The Forgotten Affairs of Youth

by Alexander McCall Smith

  The story had passed into family history and was now used extensively by Isabel’s American cousins in any dispute. “You are on the wrong side. Period,” was a very effective way of closing down a wide range of arguments from the political (decades ago one branch of Isabel’s family had strayed from the time-honoured family position and had been sent a telegram: WRONG SIDE. PERIOD.) to disagreements about the best recipe for clam chowder, the right way of training dogs, or the relative merits of New York hotels.

  Rory’s appearance changed the subject. “I’m sorry to have kept you,” he said. “I was talking to a neighbour on the phone. There’s going to be a new road and that means everybody’s up in arms. We all have cars, of course, but other people’s cars are very annoying, aren’t they?”

  They shook hands and Isabel took the opportunity to study her host, discreetly, of course. He was precisely as she had thought he would be: he was not wearing the sweater she had imagined for him, but the shoes were exactly right, as was the face. Although he must have been in his mid-sixties, Rory had kept the features of a man in his early forties. Open air, thought Isabel; all that walking around windswept golf courses. And something else too, perhaps; people like that usually had a secret: a diet restricted to dried cranberries and hazelnuts, or something of that sort. Or, in the case of the late poet, Hugh MacDiarmid, the best part of a bottle of Glenfiddich whisky a day. That, of course, was hardly recommended, but had seen him through to his mid-eighties in remarkably good shape. Scottish poets, though, were a special case.

  Rory joined them at the table, and Georgina started to pour tea.

  “Have you seen Kirsty recently?” he asked. “She hasn’t been very well, I hear.”

  Kirsty was their mutual friend in Gullane.

  “She had an operation on her knee,” said Isabel. “I saw her just after that. She’s made a good recovery.”

  Rory nodded in satisfaction at the good news. He regarded Isabel steadily. “I was rather intrigued by your telephone call,” he said. “It’s not often that somebody rings up and wants to talk about something they won’t divulge on the phone.”

  Isabel smiled weakly. “It’s easier sometimes …”

  He made a gesture of understanding. “Of course it is. Phone calls can be stilted. And you can’t always judge the effect of what you have to say if you can’t see the other person.”

  “True,” said Georgina. “I don’t like speaking about anything really important on the phone.”

  They both now looked at her expectantly, and Isabel’s heart began to hammer in her chest. She had not thought this through. She had imagined that she would talk just to Rory—how stupid of her: of course there was always a possibility of his wife being present. And now she wondered whether she could even raise the subject.

  She glanced at Georgina. “I’m very sorry,” she began. “I know it sounds ridiculous, but I imagined that our conversation …” And here she turned to Rory. “I imagined that our conversation would be confidential. It’s a rather delicate matter.”

  Georgina and Rory exchanged glances. He frowned. “We have no secrets from each other,” he said formally. “We are husband and wife.”

  Isabel noticed that Georgina winced at this. It was a fleeting reaction and immediately suppressed, but she saw it and wondered. Was it his choice of words: the cliché of having no secrets, the formality of the declaration? Or was it something else altogether: the response of one who hears something said that she knows to be untrue? If that were the case, then who harboured the secrets? It could be him, in which case she might wince at the untruth; or it could be her, in which case she might feel regret, or embarrassment, perhaps, at knowing his trust to be misplaced.

  “Please forgive me,” Isabel said. “That was most tactless of me.” She realised that she could hardly stop now. “I’ve come to talk to you about somebody called Clara Scott. I believe you knew her a long time ago.”

  “Clara Scott?” said Georgina. “No—”

  “It’s me,” said Rory. “Of course I knew her. We were at university together in Edinburgh back in the … year dot. She was, in fact, a girlfriend of mine, for a short time.”

  “Oh, her,” said Georgina. “You showed me—”

  “A photograph,” said Rory. “Yes, I have several photographs. Georgina doesn’t mind. We have photos of all our old friends—and why not? Mine is of me and Clara in York. We went there once with the university chorus.”

