Under My Skin (4 page)

“You couldn’t stay here and climb up the ladder, then?” She was halfway across my back with the sponge attachment and speech was becoming an effort.

“Hardly. There’s only one pair of shoes I’d like to be in here. And I don’t think she’s planning on taking them off.”

How right you are, I thought. “So, you’ll go?”

“If I can get the right job. I certainly don’t intend to spend the rest of my life in an overage girl’s school.”

“Are you talking about the staff or guests?”

Martha laughed. “Do you have to sleep in shared rooms?”

“I got the impression they treated you quite well.”

“Oh, it’s not bad. We’re just not taken that seriously.”

“And you think you should be?”

“Put it this way, I think it’s probably our skills and relationships with the clients which make this place really work. I mean”—she lowered her voice—“no one comes here for the food.”

I twisted my head to see whether or not the remark might have maggots in it, but she was concentrating hard on the machine, moving into my shoulders with a particularly deep stroke of the massage head. Maggots or mange-tout. Who cares? I thought limply.

“The fact is we’re just taken for granted,” she said after a bit. “Unless things go wrong. And then we’re the ones who get the blame.”

“What kind of ‘wrong’?” I prompted to see if I could tempt her into further indiscretion.

“You wouldn’t want to know,” she said mischievously. “It might make you defect to the competition. Right.” She lifted the sponges off my back. “That’s one side finished. Why don’t you turn over now and I’ll do your tummy and your front.”

I did as I was told. She poured more powder onto her hands and then rubbed it along my arms and over my breasts and stomach. At some point I must have flinched. She stopped. “Sorry. Are my hands cold?”

“No, they’re fine.”

“You feel a bit tense. I noticed it on your back. Why don’ t you try and relax?”

But I already had. Had begun to like the feel of her hands on me. I let myself think about it some more. Once again her touch brought back another’s. How long had it
been? Eight, nine months? That had been its own kind of therapy, too. Nick going out of his way to prove that not all men were the kind you meet in country lanes. Nice thought. Nice man. Wrong adjective for a lasting relationship. Shame really. I was about to start playing with other thoughts when I remembered how much I was being paid to keep my mind on the job. Martha had put aside the powder and started in with the sponges. I climbed back onto the end of the plot.

“I’m sure you’re right,” I murmured. “About the workforce being important. In my experience people only do stupid things if they’re unhappy or angry about the job.”

“Absolutely,” she said, busy with the sponge head on my thighs. “But if management don’t notice who’s upset or why, then what can you do?”

“So should I be prepared for a mutiny or just the occasional individual act of violence?” I asked, keeping it as light as I could.

She laughed. “Oh, nothing like that.” But she realized that she had probably gone too far. She worked in silence for a little longer, then ran the sponge head evenly down my left leg and over and along the bottom of my foot. A feeling to die for. I got the impression it was also a little added extra. She lifted the massage head off me. For a second she left me there, lost in my own pleasure. Then she said quietly, “OK. That’s your time up, Mrs. Wolfe, I’m afraid.”

Oh no, please, say it isn’t so. I dragged myself reluctantly from the bed and started to dress. I could have done with another hour, or maybe a day. “That was fantastic,” I said, for the first time since I arrived really meaning it. “Is this your speciality?”

She was busy detaching the sponge heads, not looking directly at me. “No, not really. We all have to do everything. I think I’m probably best on the massage table, though. I like it.” She wiped her hands down on a towel and smiled.
“You know you can always ask for me again at the office. If, that is, of course, you want to,” she added, and this time her look had just a touch of the coy. Behind her the thank-you messages joined in the chorus of approval.

Are the Kennedys gun-shy? “Thanks. I will.”

My deforestation was booked in for four, which left me a couple of hours in hand. The treatment rooms were closed between one and three for lunch. I had a quick gourmet repast—two bowls of salad and half a dozen crispbreads—then slipped back to see if I could spot any unauthorized activity. In the sauna a tall girl with cropped black hair was picking up towels and pushing them into a black plastic sack. She looked pissed off, but that could have been the menial nature of the job, and she gave me polite but short shrift when she saw me there.

