The Forgotten Affairs of Youth by Alexander McCall Smith Page A

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