The Forgotten Affairs of Youth (19 page)

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.

B
ROTHER 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 governments 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?”

That last question raised profound issues. Dogs were evidently capable of being helpful—sheepdogs and guard-dogs were; they were also capable of showing affection and friendliness to their owners and others. Those surely would be good acts if performed by human beings, but were they good if performed by an animal? That depended on the reasons for which they were performed. A person who does the right thing is not necessarily being good, as Kant was at pains to point out; this could be a moral accident, if we did something good only because we were told to do it. And that meant that dogs were never truly good, at least in Kantian terms, because it was instinct, or even fear, that made them do what they did. So no dog really deserved a pat on the head then, nor a medal, nor thanks … and no fox deserved opprobrium for eating alliums.

Isabel let the allium bulb drop from her fingers and recited:

Jamie stared at her. “Macallium?”

“Macallum is a perfectly common Scottish name, and therefore Brother Fox, were he to be graced with a name, could well be called Macallium. Surely the composers of limericks may take the occasional liberty with names.”

Jamie smiled. “I can’t set it to music,” he said. “The rhythm of a limerick is just too strong. It would take over. And besides—”

“Besides, it’s a piece of nonsense. At least Lear’s limericks had something poignant to say about human aspirations—and human loneliness.”

They began to walk back into the house.

“And yesterday,” he said. “What about yesterday? What are you going to do? Are you going to speak to Jane?”

She shook her head. “No. I want to speak to somebody else. To a judge.”

“Catherine Succoth? The woman you told me about?”

“Yes.”

Jamie placed the palm of his hand against his forehead, the gesture he invariably used when admitting failure. “Oh, I’m sorry. I forgot.”

Isabel looked at him enquiringly.

“She phoned,” Jamie said. “I meant to tell you. She phoned yesterday.”

He was always forgetting to pass on messages to her; it was a male failing, she thought. John Liamor had been the same—although he may have done it out of perversity, being jealous of her friends, though it was far from clear to her why this should have been so, when his feelings for her must have been so shallow, so loveless. And her father never passed on telephone messages, although that was vagueness, she thought, and a curious belief he entertained that nothing of any real consequence was ever said on the telephone.

“And?” asked Isabel. She forgave him this; she forgave him everything.

“She wanted you to phone back. She left her number.”

“Nothing else?”

He shook his head. “Nothing. Interesting, though. There was something about her in the
Scotsman
the other day. Some big trial in Glasgow—she was the judge. Some big Glasgow hood who had a yacht that he used to run drugs from Spain. She gave him a real dressing down and then sent him off to prison for nine years.”

“Deservedly, no doubt.”

“Apparently he started to rant and rave after the sentence was passed and he shouted out that he would get her some day. I thought: You have to be brave to be a judge.”

Isabel agreed. “Yes. It can’t be easy.”

“And then you go home afterwards, after dealing with all that stuff, and you have to do ordinary things like preparing dinner and paying bills and things like that. And you know that there’s this character, going to his bunk in Barlinnie Prison or wherever, and starting his nine years—and thinking of you as his Nemesis.”

Isabel reflected on this. “No doubt you compartmentalise. Doctors do that, don’t they? They do the difficult things they do—telling somebody that they’re terminally ill, for instance—but they can’t let it stop them leading their own lives. They switch off, I suppose.”

She thought:
What about me?
She had to do the occasional unpleasant thing—rejecting unpublishable papers, knowing how much the author might have invested in his or her work. And in some cases, when the paper came from somebody struggling to keep a job, the rejection of the paper might be the thing that means the end of a career. Yet you couldn’t think about it; you couldn’t, because there simply was not enough room on the page for everybody who felt that they had something to say.

They reached the house. Jamie opened the door for her and then remembered. “Oh, and there was another call.”

She glanced at him reproachfully. “Yes?”

“Today. Somebody from the council. Environmental Health, he said. He gave a number too. He said you should ask for the food safety officer on duty.”

Isabel frowned. “Food safety?” And then she realised what it was. Mushrooms.

SHE CALLED
the council first, using the kitchen phone, and was put through to a Mr. Wallace. As she had imagined, he was interested in mushrooms.

