The Forgotten Affairs of Youth

by Alexander McCall Smith

  The judge did not press for more information. “I told you that Clara and I were in Masson Hall together, didn’t I?”

  “Yes, you said that over the phone. That’s how I knew to come to you. I knew you were contemporaries.”

  Catherine nodded. “We both spent our first year at university there,” she said. “We were not exactly neighbours in our corridor—I was at one end, and she was at the other. But we were pretty close, at least for that year. It was an exciting time, obviously. Everything was so fresh, so challenging. To be eighteen again!”

  “And to know, at eighteen, what one knows now.”

  The judge smiled. “Of course. It seems to me that’s a very common fantasy. Most of us think about that, I believe. But to get back to Clara: we were both at Masson Hall for our first year and then, at the beginning of our second year, I went off to share a flat with a couple of other law students. It was in Newington, not far from the Dick Vet. Clara chose to share with a couple of others—another girl who was studying History, and an American student called Emma. The American girl came from San Francisco, or one of those places just outside. She was on a junior year abroad scheme and had picked Edinburgh. She was as happy as a sandboy, as I recall, and not surprisingly; Clara’s flat was in the Cowgate—a wonderful atmospheric set-up. La Bohème all over. Blackfriars Street. Number twenty-four. I always remember that. Number twenty-four Blackfriars Street.”

  “That sounds like the student days of all of us,” mused Isabel. “Whenever they were.”

  Catherine looked doubtful. “Do you think so? Do today’s students live that sort of life?”

  “Probably,” said Isabel. “Students are still poor. They still spend a lot of time in bars or at parties.”

  “Maybe … Of course we knew that we’d get jobs at the end of it all. They don’t have that luxury today. It never crossed our minds that we wouldn’t get the sort of job we thought we deserved. Nowadays they’re lucky if they find something that stretches them at all or uses their degree. I suppose it’s difficult to be carefree if that’s hanging over you.”

  Catherine paused. There was an air of coming to the point.

  “What exactly would you like to know about Clara?”

  Isabel took a sip of her tea. “She had a boyfriend, I believe.”

  Catherine did not answer immediately, which made Isabel wonder whether she had heard the question. “Her boyfriend?” she repeated.

  There was a further slight hesitation; nothing too marked, but noticeable. Perhaps she thinks this is intrusive, thought Isabel; an enquiry into her friend’s sex life; perhaps she’s wondering what business it is of mine.

  The judge broke the silence. “Yes. There was a boyfriend. She was a very attractive young woman. The boys were interested. Distinctly so.”

  “Anybody in particular?” asked Isabel gently.

  “A boy called Rory Cameron. They met in her second year, or started going out together then—I seem to remember Rory being around in our first year too, but he wasn’t attached to anybody. He was doing a degree in Classics, which I thought was a little bit odd, as he didn’t strike me as being the type. He was a good sportsman, you see—he played rugby for the university and he was in the men’s hockey team too. But there was a very charismatic, well-regarded lecturer in Classics in those days—a man called Francis Cairns. He popularised the subject and everybody appreciated his lectures. I went to one of them myself and rather regretted that I wasn’t one of his students.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “To Francis Cairns? He moved to Liverpool, I think. He got a chair there and then he ended up at a university in Florida, I believe. He wrote a lot. That’s all I know.”

  Isabel’s question had been about Rory Cameron, as Catherine now realised.

  “Oh, Rory? He was on an army cadetship at university and he went to Sandhurst when he graduated. He was in one of the Highland regiments, I think—not the Black Watch, but one of the others. I saw him years later at the Skye Ball in his full dress kilt. He cut a dash even then. A kilt helps if a man has lost his looks—mind you, he hadn’t.”

  The Skye Ball: Isabel knew people who went to that, but had never been herself. It was not her milieu—the world of Highland society and the more fashionable end of military, and it would definitely not suit Jamie. But unlike some, she did not begrudge socialites their enjoyment. Harmlessness was the test of the acceptability of fun, and spending an evening on the island of Skye dancing Highland reels until four in the morning struck her as being clearly and convincingly on the harmless side.

