The Unbearable Lightness of Scones: A 44 Scotland Street Novel

by Alexander McCall Smith

  The caterer agreed. ‘Indeed.’ He raised a finger. ‘And to pile Ossa upon Pelion, if you’ll permit the allusion, biscuits and cheese, rounded off with strawberries, meringues glacés and clotted cream.’

  Menu E was chosen, as were wines - champagne, a good Pouilly Fumé, and an equally good, but considerably more expensive, Brunello di Montalcino.

  Then there was the music, which was provided by the Auld Reekie Scottish Dance Band under the leadership of David Todd, an accomplished musician who was also the nephew of that great man, the late Sir Thomas Broun Smith, author of the Short Commentary on the Law of Scotland. Dancing would take place in the second of the two marquees, with the band at one end, heroically making their way through ‘Mhairi’s Wedding’ and the like, and the dancers at the other, flinging each other about with all the enthusiasm which Scottish country dance music engenders in the normally sedate Scottish soul. Tribal memories, thought Matthew, as he watched the spectacle of the dancing that evening; distant tribal memories that were still there.

  As Matthew surveyed the guests enjoying themselves, the reality of what he had done came home to him. It made him feel more adult than he had ever before felt. Now he was responsible for somebody else, and that somebody else, who was at that moment dancing a Gay Gordons with Angus Lordie, was responsible for him. He felt the ring on his finger, twisting it round and round - it was a strange feeling, a symbol of the profound thing that had happened to him.

  Elspeth caught his eye from the dance floor and smiled. Angus Lordie nodded. And then they were swept away by the whirl of dancers. Matthew saw the children dancing too - he noticed Bertie with a rather bossy-looking little girl; Bertie seemed to be an unwilling partner and was grimacing, which made Matthew smile. What did little boys see in weddings? he wondered. The end of freedom? The end of fun? Or something simply inexplicable?

  Matthew moved outside. The evening sky was still light and the air was unusually heavy for early June. He moved further away from the open sides of the marquee, from the light and sound that spilled out from within. There were days, he thought, which one was meant to remember in all their intensity; days such as this, his wedding day, which he should be able to bring back to mind years from now when the rest of this year would be forgotten. And yet he found that he could barely remember anything that had transpired within the church, and that even the journey from the church to the Moray Place Gardens, a journey of ten minutes at the most, seemed to have passed in a flash of . . . of what? Confusion? Elation?

  He threw a glance back into the marquee. The band had started to play something slower now and the crowd of people on the dance floor had thinned. He should not stay out here, he decided; he should go back into the marquee and claim his bride.

  He had reached the entrance to the tent when a figure came out - Elspeth’s Uncle Harald, holding a glass of champagne in his hand.

  ‘Are you enjoying yourself, Harald?’ Matthew asked. It was a banal question, but he did not really know what else to say.

  Harald nodded. ‘Of course I am. And if I appear to be somewhat emotional - which I am - then that is purely because this music makes me pine for Scotland. I go back to Portugal tomorrow, but every time I return to Scotland it becomes more difficult to leave.’

  ‘Then why don’t you stay?’ asked Matthew; if exile was a bitter fruit, it seemed to him, then end the exile.

  Harald took a sip of his champagne and looked at Matthew from over the rim of his glass. ‘It’s the idea of Scotland that I like,’ he said. ‘The real thing is rather different.’

  Matthew frowned. ‘But this is the real thing,’ he said. ‘This is real.’

  Harald looked at Matthew in what appeared to be astonishment. ‘My dear chap,’ he said, after a while. ‘You’re not serious, are you? Smoked salmon and Perthshire lamb in Moray Place Gardens? The real Scotland? Oh, my dear chap! My dear, dear chap!’

