The Forgotten Affairs of Youth (6 page)

“What is it?”

Her first thought was of head lice. Every so often a note would come back from the playgroup informing parents that there had been a case of head lice—lice letters went with the territory of being the parent of a small child, people said, and it was no reflection on hygiene: the letters always stressed that clean hair was more attractive to lice. Of course they did not say
whose
hair was affected, much as some parents would have relished getting that information—provided it was not their child, of course. There should be no shame, and yet inevitably there was; one did not advertise the fact that one’s child was lousy, in the same way as people did not talk about their colonoscopies or haemorrhoid surgery. In general we love to share our medical conditions with our friends—but not all medical conditions.

Jamie read her mind. “No, it’s not lice,” he said, his voice lowered. “It’s swearing.”

Isabel gave a start. “Swearing? Charlie’s been swearing?”

Jamie nodded. He was trying his best to be serious, but there was a smile playing about his lips. “Mrs. What’s-her-face at the playgroup—the other one, the helper—she said—”

“Mrs. Macfie.”

“Yes, her. She drew me aside and told me that Charlie had used what she described as ‘a very bad word.’ She said it had surprised her and she thought that perhaps she had misheard. But then he said it again. He was grabbing some toy from one of the other children and he uttered this unspeakable word.”

Isabel’s eyebrows shot up. “Good heavens. Do you have any idea what the word was?”

“I asked her, actually, and she blushed to the roots of her hair. She said it was unnecessary for her to repeat it but she could write it down for me. Which she did. Here’s the piece of paper.”

He reached into his pocket and took out a folded piece of paper. At the top of the paper was the name of the playgroup and its address:
Little Sunbeams Playgroup, Merchiston.
And underneath was written a word in common usage among builders, soldiers, teenagers and novelists.

“Where on earth did he learn that?” asked Isabel. “You haven’t been … No, of course not.”

Jamie never used even mildly scatological language. He just did not. Neither did Isabel.

“Not me,” said Jamie. “Maybe I’ve
thought
it on occasion; who hasn’t? But—”

“The Pope?” interjected Isabel.

“The Pope?”

“You asked: Who doesn’t occasionally, even
very
occasionally,
think
such words? I said: the Pope.”

“You’d be surprised,” retorted Jamie. “Presumably the air turns blue in the Vatican when things get really difficult.” He smiled wryly. “Well, perhaps not … But whatever the Pope does or does not say, I don’t really use language like that, especially around Charlie.”

Isabel thought for a moment. “Grace?”

Jamie shook his head. “She doesn’t use strong language. It’s highly unlikely it was her.”

“Then he must have picked it up from one of the other children. Maybe it was …”

They both reached the identical conclusion at the same time.

“Algy,” said Isabel.

Jamie nodded his agreement. Algy was Charlie’s special friend at playgroup—or as close to a special friend that children of that age will have. Friendships at that stage in life are notoriously fickle, and friends will be readily jettisoned over the smallest of things. Algy and Charlie, though, appeared to get on well and their friendship had survived several disputes and the throwing of sand from the sandbox.

“It must be him,” said Isabel. “His mother is an actress.”

Jamie burst out laughing, causing Charlie to look up with interest.

Isabel smiled sheepishly. “I know it sounds a bit odd, but she swears like a trooper. I’ve heard her. I assume it’s fashionable in acting circles. Or, if not fashionable, at least completely normal.”

“So what do we do?”

“Ignore it,” said Isabel. “If we tell him not to use that word, then he’ll realise that it gives him some power over us. He’ll use it all the time.”

Jamie thought that this made sense. “But what would people have done in the past?”

“Washed his mouth out with soap, perhaps,” said Isabel. “Punished him.”

Jamie shook his head. “So we leave it, then?”

“For the time being, yes,” said Isabel. “Then, if he uses words like that a bit later on, we can talk to him about it. We can tell him that people don’t like to hear that sort of thing.”

“Of course, once he’s a bit bigger we could stop it in its tracks,” said Jamie. “If we told him that if he used that language he’d be struck by lightning or something else pretty severe would happen. His teddy bear would die perhaps. That would work. One hundred per cent certain.”

She knew he was joking. “Unwise,” she said drily. “Imagine what it would do to his little psyche.”

