The Forgotten Affairs of Youth

by Alexander McCall Smith

  “Oh well,” said Jamie. “Children have to read something.”

  “They do. And I don’t think that we should run around removing things from Enid Blyton. The fact that Noddy and Big Ears sleep in the same bed, for example.”

  Jamie thought it ridiculous to worry about something like that. “Of course they did. They were friends.”

  “But not exactly contemporaries,” ventured Isabel.

  “Possibly not,” said Jamie.

  They fell silent for a while. Isabel sipped her wine and thought of her morning; she had not told Jamie about her visit to Catherine Succoth and was not sure whether she wanted to do so. She still felt a pang at the thought of those final moments of the encounter on the judge’s doorstep and her admission and apology. Social embarrassment was like that: the memory of some faux pas or gaucherie, of some bit of bad behaviour on our part, brings a sinking feeling later, makes us think, Was that really us? Did we do that?

  The words came back to her from the general confession of the Book of Common Prayer, on the subject of sins and transgressions: The memory of them is grievous unto us. Yes, it was. The memory of them is grievous unto us.

  Jamie, who had finished his potatoes dauphinoise, was making a mushroom tart. He looked up from his task of chopping the mushrooms. “What did you do today?”

  She hesitated, unsure that potatoes dauphinoise went with a tart. But she addressed his question. “I think I found Jane’s father. But I must admit I felt a bit bad about the way I did it. I misled somebody.”

  He did not seem interested in the misleading. “You found him? Already?”

  She explained about her conversation with Catherine. “She came up with the name of the boyfriend. Rory Cameron. He became an army officer and ended up as the secretary of a golf club.”

  “Could be worse,” said Jamie. “Jane could have found a father who did something terrible. If she gets the secretary of a golf club, well, it could be far worse.”

  “Are you being sarcastic? Are you laughing at secretaries of golf clubs?”

  He was not. It was, he said, a respectable thing to be. And there was nothing wrong with respectability.

  “Have you told her?” he asked.

  Isabel had thought about this. She had considered telephoning Jane straightaway, but she had decided against it. All that she had so far was the information that Rory Cameron had been Clara’s boyfriend in her second year at university—the year in which she became pregnant. But she did not know how long they had been together. For all she knew, they might have been seeing one another only for a month or two, maybe less. She needed more information, and she needed to find out whether Jane would like to approach him herself or whether she wanted Isabel to speak to him first. An intermediary could be helpful where there was a chance of being rebuffed, and Isabel imagined that there was always a chance of that in cases like this.

  “I’ll have to talk to her about it,” she said. “I’m going to tell her that I have a candidate—if that’s the right word. And then we’ll see.”

  “I LIKE YOUR MUSHROOM TART. Delicious. Really delicious.”

  “Not the usual mushrooms,” said Jamie. “I get fed up with those white button ones you see in supermarkets. I wanted something more unusual.”

  Isabel manoeuvred a bite of the tart on to her fork and popped it in her mouth. “Chanterelles? Oyster mushrooms? Is that what these are?”

  “More exotic than that,” said Jamie. “You can get those in the big stores now. They’re almost as common as button mushrooms. No, I got these from Cat’s. She had a whole box of hand-gathered country mushrooms. All sorts and sizes. I forget what these ones were called.”

  Isabel swallowed. “All sorts? Really? Who picked them, I wonder?”

  “She said it was a friend of hers.”

  Isabel cut another slice of the tart, but hesitated before putting it in her mouth. She laid down her fork.

  “Which friend? Did she say?”

  Jamie shrugged. “No. Some person who lives near Perth, who also supplies her with quail eggs. She didn’t give the name.”

  Isabel lifted her fork tentatively. “I hope the friend knew what she was doing.”

  She stared at the mushroom tart. No, it was ridiculous to worry about that sort of thing: Cat took food safety seriously, surely she would never sell anything at all dubious. She must have been confident in her friend’s ability to tell edible mushrooms from deadly fungus.

  She put a further slice into her mouth and chewed ruminatively. Everything tasted fine.

