Veil of Time (10 page)

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I hear Oliver say. “They only remove the diseased part, nothing that functions well now in any case.”

Edinburgh is a different city from Glasgow. The capital city smells of hops and breweries, for one thing, a sort of sour Edinburgh smell. It housed Scottish royalty after they moved from Dunadd, and the industrialization that left its scars on other British cities left Edinburgh unscathed. Whatever accommodations were
made for workers have been well hidden, and so Edinburgh held on to its sense of grandeur and never had to dig itself out later from anything.

Graeme’s school is in the outskirts, among grassy playing fields and long leafy lanes of respectable stone houses. It looks more like a medieval castle itself, with a dome over its clock tower and little onion domes and turrets everywhere else. He comes running down a sweeping stone staircase, looking happy and waving to me in the school’s car park. I watch him in the rearview mirror as I park, and I can hardly square this seventeen-year-old with the little boy who once fit so easily onto my lap. There’s a photograph in one of the many albums of him at about three years of age, looking backwards over my shoulder at the camera, holding on like he knew that’s where he belonged. Now he belongs here apparently. Holding him, slipping my hand onto his rough man’s cheek, I wait to feel the familiarity. I wasn’t good at balancing the love of the firstborn with the protection of the afflicted second. Perhaps it was an act of self-defense for Graeme to pull away into his own world, such a little world as it is, this life of the boarding school. It used to be an establishment designed for making men out of boys, but nowadays they are making men out of girls, too.

I’m obliged to hold conference with the headmaster, who in his high turreted study and flowing black robes so readily embraces the stereotype for masters of establishments
such as these. In my convent school, flowing black habits held sway, thick black cloth that smelled of cupboards and things hidden away. The headmaster pats my shoulder as I’m leaving and tells me they are expecting great things of young Griggs. Such a sharp mind, such clear ambition. He will bring glory to his alma mater. I mutter that he is a clever boy, because Graeme is waiting for my comment, and I begrudge it only because of the masters in black urging him along their path.

Nobody urged me. The black habits wanted nothing but compliance. Chastity, humility, while in secret corners we sang the Beatles: “Oo you were a naughty girl, you let your knickers down.” Naughty, hot things snickered at behind the door of the school bathrooms. Or you could become the Bride of Christ and take all that stuff and lock it just behind thought until it leaked and drenched your habit, swishing down the corridors of nice girls and brides of the church.
Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.

I shake the nice man’s hand, but I refrain from thanking him. I take my son’s arm and walk myself back outside, where lines of stuffed blazers make their way to the cafeteria.

I look at the rumbling navy sky. “You’re doing well. I’m proud.”

He sends me a side glance. “But you wish it was Ellie, don’t you?”

I look at him and wonder what I’ve done. He has to look away because the truth of what he says is on my face: I would like to have swung into this car park and been greeted by my rusty-haired daughter at seventeen in her blazer and sensible shoes, watched her ponytail swing at her back as she walked. I would like to have shaken the hand of her headmistress and heard how bright she was and how far she would go.

I clear my throat. “If I do, it’s only because it can’t ever be again. You know that.”

He nods. We are on eggshell ground. He says, “I’m doing it for her, too, you know.”

I want to prostrate myself and sob into the concrete. He won’t look at me, can’t bear the catch in his voice, and tries to smile for the passing boys he is accountable to. Graeme never really cried when Ellie died.

I eat dinner with him in the school cafeteria. Such dreary food, nothing quite fresh but trying to be. It makes you wonder what you’re paying all this money for. Graeme says it’s better at the weekends. He says his dad came down last weekend. It’s news to me.

Graeme has never seen me in the grip of a seizure, so for all good purposes I am a normal mum, except that after Ellie died, nothing was ever normal, though it tried hard to be. It was for him, no one else, that I moved through those days after she died, washing dishes, cleaning toilets, unable ever again to pick up the book I had been reading the day it all happened. Oliver was moving
through his own layers of oblivion that were different from mine, in some different corner of the universe. But I had to stay on for Graeme.

“Let’s go for an ice cream,” I say. “There’s something I want to show you.”

Graeme shakes his head. “I’d miss study hall.”

