Dandy Gilver and a Deadly Measure of Brimstone (5 page)

Had I not been sure that my elder son was a stranger to the novels of Miss Austen, and had his heart not still been bruised by its recent travails, I would have worried that he expected an Isabella Thorpe to be promenading the pump room in a bonnet and waiting only for Donald Gilver to make her morning perfect. As it was, I took it as a good sign for him to be showing interest in society at all, even if he was not well enough to have taken up his lifelong war with his little brother again.

‘There will be lots of people at the Hydro too,’ I said.

‘Ancient invalids,’ said Donald.

‘In bath chairs,’ added Teddy, giggling.

‘Interestingly enough,’ I said, ‘if there are, that’s because the bath chair gets its name from the city of Bath where the hot springs drew the very invalids you dread, Teddy.’

‘Gosh, let’s get up there,’ Teddy said. This was outrageously rude but, seeing Donald smirk at it, I let it pass.

‘Hugh?’ I said. ‘Pump room, Hydro or hillside for you?’

Hugh was behind his newspaper. I held out no substantial hope that he would be impressed by there being a newspaper for him to be behind on this first morning. He spoke without lowering it.

‘I don’t intend to drink the local brew,’ he said. ‘I’m here for science, not magic.’

A devoted wife would have believed him. I, on the other hand, suspected that he knew what to expect from a glass of healing spring water and hoped to dodge it. In contrast, I am sure that my sons had in their minds something delicious; a kind of icy, sparkling cordial. Well, they would soon see.

‘Let’s stop off at the pump room,’ I said. ‘Just to see what it’s like and then on to the Hydro for luncheon. You all have consultations booked with the doctor this afternoon and your treatments begin tomorrow. Back here for an early dinner and a quiet evening, I think.’

‘What do you think the treatments will be, Mummy?’ said Teddy.

‘Oh, tremendous fun,’ I said. ‘Lots of splashing about. No mixtures, I assure you.’

For Teddy was the ninny when it came to anything in a brown bottle to be taken off a spoon. I had once seen Nanny and two nursemaids beaten when trying to get him to swallow castor oil. He wriggled out of the arms of the nurses and sent the bottle flying out of Nanny’s hand before running off to hide in an attic. All I could say was that given the mess castor oil makes of carpets and polished wood I was not at all sure he was wrong in feeling it had no business in his insides.

The card propped up by the counter in the bath-house refreshment room – ‘First glass 6d. Later glasses free.’ – did not augur well for the stuff (no one would ever offer ginger beer on those terms) but the boys did not have enough experience of disappointment to be warned by it. The first sign that they were in for a nasty time came when the glasses were placed in their hands and they felt the warmth and saw the cloudy swirling. I took mine and glared at Hugh, standing there with his hands clasped behind his back and a smile on his face, then said a rousing ‘Cheers’ and toasted the boys’ health.

No one else in the place seemed to be making a fuss about it. In fact, looking around at the other people settled at tables, sipping slowly, I thought that the Gilvers were probably the only newcomers. One old woman in long skirts and a shawl had come in, paid her sixpence, swallowed her measure and left with a promise to ‘be back the morra’. She had not so much as glanced at her surroundings and I guessed that she had been coming here for all of her considerable years. If it was good stuff perhaps she was ninety-nine and past counting, had stopped looking round at the place decades ago. It was diverting enough for me, though. A grand room on a miniature scale, making me think of those gatehouses which mimic the splendours of the palaces they serve. Partly, it was the fact that the bath house was built in stone for even after all these years in Scotland, far from the softness of Northamptonshire, it still surprises me sometimes to see the lowly structures which are made of great square lumps of the stuff. Banks, charity schools, bowling clubhouses, public facilities of the very humblest kind, are all set to stand a thousand years as though they were castles for kings. It is very worthy, I suppose, but I still yearn for the ochre lime, horsehair plaster and crumbling ginger brick of home.

Inside was a miniature replica of the assembly rooms at Bath itself: a large chamber for promenading and doubtless for dancing too, a reading room, a discreet door to the closets where one might actually bathe, and all decked out in Adam plaster and sugared-almond paint from ceiling to floor. The decoration of the ceiling was particularly welcome: something distracting for when one tipped one’s head back and took a good deep swallow.

