The Unbearable Lightness of Scones: A 44 Scotland Street Novel

by Alexander McCall Smith

  ‘Who . . .’ Bruce began, but she had left the room and the rest of his question - which was who was Watson Cooke - would have been addressed to an empty kitchen.

  Bruce’s feeling of irritation lasted for much of the rest of the day. That morning he had to conduct interviews for new bar staff, a task he did not really enjoy as the applicants were, for the most part, unappointable. It was not that they lacked experience - some of them had served in bars for years - it was just that, well, he had to admit it privately, it’s just that they were so unattractive. The women were such frumps and the young men so pale and . . . He could not find quite the right word to describe the young men, but unappointable would have to do.

  In desperation he telephoned the agency which had sent the candidates over. ‘Those people,’ he said. ‘Not much of a bunch.’

  The woman at the other end of the line sounded puzzled. ‘Not much of a bunch?’

  ‘Useless,’ said Bruce. ‘Dross. Human dross.’

  There was a silence at the other end of the line. Then, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t quite understand. Are you saying that they weren’t suitable in some way? Not sufficiently qualified?’

  ‘Unsuitable,’ said Bruce. ‘I wouldn’t want any of them cluttering up my wine bar. We’re a place, well, I suppose one would just have to say, we’re a place with a certain coolness. Do you know what I mean?’

  ‘So you’re saying that all of those young people weren’t cool enough? Do I understand you correctly?’

  Bruce laughed. ‘Exactement,’ he said. ‘Haven’t you got anything better? My customers like to have somebody halfway presentable serving them. They don’t want to be served by somebody who looks as if she’s on day release from Edinburgh Zoo.’

  Again there was a silence at the other end. ‘I’m not sure if I understand you.’

  Bruce sighed. ‘Well, let me explain. You sent four men and two women - right?’

  ‘I believe so.’

  ‘So,’ said Bruce. ‘Take the two women first. There was one called Shona, I think. Now, I don’t like to be unkind, but, frankly, she was pretty gross. I don’t know where she got her nose from, but . . . there are limits, you know.’

  ‘Her nose? Shona’s nose?’

  ‘Yes. Helen of Troy’s face may have launched a thousand ships, but Shona’s nose must have sunk a few. More than a few, maybe.’

  Bruce heard the woman breathing heavily. Asthma, perhaps. But then, ‘I suppose she got her nose from me,’ said the voice. ‘I am her mother, after all.’

  Bruce bit his lip. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Her . . .’ He stopped; the receiver at the other end had been put down.

  He shrugged. Some people had no sense of humour and he had never liked that woman, anyway; not that he had met her, but one could tell. The call, however, had unsettled him and the rest of the day was spent in a state of discontent. By the time that five o’clock arrived, he was ready to go home and to tell Julia that he had decided that they would not go to the party in Clarence Street after all. Julia, however, was not in when he returned to Howe Street.

  ‘It’s me,’ called Bruce, as he entered the flat, throwing a quick glance at the hall mirror. Nice profile. ‘It’s moi.’

  There was no reply, and Bruce, frowning slightly, walked through to the bedroom. Julia sometimes had long afternoon naps, which could last into the early evening, and he half expected to find her on the bed, amidst scattered copies of Tatler or Vogue, fast asleep.

  There was no sign of her in the bedroom. When he went into the kitchen he saw a note on the table. He picked it up and read it. Julia’s writing was strangely childish, all loops and swirls. Gone to have dinner with P. and B. at some Italian place they know. Don’t know the name or where it is. See you at Watson Cooke’s place later on. Nine o’clock. Maybe later. Don’t arrive before nine as Watson’s coming with us for a bite to eat and we won’t be back until then, he said. Love and xxx’s Julia.

  Bruce reread the note and then, crumpling it up in a ball, he threw it into the bin. So Watson Cooke was going for dinner at . . . wherever it was, with . . . P. and B., whoever they were. How dare she?

  He went through to the bathroom, turned on the shower and stepped out of his clothes, throwing his shirt angrily onto a pile of unwashed laundry. She couldn’t even wash their clothes when she had nothing to do all day but sit about in the flat and read those stupid magazines of hers.

