I wondered if there had been some mistake,’ he said.
He opened the lid and showed her the solitary glass of water and slice of lemon. She smiled and looked at the label on the tray.
‘Mr Brock? No, no mistake, dear. You’re on total fast for three days.’
‘Three days!’
‘That’s right, dear. Seventy-two hours. You can look forward to dinner on Thursday night for a real treat.’
‘My God. What will it be?’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she laughed. ‘Something special. Maybe a glass of carrot juice. Sit down anywhere and make some friends.’
Somewhat stunned, he wandered over to a table at which a couple were sitting and asked if he might join them. The man rose stiffly to his feet and extended his hand. He was tall and willowy, and there was an air of exhaustion about him.
‘Sidney Blumendale,’ he said. ‘And this is Martha Price.’
Brock introduced himself and sat down.
‘Are you all right, old chap?’ Blumendale asked. ‘You look a bit pale.’
‘I’ve just had a shock, actually,’ Brock said. He lifted the lid of his tray and showed them the glass of water. ‘Apparently this is my dinner.’
The two diners smiled. ‘Your first day?’ Blumendale asked, and Brock nodded.
‘You’ll feel wonderful after you’ve got over the first week,’ Martha Price assured him.
‘You sound as if you’ve got plenty of experience of the place,’ Brock said, eyeing their plates. ‘What are you eating? It smells good.’
‘It’s a vegetable casserole,’ Martha told him, ‘with a delicious nut crust topping and fresh green salad. But don’t think about it.’ She was enjoying herself. ‘Oh, and this is freshly made carrot juice from the vegetable gardens here. And after the casserole we’ll get some stewed apples and cream bran — that’s bran with yoghurt and honey.’ Of a similar age to her companion, in her sixties, she appeared to have twice his energy and her voice crackled with mischief.
Brock groaned. ‘I’m told I can look forward to the carrot juice in three days’ time, if I behave myself. How long have you been here to deserve all that?’
‘Oh, we practically live here. I started coming five or six years ago, when I was first seriously bothered by this.’ She held up a hand with joints swollen by arthritis. ‘You wouldn’t believe, but I could hardly move with it, and I was only sixty-three. Now it hardly bothers me at all, and that’s all due to exercises and acupuncture and, above all, the diet. In the last six months I’ve even been able to do without my walking stick. So you must behave and do as you’re told, David. No cheating!’
Brock guessed he was getting the pep-talk she gave all newcomers and he played along with it, pulling a face and muttering, ‘Good for the soul, I suppose.’
‘Now, why did you come here if you weren’t ready to take it seriously?’ she scolded him. ‘This isn’t a holiday camp, you know. Honestly, some of you men are like little boys. You don’t know what real hardship is.’
Brock was beginning to think that Martha Price was a pain, but he nodded ruefully and sipped his water, and after a moment Sidney Blumendale gave a dry little cough and said, ‘I first came here in ‘89, the year after my wife died. Getting a bit run down, you know. Spend ten months of the year here now.’
‘The other months he visits his children for as long as they can put up with him,’ Martha added, ‘and this winter we had a fortnight out of season in Majorca, which we’ll be doing again, won’t we, Sidney?’
Sidney nodded agreement. From the look of him Brock guessed he didn’t dare do otherwise.
‘What about you, David?’
‘This is my first time. Got a bit of a bad shoulder. Thought they might be able to help.’
‘Oh, if anyone can, Dr Beamish-Newell will. He’s a wonderful man.’ Martha Price’s eyes filled with the light of enthusiastic faith.
‘Is he? I only met him this afternoon for the first time. He’s certainly got an impressive way with him.’
‘Bit of a showman,’ Sidney murmured, and then, as if he might have been overheard blaspheming, hurriedly added, ‘but brilliant, of course, brilliant.’
‘His wife’s pretty formidable too, isn’t she?’ Brock tried not to stare at them eating.
‘She doesn’t put on the kind of pretence you often find in the private health sector,’ Martha said with her mouth full, since she was determined to respond immediately to the scepticism she heard in Brock’s voice. ‘But she’s very competent and she cares deeply for her patients, the genuine ones, that is.’
‘Sound,’ Sidney nodded in agreement. ‘Very sound.’
‘Isn’t everyone genuine, then?’ Brock asked. For a moment Sidney was inclined to speak, but seemed deterred by Martha’s unexpected silence. She chewed thoughtfully for a moment, then said, ‘You’ll get the hang of the place after a while.’
Brock saw that he was going to have to be patient, and let the conversation move on to questions about himself, what he did for a living, and where he lived.
‘Not far from Dulwich,’ he said.
‘That’s where Mrs Thatcher lives, isn’t it?’ Martha said. ‘What a wonderful woman.’
‘Can’t say I’ve ever bumped into her in Boots.’
She shot him a look to see if he was being disrespectful, then went on at some length about her husband, who had been active in local government for a number of years before his death. Her voice was sharp with resentment, above all at the injustice of the stroke which had interrupted his inevitable progress towards becoming mayor and taken him when so many less adequate men had been spared. She also showed Brock a photograph of her only son, Ralph, pronounced Rafe, a man of around forty with shoulder-length hair, whom she described as artistic. Sidney waited patiently through this account of her family, although he must have heard it many times before, and at the end rose to fetch them their desserts.
The dining room had been the principal reception room of the original house, with tall glass windows overlooking the gardens, an ornate ceiling and pilastered walls, and a huge central chandelier. On one wall long gilt-framed mirrors flanked a marble fireplace, making the space seem deceptively large. The air resonated with the murmur of conversations at the dozen or more tables.
Brock felt uncomfortable sitting alone with Martha Price. He felt irritated by her and suspected the feeling was mutual, yet she had been there the previous autumn and was just the sort of person whose confidence he should be cultivating. He decided to try again. He thought for a moment and then asked her about her arthritis and how it had been helped by the treatments at the clinic. She told him about her first symptoms and the progress of the disease, at first imperceptible and then frighteningly fast, and her increasing desperation as the relief provided by drug treatments was followed by relapse and further deterioration. While she was speaking, Sidney returned with their puddings but neither of them touched their plates as she went on to describe the painful but steady progress of her recovery after she had discovered Stanhope. Brock was moved, and when she finished and asked him about his own problem with his shoulder, he shook his head, embarrassed, and admitted that it was rather trivial compared to what she had been through. She put her hand on the sleeve of his dressing gown and insisted that he tell them, so he shrugged and made his story sound as interesting as he could.
At the end she smiled and patted his hand, as if she’d just heard a confession, and nodded at Sidney. ‘There are two types of visitors here, David,’ she said. ‘We call them the sheep and the goats. The genuine ones, who are here because they need help like us, we call the sheep. But you’ll come across others who are really only here for a break, to lose a few pounds perhaps, because they’ve heard it’s a fashionable place to come or some other reason best known to themselves. They are the goats. They don’t really believe in Dr Beamish-Newell’s work; in fact you’ll hear them laughing at him behind his back. He tolerates them because they bring income to the clinic which he uses to subsidize genuine patients who couldn’t otherwise afford to come here. Of course’ — she leaned forward and lowered her voice — ‘Dr Beamish-Newell is under pressure from the business side of the clinic to take them in, to make more money.’