The Unbearable Lightness of Scones: A 44 Scotland Street Novel

by Alexander McCall Smith

  ‘The ladies are through here,’ said Todd, indicating the door that led into the living room. ‘You’ll remember my daughter, Lizzie, won’t you? That dance we all went to?’

  Bruce tried to ensure that his expression did not give him away. Lizzie Todd! There had been nothing about her on Todd’s invitation, and had there been Bruce would not have been standing there that evening. What a disaster she was, Bruce started to think, and then stopped himself. That was the old Bruce; the new Bruce said: ‘Lizzie? Of course I remember her. How nice.’

  They entered the room. Sasha stood by the window, while Lizzie sat on a sofa, her shoes on the carpet below her, her feet tucked under her. They both looked at Bruce as if he had interrupted a conversation.

  ‘There you are,’ said Sasha, moving to shake Bruce’s hand. ‘You remember Lizzie, don’t you?’

  Bruce swallowed. It was eight o’clock. If dinner was served reasonably quickly he could be away by eleven-thirty at the latest. But then . . . The new Bruce smiled. ‘Lizzie,’ he said. ‘It’s been a long time.’

  She was looking up at him he as he spoke. He remembered her sneering, but she did not do so now. And her face, from this angle at least, was extremely beautiful, like that of a Madonna in the first blossom of pregnancy; full, satisfied, expectant.

  94. Bruce Amazes Himself

  ‘So,’ said Bruce to Lizzie Todd. ‘What are you doing these days?’ A strand of blonde hair had fallen over Lizzie Todd’s brow and she swept it aside before she answered. Bruce wondered: had she been a blonde when he had met her last? He had a vague memory to the contrary, but it had been years ago. His eyes, though, followed the strand of hair. It was highlighted, he thought; highlighted, at the least.

  ‘Me?’ said Lizzie. ‘I left Glasgow last year and came back through here. I’ve got a flat in Woodburn Terrace. You know that place just after the Dominion Cinema?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Bruce. ‘I surveyed a flat there once. It was rather a nice flat - ground floor. But the people had cats, and you know what they can do to a place. And there were student neighbours.’

  ‘Not all students make a noise,’ said Lizzie. ‘I’ve got some students in the flat next to me, and I hardly ever hear them.’ She paused. ‘Mind you, we made a noise in our student flat over in Glasgow. You could probably hear us in Edinburgh.’

  Bruce laughed. ‘Who didn’t? I suppose that it’s because you’re selfish at that stage.’ He heard himself speaking; selfish - he was not selfish any more. Not since four weeks ago.

  He looked at her. I could do worse, he thought; a lot worse. But did he want to get involved? There had been no girlfriend since he had split up with . . . at first he could not bring himself to mention the name, but then he thought - new Bruce, and he uttered it silently: Julia Donald.

  ‘What did you study at uni again?’ he asked.

  ‘Indeterminate studies,’ she said. ‘It was a great course. You could design a lot of it yourself - hence the name. You had parameters, of course.’

  Bruce nodded. He had never been out with a girl who understood the word parameters. It was useful word for a girl, he thought, especially at the beginning of a relationship. Now here are the parameters . . .

  ‘You’re smiling.’

  He looked at Lizzie. ‘I was just thinking of something,’ he said.

  In the background there was the sound of ice being taken from an ice bucket and put into a glass.

  ‘Was it something I said?’

  He smiled, more openly now. ‘Yes. The word parameter. It’s a great word. Like perambulator. That’s all.’

  Lizzie looked amused. ‘We had a lecturer called Steve. He used to talk about parameters all the time. I saw him once in Byres Road with his wife and baby. He looked so . . . so defeated.’

  ‘Was the baby in a parameter?’ asked Bruce.

  Lizzie reached out and gave him a playful nudge. Bruce watched her hand, and willed it to stay where it was, but she withdrew it. His gaze moved up; she had a dimple in her cheek - he had never noticed it before, but it was there now, now that she smiled. And she was wearing a perfume that he had smelled before; one that he liked. Perhaps it had been in one of those fold-over and sniff pages in a magazine.

