Free The Unbearable Lightness of Scones by Alexander McCall Smith

it; a place where unfortunate sailors had died on the shores and cliffs or had wandered off into the interior and never been seen again. Australia swallowed people; sucked them into its great emptiness.
    Elspeth woke up just before they dropped down towards Perth itself.
    “Down there,” said Matthew, and pointed to the forests of eucalyptus coming into sight beneath them.
    She looked. The tops of the trees were swaying gently in a breeze; they were like a silver-grey sea in motion. A road cut through, die-straight; the top of a white truck could be seen moving slowly along it. And then the outer works of the airport, the perimeter fence, here as much, surely, to keep this great extending wilderness and its creatures out as to exclude human malevolence. Matthew took Elspeth’s hand. There is something significant about this landing, he felt; and yet we are here for only two weeks. Imagine arriving here knowing, as so many new arrivals had done before them, that one was going to stay, that this was where one would grow old and die.
    They took a taxi to their hotel, a small private hotel in Cottesloe. It was morning, and they passed by people going to work, sitting in their cars listening to the morning news from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, looking in their mirrors, scratching their heads, looking up at the sky to see what the weather had in mind. It was all so ordinary, but so different.
    For the rest of that day they did very little, other than to take a walk along the beach that was only two blocks away from their hotel. This beach stretched for miles, a broad sweep of sand, its surface broken here and there by outcrops of rock. Along the beach, atop the sand dunes that kept suburban Perth from toppling into the Indian Ocean, a long coastal path was the haunt of walkers, runners, exuberant dogs, the sea breeze in the hair and lungs of all.
    And there was sun; everywhere there was that sun that painted everything with slabs of light, impasto thick.
    “I had no idea,” said Elspeth.
    He looked at her. “No idea of what?”
    “Of all this,” she said. “It’s like discovering a parallel universe.”
    He pondered her words. He knew what she meant, he suspected, because he had been thinking much the same thing himself, but had not found the words to express it. Perth was a world away from Edinburgh, but was not, because in many ways it was so familiar, so redolent of some distant idea of what Britain once had been, but was no longer. The signs of this were sometimes subtle, like the echoes of a familiar tune that one heard a long time ago; at other times they were obvious and arresting. On the drive to the hotel, from the back of the taxi, they had passed a school, and he had seen ranks of boys outside what looked like a school hall beginning to march into assembly. The boys wore khaki shirts and shorts and swung their arms like soldiers on parade; the morning sun shone upon them, benignly. The sign outside the school proclaimed its name: Scotch College.
    “It’s very nice,” said Matthew. He felt a momentary guilt, embarrassment perhaps, that he should think such an old-fashioned thought, but it passed. There was nothing wrong, he reminded himself, in appreciating a bourgeois paradise when every other sort of paradise on offer had proved to be exactly the opposite of what paradise should be.
    Why do people like Australia so much? he asked himself.And an unexpected answer came to him: it’s because everything that has been destroyed elsewhere, in an orgy of self-hatred, still survives here.

17.
A Dream of Love
    The proprietrix of Matthew and Elspeth’s hotel in Perth, a woman in her late fifties who wore a faded pink housecoat, had recommended a restaurant overlooking Cottesloe Beach and had helpfully made a reservation for them.
    “You have to reserve if you want a table in the front,” she said. “If you get there for sunset you can have a drink while the sun goes down over the sea. That’s a