At the Reunion Buffet

by Alexander McCall Smith

  “I shouldn’t be telling you this,” said Eleanor, collecting herself.

  “No,” said Isabel, trying to smile. “Perhaps you shouldn’t.”

  “It’s just that when you have a memory that’s particularly…how shall I put it…particularly significant, then you want to share it, don’t you?”

  “Yes, but…”

  “It was on a hillside,” Eleanor went on. “He had the night off. It was summer and you know those long summer evenings when it never really gets dark.”

  “That’s because of our latitude, of course,” said Isabel valiantly. “I saw people playing tennis at eleven o’clock the other night. Or not quite eleven, but close enough. It was at that tennis club on Polwarth Terrace—you know the one where they have those all-weather courts. Do you play tennis, Eleanor?”

  The question went unanswered. Some questions, thought Isabel, are unanswered because of complexity or ambiguity—but not this one. One either played tennis or one did not. There was no room for verbal feinting or obfuscation. “We went for a walk together,” Eleanor continued. “I felt as if I was floating. I remember it so vividly. We went up a path from behind the hotel and we disturbed a deer. He was standing at the edge of the path, in a clump of bracken…”

  “Did you know that bracken’s thought to be carcinogenic at certain times of the year,” said Isabel. “It’s the spores. I hope you didn’t lie down in the bracken, Eleanor. One wouldn’t want to have a carcinogenic first experience.”

  She stopped herself. Eleanor was looking at her reproachfully.

  “I’m so sorry,” said Isabel. “It’s just that I have to get back.”

  Eleanor sniffed. “I still blame Barbara for what happened to Jenny Maxwell. I just do. She took an overdose, you know.”

  “I suppose that sometimes happens. People can be very upset. It happens.”

  “Not very often,” said Eleanor. “If you discover your man’s unfaithful, you don’t go off and take an overdose—not normally. No, she did it because her self-confidence, her feelings of self-worth, had been ruined by Barbara Grant. So when she encountered this little difficulty with her man, then she must have fallen to pieces. And that, I’d say, could be laid fairly and squarely at Barbara’s door.”

  Isabel sat back in her chair. “I don’t think so,” she said. “You just can’t link things like that. Causation is much more subtle…” She stopped herself; she was beginning to sound like the philosopher she was.

  “Well, I blame her,” said Eleanor. “She ruined lives, and that was one that she ruined quite conclusively.” She paused, fixing Isabel with a challenging look. “As far as I’m concerned, I have no interest in what she may or may not have become. The damage was done a long time ago—she can’t undo that and neither, I’m afraid, can we.”

  Isabel wondered whether she would argue, but decided against it. She had told Eleanor of her disagreement, but she did not think that she could say much more. And she had now begun to doubt even her own recollection of events. She remembered Barbara being involved in arguments with people; she remembered her having a reputation for making cutting remarks, but was she the incorrigible bully that others seemed to remember? Perhaps she had been, she thought; perhaps I just didn’t notice it because I wasn’t one of her victims.

  “Let’s do what we can,” she muttered. “Let’s wait and see what she’s like.”

  “We know what she’s like.”

  Isabel looked at her watch. “I really should be getting home,” she said. “I have…” She had nothing to do, and the lie would not come easily. So she said, instead, “I have nothing to do.”

  Eleanor did not catch the remark. “Of course, you must be very busy.”

  “Not really,” said Isabel.

  But Eleanor again did not appear to take in what she said, and Isabel thought: We hear what we expect to hear. But even if she had been heard correctly, it would have made no difference: people decided what they thought and would not be moved, not even by the most patient, the most rational argument. This was why it was so difficult to shift those who lived their lives according to a religious or political ideology. Such people tended not to change even in the face of the most compelling argument.

  Isabel rose to her feet and extended her hand to Eleanor. Eleanor took it, squeezed it lightly, and then she too stood up. “Dearest Isabel,” she said, looking fondly at the other woman. “If I were a man I’d fall head over heels for you, you know.”

