The Forgotten Affairs of Youth (18 page)

“Which many of us do, don’t we?” said Jane.

“Yes. More people than we imagine. There must be policemen who don’t believe in the law—or don’t identify with it, rather. There must be personal trainers who don’t see the point in being fit.” Once the theme was broached, the examples flooded in. “Or politicians who are in the wrong party, whose careers have been based in a particular party and they have to see it through or they’ll be out of a job.” She paused. “And philosophers who would far rather be doing something else. Making money, perhaps. Or doing something practical.”

Their eyes met for a moment, and then Jane looked away. “Me,” she said. “Sometimes.”

“And me too,” said Isabel quickly. “Sometimes. Not very often, but sometimes. I help my niece in her delicatessen, you see—you met her, Cat. And when I do that, I sometimes find myself thinking: wouldn’t it be far less
complicated
to have a job like that? To sell things? To order cheese and salamis and all the rest and not worry about what we should do and how we should do it?”

Jane said that she could identify with that. “My moments come when I’m on the beach. I have a beach near my place and I walk there at weekends and I see women with their families. The women have their jobs cut out for them. Where are the kids? Who hasn’t put on sunscreen? Who hasn’t had their sandwich yet? All that sort of thing. And I think: imagine if that was your
life
. Wouldn’t you be happier dealing with all that rather than worrying about whether one understands exactly what Hume was getting at?”

“And yet we choose to do what we do,” said Isabel. “Maybe it’s the same for everybody. People may have to do quite a few things that they don’t want to do—that aren’t them, so to speak—and then they have the things that they do like to do, and they fit these into the interstices of all the obligations and chores.”

Jane returned to Rory. “In his case, there doesn’t seem to have been much opportunity to be what he wanted to be.”

“And what’s that, do you think?”

Jane fingered the stem of her glass. “We didn’t go into the details. He just said that he wished he’d gone down another path altogether. He wanted different company. He did say that, at least. He said something about needing new friends and not finding any.”

“Not uncommon. Don’t you …”

Isabel did not finish. She was ashamed of what she had been about to say. She was going to admit to wanting new friends, but she did not want to sound disloyal or shallow.

Jane was intrigued. “No,” she said. “I can’t say that I particularly want new friends. Or at least I don’t go out of my way to meet them. What I’d really like to do is to spend more time in the company of the friends I’ve got, especially the old ones.”

Isabel wondered whether Jane could be described as a new friend of hers. She liked her, and she had sensed that the two of them thought in the same way about a number of things. This conversation had only confirmed her in that view. But they had met just a few times and she was not sure that one could call a person one has met merely a few times a friend.

Friend
was a powerful word in Isabel’s view. It was not to be conferred lightly because, if one did that, it weakened the concept of friendship. If casual acquaintances were friends, then how could one distinguish them from those with whom there was that more sacred, important bond?

“That priest you knew,” Jane suddenly asked. “What happened to him?”

“He carried on with it. He never revealed to anybody else, he said, that he had lost his faith. He told me in an unguarded moment and I think he regretted it. I told him that his secret was safe with me.”

Jane smiled mischievously. “And yet you’ve told me.”

“I’ve anonymised it,” said Isabel. “It’s not a breach of confidence if you give no clue as to who it is you’re talking about and the person can’t possibly be identified.”

“He’d say it was,” said Jane. “He would never tell you—even anonymously—what anybody had said to him in the confessional, would he? They’re serious about those secrets.” She put down her glass. “We’ve rather forgotten about Rory.”

“So we have. What now?”

“I’m going to take him and Georgina out to dinner in a couple of days’ time,” said Jane. “Then we’re going up to Pitlochry at the weekend. There’s a theatre there and I want to see a bit of the Highlands. And when I go back home, they’re going to come and visit me. I’m really pleased about that. I want to show them Australia. He’s always wanted to go but has never done so. I’ve got air miles. I’m going to get them a ticket.”

Isabel said that she was pleased that Jane was so happy. Jane replied that she was: very happy. And he was too, she said. They had found one another; they had found a whole future.

“I know who I am now,” she said, reaching out to touch Isabel on the arm. Isabel reciprocated. She took Jane’s hand briefly and pressed it.

