‘Dandy,’ said Hugh, rising. ‘I’ve made a decision.’ I managed to contain my amazement as he laid out the many sound reasons for it. ‘Right on the spot,’ he said. ‘And you’ll be much more comfortable too. And Laidlaw here tells me that he’s a great believer in port wine and stout as tools of convalescence.’ Laidlaw, looking more like a waiter than ever, gave a short bow and clicked his heels. I wondered if he had a medical excuse to serve whisky too, for Hugh could not survive an evening without at least one glass of the filthy stuff. ‘In fact, perhaps the boys could join me.’
I did not answer at once because, looking around following Hugh’s gesturing wave, my attention had been caught by one of the other few guests present in the drawing room. I could see nothing more than a pair of crossed ankles and a pair of brown brogues, the rest being hidden behind a Scotsman (held in a grip rather tighter than its customary editorial style could explain). But I knew those ankles well and recognised the easy way one was slung across the other.
‘Not the boys,’ I said. The Laidlaws took my pronouncement without any show of emotion beyond a faint smile on her part and a sentimental dip of the head on his. ‘Mother love’, his face seemed to say. And ‘typical female’ was what I took from hers. The boys themselves, with the perfect self-absorption of the young, accepted their parents’ clamouring for the honour of their company without turning a hair. It was Hugh who skewered me with one of his best looks. No chance of getting ‘mother love’ past him unexamined.
‘Let’s not discuss it now,’ he said, loath to pitch into a domestic dispute in public, although I foresaw that there would be no avoiding one in private later. ‘Now we three fellows all have medical examinations this afternoon, I believe? In the meantime, I think I’ll take a stroll down the path you mentioned, Laidlaw, and have a look at the river. Ash path, Dandy, perfectly dry underfoot, in case you’re worried. Donald? Teddy?’ They rose; a river, even one which could only offer a lowly trout, and that to three gentlemen without a rod amongst them, was still a draw. Hugh would inspect the banks and plantings, scrutinise the water for gravel clarity or peaty opacity, scramble down and tug out scraps of the very water weeds to determine whether and how well this river was managed and discover exactly how short its management fell of his own of the rivers at home. Donald would listen and offer thoughts about the rivers of Benachally. Teddy would throw pebbles and, if there was an overhanging tree-limb, might climb out along it and dangle there.
‘I shall see you at luncheon,’ I said, waving them off, and then wandered over to sink into an armchair beside the brogues and wait for the newspaper guard to be lowered. Alec gave me his most impish smile but did not mention the awkwardness.
The first thing he did say to me was as much a surprise as a disappointment.
‘Pretty clear why Ramsay got in on things then. Poor Dr Laidlaw couldn’t even sign the death certificate, much less get a fool like Addie to face simple facts head-on.’
‘Why couldn’t he?’ I said.
‘Blind prejudice,’ said Alec. ‘Although I’ve always wondered how prejudice can be blind if justice is too. Blind to different things perhaps? Funny sort of blindness, though.’
‘Alec,’ I said. ‘You’re wittering. Why couldn’t he?’
‘I’m musing,’ said Alec. ‘Perhaps even philosophising. I don’t, my dear Dandy, witter. She, by the way.’
‘Ahhh,’ I said. ‘Dr Dorothea Laidlaw. I see. I didn’t think that peculiar man looked much like one. What does he mean by such a get-up in the middle of the day?’
‘He hasn’t been to bed yet,’ Alec said. ‘The get-up’s left over from last evening.’
‘Why on earth-’ I began and then Alec’s bombshell, which had rolled across the carpet intact, burst at last. ‘Medical examinations!’ I said. ‘Dr Laidlaw’s going to examine Hugh? He’ll curl up and die!’
‘Only his chest,’ said Alec. ‘When I found out the doctor was a female I made sure my back trouble was in the shoulder blades – I had been tending towards the lumbar region; that’s where I always feel it after a day’s hunting – and only my shirt was disarranged. My trousers-’
‘He’ll die,’ I said.
‘-passed through the exam without a glance from her.’
‘The boys are used to Matron, but Hugh will climb out of the window and down a drainpipe to get away.’
‘Didn’t he have a Matron of his own in his day?’
‘A retired sergeant!’ I said. ‘Sergeant Black. Poor little boys of eight and suddenly only Sergeant Black instead of Mummy.’ We spent a moment thinking – I was anyway – what a lot that explained if you went in for such things and then got down, at long last, to business.
‘If Mr Addie’s mistrust of a lady doctor is all that’s afoot here,’ I said, ‘then you could melt away before Hugh sees you.’
‘Would that it were, would that I could,’ Alec said, sounding like someone translating Latin verb tables.
‘You said Dr Ramsay got wheeled on out of blind-’
‘Exactly!’ said Alec. ‘The Laidlaws must have thought the Addies would swallow his certificate with less of a gulp than they’d take to swallow hers. But don’t you see? They’d only care about having the death cert. spat out if they had something to hide. And they do have something to hide. I know it.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I got a strong whiff of something fishy during my tour with Miss- Dr Laidlaw. I couldn’t say what exactly. What about you?’
‘I couldn’t say what at all,’ Alec answered. ‘Not even a fishy whiff. I just…’
‘Hah!’ I said. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve had a hunch. After all the sneering you’ve done about hunches to me over the years.’
‘I don’t sneer, Dandy,’ Alec said. ‘I tease. And it’s not a hunch. It’s a proper hydropathic clue.’
‘Oh?’ I said, sitting forward. Of course, he had been here overnight and might well have uncovered something already. ‘What do you mean?’
Alec grinned. ‘I mean,’ he said, ‘I feel it in me water.’
I told myself that they would have all sorts of salves and mechanicals here with which to treat bruises and so I kicked him.
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.