At the Reunion Buffet by Alexander McCall Smith Page A

had become unassailable.
My sainted American mother
she was fond of saying; and why not? Why should we not have a private cult of our parents when cults of real saints—the sort who wrought miracles or led lives of privation on barren islands—have been taken away from us, made risible, reduced to being private weaknesses for the superstitious and the gullible.
    She had barely talked to Jamie about his school days, and she wondered whether this was another area of experience that was for some reason out of bounds. Had he been happy? Who had his school friends been? She had no idea. There must be a reason why he had decided not to attend his ten-year class reunion; normally Jamie’s instincts were social. If invited to a party, he went, and usually enjoyed himself; perhaps this did not apply to reunions.
    This conversation took place in the morning room of their house in Edinburgh, a room that looked out over the lawn, the line of shrubs at its edge, and the high stone wall that prescribed the boundary of their garden. This was her private realm—the small scrap of land to which Isabel—and Jamie now—had title according to the law of Scotland; its owners, in as much as any of us can be said to own the ground we stand upon.
What we have, we all must lose—
that applied to everything, even that to which we thought we had the greatest right. We were tenants of this earth—nothing more.
    He realized that she was waiting for an explanation. He gave one, although he seemed uncomfortable about it. “It’s just that we never choose the people we’re at school with, do we? We’re thrown together.”
    He was right, she thought. Yet being thrown together was a universal, unavoidable fact of life. It started with birth, really, which was a form of being tossed into something we had not chosen. “But that’s what life is like, surely,” she ventured. “We don’t choose our neighbors. We don’t pick the people we work with. We take what we’re given.”
    “Exactly,” he said. “But we can choose whether we want to socialize with the people we come into contact with. They don’t have to be our intimate friends. We don’t have to
like
them, do we?”
    No, she thought, we don’t. She herself tried to like people—and generally succeeded—but Jamie was choosier when it came to his friends, and as a result had fewer than she did. She had noticed that, because she had seen how keen people were to become close to him; they seemed drawn to him, even those who met him casually; and she had seen, too, how reserved he could be when he became aware of their interest. It was something to do with his appearance, she imagined: the beautiful were never short of people eager to befriend them.
    “But even if one isn’t going to end up liking everybody,” she said, “at least one can like some of them.”
    “Yes, but are you going to continue to like them?”
    She considered this. “Over the years?”
    “Yes. We change as we get older. And that means, surely, that we’ll…” He hesitated. “I know this sounds a bit—how shall I put it?—dismissive, but the people you like when you’re fourteen or fifteen may not be the same sort of people you’ll like when you’re thirty.” He looked at her inquiringly. “Are you still in close touch with any friends you had at that age? You aren’t, are you?”
    Isabel thought for a moment. There must be somebody, and yet she could not think of a name. She still saw people she had met at twenty, but fourteen or fifteen…Where were her childhood friends? “That may be accidental,” she said. “We lose touch with people for all sorts of reasons—not just because we become different people.”
    Jamie smiled. This was a familiar topic—one that he and Isabel had discussed at length before. Are we the same person at forty as we are at fourteen? It was Isabel who had introduced him to the philosophical debate on personal identity, and he had enjoyed the abstruse articles on the