The Forgotten Affairs of Youth

by Alexander McCall Smith

  “You must,” said the doctor. “And I think the Environmental Health people will be in touch with you. They’ll need to know. We’ve got your phone number on the admission form, haven’t we?”

  “I gave it to them,” said Jamie. “It’s there.”

  The way out led them past the end of the ward, past the bed where the young would-be suicide lay, fully clothed. The nurse who had been with him had gone off to attend to somebody else, leaving him lying there, staring out. Isabel hesitated when she saw the young man looking at her.

  “You go on,” she whispered to Jamie. “Wait outside. I’ll be with you in a moment.”

  She approached the bedside.

  “I’m Isabel,” she said. “What’s your name?”

  The young man stared at her. He was unshaven, she noticed, and there was a bruise on the side of his head; perhaps he had fallen after his overdose and hit something on the way down.

  He spoke quietly, almost too quietly to be heard. “Harry.”

  She sat down on the edge of his bed. It seemed to her that it was perfectly natural to do this. “I’m sorry that you’re here,” she said. “I’m sorry that you’re unhappy.”

  He stared at her mutely.

  “I’m here,” she continued, “because I ate some poisonous mushrooms. That’s why.”

  Harry frowned. “My brother’s dog did that,” he said.

  “Oh dear.”

  He spoke wearily. “He died.”

  “Then I’ve been lucky, haven’t I?”

  She reached out and took his hand. He did not resist, but it was limp. She felt a sticking plaster.

  “We all get luck of various kinds in our lives,” she went on. “You know that, Harry? We get a bit of good luck, then we get a lot of pretty bad luck. Sometimes more bad luck than good.”

  He looked away.

  “But it’s worth carrying on, Harry. I think it really is.”

  “You don’t know …”

  She waited for him to finish, but he said nothing more. She pressed his hand. “There’ll be somebody who loves you, won’t there?”

  He did not reply.

  She imagined what he thought: Who is this woman? But she persisted, “There will be. And there will be things for you to do. There are things for all of us to do.”

  “I’ve got no job.” He spoke bitterly.

  “You’ll get one. People do.”

  He shook his head vigorously. “There’s nothing. I’m a plasterer. There’s nothing.”

  She wondered what she could say. There were plenty of people out of work; plenty who felt worthless, unwanted. Platitudes would not ease their pain. One might as well suggest cake, as Marie Antoinette was supposed to have done.

  Suddenly, on impulse, she leaned forward and embraced him. He gave a start, she felt it, but then he relaxed. She felt his cheek against hers. His hair smelled stale: of cooking fat, of fried potatoes.

  “Harry,” she whispered.

  He was crying, the tears running down his cheek, and hers too, from its closeness. There was salt at the edge of her lips, stronger now: his tears. She did not mind. He was another person, not much more than a boy, and boys were made of salt and water.

  She withdrew, so that she was looking directly into his eyes, still wet with tears, from a foot or so away.

  “All right?”

  He moved his head slightly: a movement against the pillow; a nod, half-hearted, but discernible nonetheless. She took a step back and then left the ward.

  CHAPTER NINE

  GRACE STAYED OVERNIGHT, occupying the spare bedroom at the back of the house. She always kept a bag of toiletries and clothes there, just in case her babysitting duty ended too late to bother with the night buses or an expensive taxi.

  “You had a very narrow escape,” she said to Isabel the next morning. “And now? How are you feeling now?”

  “Just fine,” said Isabel.

  “Diarrhoea?” asked Grace.

  Isabel thought this was none of her business. Doctors and nurses could ask questions like that, but one did not go up to somebody and say “Diarrhoea?” just like that.

  She shook her head. Grace seemed disappointed by this answer, Isabel decided, and she wondered whether her housekeeper liked the thought that others might have diarrhoea when she did not. It was rather like those who, having exercised restraint at a party, take pleasure from hearing about the hangovers of those who had enjoyed themselves rather too much. Schadenfreude was an odd emotion, but it existed.

  “Sounds like you got away with it,” said Grace. “And what about Jamie?”

