The Forgotten Affairs of Youth

by Alexander McCall Smith

  Max’s eyes widened slightly. Isabel wondered if he had picked up on her hostility. Did he know, perhaps, that his uncle was, if not an enemy, then at least an adversary of hers? It occurred to her that Max was some sort of plant, an agent provocateur dispatched by Professor Lettuce from his London fastness to weaken the redoubts of Edinburgh. Was this a trap?

  “I’m very grateful to you for accepting the article,” said Max.

  Isabel thought: I didn’t. But she had no intention of telling him that.

  “I’m sure that it will attract attention,” she said. “And I remember just how important those first publications were in my own career.”

  He was staring at her, as if troubled by something. Isabel questioned whether she had alarmed him by saying that his article would attract attention. It would not, of course; she was simply being polite—or optimistic.

  “Your uncle and I have worked together for a long time,” she said. “He’s made a major contribution to moral philosophy, in one way or another. I’m certainly looking forward to his Hume book—how’s it going, by the way?”

  Max shrugged. “It’s taking him a long time. But he’s very thorough.”

  “Of course he is,” said Isabel. Thoroughly unscrupulous.

  Their order was taken. Isabel stuck to a cup of coffee although she relented to the extent of asking for a small bowl of olives. “They don’t go with coffee,” she said. “But I feel like them anyway.”

  “Then why not?” said Max. He ordered the smoked mozzarella salad; she approved.

  “All those buffaloes,” remarked Isabel. “Contented in their watery fields, or wherever it is that buffaloes wallow. They do wallow, don’t they? That’s why mozzarella is so liquid.”

  Max looked at her sideways.

  “Please forgive me,” said Isabel. “Sometimes I find that I go off at a bit of a tangent. I know it’s annoying for other people but then other people annoy us in different ways. We all, I suppose, have the capacity to annoy one another.” She paused. “And civilisation, I suppose, is the structure that helps us to minimise the annoyance.”

  This seemed to amuse Max. “I suppose we’re all in favour of civilisation, just as we’re in favour of motherhood and apple pie.”

  Isabel observed that there were presumably some who were not in favour of apple pie, but she felt that they were probably decently reticent about this. As she made the remark, she realised that she liked Max Lettuce, and that was a lesson. I had judged him even before I met him, she thought. The sins of the uncle should not be visited upon the nephew; of course they should not.

  “Dr. Dalhousie …”

  “Yes?”

  He seemed to be struggling with something. “Look, that article—”

  She interrupted him. “If you need to change anything, please don’t worry about that. Nothing’s gone off to the printer yet, far from it.”

  He shook his head. “No, it isn’t that. Not at all. It’s … well, it’s much more serious.”

  She waited for him to continue.

  “Yes,” he said. “You see … you see, I didn’t write it. It’s not by me.”

  It took her a moment or two to absorb this. “You didn’t?”

  “I didn’t write it. It was written by my uncle Robert. Oh, he asked me to write a few sentences here and there, but the bulk of it was him. Then he put my name on it and sent it off.”

  She sat quite still. One of the assistants now placed her coffee in front of her and offered her the sugar bowl. She did not notice, and the assistant, after shooting an enquiring glance at Max, moved away.

  “May I ask why he did this?”

  Max grimaced. “I feel really awful telling you this. In fact, you’ll have no idea what an effort it’s been for me to spell it out—actually to find the words.”

  “I have every idea of that,” Isabel snapped. “A confession is never easy.”

  He looked at her anxiously. “You despise me?”

  The bluntness of the question disarmed her. One could not answer yes to somebody who has the honesty to ask.

  “No,” she said. “But please explain a bit further.”

  “It’s the least I can do,” he said.

  She waited.

  “My uncle is not the easiest man, but he’s always been very good to me. My father, you see, his elder brother—he’s twelve years older than Uncle Robert—suffers badly from depression. It ruined his career—he trained as an architect—and it meant that he could never get a really good job. He was too unreliable and there would be long periods when he couldn’t do anything. He attempted suicide twice, once when I was twelve and then again a couple of years ago.

