Dandy Gilver and a Deadly Measure of Brimstone (7 page)

‘I see,’ I said. I noticed that as I let go of the handle and moved away, the little bit of tension which had hitched her shoulders up left her and she smiled again. ‘Do you have trouble persuading your regular guests to move with the times?’ I asked. I was inching my way towards Mrs Addie. She frowned politely, not understanding me. Perhaps I needed to inch a little more boldly. ‘I would imagine that any of your father’s patients who had always enjoyed “the old ways” would be hard to dissuade of their benefits.’

She threw another look at the locked door, her eyes showing a lot of white like those of a nervous horse.

‘People can grow very attached to ideas,’ she said quietly. Then with a valiant lift of her chin, she went on in quite a different tone. ‘So, these are the medical facilities. I’ll just take you up the ladies’ stair and show you the private rooms.’ She was off. ‘You’ll see the ladies’ drawing room when we rejoin the rest of your party. As well as that we have a gentlemen’s billiards room, a gentlemen’s smoking room, the winter gardens and the dining room. But we encourage all our guests to be outdoors all day if the weather is even slightly cooperative.’

She had galloped up a staircase as she spoke, with me puffing along behind her, still feeling the effects of the stultifying heat, and now we found ourselves on a bedroom corridor, with carpeted floor and satiny papered walls covered with pictures of roses and fat children in aprons.

‘I did a little redecorating,’ said Miss Laidlaw. ‘Not that that’s my particular … but as I said, my father … And I did so want to be able to keep it going after he died.’ She threw open a door.

I stepped forward to see what she meant and found myself in yet another world, far from carpets and watercolours. The walls, curtains and linens were blinding white, the floor stained almost black and the furniture – the high narrow bed, the bare dressing table, the small hanging cupboard and the inevitable towel-draped couch – were made of plain oak without the slightest adornment. It was a wonder Miss Laidlaw’s father had managed to find such stuff: the Victorians were not known for their love of clean lines and the kind of beds one could sweep under with a broad broom.

‘How delightful,’ I said. ‘And how amusing that what must have seemed very peculiar when your father chose it is now slap bang in the fashion.’ I told the truth about being amused; I was not, however, delighted for I
am
a Victorian – I have given up pretending otherwise – and to sleep in such a room would make me feel either as though I had taken the veil or had been found guilty and was serving it out in solitary confinement.

One thing which did strike me as we made our way down the main – shared, one assumes – staircase was that Hugh would love it. He prefers his quarters barrack-like and added to the fact that the billiards room was for gentlemen alone at the Hydro (and the smoking room too), and that the ladies could be hounded out into their own drawing room with glares and snubs, he would have been as happy as a sandboy here.

When we arrived in the drawing room, which was an unremarkable enough apartment, only a good deal larger than normal and with more pillows strewn in the chairs and chaises (one assumed for the comfort of rheumatic guests), Hugh, the boys and the other Laidlaw were already there. As well as, I was happy finally to see, a few other residents, perhaps as many as five – and this in a room which could hold fifty without it showing.

‘Dandy,’ said Hugh, rising. ‘I’ve made a decision.’ I managed to contain my amazement as he laid out the many sound reasons for it. ‘Right on the spot,’ he said. ‘And you’ll be much more comfortable too. And Laidlaw here tells me that he’s a great believer in port wine and stout as tools of convalescence.’ Laidlaw, looking more like a waiter than ever, gave a short bow and clicked his heels. I wondered if he had a medical excuse to serve whisky too, for Hugh could not survive an evening without at least one glass of the filthy stuff. ‘In fact, perhaps the boys could join me.’

I did not answer at once because, looking around following Hugh’s gesturing wave, my attention had been caught by one of the other few guests present in the drawing room. I could see nothing more than a pair of crossed ankles and a pair of brown brogues, the rest being hidden behind a
Scotsman
(held in a grip rather tighter than its customary editorial style could explain). But I knew those ankles well and recognised the easy way one was slung across the other.

‘Not the boys,’ I said. The Laidlaws took my pronouncement without any show of emotion beyond a faint smile on her part and a sentimental dip of the head on his. ‘Mother love’, his face seemed to say. And ‘typical female’ was what I took from hers. The boys themselves, with the perfect self-absorption of the young, accepted their parents’ clamouring for the honour of their company without turning a hair. It was Hugh who skewered me with one of his best looks. No chance of getting ‘mother love’ past
him
unexamined.

‘Let’s not discuss it now,’ he said, loath to pitch into a domestic dispute in public, although I foresaw that there would be no avoiding one in private later. ‘Now we three fellows all have medical examinations this afternoon, I believe? In the meantime, I think I’ll take a stroll down the path you mentioned, Laidlaw, and have a look at the river. Ash path, Dandy, perfectly dry underfoot, in case you’re worried. Donald? Teddy?’ They rose; a river, even one which could only offer a lowly trout, and that to three gentlemen without a rod amongst them, was still a draw. Hugh would inspect the banks and plantings, scrutinise the water for gravel clarity or peaty opacity, scramble down and tug out scraps of the very water weeds to determine whether and how well this river was managed and discover exactly how short its management fell of his own of the rivers at home. Donald would listen and offer thoughts about the rivers of Benachally. Teddy would throw pebbles and, if there was an overhanging tree-limb, might climb out along it and dangle there.

