Barbara was not looking at her, but was staring fixedly at the floor.
“Am I?” repeated Isabel.
Barbara nodded, almost imperceptibly. “I…I…” She stopped.
“You don’t have to tell me,” said Isabel.
She could just make out the reply. “You know we had another sister? You know that there were three of us?”
Isabel shook her head. “I thought there were just two.”
“Well, there was an older sister—she was five years older than I was. You wouldn’t have known her because she was at the top end of the school when we started. She was called Andrea.”
Isabel waited for her to continue.
“She’s dead now.”
Isabel lowered her eyes. “I’m sorry.”
“I hated her.”
Isabel looked into Barbara’s eyes and saw the pain.
“She bullied both of us,” said Barbara. “She was mean to us in every way you could imagine. My parents never saw it because she was so cunning, and it was concealed. We feared her, you know—we felt real fear. I wet the bed until I was twelve because of her—just because of her. My sister too.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“So when I went to school I felt that the only way I could protect myself from being hurt was to hurt others. I really thought that.”
Isabel recognized this. It lay at the heart of the psychology of bullying. “You say she’s dead?”
“Yes, she drowned in Spain. She was on holiday with some people there and she got into difficulties when she was swimming off a beach. I had to go out there to identify the body. I saw her laying in this ghastly morgue place and I just wept and wept and wept. I never thought it possible to cry for somebody who seemed to hate you so much. How was that possible? Or was I weeping for myself—for everything that had happened to me?”
“Can you forgive her? Can you do that?”
There was no response.
“Because if you can,” said Isabel, “even if you can start to forgive, then it will become easier.”
“And?”
“And then you will be able to forgive yourself—and ask others to forgive you.” Isabel paused. “I’m sorry, this is sounding a bit like a lecture, but it isn’t. It’s common sense—it’s how we get through everyday life. There’s nothing special about it. We all have to face this sort of thing—every one of us.”
Barbara still stared at the floor, but Isabel had a feeling that she had been listening. Now, she thought, is the time to take control.
“All right,” she said. “I know how you can apologize to Jenny for your unkindness to her. You can’t deliver the apology to her, but you can to Eleanor, who was her friend.”
“She hates me,” said Barbara. “I can tell.”
“Maybe she does,” said Isabel. “I won’t lie to you about that. But you might be surprised at how quickly hate can evaporate—given a chance. Shall we try?”
Isabel saw that Barbara was crying. She moved over and put her arm about her.
“I’m sorry,” said Barbara. “This is not just about the past. You see, my husband is leaving me. He’s been having an affair for over a year now, and it’s come to a head. I fought for him, but he’s chosen her rather than me. I’m sorry, I’m just so upset about that.”
“Oh, Barbara…”
“I’ll be all right. What you said to me is true. I’ll be all right. Just give me a few minutes. But one thing…”
“Yes?”
“Don’t tell anybody else about this—about my husband. I don’t want people’s pity—I really don’t.”
—
Jamie asked that afternoon, when Isabel returned from the lunch at the museum, “So what happened at the restaurant? Anything?”
“Something rather important,” said Isabel.
“Ah,” said Jamie. “Tell all.”
So Isabel told him.
“I spoke to Barbara Grant.”
Jamie grinned. “So she is who she claims to be? Not an imposter?” He made the word sound ridiculous.
“No.” She looked at him sternly. “Do you want me to carry on? Because if you do, you must recognize that this is serious.”
He made a show of sitting up straight, and chastened.
“Barbara Grant had bullied a girl called Jenny Maxwell. Jenny died—it was suicide, but that happened some years later. It was more to do with a man behaving badly than with Barbara’s persecution of her. Anyway, she came to the reunion to apologize to Jenny.”
Jamie had stopped smiling. “Too late.”
“I had to tell her that.”
His face fell. “Oh, Isabel, what a…”
“Yes,” she said. “It wasn’t pleasant. But then…”
“I don’t see how this story can end happily.”
“Well it does,” said Isabel. “I spoke to Eleanor and told her that when Barbara came to her she had to accept her apology.”
“And what did she think of that?”
“She laughed at me. To begin with. Then I told her what Barbara had told me about herself. At first she didn’t want me to reveal it, but then she said I could—just before we went to see Eleanor.”
“What happened?”
