The Forgotten Affairs of Youth

by Alexander McCall Smith

  Jane cut her short. “Is he alive?”

  “I think so,” said Isabel.

  “Oh my God—” She broke off, and Isabel heard what she thought was a sob.

  “I know this must be rather emotionally overwhelming for you. Do you want me to come round to see you? I could, you know.”

  Jane thanked her. No. She would cope; she was fine; she needed a minute or two. Now she asked Isabel what the next step would be. “May we go and see him?”

  “That’s up to you,” said Isabel. She had offered to help, and now she was running things. It had happened before; it always happened. “You decide what you want. All that I’d be inclined to say is that it might be better for me to go and see him first. I could break the news and see what his attitude is.” She paused. “He may not want to see you, you know.”

  She knew that was not an easy thing for anybody to hear, in whatever circumstances. Of course people would want to see me; how could they not? That was what most people thought, although there were those who were realistic to the point of self-effacement; those who said too quickly, “You won’t remember me, of course.”

  Jane seemed unconcerned. “I know that,” she said quickly. “We don’t know whether he’s even aware of my existence.”

  Isabel doubted that. “He may not know who you are, but surely he knows that there was a baby. Surely …”

  But as she said this she saw what Jane meant. In those days—and today—people could deny pregnancy. She had met somebody who had gone through a concealed pregnancy and then, to the astonishment of all, had excused herself one day, gone into the bathroom and given birth. This woman had been pointed out to Isabel at a wedding reception: she sat demurely at the edge of the room with a toddler at her feet.

  “That woman,” Isabel’s companion had whispered, “went into the bathroom one day and had a baby. That very child at her feet. Not a soul knew. Not her doctor. Not her parents. Presumably not the child’s father. Can you believe it?”

  It was the sort of story which people loved, which brightened their lives, in fact. That somebody should do something like that in defiance of the framework of a benevolent state, with its nurses and health visitors and information leaflets: it spoke of rebellion, of self-determination on a heroic scale. Or of shame, which itself was becoming rarer and rarer.

  Nobody felt very much ashamed of anything any more, Isabel thought. You could do what you liked and then speak about it at great length on a confessional television show and nobody would bat an eyelid. And while that revealed a healthier attitude when it came to dealing with things that were better unconcealed, or with things that should not involve shame at all, it also meant that one of the main reasons for social restraint had been removed. Isabel recalled reading an article on homicide by a psychologist who argued, somewhat obviously, that shame and feelings of guilt were the main reason why people were hesitant to murder one another: a self-evident point, but one that perhaps we might need to remind ourselves of. The hesitation could so easily be removed and then anything might be done, and was.

  And then she thought: How does the sense of shame get dismantled? One way suggested itself immediately: Get children used to killing. Yes. And how? Let them play games about killing. Let them do it on their computers!

  “Isabel?”

  “Yes, I’m still here. I was just thinking, you’re right: Clara … I suppose I should call her your mother … Your mother may well not have told Rory. She may just have gone off and had the baby.” She hesitated. “Perhaps she didn’t want Rory to be involved because she didn’t want to continue to be involved with him. Perhaps it was all an accident. She might not have loved him. It might just have happened and then been regretted.”

  It was not the silence at the other end of the line that stopped Isabel; it was her own realisation that what she was talking about here were the facts of another person’s coming into existence. We all like to imagine that we do so in the most romantic of circumstances, to the accompaniment of music, by candlelight. But for most of us it may well not be like that at all—not that we like to dwell on it. Freud was right in suggesting that what he called the primal scene was disturbing; of course it was. Our parents could surely not have done that sort of thing.

  And here she was suggesting to Jane that she was an accident. She had more or less spelled it out: a student party in a shabby flat, with two people having had too much to drink, perhaps, and ended up fumbling about in a cluttered bedroom, and hey presto, a new life is conceived. And then self-reproach and horror and embarrassment, and the new life is concealed and shunted away to Australia with a new set of parents.

