The Unbearable Lightness of Scones Read online

  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 bottoms 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 water, where the waves, their energy spent, rolled in a final tiny wall 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 sea 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 it 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 water 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 en
tirely 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 antiques 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 him. 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 …

  “You’ll both have a lovely time with Olive,” said Irene. “I’ve noticed that her head is full of ideas for games. Positively buzzing with ideas for creative play. What was that game you played when she was last at the house? She had her nurse’s kit with her, didn’t she?” She paused. “On which subject, Bertie, one wonders why Olive chose to have a nurse’s kit rather than a doctor’s kit. One might reflect on that, might one not?”

  Bertie thought for a moment. His mother did not know, of course, what Olive had housed in her junior nurse’s kit – a real syringe with which she had forcibly taken a blood sample from Bertie. There had been enough fuss from Miss Harmony when she had heard of that – and of the subsequent test for leprosy that Olive claimed to have conducted on Bertie’s blood sample. Bertie did not want that row to continue, and so he said nothing of that. But why did girls like to have junior nurse’s kits? In his view, the answer to that was simple: some girls liked to play nurses, and some did not. He supposed that boys could play nurses if they wanted to, but Bertie had not met any who did. It was as simple as that.

  “I suppose that they have nurse’s kits, Mummy, because girls like to be nurses. They play with dollies and nurse them.”

  Irene cast her eyes heavenwards. “Wrong, Bertie! Wrong!”

  Bertie said nothing, but looked at the floor. He had simply reported what he had seen, but his mother, for some reason, did not seem to approve. It was something to do with Melanie Klein, perhaps.

  Irene sighed. It was a c
onstant battle to explain the evils of gender stereotyping, really it was. “Haven’t you noticed, Bertie,” she began, “how most of the doctors at the health centre are women? Haven’t you noticed that? That doctor who looked at your foot when you hurt it the other day, she was a woman, wasn’t she?”

  Bertie thought back. The doctor had indeed been a woman, but then all the nurses at the health centre were also women.

  “But all the nurses there, Mummy,” he pointed out, “were ladies, weren’t they? I didn’t see any men.”

  Irene thought quickly. “There are male nurses, Bertie. And they are very good at what they do, even if they’re just men.”

  Bertie was silent.

  “So you see,” went on Irene, “the fact that the shops sell those silly nurse’s kits to girls is just keeping alive these ridiculous preconceptions that girls like to be nurses. They don’t. They’re only nurses because they can’t be doctors. They’ve been conditioned, Bertie, to accept that they must do what’s second best.”

  Bertie frowned. “But is it second best to be a nurse, Mummy? I read in the paper that some nurses don’t like people to say that.”

  Irene smiled encouragingly. “No, they don’t, Bertie. You’re right. Many nurses nowadays don’t like doing the things that nurses used to have to do. Changing sheets and collecting bedpans – that sort of thing. Nursing has moved on, Bertie.”

  Bertie was puzzled. “But if they don’t do that,” he said, “then who does? Do people have to tuck themselves into bed when they’re in hospital?”

  Irene was amused by this and raised her eyes again. “Dear Bertie, no, not at all. They have other people now to do that sort of thing. There are other wome … people who do that.”

  “So they aren’t nurses, Mummy?” asked Bertie.