Deadly Measure of Brimstone

4

Luncheon was, on several counts, a revelation. Remembering what Mrs Bowie née Addie had reported I had expected clear soup and rye wafers, but when I joined Hugh and the boys at one of the many tables in the vaulted and pillared dining room, the menu card announced potted shrimps, brown bread, cold ham, baked potatoes, egg mayonnaise, tomato chutney, apple charlotte and custard, and lest one faint from starvation before teatime there was the further option of biscuits, radishes, celery and cheese. Far from such fare driving one down to Moffat to the Toffee Shop for tuck, I wondered how one could rise from one’s armchair even to start the journey. That was the first surprise: the menu.

The second was the crowd. After the empty treatment suite, the deserted baths and the hollow, echoing drawing room, I had expected the four of us to be marooned in a vastness (Alec had volunteered to take a tray in his room until I could break the news of his presence and hence the reason for ours to Hugh).

The dining room was certainly vast. It was designed after the fashion of a winter garden – indeed I was later to learn, when I got to know the layout of the Hydro properly, that it matched the winter gardens in the other wing – except that only the ceiling was glass, the walls between the mock pillars being plaster painted with outdoor scenes. The painter, very sensibly, had decided to depict rather better weather than was often to be viewed through the glass walls of the winter gardens proper, and there were palm trees, bougainvilleas, stretches of white sand and the straw roofs of distant village huts besides. Inside these exotic walls, tables were set for couples, fours and sixes, with good white linen and glittering Sheffield plate and, as I say, there was a trickle, a steady trickle, of guests entering, taking seats and unfolding napkins. I could not help noticing, as I glanced around, that there was not a Mrs Addie amongst the lot of them.

To be sure, I had never met the woman, but I had seen her photographic portrait, her children and her house and could have told an inquisitor everything about her from her felt hat to her rubber galoshes, from her morning paper to her evening prayer. None of the characters filing into the Hydro dining room that day were the sort to wear felt and galoshes, nor yet to say prayers, and the few who had newspapers under their arms, as though it were breakfast and not luncheon, had them turned to the sporting pages and society columns.

I was now, frankly, staring as they sat themselves down, lit cigarettes and started up desultory conversations with their neighbours. I could not get the idea of breakfast to leave my mind, for most of them had a dishevelled look, some yawning, some coughing as they lit what looked to be the first smoke of the day, and a few positively hungover. I recognised the careful movements and the yellow-tinged pallor from my unmarried days when I would have to go down to breakfast at house parties and face the bloodshot eyes of some young man as uninteresting now, in his headache and stomach troubles, as he had been in his wine and stories the evening before. One of the several benefits of giving up girlhood for husband and home was breakfast in bed at house parties and never having to look at a hangover again. Hugh, thank goodness, does not go in for them.

‘Funny lot,’ he said now, looking around. This was a wild excursion into gossip for him; usually he affects complete oblivion of anyone in the surroundings to whom he has not had an introduction. Before my detecting days I used to too. I wondered at the comment and turned to regard him. I found him staring back out of wide, unblinking eyes. Odder and odder.

‘Invalids, I daresay,’ I murmured. ‘Here for their livers, by the looks of them.’

Hugh nodded and turned to address a speech to Donald. Rivers was the topic and I stopped listening, but I did not stop watching and I am sure that I did not imagine the look in Hugh’s eye. Amusement. Satisfaction. One of those looks that gleams, anyway.

As I worked my way through my potted shrimps, which were delicious and would make an ideal luncheon followed by the cheese and biscuits, if one could sidestep all the ham and custard in between, I watched the dishevelled masses come slowly to life. Glasses of warm water and lemon were served, brown bread was nibbled, shrimps ignored, and eventually conversation began to ripple and swoop amongst the tables. Someone laughed. Someone else called across half the room to arrange a tennis match. Someone groaned, but it was the groan with which a silly joke was answered, not a groan of suffering.

