The Unbearable Lightness of Scones by Alexander McCall Smith Page A

the wine bar he owned in George Street. If Julia came with all that, then the least he could do, he decided, was to be civil to her.
    “We’re going to have to decide about names, Brucie,” she said at the breakfast table that morning.
    Bruce looked up from his bowl of muesli. Since he had taken to reading a magazine called
Men’s Health
, he had become quite health-conscious and broke a series of nuts and antioxidants into his plate each morning. With a body like mine, he thought, one takes care of it. And he could look at the bare-torsoedmen pictured in
Men’s Health
without feeling inadequate; he could look them in the pectorals.
    “Names?”
    “For … for you know who,” said Julia, looking down at her stomach.
    “Oh.” Bruce stared down at the mixture of nuts and powdered flax seed on his plate.
    “I thought that for a boy we might go for Jamie,” said Julia. “It’s such a nice name. Strong. Or Glen.”
    “Jamie’s all right,” said Bruce. “But not Glen. I knew a Glen at Morrison’s, and he was a real waste of space. Collected stamps.”
    “Well, Gavin. There’s Gavin Hastings.”
    “It could be a girl,” said Bruce.
    Julia shook her head. “I’ve got a feeling it’s a boy,” she said. “Just like you, Brucie.”
    Bruce said nothing. Thoughts of Julia’s baby – and that is how he regarded it – had not been to the forefront of his mind. It was her baby, her idea, he told himself, and even if he had had a part in it, it was not something that he had intended or embraced. She wanted this baby – that was obvious – and so let her do the thinking about it.
    The problem with babies, in Bruce’s view, was that they spoiled everything. What was the point of living in this nice flat in Howe Street, with the money to do exactly what one wanted to do – to travel, to go out to all the best restaurants, to be seen – if you had a baby to think about? Babies tied you down; they demanded to be fed; they yelled their heads off; they smelled.
    He finished his breakfast in silence. There was no further discussion about babies, and Julia was absorbed in a magazine that had dropped through the letter-box with the morning post – one of her vacuous fashion magazines, full of glossy pictures of models and bottles of perfume, pictures which Bruce took a guilty pleasure in looking at while affecting to despise them.
    “This stuff,” he said, pointing at the box of flax seed, “contains all the omega oils you need.”
    “That’s nice,” said Julia.
    “I’m thinking of joining that gym up at the Sheraton Hotel,” Bruce went on. “You know the one, with all those pools. That one.”
    “I’ll come too,” said Julia. “I need to get in shape.”
    Bruce said nothing. He was not sure if he wanted Julia tagging after him at the gym; and what would happen when her baby arrived? The gym was no place for a baby.
    “I was reading their magazine,” Bruce continued. “There’s a trainer up there who takes groups of people to Thailand and detoxes them. They come back really toned up.”
    “Maybe we should do that,” said Julia. “Daddy always wanted to take me to Thailand. We could go with him. We could all get detoxed.”
    Bruce ladled a spoon of muesli into his mouth and munched on it. He glanced across the table at Julia. There was something silly about her face, he decided. There was a quality of vacuousness; a quality that displayed no long-lasting emotion or thought, just flickering states. Talking to her, he thought, was like turning the dial on a radio; one heard a snatch from a station and then, in a second, it was gone. He sighed. I’ve done it. I’ve got myself hitched up with a really dim girl.
    And yet, and yet … there was the Porsche, and the flat, and the money. Money. That was all it came down to, ultimately. Money. And we shouldn’t deceive ourselves, Bruce thought; every single one of us makes compromises for money.
    He stole a glance at himself in the glass panel of the