‘I shall see you at luncheon,’ I said, waving them off, and then wandered over to sink into an armchair beside the brogues and wait for the newspaper guard to be lowered. Alec gave me his most impish smile but did not mention the awkwardness.

The first thing he did say to me was as much a surprise as a disappointment.

‘Pretty clear why Ramsay got in on things then. Poor Dr Laidlaw couldn’t even sign the death certificate, much less get a fool like Addie to face simple facts head-on.’

‘Why couldn’t he?’ I said.

‘Blind prejudice,’ said Alec. ‘Although I’ve always wondered how prejudice can be blind if justice is too. Blind to different things perhaps? Funny sort of blindness, though.’

‘Alec,’ I said. ‘You’re wittering. Why couldn’t he?’

‘I’m musing,’ said Alec. ‘Perhaps even philosophising. I don’t, my dear Dandy, witter. She, by the way.’

‘Ahhh,’ I said. ‘Dr
Dorothea
Laidlaw. I see. I didn’t
think
that peculiar man looked much like one. What does he mean by such a get-up in the middle of the day?’

‘He hasn’t been to bed yet,’ Alec said. ‘The get-up’s left over from last evening.’

‘Why on earth—’ I began and then Alec’s bombshell, which had rolled across the carpet intact, burst at last. ‘Medical examinations!’ I said. ‘Dr Laidlaw’s going to examine Hugh? He’ll curl up and die!’

‘Only his chest,’ said Alec. ‘When I found out the doctor was a female I made sure my back trouble was in the shoulder blades – I had been tending towards the lumbar region; that’s where I always feel it after a day’s hunting – and only my shirt was disarranged. My trousers—’

‘He’ll die,’ I said.

‘—passed through the exam without a glance from her.’

‘The boys are used to Matron, but Hugh will climb out of the window and down a drainpipe to get away.’

‘Didn’t he have a Matron of his own in his day?’

‘A retired sergeant!’ I said. ‘Sergeant Black. Poor little boys of eight and suddenly only Sergeant Black instead of Mummy.’ We spent a moment thinking – I was anyway – what a lot that explained if you went in for such things and then got down, at long last, to business.

‘If Mr Addie’s mistrust of a lady doctor is all that’s afoot here,’ I said, ‘then you could melt away before Hugh sees you.’

‘Would that it were, would that I could,’ Alec said, sounding like someone translating Latin verb tables.

‘You said Dr Ramsay got wheeled on out of blind—’

‘Exactly!’ said Alec. ‘The Laidlaws must have thought the Addies would swallow his certificate with less of a gulp than they’d take to swallow hers. But don’t you see? They’d only care about having the death cert. spat out if they had something to hide. And they do have something to hide. I know it.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I got a strong whiff of something fishy during my tour with Miss— Dr Laidlaw. I couldn’t say what exactly. What about you?’

‘I couldn’t say what at all,’ Alec answered. ‘Not even a fishy whiff. I just …’

‘Hah!’ I said. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve had a hunch. After all the sneering you’ve done about hunches to me over the years.’

‘I don’t sneer, Dandy,’ Alec said. ‘I tease. And it’s not a hunch. It’s a proper hydropathic clue.’

‘Oh?’ I said, sitting forward. Of course, he had been here overnight and might well have uncovered something already. ‘What do you mean?’

Alec grinned. ‘I mean,’ he said, ‘I feel it in me water.’

I told myself that they would have all sorts of salves and mechanicals here with which to treat bruises and so I kicked him.

Luncheon was, on several counts, a revelation. Remembering what Mrs Bowie née Addie had reported I had expected clear soup and rye wafers, but when I joined Hugh and the boys at one of the many tables in the vaulted and pillared dining room, the menu card announced potted shrimps, brown bread, cold ham, baked potatoes, egg mayonnaise, tomato chutney, apple charlotte and custard, and lest one faint from starvation before teatime there was the further option of biscuits, radishes, celery and cheese. Far from such fare driving one down to Moffat to the Toffee Shop for tuck, I wondered how one could rise from one’s armchair even to start the journey. That was the first surprise: the menu.

The second was the crowd. After the empty treatment suite, the deserted baths and the hollow, echoing drawing room, I had expected the four of us to be marooned in a vastness (Alec had volunteered to take a tray in his room until I could break the news of his presence and hence the reason for ours to Hugh).

The dining room was certainly vast. It was designed after the fashion of a winter garden – indeed I was later to learn, when I got to know the layout of the Hydro properly, that it matched the winter gardens in the other wing – except that only the ceiling was glass, the walls between the mock pillars being plaster painted with outdoor scenes. The painter, very sensibly, had decided to depict rather better weather than was often to be viewed through the glass walls of the winter gardens proper, and there were palm trees, bougainvilleas, stretches of white sand and the straw roofs of distant village huts besides. Inside these exotic walls, tables were set for couples, fours and sixes, with good white linen and glittering Sheffield plate and, as I say, there was a trickle, a steady trickle, of guests entering, taking seats and unfolding napkins. I could not help noticing, as I glanced around, that there was not a Mrs Addie amongst the lot of them.

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.