  Catherine continued, “I heard that he left the army. Somebody told me that he didn’t like it much, that he got stuck. He got as far as being a major, though, and then he threw it in and took up a post as the secretary of a golf club somewhere near Gullane or North Berwick. Not Muirfield, but one of the others. And that was the last I heard of him.”

  “He married?”

  “Yes. I don’t know much about her, other than that she was the daughter of a farmer in Northern Ireland somewhere. She was sporty too. A horsewoman, I think, but I’m not absolutely sure.”

  She paused. “You seem very interested in Rory. Does this Australian relative of Clara’s actually want to meet these people from Clara’s life?”

  Something in the tone of Catherine’s question—a slight edge to it—made Isabel feel wary; again she wondered whether it was resentment of the intrusion. She did not want to lie to the other woman; she would not do that.

  She chose her words carefully. “Yes, she might.”

  “I wonder why?” asked Catherine. She asked the question quietly, but for a few moments it hung in the air ominously.

  “Curiosity about family past,” said Isabel. “People want to know about family—and sometimes speaking to friends is the only way of finding out.”

  Every word of what I have said is true, thought Isabel: every word.

  Catherine seemed satisfied with the answer. “Yes, that’s quite understandable.”

  “One thing, though,” said Isabel. “Clara left university towards the end of her second year. What happened? Do you know?”

  “She took a year out,” said Catherine. “She must have had some private reason: her own affair. She came back and completed her degree, of course—she didn’t throw the whole thing over. Then, of course, there was that awful road accident. That was only five years after she graduated. A terrible waste.”

  Isabel was on the point of asking Catherine whether she knew what the private reason was, but there was something in the judge’s choice of words that inhibited her. Her own affair. That was code for: keep away from this.

  There was a final question to ask.

  “Were there any other boyfriends?” Isabel said. “Was it just Rory Cameron, or were there others, do you think?”

  Catherine did not hesitate. “No, just him. There was nobody else.”

  Isabel finished her tea and quickly glanced at her watch. “I’ve taken up enough of your time,” she said.

  Catherine rose to her feet. “I don’t know whether what I’ve said is of any help,” she said as she accompanied Isabel downstairs. “I do hope that your Australian friend feels that she can now fill in the gaps in the family history.”

  Isabel said that she shared this hope, but as she replied she found herself thinking that Catherine Succoth did not really hope this; that she was indifferent to the quest of this relative and, furthermore, that she was not convinced of the existence of this person from Australia. Judges, Isabel remembered, develop an uncanny ability to tell when somebody is lying or, and perhaps more significantly, telling only half the truth.

  Isabel went out into the street, the dark blue door closing behind her. She felt vaguely ashamed of herself, as if she had gained access to another’s house by false pretences, and then abused the hospitality she had been shown. It would have been better, she felt, to have told Catherine Succoth exactly why she had come and exactly what Jane wanted. That’s
what a true Kantian would have done; she, by contrast, had behaved in a way that would not for a moment have troubled the most superficial relativist.

  She had walked only a few paces down the street when she turned round and made her way back, decisively, to the doorway she had just left. She rang the bell, firmly, and waited.

  “Oh,” said Catherine Succoth, as she answered the door. “Have you left something behind?”

  “I did not tell you the whole truth,” said Isabel. “I am very sorry about that and I apologise.”

  If the judge was surprised, she did not show it.

  Isabel swallowed hard. “My friend from Melbourne, Jane Cooper, is Clara’s daughter. She was adopted, taken to Australia, and now she wants to find out about her father. That is why I came to see you.”

  For a moment Catherine did not respond, and Isabel, holding her gaze, looked into astute, unblinking eyes.

  When Catherine spoke, her tone was measured, the few words chosen carefully. “I assumed that,” she said quietly.

  It took Isabel a few moments to absorb what Catherine had said. It made it far worse, she felt; the other woman had been sitting there throughout their encounter, knowing that Isabel was concealing something.