And as I watched I began to notice that here and there, like big black crows in a cage full of budgerigars, there were parties of Addies after all. Whatever their names were they were Addies at heart, sitting bolt upright like nannies at a party, eating their way stolidly through the courses and ignoring the twittering and plumage around them.

Mr Laidlaw appeared as the coffee was being served and took a cup with him as he walked about the room. He had ditched his dinner jacket at last, into a normal suit although rather light for the country, but looked no less of a head waiter as he made his circuit, stopping to chat, beaming, evidently entertaining since gales of laughter met his every word. He did not neglect the tables of Addies, but here he modified his demeanour, bowing, murmuring, cocking his head and spreading a look of grave concern over his face as one dowager seemed to issue a complaint. Indeed, he went as far as to set down his coffee cup, extract a small notebook from his breast pocket and jot something down in it with a pencil. The dowager did not crack a smile but she nodded firmly and with a word he was on his way again. He was making his way towards our table and he caught me watching him. I was facing him head-on, no chance to dissemble.

‘Hello again,’ he said. ‘Hello, hello. Now, how are you settling in? Everything running smoothly? Feeling better already, are we?’

He was just the sort of man – hail fellow, well met – that Hugh normally cannot stand but there was no look of scorn or detestation here today although he did not go as far as to answer such inanity.

‘Jolly good fodder,’ said Teddy. ‘I don’t wonder people get better, sir, if you feed them like this every day.’

‘Hear, hear,’ said Donald. And I was torn between feeling fond pride at their manners for once and smarting at the sideswipe to Gilverton’s kitchens.

‘And your medical chores will all be over by tea,’ said Laidlaw. ‘Ginger snaps and cherry cake, I believe. But I did just want to warn you of the fire drill.’

‘When is it?’ asked Hugh, getting out his watch and flipping it open.

‘Over the course of the next few days,’ said Laidlaw. ‘A better drill if we don’t know exactly when, eh? But it’ll be in the night, save anyone clambering out of a bath and shivering on the terrace in a towel.’

Hugh looked understandably disgruntled at this news but I knew he would not lament to me. He had been so pleased at besting me and escaping Auchenlea House that he would not for a pension admit he had let himself in for inconvenience and that I, tucked up alone in the room he had spurned, might have the better of it.

‘Very sensible,’ I said. ‘What’s a fire drill if everyone knows it’s coming?’

‘But you’re not actually staying in the Hydro, madam?’ said Laidlaw. ‘Nor the young men?’ He was giving me a sharper look than I had yet seen upon his face. I offered a faint smile in return. ‘And your husband tells me you made quite a recent booking. I see, I see. Well, welcome one, welcome all.’ He tipped me a salute and moved away.

I roundly hoped that he did not see and I did not think that he could, for neither Alec nor I had done a single thing to raise suspicion of our intent. Still, I worried because his words were puzzling.

‘What a peculiar person,’ I said, falling back on my grandmother’s way of dealing with puzzlement: stake a claim to sense and normalcy and blame the other party for any troubled feelings or confusion they might have caused. ‘Finished, boys? What shall we do?’

‘I’m awfully tired,’ said Donald. ‘Like a pit pony at dusk.’

‘Like a python who’s just eaten an antelope,’ I corrected, looking at the crumbs on his cheese plate. ‘I’m not surprised. Why don’t all three of you tuck up on some of those nice deckchairs out on the terrace and I’ll tell the doctor where to find you.’

‘There’s a croquet lawn,’ said Teddy, hopefully.

‘Rest first,’ I said. Even Hugh agreed, to my surprise, and so I accompanied them out there, a deep terrace facing the lawns where the afternoon sun warmed the stones and released billows of scent from the stands of jasmine which stood like sentries outside all of the french windows. The deckchairs were filling fast, with the bright young things – not so young, all of them, but very bright – from the dining room, and I was forced to walk at an unseemly pace to secure three together from under the nose of another party.

