The Forgotten Affairs of Youth

  They went through for the beginning of the concert, finding their seats in the third row, behind a man and woman whom Isabel had seen at concerts before but whose names she had never known. The other couple half turned and smiled at them, and then the man whispered to Isabel, “Richard says this is going to be excellent.”

  Isabel had no idea who Richard was. “Good,” she whispered back. “How is he?”

  The man shook his head slightly. “He’s doing his best, poor man. It can’t be easy, though.”

  “No,” said Isabel. “It can’t.”

  The woman now turned to her. Lowering her voice, she said, “It’s not his fault. Categorically not.”

  The musicians entered, and the puzzling conversation came to an end. Jamie glanced at Isabel and mouthed a word of reproach: Bad! She lowered her eyes to the programme; she had not been mischievous; she had been polite.

  The concert began. She looked up at the ceiling and let the music flow over her. She was thinking of what Jane had said to her at lunch that day. Her story had not been all that exceptional—there must be numerous people in her position—but it had been told in a way that had engaged Isabel from the start. Now, as she listened to the tones of the cello, she imagined the sadness that such a story entailed. Our tenancy of this world is brief: we come from nothing and go into nothing. In that brief moment that is our life, how disappointing it must be not to know who you are.

  In the interval, she said to Jamie, “I don’t want to go back into the bar. Can’t we sit here together?”

  He looked at her with concern. “That’s fine. Are you feeling all right?”

  She reassured him that she was fine, but wanted just to be with him.

  Jamie commented on what they had heard. “That cellist, Peter Gregson, plays wonderfully. He was at the Edinburgh Academy, you know, when I was teaching there. We knew that he would do great things. I love his playing.”

  “We don’t always expect people we know to do anything great, do we? Fame is something that happens to somebody else.”

  He slipped his hand into hers. “You’ll do great things, Isabel. Charlie, too.”

  She returned the pressure of his hand. His skin was so smooth, so flawless—and he had given that to his son too. “Of course Charlie will. I’ve never doubted it. The only question is what field will he excel in—which Nobel Prize he’ll win.”

  Jamie knew. “Medicine or peace,” he said. “The two best things you can do. Heal people. Stop them fighting.”

  Isabel wanted to tell him about her day. “You know Cat arranged for me to have lunch with somebody she met? An Australian philosopher.”

  Jamie nodded. “You mentioned it. How did it go?”

  “She told me her story.”

  Jamie gazed at her expectantly. “Oh yes? Anything interesting?”

  “Well, yes. Very. It was—”

  Jamie took hold of Isabel’s wrist. “Hold on. Is this leading to—”

  “I can’t ignore her.”

  He sighed. “Isabel—” He broke off. “All right. Carry on. You can’t help yourself, can you? So you may as well carry on.”

  She looked injured, and he apologised. “I’m sorry. I know that you do this out of a sense of duty. And I suppose that I’m secretly rather proud of you and everything you do. I wouldn’t want you to be selfish. It’s just that …”

  “This is nothing risky. It really isn’t.”

  Jamie was about to say more, but the musicians were returning to the platform. “Tell me later,” he whispered.

  THEY LAY IN BED TOGETHER, covered only by a sheet, as it was June and the evening was warm. It was dark, but not completely so; a chink in the curtains allowed moonlight in, an attenuated silver glow like the light cast by an old and failing projector.

  There were shadows: the towering bulk of the wardrobe that had belonged to Isabel’s parents, with its twenty drawers and its capacious hanging spaces; the dresser, with its half-length mirror on mahogany spindles, that in the darkness looked like some unlikely legged creature, the mirror its staring face; the chair on which Jamie carelessly threw his clothes; the lumpy chaise-longue at the end of the bed that had been described at auction as having belonged to the late Duke of Argyll—removed from his castle, claimed the saleroom note—as if the late duke had said petulantly, I want that thing out; I want it removed from my castle. And who could blame him; it was a most uncomfortable piece of furniture, but Isabel, who felt sorry for things abandoned, both animate and inanimate, had decided to give it a home, as a place on which to put clothes, or packets, or books—anything really. It had attracted the sympathy of Charlie, too, who loved to jump off the end of the bed and on to the chaise, before rolling off the edge to the carpeted floor. He would do that time and time again, proud of the endlessly fascinating game he had invented.

  Jamie had his hands tucked under his head as Isabel spoke. She lay on her side, facing him, their knees just touching.

  “So her mother was a student in Edinburgh. When was that?”

  “Forty years ago. Jane told me she celebrated her fortieth birthday in Melbourne just before she came over here.”

  “And?”

  The mother, Isabel explained, studied French. She was called Clara Scott and was the daughter of a doctor and his wife who lived just outside St. Andrews. She was their only child. She went off to university and while she was there—in her second year—had an affair and became pregnant. They were Catholic, and so understandably the pregnancy went ahead and she gave birth to Jane. Apparently they sent her to some place run by nuns in Glasgow for her to have the baby. They sent her away.

  “That’s what they did then,” said Jamie. “It was worse in Ireland, where they bundled them off to special homes. Some of those girls stayed there for the rest of their lives.”

  “Shameful things happened in Scotland, too,” said Isabel. “Let’s not get superior. Just because we had a Reformation—”

  “And Ireland? What about what’s going on now?”

  Isabel thought: Yes, that is exactly what has happened in Ireland. A twenty-first-century reformation, only almost five centuries late. It had happened so quickly and so drastically, with the exposure of clerical arrogance and downright cruelty. But nothing had been put in its place: no spiritual renewal—just puzzlement and distress, an emptiness, the void that goes with believing in nothing other than the material.

  And the humiliation of those who meant well, perhaps, was never edifying; all those officials of the old Soviet Union who had done their jobs conscientiously for a lifetime, who had believed that they were doing the right thing, only to discover that—together with the loss of their pension—everything they believed in was suddenly meaningless and actively despised; all those members of Irish teaching orders who had devoted their lives to others, only to find that they were public pariahs because of the abuses of a minority, embarrassed now to wear the cloth of their office.

  Was all social change like that: indifferent to individual innocence? Public judgment was rarely finely nuanced; there was no inquiry into the subtleties of a person’s position. There had no doubt been good men among the German forces that goose-stepped across Western Europe; good men were probably among those who pulled triggers, men who had been conscripted and who had no real choice. Yet a uniform makes complicit all those who don it, voluntarily or otherwise. It could not be otherwise because, Isabel realised, life, and its moral assessments, were crude affairs. She might not want it to be so, but that was how it was.

  Yet she would never accept things as they were. That was what made her do what she did—practise philosophy—and what made her, and everybody else who thought about the world and its unkindnesses, do battle for understanding, for sympathy, for love; in small ways, perhaps, but ways that cumulatively made a difference.

  “She had the baby,” Isabel went on. “It was a girl, who was given up for adoption through a Catholic agency. That baby was Jane.”

  Jamie was silent for a moment. “Go
on.”

  “Do you know a book called Empty Cradles?” she asked. “I’ve got a copy somewhere. I read it a few years ago.”

  “No.”

  “It’s by a social worker who lived in Nottingham. She had quite a few people coming from Australia to try to trace their families. As children they had been sent abroad by something called the child migration movement. They came from working-class homes and were thought to have better prospects abroad—or were children who had been in care—and the parents were persuaded to give them up, or they were simply taken away. Lots of people were uprooted and grew up in Australia in the belief that they were orphans. But they weren’t. They had been lied to.”

  “Imagine,” muttered Jamie. “Imagine if somebody came and sent Charlie off to Australia. Told him we didn’t exist, or whatever. Imagine.”

  “No. I can’t imagine that.”

  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.