At the Reunion Buffet

  “Well, everybody enjoyed themselves?” said the young New Zealander.

  Isabel decided this was a question. “I think so.”

  “No disagreements?”

  She looked at him, and laughed. “Is that what you expect at reunions?”

  “Yes, it is?” He took off his apron and folded it up. “We did one the other day where the host hit somebody? Mind you, that was at a rugby club and you get that sort of thing?”

  “Rugby is very physical,” said Isabel.

  “It is?”

  Once the caterers had gone and Isabel had locked up downstairs, she went up to the bedroom. Jamie was already in bed, but was still awake.

  “Well done,” he said. “Round one over successfully. Nobody floored. And the umpire didn’t stop the match.”

  She got undressed and slipped into bed beside him. “Thanks for being there,” she said.

  “I enjoyed it.”

  “They enjoyed having you.” She snuggled up beside him. “Who did you talk to—I wasn’t watching.”

  “Just about everybody,” he said. “At one stage or another.”

  “Eleanor?”

  “Yes. And her sidekick.”

  “Margaret.”

  “Yes. She went on a bit about the Lyceum Theatre. She’s on the board—or was. I heard all about that—for ages.”

  “Thanks for putting up with it,” said Isabel.

  They lay still, and quiet, for a few moments. She heard his breathing. Then he said, “And Claire.”

  Isabel listened.

  Jamie moved slightly. “She’s…”

  “Yes?”

  “She’s a bit…Well…”

  Isabel caught her breath. “You picked that up?”

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  Isabel gasped. “What did she do? Made a move on you?”

  “Not quite. No, when we were speaking she kept getting closer and closer. I had to take small steps backwards or…or we could have collided.”

  Isabel reached out and took his hand under the sheet. “Oh, darling, that’s what she’s like. She was the man-eater—or boy-eater, I suppose, in those days. I thought she’d changed.”

  “I don’t think she has.”

  Isabel squeezed his hand. “Thanks for being so kind.”

  “I don’t have to come to the lunch tomorrow, do I?”

  Isabel said that he did not. He anyhow was in charge of Charlie.

  “Oh, another thing,” said Jamie. “I spoke to somebody called Barbara. She seemed to be rather isolated.”

  “Yes?”

  “I felt a bit sorry for her.”

  “She wasn’t very popular, I’m afraid. I’ve been surprised to find out what some people think of her. Feelings seem to be very strong.”

  Jamie was interested. “Really? Is that why she was by herself?”

  “I think so. One or two people seem to feel that she was a real bully. I don’t remember that myself—well, I remember a few incidents—but I don’t recall anything major.”

  “Bullying can be pretty invisible,” said Jamie. “Except to the victims.”

  “Yes, I suppose so.”

  Jamie shifted his position. He had been lying on his back; now he faced her. “She said something rather odd. She talked about the school as if it had been where it is now. The school hadn’t yet moved when you were there, had it?”

  “No, we were in the old buildings. The university took them over a few years after we left.”

  “That’s what I thought,” said Jamie. “But she spoke as if you had been at the new site.”

  Isabel said nothing. This was strange, and stranger still when considered along with Barbara’s remark about Philby. She wondered about amnesia—people became confused about the past because they simply had a bad memory or suffered from some neurological complaint: that was conceivable, but unlikely, given Barbara’s age. But there was another possibility, and it was as unsettling as it was unlikely: Barbara was not who she claimed to be. Isabel entertained that for a few moments before rejecting: it was patently ridiculous; such things simply did not happen. Real life, after all, was relentlessly prosaic: people always were who they appeared to be, except…She paused for thought. There were plenty of exceptions to that, she decided, starting with the late Kim Philby himself.

  Chapter Five

  It preyed on her mind, and was there, as a question, when she opened her eyes the next morning. She had slept in and had been unaware of Jamie getting out of bed to attend to Charlie, who woke up at precisely the same time each morning and announced the fact by singing at the top of his voice.