  “Of course the problem with poisonous mushrooms,” Jamie went on, “is that they taste so good. Apparently you can munch your way happily through a whole plateful of death’s cap mushrooms and comment on how delicious they are—even as they’re doing their dreadful work inside you.”

  The rhythm of Isabel’s chewing slowed down. “Really? Didn’t Pope Clement VII die from eating that particular mushroom?”

  “Who knows?” said Jamie. “If you suddenly found out that you’ve eaten the wrong thing, apparently there’s very little you can do. You may feel perfectly all right but you’re destined for kidney failure. And that can take some time to show itself. You just have to wait. It must be like swallowing a time bomb.”

  “Oh yes?” She laid down her fork again.

  Jamie grinned. “Perhaps I’ve been a bit tactless.”

  Isabel tried to smile. “No, not at all—I’m sure that your mushroom tart is perfectly safe.” She gave a nervous laugh. “Cat wouldn’t want to poison us for any reason, would she?”

  It was Jamie’s turn to lay down his fork. “Cat?”

  Isabel answered her own question. “No motive. None at all.”

  But she knew that this was not true. Cat had shown considerable animosity towards Isabel after she had gone off with Jamie, who was, after all, Cat’s ex-boyfriend. Jealousy lay behind many poisonings, she suspected. And what better way of disposing of anybody than to poison them with mushrooms? There would be no violence and the murder weapon would have been eaten and digested: a very effective way of disposing of it. But Cat would never do anything like that, however questionable her judgement may have been in matters of the heart.

  “Let’s not think about it,” she said. “One is just as likely to be poisoned by lettuce …”

  She stopped herself: capital letters were vital here. Professor Lettuce had every reason to dispose of her, as did Christopher Dove, both of whom had seen Isabel neatly thwart their plans to seize control of the Review of Applied Ethics. What was it that Robert Lowell had written about ambitious professors in one of his poems? They’d murder for a chair … something like that. Academics were every bit as nasty as anybody else, as red in tooth and claw when it came to the attribution of glory, the division of spoils. Lettuce, aided by Dove, poisons philosopher: the newspaper headline was so easy to imagine.

  They finished the mushroom tart and the potatoes dauphinoise without the appearance of any obvious symptoms. Dessert came in the form of a piece of shortbread and coffee in a small coffee cup.

  “A can,” said Isabel, holding up her cup. “That’s what these are called—coffee cans.”

  Jamie smiled at her. “All those lovely words in your head,” he said.

  This made her laugh. “What a kind thing to say. And in your head? All those notes. All that music.”

  He ate the last crumbs of his shortbread and rose from the table. Taking her hand, he pulled her to her feet and embraced her. They kissed.

  He said: “Let’s go and sing something.”

  She said: “Yes. I’d like that.” Then she paused. There was a sharp pain in her stomach.

  He noticed and laid the back of his hand across her brow. “Something wrong?”

  “A stomach pain,” she said. It came again, less insistent now, but enough to make her wince.

  “Oh, my darling …” Jamie looked at her with concern.

  “I’m sure it’s nothing,” said Isabel, massaging her stomach ge
ntly. “Indigestion.”

  “You don’t get indigestion,” said Jamie.

  “Everybody gets indigestion,” countered Isabel. “Sometimes if I eat too quickly, I get a bit of a pain.”

  “But you didn’t eat quickly tonight,” said Jamie. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

  “Of course I’m all right.”

  She smiled at him, and then the pain returned, more intensely this time. She caught her breath.

  “Isabel?” Jamie’s voice took on a note of anxiety. “You’re not all right.”

  “Listen, it’s nothing. I’ll take one of those pink pills in the bathroom cupboard. That’ll sort it out.”

  “They’re for acidity.”

  “Well, that’s probably what I’ve got. Acidity.”

  She felt the pain again, and it registered on her face.

  “Oh no,” Jamie said. “It’s those mushrooms. Listen, we’ll have to go to hospital.”

  “Nonsense.”

