Longbleat

Aunt Crystal had booked us into Longbleat for a spa-retreat, and my suspicion was that she’d picked it solely so she could make that rhyme.  However, she was paying for the whole affair, and my mother was thrilled with the idea of a short holiday where people would look after her, and had talked her priest into coming along with her.  I’ve no idea who was paying for him, but I knew it wouldn’t be Aunt Crystal.  She felt that Christians weren’t devout enough.  My sister was coming because she saw it as an opportunity to get away from her three children for a couple of days, and her husband (who was going to be left with them) was refusing to talk to any of the rest of us.  I sympathized, but even so I was grateful; my sister was far too quick to seize on anyone nearby as a potential baby-sitter.  My brother was going and was bringing some girlfriend with him.  I’d lost track of how many girl- and boy-friends he was keeping on the go at once but I assumed that whichever one he was bringing was either special or new.  Aunt Crystal kept talking about my father going as well, but he’d died the previous year when his shed collapsed on him after heavy rains caused subsidence in the garden, so we’d been mostly ignoring her and hoping that she didn’t have some mad idea about digging him up.

My brother was driving down on his motorcycle, but the rest of us were going in a tiny motorcade of three taxis.  Aunt Crystal was riding in the middle one, and had claimed a window seat. I was sat on the row behind her watching with interest to see if she was going to wave out of the window like the Queen to anyone we passed.  Aunt Crystal didn’t really hold with Royalty though, as she felt that they were too public in their behaviour.  She would far rather that they did secretive things behind high castle walls, and only appeared to the public on special occasions.  I thought she might have mixed them up with angels.

My mother and sister were in different cars after they’d had a falling out.  My sister had delightedly looked at the cars and announced that she was going in the front car and that the rest of us could be her entourage, and my mother promptly took offence.  We’d separated them as quickly as possible, and were hoping that at least one of them would be acting more grown-up by the time we arrived.

There was a mysterious box in the rear car as well, and we were all silently hoping that it wasn’t my father.

The approach to Longbleat was through fields and across small streams and along tightly winding country roads that appeared to have been less built and more the tarmacking over of cattle paths.  The taxis had to slow down quite a lot to navigate the roads, and there was a moment of great consternation in all the taxis when my sister spotted three people having sex in one of the fields.  The driver’s radios were commandeered by the passengers who gossiped about it for the rest of the journey.  I’d spotted my brother’s motorcycle though, and was only surprised that he’d only found one extra participant.

When we arrived at Longbleat my brother and two people were waiting for us at the doors, and I had had to suppress a smile as my mother and Aunt Crystal proceeded to tell him about the shocking sight they’d seen on the way there.  He smiled a lot and said very little.  Then the hotel doorman asked us to go in and stop cluttering up the drive, and so we did.

So Longbleat

"What's for breakfast?" asked Megan as she sat down at the table.  She had to pull the chair out quite a long way before she could fit between the seat and the table, and the chair creaked as she rested her weight on it.  She'd spent a good part of yesterday complaining to the staff that their Louis XIII furniture seemed too old and battered to be serviceable, and the staff had spent the evening trying to reinforce the bits of it that Megan seemed inclined to sit on.  Which, unaccountably, appeared to include the trouser-press in her room.
"Muesli," said Barbara, her mother.  "They've given us the spa-menu again instead of the full-board one.  I say!"  She waved her menu threateningly at a waitress.  "I say!  Waitron!  We've been given the wrong menu.  Again!"
"Waitron?" asked Megan looking over the condiments on the table in case there were any she could eat while she was waiting.  The brown sauce looked appealing, so she scraped some out with a butter knife and tried it.
"It's the neuter term for a waiter or waitress unit in catering establishments," said Barbara carefully, checking that she got all the long words right.  "Your father told me about it."
"Dad's dead," said Megan, scraping more sauce from the bottle.  It was tangy, and she wasn't sure she liked it, but not enough to stop eating it.
"In the seventies," said Barbara.  "When he was alive."
"Do they still call them waitrons now then?  I thought they were front-of-house staff, or place-faces, or something like that."
The menus arrived, clattered onto a side plate with a meaningful glance, and their spa-menus with the healthful and calorie-free items disappeared into the waitress's arms.  "Tea or coffee?" she asked, her tone suggesting that she was biting back something she really wanted to say.
"Hot chocolate," said Megan immediately.  "With marshmalllows, whipped cream, caramel syrup and sugar cubes.  Please."
"Hot grapefruit juice," said Barbara.  "Not boiling, but hotter than lukewarm."
The waitress disappeared without another word, and Barbara watched until she thought she was safely out of earshot and said, "Bitch is what I'd call her.  So ungrateful."
"I know," said Megan.  "They had the cheek to tell me that room service only served the spa-menu after 11 last night."
"I heard you shouting," said Barbara, who had the room next to her daughter's.  "Did they hear reason?"
"Oh yes."  Megan got a smug look on her pimply, plump face, and a mean little smile dimpled her cheeks.  "I made sure of that."  She leaned across to another table, swapping her now-empty bottle of brown sauce with the one there.  "What have you got planned for today then?"
"Well, I've got a massage with Thierry first," said Barbara.  "You had him yesterday didn't you?  Is he good?"
"Oh, he's lovely," said Megan.  "A bit shy, when I took my towel off you'd think he'd never seen a naked woman before!  He's so polite, he was covering his eyes and whispering prayers, and then he asked me to put something on again.  Apparently there are rules about remaining towelled at all times."
"Towelled?"
"I told him he could towel me any time," said Megan, grinning again.  Her little black eyes glinted.  "You'll like him, he's got strong fingers.  I think he might be gay though."
"Oh."  Barbara sounded chastened.  "Well," she said, cheering up a little, "the walk after that has been cancelled due to Foot-and-Mouth, so I'm going to try the hot-stone therapy and then lie by the pool for a couple of hours."
"Indoor or outdoor?"
"Oh indoor," said Barbara immediately.  "They've got tanning beds round the indoor pool.  It's all very convenient."
"Oh nice," said Megan.  "I want to visit the third floor restaurant today, so I thought I might do brunch there, and then lunch in the Greenhouse Café back on the ground floor.  Then there's a knitting circle that meets here on Thursday afternoons, so I thought I'd go along to that, and after that maybe we can do tea?"
"And supper," said Barbara.  "They're doing some kind of late buffet this evening for the marathoneers which I thought we could gatecrash.  We could pass for runners, easily."

