The Unbearable Lightness of Scones: A 44 Scotland Street Novel Read online

  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 judgement 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 to her.

  She could tell his mood immediately 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 uncooperative 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 an amazing 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.’

  15. When even Puppy Love has its Limits

  Angus, dispirited by the realisation that Big Lou could not reasonably be expected to accept one or more of his boisterous litter of puppies, looked down into his coffee cup. And a coffee cup, as we all know, is not something that it pays to look into if one is searching for meaning beyond meaning; coffee, in all its forms, looks murky, and gives little comfort to one who hopes to see something in it. Unlike tea, which allows one to glimpse something of what lies beneath the surface, usually more tea.

  Although they had been in the flat for only a day and a half, the puppies were proving to be a waking nightmare for Angus. A flat without a garden is not the ideal place in which to raise a small dog, let alone six. To begin with, there was the problem of hygiene. A dog may be trained to restrain itself until taken outside, a fact which one would not have to be Ivan Petrovich Pavlov to discover, but this considerate view of the matter is not one which a puppy adopts until it has been conditioned to do so, something which involves a great deal of angst for the dog’s owner. Angus realised that he simply could not face however many weeks, or indeed months, would be required before house-training might be accomplished. In Cyril’s case, of course, the process had been remarkably quick, such was the dog’s unusual intelligence and, indeed, empathy. Cyril understood the issue immediately when it had been pointed out to him by Angus; he had simply looked at his master and nodded, to indicate that he knew that in future he would wait until he was taken outside. Angus had been astonished at the rapidity of Cyril’s understanding, and had mentioned this to one of his Scottish Arts Club friends, who happened to be a member of staff of the Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Medicine. ‘Impossible,’ his friend had said, cutting off further discussion. ‘Animals can’t grasp these things. You have to condition the dog to associate conduct with bad consequences - pain or your displeasure, which amounts to the same thing to the besotted canine. That’s all. They don’t understand these things, you know. Your dog will be no different.’

  But it had been true; it had happened, and Angus felt the same sense of frustration that must be felt by those who have witnessed a miracle and find that the person whom they wish to tell about it is a convinced Humean and believes that no human account of the miraculous can be true. It was no good his insisting that Cyril had understood immediately; he would simply not be believed. And of course the most powerful refutation of the likelihood of Cyril’s having required no house-training now lay before his eyes, in the conduct of these six puppies.

  And there was more. Not only was there the house-training issue; there were other forms of damage that the puppies were wreaking. One had chewed a roll of canvas that Angus had stacked at the side of his studio; another had worried away at a small Persian rug in his hallway, creating an untidy edge along one side an
d a small hole in the middle. And if this was not enough, another had succeeded in upsetting the small table on which Angus had carefully placed the items for his current still life, shattering the Glasgow jug that formed the centrepiece of this arrangement. The jug lay in fragments; the painting could not be completed now as Angus could not re-create the moment of juxtaposition that lies at the heart of a good still life; the painting, half-finished, was useless.

  Big Lou looked at Angus with something that was close to pity. Of course he would have imagined that it would be a simple matter to palm off a puppy on her. Angus had no inkling that she could read his motives with no difficulty at all, and his motives here were nothing to do with his professed belief that she would be better off with a dog. But in spite of the self-serving nature of his remarks, she found herself feeling sorry for him now - seven dogs in one flat, and a man - what bedlam that must be!

  As she looked at Angus, she reflected on what it must be like to be him. It required some imagination, of course; it was such a different life, a life of strange odours and textures: paint, turps; hours spent in the Cumberland Bar with all his fusty friends; being pushed about by that woman, Domenica Macdonald; those long conversations with Cyril; a diet that consisted, as far as she could make out, of kippers and oatcakes. It could not be much fun.

  She imagined for a moment the advertisement that Angus might place in the Scotsman lonely hearts column: painter, with seven dogs, seeks understanding woman. That would attract no replies, surely, or deserved not to; the trouble was that desert did not come into it: there were just not enough men. Every man, even the most unpromising one, who placed an advertisement in that column received, on average, eighty-two replies, while even the most meritorious women who advertised there was lucky to get a single reply, and this single reply, at that, would often be from a man who would have replied to several other advertisements at the same time. Big Lou had once overheard, while walking down Dundas Street, two well-dressed women talking about the difficulty of balancing the seats at a dinner party. ‘We know no single men for our single girlfriends, ’ one said, ‘not one. They simply don’t exist.’

  ‘The world has changed,’ said the other.

  ‘No. It’s always been thus. We women wait for men who never turn up.’

  And Big Lou thought: is this the lot of women? Is this what we really think? That we either reflect on our good fortune in having found a man, or bemoan his non-appearance? Surely not. Was it for this that the clay grew tall? The more she thought about this, the more she thought: the answer is probably yes. In which case, I shouldn’t even think about giving up Robbie; for all his flaws, for all his Jacobite dreaming, I must keep him. And that means marriage. I can change him. I really can. Marriage changes men - always.

  16. Paradise Found

  Matthew certainly felt changed by marriage. Even now, after only three days of being married to Elspeth Harmony, and sitting in the Singapore Airlines aircraft as it curved an arc over the East Timor Sea, he felt a very different person from the person he had been before. I’m a married man, he whispered to himself; a whisper unheard over the background noise of the great engines, that half-hushed hissing that makes the white noise of a jet cabin. He glanced at Elspeth in the seat beside him, asleep under the thin airline lap-rug, a shaft of high altitude sunlight falling across her forearm, making the skin warm and gold. Such smooth skin, thought Matthew; like that of a nectarine. Ma petite nectarine, he thought; something that the French might say, with their taste for culinary endearments.

