Under My Skin (3 page)

Back in my room I used up my first day’s quota of calories on a hefty slug of scotch from my hip flask—that’s the great thing about Catholicism, after penance come more sins—and hit the staff records. I looked at Mrs. Waverley’s first. It made aspirational reading. Carol Waverley, née Clacton and born just outside Rugby, had left school early and gone into the beauty business. Four years later she went to college to do a business diploma, and Castle Dean was her first big break after qualifying. En route somewhere she had acquired and then lost Mr. Waverley. There had been no children.

No one else on the team quite came up to her aspirational or academic standards. The average age was around twenty-two, and their track records painted a picture of casual labor, six months here, six months there, with the odd stint on cruise ships or in the big stores. Most of their references were good. All of them had been checked out by either Carol or the owner herself (the odd signed comment in a fine italic hand).

A little time-and-motion study successfully narrowed the field. Out of the twenty-four of them, eight had been off duty (although that didn’t necessarily mean off the premises) during the key times. I put them to the bottom of the pile and went through the remaining sixteen again. There still wasn’t an obvious suspect among them. But then if there had been, they’d hardly be wasting a hundred and fifty quid a day on yours truly. Thinking about the money, I decided to do a little research among the guests.

Downstairs dinner was in full swing. Nothing so crude as a gong to summon the faithful, more a communal rumbling in the stomach of a hundred underfed souls. Let’s hope they didn’t smell the scotch on my breath. Luckily the paneled dining room already had its own aroma—that of low-cal salad dressing. It reminded me of the lunch I’d missed.

At candlelit tables, each with its own bowl of flowers, sat little groups of women, heads bowed over plates of green beans and glasses of iced water. A soundtrack of low chatter echoed to the ceiling. The effect was almost devotional. “For these and all the calorie-controlled food of our lives may the Lord make us truly grateful.”

I picked a table with four others. In beauty terms they ranged from beyond hope to the “who needs a health farm anyway?” I have to admit I was ready to dislike them, ready to find them too rich or too idle, or just too self-obsessed. But it wasn’t like that. Whoever they might have been with their makeup and clothes on, without them they were pleasantly ordinary, there as much for the rest as for any miraculous transformation, and with few illusions about the state of their bodies.

My favorite was the most recalcitrant image-wise, a lady whom I recognized from the sauna. She must have been in her fifties. Her long black hair, streaked with gray, was held up in an untidy bun and she wore the kind of housecoat that one sees only at jumble sales. I got the impression she knew that and didn’t give a damn. Her stay at Castle Dean was a thirtieth wedding anniversary present from her daughter, an attractive TV producer sitting next to her. The family that slims together gyms together. As mother-daughter relationships go, they were doing better than I ever knew.

To the mother’s left was a woman who owned her own travel agency, in for a “retread” (her words not mine), and next to her a well-preserved woman called Katherine who
worked in the city and advised people with too much money what to do with it. In spite of my prejudices even she seemed OK. Maybe it was the diet, the absence of artificial additives. Theirs and mine.

I used my newcomer status to ask some dumb questions, but got little back. Carol Waverley had done her job well. Neither the nails nor the blue Marks & Spencer’s buyer had entered Castle Dean folklore. After a while the conversation reverted inexorably to food and the culinary fantasies that come with all calorie-controlled diets. Coffee—decaf, of course—was served in the lounge, accompanied by a short talk by a local expert on the wines of the Languedoc region—an extracurricular activity of some sadism, I thought, for a place under prohibition. I gave it a miss and went to check out the servants’ quarters.

The girls (or the beauticians, as the brochure insisted on calling them) lived at the far end of one of the wings of the house, their rooms carefully segregated from those of the guests. I went via the outside, across the immaculately manicured lawn, through a small gate marked
PRIVATE
. The grass on the employees’ side was decidedly less green, but then these ladies weren’t paying two hundred quid a day to stare at it. I looked up at their rooms. Only a few still had their lights on. The morning shifts started at 8:00
A.M.
Tough business, beauty. On the top floor there were a couple of windows open. From one a tinny stereo was pumping out house music, the volume too muted for the choice of music to make sense. Bedsit land. I’ve always had a sneaking fondness for the simplicity of it. Kate thinks it’s the Peter Pan in me, never wanting to live in a real adult house. I’ll leave you to guess what I think of what she thinks.

