The Forgotten Affairs of Youth (12 page)

Isabel weighed up whether to say something about the knives, and Sinclair’s rudeness, but she did not. And as she made her way back to the house, she reflected on it further and decided that she had done the right thing. She should not interfere in Cat’s life; any comment that she made about Sinclair, however well intentioned, would not be appreciated and could even have the opposite effect from that which she intended. If Cat was going to fall for this narcissistic young man, then she would do so irrespective of what Isabel advised. And that falling, thought Isabel, had probably already occurred.

She knew the signs by now, and she reckoned they were already there for the reading—the touchiness, the slight air of distraction: this was Cat in love.
Love is blind
: the old adage was absolutely true, as were so many vintage clichéd sayings. And that was precisely why such axioms were popular, and overused: because they showed themselves to be true time and time again. We knew that love was blind because so often we witnessed it obscuring the judgement of others—not our own, of course—although love was far from blind to begin with. It had its eyes wide open and saw only too clearly the things it was looking for—at least in Cat’s case, where looks, it seemed, counted for everything, with Bruno, the tightrope-walker, being the sole exception. Even he, though, must have held some physical attraction for Cat; probably his legs. A funambulist must have strong legs if he is to balance on the wire, and Cat liked men with strong legs. She remembered Toby, who had proved to be disastrous, with his crushed-strawberry trousers; one could not help but notice his legs, and Cat had.

Men’s legs, she thought, as she made her way up the path to her front door. An odd thing to think of, but then so much that went through our minds was odd in one way or another: unexpected, unconnected, unimportant; mental flotsam swilling around with sudden moments of clarity and insight. A hotchpotch of memories, plans, dreams, random bits of silliness: the very things that made us human.

T
HE ARRANGEMENT HAD BEEN
that if Isabel were to be back late, then Grace would collect Charlie from his playgroup. Grace liked this, and Isabel believed that she passed herself off to the other mothers as his aunt—a slightly peculiar thing to do, but harmless, as deceptions go.

She had found this out thanks to a remark made by Algy’s mother, the actress, who had said, in the middle of a casual conversation that she and Isabel were having, “As I said yesterday to Charlie’s aunt …” and then drifted off into some remark about something unimportant. Isabel had been momentarily nonplussed: Charlie’s aunt?

And then she had realised that she must mean Grace, and had said, “Actually, she’s not his aunt.”

Algy’s mother had paused and said, “She said she was. I’m sure she did. But it doesn’t matter, does it? The more aunts one has in this life, I would have thought, the better.”

It did not matter, of course; it was a tiny, irrelevant thing. And yet it was poignant, Isabel thought, that Grace should want to have a more formal connection—an auntly one—with the little boy of whom she was undoubtedly so fond. Grace had her own family—she frequently mentioned cousins and other relatives, telling Isabel about their doings and their foibles—so why should she claim kinship with Charlie? Unless it was simply a matter of love; after all, that was exactly how families expanded: through love.

And Grace loved Charlie: that was touchingly evident, as well as being exactly what Isabel expected and wanted. She and Jamie loved him to distraction, and it seemed only natural that others should do so too. Charlie loved them back, and showed it in the grasp of his tiny hand and the way he nestled his cheek against the face of the one carrying him, and in the odd little gifts that he would suddenly give: a crust of bread from which the butter and jam had been thoroughly licked; a feather he had picked up in the garden; something he had drawn, a scribble that was a house or the sun or a person, it was impossible to tell. So if Grace claimed to be his aunt, it was done out of love, and was a compliment.

They were in the kitchen when Isabel came back. Charlie ran to her and flung his arms around her knees. She bent down and embraced him. There was something sticky on his face—strawberry jam, probably; Grace gave him it as a treat—but she did not mind its being transferred to her skin, not from him, because he was, she realised with sudden clarity,
her.
That was the miracle of giving birth to another person, the existential miracle of motherhood. Your child was
you
. It was as simple as that.

But that conclusion, of course, gave rise to all sorts of moral hazards. Your child might be you, but would not want to be you for ever. It was all very well with a child of Charlie’s age, who snuggled and cuddled and wanted to be part of his mother, but already there were the seeds of separation. And the desire of the child to be himself should not be resisted; parents had to let go, and if they did not, then they were building up for themselves resentments and distortions that had the capacity to ruin the child’s life.

