The Forgotten Affairs of Youth

by Alexander McCall Smith

  “I’m sure that everything will be fine,” said Isabel soothingly. “There is never enough electricity, is there, and so West of Scotland Turbines should hum along nicely.”

  “I think so too,” said Grace. “That’s why I did it.”

  “And I’m quite sure that if there is any danger of a real dip in their value, the other side will give you adequate warning.”

  Grace looked at her suspiciously. She was very defensive of the spirit world and she was not sure whether Isabel’s comment was serious enough. One mocked the spirit world at one’s peril, in Grace’s view.

  The subject of stocks and shares was put to one side. Charlie had received a lunch invitation—his first—and did not need to be collected until three o’clock. Grace had offered to do the collecting, as the house of Charlie’s new friend was only a few streets away.

  “You can work,” said Grace. “The morning post was massive, I’m afraid.”

  Isabel groaned. “Manuscripts?”

  “They looked like it,” said Grace. She smiled at Isabel. “Why do these philosophers do it?”

  Isabel was not sure what this meant. “Do what? Philosophy?”

  “Write all those articles. Surely there isn’t much new to say. Surely it’s all been said before.”

  Isabel thought about this. Had it all been said before? A lot of it had, she decided, but that did not mean that it was not worth saying again. And even when something has been said before, there was some point in its being said again by different people, and said to different people.

  She was about to say this when Grace changed the subject. “A man telephoned,” she said. “He left a message.”

  Isabel wondered whether it was Gareth Howlett, who had said that he would call her to confirm the sale of the West of Scotland Turbines shares.

  Grace shook her head. “No. I know Gareth. I didn’t know this one.”

  She waited for Grace to retrieve the piece of paper on which she had written the details of the caller. Grace’s notes were laconic, but enjoyable for their sometimes astringent comments.

  Now Isabel listened as Grace read from her aide-mémoire: “Max Lettuce. Is in Edinburgh today and tomorrow. Would like to see you, if possible. Could you phone him on his mobile? Full of himself. Thought I would know who he is. Did not say please. Asked if I was cleaning lady.” Grace regarded her balefully. “That’s the message,” she said. “I wrote down the number of his mobile—not that I wanted to, but I did anyway.”

  She passed Isabel the scrap of paper, on which the mobile number had also been noted.

  “This is rather unexpected,” said Isabel.

  “Not the Lettuce I met?” asked Grace. “That big—”

  “Slug,” said Isabel quickly. And then immediately retracted her comment. It was wrong; it was uncharitable. “No, I didn’t really mean that. Professor Lettuce may not be everybody’s cup of tea; in fact, I suspect he’s nobody’s. But we should not belittle him.”

  Grace was more robust. “But he is a slug,” she said. “That describes him perfectly.”

  Isabel ignored the encouragement. “This is his nephew. The lesser Lettuce.”

  Grace laughed. “I assume he’s taken a leaf out of his uncle’s book.”

  Isabel could not help but smile. “Let us not descend to puns,” she said. “Even good ones.” She paused. “I suppose I have to phone him.”

  Grace did not see why. “You don’t have to phone people back. Why should you?”

  “Because they’ve addressed you,” said Isabel. “If somebody said something to you in the street, would you not feel that you had to reply?” As she asked the question, she realised its complexity.

  For Grace, the answer was simple. “No. Not really. If a stranger comes up and says something that you don’t want to hear, you don’t have to say anything. Why should you?”

  “Because …” Isabel shrugged. “It’s to do with minimal moral obligation.”

  “And what about minimal disturbance?” retorted Grace. “I’m entitled not to be disturbed when I’m going about my business, aren’t I?”

  Isabel nodded. “Yes, I suppose you are.”

  “Well then,” said Grace, with the air of one who had won her point.