“We follow up on cases of food poisoning,” he said. “It’s usually restaurants, but occasionally we get unsafe products being sold by retailers. The hospital informed us that you had mushroom poisoning. Is that correct?”

“I felt a bit ill,” she said. “But it wasn’t anything serious.”

There was a brief silence at the other end of the line: a silence of censure, of disapproval. Then: “Any case of food poisoning is serious, Ms. Dalhousie.”

“I didn’t mean to make light of it,” Isabel said. “It’s just that I was only very mildly ill. Hardly anything life-threatening.”

Mr. Wallace passed over this. “We’d like to know where you bought these mushrooms,” he said.

“I bought them from …” Isabel hesitated, remembering Cat’s keenness to gloss over the incident.

“Yes?”

“From a delicatessen.”

“That doesn’t surprise me,” said Mr. Wallace. “The supermarkets are very careful about these things. Which one?”

Isabel thought quickly. She could say that she had forgotten, but that would be a lie, and she would not do that. Cat would, she suspected; but she would not.

“Does it really matter?” Isabel asked. “I’ve spoken to the person who runs it and she’s assured me that there would be no prospect of this being repeated.”

The irritation in Mr. Wallace’s voice was now unmistakable. “Of course it matters. Some shopkeepers will tell you anything. We have to make sure that they understand the importance of knowing their suppliers.” He paused. “I could tell you some hair-raising stories about food impurity, Ms. Dalhousie. Yes, right here in Edinburgh.”

“What will be the consequences for the delicatessen?” asked Isabel.

“We’ll visit them,” snapped Mr. Wallace. “We’ll check up on their arrangements. We’ll discuss the situation.”

She hesitated.

“It’s for the best, you’ll agree,” came Mr. Wallace’s voice again.

She did not like being pressed in this way. Others might be so sure of their position as to answer directly and determinedly, but it was not her style. Isabel thought about things; she weighed them; she saw dimensions to a question that others might not. And in these circumstances, faced with a question that could incriminate a relative, some people might suffer a convenient lapse of memory, or tell an outright lie. But that, again, was not her way.

“What if I ensured that it didn’t happen again?” she asked.

There was only the briefest pause at his end of the line. “What do you mean? How could you?”

She kept her voice steady. “I mean exactly that. If I were to make sure that the person who sold me those mushrooms never again obtained their supplies from those people in—”

Mr. Wallace interrupted her. “So you know where they came from? You know the supplier?”

A
foss,
she thought. I have fallen into a foss of my own creation. The word came to her because it had occurred in a crossword—no other letters would have fitted—and she had gone to the dictionary to find its meaning. It was a hole, and she had dug it for herself: a metaphorical foss, but a foss nonetheless.

She realised that she could not avoid telling him. It was her duty to do so, of course, and she knew it, but she felt reticent for the most human, most understandable reasons. “It’s my niece’s delicatessen,” she explained, giving him the address. “And that makes it a bit complicated.”

The tone of disapproval deepened. Isabel was now, by her own admission, almost complicit. “I can see that,” he said icily. “But thank you for this information.”

They said goodbye and she replaced the handset in its cradle. Jamie, who had been standing in the doorway listening in to this conversation, raised an eyebrow.

“Bureaucrat,” said Isabel.

Jamie looked sympathetic. “I’m sorry.”

She took a deep breath. She should not have called him a bureaucrat, even if that was what he was. There had to be bureaucrats; there had to be people who investigated cases of mushroom poisoning, and to dismiss them as bureaucrats was wrong—it was a word which so often tended to be used with contempt that it might be described in the dictionary as a term of abuse. Mr. Wallace was only doing his job; he was paid to protect people and was entitled to expect cooperation. No doubt it was not easy, no doubt he encountered obstructiveness and mendacity at every turn. And now he was planning a head-to-head with Cat, who could be difficult at the best of times.

Jamie was thinking much the same thing. “Rather you than me,” he said. “Cat’s not going to like that.”

Isabel defended herself. “I had no choice.”

“Of course you didn’t,” agreed Jamie. “But I still say that Cat’s not going to be pleased.” He looked uncomfortable. “They could fine her.”