The Forgotten Affairs of Youth

by Alexander McCall Smith

  “Clara Scott,” she said. “Here she is. Masson Hall.”

  Jane reached forward to take the paper. Isabel watched as she examined it; she saw the expression on her face and said to herself: I have done the right thing.

  “That’s about all we can show you,” said Katrina. “You might be able to get academic results if you go to the Registry. Take evidence of the relationship and …” She looked apologetic. “Take your mother’s death certificate.”

  Isabel took the list from Jane and addressed Katrina. “Could we photocopy this?”

  Katrina looked doubtful. “I’m not sure …”

  “There’s nothing personal in it. It just shows who was there at the time, and that would have been public knowledge. The entrance of Masson Hall would have had a list of residents displayed.” She paused. “And it was a long time ago.”

  Katrina reluctantly agreed. “I suppose so,” she said, retrieving the list from Isabel. “We can do it in my office.”

  WHEN ISABEL AND JANE left Buccleuch Place, the sky had darkened slightly, but the clouds were high and unthreatening. The Institute where Jane was based was only a few yards away in Hope Park Square, a hidden eighteenth-century courtyard, and Jane suggested that they go there for a cup of tea.

  The Institute occupied a three-storey stone building that had once been a private house before being converted to offices. Isabel had always loved the domestic scale of the building and had imagined the Institute’s fellows sitting with one another in the common room and enlightening one another with great thoughts. It was not actually like that, she knew; academics as a group thought about the same things as anybody else: what to have for dinner, how to make ends meet, what chances of promotion they—or, more to the point, their rivals—had.

  While Jane put on the kettle, Isabel looked out of the window. Below her in the courtyard, a tree, in full summer leaf, was playing host to a couple of thrushes. One of these was on the topmost branch, close enough, Isabel thought, to be touched if one leaned out far enough. The bird was unaware of Isabel’s presence and preened itself unself-consciously, puffing up its speckled chest feathers and grooming them with quick movements of its beak. You use that to kill snails, don’t you? Isabel thought. It was one of the few facts she knew about thrushes: that they killed snails by holding them in their beaks and dashing them against stones.

  The bird suddenly stopped its ministrations and looked up at the sky. It was as if it knew it was being watched, the bright eyes seeking out danger, in quick darts of appraisal, before suddenly its throat swelled as it burst into song. The notes were sharp and sweet, a trill and its answer, both repeated. For a second or two after it finished its roll, the bird sang again.

  Isabel stood quite still, entranced by the tiny concert performance the thrush had given her. She wanted it to see her now, for it to know that it had been heard, but something on the ground had disturbed it, and it launched itself into flight, closely followed by its companion.

  Isabel turned round to see Jane standing in the doorway, watching her.

  “There were a couple of thrushes in the tree out there,” she said. “One sang.”

  Jane, holding a mug of tea in each hand, stepped forward. “I watch them too,” she said. “Sometimes I watch them for hours. Well, not for hours, I suppose, but for quite some time.”

  She held out one of the mugs to Isabel, who took it from her and blew across its top to cool it down.

  Isabel looked into her mug of tea. “There’s a line in Auden about thrushes,” she said. “It’s in his poem about streams. Maybe you know it.”

  Jane shook her head.

  Isabel continued, “He has a dream in which he finds himself ‘in a calm enclosure with thrushes popular.’ It’s a haunting line, don’t you think? A calm enclosure with thrushes popular—that’s what your courtyard is.”

  Jane smiled. “Of course it is. And now that’s the way I’ll think of it from now on. ‘With thrushes popular’ … yes.”

  They sat down. There were just two chairs in the room, which had a spartan feel to it—like the room of a scholarly monk: two standard-issue university chairs that had seen better days, a desk, a bookcase. On the wall the only decoration was a print of Allan Ramsay’s portrait of David Hume. Jane noticed that Isabel was looking at this.