I retreated to the poolside. Counting the girls I had seen but not talked to, I’d probably come into contact with twelve or thirteen of the twenty-four staff, but still as yet no sign of my mermaid, Patricia. I had to admit to a certain disappointment.

The atmosphere in the atrium was relaxed and sleepy. I watched a group of middle-aged women enjoying the Jacuzzi, chattering away to each other like young girls. After a while one of them got out and made her way to the pool. I recognized her from lunch. She smiled and nodded at me. She was a museum administrator from Oxford, due to retire in a few years’ time. Over the fruit course she had been great company—funny, intelligent, with a quiet confidence about who she was and what life had meant to her. But some of that confidence seemed to have come off with the clothes. She hurried across the tiles, aware of my gaze, a little less graceful in the way she carried herself. Of course a health farm isn’t the world’s most compassionate place to show off one’s body, but even so … I thought of my night
swimmer with her perfect body silhouetted in the moonlight and found myself guiltily fascinated by the contrast: the older woman’s arms, the way the loose flesh underneath wrinkled and sagged into her armpits, the lumpy body and the weight of her thighs pitted by mini moon craters with purple veins running like mineral deposits under the surface. I tried to see it all as a testament to a life well lived: to children, husband, job, all those years when she had just been too busy to care for herself. That and the inexorable pull of gravity on older flesh. I understood the process, but the deterioration still made me a little sad, like visiting a handsome old house where the effects of age and neglect have combined.

I tried to imagine myself at her age. Would I mind? Or would I just accept it? Maybe age would bring its own surrender from the burdens of image and sexual attraction. Or maybe it just altered the threshold. Just as I no longer fancied twenty-two-year-olds, finding them too baby-smooth and unlived, maybe she only got the hots for men with double chins and crepe paper round the eyes. Could be I was mourning my own loss of youth. I tried to see it all as sexual politics, the tyranny of an aesthetic based on young flesh and beauty, but underneath there was a harsher, more democratic truth. Everybody sags, everybody wrinkles. Everybody dies. Of course, nobody ever said nature was kind, or even fair. But given the havoc it wreaks, no wonder we’re so scared of it.

Across the atrium, Katherine, last night’s city broker, was flicking through a copy of the
Financial Times
. From the treatment area Martha came out and called her name. “Miss Cadwell, G five.” I looked at my watch. It was 2:25. Lucky Katherine. She would get an extra five minutes under the sponge. I felt almost jealous.

She folded up her newspaper and walked to where Martha was waiting. And as they entered the corridor, I saw
the beautician put her hand lightly on the woman’s sleeve and say something. Katherine laughed and then they were gone. I could just picture another thank-you card on the wall. Did they say it with flowers? In the pool, my museum director was half-submerged, playing with the pleasures of reduced gravity, while the Jacuzzi was filling up with other bodies. Outside, real life was no doubt still in progress. But stay here long enough and you could be forgiven for forgetting it.

The wax strips brought it all back to me. Poor legs. They’d never had so much attention in one day. First the pleasure, then the pain. On the other hand, I would have been hard-pressed to say which was more excruciating—the waxing or the conversation.

Julie was nineteen, newly plucked from the suburbs of Southampton and a born-again beautician. She had nothing but praise for Castle Dean, which she saw as some kind of high temple to beauty and self-improvement, with herself presumably as vestal virgin. And marketing manager. By the time the first leg was finished she’d told me of three separate beauty products to prevent new hair growth and recommended a particularly good one for tired skin—i.e., mine. Either she was a consummate actress or I could cross her off my suspect list right now.

To try and stop her talking I pretended to be interested in the decor. The walls sported a curious selection of posters advertising new and wondrous treatments designed to take on nature and stop the march of time. I thought back to my formidable wrinkly from Oxford. Not a lot of comfort here for her, although one picture showed somebody who seemed to have had the puffy bits of skin lifted from her eye sockets.

In the forty-to-fifty age range there were apparently more drastic transformations to be had from face peels and collagen injections. Collagen: there had been a time
when I had thought it a new term for Tory higher education. But even I have had enough contact with women’s magazines to know that what it really means is Barbara Hershey’s lips exploding into Mick Jagger’s. The woman in the photo I was looking at had not only puffed up her smile but also doctored her eyes. Not a laugh line to be seen. It was all so weird and alien that I could not resist asking Julie about it. Curiosity, after all, is meant to be one of the tricks of my trade.

