Free The Unbearable Lightness of Scones by Alexander McCall Smith Page A

sight for the eyes, I can tell you.
    “I went there for dinner,” she continued, “a couple of weeks ago, with my sister. Her husband was an agricultural machinery representative in the wheat belt, you know, and then he died. Men do, don’t they? They die.”
    Elspeth laughed nervously, uncertain whether or not she should do so, but unable to stop herself. Men did die; this woman was right, and in taking on a husband you increased your chances of becoming a widow from nothing to … well, to whatever the chances were. It was a morbid thought, and not one that you should think on your honeymoon, although it was inevitable, she felt, that happiness should prompt thoughts of how that happiness might end. It was the same with anything that you might have or might acquire in life: physical possessions might give pleasure, but ownership led to the anxiety – did it not – that somebody would take away from you that which you had. Or you might lose your possessions in some other way. Or your looks; they would go too, as certainly as the sun rose; everything was built on sand, was sand.
    She reached for Matthew’s hand and squeezed it. She wondered if such thoughts crossed his mind. Men, of course,were said to be less emotional, more matter-of-fact than women. Did that mean that they did not worry in the way in which women worried? Ever since Matthew had proposed to her and she had accepted, she had worried that he would change his mind. He had shown no signs of doing this, and had seemed every bit as keen as she was to get married, but she had still thought about this, several times a day, and in her dreams too. She had awoken from nightmares in which Matthew had suddenly said things like “What engagement?” or, in one particularly distressing dream, had turned out to be married already, to three women.
    Elspeth could not imagine Matthew, nor any man perhaps, dreaming such things.
    “What do you dream about?” she had asked him several weeks before the wedding.
    He had thought for a moment before he answered. “You, of course.”
    “No, I’m serious. Do you have … strange dreams?”
    This question had caused a shadow to pass over his face. He did have strange dreams, and some of them he could not relate to Elspeth because she would be shocked. Most people had shocking dreams, he thought; or rather, most men did. They did things that they would never normally do, or even imagine doing, and they never confessed to anybody about such matters; quite rightly, thought Matthew.
    “I have strange dreams from time to time,” he said guardedly.
    “Such as?”
    He was nonchalant. “Oh, I forget. You know how it is with dreams. You don’t remember them for very long after you’ve had them. It’s something to do with how we don’t commit them to memory because we know that they’re unimportant.”
    “But they are important!” she protested. “They tell us so much about what we really are. About what we really want to do.”
    Matthew was privately appalled, but his expression showed it. “Do they?” he asked. “Do you really think so?”
    Elspeth was studying him closely. She had seen him frown when she had suggested that dreams revealed suppressed wishes, and that worried her. He must be remembering something that he had dreamed, some dark thing, and it was worrying him. It had not occurred to her that she might be marrying a man who had a dark thing in his life. “But you shouldn’t worry,” she said. “All of us want to do things that we would never really do, not in a month of Sundays. I don’t think it matters really, because we know that we’ll never do it.”
    She was trying to make him feel better, and she succeeded. “Yes,” said Matthew. “I agree. The important thing is what you’re like when you’re awake rather than what you’re like when you’re asleep.”
    He was not sure about this, although he expressed the thought with some confidence and authority. And it was a comforting thought, an