The Unbearable Lightness of Scones (2 page)

“We’ll see,” said Matthew. He raised his glass of beer to his lips and looked at Angus. Angus was much older than he was and was unmarried, which meant either that there was some profound reason – lack of interest – or that he had been successful in evading commitment. Now, which of these was it?

“What about yourself, Angus?” Matthew asked. “Have you ever thought of … tying the knot with anybody?”

Angus smiled. “Nobody would have me, I fear. Nothing would give me greater pleasure, I suspect, but, well, I’ve never really got myself organised.”

“Of course, you’d need to find somebody capable of taking on Cyril,” said Matthew. “And that wouldn’t be easy.”

Angus shot Matthew an injured glance and Matthew immediately realised his tactlessness.

“Cyril is a slight problem,” said Angus. “It’s difficult being canine, you see. Lots of women turn their noses up at dogs. Particularly with Cyril being the sort of dog that he is. You know, a wandering eye and some unresolved personal freshness issues. But I wish people would see beyond that.”

Matthew nodded. Angus would be a task enough for any woman, and to add Cyril to the equation made it even more of a burden. “What about Domenica?” he asked suddenly. “I’ve always thought that you and she might make a good couple.”

Angus looked wistfully at the ceiling. “I’ve thought that too,” he said. “But I don’t think there’s much of a chance there. She can’t abide Cyril, you see, and I can hardly get rid of him after all these years. His heart would break.”

“She’d get used to him,” said Matthew. “And dogs don’t last forever.”

Angus shook his head. “No prospect,” he said. “But let’s not talk about me and my problems. What about the wedding? I hear you’ve got Charlie Robertson to do it for you. I knew
him when he was at the Canongate Kirk. He does a nice line in weddings, and Her Majesty used to enjoy his sermons, I gather, when she was in residence at Holyrood. She must have had to listen to an awful lot of wheezy lectures from various archbishops of Canterbury – it must have been so refreshing for her to get a good-going, no-nonsense sermon from somebody like Charlie. You know where you stand with the Church of Scotland, although as an Episcopalian, I must say there’s a certain folksiness …”

“We’re making certain changes,” said Matthew. “We’re walking up the aisle together. And we’re having a reading from Kahlil Gibran. You know,
The Prophet
. There’s a chapter there about love and commitment.”

Angus began to let out an involuntary groan, but stopped himself. “Sorry,” he said. “Yes. Kahlil Gibran. I see. And the honeymoon?”

Matthew leaned forward and whispered. “I haven’t told Elspeth. It’s going to be a surprise. Australia!”

Angus looked into his glass. For some inexplicable reason, he felt a sense of foreboding, as if a sinister angel had passed overhead and briefly looked down upon them, as one of those lumbering heavy bombers, laden with high explosive, may spot a target below – a quiet lane with lovers popular, the innocent going about their business, a farmer driving a truck along a winding lane; irresistible temptations for a sinister angel.

Inside the church, three hundred guests – and a handful of regular members of St. Cuthbert’s, entitled in that capacity to attend any service – sat waiting for the ceremony to begin. Matthew had told Elspeth that she should invite as many friends as she wished. His father was paying for the wedding and had imposed no limits; his own list, Matthew felt, was at risk of
being embarrassingly small: a few old friends from school, his father and his new wife, a couple of distant cousins, Angus Lordie, Domenica Macdonald, Big Lou, James Holloway; that was about all.

Pat, Matthew’s former girlfriend and occasional employee, had been invited too, and had accepted. Much to Matthew’s relief it appeared that she bore no ill-will towards the woman who had supplanted her in Matthew’s affections; and for her part, Elspeth, by nature, was not one to be jealous. Matthew had reassured her that although he had been serious about Pat, his seriousness had been a mistake; misplaced seriousness, as he described it. “She was really more of a sister,” he said. “I don’t know why I …” He left the rest unsaid, and it was not referred to again. So many men might say “I don’t know why I…”when talking about the carnal, reflected Elspeth; all men might, in fact.