“Are they for real, those pictures?”

“Of course,” said Julie, tearing a strip off the back of my right leg, a strip which may or may not have included the skin. “Sorry, did that hurt? You really ought to have them done more regularly, you know. Your hairs are just too long to lift off easily. Yes, I’ve met a number of ladies who’ve had collagen implants. It’s been a great success.”

“How old do you have to be?”

“Oh, any age. The skin starts to lose its elasticity from your mid-twenties on. You’d notice a difference if you did it, although you probably wouldn’t actually need it for a couple of years.”

Well, that’s a relief. “So what would you recommend for someone like me then?” I said it half in jest. I should have known better.

“Well, we do a collagen-based face mask. That’s marvelous. Really pumps up the skin. And a peel is always beneficial.”

Good word, beneficial. Probably exactly the right word for a peel. “What does that do?”

“It’s like a kind of chemical scrub. Takes a layer of skin off.”

“Did they do it in the Gulf War?”

“What?”

“Nothing. Anything else?”

She hesitated for a moment, and I could see she was a little
embarrassed. It answered my question, really. Not that I’m vain, it’s just that over the last year I’ve grown so used to seeing it in the mirror that I sometimes need to know how much other people notice it, too. I helped her out by winking the eye.

“Well, you could always have something done about that little, er … scar.”

“Do you think so?”

“Oh, certainly. It’s marvelous what they can do nowadays. I could recommend a clinic if you’re interested.”

“Thanks. Maybe. I’ll get back to you on that one.”

She hesitated again, as if she was going to say something else, then decided to let it go. I let the conversation lapse. Just as well really, since a few minutes later she started in on the bikini line. I found myself digging my nails into the palms of my hand for a little light relief. It probably hurt less to have your stomach tucked.

From Julie I moved to the gentler ministrations of Lola, who, from the brief glimpse I had of her before she smothered egg white over my eyelids, looked like a girl in need of what she was selling; she was a short, plump little chicken with a smattering of angry spots around her chin. Her fingers were deft enough, though—a nice line in temple massage and then flick-flick-flick with the face mask before leaving me alone to let it harden. After ten minutes the egg white felt as if it had been bonded with quick-drying cement. As my skin stretched tighter than God ever intended, I had a moment of pure panic that I might have inadvertently come across the saboteur. But then Lola returned and did something enormously soothing with a warm flannel and what she described as an ampule of hydra-active moisturizer. I was so grateful I forgot to ask her if she had any grievances.

I was duly dispatched from the beauty parlor half an hour later, with legs and upper thighs a delicate shade of
lobster and my pores cleaner than they’d been probably since birth. At the desk I signed a chit for forty-eight pounds. That didn’t include the recommended creams which, had I so chosen, would have set me back at least another fifty. In any other business tough women would be out on the street shouting fraud. I tell you, there’s something about beauty that affects the brain.

The treatment rooms were taking their last clients for the night. I had a quick browse, then went to my bedroom to see if I still recognized myself and to make my notes on the day.

I could now more or less confidently cross off six names, although two of those—Lola of the face mask and Julie, my born-again beautician—were already at the bottom of the pile since they had been off duty at certain key times. Martha, she of the G5 pleasure principle, remained a question mark. I reread her file more carefully and discovered a Bromley girl who’d left school at sixteen, then gone back to college to get O-levels and a beautician’s diploma, supporting herself by running the bar at a local disco. Since her arrival at Castle Dean, her conduct had been impeccable, even winning a nice comment in Mrs. Marchant’s italic script about her rapport with the guests.

I also dug out Patricia Mason’s photo to try and match her up with the pool beauty. But it was a head-and-shoulders snapshot, and without the body it was impossible to tell. I put it to one side and went through the other files again, looking for any sign of dissatisfaction—a reprimand or warning that might have gone septic. But all I could find was a note on the lovely Irish colleen’s file about punctuality, and it just didn’t seem enough to cause such a sustained campaign of violence.