Unbearable Lightness of Scones Read online

  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 you 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. With 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 rea
l 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 one 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 as 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.

  In a more justly ordered world, Big Lou’s native intelligence would have been nurtured and would have flowered; as it was, instead of bettering herself she was obliged to spend years looking after an elderly uncle. Then, when her chance of freedom came, she went north rather than south; and, north, in the shape of Aberdeen, brought only more drudgery, with a menial job in the Granite Nursing Home. When she eventually escaped from that, it was to Edinburgh, and to freedom at last, financed by the legacy left her by an inmate of the Granite. Now she had her own flat in Canonmills and her own coffee bar, the latter occupying the basement premises previously used as a bookshop. This had been frequented, for a time, by the late Christopher Murray Grieve, better known as the poet Hugh MacDiarmid, who had once fallen down the dangerous steps that led down to the basement. For Edinburgh was like that – every set of steps, every close, every corner had its memories, spoke with the voices of those who had been there once, a long time ago, but who were in a way still there.

  As well as acquiring the shop, Big Lou took possession of all the stock that went with it, and over the years she had worked her way through many of the books that she had bought. Topography and philosophy had kept her busy for two years, and history for one. Now it was literary theory and psychology, leavened with fiction (Scott and Stevenson) and poetry (she had just read the complete oeuvre of Sydney Goodsir Smith and Norman MacCaig).

  The judgment and control that Big Lou evinced in her reading was not mirrored in her romantic life. Like many good women, she attracted men whose weaknesses were the converse of her strengths. She had wasted years in her relationship with a chef who could not resist the attractions of much younger women. He had broken her heart again and again until enlightenment came and she saw him for what he was; and that was best expressed by those simple words: no good. His place had been taken by Robbie, a plasterer who specialised in the restoration of ceilings, and it was Robbie whom she was still seeing, in spite of Matthew’s conviction – eventually articulated in an unguarded moment – that Robbie was half-mad.

  “He’s obsessed, Lou,” Matthew had said. “I’m sorry to have to say it, but he really is. Who would be a Jacobite these days? Do you think any rational person would? And look at the people he runs around with – that bampot, Michael what’s-his-name and that callow youth who hangs on his every word. And that woman with the shouty voice, the one who says she can trace her ancestry back to Julius Caesar or whatever. These people are bonkers, Lou.”

  “Robbie’s interested in history, Matthew,” Lou had replied. “The Stuarts are important for some people. There are plenty of people who find them interesting.”

  “Yes,” conceded Matthew. “But there’s a difference between finding something interesting and believing in it. He actually believes in the Stuarts. How can he do that? Prince Charlie was an absolute disaster from every point of view. And as for his ancestors…”

  Big Lou had changed the subject. At one level she knew that Matthew was right; Robbie was odd, but he was kind to her and he did not run off with other women. That, she felt, was all she was entitled to ask, and she was realistic too: there were not enough men to go round, not in Arbroath and certainly not in Edinburgh, and she knew that she was in no position to be picky.

  Now, opening up the coffee bar for the morning, she polished the stainless steel bar before the first customers arrived. These tended to be office workers, often employees at the Royal Bank of Scotland offices down the road. They would not linger long, but sit engrossed in the newspapers before glancing at their watches and rushing out again. Then there would be a quiet spell before her mid-morning regulars arrived, Matthew and Angus Lordie among them. Of course with Matthew away on honeymoon, she was not expecting him, which meant that Angus Lordie would sit closer to the bar and address all his comments t
o her.

  She could tell his mood immediately when he came in, and this would tell her how his work was going. A difficult painting, or one that was not turning out as expected, would give Angus a morose expression and make him stir his coffee rather more aggressively than necessary. His expression today, though, was thoughtful rather than morose, which suggested to Lou that he had something on his mind other than an unco-operative canvas.

  “I’ve been thinking about your situation, Lou,” Angus began.

  “My situation? Here?”

  “Not so much just here,” said Angus, waving a hand around to encompass the general area. “Everywhere. Your whole life.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with my life,” said Big Lou.

  “But there is, Lou,” said Angus. “You need a companion. That chap of yours, Robbie, is all very well, but…” He looked at her cautiously, sensing that he was on dangerous ground. “What I thought, actually, is that you need a dog. A puppy. You need one, Lou. Maybe even a couple of puppies.”

  “I’d love one,” said Lou. “Even two. I really would.”

  Angus beamed. “Well, isn’t that a coincidence! As it happens…”

  “But I can’t,” interjected Lou. “I’m mildly allergic to dogs, Angus. Even your bringing Cyril in here makes me slightly wheezy. So I couldn’t have one in the flat. It’s impossible.”