  Grace was right about being entitled not to be disturbed, but even if the people doing the disturbing were in the wrong, it did not mean that they ceased to be of any account: it all depended, as everything did. If you were in a great hurry, then you might be excused for ignoring a stranger who addressed you. But if you had time enough, then surely you could at least say no thank you, or sorry, or something of the sort; that was surely easy enough. After all, the other person—the stranger—shared those attributes that made each of us, every single one of us, so interesting, so morally significant: a life; a particular set of experiences; emotions; hopes; a family. In each of us there is something of human value, some grain of wisdom. If that did not count for something, then nothing, she thought, counted.

  “I think I should phone him,” she said, looking at the piece of paper.

  Grace frowned, disapproving. “Of course,” she said. “If that’s what you want to do.”

  Isabel left the kitchen. She felt rather irritated by Grace’s attitude. Her housekeeper was entitled to her opinions, and of course she should express them. But there were tactful ways of doing so and when you were sharing space with somebody—as she and Grace were—then you had to avoid too many disagreements. The relationship between Isabel and Grace was, after all, a working one. They were bound together by circumstance, and Isabel always treated Grace with consideration, but surely she was entitled to stand in her own kitchen and not be contradicted quite so firmly.

  It was the same with friendship. Disagreement between friends—and spouses, too—had to be carefully handled. If the time you spent with friends was consumed by disagreement, then there was no room for the essence of friendship, which was a sharing of the world. And that sharing involved seeing things the same way, or at least seeing things through the eyes of the friend. That, surely, was why friends tended to be of the same general view. Jack Spratt, of nursery-rhyme fame—he who notoriously could eat no fat—could hardly have had a very comfortable marriage to his wife, who could eat no lean. And yet, of course, they proved to be a good team, as the last two lines of the nursery rhyme made clear:

  And so between the two of them, you see,

  They licked the platter clean.

  The rhyme, then, was about how opposites may complement one another for practical purposes. But they may still be unhappy, of course.

  Isabel’s irritation with Grace did not last; it never did. She knew that Grace would do anything for her, and she would do anything for Grace. It was just that, on some subjects, they did not see the world in quite the same way. And Isabel was sufficiently self-aware—and modest—to know that this was not because she, Isabel, was always right. She was, in fact, often wrong—and knew it. Life became difficult when those who were often wrong did not know it.

  She went into her study and dialled the number that Grace had written down. At the other end, the telephone rang only once or twice before being picked up.

  “Max Lettuce.”

  Isabel gave her name in return.

  A short pause followed. “Oh, yes. Of course. It’s very kind of you. I just phoned on spec. I didn’t expect you to call me back.”

  Why not? wondered Isabel.

  “My uncle,” Max continued, “said that I should contact you when I was in Edinburgh.”

  Why? Isabel asked herself. But what she said was: “How nice.”

  There was another short pause. “I was wondering whether we could meet. I’m in Edinburgh for a rather short time, but …”

  I don’t really want to meet you, she thought, but said: “I’d be very happy to see you.”

  Max asked whether that same day would be possible, and Isabel replied that it would. Where was he? She had been thinking of going into town and could meet him, if he w
ished, at Glass & Thompson. She would buy him coffee.

  “No, you must let me do that!”

  “We’ll sort that out when we meet.”

  The call ended and Isabel frowned. Why had she done this? It would have been simpler to tell him that she was busy and that she hoped they would have the chance to meet the next time he came to Edinburgh, whenever that would be. But she realised that Max Lettuce’s telephone call was a perfect illustration of the point that she had made to Grace. Max was the stranger addressing her in the street, and thankfully she had replied in exactly the way she had said one should reply. So at least she was being consistent.

  Yet she did not want to do it. Max Lettuce, she was sure, would embody all the worst qualities of his uncle: he would be ambitious and scheming, an academic operator. He would be impossible, and she should not have agreed to meet him. And yet she had readily and without hesitation done just that; the internal moral automatic pilot had taken over and she had put herself out, and ruined her day—or so she suspected—by being obliging when she was fully entitled to protect her time from encroachments. She sighed. It would be simpler, she thought, to stop thinking.

