Read The Unbearable Lightness of Scones Online
Authors: Alexander Mccall Smith
He would be magnanimous. “All right. And are you going to be a good girl from now on? Promise.”
“Oh, Brucie! You know I’ll be good.”
He reached the flat with this satisfying dialogue still in his head. It made him feel considerably better, and by the time he had had another shower and slipped into his purple dressing gown he had almost forgotten his distress of the earlier part of the evening. Now he went through to the kitchen, prepared himself a bowl of muesli and began to watch a television replay of a Scottish football defeat.
He was still watching that when Julia came in.
“Why did you leave without me?’ she asked, flinging her coat down on the kitchen floor.
“Leave?” asked Bruce. “Oh, the party. Well, it was pretty dull. I got bored, I suppose.”
“And how do you think I felt?”
Bruce looked up from his muesli. “You had your friend there. Watson Cooke. You could talk to him.”
Julia picked up a copy of
Vogue
from the table and then, quite suddenly, but accurately, threw it across the table at Bruce.
“Temper!” said Bruce. “Temper! Temper!”
“You can get out,” said Julia quietly. “Tomorrow morning. Get out.”
Bruce stared at her. “You … You’re my fiancée,” he said. “And that, that’s my baby. You can’t …”
“Oh yes I can,” she said. “Engagement over. And the baby …well, sorry, Bruce, it was Watson Cooke’s all along. I meant to tell you, but you know how it is. Anyway, please move out tomorrow morning. I’ll phone Daddy and ask him to get a couple of his men to help you. You know those bouncers from that place he owns? They’ll help you move.”
“Is there anything wrong?” asked Nick McNair as he ushered Bruce into his studio the following morning. “Or shouldn’t I ask? A hangover from the party last night?”
Bruce shook his head. “No. It’s not that. And I’ll be all right.”
Nick looked sideways at Bruce. “You look a bit washed out, if I may say so. Not quite yourself.”
Bruce rubbed his face in his hands. “Maybe. It’s just that … Well, the truth is that I broke up with my fiancée last night. It was a bit heavy.”
Nick put on an expression of sympathy. “Oh, poor girl! Was it hard for her?”
Bruce nodded. “Yes, it was. Still, it’s probably better to do it at this stage than to do it after the wedding.” He smiled weakly. “Cheaper this way.”
“That’s true,” said Nick. “I split up with Colleen – she’s my ex – about two years ago and, oh my goodness, did we ever fight! This is mine. No, it’s mine. And this is mine too. And so on. We even fought about forwarding mail. She chucked my mail in the bin – wouldn’t even drop it in the post for me.”
“They hate us,” said Bruce. “I don’t know what we do to deserve it, but they hate us.”
Bruce closed his eyes for a moment. He would have to try to forget that morning’s scene, but he felt that it would be difficult. When he had woken up – after a night spent on the less-than-comfortable couch – it was to the sound of knocking on the door. Julia, he learned, had already made a telephone call to her father, and he had arrived on the doorstep with the two bouncers Julia had talked about. They were dressed in the ill-fitting black suits of their calling, with thin, dark-coloured ties. One of them, Tommy, had HATE tattooed on the knuckles of one hand … and HATE on the knuckles of the other. The other, Billy, had a line tattooed across his forehead. Bruce could not help but peer forward to read it: BRAINBOX.
Julia appeared in the doorway of the bedroom and conferred briefly with her father, who then walked over to Bruce. “I’m sorry that it’s come to this, Bruce,” he said. “But I always think that it’s best for incompatibility to be discovered at an early stage. I would have appreciated you as a son-in-law, but it’s not to be. I hope that there’s no ill-feeling.”
“It’s her,” said Bruce. “She’s chucking me out.”
“Well, it must have been something you did. I don’t think I should go into that.”
“Something she did,” snapped Bruce. “She was seeing another man.”
Julia’s father frowned. “I don’t think my daughter would do that,” he said. “We’re not that sort.”
“Well, she did,” Bruce retorted. “Watson Cooke. You know him? Watson Cooke.”