What we do to our children, they do to the world, thought Isabel. If only Hitler had been loved more as a little boy and as a young man too—given a few prizes, told by some woman that he really was a wonderful lover, and so handsome; if only somebody had taken Stalin and kissed him and made him feel good about himself. Or was that all too simple? Was the massive psychopathy of the mass murderer something that sprang from an entirely different psychopathology? Perhaps some monsters are monsters because they feel
too
good about themselves; perhaps, but love could still have made such a difference, even to the likes of them.
Amor vincit omnia
.

She was not sure whether it was Virgil or Horace, but whoever had coined the phrase was being … She paused. Was it
omnia vincit amor
? One could so easily change the emphasis if one cleared one’s throat at the end, thereby by adding an
em,
and misremembered, or misheard, the verb. She smiled at the notion.
Omnia vincunt amorem:
all things conquer love. The problem with which Romeo and Juliet, and many other star-crossed lovers, had to contend. She smiled again as she drew the inevitable conclusion: don’t clear your throat when completing a pithy saying in an inflected language!

Grace was staring at her. “Did I say something amusing?” she asked.

Isabel shook her head. “Sorry. I was thinking.”

Grace continued to stare at her, as if waiting for an explanation. Isabel knew that the other woman considered it rude to smile to oneself and not say why. Grace had once alluded to that when she remarked that secret jokes were unnerving to those who were not party to them. “People may think that there’s something odd about their appearance,” she had said. “They might think that the other person is laughing at them. Well, not laughing, actually, but smiling—and that can be as bad. You don’t want to walk down the street and see people smiling at you, do you?”

“Don’t you?” asked Isabel. “I would have thought that it would be rather nice. Reassuring.”

She thought for a moment. She had recently spoken to a politician friend, a member of the Scottish Parliament, who had said that he had decided that we should smile more at others as a matter of principle and should be readier to greet strangers in the street as a matter of courtesy.

“Why should we lead our lives as if we’re surrounded by complete strangers?” he had asked. “If you go into the country or a village maybe you’ll find that people say good morning to one. They may not have a clue who you are, but they still say good morning, which is how it should be.”

“Yes,” Isabel had said. “Of course.”

And she wanted to add: but we are
not
moral strangers to those we see in the street. We are not.

But her friend continued: “Mind you, it doesn’t always work.” He went on to explain, “I tried it out the other day in Morningside Road, which is in my constituency. As I walked down the street one morning I said good morning to everybody I encountered.”

“And it didn’t work? Did you get a series of scowls in return?”

He smiled at the recollection. “Two of them stopped, looked me in the eye and said, ‘I’m not voting for you, you know!’ ”

They both laughed. “And if you say good morning to a child,” she added ruefully, “it will scuttle off, or call the police. Such is our paranoia.”

She had wanted to say to Grace, when she had raised the issue of smiling to oneself, that if one were completely secure, one should not mind if another smiled. But who among us was completely secure? Who would not naturally wonder, even for a moment, if one’s buttons were undone or whether one’s make-up had run, or, if one were a child, somebody had put a
KICK ME
sign on one’s back? Children used to do that to one another and think it hilarious, but of course now it seemed that the consequences could be draconian. Had not a nine-year-old boy been suspended from his school in New York for doing just such a thing? How absurd.
Of course
boys thought it funny to put
KICK ME
signs on others; there would be something
wrong
with them if they did not. In most cases it was not real bullying, although it could become easily that if the targets were subjected to regular indignities. But you could not stop boys doing things; boys threw snowballs too, and balanced books on the top of doors to fall on the heads of those who entered. That would seem extremely funny to a boy. And for adults to overreact to these childish pranks was to kill the fun of childhood stone dead.

But now she was in the kitchen with Grace, who was clearly still waiting for an explanation.

“It’s nothing to do with you, Grace,” said Isabel. “I wasn’t smiling at anything you said or did. I was smiling because I was thinking of the Latin expression
amor vincit omnia
, which is actually incorrect because it should be
omnia vincit amor
—at least, I think it should. And then I thought if you inadvertently added an
em
, through clearing your throat at the wrong time, you could turn the meaning of the phrase on its head. Provided you changed the verb to the third person plural.”