  “I’m very sorry,” she muttered.

  Jane seemed surprised. “About what?”

  “About suggesting that … that your conception was accidental.”

  “But I’m sure it was. How many of us are planned? Some, maybe, but many aren’t.”

  “You’re very matter-of-fact,” said Isabel.

  Jane laughed. “I’m Australian. We don’t go in for hypocrisy about these things.”

  “Clearly not.” Isabel paused. “But here in Scotland we do, do we?”

  “I wouldn’t put it that way. But people here are a bit more … subtle, perhaps. It comes from having to be careful not to tread on too many toes. You people say an awful lot without actually saying it, if you know what I mean. That’s a talent, maybe, rather than a fault.”

  Isabel brought the conversation back to its original purpose. “So shall I try to see him?”

  “Yes,” said Jane. “Exactly. If you don’t mind.”

  Isabel assured her that she did not. “And I’m not being subtle,” she said. “I’m really not. I’ve become interested in this. I want a happy ending, you know.”

  “Don’t we all?” said Jane.

  “Yes. But it doesn’t always happen that way.”

  “That depends on how you write the story,” said Jane.

  MIST HUNG OVER the fields of East Lothian, the rich farming land that lay between Edinburgh and the North Sea coast. There was a local name for this, for the rolling banks of white that came in off the sea, drifting across the low ground, filling valleys, lapping at the feet of hills; this was the haar, a word that Isabel had always found onomatopoeic. If the haar made a sound, which it did not, it would be “haar,” a soft breathing out, an exhalation of slightly moist air from the depths of the lungs.

  Now, at ten o’clock in the morning, the haar was still in evidence, although it was quickly being burned off by the sun to reveal the countryside beneath: the orderly fields, dark green in their summer clothing but with earlier crops here and there already golden. She drove past a large field of hay that had been cut a day or two previously, the circular bales dotted about where the harvester had disgorged them. She saw a tractor halfway up a slope, driven by a man who was waving to another man on the ground; she passed a field full of pigs with their curious, domed pig arks like the tepees of some tribe of plainsmen. She thought: All this happens to support all that—that being the life of the cities, all those people who were ignorant or indifferent to the life of the countryside and to their agricultural roots. Music and art and philosophy are ultimately based on the premise that this man on his tractor, and these pigs, and the swarms of bees that fertilise the crops, will all continue to do what they do. And every philosopher, no matter how brilliant his or her insights, needs a portion of this field—how much? Half an acre?—to support him if he is to survive.

  She followed the back road that led through the village of Longniddry and then along the railway line towards Haddington. Years ago while this had been rich agricultural land up above, it had been mining country down below. Thick seams of coal ran directly beneath these fields and out under the North Sea. The mining had stopped, but had left its mark on the land and on the people too, who, some of them, had hard work stamped on them like a badge.

  It had not been difficult to find Rory Cameron. Isabel had phoned a friend who lived in Gull
ane, a village on the coast that was surrounded by golf courses. Did she know anybody called Rory Cameron who had been—

  “He was the secretary of one of the golf clubs,” her friend interjected. “Years ago. That Rory Cameron? He was married to an Irishwoman, I think.”

  Isabel held her breath. She had not expected it to be quite as easy as this. “He’s still alive?” she asked.

  Her friend had laughed. “Why should he be dead?”

  “Because we all die,” said Isabel. “Didn’t you know that?”

  “I had my suspicions,” said her friend. “No, that Rory Cameron is alive and kicking. I saw him a week or two ago in the village. I don’t really know him very well—but you know what this place is like: everybody is aware of everybody else even if they don’t actually know them. I’ve met him once or twice at drinks parties.”

  “And?”

  “And what?”

  “And what’s he like?”

  There was a moment of hesitation. “More or less what you’d expect. A bit unusual maybe.”

  Isabel waited for her friend to explain. When she did not, Isabel asked in what way.