“Good. Very good.”

Jane got up to leave. As she did so, Isabel asked a question. “One thing I was wondering about: are you going to have a DNA test? Just to confirm?”

Jane was silent for a few moments. Then she replied, “No, we won’t.”

Isabel made no comment on this.

Jane looked at her. “You obviously think we should.”

“No,” said Isabel. “I have no views either way.”

“Well, I don’t want one,” said Jane. “Why test something that’s so perfectly obvious anyway?”

“Of course,” said Isabel.

She led Jane to the gate.
You are not his daughter
, she found herself thinking.
You are not.
She did not want to think that; she wanted to believe quite the opposite, just as, no doubt, her priestly friend had so wanted to believe. But we cannot choose our convictions; they come to us unbidden, prompted by intuitive understanding of what is and what is not. She was convinced that they had made a mistake. She was not sure why she thought this, but it seemed an inescapable conclusion to her, and she was saddened by it. And Jane knew this too, she thought.

Y
OU CAN’T LEAVE IT
like that,” whispered Jamie. “Definitely not.”

They were in the Greyfriars Kirk, waiting for a concert to begin. The church was a well-used venue for musical events—a great barn of a place in the Old Town of Edinburgh, its churchyard sloping down towards the Grassmarket. It was steeped in Scottish history, which meant that it was redolent of suffering and hardship, of fanaticism and stern refusal to budge. The defenders of Presbyterianism had signed their Covenant here, signalling their defiance of Charles I’s—and his son’s—attempts to impose royal control over religious practices. People had died here, starved to death by implacable authorities, martyrs to their beliefs. They lay cheek by jowl with common criminals, with pioneers of geology, with poets and artists—all brought democratically together in the best of Scottish traditions of rough egalitarianism. And what is more egalitarian than the embrace of the soil?

“Don’t bury me here,” Jamie said. He felt uneasy; the memorials were so final, so uncompromising.

“I’m not going to bury you anywhere.”

He smiled and kissed her lightly on the cheek. “I
am
going to die, you know,” he warned. “One of these days.”

“Don’t talk about it,” she said. He had told her, after all, not to talk about death when she had been in hospital with mushroom poisoning.

“On the grounds that the things that we don’t talk about won’t happen?”

She shook her head. “No. On the grounds that we have to live our lives without thinking of those things that will render those lives pointless. We have to conduct ourselves as if everything is going to be all right and that the things we know today will still be around in hundreds of years. Otherwise …”

“Otherwise what?”

“Otherwise we wouldn’t bother. Why build buildings that we think will last indefinitely? Why have museums and galleries and cultures, for that matter, if these things are not going to last? And they won’t. Why have countries, even?”

“Countries?”

“Because even those are not going to last. Do you think there will be a country called Scotland in five hundred years?”

“It’s been around for the last five hundred.”

“A few decades ago would people have betted on there still being a Soviet Union at the turn of the twentieth century? I would have. I would have thought it a very safe bet.”

“That’s different.”

“No it isn’t. Nothing lasts, Jamie. But we have to convince ourselves that it does. We have to make certain assumptions, certain pretences, otherwise …”

“Otherwise?”

“Otherwise we wouldn’t bother. Would I marry you if I thought you weren’t going to last?”

He stopped in his tracks. They were walking through the churchyard towards the door of the church. He looked at her with incredulity.

“I can’t believe you just said that.”

She realised that he had misunderstood. “Listen,” she said. “I would marry you even if I knew that our marriage would last five minutes. I’d marry you
for
those five minutes. I was speaking
generally
—not for me, but for people, and marriages, in general. When I said ‘I,’ I didn’t mean me, and ‘you’ didn’t mean you.”

They continued towards the door. “You worry me sometimes,” he said. “You talk about things in a way that makes me wonder whether …”

She had her arm in his and squeezed his elbow. “Don’t listen to me,” she said. “I think aloud. I think unusual thoughts. It’s not what I really mean. It’s because I’m a philosopher. The important thing is that I love you to bits—to absolute bits. I want nothing else in this world other than to be with you and Charlie. That’s all, and it’s quite enough for me. Forget these … these musings. I’ll say something else soon. Think of that.”

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.”