  They waited for Isabel to say something. But before she could do so, Rory added: “You know that she died a long time back? Poor Clara. It was six or seven years after she left university—maybe a bit later. A road accident.”

  “I know,” said Isabel. “Her daughter told me.”

  This was greeted with silence. Then Rory said, “Her daughter? Clara didn’t marry, did she?”

  “No,” said Isabel. “She didn’t.”

  There was a further silence. One of the wolfhounds mumbled in his sleep again.

  “She had a daughter,” Rory muttered, almost under his breath.

  Isabel nodded. She noticed that Georgina had glanced sharply at her husband, but quickly looked away again.

  Rory seemed to be somewhere else altogether. “Why didn’t she tell me?” he whispered, not to anybody else but to himself.

  “The daughter was adopted,” Isabel continued, “and taken to Australia. She lives there now.”

  Isabel saw the effect of this on Georgina. There was a visible relaxing of posture; clearly some anxiety had been defused.

  Only to be rekindled. “But she’s in Edinburgh at the moment. That’s why I’m here. She wants to find out more about her mother …” A half-truth that I must correct, she thought. “And her father too.”

  That brought even more of a reaction. Georgina sat bolt upright and for a moment or two closed her eyes; Rory stared at Isabel in what appeared to be complete astonishment. For her part, having delivered the shocking news, even if she had not spelled out, Isabel sat quite still. She was uncertain what to do now, but it occurred to her that it was too late for tact.

  “It’s possible, I suppose, that you’re the father,” she said to Rory. “That is, if the relationship was a close one.”

  “It was,” he muttered, half looking at Georgina. She closed her eyes again. “But she didn’t say anything. She didn’t. Why on earth would she not …” He shook his head. “Why not say something?”

  Isabel tried to answer. “People sometimes don’t. I know it seems odd, but when one’s young, and frightened too—”

  “She had no need to be frightened,” Rory interjected. “I would have …” He left the sentence unfinished, silenced, perhaps, by a look from Georgina.

  “One thing I’d like to ask,” Isabel went on, “is whether there might have been somebody else. Were there other boyfriends?”

  He thought for a moment. “I don’t think so. She didn’t sleep around, you know. She was Catholic.”

  “So you’re convinced there was nobody else?”

  He became more confident. “Definitely. As I said, Clara wasn’t the sort.”

  Isabel nodded. “I’m very sorry to spring this on you,” she continued. “We—that is, Jane and I: Jane is her name, you see—we decided that it might be easier for you to hear this from a third party, rather than her turning up—”

  “And saying: ‘You’re my father’?” Rory asked.

  Isabel noticed that he was beginning to smile. She was still cautious. “Possibly.”

  Rory now stood up and clasped his hands together in a curious, almost praying gesture. “I’m a father,” he muttered. “I have a daughter. I have a daughter.” He turned and looked at Georgina, as if suddenly reminded that he had a wife. He placed a hand on her shoulder. “My darling, please forgive me. I’m … well, I’m overwhelmed.”

  She reached up and put her hand on his—a touching gesture of support, of reassurance. “That’s good, darling. Very good.”

  Isabel thought that she should leave t
hem alone and began to rise to her feet.

  “Don’t go,” said Rory. “Please.”

  “No,” said Georgina. “Please don’t go.”

  “Does she want to see me?” asked Rory.

  Isabel nodded. “She does.”

  “Today?”

  Isabel was a bit taken aback. “We had no plans. I’m sure that she will want to see you soon, but perhaps you should give her a day or two to prepare herself.”

  “A sensible idea,” said Georgina. “We all need to adjust.” She turned to Isabel. “I think it would be best if Rory met her alone. I’d love to meet her too, of course, but I think the first meeting should be just the two of them.”

