“Seems a bit silly when they’re paying plenty to take the cure or whatever it is.”
“And that’s another thing.” The young man’s voice was indignant. “I can understand charging twenty quid a week and giving you three square meals a day, but how do they get away with charging twenty quid for giving you nothing but hot water to eat? Doesn’t make sense.” “I suppose there are the treatments. And it must be worth it to the people if they get well.”
“Guess so,” said the young man doubtfully. “Some of them do look a bit different when I come to take them back to the station.” He sniggered. “And some of them change into real old goats after a week of nuts and so forth. Guess I might try it myself one day.” “What do you mean?”
The young man glanced at Bond. Reassured and remembering Bond’s worldly comments on Brighton, he said, “Well, you see we got a girl here in Washington. Racy bird. Sort of local tart, if you see what I mean. Waitress at a place called The Honey Bee Tea Shop— or was, rather. She started most of us off, if you get my meaning. Quid a go and she knows a lot of French tricks. Regular sport. Well, this year the word got round up at the Scrubs and some of these old goats began patronizing Polly—Polly Grace, that’s her name. Took her out in their Bentleys and gave her a roll in a deserted quarry up on the Downs. That’s been her pitch for years. Trouble was they paid her five, ten quid and she soon got too good for the likes of us. Priced her out of our market, so to speak. Inflation, sort of. And a month ago she chucked up her job at The Honey Bee, and you know what?” The young man’s voice was loud with indignation. “She bought herself a beat-up Austin Metropolitan for a couple of hundred quid and went mobile. Just like the London tarts in Curzon Street they talk about in the papers. Now she’s off to Brighton, Lewes—anywhere she can find the sports, and in between whiles she goes to work in the quarry with these old goats from the Scrubs! Would you believe it!” The young man gave an angry blast on his klaxon at an inoffensive couple on a tandem bicycle.
Bond said seriously, “That’s too bad. I wouldn’t have thought these people would be interested in that sort of thing on nut cutlets and dandelion wine or whatever they get to eat at this place.”
The young man snorted. “That’s all you know. I mean”—he felt he had been too emphatic—“that’s what we all thought. One of my pals, he’s the son of the local doctor, talked the thing over with his dad— in a roundabout way, sort of. And his dad said no. He said that this sort of diet and no drink and plenty of rest, what with the massage and the hot and cold sitz baths and what have you, he said that all clears the blood stream and tones up the system, if you get my meaning. Wakes the old goats up—makes ’em want to start cutting the mustard again, if you know the song by that Rosemary Clooney.”
Bond laughed. He said, “Well, well. Perhaps there’s something to the place after all.”
A sign on the right of the road said: “ Shrublands. Gateway to Health. First right. Silence please. ” The road ran through a wide belt of firs and evergreens in a fold of the Downs. A high wall appeared and then an imposing, mock-battlemented entrance with a Victorian lodge from which a thin wisp of smoke rose straight up among the quiet trees. The young man turned in and followed a gravel sweep between thick laurel bushes. An elderly couple cringed off the drive at a blare from his klaxon and then on the right there were broad stretches of lawn and neatly flowered borders and a sprinkling of slowly moving figures, alone and in pairs, and behind them a redbrick Victorian monstrosity from which a long glass sun parlor extended to the edge of the grass.