Blanchaille and Kipsel were escorted through the great entrance hall with a vaulted roof. Old-fashioned iron lamps hung overhead from long chain pulleys; the walls were decorated with frescoes showing knights on horseback, boys on dolphins, dying dragons, naked maidens, castles, rivers, holy grails and mermaids wearing large golden ear-rings. The place was vast and silent; the only sound their own footsteps, for their barefoot companions made no noise at all. There was a very strong smell, too, a strange mixture of sulphur, mud, salt and above all of soap, and a certain peculiar dampness pervading everything. They made their way down an extraordinary corridor off which led handsome arcades flanked by tall Corinthian columns. The frescoes became more extravagant as they proceeded; angels struck rocky outcrops with golden wands and jets of crystal water burst into the light of day. The mermaids combed their long blonde hair on high rocky promontories, turning their angelic faces to the high-flung spray from the pounding seas below. Plump olive-skinned bathers with a faintly Roman or Grecian look to them, were shown taking to the waters, moving in stately fashion — noses rippling the surface like sea-lions, and their eyes shining like dates.
Blanchaille and Kipsel asked their companions where they were taking them.
For a bath,’ came the wholly unexpected answer. ‘We are the bathing attendants here to introduce our facilities to all the newly arrived guests.’
Here they began to descend a steep flight of stairs where the smell of soap and sulphur was even more pungent and the damp, mouldering air of the place clogged the nostrils.
Kipsel began to show signs of panic, ‘I don’t need a bath,’ he whispered furiously to Blanchaille, despite the fact that his need, and that of Blanchaille, had long been apparent and increasingly unpleasant, even to themselves. The stairs grew even danker and saltier until they issued at last in an enormous underground cave or bathing chamber in the centre of which was a huge bath, a large sunken swimming pool lapping at its tiled lips.
‘Step into the water,’ the bathing attendants invited, ‘as if you were Roman emperors.’
Then I saw Blanchaille and Kipsel remove their heavy walking boots and Blanchaille took off his clothes, though it is true that Kipsel at first attempted to walk into the water fully dressed and had to be restrained and it was only with considerable difficulty, after assuring the attendants that he would undress only if they went away, that he could be persuaded to take off his clothes and, with Blanchaille, stepped into the water which proved far hotter than they had expected and took some time to get used to.
The attendants meanwhile had withdrawn to a small glass booth and were watching them steadily. These attendants in their barefooted, flapping obsequiousness reminded Kipsel of warders, he said, or actor convicts who’d escaped from an old Charlie Chaplin movie. Blanchaille said this was probably because they were dressed in some costume of an earlier period. Kipsel said that one of Blanchaille’s less likeable traits was his pedantic streak. He christened the attendants Mengele and Bormann, a joke which Blanchaille found to be in very bad taste.
Kipsel gained sufficient confidence to float on his back. ‘Have you noticed how the water gets suddenly deeper? In some places I can’t stand.’ He drifted idly in the water with just his nose and his toes visible. Blanchaille stared at Kipsel’s toes which were very white and seemed to fold in on themselves, reminding him of white roots, or of strange mushrooms. The two attendants in their glass booth continued to watch them closely.
When at length they stepped out of the bath it was to find their clothes had disappeared. The attendant stepped forward and Mengele explained that the clothes had gone, as he put it, for the burning. The attendants offered towels. They were shown the row of saunas, the Turkish baths and the Turkish showers which were followed by the freezing plunge bath one reached by climbing a steep steel ladder and then dropping into, breaking a film of ice. They were shown a choice of soaps, the hairdriers, the pomades, creams, colognes, razors, sponges, scrubbing brushes, loofahs, and invited to make use of some or all of these. The waters in which they had been bathing were highly effective for oto-laryngological ailments, said Bormann, radioactive of course and slightly odorous, and so showering was advisable after taking the waters. They might feel rather tired a little later, said Mengele, but this was quite usual. They should go and lie down if they felt tired. There would be a place for them to lie down.
After their showers they were directed to the relaxation room, a chamber of the utmost modernity carved into the rock, glass-walled, softly and luxuriously furnished with leather loungers and a variety of ultraviolet sunbeds. There was also on offer, it seemed, among the many therapies: massage, electric roller-beds, acupunture, aromatherapy, colonic irrigation, physiotherapy, meditation and drinks, both hard and soft, as well as mud baths, a gymnasium, and, for those who felt they needed them, a valuable course of rejuvenating, fresh-cell injections. At short notice, the attendants also offered to arrange for inhalations and osteopathy.
These offers were declined. And as he stepped into the shower I heard Blanchaille put it with simple dignity, ‘to be clean is enough.’
Afterwards, with their hair clean, freshly shaved, deodorised and shining, they were dressed in soft and fluffy cream towelling robes with the golden letters B.K. prominently blocked above the breast pockets. I saw them led back up the stairs and through the corridors and arcades and then up a further flight of stairs into the dining room.
Kipsel could not help trembling in his towelling robe as he stood in the doorway of the crowded dining-room feeling, as he confessed to Blanchaille with a half-apologetic, rueful smile, that he really hadn’t believed that he’d ever see the light of day again when the attendants marched them into the sunken bathing hall. This notion of washing before entry is a bit bloody quaint, not so? I mean, you know Blanchie, it reminds me of going swimming, when they used to have one of those freezing foot baths with disinfectant you had to slop through. I hated that. I always hopped it.’
‘There is no hopping here,’ said Blanchaille briskly. ‘Here I get the feeling that they do everything by the book. Unless you go into the baths you can’t join the others.’
‘It reminds me of Lynch’s thoughts on salvation. Do you remember his Clean Living Fallacy?’ Kipsel said.
Who could forget it? This was Lynch’s answer to the morbid teachings of the Margaret Brethren on sudden death and inevitable damnation. The Margaret Brethren taught them that by going about in a state of sin knowing not what the day brought forth they risked the wrath of God: a motor car accident, a sudden electrocution, asphyxiation, choking, or one of the hundred hidden ways in which God might strike and send the sinner to judgement unshriven, unprepared and irredeemable. Death in the state of mortal sin would deprive the sinner of any chance ever again of heavenly bliss, and even a venial sin would plummet the sinner to purgatory where sufferings were just as bad and the period of confinement so vast that by comparison all the time which had passed since the creation of the cosmos to the present day seemed no longer than a millionth of a second. Lynch savaged this doctrine by pointing out that precisely the same fear possessed people who hoped, if knocked down by a motor car, to be wearing clean underpants. In the eschatology of the Margaret Brethren, Lynch explained to them, God was reduced to a bad driver, the human being to a hit-and-run victim and the soul to the status of an article of underwear.
This mere mention of Lynch made them both wonder and look around them as if hoping that they might spy the little priest lurking about. Perhaps they might ask him whether he thought people here lived by the book and if so whether the book was any good and life lived by it worth the trouble?