Dandy Gilver and a Deadly Measure of Brimstone (9 page)

The round little person reappeared like a jack-in-the-box. She held out a velvet bag, somewhat bigger than a boxing glove to look at and much bigger on the inside, having no padding, with a hinged wooden half-moon clasp, like a broken embroidery ring. ‘For your jewels and things, madam,’ she said. I scooped them up along with my bag and dropped them in. She snapped the half-moon closed, turned a little key and held it out to me. It was a silly little thing on a silk ribbon and I could not see the point of it when the velvet bag could be cut through with a pair of nail scissors anyway, but I dutifully held out my hand and allowed her to put the key around my wrist.

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ she said, ‘but feel it.’ I took the bag out of her hands and had to tighten my grip before it fell.

‘What on earth?’ I said. ‘Why is it so heavy?’

‘It’s lead-lined,’ she replied. ‘Safe as houses. Some of our guests use these instead of the hotel strongroom. And the key locks the cubby hole too.’

I followed her to the end of the cubicles where she deposited my clothes on a shelf and I locked the boxing glove into a tiny cupboard above.

‘Now, on you go, madam, and have a lovely bath.’

‘I’ve never …’

‘Slowly does it,’ she said. ‘Cool to warm to hot, steam if you like, and into the pool to refresh again. Just ring a bell if you feel like a rub-down. It’s Mrs Cronin’s afternoon off but we’re quiet enough.’

I wanted to tip her but my bag was under lock and key so I determined to learn her name and leave an envelope for her later.

‘Thank you …’

‘Regina,’ she said.

‘Gosh,’ I said, unable to stop myself.

‘That’s being polite about it, madam,’ she said. ‘On you go.’

The cool room was about half full, the slatted cedar chaises covered over with towels and on the towels, a mixture of solid matrons and daughters swathed in their lawn shifts, heads wrapped in turbans, and brighter younger things swathed in … I took a closer look … nothing at all! Like one of the Old Masters come to life, they lounged singly, in pairs and threesomes: Susannah without the elders, the rising and the setting sun together, Venus, Minerva and Juno awaiting Paris, all set for the judging.

I sank down onto the nearest couch, loosened the cord of my robe and stared steadily ahead, unsure whether I was blushing or whether the flood of heat into my head was the beginning of this ridiculous process by which I would boil myself, like a lobster, gradually, avoiding any pain.

Conversations were all around me as they often seem to be when one is alone – desultory remarks batted back and forth at full volume and other, more hushed and hurried exchanges, the sort where illicit knowledge changes hands. Usually it is an effort not to eavesdrop, today I was engaged in the slightly different effort of listening to all of them whilst appearing not to listen to any.

‘Dear Tot, but what a stickler he is!’

‘You should have had a pummel instead, my love.’

‘My second daughter, now, she had ever such a bad’ – whisper – ‘but she’s through it now.’

‘—
had
heard that the’ – whisper – ‘were called in, but it came right in the end.’

‘Fiend! That woman terrifies me. Pummelling indeed.’

‘—carries on like this, we might have to make other arrangements. I mean to say’ – whisper – ‘even if she didn’t understand what it meant.’

‘—wouldn’t like to upset the poor dear. I was always so very fond’ – whisper – ‘but it’s only common decency.’

‘That’s enough for me! My hair will never be the same again and my face will still be red at midnight.’

‘Tot doesn’t count the cool room.’

‘Tot needn’t know. I’m going to have a bath and a rest, darling. Knock on your way down, won’t you?’

This last speaker rose from her chaise and walked, as naked as the day she was born, trailing her shift and robe behind her along the floor as though she were laying a scent to train a pack of puppies. I caught the eye of the swaddled and be-turbanned woman opposite me and could not keep my eyebrows in place. She took this as a cue for speech.

‘If this is your first time, dear, you’ll doubtless be surprised at the sights you’re seeing. It’s changed days, I can tell you.’

‘You know the place well?’ I asked.

‘Been coming here for years with my chest.’

‘Ah, just like my dear friend Mrs Addie,’ I said. ‘Mrs Enid Addie? Have you ever bumped into her?’

‘Is it her chest, dear?’

‘Her back.’

‘It’s my chest, see.’

