The Forgotten Affairs of Youth (5 page)

She could, though, and saw herself, for a moment, standing and looking at a photograph, imagined its being all she had left of her little boy. The greatest pain conceivable, she thought: the loss of a child. Irreparable. A gaping wound in one’s world.

“This social worker,” Isabel continued, “made it her business to help these people. She traced their families and they found in some cases that they were not orphans at all. They also found siblings—brothers and sisters who had been left behind in Britain. Think of how emotional that must have been—relatives reunited after decades. What a discovery.”

“Jane was one of these?”

“Not quite the same,” said Isabel. “She wasn’t sent out as an unaccompanied baby, so to speak. She was placed with a Scottish couple who were about to emigrate. The adoption went through just before they were due to leave. He was a plumber, apparently, and she was a nurse. They took her off to Australia and that was that. They brought her up well enough, but they divorced when she was in her final year at high school. She said that the divorce had a curious effect. She had been told that she was adopted and somehow the fact of the divorce changed her feelings for her adoptive parents. She said that relations were cordial enough, but she rather lost touch with them. Both remarried, and somehow the feeling of being a family disappeared as the lives of each began to revolve around the new partner. And neither of these new partners really knew her, or was much interested in getting to know her. She described it as a fading away rather than a rupture.”

“Strange.”

“It can happen, I suppose. She said that it didn’t really worry her too much. They both moved away with their new partners—the father to Hobart, the mother to somewhere in New South Wales. Jane stayed in Melbourne, with a spell at the Australian National University in Canberra and a couple of years as a visiting professor abroad—somewhere in the United States. Rice in Houston, I think she said.”

Jamie was listening attentively. He shifted his legs slightly. “Sorry. Carry on.”

“She came up for a sabbatical—she’s on it at the moment. She decided to come to Edinburgh because she’s working on moral sentiments in the Scottish philosophers—Hume and Adam Smith—and so she thought this would be the place. But she said that it was only when she arrived that she realised that her choice might have been subconsciously motivated by what she knew of her past. She had been conceived in Scotland—this was where she started. That’s how she put it to me.”

“Understandable enough,” said Jamie. “Salmon go back to the exact bit of water where they were spawned. Maybe people want to do that too. It’s getting in touch with one’s inner fish.”

She nudged him playfully. “Do you want me to go on?”

“Yes, of course. It’s just the idea of an inner fish … We all emerged from the primeval slime, didn’t we? Aeons ago?”

“So we’re told. Frankly, I’m not sure if
all
of us did, but there we are.”

“It’s a sobering thought,” said Jamie. “It cuts us down to size.”

Isabel agreed. It was difficult to see how human pretension, human pride, could survive the knowledge of our fishy past. Professor Lettuce, that great, pompous son of a fish … She laughed.

“What?”

“I was thinking of Professor Lettuce as the descendant of a fish. It was very
helpful
.” She paused. “I’m sorry. I’m being infantile. It’s because the lights are off. If we had a light on, I’d be grown up.”

Jamie reached across and touched her cheek. “No, I like it when you talk nonsense. Not that it’s real nonsense, it’s more … fantasy. Or speculation, maybe. You think these things—these curious things come into your mind—and then you just say them. I love it. Listening to you is like reading an amazing book.”

There was no reply she could make to that, and so she continued with Jane’s story.

Jane knew that she was entitled to trace her biological parents, but had never really felt the need. Not until recently, she had said. Perhaps it had something to do with becoming forty. That was a bit of a watershed, she felt, and perhaps what made her go to an organisation once she arrived here in Edinburgh. It was a charity that put adopted children in touch with their biological parents—and vice versa.

“If both sides want it?” Jamie asked.

“Yes. Children have the right to find out the identity of their natural parents, but the parents can refuse to see them, of course, if they don’t want to make contact.”

“Some parents want to, though, don’t they?”

“Oh yes. Many feel a strong sense of loss, and guilt too. And Jane said something else very interesting. She said that up until after the time she was adopted, many adoptions weren’t really freely undertaken. Young women were coerced. They were told that the only option open to them, if they went ahead with the pregnancy, was to have the baby adopted. Apparently this happened a lot. Now we know about it and there are people trying to get the fact acknowledged—a bit late, I suppose.

“Jane said that she started to think about this once she had plucked up the courage to find out about herself, after her arrival in Edinburgh. Imagine coming to a strange city all by yourself and having to deal with this. Anyway, she went to the charity and they helped her. Then, to her astonishment, a few days after they had advised her on how to get access to her birth certificate and to see the court adoption record, she had a telephone call from a woman who worked for the charity. She said that they had something for her, but that they felt it was best that she should come in and get it personally, rather than talking about it on the phone.

