What Scotland Taught Me

by Molly Ringle

  His only choice was to turn around and do his job. My only choice was to pretend nothing was wrong. And maybe, without Laurence there, I could have pulled it off.

  But Laurence suspected something. From across the table his gaze weighed upon me like a bag of sand. Had he extrapolated from that groping episode at the train station that I’d gone farther than I was comfortable admitting? Did I merely have the worst poker face ever?

  My armpits felt clammy. All my remarks and facial expressions felt fake.

  Thomas came back with our tray of drinks. The jolly evening flowed onward.

  “Any luck with those housing ads?” Shannon asked Amber.

  “No. Scottish rat-bastards.” Amber slurped cider from her pint glass. “No one wants to take on people who can only stay four months. Damn it. We waited too long.”

  “Well,” Shannon said, “if it helps, you could just look for a place for two people. Looking for three’s probably harder. I mean, I don’t mind the hostel so much.”

  Sure. What she likely meant was she wouldn’t spend many nights there in the future, the direction she and Thomas were headed. Lucky girl.

  Amber shrugged, her tongue flicking cider foam from her lip. “Hell, I don’t either. What’s it matter, right?”

  Right, because she had Laurence at the hostel. Of course the allure of better housing would diminish. Was I the only one who still wanted to live in a room with fewer than eleven other people? Would I have to strike out on my own? Ha. As if I had the courage.

  “So I hear your dad’s in England,” Thomas said to Amber.

  She nodded. “Was all set to meet him next week. Dude canceled on me again. He’s all, ‘We’ll reschedule, I promise.’ God, what a lame-o.”

  “Sorry, Amber,” said Shannon.

  “Sucks,” I said, feeling I ought to donate a syllable once in a while.

  Laurence smiled across at Thomas. “It’s nice of him to provide us with a model of exactly what not to do as a husband and father.”

  It did suck for Amber, and I understood her snippy mood better. But my mind returned to my own problems as my eyes kept pulling toward Gil, who dutifully served pints, counted change, leaned on the bar to hear people over the noise, and swept away crumbs with a dishtowel.

  It hurt to look at him, but I couldn’t tear my eyes away. Things had changed, and the change fascinated me even while it pained me. Some women could do anything sexual with anyone they fancied, and not suffer hangovers of regret even if they did have an innocent boyfriend back home. Maybe you had to be older to gain that level of self-assurance, or maybe you had to be born with it. Either way, I lacked it woefully.

  Drink, something desperate in me said. I gave up that notion of being too tired for alcohol. I was wound up tight, and needed something to knock me into relaxation. In old British novels they always gave people wine or brandy to calm them down. So, when in Britain...

  I did feel better after the first pint of ale. The room’s edges smoothed. My nerves eased. But the good times didn’t last; it had been four hours since our light dinner, and I only weighed 110 pounds. When I stood up to walk to the restroom, the floor swayed.

  Food, I thought, as I returned to the table. Food is what you need to soak up alcohol.

  The others were already selecting pub fare, and before I knew it baskets of fish and chips, deep-fried cheese, onion rings, and chutney arrived on the table. Fish seemed the most substantial, so I took that.

  Tranquility still escaped me. Did I want Gil more now than I did before, or less? I actually couldn’t decide. If I did want him more, it would mean breaking up with Tony once and for all. And then what? Staying here and fighting for an extension on my work permit so Gil and I could be together?

  No, of course not. That was Shannon’s dilemma, not mine. Mine was...well, feeling I’d taken foreign relations too far. But my partner was someone I liked and respected, which made it impossible to quit returning his calls. What was I supposed to do? My mind and heart were total mayhem. And a particular Mr. Laurence Hawthorn knew it, and kept shooting me keen glances.

  During a lull in the bar crowd, Gil leaned on the brass rail, cocked his head at me, and waved casually. It made my stomach lurch.

  “You could be hanged for anything back then.” Thomas had swung back to his macabre chat topics. “Adultery, that was a big one.”

  Laurence cast me a smirk, as if to say, Aren’t you glad you live in this century?

  I faked a smile, infusing it with, Leave me alone, jackass.