  “There’s an air of unhappiness about him. Not what one would expect in the secretary of an East Lothian golf club. They’re usually … well, you can imagine what they’re like. Brisk and sociable. And he was also an army officer. You expect army officers to be rather brisk, don’t you? You don’t think of them as being tormented by doubts.”

  Isabel could not help but imagine an army officer plagued by doubts. Quick march, or maybe not. Left-flanking attack, or maybe right. Move forward, but perhaps not quite now.

  Isabel made a remark about avoiding stereotypes. “The army recognises that there can be all sorts of officers. And the British Army, surely, has had some very unusual soldiers in the past, hasn’t it? Look at Lawrence of Arabia. Or Montgomery. He was a much more complex character than people think.”

  She mulled this over as she neared Gullane. Rory Cameron had been polite on the telephone. She had explained that she wanted to talk to him about somebody he had known at university. She did not mention Clara’s name, even when he had asked.

  “Do you mind if we don’t go into the details over the phone?” she said. “I’d much prefer to talk to you about it in person.”

  He had seemed more bemused than suspicious. “I don’t see why you can’t say who it is,” he said. “It’s hardly state secrets we’ll be discussing.” He paused. “What’s it to do with, then? You should at least be able to tell me that.”

  “Somebody has asked me to find out more about a parent,” she said. “Somebody from back then.”

  He had remained good-humoured. “I’m sorry; do I know you?”

  “We have a mutual friend.”

  She gave the name of her friend, and he said, “Ah, yes,” before going on to say, “All right, I could see you if you wish, as long as you make it relatively early in the morning. Ten-thirty tomorrow? I’m playing golf in the afternoon and I can’t change that.”

  THE CAMERON HOUSE, which Isabel found with some difficulty after a few wrong turnings, was at the end of an old farm road, rutted and potholed from years of neglect. The fields on either side, shielded by unruly hedgerows, were still in use, with one being occupied by cattle clustered about a gate, watching her balefully as she negotiated a particularly muddy patch of the track. The cattle were expecting their feed, and one or two of them poked their heads through the bars of the gate.

  “I’m sorry, I have nothing for you,” she muttered, and then thought, It’s come to this at last: I’m talking to cows.

  The house itself was organised in the typical way of the more prosperous Scots farmyard, with a rambling barn, or steading, behind it, a block of storerooms and a walled vegetable garden. The steading had been worked on and had a set of freshly painted doors; at several points along the roof, an uneven structure covered with warm red pantiles, modern skylights had been added. Ranged against the steading wall were four large kennels, each with a tiny roof tiled to match.

  The house was larger than one might expect to find on a working farm, and Isabel imagined that a century or two ago it might have been occupied by a family with pretensions to being part of the gentry: not quite there yet, but on the way. The original family had clearly gone, but might have held on until the 1960s or 1970s, when a new generation might have lost interest in farming and pursued careers in Edinburgh or Glasgow. The land would have been let—it probably still was—to a neighbouring farmer and the house would have been bought by somebody exactly like Rory Cameron.

  If that is what he really was like, as Isabel reminded herself as she made her way to the front door. She had him pigeon-holed: he would be fit and good-looking, still; he would wear cavalry twill trousers and one of those sweaters from the Borders wool mills; his shoes—brown brogues, of course—would be well polished. No, she reminded herself: do not stereotype people. And yet, and yet … people stereotyped themselves: they were the ones who chose to follow the part assigned to them.

  “Don’t use the front door,” came a man’s voice from above. “Everybody comes in the back door. And don’t mind the dogs. They don’t even bark, let alone bite.”

  There was an open window directly above her, but no head poked out of it.

  “All right,” she called out and made her way round to the back of the house. There she found an open door and beyond it, on a floor strewn with blankets, two Irish wolfhounds lay sleeping.

  A woman appeared in the doorway. “They’re very old,” she said. “They sleep all day.”

