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.