I wondered what they made of their lives, boarding school girls by night and handmaidens by day, massaging, pummeling, waxing, and cosseting an endless stream of women who spent more in a day than they probably made
in a week. Presumably they were all paid-up members of the church of health and beauty. But even the faithful can be tempted. Maybe one of the bedsit windows concealed a recent convert to Living Marxism, dedicated to exacting vengeance on the complacent middle classes. I could hardly wait till morning.

Back in my room I washed down some leftover popcorn from
Aladdin
with a couple of hits from my hip flask. I tried to think full but my stomach wasn’t fooled. More than a couple of days of this and I’d be ready to sabotage the place myself. I channel-flicked until there was nothing left but night-owl trash, then changed into my new swimming costume. It seemed pretty unlikely that the saboteur would strike again so quickly, but I was being paid partly to let Carol Waverley sleep more easily in her bed, and, anyway, it’s one of my favorite activities, midnight swimming.

Someone, however, had beaten me to it. As I entered the atrium, the moon emerged from behind clouds and bathed the pool in a cold, foggy glow. I saw a figure moving cleanly through the water, a lovely smooth breaststroke, up, down, up, down, the ripples flowing out like cut silk behind her. I stood watching her, counting the laps, envying her elegance and her ease. Then, just as I was in danger of becoming mesmerized, she stopped and stood up. She put her hands up to her face, pushing off the water, and let out a long gasp of tiredness, pulling herself up over the side of the pool. In the moonlight I could see she had a beautiful figure: long legs; high, rounded breasts; and slim waist in a simple black swimsuit. I did not recognize her from any of the staff mug shots and certainly nothing that lovely had been in the dining room earlier. From a chair nearby she picked up a long, dark bathrobe and pulled it round herself, sliding her feet into a pair of slip-on shoes.

She was still oblivious of my presence. Since I was standing directly between her and the exit, she was about to get
the fright of her life. I braced myself for her shock. But it never came. Because she didn’t leave that way. Instead she walked round the pool to the back of the atrium and out through what should have been a locked door.

I went after her the second it closed, but by the time I reached it it was locked again. I knew from the plans that it led not to the treatment rooms but to the garden, and from there one could reach the girls’ block. I tried the other doors. They were still locked. Someone who had a key to one could well have the key to others, but if I had been doing something naughty in the steam room I would hardly have stuck around for a leisurely swim afterward. I dug out my flashlight to check the time. Ten to two. Even if I did wake her, it was unlikely Carol Waverley would feel like getting up to search the premises in the middle of the night. I decided to leave her to her beauty sleep and hit her early.

As it happened she didn’t feel much like searching then either. “Oh, I don’t think we need to worry.”

“Why? D’ you know who it was?”

“Yes, I think so. I think it was one of the beauticians.”

“Which one?”

“Er … Patricia Mason. From your description it sounds like her.”

“Is it allowed, the staff using the pool?”

“Not strictly, no. But it does happen.”

“And what if it was more than a swim?”

“Well, I’m pretty certain it wasn’t, though of course I’ll check. Thanks. I’m grateful for you telling me so promptly.”

Liar, I thought. Nobody can be grateful for being woken at 6:30
A.M.
—I certainly wasn’t when the alarm went off in my ear after less than four hours’ sleep. And I wasn’t that certain that she would check either. Interesting.

Half an hour later I was the second one down for breakfast.
By then I was so hungry that I could have eaten anything. I almost did. I was on my way to the buffet table with its tempting choice of bran or grapefruit when the woman ahead of me started screaming. Food deprivation and hysteria—an interesting medical phenomenon. I pushed past her. There, in pride of place in the center of the table, stood an enormous bowl of yogurt. “Live,” I believe, is the technical term. In this case it was a precise use of language. I watched fascinated as its thick white surface heaved and squirmed with a mass of drowning blind maggots.

