by Morag Joss
Sara gave her an enquiring look which was supposed to convey complete ignorance of the circumstances of Cecily’s arrival.
‘I came with a friend. On another matter. But perhaps I should just go on a diet,’ she added sadly. The big round eyes could look abject as well as sultry. Sara felt certain that Derek had gone off in a huff, having not got his way with Matthew Sawyer. She had seen how short his temper was and guessed that he was easily peeved, although it was just possible that Cecily had been the one to be offended and make a stand, deferring their dinner and subsequent seduction until after she had salvaged some benefit for herself out of the earlier embarrassment. But she could hardly ask.
‘Oh, dieting doesn’t work,’ Sue said, landing happily on the familiar ground of the conversation. ‘You’ve really just got to stop eating completely, that’s the only thing that works for me. Willpower’s not a problem. I’ll do anything when I really want to. Paul hates me fat. Anyway, there’s a woman here who sorts the whole thing out with her hands. It’s a mind-body thing; she lays on her hands and it kind of disperses all the fat. It’s very gentle, apparently.’
‘Really? That sounds amazing,’ Cecily said, wide-eyed.
‘Yeah, it is. I mean, you’ve got to follow this eating plan as well. Obviously. Loads of water and fruit, to eliminate body toxins. No meat or fish. Or coffee, or fat or sugar, obviously.’
‘Oh,’ said Cecily wanly. ‘It’s a diet, then.’
‘I sometimes wonder where my body toxins are,’ Sara said. ‘And what are they, exactly? How much do they weigh? I mean, could I get a test tube full? When I die,’ she said importantly, ‘I am going to donate my body toxins to medical research.’
Sue squealed with laughter. ‘Oh, you!’ she said, just as the hub of conversation in the room fell away.
‘Now I don’t intend to keep you standing here long,’ said the man on the platform, whom Sara immediately recognised as the tall pacifier of Derek. He had an unattractive, upper-middle-class accent of the kind which would have got him lynched in many parts of Britain although not, of course, in Bath. He introduced the ‘ladies’ with him on the platform.
‘...the President of the Natural Healing Arts Association’ – grinning, ample and kaftan-clad, Sara noted – ‘and my colleague Olivia Passmore who as Deputy Director of Bath Museums is responsible, with me, for this wonderful venue.’
There was Olivia, obviously already dressed for the Pump Room, her short greying hair and strong features looking marvellous above a silvery-looking silk jacket. She was bound to be walking across town to the Pump Room afterwards, so they probably would go together, or would she have to go with Matthew Sawyer? Was that why he was wearing black tie?
‘Now I’m just a simple chap who’s worked in museums all his life, and I’m also jolly lucky because it’s my job to run all the museums in this wonderful city. And that means I have the pleasant duty of welcoming you all here this weekend and I hope that you’ll enjoy not only this very special building but also the many other unique features of Bath. Now of course Bath has long been a centre of healing. Before the Romans, the prehistoric peoples hereabouts thought the hot spring contained the healing power of the goddess Sulis. So to them this was a holy place. Then the Romans came along and they were no end impressed, I can tell you. Now the Romans recognised a good idea when they saw it...’
Oh, God, Sara thought, exchanging a look with Sue, we’re going to get the works.
‘...and so there was a bit of a hostile takeover – harhar – and so generations of Romans also came to know this place as holy. Only this time the chap in charge, or chappess rather, was the Roman goddess Minerva. And by the eighteenth century...’
That’s more like it, skip two thousand years or so, get to the point, Sara thought approvingly.
‘...people were a little more prosaic and they flocked here in their droves. Now this was all on the basis of quasiscientific ideas about the benefits of the waters...’
Then it started.
‘...and it goes to show, doesn’t it, that we never really learn! It’s all a question of faith, isn’t it? For here all you dear ladies are today, in the dying years of the second millennium, to tell us that with a drop of vegetable extract here and little massage there, we’ll all be “cured” of whatever ails us! Extraordinary, isn’t it? Just clutch your healing crystal – that’ll be twenty pounds, please – and breathe deeply! And large numbers of us believe you, much in the way that people have believed in the power of the waters here, and a whole host of other quackery, for the past two thousand and something years! And it’s just as good for business as it ever was, isn’t it? I don’t need to tell you that it’s faith you need, even today! And where, ladies, does faith end and superstition begin? I put it to you that superstition is simply the name we give to all those familiar articles of faith that have stood the test of time. Just look at today’s date if you need convincing. Friday the thirteenth! We consider it unlucky, don’t we? And we consider the spa waters to be beneficial to health. Two articles of faith, you see, of which we are equally fond and which are equally unsupported by fact – har-har!’
