At the Reunion Buffet by Alexander McCall Smith

Chapter One
    “I never went to my class reunion,” said Jamie. “I thought about it—quite hard, actually, but at the end of the day decided no, I wouldn’t.”
    “Wouldn’t, or couldn’t?” asked Isabel Dalhousie, his wife, his lover, his friend, and, in addition to all that, editor of the
Review of Applied Ethics
. “There’s a difference, you know.”
    “I could have gone, I suppose, but somehow I couldn’t face it. Class reunions, well…” He shrugged.
    She allowed her gaze to dwell on him, making it possible for a rush of love to overwhelm her, as it often did when she was with him, unexpectedly for the most part, at odd moments—on awakening and seeing that he was still there; while walking in the Pentland Hills with the light behind him and the wind in his hair; in the kitchen, when he was cooking, and might turn to her, holding out a spoon, and say:
Do you like this?
She had always understood that love could have an intense physical effect; could fill a space somewhere in the chest, could turn knees weak, could raise the pulse; could intoxicate, just as could a strong martini or a glass of champagne.
Could
, she thought, and would…but only if you allowed it, only if you opened whatever portals of the heart needed to be opened. And some people, of course, found it difficult to do that.
    She loved Jamie with an intensity that had not diminished in any way since they had stood side by side in Canongate Kirk those few short years ago and exchanged their vows; if anything, she loved him even more now than she had loved him then. People said that marriage could change everything, could dull whatever initial excitement there had been, but that had not been her experience—not at all. And yet, even as one loved somebody more and more, did one necessarily begin to know the other any better? She had heard of people who were married for forty years or more—in some cases for the best part of a lifetime—who then discovered that their spouses were not the people they had thought them to be; it was possible: some spouses kept secrets from one another, and perhaps never even revealed them—took them to the grave; and only then did the truth emerge—of a passion concealed, perhaps; of an old lover who had never really gone away; of a past of vice, or greed, or foolishness—there was so much that could be hidden from others; so many ways for us to be other than what we wanted ourselves to be.
    She realized that there were things about Jamie she did not know, and this conversation was straying into that difficult territory. Jamie never talked about his parents, which had struck her as odd. She had sensed, though, that it was something that he would not want her to probe. On one occasion she had said, almost jokingly,
You did have a mother, I assume,
and he had looked at her as if she were deliberately trying to wound him.
    “Of course I had a mother.”
    She laughed nervously. “I was only joking. It’s just that…”
    “Just what?”
    “Just that you never mention her. I know nothing about her. You never speak about her, do you?”
    He had been silent for a while. Then he said, “It was a complicated relationship.”
    “It often is.”
    He inclined his head. “I wasn’t very close to her latterly. I was when I was a little boy, but then…well, I suppose I wanted to be myself. Mothers can…” He searched for the word; any accusation against a mother, however justified, could seem so harsh. “Can suffocate their sons.” He added quickly, “Not intentionally, of course.”
    She had nodded. The relationship of mothers and sons was very different from that of mothers and daughters; she knew that because her mother had been more ambitious for Isabel’s brother than for Isabel herself. She had resented this apparent favoritism, because all of us want the complete approval of our parents and cannot bear the thought of any preference for a sibling. But that feeling had passed, and her mother’s memory