  Isabel was unprepared for this. “Well, that’s kind…”

  The waiter appeared. Eleanor looked up at him, and then at Isabel. But Isabel did not engage. Instead she took the bill and passed a five-pound note and a few coins to the young man. Taking the money, he smiled, and then exchanged a glance with Eleanor.

  “Goodbye,” said Isabel, rising to her feet. “Let me know when the caterers will need access. And so on.”

  “And so on,” echoed Eleanor. “So we list the events of our lives—and so on. Und so weiter. And so on.”

  Isabel turned to leave. Try as she might, she was finding herself increasingly keen to get away from Eleanor. There was something in her manner—a certain archness, perhaps—that grated. There was an assumption of familiarity—of intimacy, perhaps—that simply did not exist. Why did she imagine I would be interested in her early sexual experiences? That conversation, in particular, had been excruciating, and Eleanor had failed to pick up—or had deliberately ignored—every cue that Isabel had given to change the subject. But then she smiled to herself: for most of us there was a central, unavoidable problem—the world was populated by people who were unlike us. That explained so many wars—particularly religious ones; that explained persecutions and injustices; that explained simple everyday irritation with one’s fellow man: They were just not like us.

  The reflection helped. A class reunion brought together all types and she should just accept that. If somebody wanted to talk to somebody else about her first boyfriend, then why not simply listen? Tolerance: that was what was needed for class reunions, just as it was for everything else we did. Tolerance was like one of those soothing creams—it drew out inflammation, it did away with the pain.

  When she reached home, Isabel found the list of those attending her reunion—the list on which she had drawn the two red lines beneath Barbara Grant’s name. Now she took out her red pen and under the name of Eleanor Williams she drew two straight lines in red, and then, for good measure, a third. But then she suddenly felt bad. Underlining the names of others with a red pen was not the act of a tolerant person. It was like the act of a bigot who addresses the world in capital letters—who shouts, even in print. So she took her black pen and scored out the red lines under each of the two names. It was a simple act of cancellation, but it worked. She could face both Barbara Grant—whom she had already forgiven—and Eleanor Williams with complete equanimity. They were welcome at her Friday party, and when they arrived she would make a point of kissing them on both cheeks, and meaning it. In theory.

  Chapter Four

  The opening party was due to start at seven in the evening. The caterers had arrived in the midafternoon, though, when Isabel was still at her desk, reading proofs of the Review of Applied Ethics. It was a slightly disappointing issue, she thought—a ragbag of articles that she had been sitting on for too long and that she had to publish before their authors gave up all hope, retired or died. She had made a joke to herself of that, but even as she did so she remembered, with a pang, Gareth Crainie, an Irish philosopher. He had written a paper on the ethical implications of climate change; it had been a well-written paper and extensively footnoted, but it had failed to engage her interest. She had agreed to publish it, though, even if she had not given a firm commitment as to when it would appear. Later it had slipped into what she called her “deep guilt pile” and there it languished until in a fit of determination to clear the backlog she had brought it out, dusted it down and put it into the New Opinions section of a forthcoming issue.
r />   That done, she had written to the author to let him know that his article would be appearing and to apologize for the long time it had taken her to publish it, although she knew she had no real excuse. The answer to this letter came from the author’s partner, who informed her of the philosopher’s death. “Gareth died eight months ago,” he wrote. “It is such a pity that this will be a posthumous publication as he had been so looking forwards to seeing it in print. He spent a lot of time on it, you know, and he was thrilled when you agreed to publish it. Now he will never see it, although he did understand how long these things can take—too long sometimes. We were together for a long time, by the way: thirty-seven years, in fact. Of those thirty-seven years, many were spent in the shadow of disapproval and exclusion. Some of that was open, some of it was concealed; but it was always there, in the days when this country was so rotten and hypocritical. There was a bishop, you know, who actually tried to have Gareth removed from his teaching post at the university on the grounds that he would corrupt young people. A bishop! And now…Sorry, I shouldn’t talk about all that as it has nothing to do with you, but we felt—both Gareth and I—that when you wrote and told him that you would publish his paper you somehow became a friend. We liked the way you phrased your letter. It was kind. There we are: nothing more to be said, really, but thank you for what you did.”

