The Unbearable Lightness of Scones by Alexander McCall Smith Page B

over the beach and the sea, a glass each of chilled West Australian wine at their side.
    Matthew raised his glass to Elspeth. “The beginning,” he said.
    She reached for her own glass. “To the beginning.”
    “Shall we swim tomorrow?” he asked. “I don’t mean in the hotel pool. Shall we swim down there, off the beach?”
    They had seen people swimming when they went for their walk earlier that day and also one or two people surfing, catching the waves quite far out and riding in until the waves collapsed in a maelstrom of sand and water.
    “I’ve hardly ever swum in the sea,” said Elspeth. “I swam in Portugal once and then a few times when I went to Greece with a couple of girlfriends. We went to the islands. Corfu. Places like that.”
    “But you’d like to swim here?”
    “Of course I would. It looks very inviting.”
    Matthew smiled, reaching out to take her hand on top of the table. “Don’t you think that we could just stay here? I could run a gallery. You could … well, you could do whatever you wanted to.”
    She looked out of the window. “You can’t just go somewhere and not come back. Not these days.”
    “Yes, you can,” said Matthew. “What about those footballfans who went off to watch Scotland play in Argentina and never came back? They married local girls and stayed.”
    Elspeth sighed. “That’s different,” she said. “People like that are very uncomplicated. They don’t think things through. They see that alcohol is cheap and they decide to stay.”
    She paused. “It would be very nice to be that uncomplicated. To live for the day – not to think about what lies ahead.”
    Matthew thought about this for a moment. “Goethe deals with that in
Werther
,” he said. “He was interested in the question of whether we could ever be happy if we worried about things.” He looked at her gently. “But of course there’s a world of difference between Goethe and the average Scottish football fan.”
    It was an observation that nobody could deny. Now the waitress appeared. As she handed them the menu, she looked out of the window, out towards the beach. The waves, whipped up by a storm somewhere far out at sea, were pounding heavily on the beach, producing a low rumbling sound.
    “Surf’s up,” said the waitress.
    “I can’t wait to go swimming in that,” said Matthew.
    “Be careful,” said the waitress. “You can get rips when it’s like this. Carry you right out.”
    She opened her notebook, fiddling briefly with the tip of her pencil. “And then there’s the Great Whites.”
    “Great White whats?” asked Elspeth.
    The waitress looked at her pityingly; poor uninformed Pom. “Great White sharks,” she said. “They’re out there, and sometimes they come in a bit too close for comfort. People get taken, you know. Right off the beach. Sometimes in water that’s no deeper than this.” She held a hand at the level of her waist, watching the effect of her words. “My brother’s friend was taken a year or two ago. He was a surfer and the shark took a great bite out of his board. He almost made it back in on a wave, but the shark came for him again and that was it. It’s their element, you see. We’re the ones who shouldn’t be there.”
    Matthew gazed out over the water, over the darkness. The tumbling lines of surf were white, laced with phosphorescence against the inky sea beneath. Their element.

24.
The Sea, the Sea
    Outside the restaurant, when Matthew and Elspeth made their way out after their meal, the night had that smell of sea, of iodine and foam, of churned-up water, of air that was washed and washed again in salt.
    Matthew breathed in deeply, drawing the heady mixture into his lungs. “Let’s take off our shoes and walk along the beach,” he said, nodding in the direction of the darkness. “And then we can go up onto the path above the dunes, later on, and get back to the hotel that way.”
    She took his hand. “Yes.”
    “I feel wide awake,”