The Unbearable Lightness of Scones: A 44 Scotland Street Novel

by Alexander McCall Smith

  Matthew stopped reading. ‘Oh dear, Lou. That’s not so good, is it? Have you heard from Robbie since they . . . since they took him away?’

  Big Lou shook her head. ‘I haven’t, Matthew,’ she said quietly. ‘And you know something? I don’t want to hear from him. I’ve decided that this is the end. I’ve put up with all this Jacobite business for long enough because I realised how important it was to him. But now I can’t take any more of it. I’ve had it up to here. I really have.’

  She paused, lowering her voice. ‘And here’s another thing, Matthew: I think the Hanoverians were more democratic. They didn’t have that divine right of kings obsession that the Stuarts had. They were simply better.’

  Matthew reached out and touched her lightly on the arm. What words of comfort could he provide? What could he say about Robbie, and the man before, and the man before that? Every one of Big Lou’s men had been hopeless in one way or another. She deserved better - anybody who knew her would agree on that. But love, it seemed, was not a matter of desert. It was random and unpredictable. Unworthy men were taken on by good women, and the other way round. There was no justice in the way in which the patterns of love arranged themselves.

  He would have liked to say to Big Lou: ‘Don’t worry, Lou. The next one will be better.’ But he could not say that, because it would not be true. So they stood there, neither saying anything, and then, after a few minutes, Matthew looked at his watch and told her that it was time for him to get back to the gallery.

  91. Fathers and Sons

  Dr Roger Sinclair, clinical psychologist, inheritor of the mantle of the recently enchaired Professor Hugo Fairbairn, was standing close to the large sash window of his consulting room in Queen Street. Outside, above the distant hills of Fife, wisps of cloud played chase across the sky. He watched these through the glass; the sky here was so different, he thought, from that other sky under which he had grown up. This one was constantly changing, was washed out; at times covered with curtains of rain, at times made of an attenuated blue that was gentle, like the surface of a milky sea; the sky of his boyhood had been high, and wide, empty and intensely blue, like lapis lazuli; filled with light, too; a great theatre for the sun.

  He took a step forward, so that his nose almost touched the glass. Somebody had said to him once that in France window-shopping was called lèche vitrine, the licking of the window; a wonderful expression that somehow conveyed the longing felt by those who wanted the goods within but could not buy them. Orality, he thought, of course it was orality: the infant within wishes to incorporate the world through his mouth; to swallow the goods in the window.

  He noticed that his breath had created a small patch of condensation on the glass, an island shape, dense and opaque in the middle, fainter at the edge; the rest of the glass was the sea, liquid, pure. He stood back an inch or two and saw that the island was exactly the shape of Australia - home - and using the tip of his little finger, he traced a line in the moisture, a route from Brisbane to Melbourne. My journey, he thought, or the start of it.

  He had been born in Brisbane, and had spent his childhood in Toowoomba, where his father had been the accountant of a large firm of cattle exporters. His father’s face came to him now; his father who had started his own voyage in Kelso and had always spoken of it to his son as if it were some sort of Eden, a place where everything was somehow more valid than the world of the smoky office from which he looked out onto the great cattle pens with their patient victims, their attendant clouds of flies. His father had hated the expression ‘ten pound Pom’ and had said: ‘If they want to call me a ten pound Scot, I’m happy with that, but don’t call me a ten pound Pom.’ As a small boy Roger had been puzzled. Who had paid ten pounds for his father? Was that all that he was worth?

  And now I’ve come back, he thought, just like a salmon that remembers where it was spawned. But do I really belong to this place? He had driven down to Kelso shortly after his arrival, as an act of homage induced entirely by guilt, and had looked for the house that his father had talked about. He found it, and had stood outside and gazed at its modest façade, at the windows giving immediately onto the street, and had thought how mean and small can be our holy places.

  He stared at the fading map and at the place where Toowoomba would have been. Then he closed his eyes and saw a block of the boys’ boarding school where he had been sent, together with the sons of the owners of the big cattle stations, and where he had been so unhappy. He saw the place near the door where he had been pushed to the ground hard by a large muscular boy from the Cape York Peninsula who had then sat on him and winded him so thoroughly that he thought that he would die. And he saw his mother, the pillar of the Anglican Bridge Club, drinking endless cups of weak tea with her friend on the front veranda and saying to her, ‘I’m dying of boredom, you know, Lill. A slow death. Pure boredom.’