  He stood under the shower, feeling the embrace of the hot water, shaking his hair as the stream of the shower warmed his scalp. I don’t have to put up with this, he thought. Julia is going to have to have one or two things explained to her, and he would do so that very night, after they came back from Clarence Street. She would probably cry - women tended to when you spelled it out for them - but he would be gentle afterwards, and she would be grateful to him, and it would all be back to normal. And tomorrow he would approach another agency to get the bar staff - attractive ones this time. He would tell them: don’t send anybody who looks like the back of a bus. No uglies. Just cool, s’il vous plaît.

  30. Edinburgh Noses through the Ages

  That evening, while Bruce fumed and Julia dined, Angus Lordie painted. He did not normally paint at night, but it was the high summer and the light would be good enough until nine and even beyond. He was working on a portrait, that of a prominent Edinburgh commercial figure, and he was trying to get the nose right. Everything else had worked out very well - the eyes were, he thought, exactly right and the mouth, often a difficult feature to capture, was, he thought, very accurate. But the nose, which in this case was large and bulbous, was proving more difficult. Angus had several photographs of it, taken discreetly from various angles, and was now attempting to capture it in paint; it was not working.

  One should not underestimate, he thought, the significance of the nose. Angus believed that this organ, so aplastic compared with those expressive, mobile features, the lips and the eyes, was often the focal point of a painting. He had learned this lesson at the Edinburgh College of Art when a visiting lecturer had spent an entire hour enlightening the students about the importance of the nose in Rembrandt’s paintings and engravings. It had been a memorable lecture, illustrated with slides of any number of Rembrandt’s self-portraits and his studies of derelict vagabonds, all possessed of noses weighed down with significance.

  Now, looking at the nose that he had been painting on the canvas in front of him, Angus remembered what it was that made Rembrandt’s noses so memorable. ‘Look at the nose,’ the lecturer had said, pointing to the slide behind him. ‘See how it sits. It is not pointing towards us, you will observe, as we stand before the painting; it goes off at an angle, thus. That gives life to the face, because the nose has energy and direction. Whatever the subject’s eyes may be doing - and in this painting they are looking directly at us - the nose has business of its own, off towards the right of the painting. And our eye, you will notice, goes straight to that nose, somewhat bulbous and over-prominent. The nose says it all, doesn’t it?’

  Yes, thought Angus; the nose says it all, and yet what could one do with one’s nose to mediate the message, whatever it was? One might wrinkle it, to convey distaste; one could certainly not turn it up, as the metaphor suggested one might. Some of Rembrandt’s noses were wrinkled, but that conveyed, in the etchings in question, not so much distaste as madness and terror. One might, he supposed, look down the nose, and convey haughtiness. But could the static nose say anything? Could the nose in repose, the sleeping nose, be made to convey a message of human vulnerability? Or the vanity of human dreams: one might have ambitions, one might wish to assert the essential dignity of the human creature, but the nose would act as a constant reminder of simple humanity. The sleeping nose: it made him think. Auden’s beautiful lullaby enjoined him to whom the lines were addressed: ‘Lay your sleeping head, my love . . .’ Would those lines have had the same grave beauty if written, ‘Lay your sleeping nose, my love . . .’ ? Angus smiled to himself, and then laughed. The n
ose was simply too ridiculous to be the subject of lyricism.

  And yet one could not ignore the nose; certainly if one was a painter. There were fine noses in Edinburgh - noses which would have given Rembrandt much to think about; and which had certainly provided inspiration and amusement for John Kay, the late eighteenth-century barber and engraver who had been such a sharp-eyed observer of the Edinburgh of his day. Kay’s subjects came from every sector of society: Highland grandees, Writers to the Signet, the wives of the common soldiery, the keelies of the toon. All were there, captured by his engraving pen, etched onto his plates with such delicacy and humour. And Kay, like Rembrandt, understood the importance of the nose, and what it could tell us about the soul within. In some of his drawing it is the nose itself that is the subject’s burden in life - a large protuberance attached to a small body; so prominent, in fact, that one might imagine the nose catching the wind on the North Bridge and spinning the person off course, turning him towards Holyrood rather than Leith, requiring that he tack his way rather than walk directly.

