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.