Elspeth had invited everyone in her address book and many who were not. All her colleagues from the Steiner School were there, her suspension having been formally rescinded after the evidence of the other children – prominent among them Tofu – that Olive’s account of the incident in which the teacher had pinched her ear was at the very least confused, and more likely mendacious. But by the time her reputation was cleared she had already resigned, become engaged, and decided not to go back to teaching.

As well as Elspeth’s former colleagues, an invitation had been given to all the children in the class she had taught. They were to attend under the supervision of their new teacher, who had led them into the church as a group and taken them to the pews reserved for them up at the top on the left. Here they sat – Merlin, Pansy, Lakshmi, Tofu, Hiawatha and the rest, hair neatly combed, their legs swinging freely, not quite touching the floor, whispering to each other, awed by the solemnity of the occasion and the significance of what was about to happen to their beloved Miss Harmony.

“She’ll probably have a baby in a couple of weeks,” said
Olive knowingly. “I hope it’s a girl. It’ll be a big tragedy if it’s a boy.”

Tofu turned and sneered at her from the pew in front. “Babies take time,” he said, adding, “stupid.”

“What do you know about it?” hissed Olive. “And anyway, no girl would ever marry you. Not in a hundred years.”

“You mean that nobody would ever marry you,” retorted Tofu. “They’d take one look at you and be sick.”

“I’m going to marry Bertie,” said Olive smugly. “He’s already asked me. We’re going to get married when we’re twenty. It’s all settled.”

Bertie, who was sitting a couple of places away from Olive heard this remark and froze. “No, Olive, I didn’t say I would,” he protested. “I didn’t.”

Olive glared at him. “You did!” she said. “You promised! Don’t think you can break your promises like that.” She snapped her fingers to demonstrate the speed of Bertie’s broken promises, then looked at him and added, “Especially in a church. God’s really going to hate you, Bertie!”

This conversation was interrupted by the organist, who began to play a Bach prelude. Although the congregation was unaware of their presence, Matthew and Elspeth had already arrived and were sitting with Charlie Robertson in the chapel at the back of the church, a small, tucked-away room on the walls of which the names of the fallen were inscribed in lead, equal in death, with no distinction of rank, just men. Matthew, feeling awkward, gazed at the lists of names and thought: they were my age, or younger. Some were seventeen or eighteen, and were only in France or wherever it was for a week or two, days in some cases, before they died in that landscape of explosion and whistling metal. They didn’t have a chance, and now here am I, whose life has been so easy, reading about them and their sacrifice.

It was as if Charlie Robertson had read Matthew’s thoughts. “We’ve been very fortunate, haven’t we?” he said. “Being born at the time we were.”

Matthew glanced at Elspeth. He reached for her hand.

“On a more cheerful note,” said Charlie. “Did you know that it was in this chapel that Agatha Christie got married?”

Matthew showed his surprise. “I would have thought that she would have been married in a sleepy little English village somewhere,” he said. “In one of those places with an extraordinarily high murder rate.”

Charlie laughed. “I see what you mean,” he said. “But no. She got married here in Edinburgh. To her archaeologist husband. She said that an archaeologist was an ideal husband, as the older the wife became, the more interested he would be in her.”

Matthew smiled. It was difficult to imagine Agatha Christie as being young; some people were remembered as how they became, rather than how they were; it was something to with names, he thought. Agatha was not a young name. “But didn’t she run away?”

“That was earlier,” said Elspeth, who knew something about Agatha Christie. “Her first, dashing husband fell in love with somebody else. So she disappeared, and was eventually found staying at a hotel in Harrogate.”

Charlie Robertson looked at his watch. “Well,” he said. “We should be thinking of starting. Are you two ready?”

Matthew rose to his feet. Their conversation, innocent enough, had nevertheless made him think. In getting married, he realised, he was giving a hostage to fortune. By taking Elspeth into his life, the chances that the world would hurt him were doubled. She might leave him; she might run away, like Agatha Christie. There was so much that could go wrong in life if you took on somebody else, and then there were children and all the worries and anxiety they brought. There were so many reasons, he thought, for remaining single.

He looked at Elspeth, who was adjusting the veil she had pinned to her hair. I don’t want to hurt you, thought Matthew; that’s the last thing I want. But should I really go through with this? Is it wise?

