The Bathhouse Experiment

The date was on a Thursday. I remember because I'd worn my good green dress on Thursday, the one I keep for interviews and funerals and things that might turn out to be nothing.

His name was Alistair. Sixty-one, retired from something vague involving insurance, hands like dried apples. We'd been set up by a woman in my walking group who swore he was "great crack." He was not great crack. He was forty minutes of talking about his boat and then, over the sticky toffee pudding, he leaned back and delivered the line.

"You're a lovely woman, Ophelia. But you're too settled. Set in your ways. A man can tell."

I put my spoon down. I actually put the spoon down, which for me is a whole event.

"Too settled," I said. "Is that what we're calling it now?"

"I mean it kindly," he said, and smiled like he'd handed me a compliment wrapped in a wet fish.

I paid for my own half of the bill, which he seemed surprised by, and I walked out into the drizzle thinking all the way home about the phrase. Too settled. Fifty-one years old, thirty of them spent in a seed lab counting and weighing and labeling things smaller than a lentil, and yes, my tea is at four, and yes, my wellies are by the same door they've been by since 2009. Settled. Guilty as charged, your honor.

But it sat wrong in me all Friday. It sat wrong through two trays of barley samples and through Hugh Bradford stopping at my bench to explain, for the third time this month, his orchid program.

"The hybrids are ready, Ophelia. I'm donating a batch to that bathhouse garden, the Nightjar place. Rare stock. It'll put us on the map."

"That's lovely, Hugh," I said, not looking up from the moisture meter.

"You could deliver them personally. Be good for the lab's profile."

"Mm," I said, which is how I agree to things at work without agreeing to them.

That night I sat in my kitchen with a mug going cold and thought, right. Fine. Too settled. A woman who's been single since Douglas moved to Inverness nine years ago, a woman whose wildest Friday is defrosting the freezer. Maybe Alistair had a point, and maybe the point deserved a kick in the teeth.

So I rang Rufus.

Rufus Smithson. Park ranger, fifty-two, hips that complain when it rains. We met at twenty-two in a botany course where he nearly set fire to the fumehood and I nearly failed because of it. We kissed once at a party when we were twenty-four, behind a shed, badly, and then laughed so hard we had to sit down, and we'd been best friends ever since. Twenty-nine years of him turning up with biscuits and leaving with complaints about tourists.

He answered on the fourth ring.

"Graves. It's half nine. Somebody better be dead."

"Somebody is. My social life. I killed it myself, Thursday, sticky toffee pudding, you'll want details."

He snorted. I heard a chair creak, him settling in. "Go on then."

So I told him. The boat. The insurance voice. The line itself, delivered in my best Alistair impression, all gravitas and no chin. Rufus laughed so hard he started coughing, and there was a pause where I could hear him wheezing and a dog barking somewhere behind him.

"Too settled," he managed. "He said that. To your face."

"To my pudding, technically."

"And what, you want me to egg his house?"

"Better." I took a breath, because even I could hear how mad the next bit was. "There's a bathhouse behind the botanic garden. The Nightjar. Steam rooms, plunge pools, the lot. I'm going Saturday night, and I'm going to be reckless and unsettled, and you're coming with me."

Silence. A long one. Long enough that I checked the screen to see if the call had dropped.

"You want," he said slowly, "to go to a bathhouse. With me. Your mate of twenty-nine years. To prove a point to a man with a boat."

"That's the shape of it, yes!"

"Ophelia. I'm fifty-two. I've got a hip that sounds like a rusted gate. The last spontaneous thing I did was buy the wrong biscuits on purpose, and that was an accident I chose not to correct."

"So you're saying you're too settled too."

That landed. I heard it land, that little sharp intake he does when I've scored.

"Low blow," he said. "Low, dirty blow."

"It's true though, isn't it. We've become two people who plan things. We plan the planning. I want one night where nothing is planned and nothing is expected and nobody calls me settled."

"Nothing expected," he repeated. "You realize bathhouses have rules. Signs. There'll be a laminated sheet somewhere telling us what's expected."

"Then we'll ignore the laminated sheet. Come on, Rufus. One experiment. Controls, variables, a proper hypothesis. Hypothesis: two old friends can still have one reckless night without the world ending. You were a scientist once. Sort of."

