Unbearable Lightness of Scones Read online

  Fortunately those days of excitable Scottish nationalism were over. While it had been necessary, Domenica felt, to repatriate the Stone of Scone by direct action, that is, by stealing it back, it was no longer necessary to do things like that in an age when the Government actually sent it back voluntarily, in a blaze of absurd, Ruritanian ceremony. She herself had been there in Parliament Square, watching in bemused astonishment as the Stone of Scone was driven up the High Street on a cushion; such a stressful day for any stone. And then it had been taken to the Castle, where it had been examined by a geologist! Really, she thought, was there no end to the comedy? Of course, Domenica rather approved of Ian Hamilton and his friends who stole the Stone of Scone back from underneath the coronation throne in Westminster Abbey; indeed, she took the view that the stone should have been repatriated a great deal earlier than it was. After all, it was stolen property, rather like the blue Spode teacup which her neighbour Antonia had removed from her flat, and both it – the stone – and the teacup should have been restored to their rightful owners a great deal earlier.

  She glanced at the letter column in front of her and sighed. Those heady days were over. Now there were no more theological disputes, or historical debates, just letters about airport runways and European treaties and the like. And the Times letters column was much the same; the eccentrics, it seemed, no longer bothered to write letters about hearing cuckoos or, as in one famous letter, seeing a horse wear a pair of spectacles. It was all very bland.

  She looked up at the ceiling. It was almost half past ten in the morning and she had not achieved a great deal that day. In fact, she had achieved nothing, unless one could count reading the paper as an achievement. And what about the rest of the day? What lay ahead of her? Domenica had never been one to be bored, but now, for the first time in years, she felt the emptiness of her future. Her social diary for the week was virginal, unsullied by any appointment; not one solitary invitation, not a single engagement of any sort. That, she knew, was the fate of those who made no effort to socialise, who never invited others and who received no invitations in return. But she had heard that it was also the fate of those who were very well-known, famous people who received no invitations because everybody assumed that they would not be able to come. This point had been made to her very poignantly by Iris Murdoch, the novelist and philosopher, who had been in Edinburgh to deliver the Gifford Lectures and who had been seen by Domenica sitting alone in the University Staff Club in Chambers Street. Domenica had hesitated, and had then gone up to her and asked her, somewhat apologetically, whether she minded if she came and said hello.

  “Of course not,” said Iris Murdoch. “Nobody comes up to me and says hello. They feel that they cannot, and yet I wish they would. I’m sometimes terribly lonely, sitting by myself, with nobody daring to come up and say hello.”

  That had surprised her, but then she had remembered that W. H. Auden experienced the same problem when he returned to Oxford and had taken up residence in a cottage in the gift of Christ College. It had been hoped that Auden would sit in a coffee shop and undergraduates would come up and engage him in – for them – improving conversation. Auden was willing to sit in the coffee shop, and did so, but very few people plucked up the courage to go and sit at his table and talk to him. So mostly he sat alone. Mind you, Domenica thought, Auden, for all his brilliance and for all the timeless beauty of his poetry, was very dishevelled. His suits were dirty, stained with soup and as covered with ash as the higher slopes of Etna; both Auden and Etna smoked. Of course the great poet did not change his clothing as frequently as he might have done; that may have discouraged people from joining him at his table. How sad, and what opportunities lost! To have been able to sit down at Auden’s table and ask what exactly he had meant when he wrote some of his more obscure poems – those puzzling words, for example, about looking through the lattice-work of a nomad’s comb: Domenica had her theory about that and would have liked to have tried it out on the poet himself. Too late now. One could no more have coffee and a chat with Auden than one could pop into Milne’s Bar and buy a whisky for more or less the entire Scottish Renaissance. We have lost so much, she thought, and here am I sitting in my kitchen thinking about loneliness and what one cannot do, when what I need to do is to go next door, immediately, and visit Antonia; not my first choice of company – especially after the incident of the blue Spode teacup – but better than nobody, and, of course, a source of amusement, with her extremely questionable taste in men.

  22. Room for Misunderstanding

  There were two flats off the top landing at 44 Scotland Street – that belonging to Domenica Macdonald and that belonging to Antonia Collie. Of the two, Domenica’s flat was the better-placed: its front windows gave a view of a slightly larger slice of Scotland Street and allowed a glimpse, too, of the distinguished roofs of Drummond Place. Antonia’s view, although pleasant enough, was mainly of the corner of Royal Crescent. And although the symmetry which inspired the architecture of Scotland Street and indeed of the entire New Town should have led to both flats having the same number of rooms, Domenica had one more room than her neighbour. This was strange, and could only have been explained by the carrying out in the mists of the past of a structural rearrangement within the building; a wall had been knocked through and a room had been taken from Antonia’s flat and added to Domenica’s. Such modifications were not without precedent in the area, and had occasionally been carried out when two adjoining flats had ended up in the ownership of the same landlord.