  6. Still Life, with Cyril

  Angus Lordie thought about Matthew’s wedding as he laid out his palette and brushes in preparation for Monday morning’s painting. Angus had always been somewhat ritualistic in his approach to his work; the image of the bohemian painter in a chaotic studio may have fitted Francis Bacon (whose studio was a notorious mess) but it did not suit Angus. He dressed with care for the act of painting, usually wearing a tie which he fixed to his shirt front with a small gold tiepin - a practice which gave him a slightly raffish air. His shirts were double-cuffed, fastened with a pair of worn gold cuff-links on which his father’s initials - HMcLL (Hamish McLennan Lordie) - had been engraved more than forty years ago. The cuff-links were something of a talisman, and Angus would have found it difficult to paint without them; a common concern of artists of all sorts: of the opera singer who cannot perform without a favourite teddy bear propped up in the wings; of the writer who cannot write without a statue of Ganesh on his desk; and so on. And lest any Freudian should mock such superstitious reliance, let it be remembered that the desk of Freud himself was covered with his Egyptian statuettes; his familiars.

  Angus was working that morning on a still life - not a common subject for him, as he was principally a portrait painter. At that time, though, there were no commissions in hand, and rather than wait for something to turn up, he had decided to embark on this still life, which now sat on the table in front of him, perched on a blue gingham tablecloth of the sort that used to cover the tables upstairs at McGuffie’s Tavern near the Waverley Station. As a student at the Art College, Angus had lunched at McGuffie’s once or twice a month, in the days when Jimmy McGuffie himself was still the host. He remembered the courteous welcome that Mr McGuffie gave his guests as they came to the top of the panelled staircase which led up from the street, and the kindness of the ancient waitresses in their traditional outfits of black skirts and white bibs. And he remembered those tablecloths over which various journalists and politicians had exchanged information and anecdotes. There one might meet, as Angus had, the likes of Owen Dudley Edwards, the scholar and raconteur; or Stephanie Wolfe Murray, the publisher; as well as others who had books and ideas within them that they were yet to reveal. McGuffie’s tables were always democratic.

  That, of course, was a time when people still had lunch, and talked. Now, thought Angus, with a degree of regret, lunch as an institution was threatened. The world of work had become all-consuming, as fewer and fewer people had to carry out the jobs that used to be done by so many more. To have lunch now was an indulgence, a guilty pleasure, disapproved of by employers, frowned upon by colleagues, many of whom had, at the back of their mind, the unsettling thought: while I’m eating lunch, people like me in Shanghai or Bombay are working - such were the implications of globalisation, that paraquat of simple security. And so restaurants that had once been a hive of conversation at midday were now largely deserted, or spottily populated by tables of one or two people, largely silent, eating salads and drinking mineral water. Mr McGuffie, were he to come back, would be dismayed by the change, and would wonder what had gone wrong. Perhaps he would think that another Reformation had occurred; that the iconoclasts had turned their ire on restaurants, having destroyed all of Scotland’s religious imagery in the previous show.

  Angus smiled. The moral energy, the disapproval, that had fuelled Scotland’s earlier bouts of over-enthusiastic religious intolerance were still with us, as they were with any society. It wore a different cloth, he thought, and was present now in the desire to prevent people from doing anything risky or thinking unapproved thoughts. Oh yes, he muttered, they’re still with us, and they’re still ready to carry out the burning of witches, even if we don’t call them witches any more. All that moral outrage, that self-righteousness, that urge to lecture and disapprove - it’s all still there.

  He looked at the objects resting on the tablecloth that had triggered these thoughts. The real secret in a still life, he thought, is to give the painting the sense of there being something about to happen. The objects might be quite still, but there had to be in t
he painting a sense of suppressed energy, of expectation, as if somebody were about to come into the room, to render the still life living; or lightning was about to show through the window behind the objects.

  He wondered how he could suffuse these few ordinary things with a feeling of immanence. What were they? A blue jug of the sort painted by so many Scottish artists - a Glasgow jug, as it was called. Indeed, the presence of a blue jug was more or less a requisite of any echt Scottish still life; so much so, perhaps, that it might have been the same blue jug that appeared in all those paintings. One might imagine William Crosbie telephoning Alberto Morrocco and asking him if he had finished with the blue jug, as he wanted to start work on a still life. And Alberto Morrocco would have replied that unfortunately he had just passed it on to William Gillies, who said that he would need it for a week or so, until he had finished his current still life, but would a bowl, replete with apples, do instead?