Jamie remembered something. “People used to do that sort of thing. They frightened children. It’s just that I’m recalling how when I was a young boy I was eventually cured of … Well, I’m a bit embarrassed to say this: fiddling around in public with my hand in my pocket. Small boys do it all the time, you may have noticed. My mother told me it would drop off. I stopped immediately.”

Isabel made a sympathetic face. “Oh, Jamie, how awful! Exactly what a mother should not say to her son. Your psycho-sexual development—”

“I’m still a bit worried about it,” he said, with mock concern.

“So you should be,” said Isabel, smiling.

Jamie returned to the question of what to do. “Should we have a word with Algy’s mother?”

Isabel considered this, and decided not to. “I should hate to seem prudish,” she said. “She’s very trendy. And we don’t really have any proof, do we?” She paused. “I’ve had an idea. Why don’t I say to her that we’ve heard that Charlie has been using inappropriate words and that we thought we should apologise to her if he’s done so in Algy’s hearing. We could say that we wanted to warn her that it might come up because we knew that she would be shocked to hear Algy saying anything like that, as he obviously wouldn’t come across such words in his own home. We’d get her to think about it—but do so tactfully.”

“Brilliant,” said Jamie. “As ever.”

But then Isabel thought: No, ordinary human issues were not solved by ingenious schemes; in most cases, inaction was the solution, as it was here. Charlie would forget what he had said: he had thousands of new words to learn as he explored the world about him. He would hear things he did not understand, and things she did not want him to understand yet; but for the moment, he should not be lumbered with guilt. There would be quite enough guilt in the future; being human, we all had our share, except for those who never felt guilty about anything because they had no idea why they should. They are a special case, thought Isabel, and I shall get to them later on.

W
E ALL REMEMBER
different things, don’t we?” Isabel said. “I may remember one thing and you may remember something else altogether. Even if we were both in the same place at the same time.”

She was walking across the Meadows with Jane. The morning, having started with a cool breeze off the North Sea, was beginning to warm up as the wind shifted its direction. Now it was from the south-west, a more favourable quarter, and the clouds that had obscured the sun earlier had rapidly dispersed. Isabel had left the house wearing a lightweight raincoat, which she now carried slung over her arm. Beside her, Jane had removed her sweater to reveal a fawn-coloured linen blouse that left her arms bare. Isabel thought this optimistic; the wind could swing back to the east and the temperature could drop, Scottish weather being almost entirely unpredictable and quite capable of producing four seasons in the space of an hour—or even less.

She made the remark about memory because that was what they were now embarking upon: a reconstruction of the past. When Isabel had offered to help Jane to trace her parents, she had not anticipated quite so enthusiastic a response: Jane had not only been effusive in her thanks, but had suggested they start immediately. This had inspired Isabel who, for all her frequent resolutions not to get involved in matters that did not concern her, actually enjoyed the business of intermeddling.

And why not? she said to herself. Of course, helping somebody else, being virtuous, should be its own reward, but it undeniably brought satisfaction in so many other ways. Most of all, it gave the pleasure of discovery—an intellectual pleasure that naturally appealed to the philosopher in Isabel. And not just to the philosopher: within each of us, she felt, there was also an inner Sherlock Holmes, just as there was an inner Sigmund Freud, and an inner … She paused. An inner Napoleon?

She had suggested to Jane that she might wish to be involved in the inquiry—though she pointed out that to call it an inquiry rather overstated the case; all she could offer was to use her knowledge of Edinburgh and its ways to piece together such facts as could be unearthed forty years on.

“This isn’t exactly recent history,” she warned. “Forty years is, well, forty years. People forget. We can’t be sure that anybody will now know what you want to find out.”

Jane had assured her that she understood and accepted this, but Isabel had her doubts. It seemed to her that, having declined in the past to seek out this information, the other woman was now feeling both impatient and unduly hopeful; hence the precautionary discussion of memory as they made their way across the park separating the Old Town of Edinburgh and its curtilage from the towering stone terraces of Marchmont and beyond.

“Of course you’re right,” said Jane. “I suppose memory’s selective because we have to have a reason to remember something. If we don’t have a reason, then the mind doesn’t record the memory properly. That’s how memory works, isn’t it?”

Isabel nodded. She had several books on the philosophical implications of memory and had actually read them, but was struggling to recall exactly what they said. There had been something about memory of dreams … Yes, that was it: there was an explanation for why dreams were so hard to hold on to.