  Yes, thought Isabel: the whole thing is clear. There were two Grant girls at school—Barbara and a sister who was younger than Barbara by a couple of years. Isabel remembered little about that younger sister, but last night, as she drifted off to sleep, she recalled one thing, and it was sufficient to jolt her wide awake: Barbara’s sister looked very like her—so like her, in fact, that the principal had once referred to the “Grant twins.” Of course, of course…Barbara had sent her sister in her place. Why she should do this was not clear, unless she had been unable to face meeting her victims—which was understandable—and had sent her sister to give the apology that she could not give.

  Isabel had drifted off to sleep with that possibility in her mind, but now, in the light of morning, it seemed absurdly fanciful. She wondered what Jamie would think, and she asked him when she went into the kitchen for breakfast. Charlie was halfway through his bowl of porridge, and Isabel, after kissing the boy on the top of his head, said to Jamie, “Do you think that Barbara Grant might be an imposter?”

  Jamie laughed. “Imposter? What have you been reading, Isabel? Girls’ school stories? The brave heroine unmasks…an imposter! Gasp. You’re a cunning imposter, she hissed, and I shall now unmask you!”

  Isabel blushed. “You may mock, Jamie, but —”

  He did not let her finish. “Hear that, Charlie? Mummy is going to unmask an imposter!”

  Charlie shouted out in delight. “Importer! Importer!”

  Isabel tickled Charlie under the chin. “Imposter.”

  “Not,” said Charlie.

  “Don’t spill your porridge,” warned Jamie.

  “I know it sounds ridiculous…”

  “Highly,” said Jamie.

  “…but I’m going to speak to her.”

  Jamie smiled. “Unmask her?”

  “If necessary,” said Isabel.

  She left the kitchen to go into her study, and it was at the study door that the key to the puzzle fell into place. It stopped her in her tracks, and she closed her eyes in sheer pleasure as the full realization dawned on her. It was all very neat. The reason for Barbara Grant’s reluctance to attend might be much simpler than she had imagined: it was because she was in Australia, and it was for this rather compelling geographical reason that she could not do it—even if she could have managed the face-to-face encounter involved. Of course that was it; it was all very obvious once one came to think of it.

  Eleanor, methodical to a fault, had provided each of the guests at the opening party with an updated list of the names of those attending, along with their address and mobile phone numbers. Barbara Grant’s number was there, and Isabel dialed it once she left the kitchen. Could they meet before the lunch that day? Half an hour early—in the museum? Barbara sounded tense, but accepted the suggestion after only a moment’s hesitation; she did not inquire why Isabel wanted to see her. There was something odd about her voice, Isabel thought—a passivity, even a note of defeat, or perhaps she was just tired.

  Isabel rang off. She looked out of the window, past the shrubs to the yew hedge that screened the house from the road. She had enjoyed last night’s party more than she had imagined she would, but now with several more reunion events before her she felt unsettled, and the thought of the looming meeting with Barbara Grant gave her a feeling of foreboding. The reunion, she decided, was an unnecessary and stressful compl
ication to life. We did not need to reheat cold dishes from the past; we did not need to remind ourselves of people with whom we had lost contact and with whom we probably had very little in common. What was the point? She was not sure that she could see one; reunions, she felt, were not much more than a scratching at the vague itch of memory. And like scratching, they rarely helped—indeed, scratching often made matters worse, as any dermatologist would tell you.

  She left for the Royal Scottish Museum earlier than she needed to, so when she arrived in Chambers Street she found she had time in hand. There was an exhibition of Jacobite material on show, some of it from the museum’s own collection, some items from museums elsewhere. She looked at her watch and decided that twenty minutes looking at that strange theme in Scottish history, that yearning for something lost that deserved to be lost but was still missed, would be twenty minutes better spent than visiting the museum shop. Such a visit would consist of inspecting tea towels, self-assembly models of dinosaurs, and tins of shortbread with Bonnie Prince Charlie’s portrait on them. What a service, she thought, had the Stuart dynasty and their pampered, strutting Charlie done for the Scottish shortbread industry. Millions of tins of shortbread, she imagined, covered in tartan and with pictures of the prince must have gone out to the four corners of the world, to exiled Scots, who looked upon these tins, and the shortbread they contained, as somehow expressing the idea of a whole culture.