  There was the blue jug, occupying centre stage on the tablecloth. And beside it, a modest green glass Art Nouveau inkwell, with its top open, plus a small posy of dried lavender, and a bunch of over-ripe grapes on a Minton plate. The over-ripeness of the grapes could be remedied in the painting, Angus thought, but could he remedy the essentially static nature of the objects he had chosen?

  He was searching for the answer to this unsettling problem when he heard the doorbell ring. His dog, Cyril, who had been sitting beside the table - although he would, by nature, have to be excluded from the still life - perked up his head at the sound. As he did so, he uttered a low growl, baring his teeth slightly; the sun, slanting down from the studio window, caught the dog’s single gold tooth and flashed a tiny glint of light, like the warning of a minute Aldiss lamp.

  7. Art of the Matter

  Angus did not like being disturbed when painting, as it broke what he thought of as his train of artistic thought. In reality it was not so much a train of thought as a mood, since all manner of unconnected thoughts crossed his mind while painting; no train, real or metaphorical, would ever be so loosely organised as this. Some of the thought, indeed, was fantasy - mild, Walter-Mittyish (Waltermittilich, as the Germans now have it, or should have, if they don’t) thoughts; imagined meetings with the Scottish Government in which he was asked to take over what the requesting civil servant described as ‘the culture brief’. And Angus would laugh and say, ‘Well, we’ll start by avoiding terms like that!’ But then, magnanimously, he would agree - subject to time being available - and he would announce the abandonment of the intrusive attempts by politicians to control cultural institutions or to use culture as an instrument of social engineering. There would be grants - large ones - available to those of real talent in the world of painting, particularly to those who showed some ability to draw, a skill notably lacking, Angus thought, in so many aspirants to the Turner Prize. He agreed with David Hockney that an artist really had to be able to draw before anything else could be achieved. Now, Hockney could draw, as Angus often pointed out in the Cumberland Bar.

  Then there would be grants for portrait painters, or Civil List pensions, perhaps, of the sort awarded to MacDiarmid. The importance of the portrait would be stressed in his new arts policy, just as the utterly ephemeral nature of installation art would be made crystal clear. Those unfortunate gallery cleaners who threw expensive installations out in the belief that they were rubbish would be vindicated, perhaps even given the grants taken away from those of whose work they disposed. And as for portraiture - what a glorious age would begin for this unjustly neglected branch of painting! The spirit of Henry Raeburn would again make itself felt in Edinburgh, and people would once more take an interest in the human face, not under the false light of our vain contemporary quest for beauty, but as the incorporation of humanity’s virtues and vices.

  Look at Raeburn, Angus once remarked to Domenica Macdonald. Everything is there in those faces: wisdom, tolerance, learning.

  ‘But not pride,’ said Domenica. ‘Raeburn’s subjects don’t look proud, do they?’

  Angus mused for a moment. ‘Is there no pride there?’ He thought of some of the better-known portraits: Francis MacNab, the McNab, draped in tartan and wearing a muckle hairy sporran. Was the face not proud? Or was it just grim? To be an anything must be difficult; how much easier going through life being just a something. Scottish aristocrats, of course, were odd. They belonged to a national tradition that did not really approve of anybody getting too above himself, and yet there they were, genuine, twenty-four-carat toffs, and if you were too demotic then what was the point of being a toff in the first place?

  ‘Henry Raeburn was a kind man,’ he said. ‘Some of his subjects may have suffered from pride, but it doesn’t really come through in the paintings. He concentrated on other things. One has to be charitable as a portrait painter.’

  Domenica raised an eyebrow. ‘Does one? And why? Because the person you’re painting is paying the bill?’

  Angus had to concede that this might sometimes happen. ‘Court painters, that sort of person does that, yes. And I suppose all those paintings of chairmen of the board - sometimes I think that those paintings are done to keep the share price up. If you had an honest portrait of the chairman, one showing him to be all worn out with care and heading for a heart attack, then . . . well, it wouldn’t help.’

  ‘Nor would portraits of military figures showing their gentle side,’ suggested Domenica.