  “Not nonsense. You can’t wait with mushrooms. They have to do something immediately or—”

  “You’re overreacting. Let’s sit down and wait for this to pass, as I’m sure it will.”

  “This is an emergency. I’m going to phone.”

  She tried to calm him. “It’s not an emergency. It’s a bout of indigestion.”

  But he was not listening. He was telephoning for an ambulance. The call made, he rang Grace and asked her to come round to look after Charlie. It was urgent, he explained, and could she be there in a few minutes’ time?

  “Of course I can,” she said. “I’ll get a taxi right away.” She paused. “Is it serious?”

  “I think so,” said Jamie.

  THE POISONS WARD at the Royal Infirmary was accustomed to drug overdoses, both accidental and suicidal, but only rarely to cases of mushroom poisoning. In general, they lost no time in dealing with their admissions, washing out stomachs, inducing vomiting, administering antidotes; minutes counted in this branch of medicine, one of the few areas where doctors treated those who wanted no treatment.

  When Jamie and Isabel arrived, the doctor on duty was dealing with a young man, jobless and abandoned by his girlfriend, who had sought to end his pain by swallowing an overdose of paracetamol. He had resisted help, but had been brought in by two burly orderlies, proponents of tough love. Now he lay on his bed weeping, shaking his head anxiously, while a nurse stood beside him, holding his hand. The nursing staff kept their voices low, but the drama was being played out in a public ward and could be seen—and heard too.

  The doctor finished with the young man and came in to see Isabel in the treatment room.

  “Now then,” he said briskly. “You think you’ve eaten a poisonous mushroom. Correct?”

  “My … my fiancée felt a sudden pain,” said Jamie. “We had a mushroom tart for dinner.”

  The doctor looked inquisitively at Jamie. “We? You too?”

  Jamie nodded.

  “But you’ve got no symptoms?”

  Jamie realised that in his concern he had simply not thought about himself. And yet he had eaten the mushroom tart too—and had enjoyed a slightly larger piece than had Isabel.

  “I feel perfectly all right,” said Jamie.

  The doctor was impassive. “Do you know the name of the mushroom in question?”

  Jamie shook his head. He explained, though, that he had brought one of the leftover mushrooms with him. He extracted a fleshy brown thing from a small plastic bag he took from his pocket and passed it over.

  Isabel sniffed the air. There was a smell of disinfectant—and something else that she could not quite identify. That something was mortality, she thought—or suffering. She glanced through the door of the treatment room towards the young man on the bed. The nurse was still holding his hand, stroking it gently. Isabel watched her and thought: This is the compassionate state in action. The nurse was paid; she was doing a job that attracted a salary at the end of the month—a job that involved the exercise of human sympathy. Money and feeling, it seemed, were not mutually exclusive.

  Her gaze returned to the doctor, who was examining the mushroom in the palm of his hand.

  “We can identify this quickly enough,” he said.

  “Do you recognise it?” asked Jamie.

  The doctor shook his head. He was younger than Jamie, Isabel realised. “I’m no good with mushrooms,” he said. “But we have a mycologist on call. He’s the expert.”

  “You’ll get him in?”

  The doctor smiled. “The benefits of technology. I’ll photograph this and send it to him electronically. I’ll get the answer in five minutes—sometimes it comes in less. As long as he can identify it from the photograph, he won’t even have to leave the house.”

  He left them, holding the mushroom delicately between thumb and forefinger. Jamie turned to Isabel. “Is it any better?”

  She had not felt any pain since they had entered the treatment room. Now, almost in response to his question, she felt a twinge, although it was less marked than before.

  “Less bad,” she said.

  “I’m sure it’s nothing,” he said reassuringly.

  “Let’s hope so,” she shot back. She immediately regretted being short with him, and reached out to take his hand. “Sorry. I’m feeling a bit frightened. I didn’t mean to snap at you.”