  Isabel agreed, and then Georgina suggested that she would show Isabel the garden while Rory collected himself. It was obvious to Isabel that her intention was to have a private talk, but Rory appeared to be quite content with this. They went outside, into the sun that had now dispatched the haar and was bathing the garden in a thick summer light, an impasto of gold.

  “PERHAPS YOU SHOULD KNOW something about my husband,” said Georgina. “He’s a disappointed man.”

  They were walking around the perimeter of the walled garden. There was a line of lavender bushes, old and gnarled, in need of pruning, and a row of espaliered apple trees.

  “I had heard him described as a bit unhappy,” said Isabel.

  Georgina raised an eyebrow. “Really? Well, that’s very perceptive of whoever it was—Kirsty, I imagine.”

  Isabel was hasty to point out that Kirsty had not been critical. “All she said was that she felt Rory was a bit unhappy. She didn’t run him down.”

  “Of course not,” said Georgina. “And she’s right, anyway. He is.” She paused and bent down to pick up a stick that had fallen across the path. “Most of us are unhappy to a degree—if we have anything between our ears at all. It would be impossible to be completely sanguine about the world, don’t you think? Not with the state that it’s in.”

  “Yes,” said Isabel. “Hardly anybody can be completely happy. And who would want to be, anyway? A life without moments of unhappiness would be monotonous, I would have thought.”

  “Exactly,” said Georgina. “But for poor Rory the prevailing emotion is unhappiness, I’m afraid. He’s never been happy with what he’s been doing. Never.”

  Isabel said nothing. Was the marriage unhappy too, she wondered?

  “You see,” Georgina continued, “he was sent off to boarding school when he was eleven. That was the start of it, I think. He went to one of those places where all sorts of cruelties were practised. They’ve closed a lot of those places down now, or they’ve changed of their own accord. You can’t bully these days—but when Rory was at school bullying was written into the life of those places. It was a tradition.

  “And so his unhappiness started. He told me that before he was sent back to school at the end of each holiday he would cry until he was sick. Actually throwing up. And then he was subjected to all sorts of indignities and, well, I’m sorry to have to say this, sexual abuse. The older boys. Nothing was done about it. Nothing. The younger boys didn’t dare mention it or report it because they knew it was hopeless.

  “Then he got a place at university but went on to choose the wrong career. He went into the army because his father was keen that his son should join his old regiment. He was in a Highland regiment, and you know how family-oriented those are. Well, Rory joined and found that he did not like it at all. But rather than resign his commission and upset his father, he stayed put. I hated it too. I found the company of the other officers’ wives insufferable—I know that sounds snobbish, but they were the snobs, not me. I hated the whole thing and tried to live my life as if the army didn’t exist.

  “And then he had to do something that really upset him. He’s never told me exactly what it was, but I know that it distressed him greatly. I don’t like to think about it, of course, but sometimes I dream about it. I see him … Well, I shouldn’t burden you with that, I really shouldn’t.

  “At long last he left the army and looked for another job. A post at a golf club came up and he applied for that. It was not a well-known one—a rather poor club, and in fact it’s no longer in business. He went there and I think he was good at what he did. But he did not enjoy golf in the slightest. And yet he found himself being drawn into the game. Now he has friends who expect him to play regularly and he goes along with it—he pretends to enjoy golf. It’s every bit as inauthentic for him as the army was.” She sighed. “His whole life has been spent doing things he didn’t really want to do. What a complete waste.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  Georgina shook her head. “He shouldn’t have let it happen. But then, quite a few people do, don’t they? They live lives that are all wrong for them.”

  She turned around. Isabel’s eyes were drawn to a brooch that she was wearing—an art nouveau twirl with a peridot in the centre. There was something intensely poignant, she thought, about the little things we do to adorn ourselves, to present a face to the world; our tiny vanities; our desire for the beautiful. How human.

