At the Reunion Buffet

  “I admire people who write practical books,” said Isabel. “And, now I think of it, I imagine that you like books by people who run delis. Look at those lovely books by Mary Contini. You like those, don’t you?”

  Mary Contini and her husband owned an Edinburgh delicatessen that had become something of an institution. They supplied cheese to the Queen, and held concerts of Neapolitan music in their back room.

  “You like her books, don’t you?’ Isabel pressed.

  But Cat did not answer the question. She usually changed the subject if Isabel tried to pin her down and she did that now. “About this reunion of yours,” she remarked. “Alice Macfarlane is not looking forwards to it.”

  “No?”

  “No. She’s not against the idea of a reunion—it’s not that. The idea’s all right.”

  Isabel waited. It seemed to her that Cat was being deliberately abstruse.

  “No, it’s not that,” Cat continued. “It’s one person in particular she’s got a bizz against.”

  Bizz was a Scots word. Like many Scots expressions it had a special pithiness. A bizz was a feeling of focused animosity; a grudge could be described as a bizz, but bizz was a far more flexible term. A bizz could be a serious resentment or something altogether more minor—a feeling of impatience that might pass in a moment of forgiveness or forgetfulness.

  “Oh well,” said Isabel, “the dislikes of childhood can linger. Who was that girl you weren’t too fond of when you were at school? Helena something. Remember?”

  Cat winced. “She was awful. Nobody liked her—it wasn’t just me, I can tell you.” She paused. “No, this woman Alice Macfarlane mentioned was called Barbara Grant.”

  Isabel frowned. Barbara Grant? And then she remembered; yes, Barbara had not been popular. There had been issues with some members of the class, but Isabel could not remember exactly what they were. She herself had had few dealings with Barbara, but then that was what school was like: you could spend years with the same people and not get to know them very well.

  “Alice said she had no time for Barbara,” Cat continued, “and had only accepted after they’d told her that Barbara Grant wasn’t going to be there. But apparently she changed her mind and she’s coming after all.”

  Isabel was silent. Then she said, “She’s entitled to turn up. She was in that year.”

  “Well, yes,” conceded Cat. “But you’d think that somebody like her would stay away.”

  Isabel wanted to say, But you’ve never met her. How can you say that? She restrained herself. “I’m not sure what Alice has against Barbara,” she said. “She may not have liked her for some reason, but that’s no justification for us to—”

  Cat cut her short. “She was a bully. Alice told me.”

  Isabel shrugged. “We don’t know for sure,” she said. “It may just have been that she and Alice didn’t hit it off. Or Alice may have thought that Barbara was bullying her when she wasn’t really.”

  Cat looked scornful. “I don’t think so,” she said.

  Isabel persisted. “She may have changed. Perhaps we can give her the benefit of the doubt.”

  It was as if Cat had not heard her. “She said that she still had the occasional nightmare about Barbara. Even now.”

  It was over twenty years ago. But Isabel knew that nightmares could have deeper roots even than that. She still very occasionally dreamed of something that had happened to her when she eight or nine—the running over of her cat, with the broken furry body being brought in by the driver, a neighbor, apologetically. In the scale of childhood traumas it was far from the worst that could happen; children lost their parents before their very eyes, saw their homes being burned down, were the victims of almost inconceivable cruelty. The loss of a cat was nothing to this, but nightmares were no respecters of proportion.

  “Well, even if she was a bully,” said Isabel, “surely the odds are that she grew out of it. And she may be sorry about it all—that’s a distinct possibility, you know.”

  “Alice Macfarlane said that she never apologized. She said that she could have done something to make up for it, but didn’t.”

  “Oh well,” said Isabel. “Perhaps she’s going to do so now.”

  Cat shook her head. “I doubt it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because hardly anybody apologizes. It’s only when they’re caught and forced to. Even then, they don’t mean it.”

  Isabel bit her tongue. Cat could be dogmatic—and ignorant too. “You know there’s such a thing as an apology movement, don’t you?” she said mildly. “It’s quite popular these days. There are plenty of people prepared to say they’re sorry.”