  ‘I like your perfume,’ he said. ‘What is it?’

  She looked slightly surprised. ‘Something my mother gave me. She bought it in the duty free. Want some?’

  Bruce arched an eyebrow. ‘Not for me,’ he said.

  ‘You wouldn’t use one of those fragrances for men, or whatever they call them?’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind those. Some of them are great.’

  ‘But you don’t use anything at the moment?’

  He shook his head. Then, ‘Actually, I use a moisturiser. My flatmate talked to me about it. It’s a men’s moisturiser.’

  Lizzie approved. ‘It’s about time that more men used moisturiser, ’ she said. ‘You’ve got skin, same as all of us. You need to look after it.’

  Sasha, who had been attending to something in the kitchen, now returned. Todd had been busying himself at the drinks trolley while Bruce and Lizzie chatted; he now threw Sasha a glance, one of those signals between married people. She came to his side.

  ‘Raeburn, could you give me a hand with something?’ Her voice was loud enough to be heard by Bruce and Lizzie. Lizzie’s eyes narrowed as she looked at her mother, but only briefly.

  ‘Certainly,’ said Todd. ‘Just let me give everybody their drink. Here.’ He brought glasses over and placed them on a small table at each end of the sofa on which Bruce and Lizzie were sitting. Then he and Sasha left the room.

  Bruce reached for the gin and tonic that Todd had mixed him. He was not very fond of gin and tonic, but had asked for it when he came in because he had been feeling ill at ease and a gin and tonic was a simple request. The glass was cold to the touch, little drops of condensation on the outside, wet against his hand.

  He put the glass down and then turned to Lizzie. The strand of hair had fallen over her brow again. He reached out. ‘Let me attend to that,’ he said.

  ‘My hair,’ she said. ‘I need one of those hair bands, but they look so silly.’

  ‘They don’t,’ he said. ‘Or they wouldn’t . . . on you.’

  She smiled at him. He saw her teeth. He leaned forward, across the sofa, and kissed her. He almost overbalanced, but checked himself. Then he pulled back and looked at her. She was staring at him in astonishment.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he mumbled, half-looking over his shoulder, at the door through which Sasha and Todd had disappeared. ‘I just felt that I had to do that. Sorry.’

  She reached forward, as she had done before; this time she left her hand on his forearm.

  ‘Don’t be sorry about that. In fact . . . do it again.’

  ‘What about your folks?’ he asked.

  ‘They’re in the kitchen.’ She paused. ‘And anyway, I think they like you.’

  Bruce hesitated. What he was about to say was not just for effect; new Bruce, he thought. ‘And do you?’

  ‘Of course. I think you’re . . . Of course I like you.’

  He did not know why he said it, but the words emerged anyway. ‘Enough to marry me?’

  He almost made himself gasp. He sat back and smacked his head with the palm of his hand, the gesture of one who has said something profoundly stupid.

  ‘Well, that’s a bit sudden, isn’t it?’ Lizzie said. ‘But I like you enough to go to the Dominion Cinema with you. That’s a start.’

  95. The Deepest Secret Edinburgh Has to Offer

  Domenica’s lunch with Dilly Emslie was long overdue. The two friends had made several attempts at meeting, but on each occasion life had intervened, as Domenica put it. One lunch had to be cancelled because Domenica developed an abscess under a tooth and required to be under the dental surgeon’s knife at the time. On another occasion Dilly found herself in a committee meeting that overran its allotted time by several hours, and was still going strong at three in
the afternoon. This time, though, the table at Glass and Thompson was booked well in advance and diaries were cleared several hours on either side of lunchtime.

  Not that Domenica found she had much to clear: she had nothing on in the morning, she noticed, and nothing on in the afternoon. And the evening, too, was blank. And that, she decided, was one of the issues she needed to discuss over lunch: she needed a project and could think of none. There had, of course, been some excitement, which had given some salience to her days - there had been the business over the blue Spode teacup, which had run for some months, and then there had been the issue of Antonia’s marmalade. That had provided excitement for others as well, but its denouement had been very tame indeed. Now there was no prospect of Antonia’s arrest - marmalade, she expected, was beneath the notice of the police, although one should never over-estimate, she felt, the potential pettiness of officials. Scotland was not France, where the diktats of Brussels were routinely ignored; Scotland was a law-abiding country, and there was always the possibility somebody somewhere would take it upon himself to make a fuss about illegal marmalade. But even if that happened, Antonia was unlikely to be sent to prison.