  “Adultery first became a capital offense under Mary, Queen of Scots,” Thomas went on. “Loads of people got hanged, but some lucky ones were only branded on the cheek and banished from the kingdom.”

  “We should institute that in America,” Laurence mused.

  I swallowed a slurp of ale, glaring at a Talisker whisky poster across the pub.

  “There was even a Concealment of Pregnancy Act,” said Thomas, from deep in his personal crypts of history. “I used that in a paper last month. Can you believe? It was actually illegal to try to hide your pregnancy.”

  “Was that a hanging crime too?” asked Amber.

  “Oh, yes. Practically everything was.”

  “’Scuse me,” I mumbled, and shooed Shannon and Thomas off the bench seat so I could get to the restroom.

  Deep breaths and cold splashes of water on my face did nothing. Five minutes thinking happy thoughts about kittens and daffodils accomplished zero as well. I gave up and left the women’s room.

  I ran smack into Laurence, who apparently was waiting for me. I grumbled at him and tried to slip past.

  He stopped me with a hand on my arm. “You all right?”

  “Yes.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  “Then why’d you ask?”

  “What did he do to you?”

  A shiver ran through me. “Who?”

  “Come off it. Something about that dude is freaking you out. What did he do?”

  “He didn’t do anything. We--nothing. It doesn’t matter.” I stepped toward our table.

  Laurence’s hand tightened. “If anything’s wrong--if you’re in some kind of trouble…”

  “God, Laurence. You sound like a fifties’ movie.”

  “It went too far, didn’t it? Farther than what I saw at Waverley Station. A lot farther.”

  “Let me go. This is none of your business.”

  “Eva.”

  “Let me go!” I shoved his hand away and stalked back to the table.

  A few minutes later he returned too. He said nothing. The others didn’t notice our silence. They were in an uproar of laughter, doing impressions of film stars.

  As the night grew late I blearily watched Gil slip between tables with his hands full of empty pint glasses. His rear bumped a chair, and my gaze lingered miserably on his body. I had pressed my hands all over those gray jeans that swiped against greasy pub furniture and customers’ sleeves. That knee had latched across mine on his mattress. I knew the metal feel of those rivets, buttons, and zipper, and the softness and hardness of what they concealed. I had manhandled him through that denim, and finally peeled it off him just two nights ago.

  Lord, have mercy.

  Desire and regret blended to make me feel ill. They’re both powerful drugs and probably shouldn’t be mixed.

  Drink some beer. Eat some fish. Drink some cider. Eat some chips. Listen to Amber and Shannon and Thomas. Avoid Laurence’s eyes. Avoid Gil’s body. Don’t feel guilty; just enjoy yourself here in rollicking old Edinburgh.

  Right. Too late. Angst had already rolled in like a thunderhead, and it was looking to be quite a storm.

  Chapter Nineteen: Our Lady of Perpetual Suffering

  I don’t remember much about the last half-hour at the pub, but the cold night air on our walk back to the hostel slapped some awareness back into my head. On the downside, that mass of fish, appetizers, Coke, and alcohol felt like a bowling ball in my stomach. I knew my face must be pale gr
een.

  Laurence said nothing about Gil on the way home, nor had he delivered any more remarks in the pub. But when he went to the bar to pay our tab, he and Gil exchanged words of some sort. Just imagining what they might have said made me so queasy I had to close my eyes.

  Back at the hostel I kept up the façade of being “fine, just tired.” I went straight to bed, clinging to the faint hope that sleep would overtake and heal me.

  No such luck. Within an hour I climbed down from my bunk, stole to the bathroom in bare feet, and crouched in a stall, where I gagged and shivered until finally throwing up.

  I still felt horrible. I couldn’t stop trembling, and the fetal position was the only comfortable one. I took the duvet from my bed and hauled myself up to the study on the fourth floor, where I could sit on a couch with a lamp on. For some reason this was necessary; the idea of lying in a dark room full of sleeping people struck me as hellish.

