Alexander Smith - Unbearable Lightness of Scones

The young woman on the other side of the table smiled. She was undoubtedly attractive, and when she smiled she became even more so. “Shauna,” she said. “And you?”

Bruce returned the smile. “Bruce. Just call me Bruce.”

There was no need to add the “just call me” part, but Bruce found that it was another thing that worked every time. I work every time, he thought. It’s not what I say, it’s me!

“Do you work with Nick?” Bruce asked.

Shauna nodded. “Yes,” she said. “Now and then. I do shoots with him.”

She looked down the table and waved at Nick, who was seated at the other end. Nick winked back at her.

Bruce smiled. “You’re in an agency?” Everybody surrounding Nick, he had decided, seemed to work in some agency or another.

“Yes,” said Shauna, “but I’m strictly advertising. Nick shoots for PR people. I’m very specialised. Just soaps, moisturisers, things like that. I do ads for the beauty industry.”

“Great,” said Bruce.

“You might have seen some of my work,” Shauna went on. “Do you read the mags?”

Bruce thought for a moment. What mags was she talking about? The sort of magazines that Julia liked to read – those vacuous glossies?

“Sometimes,” he said.

Shauna was looking at him. “Let me guess what you do,” she said, propping her chin on her hands in mock concentration. “You’re a model, right?”

Bruce sat back in his chair. “Well…”

“I knew,” said Shauna. “I could tell. You can always tell the clothes horses.”

Bruce was silent.

“No offence,” Shauna said. “Some of my best friends are clothes horses.” She laughed.

Bruce bit his lip and looked away from her. He muttered something to himself, something unrepeatable. But she, too, had turned away and was talking to the man beside her, a thin man with a pair of round wire-frame spectacles; not a clothes horse, thought Bruce.

He looked about him. There was a man to his left, who was talking to somebody on his other side, but on his right was a woman, also attractive, but in a different way from Shauna. She, though, was engaged in animated conversation with the man on her right. Bruce looked down at his hands. He suddenly felt very lonely.

He rose to his feet and looked about the restaurant. A small sign at the far end of the room pointed the direction: a picture of a man’s hat and a pair of women’s gloves. Bruce crossed the room, leaving the noise behind him. He pushed open the door of the lavatory and stood in the small space before the basin. There was a mirror. He looked in it.

“What do you think you’re doing?” he whispered to the reflection. “Just what do you think you’re doing?”

There was no answer. He reached out and traced the line of his chin on the mirror.

“Is this it?” he asked. “Is this all you are?”

He was suddenly aware of somebody pushing open the door behind him. He leaned forward to allow the person to pass.

“Bruce?”

It was Nick McNair. He was standing directly behind Bruce, and Bruce could see his expression in the mirror. He looked concerned.

“Are you all right, Bruce?” Nick asked. “You got up and charged out. You looked sick to me.”

“I’m all right,” said Bruce. “I just felt…”

Nick was staring at him. He shook his head. “You’re not all right, Bruce. You look really upset.” He paused. “Is it the splitting up? Is that it?” He reached out and placed a hand on Bruce’s shoulder. “Listen,” he said. “I know what it’s like. You feel all raw inside. You just do. And you just have to wait for time to do its thing. It will. Eventually.”

Bruce looked down at the floor. “I lied to you,” he said. “I said that I left her. It was the other way round. She chucked me out. She’d been two-timing me.”

“Oh dear,” said Nick.

“Yes. And her old man took back the car he gave me. And he’s Graeme Donald. Yes, that’s him. The guy who owns the agency. He hates me, you know.”

Nick was silent. He took his hand off Bruce’s shoulder. “You’re in a bad way, Bruce,” he said. “I suspected that you’d been chucked out. That’s why I offered you the room.”

“Why bother with me?”

Nick put his hand back on Bruce’s shoulder, a gesture that Bruce found strangely comforting.

“Because I’m a Christian,” said Nick.

The ending of a honeymoon is, in metaphorical terms, the ending of a period of charity during which the other is able to do no wrong or, rather, is able to do wrong but also able to get away with it. As we all know, politicians have a honeymoon period during which the electorate forgives if not everything, then at least rather a lot. Then, when the metaphorical honeymoon comes to an end, the mood shifts, and every slip, every ill-advised step, indeed every sign of simple human fallibility, is eagerly pounced upon. There! shouts the opposition in triumphant chorus. There! You see what he’s like! Sleaze! Ineptitude! The very qualities that we ourselves so conspicuously lack! The end of a real honeymoon, one might hope, is not quite like that, even if one has discovered, on the honeymoon, perhaps, that one has married a sleazy and inept person. Even then, one’s spouse does not typically become critical and unforgiving, as an electorate may be. Yet life is certainly different after the honeymoon.

To begin with, one has to work, and for Matthew that meant going in to the gallery on that first morning back – easier work, perhaps, than clocking in at a factory or a busy office, but work nonetheless. The mail, which had been moved from the doormat to his desk by a helpful friend, was stacked in neat piles: three weeks of catalogues, enquiries and bills. The bills had yet to turn red, but would require reasonably prompt attention; the catalogues would need to be perused; the enquiries answered. Three weeks may not be an overly long time in a slow-moving business, but it seemed to Matthew that his working life, there in the gallery, was part of an altogether different world – a world which was of course familiar, but which in some ways was now strange. That would pass, of course, but for the moment the world of Dundas Street, of Edinburgh, somehow felt very alien. The light was different – this attenuated, northern light; the colours too – these subtle shades – greys, greens – everything was so much more muted than the bright tones, the strong light of Australia.

He sat at his desk and contemplated the piles of mail. He had left Edinburgh a newly married man, blissfully happy, excited beyond measure. Now he was back as a man who had faced death in shark-infested waters, who had been rescued by a dolphin – a rescue he could not bring himself to talk about because nobody would believe him; a man who had been wrongfully detained and threatened with psychiatric confinement; a man who had thought that he was his father’s son, only to discover that he might well be the son of another man altogether, the president of the Cat Society of Singapore. Those were transforming events for anybody, but how much more so for one who had been on his honeymoon at the time?

He had left Elspeth behind in the flat, still in bed, still deep asleep in her state of unadjusted jet lag. He had looked at her fondly from the door of the bedroom, standing there gazing upon the form under the blankets: his wife. The word still came uneasily to his tongue; it was so new. And he, Matthew, who had thought that he would never find anybody, was now a husband; moreover he was a husband setting off to work. It was such a mundane, unexceptional situation, the great domestic cliché, but for Matthew it was something to be relished, and committed to memory.

They had not discussed what Elspeth was to do. She had said that she would no longer teach, but that she wanted to be occupied in some way. Matthew had suggested that she work in the gallery with him, but she had been reluctant to do that: a marriage, she thought, stood its best chance if both parties had their own areas of activity within it. Seeing one another all day and then again in the evening could become claustrophobic, Elspeth thought, even if one was head-over-heels in love with one’s spouse. So the gallery would be Matthew’s, and she would do something else.