the sand beneath his feet; he was out of his depth and the sea seemed to be dragging him. He kicked out sharply, expecting the movement to get him safely back into the shallows, but the dragging was more pronounced now and there were more waves, so hard upon one another, tumbling over his head, buffeting him. They should be taking me back in, he thought, but they were not.

  For Elspeth it happened very quickly. When she saw Matthew go in up to his waist, she laughed and called out to him not to ruin his clothes. ‘Saltwater,’ she cried out. ‘Saltwater ruins things. Don’t get any wetter, Matthew. Matthew . . .’

  Then she saw the waves cover him and she became alarmed. Matthew could swim - she knew that - but why had he decided to swim at night? Suddenly she thought of what the waitress had said that evening. Their element. The Great Whites. She screamed and waved frantically, but Matthew seemed to be ignoring her. She saw his head, bobbing in the surf, but then it disappeared and when the surf cleared it was not in the spot she had seen him in; or was that him, that darker patch in the water?

  Within the space of a couple of minutes, she could see no trace of him. She advanced to the edge of the water and took a few steps into the waves; but what point was there in her going in? She could not see him; she had no idea where he was. The rips. The waitress had said there were rips.

  She turned round, half panicking. Down the beach, about ten minutes away, was the restaurant with its lights and people and telephones. She started to run, stumbling in the sand, which slowed her down. She began to sob, struggling for breath. Matthew was going to drown. Her husband. She was going to lose him.

  When she arrived at the restaurant she burst through the first door she found. Several people were sitting round a table, one of them the waitress who had served them earlier on.

  ‘Left something behind?’

  ‘My husband . . .’

  They laughed.

  But then, in a moment, they understood.

  25. Mothers and Other Incomprehensible Mysteries

  Bertie had been dreading the afternoon on which both Tofu and Olive were to come to his house. In normal circumstances he would have been pleased - Tofu may not have been the best of friends, but he was the closest thing to a friend that Bertie had. And Bertie had a sneaking admiration for Tofu, in spite of all the fibs that his friend told, his tendency to spit at people, and all his outrageous exploits; at least Tofu did the things that he wanted to do. At least Tofu didn’t have a mother breathing down his neck all the time.

  There was some debate about Tofu’s mother. Tofu himself never spoke about her, but waved his hand vaguely when the subject of mothers arose. This could be interpreted as insouciance - a gesture indicating that mothers might be a problem for some, but not for him. Or it could have been intended to convey that Tofu was not sure about the precise location of his mother - the sort of gesture one makes when giving directions to a place one is not entirely familiar with: it’s somewhere over there.

  Certainly Tofu’s mother had never been seen by any of the other children at the Steiner School. When Tofu was picked up at school it was always by his father, the author of well-known books on plant energy fields. And sometimes, Tofu simply walked out of the school gate, announcing that he did not need to be picked up and that he was perfectly capable of catching a bus unaided. That always drew gasps of admiration from the others, except from Olive, of course, who simply narrowed her eyes in hatred and said nothing.

  Olive had a variety of explanations for the apparent absence of Tofu’s mother.

  ‘She’s in Saughton Prison,’ she said. ‘She’s been there for years.’

  Bertie doubted this. He had read about Saughton Prison in the newspapers and it had been described as a male prison. But when he pointed this out to Olive, she had been undismayed.

  ‘That’s what you think, Bertie,’ she said. ‘But you don’t know anything about prisons, do you? So who do you think does the cooking in Saughton Prison? Men can’t cook, can they, Mr Smarty Pants! So they have a special room there for bad ladies and they do the cooking. So there!’

  This struck the others as entirely feasible, but Bertie remained doubtful.

  ‘I don’t think that she’s in prison,’ he said. ‘Why would she be there anyway?’

  ‘Murder,’ said Olive.

  Bertie plucked up his courage. Olive was not an easy person to argue with. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Who did she murder, Olive? You tell us if you’re so sure.’

  Olive thought for a moment. She looked first at Bertie and then at the faces of the other children around them. ‘You’ll find out,’ she said. ‘Just you wait. You’ll find out.’ And with that she changed the subject.

