The Forgotten Affairs of Youth by Alexander McCall Smith

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