  She sighed, and when, in the exhibition, she inspected a display of Jacobite glass, she sighed again; not because she was weary of the whole story, but because she realized that that story continued to induce in her exactly those sentiments that had caused her to sigh in the first place. She was no different from anybody else; the shortbread tins, the stories and songs, the lashings of tartan exerted their curious pull on her just as they did on those who swallowed the whole package enthusiastically, ahistorically and uncritically. The truth of the matter was that she loved Jacobite glass; that she delighted in the idea that people could have signaled to one another where their heart lay just by using a glass on which a white rose had been engraved. And she liked the music too: the wistful tunes of a lost cause; the laments for a Scotland that was never to be because geography dictated otherwise and Scotland was where it was.

  “We had one at home.”

  Isabel spun around. Barbara Grant had come into the exhibition unnoticed, and now stood behind her.

  “One quite like that,” Barbara continued. “It had the white rose and a bunch of thistles. I thought it very beautiful and then my sister broke it one day and…”

  She did not finish, but lowered her eyes, as if the memory of the broken Jacobite glass was still painful—which it probably was, thought Isabel: a family treasure shattered, reduced in a moment of carelessness to useless fragments after surviving for over two hundred years. And then Isabel remembered something: Barbara had been clumsy and had once broken a whole tray of beakers in the chemistry lab. Was the younger sister clumsy too, or was Barbara the one who, true to form, had broken the Jacobite glass, just as she had broken all those beakers?

  Isabel pointed to another display case. “Did you see the miniatures?” she asked.

  They moved over to the case together and Barbara leant forwards to peer at the row of tiny oval paintings it contained.

  “The Stuarts sent them to supporters,” said Isabel. “But they also sent them to various European royal families, hoping that one of them would marry their sons. Vain hope. Being a pretender apparently was no great recommendation.”

  Barbara looked up sharply, and Isabel suddenly realized what she had inadvertently said. Being a pretender…

  Their eyes met, and for a moment Isabel felt that there was perfect understanding. I know, she thought. And you know that I know.

  Isabel took a deep breath. “Barbara, I have to ask you something. I know that it’s none of my business but I feel I have to say something.” She had to say something, she had decided, because she had been drawn into this whole affair. She had hosted part of the reunion and it was in her house that the initial contact between Barbara and the others had been made. That brought Isabel in—beyond any doubt at all. There was bad feeling—great wells of it—and if she could help to deal with that, then she felt she should do just that.

  Barbara held her gaze. She nodded, but said nothing.

  “I know this sounds ridiculous, but I feel that you may not be who you say you are.”

  Isabel had not expected Barbara’s reaction, which was one of complete astonishment. The other woman opened her mouth to speak, but no words came. Then she shook her head in bewilderment.

  “I’m sorry,” said Barbara. “I just don’t understand what you mean.”

  Isabel felt her heart beating wildly within her. Absurdly, she thought: Is this what it’s like to unmask an imposter?

  Barbara’s frown deepened. ‘What do you mean, Isabel? What on earth do you mean?”

  Isabel swallowed. Barbara’s reaction was too spontaneous, too genuine to be anything but the reaction of an innocent person. Jamie was right; she was fantasizing; the whole idea had been absurd.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m all over the place. I’m sorry.”

  And then Barbara said, “I’ve been very unhappy about all this, you know.”

  Isabel looked up. “About the reunion?”

  “Yes. And you probably know why, don’t you?”

  Isabel nodded. The tension she had felt was now almost entirely dissipated. What she now felt was relief, as if a moment of looming danger had passed safely.