“She went, with a lot of trepidation. She had not been nervous before, but now she was. She wondered whether they had found out the whereabouts of her mother—would she perhaps even be there, waiting for her? But it wasn’t that. It was a letter.

“One of the things that this charity does, apparently, is hold letters from people who have given children up for adoption. They hold them in case the child should ever come and ask for information. Then they hand over the letter. Apparently they have a lot of them—requests for forgiveness, I imagine. Letters of explanation too: why they did it.”

Jamie was quite still beside her. She heard his breathing. He was listening.

“The letter was handwritten and dated years ago, when Jane would have been about five or six. Jane showed it to me. It was very short. It said something like: ‘I am your mother and I always will be. I want you to know that I love you and I think of you every day.’ That was it—just a few lines.

“Jane said that she wept and wept when she read it, and I could see that this was true: the ink was smudged.”

“It gave no details?” asked Jamie. “No address?”

“Nothing. She was shortly to get her mother’s name, of course. She was about to go to Register House and see the birth certificate. That told her that her mother was called Clara Scott; occupation: student. And it gave her parental address. There was no father’s name, but at least she had an address for the grandparents at the time of her birth.”

“She found them?”

“No. This is where it all goes cold, I’m afraid. She went up to St. Andrews and located the house. The people living there had some information for her: they had bought it from the executors of a Dr. Scott, who had died ten years ago. His widow was alive, but was in a home. She suffered from advanced Alzheimer’s, they told her, and she had no idea of where she was or even of who she was. There was absolutely no point in going to see her.

“And as for Jane’s mother, these people said that they’d heard she had been killed in a road accident years ago, when Jane would have been about eight. So that was the end of her family. It was very disappointing for her.”

Jamie moved his arms. “Numb. My arms were getting numb. But she had a father. What about him?”

“She has no idea who he is. None at all.” Isabel paused. “She asked me whether I could help her find out about him. She hasn’t any idea how to start—she’s in a strange city and doesn’t know a soul, apart from me and Cat.”

“Then you must help her,” said Jamie. “You have to.”

Isabel had not expected this. “You normally complain if I get involved in other people’s affairs—”

“Not this time.”

She was curious. “May I ask why?”

“Because I’ve decided to try to see things through your eyes,” he said. “I try to think of—what is it you call it?—moral proximity. And once I do that, I realise that you have no alternative, Isabel. You have to help this woman.”

She said nothing, but reached out and put her arms about him, under the sheet. She moved closer. She felt his breath upon her shoulder, his hair against her skin. I have so much, she thought; I have so much, and Jane, it seems, has so little, although that, she saw, was an assumption that was both unsupported by fact and condescending in its implications. Jane was not to be pitied: why should she be? She was an attractive woman who had an enviable job; the fact that she appeared to have no boyfriend or husband was neither here nor there; for all Isabel knew, she might want none. And if she did not know who she was, that was true only in one sense; in every other sense, Isabel thought it likely that Jane knew exactly who she was.

Yet she would still help Jane because she had asked her to do so, and that, for Isabel, was grounds enough.
Ask and ye shall receive
. Yes. But then there was the line that followed, or came soon afterwards:
Or if he ask a fish, will he give him a serpent?

Isabel was feeling drowsy. “Some knowledge is a fish,” she muttered. “Some is a serpent.”

Jamie, half asleep too, grunted. She was talking about fish. Was she still on evolution? Fish, he thought. Fish. And then his mind became pleasantly blank and soporific, but aware of the weight of her arm across his naked chest, of the closeness and completeness of their being together in this most intimate of retreats, their bed, their human nest.

T
HE NEXT DAY,
a Sunday, passed in contented idleness, but by Monday Isabel could no longer put off attending to the pile of papers that had been growing steadily on her desk. It seemed to be by osmosis, as if the papers were washed up by some tide that lapped across the floor. Of course it was Grace, and her co-conspirator, the postman, who were responsible; Grace took pleasure in receiving large piles of mail from the postman and drawing Isabel’s attention to just how many letters there were.

Isabel spent the first part of Monday morning going through submissions for the journal. Her refusal to read on-screen was the subject of mutterings, but subdued ones: as she was the editor, the boot was on Isabel’s foot, and though she was careful not to abuse the power that her editorial role gave her, she was adamant that she needed hard copy to give a paper its due.

The issue of editorial power was a sensitive one. Professor Lettuce had shown her how not to conduct herself as an editor. As chairman of the
Review
before Isabel’s successful putsch, he had frequently interfered with her editorial discretion and continued to do so, on occasion going so far as to reject articles that authors had mistakenly submitted to him rather than to the editor.

