There were Turkish baths in there too, I thought, and steam rooms, unless they were the same things, and the famous sitz baths of which the brochure barely shut up for a single page and, all in all, I did not see how so much steam and hot water could be contained in a Scottish house without the whole of it being beset by seeping damp.
As we entered, I was half looking to see if the wallpapers were curling away from the plaster beneath and if the grain on the wood was rising.
As is so often the case, I was quite wrong and all was well inside the Moffat Hydro. The vestibule, entrance and hall were warm, dry, sweet-smelling – I saw a towering container of lilies on each of the side tables as we passed – and hushed. Hugh looked around himself with interest, evidently finding the place gratifyingly un-hotel-like. I saw Donald’s expression clear as he relinquished his quiet foreboding that it would be some sort of hospital in all but name. He loathes hospitals even more than the generality and no one, let us face it, ever wants to go on a picnic there. Teddy’s attention was caught by one feature only and that was the two-storey-high, coiling, gleaming, unbroken banister rail which, to judge by the way he was gazing, clearly sang to him.
‘No,’ I said.
‘No what?’ said Donald. Teddy did not turn from the siren song.
‘No?’ said Hugh. ‘I like the look of it so far. Beats me why you took that so-called house if this is what’s on offer.’ I shook my head and said nothing, although I dearly wanted to know how Hugh slept at night with tenants living in cottages of three rooms in total, if Auchenlea with its seven bedrooms and three bathrooms was a ‘so-called house’, for Grant had regaled me that morning with news of the servants’ facilities: hot and cold taps and a snake with a rose on the end for rinsing one’s hair with jets of clean water.
‘Think what your hair could look like,’ she said, ‘rinsed in pure clean cold water.’
‘Cold?’ I said.
‘Good for the scalp,’ said Grant.
‘In fact…’ Hugh was walking about the hall with a very proprietorial air, a few steps this way and then a few steps that, looking up the stairwell and all but testing the floor under his feet with little stamps as though to see if it was sprung for dancing. ‘Well, we shall see.’
I could not pursue the hints because we were being borne down upon by a magnificent figure. She was quite six feet tall in her flat shoes and tremendously ill served as to ligne by her plain white dress, poor thing. On her head was a confection of starched linen, twisted and folded into a fantastical shape. (I only knew it had started as a linen square because I had seen the nurses in the convalescent home during the war constructing these sculpted enormities with my own eyes. They made them up seven at a time, deft and distracted, while smoking and laughing with their friends, and I had always thought they should do it out on the street corners for sixpences.)
‘Matron?’ I said, guessing.
‘Well,’ said the impressive individual, ‘I suppose so, but I don’t insist on it. Mrs Cronin will do nicely. And you must be the Gilvers.’
We admitted as much and before Mrs Cronin could do more than gather breath to begin her welcome, we were hallooed from above by a voice as loud as it was fruity.
‘Welcome one, welcome all. Welcome to Laidlaw’s House of Potions,’ it said, and then a trousered bottom appeared hanging over the banister rail and shot downwards towards us. The owner of voice and bottom jumped clear of the finial, garnering Teddy’s instant admiration (the dismount of a finialled banister is what separates the real daredevils from the pretenders), and bent himself double in a bow.
When he rose, it was with an extravagant gesture, flicking back his butter-coloured hair into perfect place. He smoothed it once with a hand, shot his cuff deftly and stepped forward to shake hands.
‘Thomas Laidlaw,’ he said. ‘How d’you do.’
‘How d’you do,’ said Hugh, baffled.
As was I. The banister trick and low bow were at one with the man’s costume: black tie before luncheon, like a conjuror. But the easy smile upon his sleek, pink face, his confident manner, almost over-confident for one who surely could not yet be thirty-five, and that fruity voice said otherwise. His greeting of me was impeccable too, a nod and a handshake in place of the kiss and smirk for which I had steeled myself. The boys shook hands and murmured their ‘sir’s and Laidlaw turned and presented his sister to me. I had not noticed her joining us; who would have while the brother whizzed down and vaulted clear?
‘Dorothea Laidlaw, Mrs Gilver,’ he said to me. The female half of the operation was not decked out in matching form, no evening gown nor spangles here. Instead she was dressed in rather plain tweeds and one of those very soft felt hats which look as though a limp lettuce leaf has been laid on one’s head and left to wilt there. She resembled her brother in the usual way – the same nose (a family nose is hard to escape; when bemoaning my inheritance of straight hair and sallow skin I try to be thankful that the Lestons do not have one), the same lean figure, although hers looked set to remain lean whereas his was softening, the same hazel eyes except that hers were wide and clear and gazed at one with an engaging frankness while his were crinkled up at the edges in merriment or mischief.
‘Shall we divide and conquer, Dot?’ he went on. I saw her wince and did not blame her. ‘Oops!’ he said, without any attempt to make it convincing. ‘We were Dot and Tot as children and these things do tend to stick, don’t they?’
‘Yes, Mrs Gilver,’ said Miss Laidlaw. ‘Let me show you around the hotel and-’
‘Tut, tut, Dorothea,’ her brother said. ‘Hotel? Laidlaw’s Hydropathic Establishment is not a hotel.’
‘-my brother can take care of the rest of the party,’ she went on, ignoring his interjection absolutely. ‘Is it too late for coffee? Let’s say coffee in the drawing room in twenty minutes then, Mrs Cronin, shall we?’ She had a pleasant voice and an easy way with herself and, as I followed her out of the grand entrance hall into a passageway, I was forced to smile at the thought which had popped unbidden into my mind: to wit, that she was a lady. I suppose it was possible, for some doctors are gentlemen and her father had been a proper doctor and not a mere salesman of patent cures and odd contraptions, but somehow one put hydropathists, or hydropathologists, or whatever they were called, into the same drawer as lay-preachers and prison visitors, nonconformists all and not likely to come from the highest tier, whose members are usually, for obvious reasons, quite content with the status quo. Perhaps her father had used his money to buy his children into society, but then what of the dinner jacket and black tie at half past eleven on a Monday morning? What of Tot altogether?
Miss Laidlaw was pointing out ‘treatment rooms’ on either side of the passageway and I peered into one or two to be polite. In each there was a bier or couch arrangement covered in snowy bath towels and a smaller handcart, two-tiered like an hotel pudding trolley, upon which bottles and jars were laid as though to hand for operations at whose nature I could not guess. In one room there were contraptions, equally unguessable, drawn up on either side of the couch and in another, sturdy lamps mounted on tripods were trained on the empty bed. It all looked rather gruesome.
‘You seem very well fitted-up,’ I said, withdrawing my head again. ‘It really is rather more than an hotel.’ Rotten of me to return to the unpleasant moment, but I was interested in any sort of trouble here at the Hydro, sibling quarrels and all.
Miss Laidlaw, in reply, trailed a hand along the dado rail of the corridor, a fancy in ceramic, which formed rolling green waves, one after another, like pin curls, stretching all the way to double glass doors at the end.
‘And rather less too,’ she said. ‘My father was a great deal more interested in the therapeutic side than in the question of bed and board. Tot was aghast when he saw the spartan state of the bedrooms. He was ready to give up before we even started. And I suppose, you do have to offer some comforts and entertainments as well as the actual… that’s very true.’ Then she gathered herself with a slight sniff and a rise of the chin. ‘Father would be entranced to see the modern improvements in electric heat particularly, but through here, it’s all as he envisioned it. Exactly as he laid it out.’ She opened one of the double doors and ushered me into Equatorial Africa.