  In the study I stared straight ahead and listened to the muted sounds of traffic from outside. I wondered if I should try to read, but even cracking a book would have taken more energy than I possessed. Trembling, I closed my eyes, let my head loll to the side on the smelly leather couch, and watched nightmare images flash across my brain.

  A magistrate in a hooded robe pulled me onto a platform in the stinking medieval streets of the Royal Mile. I wore only rags. They’d starved me while I was in prison in the Tolbooth; I had to resort to chewing on rats. Now I was barely able to keep from vomiting. But people were watching, and no, I couldn’t throw up in public; that had always been a phobia of mine.

  People flung cold mud at me. I shivered. My fingers were blue. I could die of hypothermia, standing here before the public while the magistrate read my crimes off a scroll. I was an adulteress, being sentenced to hang. Or, wait, was he commuting it to a burned mark on my cheek and banishment from Scotland?

  Gil appeared among the masses, blood dripping from a blackened cut on his face. The crowd, equipped with ropes, whipped him as he stumbled through the streets. His apron fell in rags around his legs, lashed to pieces.

  I begged the magistrate not to punish me. I would do anything to right my wrong; I hadn’t known my actions were illegal.

  I spotted Laurence in the crowd. Would he help me? No. He frowned at me in disapproval and turned away. Oh, come back, Laurence...

  The sound of the study door swinging open jolted me out of the dream.

  “Just as I thought.” Laurence leaned down to look at me. “One sick little lady.” My throat made a gagging sound all on its own, and alarm crossed his face. “Up we go, babe, come on.”

  With his help I got to the fourth floor restroom in time to throw up again. He stayed in the hallway until I came out. In fact, he must have gone down to the kitchen and back, because he held a glass of water in one hand and a mug in the other. Steam wafted upward from the mug in the chilly corridor. He wore his navy-blue robe and gray sweats, with thick green wool socks.

  He lifted the mug. “It’s just hot water, with a teeny bit of ginger. You should try to stay hydrated. I thought I’d give you the option, cold water or warm, whichever sounds better.”

  “Let me sit,” I squeaked.

  “Come to my room. It’s warmer. I cranked the radiator up.”

  A lamp in the corner lit the ceiling with a soft glow. He had hauled two spare cots into the room and spread blankets across them to make a queen-sized bed for himself, but I chose to sit on the sofa since it was near the radiator. I couldn’t seem to get warm enough.

  He set the two cups on a wooden chair near the sofa where I could reach them.

  I took the mug and sipped from it. The clean warm water soothed my throat. “Did you say something to Gil?” I asked.

  “Yeah.” Laurence sat at the opposite end of the sofa and folded his arms. “When I went up to pay the bill, he said--rather rudely, I thought--‘No tips from the American lassies?’ I looked him in the eye and said, ‘I think you’re getting enough from the American lassies, don’t you?’”

  I tried to giggle at his remark, not to mention his surprisingly good imitation of Gil’s accent. But the laugh hurt my stomach, and emerged as a whimper.

  “Then,” Laurence continued, “he said, ‘Well, please take good care of her. She doesnae look so well.’

  “‘No kidding she doesn’t,’ I say. ‘I think your pub’s given her food poisoning. Why don’t you take care of that?’ And we left.” Laurence shrugged.

  “You think I have food poisoning?”

  “Maybe. Mostly I said it to freak him out. Could just be booze and anxiety. Or, um...”

  “What?”

  “I have to ask. You couldn’t be pregnant, could you?”

  “Laurence! No!”

  He wriggled into the couch cushions, looking comfortable. “Good. Your dad would have killed me if that happened on my watch.”

  “You’re not responsible for me,” I mumbled.

  “He asked me to keep an eye on you.”

  “Really?”

  “Uh-huh. So did Amber’s mom, regarding Amber. And Shannon’s dad, for her.”

  My heart ached for my family, far away and unable to help me through all my carryings-on. “I miss them. And, ow. I hurt...so much.” You never realize how many abdominal muscles are required for talking until you’ve been doubled over with digestive ailments for a few hours.

  “You don’t have to talk,” he said. “I can shut up too, if you want.”

  “It’s okay.”

  He yawned. “Well, I’ll leave on the light. But I might fall asleep.” He pulled a blanket from the bed, and draped it over himself.