“That’s precisely why our memory for dreams is so short term,” said Isabel. “We remember them for the first few minutes after waking up, and then they go. You must have experienced that. We know dreams aren’t worth remembering because they’re stories that never happened.”

“But they did happen,” said Jane. “In one sense a dream is an event; it’s something that happened to you, if you see what I mean. The fact of having that particular experience—the thing that happens in your dream—is an event, and a significant one at that.”

Isabel frowned. A dog ran across the path in front of them, chasing a ball thrown by its owner. Dogs dreamed, did they not? You saw them sleeping on the floor, their legs twitching in an arrested, stationary run. Yet dogs, by the nature of the doggy mind—and doggy consciousness was a very obscure matter—had no concept of dreaming. The experiences they had in their dream, then, must be absolutely real to them, if they remembered anything on waking up. And how would one be able to tell that? Perhaps by observation: one could watch the dog as it woke, and see whether it looked about as if to locate whatever it had been pursuing in the dream—a rabbit, perhaps, or a cat. If a dog looked for a rabbit, then it must have thought the rabbit was there. One did not have to be a philosopher to work
that
out.

She tore herself away from speculations on canine thought processes and returned to what Jane had just said. Yes, of course dreams were significant because they told us a great deal about what was going on within the subconscious mind; if one forgot everything else that Freud had said, then that, at least, would remain. But did the bundle of responses and strategies within us that dictated the reactive behaviour of the organism—did
it
know that dreams were important and should be remembered? She considered not.

Thoughts of memory prompted actual recollections.

“There’s something I’ve just remembered,” Jane said. “You said that our memories alight on different things, sometimes rather arbitrarily. Well, I just remembered a colleague, years ago when I was teaching at Macquarie, who held the most extraordinary grudge. He had lent a tent to another colleague who wanted to go camping up in Queensland. Apparently it was a rather good tent, and it proved to be pretty useful to the person who borrowed it. He had mistimed his trip a bit, and he hit the beginning of the rainy season up north. We call it the wet. Anyway, the tent came in useful, but got pretty soaked.”

“I went camping as a girl,” said Isabel. “It rained every time.”

Scottish rain, she knew, had nothing on the Australian
wet
, but it could sometimes seem like that, particularly in the western Highlands. The whole
point
of those Highlands, some said, was to block the clouds coming in off the Atlantic and make them declare their water—which they obligingly did, sometimes for days on end.

“Well, you may know,” Jane continued, “that you have to be careful to dry a tent. This man didn’t. He left it folded up when it was still damp and then he handed it back. When the owner opened it to repack it, he found that it had turned mouldy.”

“Inconsiderate of his friend.”

“Yes. My colleague was furious.
And he never forgot.
He mentioned it for the next twenty years. Often.”

“Unfinished business,” said Isabel and added, “That tent needed closure.”

Jane threw a sideways glance at Isabel.

“In a manner of speaking,” Isabel said hurriedly. “Closure has become a bit of a cliché, don’t you find? Everybody talks about wanting closure. The concept of closure, perhaps, needs closure.”

They were now nearing the point where Jawbone Walk joined Middle Meadow Walk; it was a spot that for some reason seemed popular with dogs and their owners, as natural a meeting place, perhaps, as the
agora
had been in Athens.

Isabel spotted a couple of dog owners deep in conversation while their dogs, waiting patiently at their feet, glared at one another in mute suspicion. Behind them, on the newly mown turf—the sweet smell of freshly cut grass still lingered—a small group of students sat in a circle while one, holding a book, read aloud. The boys were bare-chested, their skin pale in the morning sunlight, the girls with midriffs exposed. One of the girls, she noticed, had a tattoo worked around her navel—a Celtic design, it seemed; all whirls and whorls.

Isabel tried to make out the title of the book from which the boy was reading, but failed.
The
something.
The Prophet
by Kahlil Gibran? They were the right age, she thought; we should all read
The Prophet
before we became too cynical, too jaded to be impressed. Charlie would read
The Prophet
one day, and have a poster of Che Guevara on his wall—if anybody remembered Che Guevara by then.

She touched Jane’s forearm lightly and nodded in the direction of the students. “Look,” she said. “I expect your mother might have sat right there in her day, just like them.”