He’s taking on the wider vowels of Scotland’s upper classes, no Glaswegian scrubbers here. Not that we come from a family of scrubbers. My mother didn’t scrub. She managed a cake shop on Argyle Street, and not any old cake shop either, but one that had been in business since Victoria. It required that she leave home every morning in a smart dress suit and a Sunday hat, and me in the care of Mrs. Gillies from St. Kilda in her Gaelic world of fish and bannocks. Her flat always smelled of fish.

I smooth a loose strand of hair back from my son’s forehead over the little scar from the chicken pox he had when he was seven. “How about tomorrow?”

He agrees to take the period off before lunch, which will give us two hours. I hug him quickly and then drive away, feeling like a mother abandoning her newborn on the steps of an orphanage. He’s seventeen and thinks he has a right to live by himself like this. Perhaps he does, but I can’t see it in the waving figure that grows smaller in my rearview mirror, and then disappears altogether.

I am a woman alone in a hotel at the city center, nothing swanky, just the basics that a travel lodge will
provide. A cup of tea with artificial milk in foil containers. I sit on the bed I did not make but hope the maid changed between the last occupant and myself. I suppose you would never know unless you came across a dried patch of something. For imagined reasons like this I sit on top of the bed, drinking my tea and watching a film on television that made me cry when I was Graeme’s age but now just seems silly. The dying girl says, “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” I almost blush for having thought this profound, but I suppose at the time it stood in contrast to the nuns telling me I should be sorry for everything, especially myself. I watch the film to its end, for old time’s sake, but fall asleep without undressing and wake while it’s still dark outside my window and the river of city traffic has reduced itself to an intermittent stream.

Five o’clock. The red numerals of the bedside clock declare the time and the fact that the television has been humming pictureless for the past few hours. And six hours of sleep will have to count as a good night, which it is for me in a hotel room, with or without clean sheets. The brewing electric kettle in its small hum says I am not alone. I take my tea to the window and look out on the gathering traffic, which I suppose is no less living than my river at Dunadd. And what does any of this have to do with an eighth-century Fergus conjured out of my need for something warm to wrap myself around? All these cars and the wars about oil and the age of reason,
which slaps your hand for even thinking of times before it held sway. Fergus seems more real than this nothing flow of life from beds to clock-in to cocktails to beds.

Eating in restaurants by yourself is uncomfortable, no matter that it is a hotel restaurant and many others are feeling the same in their own circle of solitude—men with their newspapers, women with their phones, all trying to be someone by themselves, which is not easy, for we are social animals no matter how you look at it, no matter that some of us don’t run so well with the pack.

You can’t help but like a city that has only half a main shopping street, one that is dedicated to gardens and castles and maroon-colored double-decker buses. Edinburgh just seems to have its priorities right. I wander around a wintry Princes Street Gardens, then warm myself with a proper cup of tea in a saucer on the third floor of Jenners, the posh department store. A bookshop on the way back to my car cannot furnish the English-Gaelic dictionary I have been after, but it does have (on sale) a Gaelic phrase book.

As I sit in the school car park waiting for Graeme, I flip through the book, trying the unlikely pronunciations. Whatever Gaelic I learned at Mrs. Gillies’s knee leaves me dumbfounded when I look at it written. Gaelic was an oral language until the nineteenth century, and it shows, because this mess of letters seems
to bear no relation to the sounds it makes. On top of that, this is modern Gaelic, concerned with trains and shopping lists. There’s relatively little for nature in its rudeness as life was lived on St. Kilda, and certainly nothing for Dunadd in the Dark Ages. Instead of asking for the wine list, please, I could use an idiom to explain how I am battered and bruised from my dealings with men, how that look of Fergus’s makes me feel that he has bruises of his own. Rather than knowing how to ask the whereabouts of the nearest launderette, it would be useful to find the words for how available this man might be. Just in case I need to know.

I barely recognize
Is math ur faicinn,
which means “It is good to see you.” I have to close my eyes and say it before it sounds like what Mrs. Gillies would say to me after the weekend.

Graeme knocks on the car window in his tie and blazer, pleated trousers, polished shoes. I would like to loosen that tie, let in a little air.

He gets into the car and says, “Did you not sleep?”

I laugh. “That bad, eh?”

