‘Might have been menthol,’ Donald said. ‘Mustard even. Something pretty smelly anyway.’ Then he brightened. ‘She did say I was to have port wine at lunch and at dinner and red meat too.’
‘Interesting,’ I said. ‘Not a drop of water in any of that anywhere. I’m beginning to wonder how hydropathy got its name.’
‘Plenty of water for me,’ Teddy said. ‘I’m to swim in the bathing pool every morning. Breaststroke, she said. Loosening, whatever that means. And then the hot towels and mothballs, like Don. For expectation.’
‘Expectoration,’ I said. ‘At least, I would have thought so. Well, how gruesome. I hope you’re being mummified in a private room.’ Of course, what I really hoped was that I would not encounter someone, nicely loosened and now expectorating, in some shared part of the women’s accommodations. ‘No breaststroke for you then, Donald dear?’
‘No, I’m being thrown to the rubbers,’ he said. ‘Those burly men in blue overalls we saw in the hot rooms yesterday. One of them is supposed to pound me in between the lamps and the menthol.’
I did not much like the sound of that, some thug with big red hands setting about my poor diminished boy, but that was not why my face fell. His words had suggested something far worse to me. If the people dressed in blue in the hot rooms were dedicated, trained ‘rubbers’ – I supposed that plain term was just about preferable to ‘masseur’ with its whiff of decadence – then Regina was most likely to be found all day and every day in one place only, and there was only one way to fall in with her. Grant, I realised, was going to kill me.
In the end, I managed to get away with only the briefest stop in the coolest room before I caught sight of a blue sphere flashing past the opened velvet curtains leading to the rest beds. I shot to my feet, belted my robe firmly and scuttled after her.
‘Oh, it’s you, Mrs Gilver,’ she said, turning as she heard her name. ‘Back again, eh? I thought so.’ At my look (I hoped it was only puzzled and not actually guilty) she explained. ‘I can always tell who’s going to take to it and who’s not,’ she said. ‘You might have grumbled a bit when you hit the cold water, madam, but it’s nothing to what some of them let out. One lady once said a word I’d never heard in my life, and that’s me as used to pull pints in the public bar at the Annandale Arms to help out in the Tup Fair.’
‘Well, to be honest, Regina,’ I said, ‘I was rather hoping to run into you. I’ve got the most fearful crick in my neck – I think I must have wrenched it in the shock of the plunge, you know – and I wondered if you could help. Unless one has to book an appointment.’
‘Depends on the season and how busy we are,’ she said. ‘But you’re in luck this morning, madam. Slab and salt or warm oil?’ At my expression, she laughed and explained. One could either lie naked on one of the marble slabs beside the cold sprays and be doused with water and rubbed with rock salt then rinsed off, which sounded more like the beginning of a recipe to cure meat than anything one might visit upon one’s own person, or one could be taken to a quiet room, lie down on a couch and be rubbed with warm oil.
‘Only that’s extra on your bill, madam,’ Regina said. ‘And a salt rub on the slab down here is included. As many as you feel like.’ It was ‘first glass sixpence, second glass free’ all over again: I was willing to bet that the offer of endless time on the slab with the cold water was not going to ruin the Hydro in the immediate future.
I made my unsurprising choice and Regina steered me up a narrow set of wooden stairs at the side of the changing cubicles and into one of a number of small rooms which led off the upper landing. There was more of the dark wood and red velvet here, and with the couch – even if it was draped in white towels instead of silk shawls – the overall effect was that of a miniature boudoir. I lay down on my front and she expertly shrugged me out of the robe.
‘Now then,’ she said. ‘Crick in your neck, you said? Hmph. I see what you mean.’
I did not need to force rigidity into my muscles, for the novelty of suddenly having someone who was not Grant lay hands upon me and immediately comment on her findings caused an automatic tension to spread through me.
‘Wee drop eucalyptus oil,’ she said, and then bracing her feet hard, one knee bent and one straight, as I could see perfectly well over the side of the couch, she set about my neck and shoulders like a master baker with a batch of dough.
‘Golly,’ I said presently. ‘Oof. Gosh.’
‘This,’ she panted. ‘Will do you. The world. Of good. Madam.’
‘I can see why people come back year after year,’ I said, beginning to feel my way.
‘They have. So far. Anyway,’ Regina said.
This was an opening indeed, if I could just decide how best to use it.
‘It must be odd for your old regulars suddenly to have Dr Laidlaw Sr gone and so many changes,’ I said. Regina said nothing. She poured on a little more oil, smacked her hands together and set about a different bit of my back, somewhat towards the sides and threatening to be ticklish if I did not try hard to avoid thinking of it in that way.
‘Unless you mean something else?’ I said. I waited for a while. There was no sound except the unlovely one of oily hands smacking against oily back as she pitched herself with gusto at her task. ‘You don’t mean that Mrs Addie will cause a scandal, do you?’ Her hands lifted off my skin and there was silence except for her fast breathing. I craned round trying to see her and, at the sight of her patient twisting about that way, she was spurred back into action. She laid her hands rather tentatively on my skin, but did not move them.
‘I never said that,’ she whispered. ‘How did you even know about poor Mrs Addie? I never said any such thing.’
‘Of course not, my dear,’ I said. ‘One hears gossip, but not from you. Most commendable.’
‘I was fond of her,’ Regina said. ‘I’d not make tittle-tattle out of her going off that way.’ Rather uncertainly, she recommenced her pummelling. ‘Anyway it was her heart. It could have happened any time and anywhere. At home, in the pictures.’ The rhythm was back to normal, the slaps ringing out again.
‘But it happened here,’ I said.
I must say, if it could be arranged, it would be splendid to have every interview in every case accompanied by a vigorous back-rub. I could tell from the faltering of her hands again that what I had just said was troubling, could tell it as plain as day before she spoke a sound. And then her words when they came said the same.
‘That was the story,’ she said. ‘But it wasn’t true.’ I am sure that she must have felt my muscles turning to iron but she made no reference to it. ‘She went out, madam. She collapsed away out somewhere. And that right there’s enough to stop any nasty talk. She wasn’t supposed to be out. She wasn’t supposed to go out traipsing for another week. Dr Laidlaw had a full regime all drawn up. If she’d stuck to it, she might be here today, because it was working. You could tell already it was. So as to any scandal sticking to the Hydro, I should say it’s the other way on. Vice versa.’ As she became more adamant in her words so did she in her rubbing. By the end of this speech I was being thrown about like a cork in the tide and had to grip the couch to hold on.
‘She wasn’t here?’ I said. ‘Well, in that case, I agree. Nothing for the Laidlaws to worry about. But why would they say she was at the Hydro if she was out on the town?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Regina. ‘I can tell you that, hand on heart. I don’t know that I’d say she was in the town, mind you. I thought maybe the woods. The hills, you know.’ Privately, I agreed. If she was going to see a ghost and collapse then a lonely spot seemed much more like it. There were only two problems: what had an Edinburgh matron who thought the world of the Hydro been doing in the hills or woods instead of availing herself of the many facilities and diversions for which she had come all this way? That was one. The second problem was even more thorny. If Mrs Addie was out on a wooded hillside in the dark, how exactly had Dr Laidlaw managed to find her there?