His laugh was inane and nasal. Sara, although in broad agreement with most of this, was aghast at his clumsiness. Could he really think that this was the time and place to outline such a robustly sceptical analysis of the nature of belief? The audience was not laughing, but staring back at him in silence. Sensing perhaps that all was not well, Matthew Sawyer attempted to lighten the message with humour.
‘So, do venture out and see Bath’s unique Roman Baths in the course of this weekend. That’s if you’re not too busy stirring your cauldrons and cooking up cures for all those little afflictions that we all suffer from! Actually, I have a little wart on my finger here – any suggestions?’
Sara heard Sue smother a snort and felt a panicky need to laugh. She looked at the ceiling. Had his audience consisted of less deeply relaxed and psychically healed people they would by this stage have been transformed into an insurgent, seething and disaffected mob. But, being broadminded and non-violent to a woman, this mob was doing little to convey its discomfiture to Matthew Sawyer. And he had not yet finished.
‘Actually, I don’t have any particular regard for the established medical profession myself and that is another reason why I am grateful to you, as representatives of the alternative healing lobby. The more active you are, the more full the GPs’ waiting rooms will be! Personally I like the idea of keeping our doctors off the golf course with a few cases of prune juice overdose!’
He actually said ‘orff. Sara brought her eyes down from the ceiling. She had been staring in apparent admiration of the swags of laurels and berries which transversed its vast area, intersected with stuccoed garlands of palms and flowers, and after eight relentlessly appalling minutes of Matthew Sawyer, she knew every leaf. She had resolutely avoided meeting Sue’s eye, knowing that to do so would have reduced them both to cackling wrecks.
Apparently stunned into a show of good manners, the audience did actually applaud, albeit thinly. How British that is, Sara thought. If you are roundly insulted by your speaker you must still of course clap, but you clap a little less. In a surprisingly muted hum of conversation the delegates moved gratefully to the buffet tables set out at the west end under the long colonnade of columns and pilasters, anxious to blot out the whole ghastly, misjudged episode with solid platefuls of samosas and salad. The squad of chefs and servers behind the tables was trying to impose some system against the tide of people, among whom were Cecily and Sue, pushing in staunchly with their empty plates.
‘Get me a roll, could you?’
‘Want some of this rice?’
‘What’s that, quiche? Yeah, a little bit. I’ve got feta, okay?’
Evidently the joint witnessing of a blatant act of self-destruction had been a deeply bonding experience. Turning smiling from the tables, Sara caught sight of Olivia at the far side of the room. She was standing with Matthew Sawyer beside a s
mall side table and they were engaged in a tense-looking conversation. Sawyer looked rather angry, standing tall over her with his head bent stiffly towards her and his jaw ugly and tight. But it was Olivia who was doing most of the talking and, despite her size, looked much the more formidable of the two. She must be giving him hell for that speech, Sara thought. Wiser not to interrupt. Just then Olivia turned and marched towards the door at the far end, leaving Matthew Sawyer to gather up the two or three papers on the table and stare crossly after her. Sara decided not to go in pursuit of Olivia, and went to the Pump Room alone.
JAMES HAD gone early to the Pump Room to warm up on the piano before any of the audience arrived. Sara could hear him on the Steinway as she came in by the Stall Street entrance to the new, functional side of the building. She paused in the small circular lobby and moved up against the wall so as not to be in the way of the traffic of caterers. Several halls and passages led into this lobby: one from the Pump Room itself, one from the offices and stores, and another which led from the modern stairs bringing visitors back up from the Roman Baths and into the Pump Room via the museum shop. From yet another passage came the smells, clatters and voices of the kitchens, and a procession of waiters and chefs who crossed the lobby every few seconds, bearing piles of plates and huge trays of food for the warming ovens of the Pump Room servery. The race was on to produce a four-course dinner for three hundred people, as well as to convert the demure teatime Pump Room into a dining room full of large circular tables set with candles, polished glasses, generous arrangements of flowers and fruit and burnished silver chafing-dishes. And they had less than two hours in which to do it.