He shrugs. “No, I just know you and hotels.”

I smile that he still knows me and anything. “It was fine. I fell asleep during
Love Story
. How about you? How do you sleep with all those other boys snoring around you?”

He bats my knee. “Two other boys, and only one snores. I’m used to it. What’s the book?”

I hold the little phrase book up to him.

He laughs. “Does no one speak English over there in Argyll?”

“Some of them don’t,” I say, and leave him to figure out what he can’t figure out. At any rate, these Gaelic phrases are not going to help me out much with eighth-century Scots from Ireland. I start up the car and hand the book to my son. He lodges it between his thigh and the seat.

We head back into the center of Edinburgh and park at the Holyrood end of the Royal Mile. The street is narrow, cobbled and ancient, and still gives a feel of the crammed quarters people used to live in, with its tiny dank allies and its Tudor-like top-heavy buildings. Most of it these days is given over to tourism, and with Scotland’s noble castle at the highest end, there is no helping that. The castle is built on a knobby hill, much like Dunadd, though this knob is bigger and the fort grander. It used to be called Dunedin, for good measure, but got turned around, as so many things did, under the influence of the English.

Our first stop is the new Parliament Square, and I point out where the old Tollbooth Prison used to sit, marked now by a heart-shaped mosaic in the cobbles next to the grand church of Edinburgh, St. Giles, which now sits on the site. The church has always been in the business of covering things up, a pun I make to Graeme as we set our toes on the heart.

“The Tollbooth,” I tell him, “used to house the women who would later be burned for witchcraft up on the castle esplanade.”

“How many witches?” he asks.

“In all of Scotland? How many do you think?”

He shrugs. “I don’t know. Thirty? One hundred?”

I laugh. They haven’t covered the topic at his posh boarding school. When I was at school, they weren’t teaching Scottish history at all except for how it affected England. I learned about the War of the Roses and the houses of English royalty. I was taught about Cromwell, but I did not learn about William Wallace, Scottish freedom fighter, whose statue stands at the entrance to Scotland’s royal castle, just beyond the spot where the witches were burned. History is such a selective bastard.

“In all of Scotland,” I say, “upwards of four thousand, but that’s a conservative estimate. If your case made it to the High Court of Judiciary in Edinburgh, you got a record, but most of these cases were tried in local courts, and next to nothing survives of those. In all of Europe over three hundred years, generous estimates run into the millions, conservative ones into the hundreds of thousands. Whatever, it was a shocking number.”

I buy us each an ice cream on the way up to the castle esplanade, where the cobbled street becomes steeper and narrows even further. Graeme is quiet.

As I stand by the well that marks the burning spot, he goes off to find a bin to dispense with the ice cream.
The little brass sconce with its bright flowers seems like a hopeless gesture to the memory of what took place here, the mobbing crowd, the sanctimonious church officials. I stand by the wall like an extra brick, picturing Sula in one of those rude carts being brought to her death. How would she be feeling, knowing her innocence, perhaps longing for the end.

When Graeme comes back, he says, “But why did they kill the witches?”

I say, “The why is fairly simple:
Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,
so the Good Book says. And they didn’t.”

“Yes, but why then?”

“It had a lot to do with the Reformation, going back to the letter of the law over Catholicism. There’s that and then there’s a deep-seated fear of women and sexuality—go back to the Garden of Eden for that. In fact, there was a handbook drawn up by two Dominican monks for trying witches called
The Hammer of Witches
, that went into great lengths about the evils of women. A lot of what they extracted out of so-called witches had to do with their supposed sexual conduct with Satan.”

But we’re onto tender ground here between mother and son. Graeme walks a few steps away from me as we pass beyond the esplanade, under the gaze of William Wallace and into the castle proper. The turret that holds Scotland’s crown jewels is also home to the Stone of Destiny, a plain old sandstone block that came with the Gaels from Ireland and before that from the land
of Jacob, a relic that goes back to Scotland’s beginnings and is held dear, which is why the good English king Edward, known as the Hammer of the Scots, removed it to Westminster in London for its eight-hundred-year sojourn. It looks an odd thing among velvet and jewels, but this recently returned rough rectangle of stone, with its metal rings at either end, has come to mean more than the jewels.