Alexander Smith - Unbearable Lightness of Scones

They went to the check-in and handed in their suitcases. The woman behind the desk smiled at them. “Honeymoon?” she asked.

Matthew showed his surprise. “How did you know?”

“Because you have that look about you, and…” She paused for effect. “You didn’t say that you were on honeymoon. So many others do. Looking for special treatment. And then you look at the finger, and what do you see? No ring.”

Matthew glanced at his left hand. So strange; it was so strange, this public declaration of commitment, this announcement of love, made gold in this modest band.

“We’re going to have such a marvellous time,” he whispered to Elspeth, who looked up at him and said, “Yes.”

He was thinking of life; she of Australia.

Bruce Anderson, erstwhile surveyor and persistent narcissist, had not been invited to Matthew and Elspeth’s wedding, although he had heard about the engagement and had congratulated Matthew – in an ostentatiously friendly way – when they had bumped into one another in the Cumberland Bar one evening.

Bruce himself was now engaged, to Julia Donald, the daughter of a wealthy hotel owner and businessman, a man who understood Bruce extremely well and had realised that money, and an expensive car, were just the inducements required to get him to marry his daughter. And for her part, Julia understood Bruce too and had realised that what was needed to trap him was not only her father’s inducements but wiles of her own, female wiles involving her unexpected pregnancy – “Such a surprise, Brucie, but there we are!”

For Bruce, the idea of marriage was not completely without appeal, but it was an appeal that depended on its being distant; imminent marriage, followed by fatherhood, was not what he had had in mind. But when Julia’s father made clear the terms on which he would welcome Bruce into the family – generous ones by any standards – Bruce’s misgivings had been allayed. Perhaps being married to Julia would not be so bad, he thought. He could switch off in the face of constant wittering. Most men did that, he thought, with their wives. And he would never have to worry again about buying a flat – Julia owned a perfectly good flat in Howe Street, worth, Bruce had calculated, at least six hundred thousand pounds at current market prices; and she had no mortgage. In fact, Bruce was not sure if she even knew what a mortgage was; whereas Bruce, like most people, knew very well what a mortgage was and understood the difference between those who had a large mortgage and those who had no mortgage at all. They walked differently, he thought.

He would also never have to worry about a job now that Julia’s father had made him a director of his property company and given him sole charge of the wine bar he owned in George Street. If Julia came with all that, then the least he could do, he decided, was to be civil to her.

“We’re going to have to decide about names, Brucie,” she said at the breakfast table that morning.

Bruce looked up from his bowl of muesli. Since he had taken to reading a magazine called Men’s Health , he had become quite health-conscious and broke a series of nuts and antioxidants into his plate each morning. With a body like mine, he thought, one takes care of it. And he could look at the bare-torsoed men pictured in Men’s Health without feeling inadequate; he could look them in the pectorals.

“Names?”

“For… for you know who,” said Julia, looking down at her stomach.

“Oh.” Bruce stared down at the mixture of nuts and powdered flax seed on his plate.

“I thought that for a boy we might go for Jamie,” said Julia. “It’s such a nice name. Strong. Or Glen.”

“Jamie’s all right,” said Bruce. “But not Glen. I knew a Glen at Morrison’s, and he was a real waste of space. Collected stamps.”

“Well, Gavin. There’s Gavin Hastings.”

“It could be a girl,” said Bruce.

Julia shook her head. “I’ve got a feeling it’s a boy,” she said. “Just like you, Brucie.”

Bruce said nothing. Thoughts of Julia’s baby – and that is how he regarded it – had not been to the forefront of his mind. It was her baby, her idea, he told himself, and even if he had had a part in it, it was not something that he had intended or embraced. She wanted this baby – that was obvious – and so let her do the thinking about it.

The problem with babies, in Bruce’s view, was that they spoiled everything. What was the point of living in this nice flat in Howe Street, with the money to do exactly what one wanted to do – to travel, to go out to all the best restaurants, to be seen – if you had a baby to think about? Babies tied you down; they demanded to be fed; they yelled their heads off; they smelled.

He finished his breakfast in silence. There was no further discussion about babies, and Julia was absorbed in a magazine that had dropped through the letter-box with the morning post – one of her vacuous fashion magazines, full of glossy pictures of models and bottles of perfume, pictures which Bruce took a guilty pleasure in looking at while affecting to despise them.

“This stuff,” he said, pointing at the box of flax seed, “contains all the omega oils you need.”

“That’s nice,” said Julia.

“I’m thinking of joining that gym up at the Sheraton Hotel,” Bruce went on. “You know the one, with all those pools. That one.”

“I’ll come too,” said Julia. “I need to get in shape.”

Bruce said nothing. He was not sure if he wanted Julia tagging after him at the gym; and what would happen when her baby arrived? The gym was no place for a baby.

“I was reading their magazine,” Bruce continued. “There’s a trainer up there who takes groups of people to Thailand and detoxes them. They come back really toned up.”

“Maybe we should do that,” said Julia. “Daddy always wanted to take me to Thailand. We could go with him. We could all get detoxed.”

Bruce ladled a spoon of muesli into his mouth and munched on it. He glanced across the table at Julia. There was something silly about her face, he decided. There was a quality of vacuousness; a quality that displayed no long-lasting emotion or thought, just flickering states. Talking to her, he thought, was like turning the dial on a radio; one heard a snatch from a station and then, in a second, it was gone. He sighed. I’ve done it. I’ve got myself hitched up with a really dim girl.

And yet, and yet… there was the Porsche, and the flat, and the money. Money. That was all it came down to, ultimately. Money. And we shouldn’t deceive ourselves, Bruce thought; every single one of us makes compromises for money.

He stole a glance at himself in the glass panel of the microwave. I’m still to die for, he thought; that profile, that hair, those pecs. Everything. But I won’t have that forever, in spite of the powdered flax seed, and then what sort of deal will I be able to negotiate for myself? Hold on to it, Brucie, he said to himself. And as he did so, he reached out to touch Julia’s hand and he smiled at her. You may be dim, he thought, but I’m not.

If Bruce was largely made up of braggadocio and narcissism, the character of Big Lou, proprietrix of the Morning After Coffee Bar in Dundas Street, was composed of very different stuff. Big Lou had been brought up in Arbroath, a town noted for those typically Scottish virtues of caution, hard work and modesty. She had the additional advantage of having been raised on a farm – not a large or a prosperous one, but one that consisted of a few hundred tenanted acres, an appendage to an estate which had never been very well managed and which, as a result, had had little money available for investment in the fabric of the place. The fences, some of which were made of rusted barbed wire dating back to the First World War, were patched up as best as Big Lou’s father, Muckle Geordie, could manage; and the byres, rickety and oddly angled, looked as if a good puff of wind off the North Sea, or even a flaff from the hinterland of Angus, would be all that was required to bring them tumbling down.