Sulphur is a very necessary element, I am sure, for God would not have gone to the bother of it otherwise, but between the taste, the smell and the yellow tinge, it takes a worshipful frame of mind to thank Him for it when one is drinking a lukewarm quarter-pint of the stuff. I drained my glass and set it down.

‘Goodness,’ said Donald. ‘It must be awfully beneficial.’ I smiled at his composure.

‘Ugh,’ said Teddy. ‘That’s disgusting! Mummy, that’s absolutely disgusting. Why didn’t you tell me?’ The other tables of patrons tittered softly at his ringing tone and look of outrage. ‘This is mixture of the worst sort. And a whole cup of it too, instead of a spoon.’ He put his half-full glass down on the counter and went to stand beside his father. The lines, I could see, were drawn.

‘I’ll have another glass, please,’ Donald said to the grey-coated attendant who plied the ladle. He flicked the merest glance at Teddy and went on. ‘It’s a curious thing, isn’t it, Mother, how late in one’s maturity one gets a taste for such things as olives and whisky?’ These were high-scoring cards, close to trumping his brother, for Teddy had felt the two years between them like a thorn his whole life through.

Donald accepted his second glass and sipped it as though it were nectar. He had, however, goose pimples of disgust all over his neck and I was sure he was paling.

‘Sit down at a table and take your time, Donald,’ I said. ‘I have a little errand on the High Street but I’ll be back directly. Hugh? Don’t let him drown in the stuff, will you?’

My first enquiry, of a drayman stopped at the Star Hotel, furnished me with directions to the surgery of Dr Ramsay, which was a short stroll along the High Street and another up a narrow street running off it. I set off still with a sense of foreboding and turning the corner caused an extra jolt, for while Moffat High Street is wide, pleasant and Georgian, Well Street is a perfect microcosm of that sort of Dickensian city which puts one in mind of gin shops and pie shops and blue-legged urchins. To go along with this impression, Dr Ramsay’s brass plate was on a narrow door beside a bowed shop front and his surgery was up a steep staircase in what I assumed was a converted tenement flat.

The doctor of my imagining was out on his rounds in a pony and trap and I would need an appointment to see him, an appointment I would make with a fierce secretary who guarded him like Cerberus at the jetty. Dr Ramsay, in reality, answered his door himself and waved me right in to his consulting room, seeming glad of the custom, almost of the company.

He settled himself back down in his chair, a leather affair on wheels, allowing him to whizz about between desk, patient and medicine chest (doctors these days are in thrall to the machines), and I took the chance to study him. He was a thin young man but with an air of repose which would have suited an older, larger person. He certainly had none of that nervous energy which might have explained his gaunt frame.

‘Now then,’ he said. ‘And what can I do for you?’

‘Yes,’ I began. ‘Well, my name is Gilver. I don’t live here; I have my own doctor at home in Perthshire, but I’m staying here a while.’ Dr Ramsay nodded.

‘At the Hydro,’ he said, which I supposed would be the usual thing.

‘Actually, we’ve taken a house, but
for
the Hydro, certainly.’ He kept nodding. ‘And I have a question to put to you. I believe you are … connected to the place?’

‘Not … no,’ he said. ‘Not officially, no. Although I know the Laidlaws, of course. Now, what can I tell you? I am anxious to set your mind at ease.’

There was no real reason not to forge ahead with my questions; they were few and they were straightforward enough, but something about his manner arrested me. ‘Set my mind at ease’? What made him think my mind was
un
easy?

‘Are you the attending doctor for the Hydro?’ I asked. ‘If that is the correct expression.’

‘They have no need of one,’ he replied. ‘Hydropathy is …’ He drew a deep breath and opened his eyes very wide. ‘… a specialism beyond the norm, but Dr Laidlaw is a medical doctor.’

‘But Dr Laidlaw is dead, isn’t he?’ I said.

‘Dr Laidlaw Jr, I should say,’ he replied.

‘Ah!’ I said. ‘The King is dead, long live the King.’

‘Almost,’ said Dr Ramsay with a slight smile.

‘But then,’ I began, for this was puzzling, ‘if Dr Laidlaw is a real doctor and was in attendance …’

Dr Ramsay had been reclining as far as his chair would let him, as though to take a long view of me, but now he sat up straight.

‘Attending whom, Mrs Gilver?’ he said.

‘A friend of mine,’ I lied in response. ‘She was staying there recently.’

‘What a remarkable coincidence,’ he said.