  So, with that prospect precluded, what was there to look forward to?

  ‘I need to do something,’ Domenica said to Dilly as they settled at their window table in Glass and Thompson. ‘I feel rather . . . rather useless at the moment.’

  Dilly looked at her with concern. ‘You’re not depressed, are you?’

  Domenica shook her head. ‘No, I don’t think so. I know what depression feels like. I was depressed for a while after my husband was electrocuted.’ She looked thoughtful. ‘You know, I had the most extraordinarily tactless medical advice on that occasion.’

  ‘I suppose doctors can be tactless, like the rest of us,’ said Dilly.

  ‘In this case even more so,’ said Domenica. ‘We were in Cochin then, which was where we lived at the time. I went to see my normal doctor and he referred me to a colleague - a psychiatrist, I suppose. I thought that this man would put me on a course of anti-depressants, but no. You know what he suggested? Electric shock treatment.’

  Dilly tried not to laugh, but could not help herself. ‘Unfortunate,’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Domenica. ‘In the particular circumstances. And anyway, I recovered once I had made my booking to come home. The prospect of saying goodbye to my mother-in-law cheered me up immensely. The depression lifted more or less immediately.’

  Domenica looked about her. The café was busy, but she did not recognise anybody in it. That could change, and probably would; Edinburgh was still sufficiently intimate for there to be no real anonymity.

  Dilly looked at her friend. ‘Yes, you need a project, Domenica. A person like you can’t sit around. But . . .’ She was being very careful. The last time they had had this conversation, Domenica had embarked on a highly dangerous field trip to the pirate communities of the Malacca Straits. Providence had already been tempted once, and might not allow for a satisfactory ending if tried again.

  Domenica, who had been looking out of the window as if expecting inspiration from that quarter, suddenly turned round. ‘Do you ever get the feeling that there’s something going on in Edinburgh? Something that you can’t quite put your finger on?’

  Dilly thought about this and was about to answer when Domenica continued: ‘Remember that book by Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities? Marco Polo tells Kubla Khan all about those cities that the Emperor has never visited. The cities aren’t real, of course, but he gives the most wonderful descriptions of them.’

  ‘I remember it,’ said Dilly. And she recalled, for a brief moment, that haunting line, ‘In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree . . .’ And did Willy Dalrymple not entitle his first book In Xanadu? But if she said anything about Kubla Khan, or Xanadu, or even Willy Dalrymple, then she would be a person from Porlock, and so she waited for Domenica to go on.

  ‘I think there’s something going on in Edinburgh,’ Domenica said. ‘There’s an invisible city just underneath the surface. Every so often we get a glimpse of it; somebody makes an unguarded remark, begins a sentence and then fails to finish it. But it’s there. What we anthropologists would call a realm of social meaning.’ She paused. ‘Have you noticed how so many people in Edinburgh seem to know one another? How when you go to a do of some sort, everybody smiles and nods? Have you noticed how in conversation too there is an automatic assumption that you know the people the other person is talking about?’

  Dilly shrugged. ‘I suppose . . .’

  ‘There’s a whole network,’ Domenica went on.

  Dilly looked at her friend. Domenica was always so rational, so balanced. Had she become a tiny bit . . . a tiny bit paranoid? Surely not.

  ‘A network of what?’ she asked.

  Domenica hesitated. Then she leaned forward. ‘Watsonians,’ she whispered.

  At that moment, a bank of cloud, which had been building up in the east, moved across the sky, obscuring the sun that had been streaming down upon Dundas Street. The familiar suddenly became unfamiliar; the friendly, threatening.

  Dilly raised an eyebrow. ‘But of course,’ she said. ‘We all know that.’

