The Forgotten Affairs of Youth

by Alexander McCall Smith

  They entered the church. Jamie knew the young woman taking tickets at the door; she was the secretary of Edinburgh Studio Opera, and he had played for them in their production of Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci. She glanced at Isabel, who correctly read her appraising, only half-disguised, look: the older woman she had heard about—Jamie’s older woman.

  Only a handful of people had arrived, and Jamie and Isabel found seats in the second row. Jamie settled down to read the programme notes while Isabel looked about her. She liked Greyfriars; she liked the simplicity of it, which she thought was probably one of the things that those Covenanters had died for; out there in the kirkyard, huddled in their misery, but still refusing to yield to the foppish Stuarts who would impose their will on the people of Scotland. Freedom of body—and of conscience: it was such a sustaining brew, even for those who existed on gruel, and she felt suddenly proud of the fact that these were her people, these determined Scots—at least on her father’s side.

  On her mother’s side—those gutsy American forebears who had scraped a living from their farms until things had gradually turned good for them—they had been like that too, she imagined: in nobody’s pocket; they too would have known what freedom was about. Their freedom, of course, and not necessarily that of others. Her mother’s aunt came to mind, and the spirited cousin from New York: Wrong side. Period. She smiled.

  Jamie prodded her gently in the ribs. “What’s the joke?”

  She shook her head. “History.”

  “Hardly funny.”

  She agreed. “Yes, of course. But what we think about it can be.”

  He folded his programme and glanced at his watch. “We’re far too early.”

  “You’re the one who wanted to—”

  He changed the subject. “What about that Australian woman? What are you going to do?”

  It was now a few days after Jane’s evening visit. Isabel had told Jamie that night about what Jane had said to her. She did not mention her misgivings, though, and he had not seemed to be particularly interested in the matter.

  “It’s good that she’s happy,” he said. “And it sounds rather nice for him too. Well done, Isabel.”

  She would have basked in his praise, had she shared his view of the outcome. Now, she decided to tell him. She explained about Jane’s reluctance to have a DNA test, which Isabel said had contributed to her own conviction that Rory was not the father.

  “Surely he must have known that she … what’s her name … was pregnant?”

  It was the point she had already discussed with Jane, when she had first heard the story.

  “Clara. No. Not necessarily. You would think that she would have told him, but remember her circumstances. What if he had wanted her to end the pregnancy? What then? Remember that the Scotts were Catholics. She might have been frightened of his reaction. She might have imagined that he would pressure her into something that she would not want.”

  “Maybe.”

  He picked up his programme distractedly, glanced at it and then put it down again. A woman had taken the seat beside them on the pew. She smiled at Jamie, who returned the smile. More or less every woman who sees him smiles at him, thought Isabel. What a blessed state in which to go through life: to be smiled upon. And he doesn’t notice it. It must be like the weather to him: just something that happens, that is always there.

  Aware that they could be overheard, he dropped his voice to a whisper. “You can’t leave it like that. Definitely not.”

  “But I may be quite wrong. And anyway, I’m not sure that I have any right to interfere. I’ve done what she wanted me to do. It’s over to her now.”

  He looked at her half in surprise, half in reproach. “I didn’t think I’d hear you say that. You’ve always said that you have a duty to help people you come into contact with. What’s that phrase you use? Moral proximity? Well, you’ve got moral proximity with that woman. You’ve got moral proximity a mile wide.”

  “Proximity is narrow, not wide,” she corrected.

  “Narrow, then.”

  “Well, what do you expect me to do? Go on, tell me.”

  He was silent.

  “See?” she said. “It’s not simple, is it?” She slipped her hand into his. “Thank you, anyway.”

  IF EITHER OF THEM had felt tetchy, the concert put them both in a good mood. When they came out at the end it was barely ten o’clock and there was still light in the sky. Swallows were darting about the trees in the churchyard like tiny fighter planes, disturbed, perhaps, by the crowd of people spilling out of the church.

