She fitted the plug and ran the water. Hot and cold came together from a lion’s-head tap; you blended the water by operating a lever. Once you were in the bath you could control the intake of water with your foot, using a pushbutton mechanism. What would the first occupants of 9 Bismarck Road, eighty years ago, have thought of that?
Melanie reviewed the array of ornamental bottles on the shelf above the taps. Salts, oils, crystals and foam baths were prodigally provided. She selected an expensive bath oil and upended the bottle, watching the green liquid dispersed by the cascading water. Its musky fragrance was borne up on spirals of steam. How odd that William should provide all this and seem unwilling for her to use it! Each evening since Monday, when they had returned from the honeymoon, she had suggested she might take a bath and he had found some pretext for discouraging her. It didn’t matter that much to her, of course. At the hotel in Herne Bay she had taken a daily bath, so she didn’t feel desperately in need of one immediately they got back. It was altogether too trivial to make an issue of, she was quite sure. If William and she had to have words some time, it wasn’t going to be about bath nights, at any rate. So she had played the part of the complaisant wife and fallen in with whatever distractions he provided.
Tonight, though, she had deliberately taken him by surprise. She had hidden nightie and book in the towel chest earlier in the day, so when she hesitated at the head of the stairs as they came to bed he was quite unprepared. You don’t go for a late-night bath empty-handed, even when your bathroom has every convenience known to the modern home designer. She was sliding the bathroom door across before he realised what had happened. ‘Sorry, darling! I mean to have my bath and that’s the end of it!’
The door slid gently across on its runners and clicked, the whole movement perfectly timed, without a suspicion of haste, as neatly executed as a pass in the bull ring. That was the way to handle an obstructive husband. Never mind persuasion and pleading; intelligent action was much more dignified, and infinitely more satisfying. Besides, she had waited till Friday.
She tested the water with her hand, removed her slip, took her book and plastic shower-cap from the towel chest, shook her mass of flaxen hair, and then imprisoned it in the cap. She turned, saw herself unexpectedly in a mirror, and pulled a comical face. If she had remembered, she would have brought in a face pack — the one thing William had overlooked when he stocked the cosmetic shelf. She wasn’t going into the bedroom to collect one now, anyway. She took off the last of her underclothes and stepped into the bath.
It was longer than the bath at home or the one in the hotel. Silly really: neither William nor she was tall, but they had installed a six foot, six inch bath — ‘Two metres, you see,’ the salesman had pointed out, as though that had some bearing on their requirements. Over the years it would probably use gallons more hot water, but it was a beautiful shape, made for luxuriating in, with the back at the angle of a deckchair on the lowest notch, quite unlike the utility five-footer at home, with its chipped sides and overhanging geyser that allowed you enough hot water to cover your knees and no more. William had even insisted on a sunken bath. ‘It will sink to four inches below floor level, but that’s the limit, I’m afraid, or we’ll see the bottom of it through the kitchen ceiling.’
Accustomed to the temperature now, she pressed the button with her toe for more hot water. There was no hurry to rise from this bath. It wouldn’t do Mr William Lloyd any harm to wait. Not simply from pique, of course; she felt no malice towards him at all. No, there was just a certain deliciousness — a man wouldn’t understand it even if you tried to explain — in taking one’s time. Besides, it was a change, a relief if she was honest, to enjoy an hour of solitude, a break from the new experience of being someone’s partner, accountable for every action in the day from cooking a dinner to clipping one’s toenails.
She reached for the book — one she had found on William’s bookshelf with an intriguing title, Murder is Methodical. Where better to read a thriller than in a warm bath behind locked doors? There hadn’t been much opportunity for reading in the last three weeks. Or before, for that matter, with curtains to make and bridesmaids to dress.
She turned to the first page. Disappointing. It was not detective fiction at all. Just a dreary old manual on criminology. William Palmer: the Rugeley Poisoner was the first chapter. She thumbed the pages absently. Dr Crippen: a Crime in Camden Town. How was it that these monsters continued to exert such a fascination on people, years after their trials and executions? The pages fell open at a more whimsical title — from her present position, anyway — George Joseph Smith: the Brides in the Bath. Melanie smiled. That chapter ought to have a certain piquancy, particularly as one of the first place-names to catch her eye was Herne Bay. Strange how very often one comes across a reference to a place soon after visiting there. With some slight stirring of interest, she propped the book in the chromium soap-holder that bridged the sides of the bath, dipped her arms under the water, leaned back and began to read.
George Joseph Smith had stayed in Herne Bay, but not at the New Excelsior. Wise man! If the food in 1912 was anything like the apologies for cuisine they dished up these days, he and his wife were far better off at the house they took in the High Street. But it wasn’t really a honeymoon the Smiths — or the Williamses, as they called themselves — spent at Herne Bay, because they had been married two years before and he had deserted her soon after, only to meet her again in 1912 on the prom at Weston-super-Mare. In May they had come to Herne Bay and on July 8th they made mutual wills. On July 9th, Smith purchased a new five-foot bath. Bessie, it seemed, decided to take a bath on the 12th, a Friday. At 8 a.m. next morning a local doctor received a note: Can you come at once? I am afraid my wife is dead. On July 16th, she was buried in a common grave, and Smith returned the bath to the supplier, saying he did not require it after all. He inherited £2,500.
£2,500. That must have been worth a lot in 1912. More, almost certainly, than the £5,000 policy William had taken out on her life. Really, when she considered it, the value of money declined so steadily that she doubted whether £5,000 would seem very much when they got it in 1995, or whenever it was. They might do better to spend the premiums now on decorating some of the rooms downstairs. Super to have a luxury bathroom, but they would have to spend a lot to bring the other rooms up to standard. ‘Insurance policies are security,’ William had said. ‘You never know when we might need it.’ Well, security seemed important to him, and she could understand why. When you’d spent your childhood in an orphanage, with not a member of your family in the least interested in you, security was not such a remarkable thing to strive for. So he should have his insurance — it was rather flattering, anyway, to be worth £5000 — and the rest of the house would get decorated in due course.
There was another reason for insurance which she did not much like to think about. For all his energy and good looks William was fifty-six. When the policy matured he would be over eighty, she fifty-two. No good trying to insure him; the premiums would be exorbitant.
For distraction she returned to the book, and read of the death of Alice Burnham in Blackpool in 1913. Miss Burnham’s personal fortune had amounted to £140, but the resourceful George Smith had insured her life for a further £500. She had drowned in her bath a month after her wedding, on a Friday night in December. Strange, that Friday night again! Really, it was exquisitely spine-chilling to be sitting in one’s bath on a Friday night reading such things, even if they had happened half a century ago. The Friday bath night, in fact, she learned as she read on, was an important part of Smith’s infamous system. Inquest and funeral were arranged before there was time to contact the relatives, even when he wrote to them on the Saturday. Alice Burnham, like Bessie Mundy, was buried in a common grave early the following week. ‘When they’re dead, they’re dead,’ Smith had explained to his landlord.