  “Nothing at all,” said Isabel. “Apparently this particular mushroom doesn’t affect everybody.”

  “Men,” said Grace. “Their gut is different. It can handle all sorts of rubbish.”

  She said this, Isabel thought, with the air of one who had an intimate knowledge of the insides of men. She herself would not presume to pass comments on men’s anatomy.

  “Oh well,” said Isabel brightly. “A lesson learned. There are none left, by the way: I put the ones Jamie didn’t use in the bin.”

  The lesson, though, had to be communicated to Cat, and shortly after nine o’clock, leaving Grace in charge of Charlie—Jamie having gone over to Glasgow for a rehearsal—Isabel made her way along Merchiston Crescent towards Bruntsfield and Cat’s delicatessen. Halfway there, she stopped to greet the friendly grey cat that often lay in wait for her at the bottom of its overgrown garden and seemed to have an uncanny ability to know exactly when she would be walking past. She had read that animals were telepathic, but had doubted this. They might detect something—as this cat appeared to do—but she doubted whether they could send messages of the sort that human telepathists claimed to convey. What can you convey if you have no language? But then she told herself: animals do pass one another messages, by sound or by visual means, and all that animal telepathy would involve—if it existed—would be the sending of the same thought by different means.

  She bent down to stroke the animal, now rubbing itself against the railing on top of its low garden wall. Perhaps what a cat picked up was a sort of electromagnetic field, a bleep that indicated that a person was approaching. That was hardly telepathy; that was radar. But if one thought of food and then concentrated on sending a cat the idea of food, would it receive it? She concentrated on an image of a fish laid out on a bowl, picturing it in her mind: a temptation for any cat. Could you send such an image to a cat?

  The grey cat suddenly stopped rubbing itself on the railings and looked at Isabel with burning intensity. It let out a loud, demanding yowl.

  Isabel tickled the cat under its chin. “Oh,” she said. “You got the message. I have no fish at all, I’m afraid. Sorry.”

  The cat regarded her disdainfully, before leaping off the wall, back into the garden. The shift of its attention from Isabel was immediate and total, as if she were no longer there.

  “Fickle,” she muttered and continued her journey.

  She knew that Cat would be at work when she arrived at the delicatessen, and she assumed that Eddie’s replacement, Sinclair, would also be there. She had not yet met him and was intrigued. Eddie was a very unusual young man, and she wondered what his friend would be like. All she knew about him was what she had winkled out of Eddie himself—that he was good-looking, as Eddie, at Isabel’s prompting, had confirmed. She had asked about that because she knew Cat well enough to know that there would be an issue. Cat would not be able to resist a good-looking young man: it was as simple as that.

  She sighed. It was difficult to keep up with Cat’s emotional entanglements. Her last boyfriend, a teacher, had been dropped for reasons that Isabel had never learned.

  “It’s over,” Cat had said simply. “I don’t want to talk about it, actually. All I’ll say is that it didn’t work out.”

  Isabel had sympathised. “Sometimes it doesn’t,” she said, stopping herself from going on to say as I fear you know only too well.

  “We�
��re still friends,” Cat had said. “It wasn’t acrimonious.”

  That, again, was typical of Cat. The only bitter break-up that Isabel knew of was the ending of her affair with Bruno, the deeply objectionable tightrope-walker who had shouted at Cat in public and had been got rid of there and then. That was greatly to Cat’s credit, thought Isabel, although it was equally not to her credit that she had chosen him in the first place.

  She thought of Sinclair. If he was Eddie’s contemporary, then he would be twenty, or thereabouts, and Cat was now in her early thirties. If Cat fell for him, it could be difficult for him to cope with the situation, especially if he, like Eddie, was at all vulnerable. Some young men would love an attractive older woman to take an interest in them, but not all, especially if the older woman was their employer. No, Cat would have to avoid falling for Sinclair; she would have to tell herself that he was out of bounds and stick to that, which of course she would not.