Could the clientele possibly be organised by body parts as well as being split into two teams under Doctor and Master? Judging by the way the chest woman’s attention had strayed when I said back, it appeared so.

I gave her a meaningless smile and stood up to move away. Of course, the only place to go was the warm room. I parted the velvet curtain and slipped through.

There were even fewer shifts in here, and those that were worn were useless, transparent with perspiration and leaving their wearers looking more like Old Masters than ever, given the way that the clothes of the ancients, at least as rendered in oils, are always diaphanous and slipping off at one shoulder. It was undoubtedly warm too; even the tiled floor was hot under my bare feet and, while there was a smell of fresh linen rising from the towels, the base note was of humanity, only just mild enough not to be troubling.

I arranged myself for rest and felt my scalp prickle as my hair gave up and lay down on my head like a dead thing. Grant’s spray bath would have its work cut out making me presentable again, I could see.

‘God, it’s hot,’ said a voice, with considerable redundancy. ‘What’s this supposed to do?’

‘It’s a treatment,’ said another, making no great contribution in my view. ‘It counts.’

‘If you’ll excuse me,’ came a third. It was a youngish woman, with long black wavy hair hanging down her back, sticking to her shift in fact in the most uncomfortable-looking way. Indeed, her shift was sticking to her, neck to ankle, twisting as it clung to her legs. I surreptitiously peeled mine away from my moistening skin and tented it over my knees. ‘I couldn’t help hearing,’ she said. She leaned towards the two naked women who were lying like seals on rocks, heads lolling, feet flopped inwards in a fashion which would have had Nanny Palmer trembling for their knee joints. (Nanny Palmer always did seem to think that little girls’ legs were put together like the less expensive kind of French dolls, meant to bend one way and one way only, calamitous agony in store if one misused them.)

‘The dry heat of the Russian bath relaxes muscles, eases joints, softens cartilage, lifts impurities from the skin, exercises and cleanses the lungs and blends the blood.’

‘Softens
what
?’ said the younger of the naked women, lifting her head to squint.

‘If only my impurities were skin deep!’ said the other and they both snorted with laughter.

The speaker made a great show of twisting her hair into a rope over one shoulder and lay back again. The few hairs she had missed, still snaking over her arms and shoulders, looked more ticklish than ever. Just looking at her made me itch.

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘That was most informative.’ The two lolling heads twitched up again and regarded me. ‘My dear friend Mrs Enid Addie told me the baths were wonderful but she didn’t explain why.’ There was no spark of recognition in any of them and so I closed my eyes and concentrated on exercising and cleansing my lungs, trying not to think about what my blood might be being blended with. Re-blended with itself perhaps, the red corpuscles and the white corpuscles reassembling in a healthful rosy pink, like a salad dressing which had been left standing and must be shaken up again. No chance of that here. The boiled red bodies and the slim white shifts might be side-by-side but they would never emulsify.

Perhaps my brain was cooked and the appearance of good sense was mistaken, but I felt I had made a tremendous discovery. One of the doctor’s or one of the master’s, Mrs Cronin had said. Tot’s ladies were the naked yellers; Dr Laidlaw’s the swaddled whisperers. Whether it had anything to do with the case (if there was a case) was another question, but perhaps the air of scientific rigour was rubbing off on me, for no sooner had I formed the hypothesis than I longed to test it. I eyed the further set of velvet curtains covering the entrance to the hot room. In there would be naked women, drawling and giggling, and women in shifts talking about cartilage and decency. I gathered myself, swung my legs, sat up and prepared to stand. My head was pulsing, my feet too and they made the most repulsive wet slapping noises as I walked along the tiles between the rows of couches.

‘You’re moving rather fast,’ said the dark-haired woman.

‘Probably right,’ murmured one of the others. ‘Like ripping off a sticking plaster.’

I blundered on. Through the velvet curtains, in the hot room, there were no more chaises, just marble benches lining the walls and softened – a little – with folded towels. There were three women in here, all naked, and within a moment I made a fourth. The joy of removing that sodden shift and feeling a little air move over my sweltering skin cannot be described. As to what my companions made of me, I could not have cared if the three strange women had been bishops’ wives or Bloomsbury poetesses; they could damn my soul or feast their eyes, I was too hot to mind them.