Jane glanced at them and smiled. “You know something?” she said. “Ever since I came to Edinburgh, I’ve had the feeling that I’m close to her. I know that it’s probably no more than auto-suggestion, but I really do feel it.”

They chose the path off to the right, which took them to the southern edge of George Square. Here was a row of old stables, now used as store rooms, and behind them a cobbled road to the one remaining Georgian side of the square. Isabel and Jane did not follow this, but made their way round the back of the University Library, to Buccleuch Place and the premises of the university accommodation service. A discreet blue notice advertised the presence of this office. Most of the buildings in the street belonged to the university and were used for smaller academic departments, the occasional student flat and supporting elements in the academic bureaucracy.

“I know somebody here,” said Isabel, as they climbed the narrow stone staircase to the third floor. “In fact, she’s a very distant relative on my father’s side. A third cousin, or something like that. She’s worked here for at least twenty years and is more or less the institutional memory.”

A corridor ran off the landing, and beyond that a small internal hall dominated by a large noticeboard. The hall gave on to three offices, one labelled
Assistant Director
, one
Accounts
, and one bearing the simple legend,
Miss Hodge
.

Isabel approached Miss Hodge’s door and knocked loudly. A voice within invited her to enter.

“Isabel! And …”

Isabel introduced Jane to her cousin, Katrina, a slender, rather concise woman somewhere in her late forties.

“Jane is with us from Melbourne. She’s at the Humanities Institute.”

Katrina smiled warmly. “Melbourne,” she said. “I went there three years ago. I watched the tennis—the Australian Open.”

“Katrina is a keen tennis player,” explained Isabel. “Almost played for Scotland.”

“A hundred years ago,” said Katrina. “And not all that almost. Almost almost, I’d say.” She invited them to sit down. “When you phoned me, you didn’t tell me exactly what it was you wanted to know.”

Isabel apologised. “I thought it best to explain in person,” she said. “It’s rather complicated, but Jane is trying to trace her mother, who’s no longer alive. No, that sounds a bit odd. She’s trying to find out about her mother so that she can trace her father. That’s right, isn’t it, Jane?”

Jane nodded her confirmation. “I was born here in Edinburgh,” she said. “I was adopted and taken to Australia. I know my biological mother’s name and I know that she died when I was about eight. I have no idea of who my father was, but he was probably a student at the same time as my mother.”

There was a note in Jane’s voice that made Isabel take over the explanation: a note of strained emotion.

“If we could find people who knew Jane’s mother,” she said, “then we might be able to get further information about—”

“About her boyfriend of the time,” said Jane simply. “Her lover—my father.”

Katrina nodded sympathetically. “Do you know when your mother started her studies here?”

Jane did and gave the date. “It was 1968. I was born in 1970.”

Katrina smiled. “Heady days. The student revolution in Paris.
Sous les pavés … 
Under the cobblestones …”

“The beach,” supplied Isabel. “Which meant liberty, I suppose.”

“Exactly,” said Katrina. “Edinburgh was on the sidelines of all that, and the
pavés
remained in place, I gather.”

“We don’t do outrage quite as convincingly as the French,” said Isabel.

Katrina smiled as she turned to Jane. “Do you have your mother’s full name?”

“Yes. Clara Harriet Scott. She came from St. Andrews. She enrolled to read History.”

Katrina rose to her feet. “We have the records of everybody we accommodated in that and every other year, going back to 1961. Before that, I believe the files have been scrapped. A pity, I think, for historians and so on. Or for people like you, I suppose.” She paused, and looked at Jane enquiringly. “If you’re interested in everybody admitted to the university in a particular year, perhaps the best way of checking up on that is the General Council lists. Graduates become members of the General Council—all the names are there. I can give you a copy for the year you’re interested in.”

“I’d like that,” said Isabel. “But it won’t tell me where they lived, will it?”

Katrina shook her head. “No. If you want to find out where they lived your best bet is to look in our records. If they lived in university accommodation we’ll have a record of where it was.”

“And of who else lived there?” asked Isabel. “Which is a way into their lives, so to speak.”

Katrina thought about that. “Yes, that’s true, I suppose. Students move in packs. They tend to make close friendships with the people they share things with—including accommodation. So yes, those lists could help build up some sort of picture. They’re in the records room, if you’d like to come with me.”