‘Hmph,’ said one of these, a woman in her forties with the naked look of one who normally wears a great deal of paint but is currently doing without any. Perhaps such a look could not possibly be; it might come down to the over-plucking of eyebrows or the sheen of the wrinkle cream such women trowel on out of the same vanity that leads to the painting.

‘Awfully sorry,’ I said. ‘Were these yours?’

‘Come on, Pegs,’ said one of the men who was with her. ‘Let’s go and float in the swimming bath and call that our day’s treatment.’

‘Pegs’ giggled and turned with a swish of her pleats to follow the men back along the terrace.

‘We’re going to float,’ she called, waving at some swaddled nappers she was passing. ‘No contraptions for us today. Yah-boo! Sucks to you!’

There was a wave of laughter at this wit. We four Gilvers pretended not to hear her and instead made ourselves busy with pillows and rugs and cranking the backrests up and down until the angles were agreeable.

‘I’ll tell someone to let Dr Laidlaw know where you are,’ I said. ‘And I’ll see you later. Now, be brave boys when the time comes, won’t you?’ I was looking at my sons but thinking of Hugh, naturally.

‘Brave?’ said Teddy. ‘There won’t be needles, will there?’

‘Not a one,’ I said. ‘I’m sure the doctor will be as gentle as gentle can be.’ I might have given Hugh a gleaming look of my own, something for him to ponder. Then I kissed all three of them on their foreheads and withdrew.

I told a passing maid – she might have been a nurse-orderly; the uniform made it hard to say – that Dr Laidlaw’s afternoon’s patients were on the terrace and then set about the task of finding Alec. There was no reception desk or lobby as in a normal hotel and there did not appear to be an internal telephone system either. I was loitering with no firm intent near the door which led to the men’s treatment rooms when I heard heels clip-clopping rapidly across the parquet and caught sight of the matron-like figure from the morning whisking across the end of a passageway dressed in outdoor clothes. I shot after her.

‘Mrs Cronin?’ I said.

She stopped and turned. ‘Mrs Gilver?’

‘I was just wondering,’ I said. ‘Is there a… well, on a cruise it would be a passenger list. One of my sons thinks he spotted a neighbour.’

‘Very possibly,’ she said, and I was at a loss to explain the dryness of her tone. ‘Name?’

‘Oh, but with the Hydro so full, you couldn’t surely…?’

‘Let’s see,’ she said. ‘It depends if he’s one of Doctor’s or one of Master’s.’

‘I understand,’ I lied, hoping that my face betrayed nothing. ‘It’s a Mr Osborne. A young chap. Bad back.’

‘Ah, yes,’ she said. ‘I put him down as Master’s but I was wrong. He’s one of the doctor’s after all.’

‘And how would I find out where his room is?’ I asked. She blinked. ‘So I can slip a little note under the door.’

‘I could deliver a note,’ she said. ‘Or you could pop it in the bag in the entrance hall.’

‘Of course,’ I said.

‘But as it happens, there’s no need. I’m glad you hailed me, Mrs Gilver.’ There was a dramatic pause. ‘I was looking for you to give you this.’ With quite a flourish she produced an envelope she had been holding behind her back. My name was written on it, in Alec’s hand. ‘He thinks he spotted you too,’ she said with a smile which lifted one side of her mouth, but left the other and both of her eyes unchanged.

‘Ha!’ I said. ‘Gosh, what a- How-’ I cleared my throat. ‘Thank you.’ I took the envelope.

‘Don’t mention it,’ she said. ‘We don’t get many folk from Perthshire, what with all the hydros up there, right to hand. Two at once is very remarkable.’ The rat-a-tat-tat of her heels on the polished floor began again and she was gone before I could shut my mouth, much less open it again to answer.