  “Yes, I put that there myself. The good David. I brought that with me all the way from Melbourne. I find that it helps me to have him there when I’m wrestling with some aspect of his writing; it’s as if he’s, well, somehow encouraging me.”

  “I’ve always thought it a fine painting,” said Isabel. “It’s as if he’s amused by something. It’s very human.”

  “Amused by humanity, I imagine,” said Jane. “It’s a kind face, though, isn’t it?”

  Isabel nodded. Jane had put the list down on the table and she wanted to examine it. She reached across and picked it up.

  “What are you expecting from this?” Jane asked.

  Isabel looked up. “From these names? I want to find somebody who knew your mother in her university days, somebody we could talk to.”

  She returned to her perusal of the list of residents of Masson Hall.

  “And here, for example, is one I recognise.” She tapped the page. “She—this person here—was a friend of my mother.”

  “Then we can—”

  “Unfortunately she’s no longer with us,” Isabel interjected. “Breast cancer. She had two young children. It was very sad.”

  She scanned the list again, watched anxiously by Jane, whose eyes she now met. “Good,” she said simply. “Very good.”

  Jane raised an enquiring eyebrow. “A name you know?”

  “Yes,” said Isabel. “It’s exactly what I was hoping for. There was one Catherine Succoth. See, here she is. She lived in Masson Hall at the same time as your mother.”

  “And you know how to get in touch with her?”

  Isabel nodded. “I know her slightly. We were both on a committee and overlapped for a while.” She paused. “I haven’t seen her for a year or so, but I’ve read about her in the newspapers. She’s a judge. She presided over a big trial recently—it was all over the front page of the Scotsman.”

  After her earlier disappointment, Jane was beginning to look animated again. “Can we talk to her?”

  Isabel hesitated for a moment. “I don’t see why not,” she said. “But don’t get your hopes up too much. The odds are, of course, that she would have known your mother as there were only—what?—thirty women living in Masson Hall. Everyone would have known everyone else, at least by sight.” Isabel became more cautious. “But that might be the extent of it. She may have known her only slightly and may have nothing useful to offer us.”

  Isabel finished her tea, then explained to Jane that she would contact Catherine Succoth and ask whether she would see her. Would Jane care to accompany her when they met?

  Jane weighed the invitation. “Do you mind if I don’t? This is rather eating into my time and unsettling me. If you wouldn’t mind …”

  Isabel assured her that she was quite happy to see the judge by herself. And, no, Jane should not feel that she was imposing.

  “I hope that I’ll be able to do something for you sometime,” Jane said. “I’m very obligated to you.”

  It was a slightly clumsy way of putting it, thought Isabel: obligated. It put her in mind of chains, for some reason: heavy chains of obligation. But that was not the way it had to be: obligations could be strangely liberating, light things, a matter of gossamer, as could bonds of love. There was a song about it, she thought; a song about how the people we must carry are not really heavy. It had been a long time since she had heard that sung: it had been during her student days, on a trip to Canada, six glorious weeks of long warm days and sultry nights; a cabin in Ontario, a lake, the smell of barbecued trout; sitting on the deck watching the reflection of the trees on the water; a blond Canadian boy with a guitar; her whole life in front of her. It had been another world
.

  She left Jane and went out into the courtyard. As she passed the tree with thrushes popular, she looked up into the branches, hoping to catch a glimpse of the bird she had seen earlier. There was a movement in the branches, and then stillness; she did not think it was a thrush.

  She walked home. The students she and Jane had seen sitting on the grass were still there, the same boy reading from the same book. Isabel slowed down as she passed them, hoping to see the cover sufficiently clearly to satisfy her curiosity as to whether it was The Prophet. One of the students gazed back quizzically, and Isabel hurried on her way. But as she made off, she heard the voice of the boy who had been reading aloud, “ ‘But what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind …’ ”

  She smiled to herself. Gibran, she thought, just as I suspected. Such mystical wishful thinking, but beautifully put, as mystical wishful thinking so often is.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  ISABEL WALKED DOWN Dundas Street the following morning, with the hills of Fife clear in the distance across the Forth. There was a breeze, but not an unfriendly one, and the sky was high and cloudless, a colour that her mother had called “singing blue.”