  “Because of all that, we were pretty hard up. He’s sixty now and he has no pension, none at all. Uncle Robert, though, has money from his first wife, who came from a family that owned quite a few commercial buildings in Leeds and Newcastle. She died. Did he ever mention her to you? He was very much in love with her and I think he still misses her, even if he remarried. Uncle Robert has kept my father going for years. He gives him a monthly sum—I don’t know what it is—but it keeps my parents going. Without him, they would have been out on the street.

  “Uncle Robert also paid for my education. He persuaded me to study philosophy, which I enjoyed anyway. He introduced me to the professor I did my post-graduate work with. He set everything up. I was grateful—who wouldn’t be?

  “Then he arranged for me to get that post-doc post in his department. I was more worried about that, because I knew that there were a whole lot of people after the post and I’m sure that some were better qualified than I was. But I took the job anyway. I shouldn’t have, but I did.”

  He paused as the assistant reappeared and placed his mozzarella salad in front of him. The assistant glanced at Isabel. “Did you order olives?”

  “I did.”

  “I just wanted to be sure.”

  “Well, I did.”

  She went off to the kitchen, to return a few moments later with a small bowl of olives in oil. “Enjoy,” she said.

  Out of earshot, Isabel said to Max: “I wonder if that’s mandatory. It sounded like it, don’t you think?”

  Max was too immersed in his confession to appreciate the remark. “Yes, maybe,” he said vaguely. “So I took the job and then he was very good to me. If an invitation came to go to a conference that he couldn’t attend, he would often put my name forward as a substitute. Normally I would never have got that sort of thing, but I did. I went to Oslo. I went to a conference of the American Philosophical Association in St. Louis. I went to a UNESCO philosophical meeting in Paris. Everything was going really well.

  “Then he said that I should publish something. I started to work on an article, a version of a paper I had given at a conference, but he said that it wasn’t right. I tried something else, and he said the same thing. I thought that he was becoming a bit concerned, and I was right. He took me out for a drink and told me that I really had to get something into print or I might find it difficult to get the next job—the post I have in his department is for three years, you see.”

  Isabel was familiar with the situation Max was describing. The life of the untenured academic was less secure, she knew, than the life of the junior plumber—different, maybe, and more privileged, but without the same prospects of a career. It was all very well becoming a philosopher—that was perhaps the easiest part; it was remaining a philosopher that was the challenge. Not that philosophers, or academics of any discipline, should complain too much; there were people whose career path was even steeper and more slippery. Isabel had known professional singers who had for years clung by their fingernails to the lowest rungs of the singing world, stuck in the choruses of obscure opera companies, understudying roles for principals who were distressingly healthy, who never developed last-minute laryngitis or suffered allergic reactions between Act Two and Act Three.

  “It’s not easy,” said Isabel.

  So Lettuce—the elder one—was a che
at, a practitioner of academic fraud, no less. He should bear most of the blame for this, she thought, rather than his nephew. It was a classic case, the sort of thing one read about all the time in newspaper court reports. Fagin and the Artful Dodger: a young man corrupted by an older one. It was an ancient story, and a tawdry one.

  “Then he gave me an article he had drafted. He said that I should add a few footnotes, but that in essence the piece should be published as it was. I didn’t know what to say. I should have given it right back to him. I should have said that I assumed that he was joking. I should have shown some moral courage. I did none of these things. I took it off and read it and did what he told me to do.”

  He paused. He was staring down at the table, his mozzarella salad untouched. For a moment Isabel thought that he was about to burst into tears, but he did not. He looked up at her, his face full of misery and self-reproach.