Suddenly, though, there was the sound of bells, and Matthew found himself outside the church, with Elspeth beside him, arm linked in arm. There were people in the churchyard – people whom he did not recognise, but who were smiling at him. One woman, a visitor, had a small disposable camera, which she raised and pointed at them. Matthew smiled for the camera automatically, although he felt dazed. He turned to Elspeth, who was looking behind her now; the children had emerged from the front door and were jostling one another for her attention. She bent down and placed a kiss on the forehead of one of them, a small boy in a curious, rainbow-coloured coat. Matthew saw the boy’s sandals, one of those little details one notices, and smiled again; he was proud of Elspeth. He was proud.

There were other guests now, stepping out into the light. The late afternoon sun was blocked from the church by the towering bulk of the Caledonian Hotel over the road, but it reached the Castle now, up above them, touching the walls with gold; and the sky was so empty, just blue. Somewhere behind them, a train moved through Princes Street Gardens, a clattering sound, and there were pigeons in the air, a sudden burst of them. The children pressed around Elspeth; Matthew found himself beside Gordon, his father, bekilted like Matthew himself. This unites us, he thought, father and son; this shared garb, this same tartan; and he reached out and took his father’s hand in a handshake that became a semi-embrace and then reverted to a handshake.

“Well,” said Gordon, “that’s that then. You’ve done it, Matt. Well done, son.”

Matthew looked at his father. The little paternal speech, so apparently trite, seemed just right, so pre-ordained, just like the words he himself had uttered in the church, although he could hardly remember what he had said. Presumably he had done all that was expected of him, as Charlie had smiled throughout and had not corrected him. And what else could
his father say? That he was relieved that Matthew had at last done something decisive? That he hoped that at least he would get marriage right, even if he had never got anything right with all the businesses he had been set up in? The gallery, though, was not a failure, and he wondered if his father knew that. But this was not the time.

Gordon leaned forward and whispered into his son’s ear. “When you walked up the aisle together, you know, I thought by the look on your face … I thought that you were having second thoughts! I was mighty worried!”

Matthew’s smile was fixed. “Me? Second thoughts?”

“Well, obviously not,” said Gordon. He glanced at Elspeth, who was surrounded by a group of women in elaborate hats who were having their photograph taken with her. “You’ll remember those people we knew in Kilmacolm? Well, she called it off at the very last moment, you know, and everybody had to traipse back to the hotel. It was over in Largs. And then she changed her mind and they sneaked into the registry office two weeks later and did it. You were too young to know about it.”

Matthew listened to his father’s story patiently, but he was really thinking of what his father had said about his expression as he had made his way up the aisle. Had it been that obvious? If it had, then he wondered if anybody else had noticed it. Of course nobody looked at the bridegroom; all eyes would have been on the bride, as was always the case at weddings.

His father was, of course, right. As he walked behind Charlie Robertson, he had been thinking of the consequences that would ensue if he were to decide not to go ahead with the wedding. It would be heartless in the extreme to let the bride down before the altar, but presumably that had been done before, on the very brink of the exchange of vows. And perhaps there were circumstances in which it would be the right thing to do – not an act of selfishness, or cowardice, but an act intended to prevent the other person from making the mistake of marrying somebody whose heart was not in it.

Well, he had not done it, and they had gone ahead with the ceremony. And now, he thought, I’m married! He looked down at his hand and turned the ring around on his finger. How strange it felt; how grown-up.

He glanced at Elspeth. She had moved away from the women in hats, and the children, and was talking to an elderly man wearing a soft brown hat and a pair of large sun-glasses. That, he thought, was the Uncle Harald of whom she had spoken, her half-Norwegian uncle who had moved to Portugal with his friend of thirty years, a man who wrote books on china. The friend had drowned when their yacht had been swept onto rocks. Harald had remained in Portugal, alone; how many of us lead lives of quiet desperation, thought Matthew; we hope to be saved by one person, one thing; we convince ourselves that one thing can last.

Harald was making a point to Elspeth and reached out to touch her on the arm. Matthew heard what he was saying to her. “I do so like weddings,” he said. “I’ve always liked them.”