  “I really am very sorry,” said Isabel. “I felt that I could not reveal what Jane had told me. I wasn’t sure whether she wanted anybody to know.”

  Catherine seemed to assess this, as she might weigh a defence to an indictment. This, thought Isabel, must be what it’s like to be in the dock of a criminal court: to be judged by a rational and dispassionate mind, one that would not be easily misled, nor unduly lenient.

  “I see.”

  “It’s a strong desire,” Isabel went on. “This desire to know who you are is terribly powerful. I’m only doing this to help her.”

  It was not much of an excuse, she thought, but it was at least the truth.

  “Of course. That’s good of you.” The judge looked at her watch. “Look,” she said. “I appreciate your frankness, and I really don’t hold it against you. You were being discreet—which is nothing to reproach yourself for, given that everybody seems compelled to be transparent, so to speak, to the point that … well, to the point that nothing remains private any more. So please don’t worry.” There was another glance at the watch. “But I really must get back to work—I’m in court tomorrow and I have to write something up.”

  Isabel took a step back as they said goodbye. She felt that her apology had been accepted, but there was something else in Catherine’s manner that suggested the door closing behind her was metaphorical as well as real. And who can blame her? she thought, as she began to walk back down Northumberland Street.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  JAMIE COOKED DINNER that evening while Isabel read a bedtime story to Charlie. Like most young children, Charlie was conservative in his reading habits, demanding the same book time and time again, and impatiently rejecting any attempt to introduce new fare. Only when a book had collapsed through overuse or had been mislaid—deliberately or otherwise—would he allow something new. Until then, the same text had to be repeated ad nauseam, on its young audience’s insistence, to the point that Charlie knew every word of the narrative and would protest loudly at the omission of any sentence or paragraph.

  The current enthusiasm was a once-suppressed book about a small boy who is stalked by a tribe of frightening tigers. The boy’s name, and his description, may not have caused its original Victorian readership to cringe; but a modern reader—at least, one sensitive to stereotype and condescension—might do just that. The story, though, was enough of a classic to remain in print, and was vastly appreciated by Charlie, to whom it was simply a story of a little boy in bright clothes who turns tigers (which is what he called the neighbourhood cats) into butter by making them chase their tails round a palm tree. Tigers, Isabel explained, were rather different from the cats they saw in the street; to which Charlie had solemnly replied, “Cats,” and nodded.

  After the tigers had turned to butter for the third time, Charlie dropped off to sleep and Isabel was able to join Jamie in the kitchen downstairs.

  “White wine, please,” she said, in mock desperation. “And please don’t mention either tigers or butter.”

  Jamie had been and was smearing a layer of butter on sliced potatoes in a dish—the beginnings of his potatoes dauphinoise. “I won’t,” he said, showing her the buttery knife.

  Isabel shuddered. “I know it’s a classic, but I really have had enough. And it’s so full of … well, every sort of assumption that we don’t want people to make. We’re laying them down in Charlie’s young mind. Who gave him that book?”

  “Cat. She said she’d enjoyed it as a child.”

  Isabel thought for a moment. Charlie had addressed Cat as “Tiger” the other day, and she had wondered why. It was so obvious, now that she came to think of it.

  “Oh well,” she said. “There’s plenty of that stuff ahead of him. And we can’t change—and shouldn’t, I suppose—things and books that … just were.”

  “Same with music,” said Jamie. “We play what was written, not what we think composers should have written.”

  “But would you play something with really unpleasant associations? Music can be like that, can’t it?”

  Jamie laid down his buttery knife. “Perhaps,” he mused. “Some people believe that Wagner’s tainted. There used to be a tacit agreement in Israel that he wouldn’t be played there—and still is, I think, even though Barenboim played Wagner in Jerusalem.”

  “I can understand how people feel,” said Isabel. “And some don’t like to listen to Carmina Burana for much the same reason. It was wildly popular in Nazi Germany, after all. But it’s also pretty vulgar, isn’t it?”