  “I bet she won’t,” said Cat. “But let me know if I’m wrong. Let me know if she stands up and says that she regrets everything she did.”

  Isabel suspected that Cat was right; if Barbara Grant had indeed been a bully—it was unlikely that she was coming to apologize. It was far more likely that she had simply put her bullying out of her mind. She might even be surprised that anybody remembered her as a bully. People reinvented themselves, writing out of their personal histories those episodes of which they felt ashamed. And why should they not? thought Isabel. What had Eliot said? “Human kind cannot bear too much reality.” That was true—especially so when it came to the reality of ourselves.

  She did not express these thoughts to Cat, but that evening she added Barbara Grant’s name to the list and underlined it—twice. She was not sure why she did it, but the act of writing Barbara’s name—a simple listing of a name—seemed to move something within her, and she felt suddenly ashamed of herself. Unless we do something about the past, she thought, then it will weigh us down to such an extent that we simply cannot move. Is that what I want?

  She went out into the garden. The evening sun dappled through the leaves of the oak tree that now towered higher than the house itself. A wind breathed through the branches, gently, almost too gently to move the foliage. Isabel thought If, as they say, you were a bully, I forgive you, Barbara Grant. By this deliberate act, here in this garden, I forgive you. She turned around and as she did so the thought came to her: Barbara Grant might not want forgiveness, may not think that it was required. And if some people did not want to be forgiven, should we forgive them none the less?

  Chapter Three

  The organization of the reunion had been undertaken by a committee of two, a cabal, as they called themselves. “The word committee is far too grand for us,” said Eleanor Williams, whose idea the reunion had been. She spoke with a deliberate archness. “We’re a cabal—a junta, perhaps—acting in the interests of all, of course, but unelected—as all the best cabals are.”

  She met Isabel in La Barantine, a small French bakery and coffee shop in Bruntsfield, only ten minutes’ walk from Isabel’s house. Isabel remembered Eleanor as a quiet, studious girl, always praised by teachers, to the slight irritation of her classmates, for her neat and methodical work. Isabel thought that if anybody could arrange a well-planned reunion it would be Eleanor—and here she was, sitting opposite her at the table, three neatly labeled files laid out before her: Catering, Social Activities, Financial. Isabel repressed a smile, she recalled such files from school—Eleanor had one for each of her subjects and one labeled Sundry that she had never explained and that had been the subject of some discussion among the other members of the class. Boys, said one of the girls. Eleanor files information on boys. This had been greeted with mirth; Eleanor was never boy mad, unlike Claire Sutherland. But Isabel put that thought out of her mind; she would not condemn Claire Sutherland forever on the basis of an…an enthusiastic youth.

  Eleanor had wanted to discuss catering for the Friday evening party—the one that Isabel had agreed to host. “We don’t want you to be put out in the slightest,” she said. “I know you offered to do the food but…”

  “My husband is a very keen cook,” said Isabel. “It would be no trouble.”

  Eleanor looked at her with what seemed to be
disbelief. “I’m sure he is.”

  “He really is,” said Isabel. “You’d be surprised.”

  “Oh, I know that some husbands can cook,” said Eleanor. “My own husband, alas, is of zero use in the kitchen. Zero.” Disbelief changed to wistful envy. “But the point is this: we really don’t want you to be put to any trouble. We want you to enjoy the occasion just as much as the rest of us. If you’re worrying about what’s going on in the kitchen, then you won’t be able to relax, will you?”

  She answered her own question. “You will not. So we’ve budgeted for caterers. There’s a young couple I know who have started up a catering business. They do weddings and parties and so on, and their charges are very reasonable. I’ve brought some suggested menus to show you. We need to choose. Then I’ll pay a deposit and they’ll come round and talk through the details with you. They’ll need to know what you have in the kitchen, and so on.”

  Isabel repeated her offer, but Eleanor’s mind, it seemed, was made up and the only outstanding question was that of the menu. She showed Isabel the caterers’ list of buffet dishes.

  “Any of these will do,” said Isabel. “Shrimp curry?”