  ‘No, that might not help one’s defence posture,’ agreed Angus. He paused. ‘I painted George Robertson once, you know. It was while he was Secretary-General of NATO.’

  ‘Did you make him look resolute?’ asked Domenica.

  ‘Reasonably so,’ said Angus. ‘But he looked fairly resolute anyway. He came out of it very well. I got on very well with him. He has a sense of humour, you see. And he’s a great man. He comes from Islay, you know, and that’s an island that always produces good men and good whisky.’

  ‘Not a portrait to scare NATO’s enemies?’

  ‘My portraits don’t scare anybody,’ said Angus. ‘Mind you, I did once, years ago, do a little picture of Margaret Thatcher - bless her - a tiny little miniature. Then I pasted it onto a matchbox.’

  Domenica looked puzzled. ‘Oh?’

  Angus smiled. ‘Yes. Then I stood the matchbox outside a mouse hole. The mouse had been bothering me - he had gnawed away at some canvas I had. So I used it as a mouse-scarer. It was more humane than a mouse-trap, you see. The mouse came out and saw this picture of Margaret Thatcher staring at him and he ran straight back into the hole. It was very effective.’

  ‘Did she scare us that much?’ asked Domenica, trying to remember.

  ‘Yes,’ said Angus. ‘She scared everybody. She was nanny, you see. She was a stern nanny who marched into the nursery and read the Riot Act. She told us to tidy up our rooms, that’s what she did.’

  ‘I suppose she did,’ mused Domenica. ‘But did people listen?’

  ‘At first they didn’t,’ said Angus. ‘But then they realised how strict she was. Nanny had a hairbrush and she whacked people with it. The miners. The Argentines. The railways. The universities. Whack, whack!’

  Domenica remembered. Yes, there had been a great deal of chastisement, and not everybody had enjoyed it. ‘Didn’t Oxford refuse her an honorary degree?’

  Angus nodded. ‘Yes, it was a bit petulant, I thought. Rather like a child saying, I won’t invite you to my birthday party. You know how children are always doing that - it’s their only little bit of power.’

  ‘Yes. And what did Maggie say?’

  ‘Oh, she was wonderful,’ said Angus. ‘She replied in kind. She said she didn’t want to come anyway. Which is exactly what one child says to another when that particular threat is made.’

  But now he had to go to answer the door. It was most tiresome.

  And there was nobody there - just a note, which he picked up, unfolded and read. The puppies are downstairs, said the note. In a large cardboard box. Your dog produced them
and you are therefore responsible for them. There really is no alternative.

  Angus stared at the note. Margaret Thatcher herself could not have put it more succinctly.

  8. Puppy Facts

  Old friends, like old shoes, are comfortable. But old shoes, unlike old friends, tend not to be supportive: it is easier to stumble and sprain an ankle while wearing a pair of old shoes than it is in new shoes, with their less yielding leather.

  In his despair, Angus decided that it would be Domenica to whom he would turn. He did not have much choice, of course; in recent years he had not paid as much attention to friendships as he should have done, and there were relatively few people with whom he had preserved a dropping-in relationship. And there are many of us, surely, in that category; we may feel that we have numerous friends, but how many can we telephone with no purpose other than to chat? Angus was aware of this. He had spent evenings on his own when he ached to talk to somebody and he had decided that he really should do something about acquiring more friends.

  Fortunately, Domenica was in. She was due that morning to attend a Saltire Society meeting, but that was not until eleven, and it was barely half past nine when Angus knocked on her door. She immediately sensed from his expression that something was wrong, and invited him in solicitously.

  ‘Something’s happened?’ She thought immediately of Cyril. To have a dog is to give a hostage to fortune, and Domenica had occasionally reflected on the fact that when Cyril went - and dogs do not really last all that long - Angus would be bereft. Yes, she thought; something has happened to Cyril - again. It was only a month or so ago that he had been arrested and had faced being put down for biting - an unjust charge which had in due course been refuted. And then there had been his earlier adventure when he had been kidnapped while Angus had been buying olive oil in Valvona & Crolla. Cyril, it seemed, was destined to bring drama to their lives.