  She had learned her lesson and now, in every fourth issue, she published the papers that were waiting in the queue. It worked, and the guilt pile largely disappeared, even if it made the contents of those mopping-up issues seem somewhat random.

  As she went up to the bedroom to change for the party, Jamie appeared. He had been putting Charlie to bed, Isabel having said good night to him after his bath.

  “He’s utterly exhausted,” said Jamie. “He went to sleep the moment his head touched the pillow. There was no time even for his story.”

  “The benefits of a clear conscience,” said Isabel. “That’s why children sleep so well.” She thought of the guilt pile. At least she had looked that in the face.

  Jamie asked her whether she had finished the proofs. “Get those out of the way and you can relax. Enjoy the reunion.”

  Isabel smiled. “I wonder whether anybody’s relaxing. I suspect that everybody’s on tenterhooks.”

  “Oh well,” said Jamie. “I’m sure it’s all going to go very smoothly. The caterers have been working like slaves all afternoon.”

  Isabel slipped out of her jeans and fingered the dress hanging on the wardrobe door. Too formal? “Slavery,” she mused. “As it happens we’re doing an article on that. Slavery and reparation. It’s in those proofs I’ve just been reading.”

  Jamie sat down on the bedroom chair, a low red armchair in need of reupholstering. It had been Isabel’s mother’s bedroom chair, and her grandmother’s before that. It had originally come from Mobile, she had been told, and it had become for Isabel a link with that distant, romantic world of the house in Mobile with its live oaks and its hanging moss, a house that she associated, oddly enough, with faded fabrics, eau de cologne and mint juleps. Those were, of course, the texture and scents of her grandmother, whom she had met only on a couple of occasions as a young girl.

  “Slavery?” said Jamie.

  “Yes. We’re publishing a paper on contemporary slavery.”

  “But I thought…”

  “…slavery was abolished? It was, but not everywhere. It’s just less overt now.”

  “So no slave markets.”

  Isabel fingered the fabric of her dress again. It was silk, and she wondered who had woven it. She imagined a large factory somewhere far away, with great clattering machines, and people whose faces she could not see. We just cannot imagine any longer where things come from. The label says China, but where in China? And in what conditions were they made? She looked down, at the oriental carpet on the bedroom floor, she realized that she was not sure about that either. There were children employed in carpet factories in Asia; they were very small children who sometimes worked long days on the repetitive tasks of weaving. Were they slaves?

  For a moment she experienced a feeling of pervading bleakness: the world was a vale of tears—it always had been. Only civilization stood between us and the horror: civilization in the form of art and architecture, philosophy and courtesy, and all the institutions that persuaded us to treat one another with decency and consideration, and, of course, tolerance. But those institutions were much weaker than we imagined and could be blown away with a puff of cynicism. It was so easy, and so effective: to pour scorn on something was like pouring acid on it. It ate it away.

  Isabel looked at her dress, and for a moment the sheer burden of her thoughts overcame her. She was immensely fortunate—she had this house, this child, this sympathetic man, this refined world of ideas—but the great sea of unhappiness and struggle that was the world was still there, too large to be dealt with, too intractable to submit to our tiny interventions, our metaphorical fingers in the dykes. She could do so little, and when she had done what she could, the anguish of the world would still be there: as insistent and reproachful as when she had started.

  Jamie was at her side. He had risen from the red chair and was standing beside her. He put an arm about her shoulder.

  “My darling Isabel.”

  She half-turned away. She did not want him to see her tears.

  He touched her cheek gently. “What is it? Is it because of what goes on in the world? Is that it?”