It was almost mesmerising, the baking heat; I could taste it. I thought I could feel myself shrivelling too, as moisture left my body and ran down my skin to soak into the towel beneath me. Were there impurities in that moisture, being carried away? Was I going to emerge shrunken but serene, muscles like rubber, cartilage like jelly, blood like mayonnaise?

‘I think I’m still squiffy,’ was the first remark which intruded onto my budding serenity. ‘That nasty big excrescence on the ceiling up there looks just like my dancing master.’

‘Of course you are! You drank enough to float a navy last night. I can smell it from here.’

‘Don’t be foul! How dare you say you can smell me, you beast. It was therapeutic. Guinness, don’t you know. Tot counts that, so really I’m in oodles of credit, chumming along with you in here today.’

The third member of the party piped up then.

‘Guinness might well be medicinal,’ she said. ‘But what’s your excuse for mixing it in with champagne?’

‘Oh well, you know,’ said the first woman. ‘Guinness! Ugh!’

And although they were almost talking about medicine, I felt that my experiment was successfully complete. Three naked women and not a whisper among them.

I hauled myself to my feet, put my robe around my shoulders – the shift was not fit to mop the floor with, really – and exited in a kind of helpless stiff-legged hurtle, feeling as though I might burst like a sausage from the heat roiling inside me, not so shrunken after all.

The steam room had not even entered my mind; it had sounded like a cruel joke when Dr Laidlaw had shown it to me that morning: hotter than ever and muggy too, but just as I reeled along towards the resting room where I thought, with enough tea and cool cloths, I might be returned to my usual self in a day or so, three robed ladies of great age and girth opened the frosted glass door and went in. I could not resist. My hypothesis had only been half tested. Here was the rest of the … I believe the word is cohort; Hugh taught it to me when he was testing soil amendments in his barley fields and it left an impression on me which has never faded.

I slipped my arms into the sleeves of the robe, belted it, and pulled open the door onto a great engulfing billow of scented steam which rolled out and enveloped me. It was like taking the lid off a steaming kettle and putting one’s head in and it seemed impossible to me that one could enter and survive, impossible that one could draw down such boiling fog into one’s lungs without drowning.

My view was not that of the majority. As I stood there, a sharp voice accosted me.

‘Here, shut that door. You’re letting the heat out.’ For all the world as though I had introduced a chilly draught to a parlour.

‘So sorry,’ I muttered and stepped inside, to the strange, ghostly, pungent embrace of the Turkish bath. I could not see a thing. I tripped over a pair of feet, uttering another apology, and felt my way to a marble shelf, dripping and slippery, where I sat down and shrugged my robe off again, letting my head fall backwards and my mouth drop open. This could not possibly be good for the human frame! It smelled rather pleasant, of eucalyptus or some such, and since it was impossible to say whether the moisture now streaming down me like rain down a window in a storm had its source without or within, I might even have said I felt less pricklingly uncomfortable than I had before, but it was like trying to breathe wet cotton wool through a sieve; I laboured and sighed and sounded, I am sure, like every variety of farm animal, only saved from mortification because I could hear breathing just as stertorous, just as vile, from all around. I blew upwards into my hair. I didn’t manage to shift a single sopping strand of it, naturally, but at least the draught made me need to blink. I was quite sure I had not blinked once, had not needed to, since I had pulled open the door.

I was just summoning my reserves to leave when a curious thing happened. The three ladies, I am sure of it, simply forgot that I was there. Even though I had just trodden quite hard on one of their bunions, the pall of steam had cloaked me and perhaps my breathing was softer than theirs after all, but I am sure that the words which filled that muffled air were not meant for the ears of a stranger.

‘And you’re sure, are you, Mrs Riddle?’

‘Absolutely positive, Mrs Davies. My lady in Glasgow was perfectly clear that we’d not find them here. Not for a minute.’

‘They, Mrs Riddle? Is there more than one? That nice young man mentioned one only.’

‘Who’s to say, Mrs Scott? I’d be very surprised if, after everything that’s happened here in seventy-five years, it’s only been that one single time. That “nice young man” was out of his depth completely.’

‘Feeling his way.’

‘By pure faith.’

‘So unusual to find it in a youngster, never mind in a man.’