Longbleat

The Longbleat Health Spa and  Farm was located in the luxurious Sussex countryside, surrounded for miles around by farmland, forest and heavy vegetation.  The brochure – glossy, smelling faintly of lavender, and reported to taste like Epsom salts (Barbara hadn't actually licked the pages to find out) – talked about the opportunity for long walks around the Spa and Farm, admiring the vegetation and generally healthfully benefitting from the close proximity to nature.  It also devoted double page spreads to the rooms, which were panelled in dark woods and furnished with soft white linens and knitted woollen, white blankets so that the effect was of snow-fall in a Narnian wood.  There was a chapter on the food, which while claiming to be nutritionally balanced and dietetically analysed still appeared to have obtained a Michelin star, and was mouth-watering enough that some of the pages were now stuck together for entirely wholesome reasons.  Barbara had stared at the pages until she could no longer resist temptation, and had then booked a week there for her and her daughter, Megan.
Megan was staring out of the taxi windows in horror as they passed another bog on the narrow, single-car road that apparently led to Longbleat.
"Babs," she said, knowing that her mother hated the informality.  "Where the eff is this place?  Are they going to have television there?  Or internet?  Wi-fi?"
"Megs," said Barbara, knowing that the name-calling was childish and yet unable to stop herself.  "It's a health spa, you won't need the television.  It'll be leisurely meals, gentle exercise, massage, exfoliation, heated stones, and comfortable beds made up by room service.  It's a chance to relax and get away from it all.  It's paradise."
Megan scratched at a spot on her chin.  It did sound quite appealing when put that way, and her mother was paying for it all, so perhaps she shouldn't sound too ungrateful.  But she didn't much fancy missing any of her evening soap operas; perhaps there'd be free wi-fi so she could watch them online.  She pulled her phone out of her pocket and checked for reception.  Nothing.
"There's no reception!" she said incredulous.  Babs stared at her for a moment, and then pulled the well-thumbed brochure out of her Louis Vuitton handbag.
"Yes there is," she said, pointing to page four.  "Look, it's done in a Louis XIII style.  The reception looks a bit sixties, but I think that's supposed to be part of the charm."
"No, I mean mobile phone reception," said Megan, and then stopped.  "Louis XIII?  Wasn't his mother a Medici?"
"What if she was?"  Barbara hated history almost as much as she hated the news.  It always got depressing when you got to the good bits, and there was never enough sex.  She preferred OK! magazine, and its newly published sibling, F-U!
"Poisoner and political intriguer," said Megan.  "Interesting choice of monarch for reception then."
"Oh really!  It's the style of the furniture," said Barbara, her tone dismissive and snappish.  "I hardly think they're going to poison guests in reception."
"No," said Megan.  "It would make more sense to do it on some of the blasted moorland that surrounds the farm."
"That's farmland, woodland, and rich, saponiferous vegetation," said Barbara, reading from the brochure to make sure that she got the long words right.
"You won't be going for many walks this week," said the taxi-driver, who'd been silent up until then.  Megan and Barbara exchanged looks, and Megan got the task of talking to the man that Barbara thought of as 'the help'.
"Why's that?  Is the weather bad?"
"Foot and mouth," said the taxi-driver.  There'll be sheep-pyres all over the place up here.  Look out for them at night and open the window.  Great mutton flavour."
"Oh that's horrible!"  Barbara's hand flew to her mouth.  "Of course we won't be opening the windows, there'll be air-conditioning!"
"I don't much care to walk anyway," said Megan.  The taxi-driver, who'd noted the suspension drop when she got in, wisely said nothing.
"Well," said Barbara, annoyed by the taxi-driver and determined to get back to the positive of the Longbleat spa, "there's a heated indoor pool."
"Presumably not heated by burning sheep?"  Megan subsided when she saw the little red spots begin to burn angrily in Barbara's cheeks.  "I don't really swim much, either, Babs.  It's a bit... well, wet."
The taxi-driver coughed, which could, just, have been a stifled snort of laughter.  Both women looked at him, but when he stayed silent returned to the brochure and their conversation.  "The hot stone massage sounds nice though.  Do you think they use special stones?"
"Oh yes," said Barbara immediately.  "They're volcanic in origin, smoothed by centuries of passing water at the bottom of rivers just beyond the main volcano.  They have special sherpas go and collect them and bring them back to civilisation."
"Oh good," said Megan.  "You know, I heard a rumour that in America they just use house-bricks, or old cobblestones."
"That's awful!"  Barbara's hand was at her mouth again.  The taxi swung to the left as they took a tight corner and turned onto the Longbleat drive.  "Oh look, what's that under that tree?"
They both peered out of the window as a spavined horse, foaming at the mouth, shuddered its last beneath the tree and collapsed, its mournful face bouncing heavily off the ground.
"Nature at its finest," said the taxi driver into the silence.