“Love conquers all,” said Grace. “Love conquers all—em?”

Isabel struggled not to smile at that.
“Amorem,”
she said.

She was surprised: she had not expected Grace to know the meaning of the Latin phrase, but she immediately realised that her assumption was condescending. It was as if she had said to herself: housekeepers don’t know Latin. And in general, they did not, but it was wrong to imagine that somebody who happens to have such a job in life should not know such things. And that, surely, was what education was all about: it should make it possible for everybody to have the consolations of literature—and Latin, too—to accompany them in their work, whatever it turned out to be. The bus driver who knows his Robert Burns, the waitress who reads Jane Austen or who goes on her day off to look at an exhibition of Vermeers: these are the quiet triumphs of education, Isabel thought. It’s why education was justified for its own sake, and not as a means to some vocational end.

“I was wondering whether love really does overcome everything,” Isabel continued. “Do you think it does, Grace?”

Grace, who had been wetting the corner of a towel under a tap in order to wipe Charlie’s face, shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe in a very general sense, in that good overcomes bad in the long run. Maybe then. But otherwise, no. There are plenty of cases where people never get the person they want because things are stacked against them. There’s an aunt of mine, for instance. And then …”

She did not complete her sentence, and Isabel understood that Grace had been thinking of herself; and her heart went out to her, and she wanted to put her arms about her and comfort her, but did not, because it would have embarrassed Grace. Regret is sometimes best left unspoken.

“Oh well,” said Isabel. “These are big issues, and Charlie will need his lunch. I’m going to give him sardines, I think. He’s discovered that he likes mashed sardines, and he can’t seem to get enough of them.”

At the mention of sardines, Charlie gave an excited yelp. “Yes. Yes. Charlie’s sardines.”

“Charlie’s sardines indeed,” said Isabel.

AFTER CHARLIE
was put down for his nap, which he took reluctantly that day as he had his own plans for the afternoon, Isabel went into her study. She had done no work that day, she reminded herself, and if she allowed herself to do the
Scotsman
crossword, three o’clock would come and she would have made no progress on the papers that had piled up on her desk. She glanced at the newspaper, aware of the temptation, and thought that if she did just one clue she could start on her real day’s work a few minutes later and feel virtuous at having resisted the diversion.

Five down:
He enjoys female company and gives authority (8)
. That took two minutes, and then “mandates” came into her mind. He was like Cat, she thought; she liked dating. How would one compose a clue for Cat?
Feline plays the role of prize, we hear; her love life is certainly this! (11).
Catastrophe.

She immediately felt guilty. Compiling crossword clues like that about her own niece showed, she feared, a great lack of charity. She should support Cat, rather than make up crossword clues about her. So she tried something different:
Give feline a pick-me-up
, she thought,
the opposite effect! (9)
. Catatonic.
Bed for a feline, a use for string
(4-6)
. Cat’s cradle.
As many appendages as it has lives, punishing! (3-1-4-5)
. Cat-o’-nine-tails.

Hours might be wasted like this, she thought, and she put the newspaper down firmly on a table. Now, to work …

She eyed the stack of manuscripts. There was only one way to deal with it, and that was to mine one’s way through the pile. Sighing, she picked up the first one and read the title out loud: “On Good and Bad Diversions.” She looked at the synopsis that the author had typed on the title page.

“There are some leisure pursuits that are intrinsically bad,” he had written. “They may not have consequences in the real world, but they encourage character traits that could well have deleterious results. The playing of electronic games that simulate the death of others is one example.”

Isabel sat down. This intrigued her. Of course amusing oneself with the death and destruction of others was bad for the character, and yet that is precisely what electronic games were all about. She glanced at the author’s name: William Blandford. He was courageous to make the point; people mocked those who spoke in favour of gentleness and the virtues. And the moment there was a whiff of censorship … Yet how could one stop the peddling of these things, if not by banning the sale of games that glorified and rewarded violence? The makers were incorrigible; millions of pounds were at stake and if the market wanted cruelty and death, then that was what they would provide.