The Forgotten Affairs of Youth (16 page)

Grace nodded. “Sometimes they don’t eat,” she remarked, “when there are other children around—they’re too busy playing.”

The telephone rang. Isabel answered it on the kitchen extension. It was Gareth Howlett.

“Isabel? I said I’d call back to confirm that we’d got rid of West of Scotland Turbines. That went through fine. And, as I anticipated, you made a pretty good profit.”

“Well done.”

At the other end of the line Gareth laughed. “And we were just in time.”

She looked across the room. Grace was wiping the counter with a cloth.

“Oh? Why?”

“They fell badly,” said Gareth. “A couple of hours after we sold. That sometimes happens when there is a bit of completely unexpected bad news.”

Isabel was silent, her gaze resting on the back of Grace’s head. That money had been the other woman’s nest egg. I have so much, Isabel said to herself, and Grace has so little. And yet it is I who have made the profit.

“Isabel?”

“Sorry. It’s a bit of a surprise, that’s all. Tell me what happened.”

Gareth explained. “They were counting on the success of their new equipment. It had performed brilliantly in tests, which accounted for the rise in value of the shares. Everything seemed to be going the right way, but now one of the turbines has failed dramatically—it blew up, in fact—and that’s set them back several years, I’m afraid.”

“I see. Well, I suppose we should be grateful that we sold just at the right time.”

She tried to keep her voice down, but Grace suddenly turned round and looked at her directly. Isabel closed her eyes. She said goodbye to Gareth hurriedly and put down the phone.

Grace moved her cloth slowly over the surface of the counter, but her heart was no longer in cleaning anything. “Is that West of Scotland Turbines you were talking about?”

Isabel could not lie, nor did she want to. “Yes.”

“So if you sold yours at the right time, that must mean I’ve bought mine at a bad time.”

Isabel nodded miserably. “I’m so sorry, Grace. I wouldn’t have recommended you to buy them had I known. But I didn’t …” She trailed off lamely.

Grace stared down at the surface of the counter. “It’s my own fault,” she said. “I’ve been greedy. I saw the chance of a quick profit and I went for it. I’m getting what I deserve.”

“You’re not,” said Isabel. “You don’t deserve to lose anything.”

Grace appeared uncomforted by this. “There’s no difference between gambling and playing the stock market,” she said. “They are much the same thing. You may as well take the money to somewhere like Las Vegas or Monte Carlo and put it all on the tables.”

Isabel was about to refute this but she realised that this was not the time. One could play the stock market quite morally because one was providing capital for companies to put to use. There was nothing wrong with that. The real villains were the people who made money out of manipulating people’s currencies or took aim at companies in order to cripple them and profit from their distress; they were even worse than ordinary gamblers, she thought. They wore suits and ties and worked in plush offices, but they were muggers, really—no different from the criminals who lurked in the shadows and leaped out to relieve people of their wallets.

She knew, though, what she must do.

“Let me make it up for you,” she said. “The profit I’ve made will more than compensate you.”

Grace would not countenance this. “No,” she said immediately. “It’s very kind of you, but it’s my own fault. I took the risk and I must pay for it.”

“Please,” said Isabel. “Please let me.”

Grace shook her head.

“I have more money than I need,” said Isabel. “And I’d feel much better if you let me do this.”

Grace faltered. “I don’t have much else,” she said. “I’ve never been a great saver.”

Isabel pressed home with her offer. “Good. Then that’s settled.”

“But what can I do for you in return?” asked Grace.

“Carry on being who you are,” said Isabel.

ISABEL WAS RARELY
in a bad mood, but when she arrived at Glass & Thompson she felt angry, with herself—for agreeing to go; with the as yet to be encountered Max Lettuce—for being a Lettuce; and with West of Scotland Turbines—for allowing their shares to tumble. There were other, lesser things that had irritated on her trip into town: a young man with extremely dirty dreadlocks sitting directly in front of her on the bus—she was sure that she saw his hair
moving;
a vapour trail across an otherwise unclouded sky—why must we spoil even the sky with the signs of our presence; and a newspaper billboard announcing a secret plan to impose a local income tax on Scotland.

How dare politicians have secret plans, she said to herself; if you intend to do something, then you should be honest about it and not seek to keep it secret from the people who will be affected by your plans. And if the government imposed heavier and heavier taxes on the population then presumably there would come a point at which anybody in a position to leave would do so. Well-off people were resented, of course, because human beings were, by nature, envious. But there came a point at which we had to accept that shaking out the pockets of the wealthy would simply drive them away. And after their pockets had been shaken out, who would there be to invest in schemes to create further wealth?

She went into Glass & Thompson and looked about her. The café was reasonably busy, although there were one or two tables free. Behind the counter, the bow-tied proprietor, Russell Glass, was cutting a large quiche.

“Your friend is over there,” he said, nodding in the direction of one of the tables at the back.

“Not my friend,” muttered Isabel.

“Oh!” said Russell. “He said he was.”

Isabel checked herself. “I’m not in a good mood, Russell. Everything is—”

“Going pear-shaped? Oh, I know the feeling. Let me get you something to sort all that out. A bit of this almond tart? Almond tart has amazing restorative properties.”

She smiled. “Thanks, but I’ll resist.”

“Very restrained of you. I’ll tell you what, friend or no friend,” said Russell, “he made some very nice remarks about New Zealand.” Russell was a New Zealander and was receptive to compliments.

Isabel made her way towards the back of the café. There was no mistaking Max Lettuce, who had the same sandy hair as his uncle, but cut shorter, and the same nose.

As she approached the table, Max stood up. “Dr. Dalhousie?”

They shook hands. “Please don’t call me Dr. Dalhousie. Isabel.”

“Isabel,” he said, as if savouring the name. “I’m Max.”

“I can tell,” she said. “You are not entirely dissimilar to your uncle.”

Max looked down at his hands. “So I hear. I thought I resembled my father, but my father obviously looks like his brother.”

“Most of us don’t like to be reminded of family resemblances,” said Isabel. “We like to feel unique, don’t we?”

Max agreed.

They sat down and Max pointed to the menu chalked up on the board behind the counter. “That’s if you need something other than coffee. I didn’t have lunch and thought that I might have something light.”

While he read the menu, Isabel sneaked an appraising glance. He did look like Professor Lettuce, she decided, but was less fleshy, less ponderous. Would that change? Was this merely a young Lettuce who would become an old Lettuce in due course and be like all the other old Lettuces—assuming that all the other old Lettuces, whom Isabel had never met, were all alike?

Her attention moved to his clothes. Professor Lettuce always seemed to wear a tweed jacket and flannels—hopelessly old-fashioned attire that flapped about him like a tent; Max, by contrast, was wearing a blue linen jacket and black denim jeans. She noticed that his shoes were made of soft blue leather, an effective match with the jacket.

He turned to face her and smiled. Isabel smiled back: that old, instinctive human exchange, the signalling that overcomes initial distrust. In this case, what needed to be overcome was her preconceived irritation, which now seemed to be fast dissipating.

“It’s good of you to see me at zero notice,” said Max. “Thanks so much.”

Isabel made a gesture to indicate that it had been no trouble. “I like to get away from my desk,” she said. “Any excuse will do.” That, she thought, sounded rude, and she corrected herself. “I wanted to meet you anyway. Now that we’re about to publish you, it seemed a good opportunity to put a face to the name.” And that name, she could not help but think, was Lettuce.

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?”