  ‘But do we know how it works?’ Domenica asked. ‘We know that they’re there. But how do they operate? That would make a really interesting anthropological study. “Power and Association in a Scottish City” - I can see the title of the paper already!’

  Dilly had to agree. It would make fascinating reading. But how would Domenica penetrate the closed circles of Watsonians? She posed the question, and waited for a reply as Domenica sat back in her seat, a smile spreading across her face. ‘There will be no difficulty,’ she said. ‘I have the perfect cover.’ She paused, and then delivered her bombshell. ‘I’m one myself.’

  96. A Scorched-Earth Wardrobe

  Elspeth Harmony sat at the kitchen table in the flat in India Street and contemplated her situation. It was not one of those stock-takings that follows upon a personal crisis, it was, rather, a leisurely dwelling on where she was and how she had got there. Unlike Dante, she did not find herself in the middle of a dark wood; such woods might lie ahead, but she was not yet old enough to feel them pressing in on her. Nor did she feel that she had lost Dante’s straight path, even if she had, within the space of a few months, sold her flat, left her job and married Matthew. Even her name had changed - for some purposes at least - although she still thought of herself as Elspeth Harmony, and would use that name for professional purposes. But what professional purposes? she asked herself. She was no longer a teacher, and that she missed.

  My life, thought Elspeth Harmony, has been totally transformed. How many months ago was it that I said goodbye to the children at the Steiner School? Five? Six? That had not been easy, as she had gone back specially to see them after her suspension - for pinching Olive, under severe provocation - had been rescinded. The children had been puzzled by her sudden replacement by a new teacher. One afternoon Miss Harmony had been there, and then the next morning they had Mr Bing welcoming them into the classroom, with no sign of Miss Harmony.

  There had been speculation in the playground, of course. ‘She’s been kidnapped,’ announced Tofu. ‘You just wait. There’ll be a note from the kidnappers asking for ransom. And we’ll all have to give up our pocket money for months, just to get her back.’

  Bertie did not think that this was a very credible theory, but said nothing. He thought that Miss Harmony would be back; she would not leave them like that; she would not desert them. And a few days later he was overjoyed when she did come back, not permanently, but at least to say goodbye properly. ‘I’m getting married,’ she said. ‘I’m very happy, but I shall miss all of you so much.’

  ‘Even Tofu?’ asked Olive. ‘Will you even miss him, Miss Harmony?’

  If Miss Harmony hesitated, it was only for the briefest of moments before she replied. ‘But of course I’ll miss Tofu, Olive! I shall miss all of you
.’

  Olive looked doubtful.

  ‘Will you have children yourself, Miss Harmony?’ asked Skye, and added, ‘Are you already pregnant?’

  ‘Goodness no,’ said Miss Harmony. ‘I mean, I’m not expecting a baby just yet, but I would certainly like one.’

  ‘Does your husband know how to make you pregnant, Miss Harmony?’ Skye persisted. ‘Will you be able to teach him?’

  Miss Harmony blushed, and laughed. ‘Let’s not talk about me,’ she said. ‘Let’s talk about what fun you’re going to have with Mr Bing as your new teacher.’

  And then, after that conversation, there had been the leave-taking. Many of the children had cried, and Elspeth Harmony had found herself weeping too, and had been obliged to stop her car in Spylaw Road and compose herself before she could drive on. It had been a good school in which to teach, and she had loved the children, for all their little ways. Love: the quality in a school-teacher which no training can instil; it must be there, in the heart, ready to be discovered, poured out.

  Now love would find a different focus in her life. She had a husband, and a home to make out of this rather austere bachelor establishment into which she had moved. Of course that required tact; Matthew was proud of his flat and of the things it contained. He had shown her his British aviation prints in the bathroom and his framed batik from Bali. Neither of these, she felt, had a long-term future in the flat, but she had refrained from saying anything just yet. And as for the kitchen, the only possible approach, she felt, was a scorched-earth one. She had seen pictures of Clive Christian kitchens and she thought one of those would fit very well in India Street; it was not the sort of street to have Clive Christian kitchens at present, but all that could change.