  “There seems to be bad feeling between you and some of the others,” said Isabel. “They feel…” She struggled to find the words. “They think you bullied them.”

  Barbara’s lips pursed. For a few moments she was silent, but then she said, “They think I bullied them? Eleanor thinks that?”

  “Yes,” said Isabel.

  Barbara shook her head. “I did nothing to Eleanor. Or Claire Sutherland, for that matter. I hardly knew them.” She looked at Isabel intently. Her reaction had been one of mild outrage; now it became something different. “But I do have something to be ashamed of,” she said. “I admit it.”

  Isabel waited.

  “I was very unkind to one particular person,” Barbara went on. “I suppose you could say I bullied her. It was very cruel of me.” She hesitated before continuing. “I hate to think of it now. I am very, very ashamed of myself.”

  Isabel felt a welling of sympathy within her. Of course you do, she said to herself. Of course you do. She wanted to say something that would comfort Barbara, and so she said, “All this was a long time ago. Bygones should be bygones. We all grow up.”

  Barbara shook her head. “We don’t forget, though.”

  “You were brave to come,” said Isabel. “I admire that.”

  Barbara had been carrying a piece of paper, and she folded and unfolded this now. “I nearly didn’t,” she said. “But I wanted to come to apologize to that person in particular. I was hoping she would be here.”

  Before Isabel had time to reflect on this, Barbara continued, “Jenny Maxwell. Do you remember her?”

  Isabel froze. She had assumed that Barbara would have known of Jenny’s death, just as everybody else in the class did. But of course she might not have known, as she had gone off to Australia and had probably been out of touch. If you were living an entirely fresh life in Melbourne, then there was no reason why the news of a death in Scotland, which even in Edinburgh had been reported in a small death notice in The Scotsman should reach you so far away.

  “Do you remember her?” pressed Barbara. “She used to wear glasses and her hair…” She stopped. “Isabel?”

  Isabel had been unable to conceal her consternation. Now Barbara’s eyes narrowed. “She’s dead, isn’t she?”

  Isabel winced. “Yes. Jenny’s dead.”

  Barbara’s voice was barely audible. “Killed herself?”

  “Somebody told you?”
r />   Barbara continued to speak in a half-whisper. Her voice was unsteady. “No. I just felt it, the moment you said she was dead.” She swallowed hard. “I didn’t ask anybody last night. I was going to, but I couldn’t bring myself to ask after her. Nobody said anything.”

  Isabel made an effort to recover. “It wasn’t you,” she said. “It wasn’t anything to do with you. It was over a man—some man who let her down. The familiar story.”

  Barbara put her hands to her face. She covered her eyes. She began to shake.

  “It wasn’t,” said Isabel.

  Barbara’s frame was shaken by sobs. Isabel took her in her arms; she pressed her to her. “It wasn’t your fault—it really wasn’t. You mustn’t think that.”

  A man and a woman came into the exhibition room. The man consulted a guidebook—notes on the exhibits—but the woman saw them. She stood still for a moment before taking a step forwards. “Is everything all right?” She spoke with an American accent.

  Isabel thanked her. “My friend’s a bit upset. Thank you anyway.”

  “Oh dear,” said the woman as she moved away. Isabel smiled at her—a smile of appreciation that a stranger should take the trouble to offer comfort.

  Isabel now led Barbara out of the exhibition room and into the hall outside. She found a bench in the atrium and sat down with Barbara; above them was the high glass dome through which the sky could be made out; a cloud—a wisp of white—sailed slowly over.

  Isabel said: “I want you to listen very carefully, Barbara. I want you to listen to this. I know how you feel about what has happened. Yes, it appears that you were a bully at school and, yes, you made life a misery for at least one person—you’ve admitted that yourself. People say that you made Jenny Maxwell very unhappy. You did that because, I should imagine, you were suffering from the insecurity or self-hatred that most bullies have. That’s why they do what they do. They share their unhappiness with others. I assume that there was something that made you unhappy. Am I right?”