The Forgotten Affairs of Youth by Alexander McCall Smith Page B

that they should go in there.
    “More comfortable,” she said, “and there’s a pot of freshly brewed tea, as it happens.”
    Isabel looked about the study, a smaller room than the drawing room and facing south towards the back of Heriot Row. On one wall there were several pictures, all expressing exactly the taste that Isabel would have expected: a nineteenth-century watercolour of the Falls of Clyde; a Thorburn, or Thorburn-ish study, of grouse in flight; several framed plates from Kay’s
Edinburgh Portraits
. There was no photograph of Alastair Rankeillor, but of course there would not be: this was a judge’s study, not the bedroom of a lovesick teenager. And yet, thought Isabel, that’s what we all are at heart: love-struck teenagers. And every so often the love-struck teenager within emerged to remind us that love is quite as capable of turning our world upside down as it ever was.
    The opposite wall was completely taken up by shelves, right up to the ceiling, and they were packed with books, including a long run of green-bound volumes of the
Scots Law Times
. Isabel remembered those so well from her father’s library; as a bored teenager she had occasionally paged through them, trying to find interesting nuggets hidden among the arid wastes of legislative news, legal wrangles and obfuscations. There was nothing for a girl there, although she had liked the divorce cases, with their mildly titillating details and, on occasion, their raw explicitness.
    She was also amused by the reports from the Court of the Lord Lyon, with their discussions of obscure points of genealogy and heraldry.
    “Does anybody actually
worry
about that sort of thing?” she had asked her father, and he had smiled before replying enigmatically, “You will.”
    Catherine offered Isabel a chair before seating herself on the other side of a small library table. She poured her a cup of tea from a small china pot on the table, then passed it to her.
    “You wanted to speak to me about Clara Scott?” she said.
    Isabel noticed that the judge wasted no time in getting to the point. The visit, she thought, was not going to develop into a social one; there had been no discussion of the weather, no small talk about the irritations of the interminable work on the city’s new tramlines.
    “Yes,” said Isabel. “I’ve been contacted by an Australian relative of Clara’s who wants to find out about her.”
    Isabel had decided that she could not reveal the exact nature of the enquiry. She and Jane had not discussed the extent to which Jane wanted her quest to remain private—perhaps they should have done—and she felt that it was best not to disclose everything. To say that she was making an enquiry on behalf of an Australian relative was perfectly true, even if it did not reveal exactly what lay behind it.
    The judge did not press for more information. “I told you that Clara and I were in Masson Hall together, didn’t I?”
    “Yes, you said that over the phone. That’s how I knew to come to you. I knew you were contemporaries.”
    Catherine nodded. “We both spent our first year at university there,” she said. “We were not exactly neighbours in our corridor—I was at one end, and she was at the other. But we were pretty close, at least for that year. It was an exciting time, obviously. Everything was so fresh, so challenging. To be eighteen again!”
    “And to know, at eighteen, what one knows now.”
    The judge smiled. “Of course. It seems to me that’s a very common fantasy. Most of us think about that, I believe. But to get back to Clara: we were both at Masson Hall for our first year and then, at the beginning of our second year, I went off to share a flat with a couple of other law students. It was in Newington, not far from the Dick Vet. Clara chose to share with a couple of others—another girl who was studying History, and an American student called Emma. The American girl came from San Francisco, or one of those places