The Forgotten Affairs of Youth (21 page)

She spoke quietly and deliberately, and Isabel knew that this was a moment of confession. Had she ever said this to anybody else, she wondered? She thought not. The judge was strong; she had to be. She had to be decisive, organised, determined, because that was what was expected of her in her position. And no doubt she was all of that; but she was also a woman who had loved a man, hopelessly, and who loved him still.

“And me too,” whispered Isabel.

She had said it. John Liamor. She had loved him so intensely, although he had never loved her in return. She had thought of him obsessively, while she must have occupied only a small part of his thoughts; and it had been so difficult for her to forget him, although he must have found it easy.

Catherine clearly expected her to say more.

“I loved an Irishman. He was called John Liamor. I know that this sounds predictable, ordinary, but he was a very good-looking man. I know that has nothing to do with it—or should have nothing to do with it. There are plenty of good-looking men, and one might well say, so what? But his looks were part of his charm and I thought I had never met anybody quite so exceptional. I felt that I had come into the company of somebody who was imbued with … some sort of power that I couldn’t quite describe. I expected other people to feel it. I thought that they too must be in awe of this man, must sense what I sensed. I wanted to share my discovery. I wanted to say:
Look at this marvellous man, just look at him
.

“And of course that is a real sign of being in love, isn’t it? You want to share your discovery with others. You want to share your delight. It’s exactly what we want to do when we perceive any other sort of beauty, whether it’s a shell we pick up on a beach or a sunset or anything, really: we want to say
look at this
.” She stopped. “I shouldn’t be talking to you about all that.”

Catherine shook her head. “No, you’re wrong. Of course you should be. I told you about … Alastair.” She had hesitated before she mentioned his name. Isabel thought, it’s as painful as it ever was.

“I’ve put John Liamor out of my mind,” said Isabel. “I try not to think of him, and it works, you know. You can tell yourself not to think of things. You can tell yourself all sorts of things and end up doing as you are bidden. It’s like going on a diet, or giving up some bad habit. You can do it if you tell yourself to.”

“And if you want to listen to yourself,” added Catherine.

“Exactly. And I’m not sure whether most of us have sufficient credibility with ourselves to do that.”

“To listen to ourselves?”

“Yes.”

Isabel imagined saying to herself, “Oh, it’s only you going on again about that! Please! Do you think I’m going to listen to
me
?”

Catherine glanced at her watch. “I mustn’t stay too long. I have some people coming to see me in chambers.”

Isabel nodded. “Of course. And I suppose I should get on with what I’m meant to be doing.”

The judge had returned. “So there we have it. Alastair is probably the man whom Jane is looking for. I should not have sought to protect him. I did. I’m sorry. And I’m sorry for misleading you.” She paused. “And myself—as I have just done.”

Isabel looked at her enquiringly.

“Yes,” said Catherine. “If I’m to be honest with myself, my real reason for lying to you—and I’m afraid I did lie—was probably my resentment, my hurt I suppose, that Alastair should have had a child with another woman.” She stared forlornly at Isabel. “With another woman.” She repeated the words, full of bleakness.

“I know,” whispered Isabel. “I know what you feel.”

For a short time neither spoke. Then Catherine appeared to pull herself together. “Well, that’s it,” she said. “Once again, I’m very sorry.”

Isabel thought out loud. “The problem is that Rory Cameron believes it’s him and is, apparently, really pleased. He’s spending time with Jane Cooper. He seems to be seizing what he has been given. So what do we do now?”

She wanted to say, you’re the judge, you sort this out. But she simply looked at Catherine, who said, “That’s all my fault. I shall go and speak to her. I’ll explain why I lied and … well, I hope that she understands. And then I shall go to him—to Rory Cameron—and tell him too. Don’t worry. I’ll do all that for you.”

Isabel shook her head. “No,” she said. “Don’t.”

She did not want Catherine to suffer any more. To be in love with a man for years and years, at a distance, to be haunted by him, was punishment enough for whatever small failings she might have, for any deceptions such as the one she had practised on Isabel. More than enough. The judge might sentence others, but was herself under a sentence of unhappiness from which there appeared to be no release, no early parole, and Isabel had no desire to add to that weight.

I
SABEL WENT
to Cat’s delicatessen the following day to buy a jar of stuffed olives. The olives were not for her, although she liked them a great deal; they were for Charlie, whose precocious palate demanded them in the same breath as it called for sardine sandwiches—the sardines being mashed and applied finger-thick to buttered bread; for boiled-egg soldiers—the still-runny yoke spooned onto strips of thick white bread; or for bowls of rice pudding with deep wells of red jam deposited in the middle. It was all nursery food—the food envisaged by Lin Yutang when he made his famous remark about patriotism being nothing more than the love of such dishes—and yet it sat alongside this curious taste for olives, for gherkins, and for Italian sausage heavily flavoured with garlic.