  Isabel arrived at the delicatessen to see Cat behind the counter, serving a customer. Cat caught Isabel’s eye and nodded when Isabel pointed to one of the tables. She would sit and read the newspaper until Cat was free. The first half hour was busy after the shop opened each morning, as people dropped in on their way to work; thereafter things slackened off until noon, when the first of the lunchtime shoppers arrived.

  Isabel settled herself at the table. A copy of the previous day’s local paper, the Evening News, had been placed on the rack and she flicked through the pages of this. A ferry had run aground in the Western Isles—it happened from time to time—and there were the passengers on the beach, looking at the stranded vessel.

  “We were very disappointed,” one was quoted as saying. “We thought we were going to Oban, but we ended up here instead. This is not where we wanted to be.”

  Isabel smiled at the comment. What did journalists expect people to say? And when they expressed the obvious—as that passenger had—then should it even be printed? Of course you would be disappointed if the ferry on which you were travelling ran aground, but your disappointment was hardly news.

  And she found herself becoming irritated with the passengers too. They should be relieved that they had only run aground and not sunk. People should not complain about things that just happened, where it was not necessarily anybody’s fault. Ferries ran aground because the officer on watch misread a chart, or looked in the wrong direction at the wrong time, or forgot that the tide was going out rather than coming in; and none of these might involve actual fault, or at least not fault beyond the normal range of inevitable human error. People made mistakes because they were human, and there was as much point complaining about that as moaning about the weather. So the man who told the newspaper that he was upset because he was in the wrong place should really have reflected on how fortunate he was to be alive and not to have been travelling on that poor Egyptian ferry that overturned in the Red Sea and took so many passengers—hundreds of them—to their watery deaths. That was what he should be thinking about.

  She turned the page: a man who had been convicted of the assault of a neighbour had been sentenced to three months’ imprisonment. The accused had hit his neighbour with a fence-post, the paper reported, in an argument over a planning application for the extension of a driveway. This sentence had been greeted with outrage by members of the victim’s family, who said that three years would have been more appropriate. But of course they would, thought Isabel. Again, if you ask people what they think of the sentences meted out to criminals, they say they are not long enough, an answer you will almost always get from the victim’s family.

  She was absorbed in the story of an Edinburgh woman whose two daughters and a son had all become opera singers when Cat, who had finished with her customers, came over.

  “Something interesting?” asked Cat, as she sat down opposite Isabel.

  Isabel put the paper aside. “I was reading about a woman who raised three opera singers,” she said. “There was an interview with her and she said …” She picked up the paper again and read from the report: “ ‘I can’t sing a note myself,’ said their mother, Sylvia, forty-seven, from Inverleith. ‘I don’t know how this happened. They were just always singing. All over the place—all this singing.’ ”

  Isabel looked at Cat and laughed. But Cat did not.

  “And?”

  Isabel gestured to the page. “I find that rather funny.”

  Cat seemed puzzled. “Why?”

  Isabel shrugged. It was sometimes difficult to explain just how funny things were, especially to Cat, whose perspective on the world was often quite different from Isabel’s.

  “It’s just the thought of this household with the musically ungifted mother opening a bedroom door and finding a small child singing. Or looking in a cupboard, perhaps, and finding inside a child singing an aria from Tosca. Life would be full of surprises.”

  “Why would a child sing in a cupboard?” asked Cat.

  “I don’t necessarily think that happened,” said Isabel. “Although children do like to squeeze themselves into tight corners, into nooks and crannies. It springs from the desire to get back to the time when they were smaller … perhaps.”

  “A sort of nostalgie de la boue?” suggested Cat.

  Isabel shot her a glance. “Maybe. Although that usually involves the desire to experience crudity.”

  And she thought: As well you know, Cat! Bruno had involved nostalgie de la boue.

  Cat did not like to be corrected. “I thought it meant wanting to go back to something,” she said sulkily. “Didn’t we all come from the mud a long time ago? Didn’t our distant ancestors crawl out of the mud and onto dry land?”