  He, at least, had escaped to Melbourne, and to university, and had discovered psychology, against the will of his father, who had wanted him to follow him into business. He had left home on the understanding that he was to register for a bachelor of commerce degree at Monash, and had done so. But a week after registration, and after attending the first three orientation lectures, he had changed his registration to psychology.

  He did well, although he never told his parents of the change in his course. His mother would hardly have been concerned; her mind was on the affairs of the Anglican Bridge Club, and the difference between a bachelor of commerce degree and a degree in psychology would not have struck her as being very great. Anyway, she was proud of him, and of anything he did; his father was the problem.

  When he graduated, his parents came down to Melbourne for the ceremony.

  His father was bemused. ‘Look, Rog,’ he said. ‘They’ve made a mistake on the programme. They’ve put you under psychology rather than commerce. Better get that sorted out!’

  ‘No, I don’t think we should make a fuss, Dad. I’ll just go through with it. We can sort it all out later.’

  His father had been appalled. ‘You can’t do that, Rog! You can’t go and get the wrong bit of paper. Heavens no. I’ll speak to them myself, if you like.’

  He swallowed. ‘Actually, Dad, I changed courses. I meant to tell you, seeing how you were paying for the whole thing, but you know how it is . . . I kind of forgot. It’s a very good degree, and they’ve accepted me for a master’s in analytical child psychology. That’s quite a thing, you know. The competition is very stiff.’

  His father had looked at him in wide-eyed horror. ‘You forgot to tell me . . .’

  And Roger thought: all my life you’ve wanted me to be just like you, to do the things you like to do, to be a smaller version of you. You thought I wasn’t tough enough. You sent me to that school. You said that I should stand up for myself, be a man, be an ordinary Aussie bloke, just like you. But that’s not who I am.

  His father looked at him, and then looked at his mother. She looked away. This was male business, father and son business. She did not want them to fight. She wanted them to be friends, just as the husbands and sons of the other women at the Anglican Bridge Club were friends.

  92. A Complex Complex

  Bertie sat in the waiting room while his mother was inside, talking to Dr Sinclair. They had been ten minutes already and, with any luck, it would be another ten before Dr Sinclair called him through.

  Sometimes, in the days when he came to see Dr Fairbairn, the two adults had talked for forty-five minutes before Bertie was admitted, which meant that he had only fifteen minutes of the psychotherapist’s bizarre questions. In Bertie’s mind, Dr Sinclair, or Roger as he had asked to be called, was not nearly so bad but, even so, it would be nice if their sessions were shortened by his mother’s interventions.

  He searched the pile of magazines on the waiting room table to see if there was a new copy of Scottish Field. There was, and he seized it eagerly. There was an eagle on the cover this time, and Bertie studied the plumage and claws with some i
nterest. Tofu had said that he had seen an eagle in a tree in his garden, but Bertie doubted this.

  Tofu lied about most things when it suited him, and it usually suited him to impress other people. He lied about his father, saying that he was a private detective, when Bertie knew that he was really a writer of books on vegetarian matters. He lied about his mother, who he claimed had been eaten by a lion while on safari in Africa, but who was, according to Olive, locked up in prison. Olive herself, of course, was not above lying. She had misled Akela with entirely false claims of previous scouting experience, but much more importantly she had deceived everybody at school with claims that Bertie was her boyfriend, which, as far as he was concerned, was most certainly not the case.

  He opened Scottish Field and turned the pages. There was an article on a man who had turned an old byre into a house. There was an article about a man who restored old cars, and one about wolves and whether they should be reintroduced into Scotland. Bertie thought this would be a good idea, but that it would be best to reintroduce them into Glasgow first before they started to reintroduce them into Edinburgh. If the wolves did well in Glasgow, and didn’t bite too many people, then they could start by reintroducing them into Queen Street Gardens before they allowed them to make their lairs elsewhere.

