The Forgotten Affairs of Youth by Alexander McCall Smith Page A

Rankeillor plate; there had been a second plate, and it had been removed, or fallen off.
    She reached for the bell, a large old-fashioned button surrounded by a generous square, also of brass, well polished this time. She pushed it, and it was as if the act of pushing released a memory within. It all came back: the name Alastair Rankeillor had been familiar, and now she remembered.
    Of course, it was
that
Alastair, the Alastair who had been a well-known lawyer with a reputation as a philanderer. He had been almost irresistible to women and had taken full advantage of that, leaving a long trail of disappointed girlfriends behind him—as well as a queue of husbands to take issue with him over his seduction of their wives. But there had been one woman to whom he had always returned—one woman who tolerated his bad behaviour and was always prepared to take him back. And, of course, that woman was Catherine Succoth—of course it was: Isabel remembered Roddy Martine telling her about it. Roddy knew all the secrets of Scottish society, and had held Catherine up as an example of female toleration of the waywardness of men.
    “It’s pretty impressive, isn’t it?” he had said. “I could give you a long list, Isabel, of women who have shown the patience of saints—and the same capacity to forgive. Catherine Succoth did this. Forgave him and forgave him. However …”
    Roddy looked pained.
    “However what?”
    “However, he eventually brought the affair to an end—after all those years he upped sticks and went off to the British Virgin Islands, where he is today, senior partner in an offshore firm of lawyers, I believe, and doing very nicely. New woman with him, naturally. The widow of a shipping line, you might say. He must be getting close to retiring—at least from the law.”
    “He must be around that age.”
    “Yes, but I don’t think Lotharios retire from active service in the other department, so to speak. I think they carry on having affairs until they drop.” Roddy shrugged. “The injustice of this world, Isabel. Cads, as they used to be called, do very well. They thrive. They live happily ever after. It’s enough to make one want to believe in the place below, where they’d get a good roasting for their efforts. It would make the rest of us feel so much better, wouldn’t it?”
    She pressed the bell and waited. Alastair Rankeillor. She had met him, or at least had him pointed out to her at parties. He was good-looking, certainly, but was he really irresistible to women? Was anybody
completely
irresistible?
    Catherine Succoth was, as Isabel’s father would have put it, well preserved. Although in her early sixties, she could have passed for a decade or so younger; her hair colour, a light auburn, looking quite natural, and her skin retaining that smoothness that goes with a life spent away from the sun—the skin that comes from living in Iceland, or Finland, or northern Scotland for that matter. She was, by any standards, a handsome woman, with an animated, intelligent look to her that made it easy for Isabel to understand why Alastair Rankeillor, who by all accounts had to fight women off, had remained with her—in his way—for years.
    Her greeting was friendly, but with a slight note of reserve. Isabel thought this was normal: the judge belonged to a generation, and a social circle, that was not effusive. There was none of the frostiness, though, that one might have expected from somebody of an even earlier generation, a coldness expressed in the hoary saying that Edinburgh invitations always implied:
you’ll have had your tea
.
    Catherine led Isabel up the staircase that ascended in a curve from the hall to the floor above. Two open doors gave off the landing, through one of which there was a glimpse of a formal drawing room: an ornate gilt-framed mirror above an Adam fireplace; a sofa and sofa table: altogether an air of quiet comfort. And through the other door was a study; Catherine indicated