The Forgotten Affairs of Youth

  Jamie took some time to answer. “Sixty per cent of men could,” he said. “No, seventy.”

  She chided him. “Where do you get those figures?”

  “Intuition,” he said. “I know what men are like. First-hand experience. I am one.”

  “But you’re not part of that sixty or seventy per cent?”

  “No. I promise you I’m not. Just you. You’re the only one who could seduce me.”

  She laughed. “But I’ve already done that,” she said.

  “So you have,” he said. “Utterly. Completely. Totally.” Then he became serious. “You do remember that we’re going to get married, don’t you?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “When?”

  She replied with a question of her own. “When would suit you?”

  “Two weeks’ time?”

  “Why not.”

  He took her in his arms. “Good. I’ll make arrangements.”

  THAT NIGHT Isabel had a visit from Jane Cooper. She came unannounced, shortly after half past nine, finding Isabel alone in the garden. The midsummer evening, only a couple of days away from the solstice, was still lit by a sun not yet set; there would be a good hour of light left before the gloaming proper, that hazy, fuzzy time of soft edges and gentle, washed-out colours. And it remained warm; Isabel wore a blouse with no cardigan or sweater, the friendly air about her at a perfect temperature.

  She saw Jane before Jane saw her. The other woman was walking down the street, on the other side, and had slowed down when she drew level with Isabel’s house. She hesitated for a moment before crossing the road, peering up—presumably to see if lights were on—and then started to make her way up the garden path.

  Isabel, who had been examining a camellia bush, a mug of tea in her hand, called out: “You needn’t press the bell. I’m here.”

  Jane spun round, almost guiltily, and made her way across the lawn to where Isabel stood.

  “I was passing by,” she said. And then, “Well, actually, I wanted to see you, but I felt—I don’t know—I felt that I didn’t want to pester you. So I thought if I took a walk and just happened to bump into you …”

  Isabel sought to put her at her ease. “You can come and see me any time,” she said. “I’m not one of those formal people who expect every visitor to phone in advance.” She gestured to a bench at the side of the house, near a clump of lavender. “Why don’t we sit there? I’m just finishing this tea—I could get you a glass of wine. An excuse to have one myself.”

  Jane accepted, and Isabel went off back into the house to fetch the glasses. She came back out and handed her visitor a glass of chilled white New Zealand wine. They exchanged toasts.

  Isabel went straight to the point. “You’ve met him?”

  She knew immediately from Jane’s expression that the meeting had been a success. “Yes. Earlier today. We met for lunch in that restaurant you recommended to me. The Café St.… I forget its name.”

  “St. Honoré,” Isabel prompted.

  “Yes,” said Jane. “There.”

  Isabel sipped her wine and then held the glass up to gaze through it at the sky. The pale, attenuated blue became green through the yellow of the liquid; the colour of our world, she thought, is mediated by our lens.

  “And it was a success?”

  She imagined Jane entering the restaurant and looking about her—for the father she had never met. What would one say in such circumstances, without appearing melodramatic. Father? Too restrained; too reminiscent of the dialogue of an old-fashioned repertory play. Noël Coward. Or Oscar Wilde, with discussions of handbags and railway stations. Perhaps such a first contact today would be wordless, or maybe feelings would be closer to the surface and there would be unashamed sobbing and unrestrained emotional histrionics.

  Jane smiled. “It couldn’t have gone better. It was very … moving, I suppose. He was so kind to me.”

  Isabel, who had become tense, relaxed. This was an intervention on her part that had worked; it was a very satisfactory conclusion, which was not always the case with what she called her involvements. Jamie would be pleased; he was always concerned that she might make matters worse. Well, she had not done that in this case; far from it. She had facilitated happiness.

  “We talked for hours,” Jane went on. “I went there at twelve—we were the first people in for lunch. In fact, I think I was there at ten to. He came along fifteen minutes later, and we stayed until three. They started brushing the crumbs off our table very attentively—the signal, of course. At dinner they can turn the lights off if they want to give people the message.”

  Isabel smiled at the recollection of her own experience of the ways of restaurant staff understandably anxious to get away. She had once been in Paris, at a philosophical congress, and had had dinner with two loquacious Milanese philosophers. They had enjoyed their conversation so much that eventually a waiter had felt obliged to whip the tablecloth from under their elbows—a feat of dexterity requiring, no doubt, years of practice if it is to be done without causing seismic disturbance to the table arrangements. Nobody could fail to get that message, and the Italian philosophers had risen to their feet, unfazed, continuing their debate as they left the restaurant.

  “You must have had a lot to talk about,” she said. “Your whole life. And his, too, I suppose.”

  She wondered how one began such a conversation. The bare facts of a life can be compressed into a few pithy phrases summing up school, job, marriage, interests, but those would hardly do in such a case.

  “He told me a lot about himself,” Jane said. “To begin with, I thought that he would be reserved. You know there’s a certain sort of man who … well, I suppose, strikes one as being buttoned up. Military people are often like that. He had that about him, and then suddenly, all in a bit of a rush, he opened up and started talking about his feelings. I hadn’t expected it, but I suppose I had no idea what to expect.”

  Isabel knew what she meant. So many men were starved of the opportunity to discuss their emotional lives, put off by inhibition, by the expectations of others, or by male denial: so much so that some felt they had no such life, that there was simply nothing there: a desert of the heart. Auden had said that, she remembered: in the deserts of the heart, let the healing fountain start …

  “A healing fountain …”

  Jane was listening attentively. “Exactly. That’s exactly what I felt. The pain started to come out, but even as it emerged you could see—really see—him feeling better. He started to smile. He started to talk about his future.”

  Isabel was interested in that. “Did he say he was going to give up golf?”

  Jane was puzzled and listened intently as Isabel explained. “I had the impression—from something his wife said—that he played golf but did not actually enjoy it. He was trapped, in a way.”

  Jane became animated. “Yes! Yes! That’s exactly the word he used: trapped. He didn’t say that he was trapped by golf, but he did say that he had been trapped all his life by people who expected him to do things he didn’t really believe in.”

  “And that’s pretty common,” said Isabel. “Have you ever known a priest who doesn’t believe in God?”

  “John Knox knew a God who didn’t believe in priests,” Jane replied.

  Isabel laughed. “Jokes about the Scottish Reformation are so rare,” she said. “And all the funnier for it. But, tell me: have you? I have. I had a university friend who became a priest because he came from a devout family and there was a lot of pressure on him to go off to a seminary. Subtle pressure—nothing crude—but it was there. He half believed to begin with, and then he persuaded himself a bit more, but eventually he lost what little faith he had. But by that time he was a fully fledged priest with a parish and people relying on him and so forth. And all the time, he was just going through the motions.”

  “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.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  YOU 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 yo
u 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.