  “I find it difficult to see myself as the descendant of a lizard,” said Isabel. “You may, if you wish, but not me. I have no inner lizard, I’m afraid. Nor do I feel great affinity for one of those curious salamander things—half fish, half something else.”

  “Oh well,” said Cat. “Evolution’s not compulsory.”

  Isabel smiled at the comment. Surely evolution was not a matter of choice—if you wanted to survive. Of course there might be those who had just done enough evolving. She thought of what such a person might say. Frankly, I’m not evolving any more.

  “What’s the joke?”

  Isabel shook her head. “Evolution,” she said. “Well, that’s not a joke, of course.” She gazed out of the window. “Actually, I was in hospital last night. But only briefly.”

  Cat was concerned. “Isabel! What happened?”

  “Something I ate,” said Isabel quietly; she would have to handle this tactfully.

  Cat raised an eyebrow. “It must have been pretty bad to end up in hospital.” She paused. “Diarrhoea?”

  That is the second time, thought Isabel, that somebody has asked me that today.

  “No,” she said. “No diarrhoea. Just stomach pains—like colic, I suppose. I’m afraid it was a mushroom. Or a number of mushrooms.”

  Cat greeted this with incredulity. “You didn’t go mushroom picking? Isabel!”

  “No. Jamie bought them. Here, as it happens. Remember?”

  Isabel noticed that Cat’s immediate reaction was to blush.

  “Here?”

  Isabel tried to make it as gentle as possible. “It’s not your fault. I’m really not blaming you. The mushrooms were only mildly toxic.”

  Cat shook her head. “Oh my God, I’m sorry. I really am. Jenny gave them to me. She said they were … I forget what it was, but she used a Latin name and she’s always been a mushroom picker. She has all those books—”

  Isabel sought to reassure Cat. “It doesn’t matter. The important thing is this: you haven’t got any more, have you? Because if you have, I’d suggest that—”

  “No, there aren’t any more.”

  “Well, then there’s nothing to worry about.”

  Cat was relieved. “Good. And you won’t tell anybody about it, will you Isabel?” She did not wait for an answer. “Great. So now let me get yo
u a coffee. It’s the least I can do after having half poisoned you—unwittingly of course.”

  Isabel accepted the offer. “All right. Are you going to be single-handed all day? Where’s your new assistant, Eddie’s friend?”

  Cat looked at her watch. “He usually comes in about now. He’ll be here.”

  Eddie, by contrast, was always there before the delicatessen was opened to customers.

  “He’s a bit late,” said Isabel.

  “He lives over near Jock’s Lodge,” explained Cat.

  “Hardly Timbuktu,” said Isabel.

  Cat ignored this. “He’s a quick learner.”

  “Good.” Isabel noticed that the door was opening. “That’s him?”

  Cat turned round. “Yes.”

  There was a change in her expression, and Isabel noticed it. We cannot conceal it, she said to herself; we cannot conceal the quickening that goes with sexual desire. Watch the eyes; watch the whole demeanour: it’s unmistakable.

  Sinclair came up to the table. “Hey,” he said.

  Cat replied, “Hey.”

  Isabel said nothing.

  “Hey,” said Sinclair again, this time to Isabel.

  “Hey,” she said weakly. She did not like saying “hey”; she saw no reason why she should say “hey” to somebody she had never said “hey” to before.

  Cat introduced them. “This is Isabel. She sometimes helps out here.”

  Isabel inclined her head. She was under Sinclair’s gaze, and she felt it. After a moment or two, she raised her eyes to meet his.

  “Hey,” said Sinclair again.

  Isabel stared; it was impossible to do anything else. She tried to look away to avoid embarrassment, but she could not. Medusa, she thought, but this was utterly different, of course. Sinclair smiled and two small dimples, perfectly placed, appeared on his cheeks.

  “Eddie told me about you,” he said. “Eddie thinks you’re great.”

  Isabel laughed nervously. “The feeling’s mutual. I’m very fond of Eddie. We all are.”

  “Eddie’s a good guy,” said Sinclair, then turned to Cat. “What do you want me to do?”