  “I don’t want to go home just yet,” said Isabel. “Grace is staying the night. We don’t have to keep an eye on the clock.”

  Grace had agreed to look after Charlie and, as sometimes happened, would be staying the night rather than going home afterwards. She liked going to bed early, often before ten, which made it more convenient for her to stay. She also liked the breakfast that Jamie made for her when she did this: scrambled egg with smoked salmon, generous racks of toast and lashings of milky coffee.

  Jamie shrugged. “I don’t mind. We could go somewhere for a drink. Sandy Bell’s? Or that place behind the Museum?”

  Isabel considered these possibilities. “Or we could go for a walk.”

  “Where? Holyrood Park?”

  “No. What about just around here? We could go down Candlemaker Row and then along the Cowgate.”

  He seemed unenthusiastic. “I’m not sure that I want to go down there.”

  The Cowgate was the basement of the Old Town, a narrow road that ran below the towering tenements and bridges of the extraordinary early feat of engineering that Edinburgh was. Walking through it, you were aware that life was going on above you, on the streets under which the Cowgate ducked and weaved, or in the streets that ran off on either side: steep cobbled alleyways, twisting in either direction up towards the light.

  “Come on,” said Isabel.

  “Why?”

  “I want to go to see something.”

  He looked at her quizzically. “Such as?”

  “Blackfriars Street.”

  He was puzzled. There was nothing to see in Blackfriars Street, he thought; was there anything there? Bannerman’s Bar at the bottom and a place that sold folk instruments and Scottish fiddle music. And … there was nothing else, he thought, unless one counted the tenement flats. It made for, of course, an attractive enough stroll, but there were plenty of places more interesting than Blackfriars Street, and if Isabel were prepared to be imaginative, a much better walk could be concocted.

  “You aren’t planning—” Jamie began.

  “I want to look at a place from the outside,” said Isabel. “It’s the flat where Clara stayed at the time that this happened. Catherine Succoth told me about it. She said it was number twenty-four Blackfriars Street.”

  Jamie did not object. “All right. If you insist on playing the investigator.”

  Isabel reacted playfully. “That’s rich! Who told me not much more than an hour ago that I couldn’t leave things as they were? Sound familiar?”

  He accepted her point gracefully, but added, “I don’t see the point, but if you want to, then all right. But Isabel, may I ask one thing: what do you think you’ll find?”

  “I’m not looking for anything in particular,” said Isabel. “I just want to remind myself of what it must have been like. That’s all.”

  They left Greyfriars and made their way along the sharply descending street that curved down towards the Grassmarket. The roadway at the top was bounded on either side by buildings of ubiquitous Edinburgh stone, modest in scale here—a few floors at the most, comfortable in their simplicity. The façades of these buildings were punctuated by low doorways that led to the flats above, the highest of which looked over the kirkyard towards the Castle. The street was not busy; a group of young people—students by the look of them, thought Isabel—had spilled out of the Greyfriars Bobby Bar and were making their way down the hill ahead
of Isabel and Jamie. Two boys and two girls were conducting a conversation that echoed off the walls.

  “She didn’t!” one of the girls exclaimed.

  “She did. I swear she did.”

  “Joe doesn’t make things up, do you, Joe?” This from the other girl.

  “No, of course not. It’s true. Seriously true. She met this guy right under Alan’s nose. He was one of his flatmates. She started sleeping with him when Alan was out of the flat. Two-timed him.”

  The first girl again: “And you look at her and think … and then you realise that—”

  “Same as anybody,” said Joe. “She’s just more up front about it.”

  “Except to him? Yeah?”

  “True, except to him. He thought that this other guy was his friend. And he was laughing at him all the time. Then he came back from lectures one afternoon and there was little Miss What’s-her-face having a seriously nice time with this guy and so Alan gets his stuff and throws it out the window. Yeah, he did. And there was this neighbour who was walking out the door and …”

  There was laughter, drowning out the rest of what was said. And then they stopped at a door to a shared stairway and disappeared.