  When Antonia had bought the flat from Bruce Anderson at the end of his first Edinburgh sojourn, he had said nothing about the clear outline of a doorway which could be made out on one of the walls adjacent to Domenica’s kitchen. It was only when Antonia had been invited into Domenica’s flat for drinks one evening shortly after her purchase of the flat that the subject had been brought up, and even then raised indirectly.

  “You’re most fortunate,” Antonia had said, “to have an extra room. You really are.”

  Domenica had affected surprise. “But I don’t have an extra room,” she said. “I have the number of rooms that I have – and always have had.”

  Antonia had looked into the glass of wine that Domenica had poured her; the wine came barely half way up the side of the glass, but that, she thought, was another thing. “What I meant,” she said, “is that your flat, which one would have thought would be the mirror image of mine – being on the same landing – appears to have two more rooms than I do. That’s rather surprising, would you not agree?”

  Domenica would not. She knew exactly what Antonia meant – she was suggesting that the owners of Domenica’s flat had at some point stolen a room from next door. What a ridiculous thought! “No,” she said. “Not really. Many flats in this part of town are of different sizes. Some flats were intended for people of greater means than other flats. Some flats had maids’ bedrooms, for example.”

  Antonia looked out of the window. She, or her predecessors in title to the flat, had lost a room, and she was in no doubt about where it had gone. It was, she thought, like one of those historic injustices that resonated down the centuries – a land grab of the sort that was imposed on the weak or the inattentive. This was exactly how Paraguay must feel about the loss of so much of its territory to its now larger neighbours. But, like Paraguay, there was not much she could do, and the conversation had turned to other matters.

  Domenica remembered this conversation as she stood before Antonia’s door and prepared to press the bell. The two women had known one another for a long time, even before Antonia had moved to Edinburgh from Fife on the break-up of her marriage, but their relationship had not developed into the friendship which both had initially wished for. Now they had settled into a reasonably amicable, if slightly strained, modus vivendi in which each kept largely to herself but responded readily and in good grace to the duties of neighbourhood. Social invitations were extended and reciprocated, but they were carefully judged so as not
to be too frequent as to lead to any form of imposition.

  When Domenica had been on field work in the Malacca Straits, her flat had been looked after by Antonia. This had been a convenient arrangement for both of them, but on Domenica’s return she had made the shocking discovery that Antonia had removed a blue Spode teacup from her flat and was using it, quite openly, in her own. It was this teacup that now crossed her mind as she pressed Antonia’s bell.

  When Antonia appeared at the door she did not seem to be at all surprised that it was Domenica who stood on her doorstep.

  “Oh, it’s only you,” she said.

  Domenica caught her breath. Only you… “You were expecting somebody more exciting?”

  Antonia treated this as a joke. “Oh no! Well, maybe yes. But that’s not to imply that you’re not exciting… in your way.”

  A short silence ensued. Declarations of war have come in more subtle forms than this, and Domenica would have been quite within her rights to interpret this as such, but then Antonia smiled and gestured for her to come inside, and Domenica decided that she would forgive the other woman’s tactlessness. There was no point in being at odds with one’s neighbour, whatever the provocation: selfishness in all its forms was what neighbours manifested and one simply had to accept it – unless one wanted distrust and downright enmity.

  “Who were you expecting?” she asked. “I don’t want to get in the way, you know.”

  This last remark was intended to imply that Antonia was the sort of woman to engage in trysts at ten-thirty in the morning, and that was exactly how it was interpreted.

  Antonia smiled sweetly. “It’s a bit early for that,” she said. “Even for me.”

  Domenica watched her neighbour. What exactly did that mean? That even if she were the sort to entertain a lover at eleven in the morning, ten-thirty would be slightly early?

  “But let’s not stand in the hall forever,” Antonia continued, ushering Domenica into the living room. “As it happens, I’ve brewed some coffee already.”

  And will it be served, Domenica asked herself, in my cup?

  Antonia left to go into the kitchen. And it was then that Domenica noticed the smell. It was not an unpleasant smell, sweetish perhaps, slightly cloying, but certainly sufficiently pronounced to linger in the nose and on the palate; an olfactory memory without a link to substance. It was not the smell of coffee, Domenica thought. Definitely not.

  23. Omen Away

  After their walk on the path that led along the top of Cottesloe Beach, Matthew and Elspeth had returned to the hotel and sunk into a deep jet-lagged sleep that lasted for over two hours. When they awoke, it was almost six in the evening, and the fiery Western Australian sun had been drained from the evening sky, leaving it a strange, washed-out colour, almost a soft mauve.

  What awoke them was not the change in the light, but the sound of a flock of parrots returning to one of the trees that towered over the hotel’s back garden. It was a sharp chattering, an excited flurry of sound that seemed to fill the air completely, echoing off the walls of the hotel courtyard in a profusion of high-pitched squeaks. “Our little friends,” said Matthew, raising himself on an elbow to peer out of the window at the small green birds. “Hundreds and hundreds of them.”

  He shook his head and let it flop back onto the pillow. The air was still warm, and a light film of perspiration was making him feel sticky. He would shower, he thought, or have a swim.

  “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 who 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 beachside 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 few 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 comf
ort. 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.”