  Eleanor shook her head. “Will stain,” she said. “If it’s a buffet people will be balancing plates on their knees and they’ll be bound to spill. I’ve ruined hundreds of dresses that way—hundreds!”

  Isabel raised an eyebrow. But then Eleanor repeated, “Hundreds—completely ruined. Bleach doesn’t work on turmeric, you know.” She looked at Isabel as if challenging her to refute this piece of wisdom, but Isabel did not. Instead, spotting another item on the list, she said, “Seafood quiche. Nobody can object to quiche.”

  Eleanor was not so sure. “Not everybody likes seafood. People may have had a bad experience with oysters or whatever and it puts them off seafood for life.”

  “You choose then,” said Isabel. “I’m sure that I’ll like what you choose.”

  They settled on three main options: vegetarian quiche, a venison stew, and a Lebanese chicken dish that involved raisins and couscous. Dessert would be apple meringue pie and mango sorbet. Isabel agreed to them all without demur—“You’re very easy to please,” remarked Eleanor. “You weren’t like that at school, were you?”

  Isabel was unsure what she meant. Eleanor’s remark bordered on the rude. “I don’t think I was all that fussy,” she said mildly.

  “Oh you were, darling. You were terribly fussy. I remember.”

  “Well, if you say so,” said Isabel.

  They moved on to wine: Eleanor had strong views on the mark-up the caterers expected; Cava would be served first as an aperitif and then they would move on to an Australian sauvignon blanc that she said would not break the bank. “My husband quaffs that stuff by the gallon,” she said. “He must get through hundreds of gallons a year.”

  Obviously not fussy, thought Isabel. And then she thought: I have nothing against Eleanor, but can I really say that I like her? She could not, and she felt in a moment of clarity, touched with shame: we pretend to people that we like them, we spend time with them and put a brave face on it—while they may be feeling exactly the same way about us. But surely all this is a waste of everybody’s time—this pretense of positive feeling where none exists.

  Eleanor shuffled her papers back into their file. Her expression became grave; she lowered her gaze. Isabel studied her. Eleanor was weighing up whether to say something, she thought, and she had a good idea what that might be.

  “Barbara Grant,” Isabel said. “I hear she’s coming after all.”

  Eleanor looked up sharply. “You’ve heard that?”

  Isabel explained how Alice MacFarlane had mentioned it to Cat. Eleanor listened and then shook her head. “This city is such a village,” she said. “Nothing—nothing at all—is ever kept confidential.”

  “Well, surely it hardly matters who knows who’s coming. It’s not exactly a state secret.”

  A shadow passed over Eleanor’s face. “But it does matter, Isabel,” she snapped. “If everybody knows that Barbara is coming, then it might put people off. There are plenty who would say, If that woman’s going to be there, then count me out.”

  “Surely not.”

  Eleanor’s voice rose sharply. “Surely, yes. People can’t stand her, you know. Remember that time we went to Abbotsford on the school bus and nobody would sit next to her? And the teachers had to come and force people to take those seats.”

  Isabel squirmed. Barbara may have been a bully, but there was more than one form of cruelty. “That was a long time ago,” she said. “She may well be an entirely different person today.”

  “I doubt it,” said Eleanor. “What do they say about a leopard changing its spots?” She paused. “You were always far too charitable. I suppose it’s a virtue, but I’m afraid most of us are less prepared to forget what Barbara Grant was like.”

  Isabel wondered what had happened to Barbara in the intervening years. “Didn’t she go abroad? I seem to remember hearing that she did.”

  “I believe she went to Australia,” said Eleanor. “I heard something about her marrying an Australian and going off to live in Melbourne. I thought she was still there, but obviously not.”

  “Or she may be coming back just for this,” suggested Isabel.

  “Highly unlikely,” said Eleanor. “Why come all that way just to see people who can’t stand the sight of you?”

  “Well, she’s coming,” said Isabel. “So we may as well try to make the best of it.”

  Eleanor appeared to consider this. She sighed. “I shall avoid her.”

  “You can’t.”