  I assume he did fall asleep. I drifted off myself, only to be roused by a stab of nausea some time later. One more speedy shuffle to the toilets, one more bout of throwing up, and finally my head and stomach started to settle.

  I swished my mouth out with icy tap water, washed my face, and dragged myself back into Laurence’s room. He lay curled in the blanket on the couch, gazing at the ceiling. The lamplight picked out traces of blond in his hair. Without his glasses he looked younger and less certain than usual.

  Of course, it was the middle of the night, and nothing was going to look normal in my condition.

  His gaze dropped to me. “How you doing?”

  I knelt and took a swallow of the now-lukewarm ginger water. “Better,” I said. “Tired.”

  I collapsed onto my end of the couch and rewrapped myself in the comforter. I started shivering again, but this time only from cold and not sickness. Acting on heat-seeking instinct, I scooted across the couch, nudged my way past Laurence’s knees, and flopped my head on the throw pillow beneath his left arm.

  Laurence chuckled and arranged the blankets across both of us, even sitting up to tuck them under my feet. When he had smoothed everything to his satisfaction, he stretched out full-length beside me on the couch. My nose rested near his elbow, in the folds of his robe. I could feel the tension draining away from me with the warmth. Sweet sleep was within my grasp.

  He yawned. “I don’t let just anyone climb into bed with me, but I’ll humor you because you’re sick.”

  Tears welled up in my eyes as I thought of all the kind things he had done for me--and of the horrible way I had treated him in return. One drop slipped off my eyelashes and got sucked up into Laurence’s terrycloth. “You’re being nicer to me than I’ve been to you lately,” I said.

  “Yes, I am. But then, Hitler was nicer to Poland than you’ve been to me lately.”

  I laughed, though in truth it was halfway a sob. “I’m sorry, Laurence.” Sorry, I meant to say, for being mean, as well as pathetic and disgusting; and sorry also for smelling like alcohol, pub food, sweat, and vomit, and then climbing under his blankets anyway.

  “It’s all right,” he said.

  I closed my eyes. We lapsed into silence for a couple of minutes.

  Then he poked me on the hip. “Hey. I’m glad you’re not pregnant.”

  “Ye
ah. Join the club.”

  He patted my leg with two heavy, sleepy thumps, and let his arm fall there, like another warm blanket. “Night, Eve.”

  Chapter Twenty: Methods of Avoidance

  I ended up mad at Laurence again the next morning.

  Our day started amiably enough. He got up at 8:00, and told me he would call in sick to the Monteith Hotel for me. I mumbled, “Thanks,” and fell back asleep.

  I woke up when he returned, carrying a towel. He was dressed in jeans and zip-up sweater, with damp hair and a clean shave. I caught the scent of shampoo from where I lay.

  “How you feeling?” he asked.

  “Like a ninja sucker-punched me.” I sat up. “But recovering.”

  “Guess you learned your lesson about pub fare, huh?”

  “Hey. It was your suggestion that I eat more ‘real food.’ That’s why I chose the fish.”

  He smirked. “Pub fare is never ‘real food.’ Didn’t think I needed to tell you that.”

  “You guys ate it, too. Why was I the only sick one?”

  “Stress, stress, and more stress.” He hung his towel over the back of a chair. “And maybe your lunch. These things can incubate for a while. Did you refrigerate your sandwich?”

  Irritation stung me, since in truth I had left it in my backpack instead of stuffing it into the Monteith Hotel’s crowded refrigerator. “It was only out a couple hours,” I said in defense.

  “Did it have meat in it?”

  “Yes, because you’ve been all, ‘Eat more meat, you’ll be healthier.’”

  “Always refrigerate meat, Eve. Again, not something I thought I had to tell you.”

  I stood up with my blanket around me. “Sure, you’re always right and I’m always wrong. See you later.” I stomped toward the door.

  “No, I’m always right and you’re always annoyed about it,” he said.

  “Do you never know when to let up?”

  “Do you never show gratitude?”

  Not up to mental exercises in ethics, I said, “Bite me,” and tromped out.