  At the junction with Northumberland Street, she turned to the right and began to look at the numbers on the doors. She was in the heart of the New Town, and the stone terraces had all the features of classic Georgian architecture: perfectly proportioned windows, neat astragals, the whole effect being of harmony and pared-down elegance. Judges had to live somewhere—as everyone did—and this, Isabel thought, was a very fitting place for a judge to live: reserved, dignified, understated.

  She had phoned Catherine Succoth the previous evening. The judge had seemed a bit guarded when Isabel first spoke to her, but her tone became warmer once she established that Isabel was not contacting her about a professional matter.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “But I must ask you whether this is anything to do with the law. I don’t want to be unhelpful, but in my position I can’t really discuss legal affairs. It’s one of the consequences of being a judge—one has to withdraw, so to speak.”

  “It’s nothing like that. It’s … well, it’s about somebody you might have known years ago—in your student days. Clara Scott.”

  There was a brief silence at the other end of the line. Then, “I remember her. My goodness, that was ages ago. Clara Scott. Yes. Masson Hall.”

  Isabel could not conceal her pleasure. “I’m delighted you remember her. Could we meet?”

  “Of course,” said Catherine. Then there was a pause. “I take it that you’re aware that she died some years ago? A car accident.”

  “I know that. But there’s something I need to ask you about.”

  “Come round,” said Catherine. “Tomorrow? I’m not in court, so you could catch me in Northumberland Street. Eleven-ish?”

  Now, at a few minutes after eleven, Isabel found herself outside a dark-blue doorway on which was fixed the house number in brass Roman numerals. To the right of the door, on the stone architrave, on a discreet brass plate, the size of a playing card, was inscribed Mr. Rankeillor, Advocate. The brass plaque had weathered but its inscription was still perfectly legible. This was the Advocates’ Quarter, the traditional territory of the members of the Faculty of Advocates, the Scottish Bar, and such brass plates were common up and down its streets. Mr. Rankeillor, Advocate … Why not Miss Succoth, Advocate, which is what Catherine would have been before she became a judge?

  Isabel looked again. There were four neatly filled holes in the stonework directly below the Rankeillor plate; there had been a second plate, and it had been removed, or fallen off.

  She reached for the bell, a large old-fashioned button surrounded by a generous square, also of brass, well polished this time. She pushed it, and it was as if the act of pushing released a memory within. It all came back: the name Alastair Rankeillor had been familiar, and now she remembered.

  Of course, it was that Alastair, the Alastair who had been a well-known lawyer with a reputation as a philanderer. He had been almost irresistible to women and had taken full advantage of that, leaving a long trail of disappointed girlfriends behind him—as well as a queue of husbands to take issue with him over his seduction of their wives. But there had been one woman to whom he had always returned—one woman who tolerated his bad behaviour and was always prepared to take him back. And, of course, that woman was Catherine Succoth—of course it was: Isabel remembered Roddy Martine telling her about it. Roddy knew all the secrets of Scottish society, and had held Catherine up as an example of female toleration of the waywardness of men.

  “It’s pretty impressive, isn’t it?” he had said. “I could give you a long list, Isabel, of women who have shown the patience of saints—and the same capacity to forgive. Catherine Succoth did this. Forgave him and forgave him. However …”

  Roddy looked pained.

  “However what?”

  “However, he eventually brought the affair to an end—after all those years he upped sticks and went off to the British Virgin Islands, where he is today, senior partner in an offshore firm of lawyers, I believe, and doing very nicely. New woman with him, naturally. The widow of a shipping line, you might say. He must be getting close to retiring—at least from the law.”

  “He must be around that age.”