  She went into the kitchen to check with Grace on the arrangements for collecting Charlie. She would be back, she hoped, not long after Grace picked him up. He might need a piece of bread and peanut butter when he came back; it depended on what he had been given for lunch.

  Grace nodded. “Sometimes they don’t eat,” she remarked, “when there are other children around—they’re too busy playing.”

  The telephone rang. Isabel answered it on the kitchen extension. It was Gareth Howlett.

  “Isabel? I said I’d call back to confirm that we’d got rid of West of Scotland Turbines. That went through fine. And, as I anticipated, you made a pretty good profit.”

  “Well done.”

  At the other end of the line Gareth laughed. “And we were just in time.”

  She looked across the room. Grace was wiping the counter with a cloth.

  “Oh? Why?”

  “They fell badly,” said Gareth. “A couple of hours after we sold. That sometimes happens when there is a bit of completely unexpected bad news.”

  Isabel was silent, her gaze resting on the back of Grace’s head. That money had been the other woman’s nest egg. I have so much, Isabel said to herself, and Grace has so little. And yet it is I who have made the profit.

  “Isabel?”

  “Sorry. It’s a bit of a surprise, that’s all. Tell me what happened.”

  Gareth explained. “They were counting on the success of their new equipment. It had performed brilliantly in tests, which accounted for the rise in value of the shares. Everything seemed to be going the right way, but now one of the turbines has failed dramatically—it blew up, in fact—and that’s set them back several years, I’m afraid.”

  “I see. Well, I suppose we should be grateful that we sold just at the right time.”

  She tried to keep her voice down, but Grace suddenly turned round and looked at her directly. Isabel closed her eyes. She said goodbye to Gareth hurriedly and put down the phone.

  Grace moved her cloth slowly over the surface of the counter, but her heart was no longer in cleaning anything. “Is that West of Scotland Turbines you were talking about?”

  Isabel could not lie, nor did she want to. “Yes.”

  “So if you sold yours at the right time, that must mean I’ve bought mine at a bad time.”

  Isabel nodded miserably. “I’m so sorry, Grace. I wouldn’t have recommended you to buy them had I known. But I didn’t …” She trailed off lamely.

  Grace stared down at the surface of the counter. “It’s my own fault,” she said. “I’ve been greedy. I saw the chance of a quick profit and I went for it. I’m getting what I deserve.”

  “You’re not,” said Isabel. “You don’t deserve to lose anything.”

  Grace appeared uncomforted by this. “There’s no difference between gambling and playing the stock market,” she said. “They are much the same thing. You may as well take the money to somewhere like Las Vegas or Monte Carlo and put it all on the tables.”

  Isabel was about to refute this but she realised that this was not the time. One could play the stock market quite morally because one was providing capital for companies to put to use. There was nothing wrong with that. The real villains were the people who made money out of manipulating people’s currencies or took aim at companies in order to cripple them and profit from their distress; they were even worse than ordinary gamblers, she thought. They wore suits and ties and worked in plush offices, but they were muggers, really—no different from the criminals who lurked in the shadows and leaped out to relieve people of their wallets.

  She knew, though, what she must do.

  “Let me make it up for you,” she said. “The profit I’ve made will more than compensate you.”

  Grace would not countenance this. “No,” she said immediately. “It’s very kind of you, but it’s my own fault. I took the risk and I must pay for it.”

  “Please,” said Isabel. “Please let me.”

  Grace shook her head.

  “I have more money than I need,” said Isabel. “And I’d feel much better if you let me do this.”

  Grace faltered. “I don’t have much else,” she said. “I’ve never been a great saver.”

  Isabel pressed home with her offer. “Good. Then that’s settled.”

  “But what can I do for you in return?” asked Grace.

  “Carry on being who you are,” said Isabel.

