The Forgotten Affairs of Youth by Alexander McCall Smith Page B

philosophers—Hume and Adam Smith—and so she thought this would be the place. But she said that it was only when she arrived that she realised that her choice might have been subconsciously motivated by what she knew of her past. She had been conceived in Scotland—this was where she started. That’s how she put it to me.”
    “Understandable enough,” said Jamie. “Salmon go back to the exact bit of water where they were spawned. Maybe people want to do that too. It’s getting in touch with one’s inner fish.”
    She nudged him playfully. “Do you want me to go on?”
    “Yes, of course. It’s just the idea of an inner fish … We all emerged from the primeval slime, didn’t we? Aeons ago?”
    “So we’re told. Frankly, I’m not sure if
all
of us did, but there we are.”
    “It’s a sobering thought,” said Jamie. “It cuts us down to size.”
    Isabel agreed. It was difficult to see how human pretension, human pride, could survive the knowledge of our fishy past. Professor Lettuce, that great, pompous son of a fish … She laughed.
    “What?”
    “I was thinking of Professor Lettuce as the descendant of a fish. It was very
helpful
.” She paused. “I’m sorry. I’m being infantile. It’s because the lights are off. If we had a light on, I’d be grown up.”
    Jamie reached across and touched her cheek. “No, I like it when you talk nonsense. Not that it’s real nonsense, it’s more … fantasy. Or speculation, maybe. You think these things—these curious things come into your mind—and then you just say them. I love it. Listening to you is like reading an amazing book.”
    There was no reply she could make to that, and so she continued with Jane’s story.
    Jane knew that she was entitled to trace her biological parents, but had never really felt the need. Not until recently, she had said. Perhaps it had something to do with becoming forty. That was a bit of a watershed, she felt, and perhaps what made her go to an organisation once she arrived here in Edinburgh. It was a charity that put adopted children in touch with their biological parents—and vice versa.
    “If both sides want it?” Jamie asked.
    “Yes. Children have the right to find out the identity of their natural parents, but the parents can refuse to see them, of course, if they don’t want to make contact.”
    “Some parents want to, though, don’t they?”
    “Oh yes. Many feel a strong sense of loss, and guilt too. And Jane said something else very interesting. She said that up until after the time she was adopted, many adoptions weren’t really freely undertaken. Young women were coerced. They were told that the only option open to them, if they went ahead with the pregnancy, was to have the baby adopted. Apparently this happened a lot. Now we know about it and there are people trying to get the fact acknowledged—a bit late, I suppose.
    “Jane said that she started to think about this once she had plucked up the courage to find out about herself, after her arrival in Edinburgh. Imagine coming to a strange city all by yourself and having to deal with this. Anyway, she went to the charity and they helped her. Then, to her astonishment, a few days after they had advised her on how to get access to her birth certificate and to see the court adoption record, she had a telephone call from a woman who worked for the charity. She said that they had something for her, but that they felt it was best that she should come in and get it personally, rather than talking about it on the phone.
    “She went, with a lot of trepidation. She had not been nervous before, but now she was. She wondered whether they had found out the whereabouts of her mother—would she perhaps even be there, waiting for her? But it wasn’t that. It was a letter.
    “One of the things that this charity does, apparently, is hold letters from people who have given children up for adoption. They hold them in case the child should ever come and ask for