Isabel wondered what they thought of this at Charlie’s nursery school, where she suspected garlic was hardly encouraged. Charlie’s tastes, she felt, were not their concern, and if they disapproved of the contents of his tiffin box, then that was unfortunate, but not something for her to worry about. Some of the children at the nursery school brought chocolate and potato crisps for their lunch; let them look to those diets, with their preservatives and bad fats, before they commented on the olives and garlic of others …

She entered the delicatessen, expecting to find Cat or Sinclair, but found neither. A young woman, somewhere in her early twenties, her dark hair swept back in a chignon, was standing behind the counter, ladling hummus from a large jar into the small tubs in which Cat sold it. She looked up as Isabel came in and greeted her with a smile.

“You’re … her cousin, aren’t you?”

There was a jauntiness in the young woman’s manner that appealed to Isabel. And then there was the accent, which was not Scottish, but from somewhere in Northern Ireland and not unlike Georgina Cameron’s; the English that Shakespeare would have spoken, preserved by centuries of relative linguistic isolation.

“I’m Trish,” the young woman continued, finishing with the hummus jar. “I’ve just started. All this food! I’m going to put on weight, so I am.”

Isabel smiled at the “so I am.” It was a turn of phrase that was characteristic of that part of Ireland, and she liked it. It was a little bulwark, she felt, against the bland homogenised speech that was spreading so quickly, destroying personal, quirky, local expressions, a linguistic herbicide.

“Is Cat—”

“She’s out. But she’ll be back soon. Can I get you something meantime? A cup of coffee maybe? I haven’t used that machine over there yet and I can’t wait.”

“It can be cantankerous,” said Isabel. “It shoots out jets of steam if it doesn’t like you.”

Trish laughed. “It’ll like me.”

And it would, thought Isabel, because you are perfectly likeable.

Isabel said that she would be happy for Trish to try out the machine and make a cup of coffee for her. But where was Sinclair? Was he late—again?

“No, he’s gone,” said Trish, wiping her hands on her apron. “Cat got rid of him yesterday.”

Isabel was intrigued. Sinclair had not lasted long, and while that would have been the case had she—Isabel—been in charge, it was still somewhat surprising, given Cat’s proclivities.

Trish’s tone became confidential. “I think something happened.”

“Oh yes?”

“Yes. I don’t know, mind you—not for certain—but I think he might have made a move against her, know what I mean? Something like that.”

Isabel was silent. Or could it have been the other way round, she asked herself. No, she thought. I will not allow for that. I will not.

Trish began to ladle coffee into the machine. “I hope I’m doing this right,” she said. “Yes, that boy did something or other, judging from what Cat said to me. You can’t work with somebody if he’s going to bring sex into things, can you? Cat wouldn’t have liked that, would she?”

Trish had more to say on the subject. “I had that problem two jobs ago when I worked down in George Street. There was this fellow—he was seriously seedy—who thought that he was God’s gift to women. He was sick-making. And he kept coming up to the assistants and putting his hand on their shoulders and whispering advice into their ears. It was horrible. And he smiled like this, showing all his teeth, and he needed to get to a dentist, so he did.

“There was this girl who worked beside me. She was from one of those places down on the coast—my geography’s not much good but it was near Musselburgh, I think, and she had this tattoo on the back of her neck. I won’t tell you what it was and it was always covered by her hair so I suppose that was all right. But anyway, she was tough and this creepy man comes up to her and whispers something into her ear and so she just lifts her hair—like this—and he sees the tattoo and he looks really surprised. And then, and I’m not making this up, she gets this small, hand-held vacuum cleaner—we used it to get dust off the windowsills; the boss was really fussy about that—and she switches it on and pushes it up against his nose and his nose got stuck in it, so it did. It was terrific craic. You should have seen him. You can’t be a big lover-boy, can you, when your nose has been stuck in a vacuum cleaner? No, you can’t.”

Isabel chuckled at the thought, then returned to the issue of Sinclair. The fact that Cat had got rid of him was greatly to her credit. If she had been as incorrigible as Isabel had feared, then she would have welcomed the advance rather than rejected it. Perhaps she was learning, after all; perhaps this was a sign of change. And as for Sinclair, he would not be much missed in the delicatessen: selling cheese and stuff, as he had put it, was clearly beneath him; and Trish was far better with customers, she imagined. Sinclair was not interested, and people did not respond well to that. There was nothing worse, she said to herself, than being served by somebody who clearly would have much preferred to be off modelling somewhere …

She smiled. There should be badges for people to wear:
I’m really a model
, or,
I don’t really have to do this job
. She could wear that one when she worked in the delicatessen, or perhaps one that said,
Philosopher
. Or would that be pretentious? Very, she decided. A badge that said
Temporary
would be quite enough. But then she reproached herself. There was nothing wrong with selling cheese and stuff, and she would do it with pride.

Once her coffee was made, Isabel took it to one of the tables, leaving Trish to deal with a customer who had just come in. He was given the same cheerful welcome that Isabel had received, and a conversation was struck up. The customer had been in Fermanagh the year before, on holiday, and, recognising Trish’s accent, asked her whether she knew the place. She did, and had cousins there, and one of these cousins had a dairy farm and had …

Isabel stopped listening. Trish was a vast improvement on Sinclair, but might be exhausting in the long run.