There was a flicker of recognition, and Bruce suddenly realised that Julia’s father looked pleased. “Well, I don’t think we should go into all that,” said the older man. “Julia has asked me to help you move your stuff out. I’ve brought the men. They can pack things up and store it somewhere for you. And if you wouldn’t mind giving me the keys of the Porsche, I’ll take care of that. And as far as the job is concerned, I’ll arrange for the accounts department to send you a couple of months’ salary in lieu.”
Bruce had been sitting on the couch during this conversation. Now he stood up. “Now hold on! Just hold on. You gave me that car.”
Julia’s father looked down at his feet. “Not gave, Bruce. Provided. And the registration documents, I’m afraid, are in the company’s name. So if you wouldn’t mind giving me the key?”
“Actually, I would mind,” said Bruce. “I’d mind a lot.”
Billy now stepped forward. Bruce saw the legend BRAINBOX in close proximity. It was tattooed in Times New Roman, he thought. Or maybe Palatino.
“Youse just gie us the key of the motor,” said Billy. “Right?”
Bruce hesitated, but only briefly. The key for the Porsche was in his jacket pocket and he retrieved it.
“Thank you,” said Julia’s father. “There really need be no unpleasantness. So, if you wouldn’t mind showing the boys what they need to pack, they’ll get it into a couple of suitcases and we can all get on with our lives. So sorry.”
Bruce opened his eyes. The scene was far from expunged, but there was no point in thinking about it now.
“You don’t have any coffee, do you?” he asked Nick.
“Natch. I keep coffee on the go all the time. But I always limit myself to three cups a day. More than that and … zoom!”
Nick went off to a coffee machine at the side of the room and Bruce looked about him. The studio, which occupied a small mews flat behind North West Circus Place, consisted of a largeish room, in which they were now standing, with smaller rooms off that. One of these smaller rooms looked like a darkroom, and another had an array of computer equipment. In the large room there were several open shelves on which various cameras and lenses had been stored, along with tripods and folded reflectors.
“I’m mostly digital these days,” said Nick, returning to Bruce. “But I still like actual film. I love the hands-on feel of it.” He handed him a cup of coffee and Bruce raised the mug to his lips. Even the smell alone was enough to revive his spirits. The face of Scotland! What did it matter if he had been thrown
out by that dim blonde; he was going to be the new face of Scotland. That was infinitely more important. Watson Cooke was welcome to her.
“So is she moving out then?” asked Nick.
“Who?”
“Your ex.”
Bruce shrugged. “I think I’ll let her stay,” he said. “I don’t want to be unkind.”
“That’s good of you,” said Nick. “So where will you go? Have you got another place lined up?”
Bruce took another sip of his coffee. “Actually, I haven’t. And I was wondering, you wouldn’t possibly …”
“Of course,” said Nick. “You can stay at my place down in Leith. I’ve got a couple of spare rooms and I was going to get somebody for one of them anyway. So that will be fine.”
“That’s very kind of you,” said Bruce. And he thought of himself in the infinity pool, looking out over the North Sea. The face of Scotland looking out over Scottish waters.
Oh, Julia Donald, he thought, you don’t know what you’re missing, do you?
Nick looked at his watch. “
Tempus fugit
,” he said. “Remember old Rait, the classics teacher at Morrison’s? The one with the nose. Remember him? That’s all the Latin I remember.
Tempus fugit
. Time flies.”
“Yes,” said Bruce. “
Et
cetera
.”
Nick was busy erecting a small umbrella reflector at the side of the room. “
Et
what?”
“
Et cetera
,” repeated Bruce. “It’s the Latin for whatever.”
“Useful,” said Nick. “I must remember that. Now, Bruce, I think that we’ll start with a few face shots. Full on.” He indicated a place in the middle of the floor. “You stand just there and look over here where my hand is. That’s right. Great.”
Bruce, positioned in front of the reflector, looked at the space previously occupied by Nick’s outstretched hand. He sucked his cheeks in slightly, but only slightly; years of practice in front of the mirror had taught him that the key to cheek control was very gentle inward pressure. If you sucked in too much you ended up looking like those boy band members who all tried to look so intense when there was nothing, or almost nothing, in their heads. Young pop musicians trying to look all intense and serious – it was laughable.