  “Why did I do it?” he asked. “It wasn’t for the job—I really don’t mind too much about that. It was because I knew that if I rubbed my uncle up the wrong way, it could mean a falling-out between him and my father. I know what my uncle’s like. He can be vindictive and I didn’t want to do anything that could threaten the status quo. I have to remain on good terms with him for my parents’ sake. Uncle Robert has got this mixed-up thing about me—he sometimes calls me the son he never had, but he can be very ambitious for me, overweening, bullying even.”

  Isabel regarded Max with sympathy, wanting him to know that she understood.

  “So there you have it,” said Max. “My confession. I’m sorry that I did it. And now, I suppose, you’ll have to take it up with him.” He suddenly sounded like a boy caught out. “Everything’s ruined.”

  “In what way?”

  “He’ll be furious with me for telling you. But I had to speak about it. How could I continue in the knowledge that you were being deceived?”

  He seemed to expect an answer. She looked at him, thinking: I had written this man off. Now he reveals himself as flawed, weak and repentant, as we are, all of us: flawed and weak, if not repentant.

  “Max, what you’ve just done is very brave. It isn’t easy to confess to something like that. You’ve done it and I admire you for it.”

  He seemed astonished. “You admire me?”

  “Yes,” she said gravely. “All of us do things we regret—that’s part of being human. And sometimes, I think, moral quality reveals itself not so much in what we do, but in what we later say about what we have done. Do you see what I mean?”

  “Maybe. But—”

  Isabel stopped him. “But nothing. Of course you were in awe of Lettuce … I mean, your uncle. He was supporting your indigent parents; he was indirectly supporting you. Money is so powerful, isn’t it? Those who have it can control the lives of those who don’t. And they do just that—with arrogance and selfishness in some cases.” She paused. “I’m sorry, but what you’ve told me about your uncle doesn’t endear me to him. In fact, I must say that my previous dealings with him haven’t done that either.”

  He appeared suddenly crestfallen, and Isabel doubted whether she should continue. Did he still like Lettuce after what he had done to him? He must have admired his uncle; did that feeling persist?

  She decided not to say more. “But that’s irrelevant now. What we need to think about is what he’s involved you in here. We can’t leave things as they are, can we?”

  He shook his head. “No. So can I just withdraw the article?”

  She thought about this. There was a way out and it was just beginning to show itself. But there was something that did not seem to make sense and she needed to ask a question first.

  “May I ask you something?” she said. “Why did your uncle suggest that you come to see me? Was it just because you happened to be in Edinburgh?”

  He took a moment to answer. “He didn’t suggest that I come to Edinburgh. I was here anyway to see somebody—a friend who’s taken a job here. He said that I should seize the opportunity to meet you since you were going to publish my article. And …”

  “Yes?”

  “And he said that he wanted to get me on to the board of the Review. He said that he had an idea of how he could.”

  Isabel sat bolt upright. “Did he now?”

  “Yes,” said Max.

  “And how did he propose to do that? You do know, don’t you, that I own the Review? I’m not just the editor—I’m the publisher.”

  Max nodded miserably.

  “Well?” Isabel pressed.

  “I’ve started telling you the truth,” said Max. “I have to carry on.”

  “Yes please,” said Isabel. “I’m listening.”

  “It’s not easy to say this.”

  “Evidently not.”

  He sighed and looked away. “He hinted—just hinted.”

  “Yes?”

  “He wanted me to seduce you.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  JAMIE LISTENED with growing anger. Isabel had not seen him angry before, and she reflected on how strange it was that even at this stage in their relationship she had never observed the effect on him of that most common of human emotions.

  “He said what?” he exclaimed.

  She repeated Max’s disclosure.

  Jamie’s face reddened. “I’m going to sort him out.”

  Isabel frowned. “Sort who out?”

  “Lettuce,” Jamie snapped back.

  “Which one?”

  “The older one. That creep down in London.”