Isabel picked up the newspaper and perused the front page. There had been a political betrayal—a falling-out of allies—and insults were being exchanged. One side was calling the other hard-hearted and the other was replying that their erstwhile allies were disloyal. Representatives of both were pictured shaking hands and smiling: the picture had been taken in happier days.

Then there was a report on a war in a country in Africa, with a picture of a boy soldier, gun in hand, a ridiculously large military cap on his head. The cap had fallen forward to obscure the boy’s face. He could never have seen well enough to shoot anybody with that cap obscuring his vision, but anybody else, Isabel thought, would surely be able to see him well enough to shoot him—which may well have happened by now. This little boy, who should have been playing with a toy car, or learning how to read, would have become a tiny corpse tossed into a common grave with other tiny victims. Was there a mother somewhere keening for him, as mothers have done for their sons since war was first invented? Or a father?

“Horrible.”

She looked up. It was Jane.

“That photograph,” Jane said, pointing to the paper. “I saw it too. Isn’t it horrible?”

Isabel nodded. Now her thoughts turned from the sad subject of boy soldiers to the present moment, and what she should say to Jane. It would be easy to say nothing, but could she do that? No. She was in exactly the same position as the walker in the hills who sees another making his way towards a precipice of which he is unaware. A failure to warn in such circumstances was the moral equivalent of a deliberate invitation to walk that way—Isabel was convinced of that. And yet, did a failure to put money in the charity box amount to killing the person who would otherwise have starved to death in some distant famine? She had never been convinced of that, even if she felt uneasy about it.

That involved complicated discussions of causation, of the distinction between acts of commission and omission: the sort of issues that were bread and butter to the editor of the
Review of Applied Ethics
but were much harder to deal with when they became real, and had to be confronted while seated drinking coffee in her niece’s delicatessen in Edinburgh …

“I’m so grateful to you,” Jane said as she sat down at Isabel’s table.

Isabel tried to smile.

“Yes,” Jane went on. “I was out at Rory and Georgina’s and we went over to New Lanark together. I’d always wanted to see it, you know. The whole idea of setting up an ideal, enlightened community is such an attractive one. And to think that they did that when everywhere else the conditions of working people were so bleak.”

“Yes,” said Isabel flatly. She would have to say something soon. The longer she left it, the greater the pain. “Light and air. Robert Owen believed in that, didn’t he?”

“Yes, he did. And education.”

Isabel was still thinking. Alastair Rankeillor did not sound like good father material, but would Jane want to contact him? What would be the point, other than confirming her identity—and that was the aim of Jane’s quest in the first place.

“Then we went to the Falls of Clyde,” said Jane. “I’d seen photographs—”

“Jane.”

“Yes?”

Jane’s expression was one of contentment.
She’s happy,
thought Isabel,
and I’m about to shatter her happiness.

Isabel drew breath. Her resolve to tell Jane was on the point of deserting her, but she had taken her decision and she must persist. “I’ve been giving some thought to your situation.”

There was a very slight movement about Jane’s lips. An innocent twitch? A flinch? “My situation?”

“Yes. You must have been thinking about it yourself, I suppose. And there must be a question mark …”

Jane looked away. “There are often question marks over what we do.” She paused. “And sometimes it’s best to ignore them, don’t you agree?”

Isabel waited until the other woman looked back at her again. She was not sure she was reading this remark correctly. Did Jane not want to know the truth? She swallowed. She could ask her directly. “Do you want to be completely sure?”

“About who my father is?”

Isabel nodded. “Yes, about that.”

Jane frowned. “I know that Rory isn’t my father,” she said quietly. “I know. You don’t have to tell me.”

Isabel had not expected this. She had imagined that Jane might have been hoping that Rory
was
her father, but an optimistic belief was different from knowledge of falsity.

“How do you know?” she asked. “When I spoke to you about it before, you said you didn’t want a DNA test. So how do you know?”

Jane hesitated before she answered, then said, “Georgina spoke to me.”

“And?”

“And she told me that it could not have been Rory. They had tried to have children, you see, and they had consulted a specialist. He’s infertile, apparently. And could never have been a father at any point.”

“So he knows too? Then why is he going along with it? Why hasn’t he told you?”

“Because he doesn’t know.”

It did not make sense.

“I can see that you’re puzzled,” Jane continued. “But there’s an explanation. He doesn’t know because she didn’t tell him. He was away at the time that the results of tests came in. He was in the army, remember, and he was on a posting abroad. She went for the consultation and it was explained to her that while she appeared to be fine, he was the problem.”

Jane went on to tell Isabel about how Georgina had decided to say that the problem was hers, rather than his.

“She felt that he was vulnerable. She felt that he had had too many blows to his pride anyway—he had been passed over for promotion—and so she decided to protect him from the psychological burden of the knowledge of his infertility.”

“So she told him it was her?”

Jane nodded.

Isabel reflected on what she had been told. A deception was being practised by two people, and she, an outsider, had come to know about it—except that she was not an outsider: she had brought about the meeting of Jane and Rory, and was therefore implicated in the outcome.

She asked Jane whether she thought it right that Rory should be deceived.