James was so good. Sara listened in admiration to the flow of his playing, as he played through the accompaniment to the first piece they would be performing, Mendelssohn’s Song Without Words in D. As a very young man he had won several of the major international prizes for accompanists and Sara thought it a slight pity that he now did so much broadcasting, fronting the big televised music competitions and hosting radio programmes, rather than playing. But he was so good at that too: engaging, witty and articulate, and immensely knowledgeable without ever being intimidating. He was small, very dark and good-looking, with ears that stuck out noticeably and attractively. In all that he did and, indeed, all that he was, James seemed incapable of inelegance. He and Tom were by now an old married couple and lived partly in London, where Tom was based as an EU lawyer and had kept his house, and partly in Bath, which they both preferred. Tom’s necessarily frequent spells in Brussels meant that James was often on his own.
Here he was now, coming through from the Pump Room calling, ‘Och, it’s yourself! All right now?’ in his best Tannochbrae and planting a kiss on her cheek. He went off in search of drinks while she went to change in the small office which served as a dressing room. She dressed quickly, stepping into her wonderful Manolo Blahnik shoes, just low-heeled enough to allow her to play without getting in the way, and climbing into the stiff petticoat which gave the blue-black velvet dress such a supple and extravagant swing. It was by now second nature to her to choose her concert dresses with a view to how they looked when she was sitting down, and this was a good one. It was almost demure at the front, cut high from shoulder to shoulder just below her collar bones. The waist was small and belted tightly with a broad band of brilliant blue silk, and the almost circular ankle-length skirt sank softly in folds to the floor when she sat down to play. At the back it was cut in a deep V almost to the waist, exposing most of her polished back. She fixed her face in a hand mirror under the atrocious light of the office. She could look the part, anyway. James called, ‘Ye decent?’ from the doorway and came in.
‘You look very nice. Still working at the rowing machine, I see,’ he said, watching with a glass of mineral water in each hand as she brushed and twisted her dark, ridiculously shiny hair up underneath a large diamanté and velvet clasp.
‘Aye, it’s not a bad wee frock, this,’ she replied, pouting theatrically and dredging up for his benefit the never-forgotten vowels instilled in her at Glasgow Academy. ‘You look gorgeous. That new?’
‘Oh, this?’ James said mischievously, fingering the printed velvet waistcoat that he was wearing with a creamy white dinner jacket and dark blue bow tie. ‘Georgina von Etzdorf. Present from Tom, actually. Och, no, I’ve had it weeks.’
Sara shifted her pile of clothes off the chair in the cramped office and brought her cello out of its case. Pulling the end-pin out of the base, she rested it on the floor and then sat down and drew the familiar warm wood of the shaft against her shoulder. She tapped on the strings lightly with the fingers of her left hand, moved the folds of her dress out of the way as she planted her feet and pulled the body of the cello between her knees. She tightened up the bow and with her head slightly tilted, tuned up. She shifted in her chair, blew lightly on the fingers of her left hand and played several scales, apparently without effort, repeating one or two difficult shifts for the left hand. She played them again very softly, then again with a rich sonorous vibrato which the small room could barely contain. Sara’s instrument was the Christiani, a glorious Stradivari cello made in 1700, just as he was entering his Golden Period. Its celebrated owner, Lisa Christiani, had died in 1853 at the age of twenty-six, but in her short career had so captured Mendelssohn that he had dedicated to her the beautiful Song Without Words, which was the first piece Sara was to play. Then she practised some broken chords, first smoothly and then staccato, allowing her bow to bounce regularly and lightly on the strings. She stopped, adjusted the tuning and sat in repose for a few seconds. Then she lifted the bow and played the opening bars of the Mendelssohn. Then she played twice through the fiendish scale passages of fast demi-semiquavers of Bruch’s Kol Nidrei. She paused, closed her eyes, and began the Schumann Three Fantasy Pieces Opus 73, the middle piece of their programme.