‘Matron’s onto us,’ I said, slipping into Alec’s room a few minutes later. It was another of the white chambers, with a metal bed-frame and an enormous bare window taking up most of one wall, but the view was across the valley and so the room was flooded with afternoon light. It was so warm, with the sun beating in, that the paint, distemper and wood varnish, the very soap which had been used to wash the floor, were releasing their pungencies to mix in the stifling air. Alec sat in the room’s only armchair, a wicker one, looking stupefied.

‘I have a hearty appetite, Dandy, as you know,’ he said. ‘But that luncheon and this sunshine have almost done for me. Could we take a turn about the gardens?’

‘Hugh and the boys are on the terrace,’ I said. ‘Did you hear me?’

‘I did, but all my blood’s in my middle dealing with the apple charlotte. None left in my brain. Onto us how?’

‘How disgustingly detailed,’ I said. I crossed the room and after a moment’s wrestling with the unfamiliar catch I threw open the window. ‘I’m not sure, but she certainly hasn’t swallowed the notion of our just happening to meet here.’

‘Oh.’ Alec was taking deep gulps of fresh air but was still not exactly sparking.

‘I hope she hasn’t twigged that we’re detectives. If she’s neck deep in Mrs Addie, anyway.’ I turned away from the breeze to light a cigarette. ‘Odd about the food, after what Mrs Bowie said, isn’t it?’

‘We haven’t started detecting yet,’ said Alec. He hauled himself to his feet and joined me, looking down over the grounds, and farther out across the valley. ‘With any luck she only suspects us of an assignation.’

I coughed out a puff of smoke.

‘In any case, we need to box shy of her,’ I said. ‘Pity. Because she gave an interesting little view of the Laidlaws just now. There’s a split down the middle of this place as far as Mrs Cronin’s concerned. There’s them as is here for the doctor and there’s them as is here for the master.’

‘So Mrs Cronin might only be neck-deep in factional loyalties – remember the Addies told us that one of the Laidlaws wants to sell up and one of them wants to carry on?’

‘But on the other hand she might know something about how Mrs Addie died,’ I supplied.

‘So Mrs Cronin’s card is duly moved to the front of the box with one corner turned down,’ Alec said.

‘And actually, I don’t know if you noticed it yourself but there do seem to be two distinct sorts of Hydro inmates. I thought so myself at luncheon.’

‘But which sort is Matron all for?’ Alec asked. I shrugged. ‘Master is the more respectful term. And don’t nurses tend to loathe lady doctors?’

‘But she’s a woman as well as a nurse,’ I said. ‘And Laidlaw is a bounder.’

Alec was lighting his pipe and he snorted and choked a little.

‘A bounder, begad?’ he said. ‘And a cad and a rotter?’

‘Oh all right then, a creep,’ I said. ‘As Donald and Teddy would say. Don’t you think so?’

‘Despite the fact that he’s latched on to me in a rather mysterious way,’ said Alec, striking another match and taking a second run at it, ‘I took his act to be tailored to ladies.’

‘Ugh.’

‘I went as far as to think it a shame that all the charm and frivolity came to him and none to the poor dear doctor when it was she who got the actual looks.’

I thought back to Dr Laidlaw, her floppy hat and drab dress, and could just about see what he meant. She had very large soft brown eyes, like a Labrador retriever, and good cheekbones. An elegant jaw too, whereas her brother had the pudgy cheeks and double chin of a bon viveur.

‘How do you mean, latched on?’ I asked.

Alec shrugged. ‘Seems to want to find something out without asking. Veiled remarks and all that, very tiresome. But probably irrelevant. Right,’ he went on, after one of the long series of puffings with which he gets his pipe going. I always want to make choo-choo noises as he does so. ‘Where do we start?’

‘We need to piece together Mrs Addie’s last day,’ I said. ‘See if we can find out where she was, what she did, try to fall in with the staff she’d have been seeing. You could cultivate any other long-term guests too.’

‘And you?’ said Alec, not exactly trustingly.