  ‘Spirit of Kay,’ thought Angus, ‘light up this city now . . .’ Who had said that? Nobody, he thought; just Angus Lordie, painter and occasional poet. What had come to mind was that line of MacDiarmid: ‘Spirit of Lenin, light up this city now . . .’ MacDiarmid was talking about Glasgow, of course, although he had no doubt thought that Edinburgh could have done with a dose of Lenin too, even more so than Glasgow. But what nonsense MacDiarmid wrote when he became overtly political, thought Angus; and he offended everybody in the process. Any extreme political creed brought only darkness in the long run; it lit up nothing. The best politics were those of caution, tolerance and moderation, Angus maintained, but such politics were, alas, also very dull, and certainly moved nobody to poetry.

  He looked at his painting. His subject, he believed, had led a largely blameless life, had loved his wife, had served on committees, had helped the requisite number of good causes. There had been, he suspected, little passion in his life, and relatively few disappointments. He had lived in Barnton, a comfortable suburb in which nothing of note happened, and he had loved the Forth Bridge, golf, Speyside whiskies, money, and going on the occasional summer cruise in northern waters - to Orkney and Shetland, to the Faroe Islands, and once, more adventurously, to Iceland. That was his life. And now here am I trying to capture this with a few strokes of my brush, to fix all this in oil paint on canvas; recording nothing very much with next to nothing.

  This line of thought, connected with what Angus was doing, but only vaguely so, was now suddenly broken. The puppies, sequestered in a neighbouring room, had begun to yap again. Angus sighed. He would have to take them out again into Drummond Place; six frolicking, excited centres of canine consciousness, eager to get on with their own small lives. I am the owner of seven dogs, he reminded himself, utterly appalled.

  31. Selling a Pup (or Six)

  It took some time to get a leash on six puppies. As he busied himself with one, another would bite playfully at his fingers, covering them with canine saliva, while another would worry away at his shoe-laces. Then, when the biter and its sibling were safely clipped onto the ends of their leashes, the worrier would roll over on his stomach in an attempt to elude capture, and so on until, after ten minutes of effort, there would be six small bundles of leashed fur, all tugging in different directions, all barking or growling in anticipation of their walk in the Drummond Place Gardens.

  There was still a good deal of light in the sky when Angus emerged from his stairway door and crossed the street to the gardens. The puppies, sensing adventure, yelped with excitement, one of them executing a complete somersault, such was his enthusiasm. Angus had to smile; Cyril’s offspring were lively dogs, which was not surprising, as their father was a dog of noted character and had many friends in the human world.

  He closed the gate behind him and bent down to release the puppies. They dashed off, falling over themselves in their eagerness. ‘Don’t go far, boys,’ said Angus, but he was largely ignored: they had layer upon layer of smells to investigate and were setting to the task with relish, filing away the odours which make a dog’s world a riot of impressionist olfactory exuberance.

  Angus stood on the pathway and watched them, with mixed feelings. In the past, surplus dogs - and surely these puppies were surplus - would be bundled into a sack and tossed into the canal. There was little sentiment for animal suffering in those days, and the few moments of spluttering terror under the water would not be thought about. Such things simply were, they happened. Now, of course, the circle of our moral concern had widened - and happily so. Animal suffering was not tolerated, even if we still had abattoirs where bovine - and other - lives were brought to a sudden end. There was terror there, of course, in those last moments, and surely that meant suffering, but people did not think about that very much. We did not stroke cattle and sheep, or give them names and hug them; we did not encourage them to sleep at the foot of our bed; that was what seemed to count.