  He paused, and looked up at the ceiling. What would happen, he wondered, if they reintroduced wolves into Queen Street Gardens but did not tell his mother? And what would happen if he, Bertie, read about this in Scottish Field? Would he have to warn his mother if she told him that she was taking Ulysses for a walk in the gardens - as she sometimes did? If the wolves ate his mother, of course, they might take pity on Ulysses and raise him as one of them. Bertie had read about this happening, about feral children being brought up by wolves and such creatures, and he thought it would be fun to have a brother who lived with wolves, like Romulus and Remus.

  Bertie skimmed through the article on wolves and reached the pages at the back where there were pictures of the latest parties and dances. This was the part of the magazine that he liked the most, as he now recognised some of the people in the pictures, and it made him feel part of everything to see them enjoying themselves.

  He would go to these parties and dances himself when he was eighteen; he was sure of that; he would go without his mother. There had been a dinner at Prestonfield House, he read, and there had been hundreds of people there. He scrutinised the pictures and saw some faces he knew: Mr Charlie Maclean, in a kilt, talking to Mr Humphrey Holmes; Mr Roddy Martine talking to a lady in a white dress with a tartan shawl about her shoulders. Bertie’s eye moved over the captions. Annabel Goldie talking to Mr Alex Salmond, and both smiling. He had read about them in the papers and he knew who they were. He was telling her a joke, Bertie thought, and it must have been very funny, because she was laughing a lot. And there were pictures of a band. Mr David Todd playing the fiddle in his tartan trousers while a group of people danced. Bertie sighed; he had only ever been to one party, and that was Tofu’s, at the bowling alley in Fountainbridge. There were never any photographs of parties like that in Scottish Field.

  Irene did not take forty-five minutes. Within ten minutes of going in, she came out again.

  ‘You can go in to see Dr Sinclair now, Bertie,’ she said, rather tersely. ‘Mummy’s popping out to Valvona & Crolla, but will be back at the end of your session.’

  Bertie went in and sat in the chair in front of Dr Sinclair’s desk.

  There was a silence, and out of politeness Bertie thought he would make a remark. ‘Do you ever think about wolves, Dr Sinclair?’

  The psychotherapist, who had been scribbling a note on his pad of paper, looked up sharply.

  ‘Wolves, Bertie? No, I can’t say I think about wolves very often.’ He paused. ‘Do you?’

  Bertie nodded. ‘I think that wolves are going to come back,’ he said.

  Dr Sinclair stared at him. ‘That’s interesting, Bertie. Does that worry you?’

  Bertie thought for a moment. ‘A little bit. I wouldn’t like to be bitten by one.’

  Dr Sinclair said nothing. Freud’s Little Hans, he thought; he had been worried about being bitten by the dray horses. And then there was Freud’s wolf man. How strange that young Bertie should . . .

  Bertie interrupted this disturbing train of thought. ‘Of course, we could always get the Archers to deal with them if they became too much of a problem in Edinburgh.’

  Dr Sinclair looked puzzled. ‘“The Archers”, Bertie? Who are these archers?’

  ‘They wear a green uniform,’ explained Bertie. ‘And they have a hide-out on the edge of the Meadows. I’m not sure if they’d be able to hit the wolves, though . . .’

  Dr Sinclair made a note on his pad, but kept his gaze on Bertie. I almost made a major mistake, he thought. I was on the point on discharging this poor little boy, on the grounds that he did not need therapy. And now this . . . a complicated neurotic structure, complete with wolf and archer fantasies, and I missed it entirely, until it revealed itself, unfolded before my eyes.

  I owe his mother an apology, he thought. It just goes to show how professional arrogance and its attendant assumptions can lead one up entirely the wrong path.

  93. A Dinner Invitation

  Bruce’s invitation to dinner at the Todds’ house in Braid Hills had been delivered to him by Todd’s secretary. It was written on a correspondence card tucked into a white envelope: ‘Dear Bruce, Sasha and I would love to have you round for dinner next Saturday. Free? I hope so. Raeburn.’