James saw that she was in danger of doing too much and tensing up. He nodded and smiled. ‘That’s good. Why not leave it to settle now? You’ll be fine.’
She smiled without looking at him. She rose and placed the cello carefully back in its case. Then, taking their glasses, they went back out to the lobby and descended the stairs which led down through the museum and out to the Great Bath.
They stood staring into the great rectangle of milky greenish water from which wisps of steam were rising. The open flares on the stone columns surrounding the bath underlit the colonnades, where a few people were already standing or strolling in the twilight. The flames cast their light upwards and caught the aloof stone figures standing on the Victorian balustrade above. Downwards, their glow touched the surface of the water, revealing the edges of the stone steps which descended into its depths. A breeze caught the water’s surface, which rippled delicately with the slight guttering of the flares. Steam eddied upwards. As she always did, Sara tried and largely failed to imagine the Great Bath roofed over in hollow brick as it once had been, for to see the sacred water now held in its rough stone cradle, lit by torches and open to the summer night sky, intensified its watery magic. Generations of Romans had come here to bathe, swap news, argue and do business, and Sara knew that they had come to show off too, which put the representatives of moneyed Bath presently sipping their drinks under the colonnades in their proper context, as merely continuing an old tradition. But long before the Romans, the spring had been a place of pilgrimage and devotion. Sara wondered if it had been, when dedicated to the Celtic goddess Sulis, somehow more holy. ‘Minerva is patron goddess. In her temple eternal flames never whiten into ash,’ so the Roman historian had said. What had become of Sulis? The Romans, unnerved by a foreign, elusive deity, had simply superimposed one of their own, the familiar Minerva, a goddess they could talk to, one who spoke their language, one whom they could capture and contain within the carved stones of their new temple. Sara left James’s side and made her way over the lethally uneven flagstones to the edge of the water, crouched down and swirled her hand in its unearthly heat. She di
d not feel like talking, particularly. She looked out across the green pool where the reflections of the flares, against the darkening sky, trembled. Perhaps it was just the passing of time, these walls having borne witness to so much skulduggery, gossip, barter and supplication, which now made the place seem not hallowed, but over-exposed. The Romans, as was their way, had tried to articulate and quantify the spring’s sanctity and, in so doing, had rendered it utterly secular. No ghosts of holy tenants were lingering here. It was the wind, only the wind, that caused the flares to shiver with such malevolent-seeming delicacy, and only silence that was in possession now. Again tomorrow, and the next day, and every day, people would come to the Roman Baths not to visit the ancient and sacred shrine of a pre-Christian deity, not any more to bathe for physical, let alone spiritual, renewal, but to be impressed by engineering. And that was the glory that was Rome. Sara rose, turned gingerly and returned over the stones to James, who stood patiently holding her drink. As she took it, an echo of cocktail laughter reached them from the other side.
ABOUT AN hour after his public humiliation and two minutes into his first glass of Cecily’s plonk, Derek began to calm down. He had tried inwardly ridiculing the man: ‘Oh, yes...and I am the Director of Museums and Civic Leisure Resources!’ Oh, yes? Arrogant prat! Upper-class bastard! But it had not worked, because the man had not been ridiculous and Derek, knowing himself to have been the arrogant prat, found less than the usual comfort in not being upper class. It is a terrible thing, at fifty years of age, to be sufficiently embarrassed to blush in an empty room. He sank back on the sofa, a whale in a dolphin’s shirt, rested his glass on the straining button in the middle of his high stomach and looked at the ceiling. What had made him go on like that? He had been swept along by the excitement of getting the letter, lost his usual reserve and had just let events run away. He drained the glass and refilled it. It was a sort of hidden Mediterranean streak he had, this occasional tendency to cast caution to the winds. Nothing wrong with being spontaneous now and then, was there? Sometimes it was best just to pitch in and reveal your hand. It was an impulse to which he had often succumbed where his secretaries were concerned. Well, not so much his hand as other parts of his anatomy, ha-ha, but it usually went down well enough. Oops, did he really mean ‘down’? He had to admit it, he was a bit of a devil.