Part Thirteen: TEA AND EMPATHY

Miss Laird had regained her composure and put the affair of the missing eggs into its proper perspective.

In her prayers at Church that morning she had remembered to ask for forgivenness for her cruel outburst. Her repentance had been as strong as her character and it had greatly improved her frame of mind, as had an above average sermon from the Minister which had managed to be both stern and comforting at the same time. Yes, it was safe to say that all but perhaps one, or two, of the laughing imps were some distance away at the moment.

Nevertheless, she could not deny a small pang of melancholy as she sipped her tea for, all around her, in the Botanic Garden Tea Rooms were couples and parents with children and here she was, another Spring and still on her own and still at No.17.

She was supposed to be enjoying a different life by now. Circumstances had forced her far from the course set by herself and, instead of blaming the metaphorical reefs that lay just under the surface of life and upon which she had certainly come to grief not a few times lately,she did that typical Scots Calvinist thing and blamed herself. It was all her fault. She should have seen things coming. She should have listened to her mother. She should have smelt a rat with the Todd thing that was for sure.Her siblings had sorted themselves out, why couldn't she.

To be honest, she wasn't sure in what way her life would be different but she was quite sure that it would not involve stale smelling rooms, threadbare carpets and strange fellow lodgers.

Lodgers! How she hated that word. Surely, if any single word in the English language conjured up the idea of failure - it was "lodger".

This alternate life, only ever seen through mists of wishful thinking, would not have involved being alone either. She took a deep breath, as though it would clear these morbid thoughts out of her system, and another sip of tea and remembered the morning's sermon. Yes, indeed, despair was a sin - and it was also very tiring.



A little girl in a red matinee coat stood a few feet away studying her with the intentness of those for whom the world is still a minute by minute adventure.

"Hello poppet", said Miss Laird, glad of the distraction, "what's your name?"

The child laughed and hid her face behind her hands and, for the first time since Lachlan's call, Elizabeth Laird, 42 and still spinster of this parish smiled too.

She was still smiling when she happened to glance over in the direction of the counter and saw Buster staring back at her with the expression of a terrified goldfish. Miss Laird's smile vanished like snow on a griddle and Buster vanished, as best he could, behind a portly lady just ahead of him in the queue.

He had only come in to the tea room because he had not realised that squirrels lived in the Botanicals too and he had nothing for them in his pockets. Besides, he was feeling peckish himself and he had decided to kill two birds with one stone. It seemed, to him, a bit thick that, so often, when you tried to do a good deed for others, you landed up in the soup yourself.

Now he just wanted to get the things he had come in for and to get out again sharpish. He certainly did not want any more trouble. So far, Edinburgh seemed to have had more trouble in store for him than was normally the case and it was bad enough to get a dressing down when you were the only one in the room but it would be a thousand times worse if this mad lady lost her rag in front of all these people. Just as he was reflecting on the form his humiliation might take, the portly lady was served and his cover had gone.

"Yes, dear?", said the motherly woman at the counter.

Buster shot Miss Laird a nervous glance before giving the woman his order along with a polite request that she place them in two separate paper bags.

Whether it was to do with the Rev Mackie's sermon, or the strain of holding on to bitterness for too long, but Miss Laird found that her anger toward this unfortunate had completely leeched away and she was now wondering what the "poor soul" was doing wandering about without any supervision.

Buster grinned nervously as the woman behind the counter made a great display of putting ginger biscuits and Dundee Cake into two paper bags. She was a kind lady and she was trying to make him feel important but he just wished she'd hurry up and he hated himself for it.

Meanwhile the memory of the words spoken in the kitchen surfaced again and Miss Laird cringed with guilt as she wondered how she could make amends to prove to herself that her repentance was real and not merely a matter of polite form.

Buster paid for his purchases just as Miss Laird rose from her chair in that semi-automatic way that people do at Fundamentalist Meetings. She had to get this off her chest and she would make a start by buying the eccentric lodger a cup of tea and taking the opportunity to tell him how sorry she was. She took a few steps toward Buster, her face etched with a mixture of concern and contrition.

Unfortunately for her, Buster turned away from the counter just in time to see Miss Laird bearing down on him and he, not the most skilled at reading facial expressions, thought that his worst fears had been confirmed and that he was about to be "torn off a strip" in public by a woman not fully in control of her emotions.

Once more, he fled from Miss Laird's clutches, leaving her standing, open-mouthed, in the middle of the tea room. Suddenly, the poor woman was aware of many eyes burning into her flesh. She slipped back to her table, picked up her handbag and tiptoed out of the tea room studying the floor every step of the way.