  “Yes, but I don’t think Lotharios retire from active service in the other department, so to speak. I think they carry on having affairs until they drop.” Roddy shrugged. “The injustice of this world, Isabel. Cads, as they used to be called, do very well. They thrive. They live happily ever after. It’s enough to make one want to believe in the place below, where they’d get a good roasting for their efforts. It would make the rest of us feel so much better, wouldn’t it?”

  She pressed the bell and waited. Alastair Rankeillor. She had met him, or at least had him pointed out to her at parties. He was good-looking, certainly, but was he really irresistible to women? Was anybody completely irresistible?

  Catherine Succoth was, as Isabel’s father would have put it, well preserved. Although in her early sixties, she could have passed for a decade or so younger; her hair colour, a light auburn, looking quite natural, and her skin retaining that smoothness that goes with a life spent away from the sun—the skin that comes from living in Iceland, or Finland, or northern Scotland for that matter. She was, by any standards, a handsome woman, with an animated, intelligent look to her that made it easy for Isabel to understand why Alastair Rankeillor, who by all accounts had to fight women off, had remained with her—in his way—for years.

  Her greeting was friendly, but with a slight note of reserve. Isabel thought this was normal: the judge belonged to a generation, and a social circle, that was not effusive. There was none of the frostiness, though, that one might have expected from somebody of an even earlier generation, a coldness expressed in the hoary saying that Edinburgh invitations always implied: you’ll have had your tea.

  Catherine led Isabel up the staircase that ascended in a curve from the hall to the floor above. Two open doors gave off the landing, through one of which there was a glimpse of a formal drawing room: an ornate gilt-framed mirror above an Adam fireplace; a sofa and sofa table: altogether an air of quiet comfort. And through the other door was a study; Catherine indicated that they should go in there.

  “More comfortable,” she said, “and there’s a pot of freshly brewed tea, as it happens.”

  Isabel looked about the study, a smaller room than the drawing room and facing south towards the back of Heriot Row. On one wall there were several pictures, all expressing exactly the taste that Isabel would have expected: a nineteenth-century watercolour of the Falls of Clyde; a Thorburn, or Thorburn-ish study, of grouse in flight; several framed plates from Kay’s Edinburgh Portraits. There was no photograph of Alastair Rankeillor, but of course there would not be: this was a judge’s study, not the bedroom of a lovesick teenager. And yet, thought Isabel, that’s what we all are at heart: love-stru
ck teenagers. And every so often the love-struck teenager within emerged to remind us that love is quite as capable of turning our world upside down as it ever was.

  The opposite wall was completely taken up by shelves, right up to the ceiling, and they were packed with books, including a long run of green-bound volumes of the Scots Law Times. Isabel remembered those so well from her father’s library; as a bored teenager she had occasionally paged through them, trying to find interesting nuggets hidden among the arid wastes of legislative news, legal wrangles and obfuscations. There was nothing for a girl there, although she had liked the divorce cases, with their mildly titillating details and, on occasion, their raw explicitness.

  She was also amused by the reports from the Court of the Lord Lyon, with their discussions of obscure points of genealogy and heraldry.

  “Does anybody actually worry about that sort of thing?” she had asked her father, and he had smiled before replying enigmatically, “You will.”

  Catherine offered Isabel a chair before seating herself on the other side of a small library table. She poured her a cup of tea from a small china pot on the table, then passed it to her.

  “You wanted to speak to me about Clara Scott?” she said.

  Isabel noticed that the judge wasted no time in getting to the point. The visit, she thought, was not going to develop into a social one; there had been no discussion of the weather, no small talk about the irritations of the interminable work on the city’s new tramlines.

  “Yes,” said Isabel. “I’ve been contacted by an Australian relative of Clara’s who wants to find out about her.”

  Isabel had decided that she could not reveal the exact nature of the enquiry. She and Jane had not discussed the extent to which Jane wanted her quest to remain private—perhaps they should have done—and she felt that it was best not to disclose everything. To say that she was making an enquiry on behalf of an Australian relative was perfectly true, even if it did not reveal exactly what lay behind it.