  She felt touched that Jamie had reacted in such a protective, if clichéd masculine way. Was that what men should feel in circumstances where somebody makes an approach to their partner? And what did sort out mean? It sounded physical, but surely Jamie was not planning to assault Lettuce; he was far too gentle for that. She had never really thought about it, but had she been asked whether he was capable of physical violence, she would have answered that he was not.

  Indeed, there had been the occasion when they had witnessed a military parade outside St. Giles’ Cathedral—one of those occasions when the Scottish establishment dressed up and carried flags from point A to point B with immense solemnity; the Earl of This and the Duke of That and the Hereditary Keeper of the This Thing and That Thing, all bedecked in tartan, with feathers in their bonnets, were rendering homage to an ancient Scotland that still haunted the present. On the edge of this ceremony had been a platoon of kilted soldiers, simple working-class boys from worlds so far from those of the grandees. These boys had real rifles with bayonets attached, and the bayonets had glinted in the slanting Scottish sun.

  Isabel had whispered to Jamie, “Could you ever have done that? Could you ever have put on a kilt and carried a rifle with a bayonet?”

  And he had glanced at the soldiers and she had seen something like sympathy, and sorrow, in his expression, and he had said, “Never. Never.”

  He had been about to add something, but the bagpipes had begun to play and their wailing sound had drowned all speech, as it was meant to do.

  No, Jamie was too gentle to sort anybody out, and even now, immediately after issuing the threat, he had calmed down and begun to look sheepish.

  “You don’t mean it, do you?” she asked.

  “What? Sorting Lettuce out?”

  “Yes.”

  He started to smile. “I’m not sure if I’d know how to.”

  She leaned over and kissed him. “I’m sure you wouldn’t. And just as well—I couldn’t live with somebody who sorted other men out. It just wouldn’t seem right.”

  “It’s still an awful thing for him to have said,” Jamie muttered. “It’s a sort of violation. By proxy.”

  Isabel shrugged. “Lettuce. He’s dreadful. He always has been.”

  “And that nephew of his?”

  Isabel thought very carefully. She had already done Max an injustice by condemning him before meeting him; she was keen not to do the same thing again.

  “He’s a bit weak, I suppose. He
certainly let himself be led astray by Lettuce. But beyond that, we have to remember that he came clean. That takes courage. And now he’s all for accepting responsibility for the whole situation.”

  Earlier on she had explained to Jamie about the article. It was fraud, he suggested, and she had agreed. Go to the police, he had said, but she had considered that something of an overreaction.

  “The police would hardly take it seriously. They’ve got murders and muggings to look into. I’m sure they don’t have the time for a couple of philosophers getting hot under the collar about who wrote what. And anyway,” Isabel continued, “I’ve decided what to do. I’ll write to Lettuce to say that I’ve declined the article on the grounds that I don’t think it’s the work of his nephew. I’ll say to him that I think it reads like the work of a more experienced writer.”

  “He’ll kick up a fuss.”

  “Of course he will, but I’ll stand by my guns. I won’t tell him that I think it’s him, but I’ll say that if he wishes, I can hand it over to one of those stylistic analysts. They’re people who use computer programs to identify the frequency of the use of certain words and constructions. They can detect a writer’s fingerprint, so to speak. I’ll suggest that we run the article against something by him—by Lettuce—and see how it looks, just to show him how it works. Of course that’ll alarm him and he’ll drop the matter because the computer program would probably come up with the conclusion that he wrote it.”

  Jamie smiled at her ingenuity. “But why not just confront him?”

  “Because it will harm Max and in my view he’s relatively—not entirely—innocent in all this. He agreed to go through with it only to save his parents from Lettuce’s wrath.”

  She paused; an idea occurred to her. She would encourage Max to write something that was authentically his. She would publish it if it was up to scratch, which it probably would be: Max struck her as an intelligent young man, even if he was a Lettuce. He would go away a friend rather than an enemy, and not only was it therefore the right thing to do in itself, it would also negate the elder Lettuce’s scheming.