  ISABEL WAS RARELY in a bad mood, but when she arrived at Glass & Thompson she felt angry, with herself—for agreeing to go; with the as yet to be encountered Max Lettuce—for being a Lettuce; and with West of Scotland Turbines—for allowing their shares to tumble. There were other, lesser things that had irritated on her trip into town: a young man with extremely dirty dreadlocks sitting directly in front of her on the bus—she was sure that she saw his hair moving; a vapour trail across an otherwise unclouded sky—why must we spoil even the sky with the signs of our presence; and a newspaper billboard announcing a secret plan to impose a local income tax on Scotland.

  How dare politicians have secret plans, she said to herself; if you intend to do something, then you should be honest about it and not seek to keep it secret from the people who will be affected by your plans. And if the government imposed heavier and heavier taxes on the population then presumably there would come a point at which anybody in a position to leave would do so. Well-off people were resented, of course, because human beings were, by nature, envious. But there came a point at which we had to accept that shaking out the pockets of the wealthy would simply drive them away. And after their pockets had been shaken out, who would there be to invest in schemes to create further wealth?

  She went into Glass & Thompson and looked about her. The café was reasonably busy, although there were one or two tables free. Behind the counter, the bow-tied proprietor, Russell Glass, was cutting a large quiche.

  “Your friend is over there,” he said, nodding in the direction of one of the tables at the back.

  “Not my friend,” muttered Isabel.

  “Oh!” said Russell. “He said he was.”

  Isabel checked herself. “I’m not in a good mood, Russell. Everything is—”

  “Going pear-shaped? Oh, I know the feeling. Let me get you something to sort all that out. A bit of this almond tart? Almond tart has amazing restorative properties.”

  She smiled. “Thanks, but I’ll resist.”

  “Very restrained of you. I’ll tell you what, friend or no friend,” said Russell, “he made some very nice remarks about New Zealand.” Russell was a New Zealander and was receptive to compliments.

  Isabel made her way towards the back of the café. There was no mistaking Max Lettuce, who had the same sandy hair as his uncle, but cut shorter, and the same nose.

  As she approached the table, Max stood up. “
Dr. Dalhousie?”

  They shook hands. “Please don’t call me Dr. Dalhousie. Isabel.”

  “Isabel,” he said, as if savouring the name. “I’m Max.”

  “I can tell,” she said. “You are not entirely dissimilar to your uncle.”

  Max looked down at his hands. “So I hear. I thought I resembled my father, but my father obviously looks like his brother.”

  “Most of us don’t like to be reminded of family resemblances,” said Isabel. “We like to feel unique, don’t we?”

  Max agreed.

  They sat down and Max pointed to the menu chalked up on the board behind the counter. “That’s if you need something other than coffee. I didn’t have lunch and thought that I might have something light.”

  While he read the menu, Isabel sneaked an appraising glance. He did look like Professor Lettuce, she decided, but was less fleshy, less ponderous. Would that change? Was this merely a young Lettuce who would become an old Lettuce in due course and be like all the other old Lettuces—assuming that all the other old Lettuces, whom Isabel had never met, were all alike?

  Her attention moved to his clothes. Professor Lettuce always seemed to wear a tweed jacket and flannels—hopelessly old-fashioned attire that flapped about him like a tent; Max, by contrast, was wearing a blue linen jacket and black denim jeans. She noticed that his shoes were made of soft blue leather, an effective match with the jacket.

  He turned to face her and smiled. Isabel smiled back: that old, instinctive human exchange, the signalling that overcomes initial distrust. In this case, what needed to be overcome was her preconceived irritation, which now seemed to be fast dissipating.

  “It’s good of you to see me at zero notice,” said Max. “Thanks so much.”

  Isabel made a gesture to indicate that it had been no trouble. “I like to get away from my desk,” she said. “Any excuse will do.” That, she thought, sounded rude, and she corrected herself. “I wanted to meet you anyway. Now that we’re about to publish you, it seemed a good opportunity to put a face to the name.” And that name, she could not help but think, was Lettuce.