  She looked at Jamie, expecting a challenge. The concept of the vulgar was not one that everybody accepted any more. And yet some things were vulgar: there was just no other word for them. The houses of overpaid football players sprang to mind in that regard; large jacuzzis; cheap eateries with brightly coloured plastic furniture …

  Jamie picked up his knife and licked it.

  “Don’t do that,” protested Isabel. “We can hardly stop Charlie from doing it if he sees you. And there’s the cholesterol. Not good for you.”

  He put the knife down again, almost absent-mindedly. “I was thinking about Orff,” he said, as if it were an explanation for licking the knife. “I like Carmina Burana. That wailing swan. The drums. The sheer viscerality of it.” He paused. “Can you say viscerality?”

  “If you wish,” said Isabel. “If you say it with conviction. That’s how neologisms get going. Somebody uses a word with conviction. Or shall I say convictionness.” She remembered the words she had invented as a girl, and smiled. “I don’t like to boast, but I came up with some really good words when I was just a little bit older than Charlie. Or so my parents told me. Hashoo. Oshlies. Gummers.”

  “Hashoo? A sneeze?”

  She shook her head. “No, a saxophone. I couldn’t say saxophone, apparently, and so it became hashoo, which is beautifully onomatopoeic, don’t you think? Oshlies is orange juice—another good word, if you ask me—and gummers are the pads on a cat’s feet. And what else could they be but gummers?”

  “Delectable words,” said Jamie. “I’ll use them all. We’ll teach them to Charlie. Hashoo in particular: that’s definitely what it is.”

  “But he might not be able to say hashoo,” Isabel suggested. “And then he might say saxophone for hashoo.”

  “And if he can’t say gummers he would have to say—”

  “There is no other word for that,” Isabel interjected, then remembered a story. “Your saying that’s what it is reminds me,” she began. “It’s a story of English assumptions. Would you like to hear it?” She did not wait for Jamie to reply before she continued, “An Englishman was reflecting on the different words that people use for fish. ‘Isn’t it strange,’ he said, ‘that the French say le poisson, the Spanish say e
l pescado, and the English call it fish—which is what it is.’ ”

  They both laughed. Jamie, who had been struggling with the corkscrew while Isabel told this story, succeeded in getting the cork out of the bottle, and poured wine for Isabel.

  “Here,” he said, passing her the glass. “New Zealand white wine. Sauvignon blanc—which is what it is.”

  The chill of the wine made the glass cold to the touch. She felt the tiny drops of condensation against her fingers. We forget, she thought inconsequentially, how wet air is.

  “I suppose we’ll have to give it some consideration,” she said.

  Jamie returned to his cooking. “Give what?”

  “What Charlie reads. It’s just such a notion: that there’s a little mind there, and we have the power to shape it. That amounts to … to making a person, I suppose. What power! And should we try to make him in our image? To think like us? To like the things we like?”

  “That’s what parents do,” said Jamie. “Who doesn’t? Children can’t choose their own culture—they’re born into something.”

  Isabel saw that this was true; of course it was. “But we can be aware of the sort of message that they’re getting, can’t we? And this is put across quite subtly in children’s literature.”

  “Maybe.”

  “No, it is. I’m not one of those hyper-sensitive censors you hear about, but when you look at it, it’s there, and you can make out a case. Babar the Elephant, for example. It really is crammed full of imperialist notions. Celesteville is a French provincial city inserted into the middle of Africa. And that’s not the only bit of aggressive cultural imposition: the elephants, remember, are made to wear Western clothes. And as for Tintin, our friendly boy detective is a really nasty piece of work.”

  “Surely not,” said Jamie. “I rather like Tintin … And Captain Haddock. All that whisky and colourful language. He was clearly meant to be Scottish.”

  “Have you ever read Tintin in the Congo?” Isabel asked. “You Tintin enthusiasts pretend that that book doesn’t exist, but it does. Tintin shoots whole herds of antelope and his reaction to a rhinoceros, be it noted, is to drill a hole in its back and stuff it full of explosive. And then there’s Huckleberry Finn, while we’re about it, not to mention the entire oeuvre of Enid Blyton.”