‘So what are we doing rambling around public parks and up and down monuments then?’ said Alec, heading for the top of the stairs as though there were not a moment to lose.
‘I didn’t know Maggie and Miss Abbott were crucial before we talked it all through,’ I reminded him.
‘Can’t think why,’ he said. He was plunging ahead, already out of sight, and surprisingly for one with a fear of heights he seemed to have no qualms about racing down a dark, twisting staircase with a lively spaniel tugging him to go even faster. I, on the other hand, had never been more sorry for Bunty’s poor training and when she had almost pulled me off my feet for the second time I am afraid that I unclipped her lead and let her slither down to catch up Alec and Millie, with only a ‘Watch out!’ to warn of her arrival.
I was returning early, thanks to Alec’s eager departure, and turning the corner of Heriot Row I met Clara sauntering towards me, swinging a duffel bag. She stopped when she saw me.
‘You’re back sharp,’ she said. ‘Are you no’ feeling well?’
‘Just run out of things to do,’ I said. ‘I’ve no family to visit and my friend that I was meeting had to go.’ She gave me a pitying look at that; one surmised that she would never run out of amusements on a May afternoon. ‘Where are you off to?’
‘The baths,’ said Clara. ‘It’s not my day or anything but Mrs Hepburn said I could go. My afternoon free is on a men’s day, see? So I’d never get there else.’
‘Mrs Hepburn is very kind to you all,’ I said. I had fallen in with Clara and was walking away from the house again.
‘Are you…?’ Clara began, eyeing me warily. ‘Are you chumming me, Miss Rossiter?’
‘If you don’t mind,’ I said. Clara gave a tight smile and said nothing. She could not have sent a stronger signal that she dreaded Miss Rossiter’s awkward questions if she had tried.
‘Of course not,’ she said, ‘but they don’t hire out towels. You can borrow mine, though.’ I laughed and shook my head.
‘I don’t have a bathing suit with me,’ I said.
‘Oh, they hire out costumes,’ she said. I tried not to show what I thought of this idea.
‘Yes, a very kindly soul is our Mrs Hepburn,’ I said again. ‘I’m not surprised that Mr Faulds is captivated, are you?’
Clara had one of those faces upon which every thought passing through her mind is played out. Now, an impish amusement and natural taste for gossip fought with an equally natural suspicion (and disapproval) over an upper servant like me sucking my teeth with a lower servant like her about my equals and her betters. Or perhaps the disapproval was for two such ancient persons as Mrs Hepburn and Mr Faulds giving in to passion.
‘Well, I was surprised, Miss Rossiter, to be honest,’ she said. ‘They’ve been awfy discreet. And I thought I could tell when Mr Faulds liked a girl – you know – that way. I mean, he’s always had a right soft spot for Phyllis and he never hid it better than a boil on his-’
‘Nose?’ I said quickly. The usual expression had always struck me as rather nonsensical; a boil where Clara had just been about to place one is hidden for much of the time in the ordinary way of things.
‘Miss Rossiter, you’re terrible,’ she said. ‘I thought when you first turned up you were a right old stick-in-the-mud.’
‘It’s my face,’ I said. ‘And these clothes, but I assure you I’m not, dear.’
We tramped on for a while, down sweeping crescents and along endless quiet rows of tall houses, until it occurred to me to wonder where we were heading. After all, Mattie was set to walk nine miles to his village on the morrow.
‘Where exactly are these baths?’
‘Glenogle,’ said Clara. ‘Stockbridge. We’re nearly there.’ She cleared her throat. ‘Miss Rossiter?’ I waited, trying not to perk up too visibly. ‘Do you really think they’ll put mistress out? And the rest of us? Mr Faulds says no.’
Now, in truth, Alec and I had all but decided that the will was nonsense and would not stand, but if Clara needed an incentive to do her duty, then my duty was clear.
‘Absolutely,’ I said. ‘I’m afraid. Unless the police can catch the man who did this – if it’s Cousin George, that is – then it’s a grim lookout for all of us.’
‘Poor mistress,’ Clara said. ‘Poor us an’ all. I’ll never get another parlourmaid’s job in a house with all that company. Not in Edinburgh, anyway.’
‘No indeed,’ I agreed. ‘I shall be very lucky to be a lady’s maid and not a cook-general.’
‘Can you cook, then?’ said Clara. ‘I cannae even do that. I’ll end up in a factory. Or a shop. Living back at my mammy’s in the middle of nowhere. She ayeways said that Balfour job was too good to be true.’
‘Let’s hope that someone saw something and will speak up, then,’ I said trying to sound like justice raining unstoppably down, but only succeeding in sounding like Nanny.
‘I suppose,’ said Clara, ‘but even if it brings no good to mistress or to me, I just can’t see myself helping to punish whoever killed him. I’d have killed him myself if I’d thought of it. And I just don’t give a-’
‘Tinker’s cuss?’ I said.
‘You have a wonderful way with words, Miss Rossiter,’ she said. ‘As good as Mr Faulds when he gets his music-hall patter going.’
‘But you’re not protecting anyone in particular, Clara, are you?’
‘Like who?’ said Clara.
‘It might not be that you saw someone covered in blood leaving master’s room, you know,’ I said. ‘It could be something else entirely. Someone who perhaps… oh, let’s say… suddenly had extra money she – or he, of course – shouldn’t have.’
‘What money?’ said Clara. ‘Where does money come into it?’
‘Well, if someone opened the door up to let George Pollard into the house, she – or he, of course – might have been paid for it. That’s all.’
Clara had stopped walking and turned to face me. ‘But no one could open a door without somebody else hearing,’ she said.
‘True,’ I said. I looked along the street and then back at her, standing there in front of me like a statue. ‘Shall we go on?’
‘We’re here,’ said Clara. ‘This is it. Come in and have a wee look. See if you fancy it for another time.’
We were on one of those Edinburgh streets, of which since the city clings to the side of a steep hill there are many, where sunlight never reaches down between its high walls and the road is carved deep like a fissure. To the natural darkness was added an extra measure of gloom from the dark, red stone of the baths, mossy and wearing little sprouts of fern like buttonholes here and there. Inside, beyond the turnstile, the tiled passageways were just as dark and even damper and smelled of floor soap and chlorine. The chlorine, at least, was a smell which had nothing but happy memories for me, making me think of lidos in the south of France and a hotel Hugh and I had stayed in once in Italy which, despite the endless sunshine, had a covered swimming pond under a glass roof beyond its foyer – for the Italians, one supposed, who could find it too chilly for the sea and could look glamorous in cashmere wraps when I and the other Englishwomen were hot and red in limp cotton frocks with our waves melting.
The pool at Glenogle was under a glass roof of its own, but was otherwise as unlike the pond at the Miramalfi as my own tin bath before my bedroom fire at home. Wooden changing cubicles were ranged up and down its sides, most of their doors left open onto inelegant heaps of discarded clothes and, on hooks outside them, the kind of demoted bath towels – thin and grubby – that mothers hand out to children to take swimming. In the pool itself, a flotilla of girls and women bobbed around looking, in their rubberised bathing hats with the straps firmly buckled under their chins, like a squadron of pilots after an unfortunate water landing.