‘I shall have to go and talk to the police, I suppose. I don’t much care for them, you know.’

‘You care for Inspector Hutchinson.’

This was true. Inspector Hutchinson had treated Alec and me to an unrelieved diet of sharp questions, scornful remarks and deflating summations during the case we had worked together, but had somehow earned our undying devotion that way.

‘Not much chance of meeting his equal.’

‘What are you going to say?’

‘I have no idea. I’m hoping to hear more than I tell.’

‘I wouldn’t have thought so,’ said Alec. ‘Still, you have to keep busy somehow.’

I did not intend to steal his thunder. Nothing was further from my mind. Alec was here in the heart of things and, for once, I was not. It was no more than a redressing of the balance between us and at that it was long overdue. Nevertheless, when I left him, I found myself neither descending to the town nor returning to the terrace to see how my menfolk fared. Instead, I made my way back to the corridor of treatment rooms and to the Turkish baths at its end.

It was a very different place from the one Dr Laidlaw and I had walked through that morning. Almost all of the lounging couches in the resting room were occupied now, the occupants swaddled in robes and fanning themselves with paddles. I took no more than a couple of steps before I was accosted.

‘Here, miss!’ I turned. ‘Oh, madam, I beg your pardon.’ It was a nurse of some sort, a round little person in a blue uniform dress anyway, with the sleeves rolled high up on her reddened arms. She pushed a bale of white towelling cloth into my arms and propelled me towards one of the cubicles. ‘You’ll melt away if you come in here like that,’ she said. ‘Never mind ruin your fur. Lovely fur, madam, if you don’t mind me. Just you ring the bell when you’re changed and I’ll come and take your things.’ She banged the door shut on me and left me inside the tiny cubicle. There was a hook to hang one’s clothes on, a net to pull on over one’s hair lest it be disarranged upon undressing, and a bench with a velvet cushion to sit on while one unfastened one’s shoes. I ignored the net, blessing my shingle, but sat down and started unfastening. How far was one to go? How many of one’s things should one remove and how many retain? I unrolled the bale of towelling and found inside it a very fine lawn shift, armless and only a slit for a neckline like a partly unpicked pillow-case. It seemed to suggest that complete divestment was the order of the day, so after shrugging out of my tweeds and shirt, I peeled off my underthings too. I took off my earrings and wristwatch, my pearls and my bracelet and then wriggled into the shift, bound the robe tightly about me, and rang the bell.

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.’

‘But we’re safe in here?’

‘As houses.’

‘But you shouldn’t be thinking of safety and danger, Mrs Davies. There’s no need to worry.’

‘I’m sure I don’t need to be lectured on that, Mrs Riddle. I’ve been active in my circle for twenty-odd years, a founder member, as you’re very well aware. And I have no fear of what we know. But this is something else again. All these… poisons, all these… ill humours.’

I was, as can fairly be imagined, electrified with interest about it all. As lost as a blind lamb on a moonless night, certainly, but fascinated all the same. I was breathing as quietly as I could, sitting stock still lest my feet make another of those slapping noises should I move them and only wondering if I could possibly stay without melting.

‘Actually,’ it was the voice belonging to Mrs Scott, ‘I’ve done a thorough check on my bed-sitting room and I’m convinced that we’d be fine there.’

‘Your bed-sitting room?’ Mrs Riddle’s voice could not ring out in that soft enfolding dampness but she gave it a good try. ‘Then what in the name of all that’s holy are we doing in here?’ There was a sucking noise as she peeled herself off the marble. I tucked my feet up and tried to disappear against the wall behind me. Either I managed it or, despite the swirling caused by their movement, they did not notice me, but in any case the door opened, once more drawing a great draught of the steam out into the clear air on the other side, and then it shut behind them, leaving me alone, in a state of perplexity edging into utter bafflement.