  She was frightened because she had remembered an article she had read in the press a few years before, of an incident in which somebody in a town near Edinburgh had eaten a lunch of poisonous mushrooms he had found in the woods. He had lost all kidney function as a result and was now on dialysis, hoping for a transplant. It was a tragic story, and it had happened to somebody not far away, somebody she might easily have known. Proximity of that nature brought things home.

  “I could die, Jamie,” she said.

  “Nonsense!” he burst out. “Don’t say that.”

  “But I could. I could be dying right now.”

  “Don’t—”

  “Don’t die? I’ll try not to, but dying, I’m afraid, is not exactly a voluntary act—most of the time.”

  She tried to smile. Her stomach felt heavy, as if something were pressing down upon it.

  She squeezed Jamie’s hand, and he moved closer. “If I die—”

  “Isabel, please don’t talk like that. And what about me? I ate them too. I’m not dying, and neither are you.”

  “No, I have to speak. If I were to die, from those mushrooms or from anything else, I’d want you both—you and Charlie—to know something: I love you a great deal. I love you with all my heart, with all my heart. It is you I love. And if you have loved me, and I believe you have, then thank you so much for that, my darling.” She paused. “And Charlie. If I were to go, would you promise to tell him about how much I loved him? Just tell him, as often as you can.”

  She closed her eyes. Would it help Charlie to know that? She thought it might, as the memory of love can be as strong, as powerful, as love itself.

  He did not know what to say. He tried to speak, but his voice caught and nothing came. And then, behind them, coming back into the treatment room, was the doctor. Isabel saw that the hem of his white coat had come unstitched and was hanging down. He has nobody to look after his clothes, she thought.

  “Well, there we are,” said the doctor. “Professor Watson identified it straightaway. Tricholoma something-or-other. Or Man on Horseback, to give it its common name.”

  Isabel felt her heart miss a beat.

  The doctor smiled. “You’ll be all right.”

  “It’s not poisonous?” asked Jamie.

  The doctor made an equivocal gesture. “It is and it isn’t. It’s not very toxic—as far as we know. It used to be considered a delicacy, but it does appear to cause a reaction in some people. Not everyone.” He looked at Jamie. “Just some. But even if it does, there are no clear reports of fatalities. I’d consider it poisonous, frankly, and wouldn’t touch it. But others take a different view.”

&n
bsp; Isabel felt immediate, overwhelming relief. She reached again for Jamie’s hand.

  “Often the reaction becomes psychosomatic,” the doctor continued. “If people think they’ve eaten something that’s going to do them harm, the stomach tends to agree. That might be part of the explanation for your rather premature colicky pains.”

  “Do we need any treatment?” asked Jamie.

  The doctor shook his head. “I don’t think so. Just let us know if the nausea continues or if you have any other symptoms. But you’ve probably already experienced the worst it can do to you.” He had been addressing Isabel; now he turned to Jamie. “And you—well, those particular mushrooms obviously don’t disagree with you. But if you feel any discomfort, you can come back here if you like.”

  “I’m fine,” said Jamie. “I can eat anything usually.”

  The doctor smiled. “Not the things that people in this particular ward swallow.” And to Isabel, “Be careful.”

  He patted her on the wrist—a strange gesture, she thought: halfway between reassurance and reprimand.

  She lowered her feet off the examining couch, feeling for her shoes as she did so.

  “Thank you so much,” she said.

  “That’s what we’re here for,” said the doctor. He stretched his arm out as he spoke, as if relieving it of cramp, and glanced at his watch. “Next time you go picking mushrooms,” he said, “just don’t. We’ve had very experienced people in here. Mushroom people are fond of saying, ‘There are old mycologists and there are bold mycologists, but there are no old, bold mycologists.’ ”

  The same might be said, Jamie thought, for bikers and pilots and off-piste skiers …

  “We didn’t pick them,” said Isabel, in a matter-of-fact tone. “We bought them.”

  “What?”

  “We bought them at a delicatessen.”

  The doctor shook his head in disbelief. “Where?”

  “Here in Edinburgh. In Bruntsfield. The deli belongs to my niece.” She hesitated. “I’ll tell her immediately. Tomorrow morning.”