  “Oh, I won’t cut her dead, but I shan’t make an effort. I’m not going to be all pally with somebody whom I regard as being responsible for Jenny Maxwell’s death.”

  Isabel’s eyes widened. “What?”

  “For Jenny Maxwell’s death,” Eleanor repeated.

  Isabel struggled to remind herself of the facts. She had not thought of Jenny Maxwell for years. “But Jenny committed suicide, didn’t she? Five or six years after we left school, wasn’t it?”

  “Four and a half years,” said Eleanor.

  “Well wasn’t that over some man?” asked Isabel. “The story I heard was that she had a boyfriend who was carrying on with somebody else and then Jenny found them in bed together—it was in the Roxburghe Hotel, I believe. That was what happened, wasn’t it?”

  “Roughly,” said Eleanor. “It wasn’t the Roxburghe, by the way. It was one of the bigger hotels.”

  Isabel looked at her hands. She had no idea why she had brought the Roxburghe Hotel into the conversation; the detail was so irrelevant. What could it possibly matter where Jenny Maxwell had found her lover in flagrante delicto? But even as she thought this, the scene came vividly to her mind. Jenny Maxwell, who always looked untidy, rushing down a hotel corridor, hair all over the place, clothes unkempt, arriving breathless and outraged at the guilty door. Did she knock? Or did she push it open, perhaps shoulder it, or even use a credit card to open the lock, as people did on the screen—and then find the guilty couple, sheets pulled up to their chins. Would that all have happened in a slightly different way according to the hotel in which the dalliance occurred? Perhaps infidelity had a different complexion in the larger, less respectable hotels, where all sorts of things could be expected to happen, and presumably did.

  She was jolted out of her reverie by Eleanor. “Are you still with me?”

  “Of course. Sorry. I was thinking of Jenny.”

  “He was an electrician,” said Eleanor. “He came to her flat to fix something.”

  “Who?”

  “Her lover—the man who was carrying on with the other woman.”

  Isabel wanted the conversation to end, but felt herself being drawn in. “Dangerous.”

  Eleanor adjusted her files on the desk—fussily, thought Isabel. “Dangerous being an electrician? They very rarely get shocks. They’re very careful about turning things off.”


  “It wasn’t that,” said Isabel. “It was more a question of the danger of getting involved with somebody who comes to the house to fix something. It’s like falling in love with the waiter. It’s not going to work.”

  Eleanor appeared to consider this. “When I was seventeen I fell in love with a waiter. We went to Crieff Hydro for a week—the whole family—and there was a student working there during the summer. I suppose he was about eighteen or nineteen—a year older than me. He was studying physics at Edinburgh University. He was drop-dead gorgeous.” She gave Isabel a coy glance. “It was my first…my first experience, so to speak.”

  Isabel looked away. She did not want to hear the details. She had always taken the view that although one might talk about the sexual activities of others, one did not talk about one’s own. It was a question of privacy and trust: the other person was entitled not to have a private moment disclosed to all and sundry. The juvenile adage Never kiss and tell had a sound moral instinct behind it.

  “Well,” she said. “These things happen.”

  But Eleanor was not ready to abandon the subject. “He was called Clive,” she said. “He played rugby for St. Andrews University.”

  Clive, thought Isabel. It was not her favorite name; she had known a Clive who had been a drinking companion of John Liamor. He enjoyed making snide remarks about people. She had not liked him, and now all Clives—unfairly, she admitted—had a presumption to overcome.

  She said nothing, but looked over Eleanor’s shoulder to see if she could attract the attention of one of the staff. She would pay for the coffee, which would prevent any further disclosures about Clive and bring their meeting to an end.

  But Eleanor had not finished. “He was a real looker,” she said.

  Isabel nodded politely. “I suppose that being a rugby player he was…”

  “Terrifically strong,” said Eleanor. “Yes, he was. And there’s something interesting about strong men, you know—the really strong ones. They’re gentle. Especially in bed.”

  Isabel tried desperately to catch the eye of the young man behind the counter. He looks strong, she thought, but I only want to pay for the coffee—that’s all.