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exactly surrounded by nubile Circassian slaves or indolent pampered sultanas. Except for the three of us, and none of us were in our youth, the average age here was about seventy. These were women whose lives you could see on their bodies, from their humped shoulders to their swollen ankles. Some were stiff and withered, almost fleshless, as they let themselves down ever so slowly into the healing waters. Others had the big collapsed bellies and elongated breasts of many pregnancies, or the elephantine legs of gout. Hard work and gravity had pressed them almost into the earth; their spines were twisted, their arms were heavy and their legs barely moved. Yet once in the water they floated like lilies, the tentative, halting land movements became luxurious and sure, their cracked, shriveled skin plumped up like raisins and the sparse hair below their bellies streamed like underwater plants.
    Submerged in this warm mineral sea of menopausal crones, I relaxed my own thin, freckled limbs, and thought of purification and renewal. Water washed the soul clean, it baptized, it was sacred and holy. But it was also profane; heated, water relaxed the muscles and opened the pores. It brought back memories of the womb, of being lightly held in a pool of fluid. Warm water was erotic; it loosened inhibition, encouraged nudity. Cloudy with steam or mist, yet transparent, it allowed the bather to half hide, half reveal; it allowed the voyeur to see yet pretend to be blind.
    Jack found a spot under a small waterfall and, raising herself slightly, let a stream of water come down on her neck and shoulders. I saw for the first time that she had a scar on her lower abdomen and that it had healed jaggedly.
    “Had my appendix out in Nepal last year,” she said following my gaze. “I don’t recommend it. I was laid up for weeks.”
    And there it was again, that faint rhythmic drumbeat of age that I had begun to hear in the clacking of the train on the Northern Line coming down to Tottenham Court Road, and that was still beating, however much I tried to distance myself. I saw my own loosening, wrinkling, scarred flesh on my friend’s body, saw myself old and crippled and getting ready to die, not like my father whose heart attack killed him quickly, but like my Aunt Maeve, trapped in an old people’s home with a wasting disease.
    “Eva’s got her eye on you,” Jack whispered. “Go for it.”
    I felt the warm water slip like silk between my legs and flutter teasingly in and out of my hidden places, and suddenly I was alive again. The only thing that prevented me from totally giving into lust was the knowledge that I had a rather battered shower cap on my head.
    On Eva the shower cap looked cute, as if she were in a bubblebath in a movie from the fifties. She floated peacefully, her breasts bobbing. Just before she’d stepped into the pool I’d seen how athletic her body was still: the hard tight calves and strong thigh muscles, the broad shoulders tapering to a narrow waist.
    I wanted to talk about romance. Eva wanted to talk about business.
    “If you wanted to work for us, Cassandra,” she said, “I’m sure, with your languages and background as a translator, I could get you many jobs.”
    “Thanks,” I said. “I don’t have a head for business. It’s a great weakness.”
    “Oh, I’m sure that is only modesty.”
    “I wish I could be modest,” I said. “All too often I’m given to bragging about the things I do well.”
    “And those things are?”
    “Reading train timetables, bargaining, writing postcards. Crossing borders. Transgressing boundaries. And of course translation.”
    “But your Spanish would come in so handy at O.K. I have a businessman from Madrid in town right now whose English is rather poor… Of course!”
    Eva lifted herself out of the pool and reached for the bag she’d brought into the thermal baths with her. She took out the cellular phone. Moisture ran down her nose from her piled-up blond hair as