  The other theory about Tofu’s mother was that she had starved to death. Olive herself, ignoring the inconsistency which this idea involved with her remarks about her being in prison, had put about the notion that Tofu’s mother had starved because the whole family was vegan. ‘She became very thin,’ she announced. ‘That’s what happens to vegans. They don’t last long.’

  Bertie had eventually decided to ask Tofu whether he had a mother or not. He did not like the rumours that Olive was putting about and he thought that the best way of putting an end to these would be to find out the truth.

  ‘Where’s your mother, Tofu?’ he asked one day in the playground.

  ‘At home,’ said Tofu, waving a hand vaguely.

  ‘Are you sure?’ asked Bertie.

  ‘How do I know what my mother’s doing?’ Tofu snapped back. ‘I can’t look after her all the time.’

  Bertie had dropped the topic, but it worried him. Tofu was so full of bluff and bravado, but was he really sad inside? A boy with no mother to look after him and a father who went on about nuts and broccoli? Bertie reflected on his own mother situation and wondered if he was not, in fact, fortunate in having the mother he did. What would it be like if his mother were suddenly not to be there? He had so often wished for that, but now he remembered seeing something in that small antique store on the corner of Great King Street. One morning he had stopped and seen in the window an elaborately worked Victorian sampler mounted on a stand. ‘Be careful what you wish for,’ it had read, and Bertie, puzzled, had drawn the message to the attention of his father.

  ‘What does that mean, Daddy?’ he asked. ‘Why should you be careful what you wish for?’

  Stuart smiled. ‘They were always coming up with things like that in those days,’ he said. ‘We used to have one of those at home. It was made by your great-grandmother, Bertie. It said, “Save your breath to cool your porridge.”’

  ‘That’s very funny,’ said Bertie. ‘Did it mean that you shouldn’t talk too much?’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Stuart, ruffling his son’s hair and thinking he could name at least one woman who might consider that. But he immediately felt disloyal and put the thought out of his mind.

  ‘So what do they mean about being careful what you wish for?’ Bertie asked.

  Stuart reached for Bertie’s hand as they stood on the pavement in front of the shop. Behind them, a 23 bus lumbered up Dundas Street; above, a gull mewed and circled. He looked down at his son, at the eager face staring up at h
im. There were so many questions - and so many wishes. Wishes, he thought, are usually for the world to be quite different from the way it currently is, but do we really want that?

  ‘The thing you wish for,’ Stuart began, ‘may not be what you really want. You may think it would be nice if something happened, but then, when it happens, you may find that it’s not really what you wanted. Or you may find that things are worse.’

  He looked at Bertie. What did this small boy wish for? What hopes were harboured in his brave little heart?

  ‘What are your special wishes, Bertie?’

  Bertie thought for a moment. ‘I thought you shouldn’t speak about wishes. I thought that if you spoke about them they wouldn’t come true.’

  ‘Maybe you’re right,’ said Stuart. ‘Maybe.’

  ‘But I’d really like to join the cub scouts, Daddy.’ He hesitated. ‘And wear a uniform.’

  Stuart gave Bertie’s hand a squeeze. ‘Good idea, Bertie. Why not?’

  Bertie looked away. He had uttered a wish.

  26. Gender Agendas

  The arrangement had been made between Tofu’s father and Bertie’s mother. ‘Tofu can travel back with us on the bus,’ said Irene. ‘I’ve arranged that with his father. Olive will be coming a bit later.’

  Bertie looked pleadingly at his mother. ‘Do you really think there’ll be time for Olive to come to my house, Mummy?’ he asked. ‘If she comes later, then everything will be finished.’

  Irene laughed. ‘Everything will be finished? You make it sound like a formal dinner party, Bertie! There’ll be a bit of Dundee cake and tea. Plenty to go round.’

  ‘I didn’t mean the food, Mummy,’ protested Bertie. ‘I meant the . . . the playing. We’ll have finished playing by the time that Olive comes. I wouldn’t want her to be bored.’

  Irene did not think that there was much prospect of Olive’s being bored. She was a somewhat busy little girl, she reflected, with a great organisational talent, but she was still a good influence on Bertie, who needed to allow his feminine side to flourish. And she was certainly a good antidote to the somewhat unsavoury Tofu, with his unresolved masculinity; Tofu was certainly not a good companion for Bertie at all, but faute de mieux . . .