that sort of dress was very popular among younger people. What’s wrong with that? It’s just an observation.”
“Except that you think that I’m too old to be wearing it,”
Sasha blurted out. “That’s it, isn’t it? You’re never happy unless you make me feel small. You’ll be forty-four one day, you know.”
“Forty-five,” said Lizzie.
At this remark, Sasha turned sharply away and walked out of the room, leaving her husband and daughter staring mutely at one another. Todd lifted his glass of whisky and drained it.
“I think you should say you’re sorry,” he said. “It’s a big night for your mother, and I really don’t think that you should ruin it for her. Couldn’t you just go through there and say that you’re sorry? Would it cost you that much effort?”
Lizzie shrugged. “She could say sorry to me,” she said. “She could say sorry for making me feel so bad all those years. For nagging me. For making me do things that I never wanted to do. For ruining my life.”
He spoke quietly. “For ruining your life?”
“Yes,” she said.
He looked down at his sporran and at his patent-leather Highland dancing pumps. This is what it has come to, he thought.
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This is what all their effort had brought forth: the accusation that they had ruined her life.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I really am very sorry if you think that.
And I take it that you think the same of me – that I’ve done the same.”
Lizzie shook her head. “Not really. I don’t blame you for it.
You can’t help the way you are.”
“And what, may I ask, is that? What way am I?”
Lizzie looked up at the ceiling, as if bored by the task of explaining the obvious.
“All of this,” she said. “All this respectability. This whole Edinburgh bit. All of that.”
Todd tried to look her in the eye as she spoke, but she avoided his gaze. “All right,” he said. “You’ve made your speech. Now please just try for the rest of the evening. That young man is walking up the path out there and I would prefer it if he didn’t witness a family row. I’m going to fetch your mother. Please try.
Please just try. I’m not asking you to approve of us, but please just try to be civil. Is that too much to ask? Is it?”
“You’ll remember my wife,” said Todd. “And my daughter Lizzie, of course.”
Sasha, smiling and holding out her hand, advanced upon Bruce, who shook hands with her formally. Lizzie, who had been standing at the window, half turned to their guest and nodded. She made no move to shake hands.
“Well,” said Todd, rubbing his hands together. “I must confess that I’ve jumped the gun. I’ve had a dram already. What about you, Bruce? Whisky? Gin? A glass of wine?”
Bruce asked for a glass of wine and while Todd went off to fetch it, Sasha took Bruce by the arm and led him to a sofa at the far end of the room. She sat down, and patted the sofa beside
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her. And it was at this point that Bruce suddenly realised that in his haste to leave the flat he had dressed inadequately. He had donned his full, formal Highland outfit, his Prince Charlie jacket with its silver buttons, his Anderson kilt, the dress sporran that his uncle had given him for his twenty-first birthday, his white hose from Aitken and Niven in George Street, and, of course, his new dress shirt. But he had forgotten to put on any underpants.
Bruce knew that there were those who refused to wear anything under the kilt as a matter of principle. He knew, as everybody did, that there were traditions to this effect, but they were old ones, and he had never met anybody who followed them. It was not just a question of comfort, and warmth, perhaps in the winter; it was a question of
He lowered himself carefully, keeping his knees close together and making sure that the folds of the kilt fell snugly along the side of each leg. Then he looked at Sasha, who was watching him with what he thought was a slightly bemused expression. Had she guessed, by the way that he had sat down? He remembered, blushing, the last time this had happened when, as a thirteen-year-old boy he had similarly rushed off to a school function and had been laughed at by schoolgirls, who had pointed to him and giggled. One might have thought that such painful episodes were well and truly in the past, but now here he was reliving the burning awkwardness of adolescence.
Sasha raised her glass, although her husband had not yet come back with a drink for Bruce. “We haven’t seen one another for a long time, have we?” she asked. “Was it last year, at the office dinner at Prestonfield House?”
“I think so,” said Bruce vaguely. He had worn his kilt on that occasion too, but had wisely donned underpants then. How on earth had he managed to forget to put them on tonight? What could he possibly have been thinking about?
Sasha looked across at Lizzie – a glance which was intercepted by Bruce. There was a feeling between these two, he thought; mothers and daughters were often at one another’s throats, he had found; something to do with jealousy, he thought. Bruce’s 138