“I take it that you don’t object to my saving you the effort,” he had recently written in a note to Isabel. “A few articles have ended up in my in-tray and I’ve sent most of them back. People will insist on sending stuff to me because they see my name at the top of the editorial board list. Anyway, I rather like one of these papers, and have accepted it for publication. I’ll send it on to you in due course.”

There were procedures for this, and he had ignored them. And the article that he had unilaterally accepted—to Isabel’s open-mouthed astonishment—was by a young post-doctoral student, Max Lettuce.

“This Max Lettuce,” she wrote back. “Forgive my asking, but is he any connection? It’s an unusual name, and I just wondered.”

She had wanted to write
It’s a ridiculous name
but had stopped herself.

“As it happens,” Lettuce replied, “Max Lettuce is my nephew. He took a very good degree at Oxford and is now a post-doctoral fellow in my own department. His work is quite exceptional, as you will see from the paper he submitted. Indeed, we are fortunate to have it.”

The paper was not exceptional in any way.

Isabel wrote again:

But she did not post the letter: there was no point. Lettuce would never change, would never accept that he had acted wrongly. And Max Lettuce, for all Isabel knew, was blameless, no doubt believing that his achievements—the post-doctoral fellowship and the acceptance for publication—were no more than his due.

And there was another reason: sarcasm could be fun, but Isabel felt that it should be a private vice, not one practised in public. It was like swearing: a private expletive, muttered in anger or irritation, could be cathartic and was harmless, unless it reached the point of corrupting the attitude of the person who uttered it; public swearing drew others into one’s circle of anger at the world, exposed them to one’s antipathy or rage, and invited them to share both it and the view of the world it reflected. That was a different matter altogether.

The morning passed quickly. Jamie, who was at home that day, was going to collect Charlie from playgroup, leaving Isabel free until such time as she chose to break for lunch. By twelve the pile of papers was considerably diminished, even if many of them had been given only a cursory initial glance in anticipation of fuller attention later on.

Several letters had been typed on the word processor and printed out for signature, and a crucial contract with the
Review
’s printers had been read and signed. Printing charges were going up, and sooner or later the cost of subscriptions would have to be raised. She knew what this meant, though: cash-strapped academic libraries, which formed the bulk of the subscribers, would have to consider whether they could afford the new charges. Some would cancel; others would cancel other journals to allow the
Review
to be continued.

It was economic pain of the sort that the politicians had been warning everybody about. Nobody was immune: not even the remote groves of academe in which enterprises like the
Review of Applied Ethics
flourished—or tried to flourish.

Isabel sighed. She would pay the difference out of her own funds if it came to that—she was fortunate enough to have the money, even if the principal source of it, the funds left her by her sainted American mother, were feeling the pinch.

“There is always fat,” Peter Stevenson had once said to her. “There is always something that can be trimmed.”

Yes, thought Isabel, and for a brief irreverent moment imagined Professor Lettuce, who was considerably overweight, having a diet imposed on him. “There must be cuts,” they would say, “and, alas, your waistline has been identified as a suitable target.” Not as fanciful as it appeared: she had read somewhere of a very overweight Polynesian monarch—the last king of Fiji, she seemed to recall, who had decided to go on a diet—and had proceeded to put the whole nation on a compulsory diet at the same time. That had happened and quite recently.

Thoughts of money reminded her of the note she had scribbled a couple of days ago. It was still there on her desk, where she had left it.
West of Scotland Turbines.
She picked it up, examined it, and then put it down again. What if the medium were right? What if West of Scotland Turbines was indeed about to do well; and what if she bought a holding in it and then, when the shares went up in value, sold them and … and used the money to offset the impact of the increased printers’ bills for the
Review
? That would mean that she could avoid any raising of the subscription, and if the shares did
really
well, then she could actually lower the subscription price. Great would be the rejoicing, then, in those struggling university libraries.
A reduced subscription!
The news would spread like wildfire, texted from one librarian to another, from one threatened philosopher to another facing the same fiscal axe. Beacons would be lit on hills to convey the good tidings …

She reached for the small blue-bound book in which she kept telephone numbers. Gareth Howlett, who managed her investments for her, was at his desk. His arrangement with her was not to bother her with day-to-day decisions, but to manage things quietly in the background, following a set of ground rules they had established at the outset. No shares in tobacco companies; no shares in fast-food companies; no shares in arms concerns; no shares in the empires of a small list of press barons—a position that Gareth cheerfully described as “broadly ethical.”

“Good shares can do just as well as bad shares,” said Gareth. “Often they do better. Virtue, you see, has its rewards, Isabel.”