  A few yards back, Isabel looked at Jamie and raised an eyebrow. “La Bohème,” she said. “Contemporary version.”

  “Yes, except La Bohème is completely different.”

  “I mean the student life.”

  Jamie smiled. “I had a flatmate like that at music school.”

  “Like her—or him?”

  “Like him. He was hopelessly in love with this girl from Aberdeen. She had about six boyfriends at the same time, and he never seemed to have a clue what was going on.”

  “Six?”

  “A bit of an exaggeration, maybe. Certainly three or four. She just liked sex, I think. It was … well, it was her hobby, I suppose. Like stamp collecting. She collected boys.”

  Isabel wondered why the Aberdonian girl bothered to keep Jamie’s flatmate in the first place. “Was your flatmate her regular boyfriend?”

  “He was meant to be.”

  “But why did she bother?”

  “He was a terrific cook,” answered Jamie. “He made her these fabulous meals.”

  “That basic,” sighed Isabel.

  “That basic,” agreed Jamie.

  Isabel wondered what had happened to this enthusiastic young woman. And she could not help but compare her with Cat, whose emotional entanglements were innocence itself by comparison.

  They reached the bottom of Candlemaker Row and turned into the Cowgate itself. Directly under the high arches of George IV Bridge the street became tunnel-like. They passed the Magdalen Chapel, a sixteenth-century almshouse, in shadows and darkness. A voice called out, a rough, guttural sound: a drunk, a man sleeping rough and having a nightmare.

  Then they came to the back entrance to Sheriff Court, with a door large enough to admit the vans that brought prisoners into court. Isabel had walked past it a few months ago on her way to have lunch with a friend who worked in the Scottish Parliament at Holyrood, and she had been obliged to stop as one of the prison vehicles—the Black Maria, or the paddywagon, as her mother used to call it—had nosed its way out after that morning’s trials. It had passed so close to her that she had glimpsed, through the narrow, barred window, the face of a young man inside—a youth really—and seen that he was crying.

  We create misery for each other, she had thought, such misery, as this young man had probably done. He would have assaulted somebody, or stolen somebody’s car, or done something dark and horrible to another human being, and now, fresh from the passing of sentence, he wept as the state set about imposing its own brand of misery in retribution. But it had to—it had no choice. If he went unpunished, there would be more misery in store as, undeterred, he did once more whatever he had done already. And those whom he had wronged would feel outraged that nobody had attended to their pain … She had watched him briefly and then, quite unexpectedly, she had lifted a finger and wagged it at him. His eyes had widened and the vehicle had borne him away.

  She had stood where she was, astonished at her own action. What had possessed her to do that? What had made her suddenly take on the role of the disapproving, tut-tutting tricoteuse, admonishing this youth for whatever he had done? It had happened so quickly, almost without her realising that she was doing it, and now he had been carted off and she could not apologise—as she wanted to do—for adding to his humiliation.

  Perhaps it was just that she had had enough of hearing about people who spoiled the lives of others. She had read that morning in the newspaper of a man in London who had had bleach thrown in his eyes by a mugger. No, he had not known his attackers. Yes, he was going about his ordinary business. Yes, his eyes had been damaged. Was that why she had shaken her finger in a trite, populist way: because the young man deserved to be censured?

  “Isabel? You still with me?”

  They had walked almost halfway along the Cowgate now, while she had been deep in thought about justice and retribution and showing one’s condemnation like an echt Mrs. Grundy.

  “Grundyism,” she muttered.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I was thinking of people who set themselves up as the guardians of conventional morality. Who spend their time disapproving of others. There’s a name for it apparently—Grundyism, after Mrs. Grundy, a character in a play, who was the epitome of propriety.”

  “Oh. Well, we’re almost at Blackfriars Street. You did want to walk up it, didn’t you?”

  She did not.

