At the Reunion Buffet by Alexander McCall Smith Read Free Book Online

but there were those high cheekbones that she remembered from school days. And the eyes were the same—those eyes of intense green. They had been her most noticeable feature, and they were still there. It was those eyes, she reflected, that had probably caused more dread in her victims than anything else.
    But now it was different. The old confidence, the old sense of impunity, had gone. Why, Isabel asked herself, did they let her get away with it? The staff must have known, but were presumably indifferent to it, thinking it was just the way girls of that age were.
    “What did you do?” asked Isabel. “After leaving school? We seemed to have lost touch.”
    Barbara looked down at her glass of wine. “I went to university. King’s College, London.”
    Isabel asked what she had studied, and Barbara told her. “French.”
    Isabel nodded. “And then?”
    “I taught at a school in Norfolk. Holt. Greshams School.”
    Isabel brightened. “But that was where Auden went. He was at Greshams.”
    Barbara’s gaze remained fixed on her wineglass. “Of course.”
    “And…” Isabel faltered. She knew that Benjamin Britten had been there and one of the Cambridge spies. Who was it? Kim Philby, she decided. “And Philby.”
    “Yes,” said Barbara, flatly. “Auden and Philby.”
    “I gather there’s a monument to Auden,” said Isabel. “In the school grounds. What’s it like?”
    “Oh, it’s not very big,” said Barbara. “It records the fact that Auden was there. That’s about it.”
    “There’s that Britten monument in Aldeburgh, isn’t there? That wonderful steel scallop on the beach.”
    “There is,” said Barbara.
    Isabel took a sip of her wine. This was the reality of the great bully: a rather dull woman with a markedly passive attitude. She must…She stopped herself. It was not Philby who had been at Greshams, but Donald Maclean. Like Philby, Maclean was a diplomat who passed secrets to the Soviet Union. He had been at Greshams and his name was still there, she had heard, on one of the honors boards. He had won a prize for something or other and his name was on a painted board in the school hall, along with Britten’s and Auden’s.
    Barbara had started to say something. “I wasn’t at Greshams for all that long,” she said. “Four years. Then I took a job with a finance company in Glasgow. I met somebody there. He was Scottish, but he had just been offered a job in Australia.”
    Isabel nodded. “Oh yes, I think I heard you’d gone to Melbourne.”
    Barbara seemed taken aback by this, and looked defensive for a moment. But then she relaxed again. “We still live there, actually. But Iain, my husband, is an academic and has a full year’s sabbatical. So that’s why we’re here. We’re spending part of it Scotland and part in…” She trailed off.
    Isabel waited, but Barbara did not finish, at least not immediately. It was as if she had forgotten where they were to spend the rest of the sabbatical. That was odd, Isabel thought.
    “In France,” said Barbara at last. “In Par…in Lyons.”
    “I see,” said Isabel. She was still wondering why Barbara had confused Philby and Maclean, and she realized that it was probably for exactly the same reasons that she herself had done so. But then Barbara had taught there—she would have known far more about it. Was she for some reason making up the story of having taught at Greshams? Isabel could think of no possible reason for her to do so—it was confusion, pure and simple: confusion brought about by the emotional demands of the reunion. After all, if Barbara had enemies—and that seemed to be the case—then she could well be expected to feel anxious about attending a reunion of her victims; anybody in that position might well confuse one spy with another, particularly British spies of that period who were almost all from the same mold, which was half the problem thought Isabel: conformity—a uniform of accent, dress, assumptions—was the