For a moment nobody did anything. Then I picked up a napkin and flung it over the bowl. Next to me the woman’s screams had transmuted into panicky, yelping little hiccups. “Don’t worry,” I said calmly. “They’re protein. Very low in calories.”

Sabotage. It comes in all shapes and flavors.

O
f course nobody felt much like eating after that. Indeed, my breakfast companion felt more like going home. Don’t blame her really. I sat in reception with a cup of Red Zinger pretending to read a magazine, while Carol Waverley placated and charmed her over the bill. I thought on balance it was probably better that way. At least if she went, there was more chance she could keep it quiet.

“So?” I said, after she had waved her good-bye. “Do you want to give me the records of the kitchen staff?”

She gave a desperate little shrug. “The supervisor says they laid out the cold table at a quarter to seven, then all the girls went back to prepare the hot meal in the kitchen. Anybody else could have walked into the dining room during that time.”

Down the snake back to square one. Time to start getting to know some of the anybodies.

By lunchtime I had done aerobics in the pool, a round in the gym, fifteen minutes in the steam room, a sojourn in a peat-colored peat bath, and half an hour under the glorious G5. I’d also met Mary, Karen, Flosie, Nicole, and Martha. None of them smelled of fish bait, but between them I learned more than a person should ever need to know about the beauty business: how it took anything from one year to three to get your diploma, and how, once qualified, many girls chose the health farms first because you could
make the salary stretch longer and it was good experience before moving on to London or the big wide world.

They were all living in. Flosie was straight out of college, Nicole and Karen on their second job, and Mary, lilting and shy, just over from Ireland. The accommodation wasn’t bad. They either had their own room or shared, and there were communal kitchens. Half a dozen girls had cars, so there was always the chance of getting the hell out into Reading for a night off. From the sound of it, Reading was clearly the most exciting thing that had happened to most of them. They were not so much boring as unformed. Oh, to be that young again.

Finding out that much proved easy. But when it came to casual inquiries about problems, all I got was the occasional whine about schoolgirl bitchiness in the dorms and missing their boyfriends.

Luckily Martha, with the notorious G5 massage machine, was more forthcoming.

Take away the nails and I have to tell you G5 rates as one of life’s great experiences: the human equivalent of those car washes where huge pillars of vibrating fluff rub your bodywork all over. By the time we got to the polishing stage I was rendered almost inarticulate with pleasure, but as mine is a vocation as well as a job, through it all I kept talking.

So, bless her cotton socks, did Martha. She was a handsome woman, with black hair and soft olive skin, probably in her mid-to late twenties, and with a nicely tuned sense of humor. That she was good at her job was proved by the selection of thank-you cards tacked to the wall: “Thanks for helping me relax,” “A week was not enough!” I had read them while I was supposed to be undressing. I had also checked the massage head, just because—given all the trouble with the worms—Carol would not have had time to.

“Sponge,” Martha said. “I think you’ll like it. Most people do.”

I lay on my front first and she spread powder over my back and shoulders and down my legs. She had good hands—confident, not at all tentative. I was pleased to have them on me, even if they did remind me of how long it was since anyone else’s had been there.

My stomach grumbled softly, just to draw attention to its continued bad treatment.

“Hungry,” she said softly. A statement rather than a question.

“Mmm,” I murmured, wondering if any of the popcorn had maybe fallen into my coat pocket.

“That shows it’s doing you good,” she stated with what I thought was admirably concealed irony.

She worked on for a while in silence. But once given the cue was quite happy to chatter more, about both the place and herself. She’d been there for almost a year. It was her third job and she was looking to move on. She’d already done the see-the-world stint on the cruise ships only to discover that all that glitters isn’t gold—I mean, where’s the glamour in spending twelve hours a day in a room without a window while the Caribbean sun shone on the rich folks out on deck? Anyway, she was more ambitious than that. Wanted to run her own salon. And to do that she was going to have to move to London. She had sent off a number of applications already, so presumably she didn’t feel the need to be that loyal anymore. Whatever the reasons, we were getting on famously.