Although she left most of the decisions to Gareth, occasionally she contacted him with a particular request. She had suggested an investment in a small company that made disposable syringes—she had read about them in the
Scotsman
and had approved. She had also bought shares in a company floated by a friend—not a good investment, as it turned out—but one that loyalty at least dictated.

“West of Scotland Turbines?” Gareth asked. “Those people over in Paisley?”

“I’m not sure where they are,” said Isabel. “But Paisley sounds about right. They make … well, I believe they make turbines for hydroelectric schemes.”

“Indeed they do,” said Gareth. “As it happens, I know the company slightly. They’re small—listed on the alternative market rather than the main exchange. We’ve been looking at their shares. Solid enough, I think, but nothing spectacular.” He paused as he typed details into his computer. “In fact, Isabel, I would say that they were rather dull for you. You’ve always gone for slightly quirkier things—those disposable syringe people, for instance. West of Scotland Turbines is an engineering company. They … well, they make turbines. I’ve actually seen pictures of their products in one of their brochures. Big metal boxes. The water comes in a pipe and goes out another. The turbine is the bit in between.”

Isabel listened as Gareth went on to discuss the price-to-earnings ratio of the turbine shares—he had brought the details up on his screen and had the figures at his fingertips.

“They’re priced round about right, I would have thought, which fits with what I said before: nothing special, solid; a reasonable choice if you’re feeling conservative.”

“As opposed to feeling reckless? Risky?”

Gareth laughed. “I can’t imagine you feeling reckless. It doesn’t quite fit with being a philosopher.”

“I’m quite capable of throwing caution to the winds,” said Isabel. “It makes such an exhilarating sound, when you toss caution into the wind. It’s a sort of whooshing …”

“Isabel? Are you all right?”

“Sorry. Just speculating.”

“Well, speculation is something I don’t really recommend—when discussing investments. If you’re on the lookout, I can come up with a much more interesting option. We had a meeting here the other day—my colleagues and I—and we talked about a company that runs cruise liners. Somebody has come up with a formula to track the relationship between obesity levels and the profitability of cruise lines. Apparently the heavier people get, the better cruise lines do. Interesting.”

Isabel laughed. “These are dark arts you practise, Gareth.”

Gareth responded that dark sounded better than the sobriquet normally given to economics—dismal—and the conversation returned to West of Scotland Turbines.

“You’d like me to put some of your funds into them? Are you sure?”

“Everybody needs electricity,” said Isabel. “And hydroelectricity is as green as it gets.”

Gareth agreed. “Well, there’s no real reason for me to advise you against it, and so I’ll go ahead. How much?”

A brief discussion ensued. Isabel found it awkward to talk figures: she had not asked for all this money, she felt, and she had no intention of letting it dictate the course of her life. She could give it away, of course, but …

And there she recognised the contradictions in her position. She did not like to think that she needed the money, but she did. She had the house to maintain. She had to pay Grace. She had all the expenses connected with Charlie—the playgroup charged fees; her green Swedish car would need major surgery, she had been told—possibly a new transmission. There were taxes to pay, insurance, local rates: the list seemed endless. So although she gave generously to a number of causes—Scottish Opera, in particular—she had to keep
something
.

They decided on one hundred thousand pounds, and the telephone conversation came to an end. Rising from her desk, Isabel crossed the room to stare out of the window. She asked herself what she had done. It was absurd, even shameful. She—who had often criticised speculators who played with the currencies and assets of others, those manipulators who did not think for a moment of the victims of their economic games, those financially concupiscent bankers who rewarded themselves with immense bonuses—had behaved exactly the way they did: shifting money about with a view to a quick profit. Shame on you, she muttered. Shame on you.

JAMIE BROUGHT CHARLIE HOME
shortly after twelve. The little boy ran into Isabel’s study—or tottered, as his running was still a headlong, almost uncontrolled projection—launching himself into her arms.

“And what happened this morning?” she asked, kissing him as she spoke.

He grimaced and wiped his cheek; she could imagine him thinking,
I’m not a baby!
but not yet having the words to express the thought. Boys grew away from their mothers, she understood—but did it start this early? Small boys needed love and cuddles; there would be time enough to be masculine, and lonely, later on.

Charlie seized one of the bulldog clips that Isabel kept on her desk and set about forcing it open. The spring was initially unyielding, and his little fingers were barely up to the task, but he succeeded eventually, fastening it to Isabel’s blouse—much to his amusement.

Standing behind Charlie, Jamie signalled to Isabel. “We need to talk,” he whispered, adding: “out of range of juvenile ears.”

Distracting Charlie with a piece of paper and a red pencil, she rose to her feet and joined Jamie at the doorway of the study. Charlie seemed indifferent to the presence of his parents; a red pencil, applied with force to a blank sheet of paper, was far more interesting.