  Bruce spent some time analysing the precise wording of this message, and the mode of its delivery. The fact the envelope had been brought to him by Todd’s secretary was significant, but he could not yet work out exactly what that significance was. Was Todd embarrassed to ask him face to face? Was he concerned Bruce would find it easier to refuse if he delivered the invitation personally? Or was it a case of his not being overly enthusiastic and therefore issuing the invitation as a casual note, dashed off and tossed across the desk to his secretary? It was hard to tell.

  And then there was the wording, which was capable of as many readings as there were words. ‘Sasha and I’: did that mean Sasha was the originator of the invitation, with Todd being added merely for politeness’s sake? He could hardly have written: ‘Sasha would love to have you round for dinner’, as that would have made clear his own indifference, or indeed antipathy, to the idea of entertaining him.

  The words ‘would love to have you round’ were also problematic. Todd would never say he would love anything to happen; that did not sound at all like him. He would say, ‘I would like to have you round’, or, possibly, ‘Would you care to come round for dinner?’ He would not say, ‘I would love you to have you round.’ That was the language of the thespian, the man in touch with his feminine side; it was not the language of men like Todd. So this meant, perhaps, that the wife was the real author of the note.

  But then, just a word or two further on, the presumption changed. ‘Free’? had the ring of the authentic Todd: he was always saying things like that. ‘See?’ ‘Agree?’ ‘Problem?’ He liked single-word sentences with a question mark at the end. And ‘I hope so’ was also quintessential Todd. It was an expression he used when he wanted to preclude further discussion. ‘Free? I hope so’ meant: you had better be.

  So Bruce concluded this invitation was the work of two minds. The words used at the beginning were those dictated by Sasha; those at the end were Todd’s. They both wanted him to come to dinner then. And Bruce, still grateful to Todd for his kindness in giving him his job back, had written a note saying he would be delighted to accept. ‘Saturday great,’ he wrote. ‘Can’t wait. Bruce.’

  Even if he had not expected to be invited for dinner quite so soon, Bruce had anticipated some gesture from Todd. Since he had started in the firm once more, Bruce had been assiduous in the performance of his duties. His reports had all been models of their type: hedged about with all manner of exclusion clauses, as was
standard surveyor practice, but clear and concise, and, what was most important, delivered well on time. One client, in fact, had been so pleased by the speed with which Bruce had completed a survey that he had specially drawn Todd’s attention to it and asked him to compliment Bruce.

  Bruce accepted Todd’s words of praise with modesty. ‘I do my best,’ he said. ‘It was an unusual place.’

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Bruce. ‘It underlined how heated the market’s become: a quarter of a million for a very small studio apartment in Great King Street.’

  Todd shrugged. ‘Fashionable area.’

  ‘I know that,’ said Bruce. ‘But this was actually a converted cupboard. A large one, but still a cupboard.’

  ‘That’s taking it a bit far,’ said Todd.

  Bruce nodded. ‘They had a very clever architect. He managed to get a mezzanine floor in and a sunken bath. Pretty amazing.’

  ‘And windows?’

  ‘No,’ said Bruce. ‘The original cupboard had no windows. It was just a cupboard, you see. But they put in really good hidden lighting. Quite a place.’

  ‘It’s often the address that counts,’ mused Todd. ‘A cupboard in Great King Street is worth a three-bedroom flat in Easter Road. But well done, anyway. They seem pleased with what they’ve got.’

  ‘I hope there’s only one of them,’ said Bruce. ‘I don’t think there would be room for two.’

  Now, standing before Todd’s house, glancing at his wristwatch to check he was neither too early nor too late, Bruce took a deep breath. It would not be easy seeing Sasha again, after that unfortunate misunderstanding, and as for the daughter . . . Had Todd said anything about her?

  Todd answered the doorbell. ‘It’s you,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Bruce. ‘Me.’

  Todd ushered him into the hall. It had been all of four years - maybe a bit longer - since Bruce had last been in the house, but as he stood there, it all seemed remarkably familiar. The views of the Edinburgh skyline, which could be seen from the front windows, were reproduced in prints on the wall. And then there were the golfing prints: ‘Hole in One’, ‘The Old Course at St Andrews’, ‘On Course for a Birdie’ and so on.