“I promised Barbara I wouldn’t tell anybody else.”
“But you told Eleanor?”
“I persuaded Barbara to let me tell her.”
“And that changed Eleanor’s attitude?”
“It did.”
Jamie asked what had happened then. Isabel thought for a moment, remembering her surprise and her subsequent relief. “Something rather unusual,” she said.“I think that when she heard about Barbara’s situation—about what had happened to her—she felt a very simple human thing, the prompting of mercy. People don’t talk about mercy very much these days—it has a rather old-fashioned ring to it. But it exists and its power is quite extraordinary.”
“Yes?”
“Yes. Mercy comes before actual forgiveness. You feel sorry for somebody. You understand the other’s suffering and you forego anything that will make that worse. Mercy means saying: you shall not suffer the thing you fear—I will not make you do that.”
“I see.”
“And it’s the most wonderful thing to witness, Jamie—the actual showing of mercy. It makes me want to cry when I see it.”
She studied Jamie’s face. He would always be merciful, she thought; it was not in him to be vengeful.
“And then,” she continued, “something quite extraordinary happened. You want to know what it was? Forgiveness broke out. I think that’s the way I’d put it: it broke out. It was like stepping into the sun—you could actually feel it.”
For a few moments she and Jamie stared at one another.
“So a reunion,” he said at last, “can have a point.”
“This one has,” said Isabel.
He nodded. “I can see that. And I’m glad.”
“So am I.”
He raised an eyebrow. “All sorted?”
“Mostly,” she said. “Barbara must feel relieved, and Eleanor must feel, well, she must feel quite a bit better too. Forgiving somebody—which she has done—improves everything.”
He looked thoughtful. “What music goes with what you’ve told me? You know how I like to link things with music.”
She did know that. “You tell me,” she said.
“Mozart?” he said. “Soave?”
She smiled. He knew.
“I can play a version on the piano and you can think of the words,” he said. “One person can’t sing a trio.”
“No, one person can’t,” said Isabel.
They went into the music room. He fills a room with his lovely presence, thought Isabel—as does love, and forgiveness, and friendship.
“Soave sia il vento,” said Jamie, as he took his seat at the piano. “May the breeze that carries you on your journey be a gentle one.”
After he finished playing, he closed the lid of the piano, stood up and stretched his arms. And
it was at this point that Isabel remembered something that Claire Sutherland had said at lunch. She had not been paying particular attention, but now it came back to her. Claire had made a remark about Barbara’s younger sister. “She became an actress,” she said. “Apparently she’s quite a good actress.”
Isabel had not thought much about it. Now she did. An actress. A good actress becomes the person she is portraying. A good actress can convince others that she feels what she says. A good actress could do everything that Barbara—or the sister—had done. I have been completely misled, thought Isabel. And then she added, Maybe.
But did it make any difference if the Barbara who was at the reunion was the real Barbara or her sister? What had been said in the museum could be entirely true—even if the words came not from the person about whom they were spoken but from an accomplished actress. If there were good reasons why you could not do what you needed to do in person, then did it matter if somebody did it for you—as long as you meant it where it mattered—in that chamber of your heart where the most intimate feelings lodged? If moral scales needed to be righted after all those years, then did it really matter who carried out the act of balancing them? What counted, surely, were the apology and the forgiveness—if forgiveness was forthcoming. And it had been here—that was beyond doubt.
That was what she was thinking when another possibility occurred to her. She stood quite still, as if immobilized by the thought. It was possible that the Barbara at the reunion was really the younger actress sister—that was perfectly possible—but she may not have been sent by the real Barbara at all, having come of her own accord in order to apologize on behalf her sister who was never going to apologize because she did not want to. The thought dismayed her, because it was another possibility altogether introduced at a late stage. But, again, did it really matter? She had thought only a moment ago that it did; now she was not so sure.
“Jamie,” she said, “what should one do if one has considered a possibility, rejected it, and then one finds out that your hypothesis might have been correct all along. But, by the time you discover this, things have moved on.”
He did not hesitate to reply. “You forget about it,” he said.
“You’re probably right.”
He moved towards her and took her in his arms. “Kind woman,” he said. And then added, “Gorgeous.”
Alexander McCall Smith, At the Reunion Buffet
(Series: # )
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