  Georgina resumed. “What you told Rory this morning will be terribly important to him, you know. I expect that he’s thrilled. But we must be careful about it—the whole point of my speaking to you as I just have done is that he is very vulnerable, believe it or not, and this is a very emotional area for him. I’ve been unable to have children, you see.”

  Isabel drew in her breath. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to barge in like this—”

  “But you did the right thing,” said Georgina. “It’s just that we must be quite tactful with Rory. That’s all I’m saying.” She stopped for a moment, as if weighing up what to say next. “In fact, there’s something that perhaps I should …”

  Isabel waited, but Georgina had evidently decided not to say whatever she had on her mind.

  “Yes?” she prompted gently.

  Georgina shook her head. “Let’s get back to the house,” she said.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  ISABEL HAD TOLD GRACE about Gareth’s telephone call. “That medium was spot on,” she said.

  Grace looked puzzled. There are so many mediums in her life, Isabel thought; perhaps one séance fades into another and she becomes blasé. And so many spirits jostling to communicate; after all, the other side must be pretty crowded by now …

  “The one who told you, the audience—”

  “The meeting,” Grace corrected primly.

  “Yes, told the meeting about that firm West of Scotland Turbines. That one. Well, I bought some of their shares and I’m happy to say they’ve gone up in value tremendously.”

  Grace smiled. “I told you so,” she said.

  You didn’t, thought Isabel. You never said anything about the shares.

  But Grace was determined to claim whatever credit was available—or to claim it on behalf of the spirit world.

  “They’re usually absolutely right,” she said. “I can think of hardly any occasions when they’ve been wrong.”

  Isabel could. She very clearly remembered the spirits being reported—through Grace—as having predicted the outcome of a French presidential election entirely wrongly; the spirits, it appeared, tended towards a conservative view of politics and the victory had gone to the socialists. And she remembered, too, when one of the spirits had said that an Irish horse was going to win the Grand National when it was an English horse owned by an Arab sheik that eventually romped home. The spirits had also warned Grace about a volcano in the Canary Islands that they said would explode within two months. That was eight years ago. And while seismologists may get it wrong from time to time, spirits surely could get it right, given their location, as Grace often put it, beyond the constraints of our ordinary human time and place.

  The conversation about the rising share price of West of Scotland Turbines had taken place the day before Isabel went to see Rory and Georgina. Isabel had not thought much of it and c
ertainly did not expect the outcome that Grace revealed to her when she came back from East Lothian.

  “I’ve invested in West of Scotland Turbines,” Grace said, as Isabel came into the kitchen.

  Isabel frowned. “When?”

  “This morning,” said Grace proudly. “You remember that legacy I got from my father’s cousin? The one who lived in Aberdeen? The twelve thousand pounds?”

  Isabel nodded weakly.

  “Well, I had that in the bank and it wasn’t getting much interest with these rubbishy interest rates these days. So I spoke to the bank on the phone and they have a stockbroking service that buys shares. I told them to buy shares in West of Scotland Turbines. They’ve done it for me.”

  Isabel tried to sound a note of caution. “You have to be careful,” she warned. “Just because something has gone up, it doesn’t mean that it’s going to stay up.”

  “But you made a profit,” said Grace. “You told me so.”

  “I did,” said Isabel. “But you have to remember that the stock exchange is volatile.”

  “But yours went up,” said Grace.

  “I know,” said Isabel patiently. “But yours may not.”

  “Are you saying that they’re going to go down? Is that what you’re saying?”

  Isabel tried to reassure Grace that she was not suggesting this. She was careful: Grace was touchy about a whole range of matters, and money was one of them. It was not that Grace resented Isabel’s financial position; she did not. It was more a question of independence, which was something that Grace defended assiduously. She did not like Isabel to advise her on anything, and even when it seemed that advice was exactly what her housekeeper was looking for, Isabel knew better than to offer it. And that, she felt, was precisely what many people wanted who sought advice. They did not want you to tell them what to do; they wanted you to confirm that what they intended to do was the right thing.