  He had been in no doubt that he loved her. He had believed that from their first meeting, even though he knew that it was absurd that one might love another whom one did not really know. Or was it? Could one have a generalised love for humanity, something between agape and passionate love, a state awaiting transformation into full-blown love when the opportunity arose? This meant, of course, that at least part of the love one felt for one’s beloved was of another origin, came from somewhere else, and merely settled opportunistically on the chosen person; but that, he thought, was inevitable.

  Their time together, as husband and wife, an expression so much richer, so much dearer, than the anodyne, soulless ‘partners’, had convinced Matthew that in proposing to Elspeth he had done exactly the right thing. They were happy, entranced with the leisurely discovery of each other, fulfilled in a way that Matthew would never have thought possible. Eros himself had sent a vision in the hotel room in Singapore in which they had spent the night halfway through their long journey to Perth; he had appeared to them in Raffles Hotel, no less, under the swirling fan of their room overlooking the courtyard. And Matthew had lain awake and thought how pale an imitation of erotic delight was anything that he had experienced before. This was love with commitment, and that, he realised, made a profound and unmistakable difference. How shallow, by comparison, was mere physical dalliance; how empty!

  The journey from Singapore to Perth took barely five hours. From the window of the plane, Matthew watched the coast of Western Australia reveal itself below; a long line of brown on the edge of the steely blue of the sea. A thin lacing of white on the edge of the brown marked the littoral divide, and then, behind that, a nothingness of both land and sea. From up there the world looked neatly laid-out, like a map, with well-behaved expanses of brown, blue, green, all in their place. Their height made the landscape look easy, though he knew it was tough, waterless, unforgiving of anyone who found himself cast upon it; a place where unfortunate sailors had died on the shores and cliffs or had wandered off into the interior and never been seen again. Australia swallowed people; sucked them into its great emptiness.

  Elspeth woke up just before they dropped down towards Perth itself.

  ‘Down there,’ said Matthew, and pointed to the forests of eucalyptus coming into sight beneath them.

  She looked. The tops of the trees were swaying gently in a breeze; they were like a silver-grey sea in motion. A road cut through, die-straight; the top of a white truck could be seen moving slowly along it. And then the outer works of the airport, the perimeter fence, here as much, surely, to keep this great extending wilderness and its creatures out as to exclude human malevolence. Matthew took Elspeth’s hand. There was something significant about this landing, he felt; and yet we are here for only two weeks. Imagine arriving here knowing, as so many new arrivals had done before them, that one was going to stay, that this was where one would grow old and die.

  They took a taxi to their hotel, a small private hotel in Cottesloe. It was morning, and they passed by people going to work, sitting in their cars listening to the morning news from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, looking in their mirrors, scratching their heads, looking up at the sky to see what the weather had in mind. It was all so ordinary, but so different.

  For the rest of that day they did very little, other than to take a walk along the beach, which was only two blocks away from their hotel. This beach stretched for miles, a broad sweep of sand, its surface broken here and there by outcrops of rock. Along the beach, atop the sand dunes that kept suburban Perth from toppling into the Indian Ocean, a long coastal path was the haunt of walkers, runners, exuberant dogs, the sea breeze in the hair and lungs of all.

  And there was sun; everywhere there was that sun that painted everything with slabs of light, impasto thick.

  ‘I had no idea,’ said Elspeth.

  He looked at her. ‘No idea of what?’

  ‘Of all this,’ she said. ‘It’s like discovering a parallel universe.’

  He pondered her words. He knew what she meant, he suspected, because he had been thinking much the same thing himself, but had not found the words to express it. Perth was a world away from Edinburgh, but was not, because in many ways it was so familiar, so redolent of some distant idea of what Britain once had been, but was no longer. The signs of this were sometimes subtle, like the echoes of a familiar tune that one heard a long time ago; at other times they were obvious and arresting. On the drive
to the hotel, from the back of the taxi, they had passed a school, and he had seen ranks of boys outside what looked like a school hall beginning to march into assembly. The boys wore khaki shirts and shorts and swung their arms like soldiers on parade; the morning sun shone upon them, benignly. The sign outside the school proclaimed its name: Scotch College.

  ‘It’s very nice,’ said Matthew. He felt a momentary guilt, embarrassment perhaps, that he should think such an old-fashioned thought, but it passed. There was nothing wrong, he reminded himself, in appreciating a bourgeois paradise when every other sort of paradise on offer had proved to be exactly the opposite of what paradise should be.

  Why do people like Australia so much? he asked himself. And an unexpected answer came to him: it’s because everything that has been destroyed elsewhere, in an orgy of self-hatred, still survives here.

  17. A Dream of Love

  The proprietrix of Matthew and Elspeth’s hotel in Perth, a woman in her late fifties who wore a faded pink housecoat, had recommended a restaurant overlooking Cottesloe Beach and had helpfully made a reservation for them.

  ‘You have to reserve if you want a table in the front,’ she said. ‘If you get there for sunset you can have a drink while the sun goes down over the sea. That’s a sight for the eyes, I can tell you.