The Forgotten Affairs of Youth (14 page)

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
.

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 them 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.”