He made a noise like a man being talked into something against his better judgment, which is Rufus's native language.

"Saturday," he said at last. "Fine. Saturday. But I'm setting terms. One, no photos, I'm not ending up on anybody's phone. Two, we leave whenever one of us says so, no arguments. Three..."

"Go on."

"Three, nobody finds out. Especially not your walking group. I've met your walking group."

"Deal," I said, grinning at my cold mug like an idiot. "I'll book us in."

"Book us? I thought this was unplanned."

"An experiment still needs a booking, you great numpty."

He laughed again and rang off, and I sat there in my kitchen feeling, for the first time since Thursday, properly awake.

Saturday came round faster than I'd expected, the way Saturdays do when you've promised yourself something daft. I'd told Hugh I'd collect his orchid donation on the way, since the Nightjar was taking delivery anyway, as he'd asked. That meant a crate of rare hybrids riding shotgun in my ancient blue Corsa while I drove up through the hills, mist coming off the loch like something out of a tourism advert.

The lab was quiet that morning. I signed out the crate, signed the clipboard, signed myself into whatever this was becoming, and loaded the plants carefully. They were lovely, I'll give Hugh that. Pale flowers with dark throats, packed in straw like little sleeping things.

"Tell them the light in the conservatory suits them," Hugh said, hovering. "Diffused. Never direct."

"They're going to a bathhouse garden, Hugh, not a state visit."

"Diffused light," he called after me, as if the plants could hear.

The pub was half a mile from the ranger station, the one with the low ceiling and the fire that's never actually gone out since before either of us was born. Rufus was already there, in the corner seat he always takes, two pints on the table and the face of a man attending his own sentencing.

"You came," I said, sitting down.

"You rang," he said. "That's how it works, Graves."

He pushed a pint at me. I took it. Outside, the drizzle was doing its usual Scottish thing, half rain, half apology.

"I still think this is absurd," he said. "You know that. A bathhouse. Us."

"That's rather the point of it. Absurdity is the variable."

"Twenty-nine years I've known you and you've never once done anything reckless."

"I kissed you behind a shed."

"That wasn't reckless, that was bad coordination. We both tripped."

"We did not both trip, you leaned in first, I've had nearly three decades to build the case and the case is airtight."

He laughed into his pint, and for a second it was like being twenty-two again, minus the fumehood fire. Then he set the glass down and went serious, the way he does when he's about to be sensible, which is his worst quality.

"Right. Terms," he said. "We go in. We sit in hot water. We get properly warm for the first time since 2019. We come out prune-handed and slightly dizzy, and we call it a night. That is the entire shape of it. Nothing weird."

"Nothing weird," I agreed.

"And if it's rubbish, we say it's rubbish and go for chips."

"And if it's brilliant?"

He looked at his pint. Then at me. Then at his pint again, which is very Rufus.

"Then it's brilliant," he said, "and we still go for chips. Some things hold at any temperature."

I raised my glass. He raised his. The fire crackled like it was placing a bet on us.

"To the experiment," I said.

"To being unsettled," he said, and we drank, and it was settled, which I suppose was the first joke of the night, though neither of us laughed at the time.

Yvonne caught me at the Nightjar's front desk, of all places, while Rufus was off finding the gents. I hadn't seen her in fifteen years, back when we both did the horticulture contract for the council and she quit to work at the Nightjar.

"Ophelia Graves," she said, like I was a package she'd been waiting on. "As I live and breathe. You still driving that blue Corsa?"

"Still driving it. It's outside with a crate of orchids in it."

"Orchids." She raised her eyebrows. "Hugh's, I suppose. He's been going on about his donation for weeks. Diffused light, never direct, don't touch the labels." She did a fair impression of him. "Well, they'll be happy where they're going."

"And where's that?"

"Conservatory at the Nightjar. We're putting in a new garden, Victorian revival, very grand. Hugh sent something else along too, actually." She rummaged in a box on the counter and came out with a brass thing on a wooden base. A barometer. Polished, with a little dial and a needle, glass over the front. "For the garden wall. He says a proper Victorian garden needs a proper Victorian barometer."

"It's lovely," I said, and I meant it, and then I looked closer and stopped meaning it quite so calmly.