  He looked up at the evening sky, a sky which, in this final hour before darkness, was drained of colour. A vapour trail, bisecting it, had begun to transform itself into a wispy sweep of cloud, the tracks, he thought, of a group of people heading westward, each with business of his own, unaware that five miles below them all these little dramas were being enacted. ‘I, a man with seven dogs,’ he muttered, ‘stand here / Looking up at the line of your journey / Indifferent each to each other / But recognisably in the same metaphorical boat / Even with five miles of air between us . . .’

  He stopped himself. Fragments of poetry came to him with some regularity but were not always written down or remembered. And now, turning his head slightly, he became aware that a man had come up behind him, and was standing watching the puppies at play.

  ‘How many?’ asked the man.

  ‘Six, I’m afraid,’ said Angus, sighing. ‘Six spirited, enthusiastic, hungry, incontinent, hybrid and utterly lovable dogs.’

  The man laughed. ‘They are very beautiful, aren’t they?’

  Angus raised an eyebrow. ‘They are hardly likely to win at Cruft’s,’ he said. ‘Their mother was an extremely odd-looking dog. Very common. My own dog, their father, is by contrast a fairly handsome fellow. He’s got a gold tooth, you see, and a rather raffish grin. Great dog.’

  ‘Tasty little things, though,’ said the man. And then, after a few moments of hesitation, went on to ask, ‘Have you got a home for them yet?’

  Again Angus sighed. ‘That’s proving somewhat difficult,’ he said. ‘I’ve been asking around my friends, but nobody seems interested. Precious little support in that quarter when the chips are down.’

  The man shook his head in sympathy. ‘That must be very worrying for you. One or two puppies would be bad enough, but having six must be something of a nightmare!’

  ‘You can say that again,’ said Angus. ‘In fact, I have already had several bad dreams about these little chaps. I dreamed a few nights ago that I was in the Scottish Arts Club with them and they were all over the other members. It was extremely embarrassing.’

  The man looked at Angus, who noticed now his eyes, which were bright with enthusiasm.

  ‘I like dogs,’ said the man. ‘I might be able to help you out.’

  Angus caught his breath. ‘You mean you’d take one off my hands?’

  ‘I’ll take all six,’ said the man. ‘If you’re happy to part with them.’ Angus felt a sudden, overwhelming euphoria wash over him. ‘Well, that’s very generous of you,’ he began. ‘All six . . .’

  ‘Certainly,’ said the man. ‘I can take care of them for you. Willingly.’

  Angus paused. The prospect was thrilling, of course, but he was a responsible dog-owner and one could hardly just hand six puppies over to a complete stranger. ‘I’m sorry to raise this,’ he said, ‘but I’ve only just met you. I don’t really know anything about you.’

  ‘Of course,’ said the man, stretching out to shake Angus’s hand. ‘Of course.
Well let me introduce myself.’

  They shook hands, and Angus felt, quite unmistakably, the pressure on his knuckle. A Mason! Well that was all right. If one could not entrust a puppy - or even six puppies - to a member of a Masonic lodge, then to whom could one entrust him, or indeed them?

  ‘Here’s my card,’ said the man. ‘It has all my details on it.’

  Angus took the card and slipped it into his pocket. For the first time since the puppies had arrived in his flat he felt a free man again. I am no longer the owner of seven dogs, he said to himself; I am the owner of one, which is just about right.

  ‘Would you like to take them now?’ he asked. ‘Or perhaps tomorrow morning?’

  ‘Well, no time like the present,’ said the man. ‘If you help me get them on the leash, I’ll take them off your hands.’

  He began to marshal the puppies together. As they did so, Angus noticed that the man seemed to lift each one up as he put the leash on, as if to weigh it. How caring, thought Angus; a concern with birth weight and development.

  32. Last Thoughts

  When Matthew felt the first tug of the water - the one that led to his overbalancing - he thought nothing of it. His mind at the time was on something quite different: on the meal he had enjoyed in the restaurant overlooking the beach; and on the name of the West Australian wine they had so enjoyed. Cape something or other. Menthol? No, that was not it. Menotti? No, he was a composer. And hadn’t he lived out near Gifford somewhere? Yesterday House? No, that was not it. Yester . . . Yes, that was it. And he wrote that opera that . . .