At the Reunion Buffet Read Free

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