  “I’m sorry, Jamie, I’ve changed my mind. Let’s go home.”

  He was puzzled. “Why? I thought you wanted to—”

  She took his arm. “Come on. Let’s get a taxi and go home. I’ve thought of something, that’s all.”

  They had no difficulty in finding a taxi. The driver mumbled something about the road being up in the Grassmarket and took them by a circuitous route up the narrow cobbled road past the city morgue. In the midst of life we are in death: those final harrowing words, in the unsurpassed English of the King James Version, as desolate as language can be. Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live … he cometh up, and is cut down like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay.

  She reached across and took Jamie’s hand in hers. He had been looking out of the window, but in the opposite direction so that he had not seen the morgue. She wanted, suddenly and absurdly, to protect him; she did not want him, or Charlie, to have to think about these things. If reality had to be faced, then she wanted to do it for both of them as well as for herself, so that they might think, with untroubled hearts, of things that were as light and free and lovely as they themselves were.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  BROTHER FOX had been digging. Isabel had a bed of alliums—her ornamental onions as Jamie called them—and Brother Fox had taken an interest in them, scratching away at the spoil to expose the bulbs. These he had then gnawed, or simply discarded on the neighbouring lawn.

  “Odd behaviour for a fox,” observed Jamie, as they surveyed the damage the following morning.

  Isabel bent down to pick up a felled plant with its mangled bulb. “If it was Brother Fox,” she said. “We have no proof.” She looked at Jamie sheepishly. “Sorry, that’s very lame. It must have been him.”

  Jamie said in mock reproach, “You always try to protect him. To excuse him. He’s a bad fox, and you just want to let him off the hook.”

  “A fox can’t be bad,” said Isabel. “I’m not sure whether any animal can. They just are as they are: neither good nor bad.”

  She stood up, the bulb in her hand, a small drift of soil, a wisp, falling from between her fingers. She realised that she did not believe this—although she had said it. We can say all sorts of things without believing them, she thought. The apologists of appalling regimes—the ambassadors of tyrannies—are called upon to defend their government
s when quizzed by journalists; they know, thought Isabel, they know; and yet they speak with such conviction, denying the obvious, the manifestly true reports of wrongdoing. She had often wondered how it must feel to have to say things you knew were untrue; to say that your employer, your political boss, was as pure as driven snow when you knew just how bloody his hands were. It was easy, she decided; saying one thing while you thought quite another was the simplest thing in the world. All you did was open your mouth; actors showed us how easy it was when they spoke their lines as if they believed them.

  “Actually, that’s probably not quite right,” she said. “Perhaps animals can be good and bad.”

  “Exactly,” said Jamie. “That dog round the corner is obviously good—you know the one? The one who tries to lick your hand.”

  “Moby-Dick,” mused Isabel. “Whales …”

  “They’re good,” said Jamie.

  “Not Moby-Dick,” said Isabel. “He showed malevolence.”

  “He didn’t exist,” said Jamie. “You can’t pay any attention to the emotions of fictional characters, especially if they’re whales. All you’re doing there is reflecting what the author thinks.”

  “But if Moby-Dick behaved as real whales do, then you can. He stands for all whales, or even just for a number of whales.”

  Jamie said nothing. In his mind, Brother Fox had done it because he was naturally mischievous: Isabel might dote on the fox, but Jamie did not. Isabel was silent too; not because there was nothing more to be said about the moral lives of animals, because there was, and she had just received a book for review that dealt with just that topic and bore that precise title: The Moral Lives of Animals. She was wondering, now, whether a whole issue of the Review of Applied Ethics might be dedicated to that topic. She could contact Peter Singer at Princeton, perhaps, one of the first philosophers to deal with the implications of attributing greater moral status to animals. She could contact some of the others who had taken up the issue since then. She could give it a catchy title perhaps: “Was Moby-Dick a Malevolent Whale?” Or possibly, “Are All Dogs Good?”