"Yvonne. Where's this going again?"

"The Nightjar. Conservatory wall. Why?"

"Because the brochure has a photo of one of these in the steam room. I looked at it for an hour on Friday. Same dial, same base, same brass ring on top. I remember thinking it was the only honest thing in the room, because it just sits there and tells you the truth about the air."

"Well, they're from the same supplier," she said. "Hugh buys them in pairs. Always has. One for the lab, one for wherever he's donating. Keeps the readings consistent, he says." She wrapped it in newspaper with the brisk hands of a woman who has wrapped ten thousand things. "You should see the needle move when the steam builds. Up and up. Marvelous for the lungs, apparently, watching it."

I held it in my arms while Yvonne went for a trolley, and I'm not proud of what I did next, which was to think about it for the whole time the orchids were being unloaded. A needle. A needle that climbs when the steam climbs. The steam rooms at the Nightjar get hot on a schedule, I'd read that in the brochure, thirty past seven, quarter past eight, like a timetable for weather.

I won't pretend I had a plan. I didn't have a plan. I had a needle and a friend and a hypothesis, and that's how most science starts anyway.

The orchids went in easy enough. Yvonne brought the trolley round to the side door with two other staff, we unloaded the Corsa, and Hugh's diffused light speech was relayed to the head gardener, who nodded the way people nod when they've heard it four times already. Then Yvonne clapped her hands together.

"Right. You two are booked for the evening, yes? I remember the name. Graves, party of two."

"That's us."

"And what are you after tonight? Deep heat? Quiet? The plunge?"

"Somewhere quiet," I said. "A quiet corner. We're old friends catching up, we don't want to be in the middle of things."

And that's when I watched it happen. I watched Yvonne's face do a small, catastrophic arithmetic. Quiet corner. Party of two. Woman of a certain age, man of a certain age, not wearing rings, Saturday night. I watched her arrive at the wrong answer with total confidence.

"Of course," she said softly. "Of course. Say no more, Ophelia!"

"There's nothing to say, we're just..."

"Say no more," she repeated, and took my elbow, and steered me and Rufus down a corridor smelling of eucalyptus and hot tile, past the main pools, past the big steam room with its honest barometer on the wall, and through a door with a brass number on it.

The suite was tiled floor to ceiling in green and cream. A deep pool, big enough for four. A marble bench. Candles already lit, which should have been my first warning. There was a card on the bench.

"Yvonne," Rufus said behind me. "This looks... private."

"It is," she said, glowing. "Now. I'll leave you to it. Your guest is expecting you at half past eight, I told him the quiet suite, and oh, he's lovely, Ophelia, truly, a widower, grows his own..."

"Yvonne." I held up the card. "What's this?"

"That's the little arrangement I made for you. Blind date. He's a regular. I thought, well, you asked for quiet and privacy, and I thought, who better than..."

"We are not here on a date," I said. "We're here together. With each other. As in, this man beside me is my date, such as it is."

There was a silence of about four seconds, which in a steam corridor is a very long time.

"Oh," said Yvonne. "Oh, dear. I've matched you twice over."

"You've what?"

"Well. Harold is expecting a quiet suite at half past eight. I can't very well put him back in the communal pool now, he's terribly shy, it took me three months to talk him into this." She wrung her hands, actually wrung them. "I'll sort it. I'll give him the little room off the plunge, it's smaller but it's got the good mosaic..."

"Yvonne," Rufus said, in his calm ranger voice, the one he uses on lost hikers. "Nobody's in trouble. Sit down a second."

She sat on the marble bench like a woman awaiting sentencing.

"Here's what happens," he said. "You go find Harold. You explain, honestly, that the suite was double-booked. You offer him whatever makes it right, a free month, whatever. And we'll stay in here, because we've paid for it and it's warm and we don't mind."

"But it's for strangers," she said. "It's meant for two strangers to meet. It would be improper, two people who already know each other, in the strangers' suite, it defeats the whole..."

"Yvonne," I said. "Two friends using a stranger's suite is the least improper thing that will happen in this building tonight. Go on. Mind Harold. Tell him the barometer says rising."

She went. I heard her footsteps, and then a distant door, and then just the water moving in the pool and the candles doing their little flicker.

Rufus looked at me. "You told her to tell