  Isabel looked at the woman who had appeared to greet her. She was somewhere in her fifties, she thought, which would make her a few years younger than her husband—if she was, as she suspected, Rory Cameron’s wife. She had a rather angular face, but any severity in her features was softened by an unusually warm smile. She was dressed comfortably, but with a touch of country elegance—exactly as one would expect a woman living in such a place to be dressed.

  “I’m Georgina Cameron,” she said, holding out a hand. “And you’re Isabel Dalhousie, aren’t you?”

  Isabel nodded and shook the proffered hand. The skin was dry: the hand of a woman who groomed horses, or worked in the vegetable garden? The accent, she could tell, was Northern Irish.

  “Rory will be down in a moment. You caught him in the middle of a telephone call.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m a bit early.”

  Georgina smiled. “Actually you’re a tiny bit late. Not that it matters, but Rory will have to keep to half an hour on the clock.”

  “He told me,” said Isabel. “Golf.”

  “Yes.”

  Georgina led her from the hall and into a large, well-lit kitchen. At the far end of the room was a wide Aga stove, with a capacious kettle on one of the hotplates. On a pine table in the centre of the room a white china teapot had been set out with three cups and saucers. There was a plate of shortbread beside this and an opened copy of that morning’s Scotsman.

  In the background, one of the dogs gave a growl.

  “He talks in his sleep, that one,” said Georgina. “Dreams of past glory, I suppose. Same as all of us.”

  Isabel found herself taking an immediate liking to this woman. It was the smile, but also the accent. Isabel liked Northern Ireland and its much misrepresented people. “Charming people, when not actively shooting one another,” a friend had once said, which was so unkind but, like so many unkind comments, had a grain of truth in it. They did shoot one another and had been doing so for centuries. They did bicker over and brood on long-dead history—or history that should be long dead. The problem with history was that it refused to lie down and die.

  “You’re from Northern Ireland?” Isabel asked.

  “I am that,” said Georgina. “Belfast.” She paused, a smile showing in her eyes as well as on her lips. “You know it?”

  “A little. I’ve been there a few times and I liked it.”

  Yes,
she thought; yes. She liked it because John Liamor, her Irish ex-husband, hated it.

  “A grand place,” said Georgina. “But I’ve lived here in Scotland for so long that when somebody asks where I’m from, I say Scotland. Which, in a sense, is historically true. I’m an Ulster Protestant—that much maligned category. My people went over from Scotland in the seventeenth century. The plantations.”

  “Nothing to be ashamed of. Protestantism in those days stood for the rejection of the old dark ways—the ways of corruption and superstition and so on.”

  Georgina nodded. “Maybe. But we were still settlers, weren’t we?”

  “But there have been all sorts of settlers. The Irish settled in Glasgow in the nineteenth century. Look at all those Irish names there. And London too. So it worked both ways. People move in and out. We’re all mixed up in these islands.”

  Georgina thought this was right. “I’m not apologetic. I just want us all to … well, make our peace, which we have more or less done now—or started to do. We have more in common than we think.”

  “Except a flag,” said Isabel. “You differ on that.”

  “And what does that matter?”

  Isabel raised an eyebrow. “For some people, it matters a great deal, I suppose. Not particularly for me, but for many.”

  “It doesn’t matter to you because you’re under the right flag—the one you want to be under. It’s not quite the same if you find yourself under the wrong flag. Then it matters a lot.”

  A slightly edgy note had entered the conversation. Isabel realised that she had gone straight to the issue on which Northern Irish people, of whatever persuasion, might be expected to feel strongly. One should not do that, she thought. She remembered her mother’s aunt, a redoubtable matriarch from Mobile, Alabama, who insisted on raising the Civil War in any meeting with a Northerner, and would persist with the conversation, pretending to be too deaf to hear any defensive sallies made by a visitor. Age and a generally forbidding manner meant that she got away with this for years, until eventually a spirited New Englander, who had called at the house, seized a yellow legal pad and wrote in large letters: YOU WERE ON THE WRONG SIDE. PERIOD.