I did not see what made it so, since I had sought him out. Different if we were in London and had bumped elbows at a party. My sense was growing that something was amiss here.

‘Yes,’ I said, making sure that none of that sense showed on my face or in my voice. ‘A Mrs Addie, you might remember.’ He sat up even straighter and became even more remarkably still. ‘And her daughter is so very distraught. It often happens, doesn’t it, with a sudden death when the loved one is far from home. I said I would have a word while I was down here, just to be able to reassure her that there was no need to worry.’

‘And you are able to do so,’ he said, sitting back again. ‘There isn’t. You have my word.’

‘But why yours?’ I asked him, innocent tone and expression going strong. ‘Why didn’t Dr Laidlaw sign the death certificate, Dr Ramsay? I always thought it was preferred for a doctor who knew the patient to take care of these things.’

‘It is, it certainly is,’ said Dr Ramsay. ‘In this case, Dr Laidlaw chose not to.’

‘But why?’ I said.

‘You would have to ask Dr Laidlaw that,’ he said. I was surprised to see that there was a glint of amusement in his eyes. He put his foot up on the bar of his desk and leaned further backwards than ever.

‘It didn’t worry you to be asked?’ I said. ‘You didn’t hesitate?’

‘Clearly not,’ said Dr Ramsay, with a smile. ‘I was happy to help.’

‘Of course,’ I said, smiling back and hoping he would not see past it. Dr Laidlaw could not
possibly
have any innocent reason for refusing to sign a death certificate of a patient actually living at the Hydro. Far from Dr Ramsay’s word being an assurance, the very fact that he was dragged into the business was extremely fishy. ‘Well, acute heart failure is probably something you cover in chapter one,’ I went on breezily. He frowned. ‘Of your big red book of medicine.’

‘Mrs Gilver,’ he said. ‘What laymen such as yourself often seem to forget is that everyone dies of heart failure in the end. That’s the only cause of death there is, really, when you strip away all the secondary considerations.’

I nodded slowly for a bit as though digesting this. In truth, my thoughts were rattling about like those Mexican jumping beans one sees in the little snippets between the newsreel and the main feature.

‘You are right, of course,’ I said at last. ‘I think my friend, Mrs Addie’s daughter, would have preferred one of these secondary considerations, that’s all. She was sure that her mother’s heart was fine.’

‘If her heart had been fine she would still be with us,’ said the doctor. He spoke kindly as though to an imbecile. ‘Healthy hearts don’t just stop beating, you know.’

I could barely contain my astonishment. Healthy hearts stop beating all the time. They stop when someone jumps off a cliff, for instance, or drinks a bedtime cup of strychnine. Contain it I did, though, and forged on.

‘I suppose – forgive me for this – there’s no chance that you missed something, is there?’

‘None,’ said the doctor. ‘She bore all the signs of having suffered a severe heart attack. And do you know what the chief of these is?’ He was truly patronising me now. Had I been twelve and in cotton socks and had he been sixty and grizzled I might have been able to stomach it. As it was, it took all my effort not to draw myself up and squash him. With difficulty, I kept the annoyance off my face and simply shook my head.

‘Being dead,’ he said, very proud of the sound of it. ‘It’s a sad fact that dying of a heart attack is often the first clue that your heart wasn’t healthy. And the last one.’

I nodded and even managed another smile, in acknowledgement of the clever points he was making, but inside I was reeling. Nonsense that a woman who had just been carefully attended through a bout of crippling back pain would not have had her heartbeat listened to! Nonsense that it would not, under the strain of illness, show signs of the weakness which was going to overcome it only weeks in the future! I could not understand why no one had thought it except me. He was speaking again and I snapped my attention back to him.

‘I’m sure if you go to the Hydro,’ he was saying, ‘you’ll soon be able to fill in any troubling little details. Beyond the medical facts, I mean.’

‘Troubling little details’? Had the man any idea how suspicious he seemed? I supposed not or he would surely have shut up, and yet he was still talking.

‘What she’d been up to,’ he was saying. ‘How she spent her last hours. All that – very soothing to the family that’ll be.’

‘I’m sure you’re right, Dr Ramsay,’ I said. ‘Thank you for speaking to me.’

‘Happy to help,’ he said. It appeared to be his response to anything. A fellow doctor asking for his signature after a death with no visible cause? Happy to help! A perfect stranger asking questions about it? Happy to help her too. The man was a fool.