When my attention at last returned from my eavesdropping to my own comfort, I realised that besides being sopping wet, my head itched like a plague, my breath rasped in my throat and my cheeks and temples and my very eyeballs heaved in time to my pounding pulse. In short, it was long past time for me to draw my life’s association with Turkish bathing to a close. I stood, waited until I was sure I would not swoon, and then slipped out of the steam room.

Regina, the round little person in the blue uniform, was outside, almost as though waiting to pounce upon me.

‘Mighty!’ she said, taking a look at my face. ‘You’ve maybes overdone it, madam. Now, quick about you and cool off then I’ll give you a nice salt rub-down.’

‘Cool off?’ I echoed, hopefully. It sounded lovely but I needed details.

‘Plunge pool or cold sprays?’ she said, leading me through an archway towards the wet marble temple with the slabs. I could see a woman standing rigid with horror in one of the niches as jets of water assaulted her from every angle and a downpour from a rose contraption, such as one would find on a giant’s watering can, drenched her head and plastered her hair to her face.

‘The pool,’ I said firmly. Regina led me through a second archway from the temple to the long room where the pool lay waiting. I shivered. Even the air was cold in here, but I could still see vapours rising off the surface of the water and I had not forgotten the feeling as I dipped my wrists in. I moved to the edge and looked down.

‘Should one use the steps?’ I asked. ‘It is called a plunge pool after all.’

‘It’s up to you, madam,’ said Regina. ‘Do you knock back castor oil or sip it with milk? Not that pool’s not lovely.’ This last part was rather late and did not convince me.

‘Down in one,’ I said. I sat on the marble wall, swung my legs over the water, shoved myself off and dropped.

The one good thing that could be said about the water in the plunge pool was that it was less sulphurous than that in the pump room. This I knew because I swallowed a good half-pint of it, opening my mouth and gasping, helpless not to. It was like needles, like a hundred hedgehogs rolling over me, pressing hard, and as well there was an ache, instant and profound, deep inside my body, and another in my head and yet another in my teeth. I rose, thrashing like a salmon, and coughing until my eyes streamed and I could feel the tears as they rolled down my cheeks, could tell them apart from the rest of the water coursing off me, because they were warm. Shuddering, almost whimpering, I galumphed my way towards the steps in an ungainly paddle.

‘Quite cold,’ said Regina. ‘Quite a surprise the first time, I daresay. But if you can just stay under till you’re settled it would do you a power of good.’

‘Settled?’ I said. I was perturbed to hear how loud my voice was, ringing round the room. I even thought I heard a titter from through the archway at the far end that led to the resting room. ‘I’ll be st-stone d-dead if I don’t get out of here. I’ll be d-dead of… what is it that they keep dying of on p-p-polar expeditions?’

‘Hypothermia,’ said Regina. ‘But this water wouldn’t give you hypothermia unless you stayed in twenty minutes or more. And so long as your heart’s strong there’s no chance of palpitations.’

‘My heart?’ I said. I must have looked alarmed.

‘You don’t have a weak heart, madam, do you?’ Regina had rushed forward, eyes wide, and was down a couple of steps, with her rubber-soled shoes in danger of spoiling. ‘Please come out, madam, do.’

‘I d-don’t have a weak heart,’ I told her. ‘Although I have to say it f-f-feels rather shaky right now. So the st-steam and p-plunge is not for everyone? Dr Laidlaw told me to help mys-s-self.’

‘Just…’ Regina attempted a smile. ‘Just me being daft, madam. Nothing at all to trouble you. And please don’t say to Dr Laidlaw that I caused you alarm, for she has enough on her pl- Anyway, all’s well, madam. All’s well.’

But I had seen where she had looked, a flicked glance she could not help before her smile widened, and unless I was greatly mistaken (and I could well be, for I am able to get lost inside houses I have visited dozens of times), nevertheless, I was quite sure her eyes had turned to where Dr Laidlaw’s eyes had turned. In short, to that same locked door.