There was, by contrast, a lot in Bruce’s head. He was thinking of life, and of how it has a funny way – an uncanny way, at times – of working out. Every time things had gone wrong for him – through no fault of his own, of course – they had righted themselves in no time at all, just like the Campbeltown lifeboat. If there was a Campbeltown lifeboat, which Bruce thought there was. When he was a boy he used to be sent up to the Mull of Kintyre to stay with Doreen and Victor Douglas, distant relatives of his father. They had taken him into Campbeltown and there had been a pipe band playing in aid of the lifeboat; he remembered that. And people had come up to him in the street and tousled his hair and said what a “bonnie wee boy” he was. He smiled at the memory. There were lots of people who would still like to do that, although now there was hair gel to consider.
Yes, his life was like the Campbeltown lifeboat. A wave, or misfortune, would come along and turn him over and within moments he would be back on an even keel, getting on with
life at full steam. That had happened when he lost that job at Todd’s ridiculous firm; when that neurotic woman had invited him to lunch at the Café St. Honoré and had more or less seized his hand – for emphasis, she said – what an explanation, he thought; I must remember that – and her terminally boring husband had come in and created such a big fuss. Over nothing! I would no more have touched her than have flown to the moon. Mind you, I must be honest. Would I? Is there any woman in need whom I would turn away? Probably not … St. Bruce, patron saint of needy women.
C’est moi
. No, there are some. There are some to whom I would have to say, “Sorry, appointments only!” Some of those political women, those bossy Labour types always thinking of new ways of restricting men. I would have to draw the line at them; I really would.
And then there was the wine business. That chap Will Lyons thought I knew nothing about wine.
Rien
. I showed him. Château Pétrus – no problem! And I made a tidy profit there; enough to set me up in London, not that I should have even bothered to go down there. London. What a waste of space. And when things had gone wrong there, had it worried me for more than three seconds?
Non
. It was straight back up to Edinburgh and kapowski into a new job – looking after Julia – that was the job. Running the wine bar was simple by comparison. What a stupid, stupid woman! Talk about wastes of space; she was a positive environmental disaster. And as for Watson Cooke, with his Scottish schoolboy rugby cap. Well, if the cap fits, wear it, Watson Cooke! You’re welcome to Julia and her stupid, stupid baby. If it looks like you, W. Cooke, it’s going to look like a rugby ball. That would be a great birth announcement in
The Scotsman
: To Watson and Julia, a rugby ball, at Murrayfield Stadium. Thanks to referee and linesmen.
“Something amusing you, Bruce?”
Bruce looked at Nick, who was pointing his camera at him from a couple of feet away, crouching for the right angle.
“Nope. Just thinking.”
“The smile’s great. Try and think about something else amusing. Great smile. It’ll wow them down at the agency. Most people these days have forgotten how to smile naturally. It’s all teeth.”
Bruce applied his mind to the thinking of something amusing. It was quite difficult when one was asked to do that, as amusing things tended just to crop up of their own accord. What was there to laugh about? Watson Cooke? Watson Cooke, the Watsonian?
“Knock, knock,” he said.
From behind the camera Nick muttered: “Who’s there?”
“Emma.”
“Emma who?” asked Nick.
“Emma Watsonian.”
There was a brief silence. Then the camera was lowered and Nick beamed back at Bruce. “Emma Watsonian? That’s really funny, Bruce. Oh, I can hear it. I’m a Watsonian. Emma Watsonian. Oh, that’s really great, Bruce.” He paused. “The old jokes are always the best, aren’t they?”
Bruce frowned.
“Hold it!” shouted Nick. “Hold that expression. Great. Just great. That’s the face of Scotland being serious. Thinking about the environment, maybe. Or wave power. Stick the chin out a bit more – great – that’s the face of Scotland thinking about those new power generating thingies you stick at the bottom of the sea so that the currents move the doodahs and the power comes surging out to charge all our Scottish iPods. That’s it. Great.”