  She nodded. It was—to an extent—but not entirely. Their discussion had been the catalyst, but it was so much more than that, and she could not begin to explain it to him, with a party starting downstairs in less than an hour, and hair to be washed, and clothes to be put on, and makeup.

  He put his other arm about her. “You can’t worry about everything, can you?”

  “I know. You’re right.” He had passed her a handkerchief and she took it. “It’s just that I look at the world and realize that all the things that we create for ourselves—the culture, the beliefs, and so on—all of that is just an attempt to protect us from the reality of our situation. Our world is a tiny, insignificant thing in a massive explosion, hurtling wherever it is we’re meant to be hurtling; and we cling to one another on our little raft and try to be brave, but…”

  He looked at her with surprise. “But everybody knows that. We just have to ignore it. We just have to pretend it’s not so. What else can we do?”

  “Yes, I suppose you’re right.”

  He took the handkerchief from her and dabbed at her cheeks. “So don’t cry. Because I love you, you know.”

  She looked at him. “I know that.” She paused. She was collecting herself. “I hope those caterers have enough food.”

  “Of course they have. They’re very professional.”

  He had moved a hand down to her back. She shivered, and held him to her. Holding him was somehow the solution, or was at least part of it.

  “I need to have a shower.”

  He kissed her lightly on the brow. “So do I.” He paused for a moment, and then whispered, “Tutti.”

  She smiled.

  “The musical term,” he said, “for all together. In this case, just together. Tutti.”

  The cabal arrived first, in the shape of Eleanor Williams and a woman whom Isabel only vaguely remembered: this was the other organizer, Margaret Milne. Eleanor seemed ebullient and quizzed the caterers with a series of searching questions. Then she turned to Margaret and gave her a series of instructions. Her tone was somewhat peremptory—even high-handed, but Margaret listened meekly and went off to do as she was instructed. Isabel watched bemused: Eleanor had been very ready to accuse Barbara Grant of bullying, but she could imagine her being something of a bully herself.

  “Well now,” said Eleanor. “The means by which we shall know who’s who—just in case the years have been too ravaging.” She smiled. “You, of course, have kept your looks, Isabel.” She paused, and seemed to look intently at Is
abel’s face and neck. “It’s always interesting to speculate as to whether people have submitted to the surgeon’s knife in pursuit of continued youthfulness.”

  Isabel took a deep breath. The effrontery was astonishing, but she would not allow herself to be riled by Eleanor.

  “If people feel it helps,” she said mildly, “then it’s up to them, isn’t it?” Now came the chance for a small riposte. She struggled with the temptation, and yielded. “You haven’t, have you, Eleanor?”

  Eleanor stiffened, and Isabel immediately regretted her remark. But then the other woman smiled. “Very funny!” she said, and she delved into a bag she had brought with her and took out a plastic container of name badges.

  Eleanor held up one of the badges to show Isabel. “We thought—Margaret and I—that we should all wear these name badges this evening and then not bother for the rest of the weekend. We’ll know who’s who by then.”

  Isabel indicated the hall table. “You can lay them out there. I’ll give you a hand.” She disliked name badges, particularly those that required one to peer closely to read. These, at least, were legible without the infringement of personal space; Eleanor had written out the name of each guest and had put, in brackets, the married name by which she might be known.

  She explained her system: “If they’re divorced but still using their married name, I’ve put that in square brackets. If they’re still with their husband, I’ve put it in round brackets.”

  “I see.”

  “And if they’re divorced, but have gone back to their maiden name, then that’s all that’s on the badge.”

  Isabel said that she thought that perfectly logical.

  “And as for shortenings of names,” Eleanor elaborated, “I’ve not done that. Liz is Elizabeth. Maggie is Margaret—and so on. Just like it was at school when they called the register.”

  Isabel glanced at one of the labels. There had been a girl whom everybody—even the teachers—had called Toffee Martinson. She had become Angela Martinson [Peabody], which revealed her matrimonial history, but did not identify her as most of the guests would—as Toffee, who indeed was famous for her insatiable taste for toffee.