Dolly And The Cookie Bird - Dorothy Dunnett - Johnson Johnson 03 (3 page)

“I know I shall, Austin,” I said. We went through Ibiza to get to Santa Eulalia, but we didn’t go up to his gallery. We turned through a sort of boulevard with shops and cafés and trees at the foot of the hill, and then out to a dazzle of ships and blue sea and a long line of boats queuing neatly right along the main road. A square white-masted building showed up on the right, just past a boatyard with someone’s old ferryboat high up on the stocks, and Austin nodded his head as we passed.

“The Club Náutico. The yacht marina and boatyard.”

I looked back, just as he said, “My God: Sarah, I’m sorry.” It was the boatyard, I suppose, where a week or two back, Daddy was found on the horse-winch. I gave a brave smile at Austin, but it didn’t upset me: not then. In fact, in a funny way, it made me feel more at home.

At the next corner there was a notice saying, Santa Eulalia, 13.5, and a long, straight avenue of leafless trees leading north. Austin let out the Cadillac just as the sun disappeared. Ahead of us, the sky had a few litle pink clouds, but all the color had gone from the roadside. I shut my eyes and let the wind carry my hair.

It was a good road. I felt the drag as Austin slowed down and took a bend sharp on the right, and then we picked up speed again in a long rising course. I opened my eyes and saw the new lights of a road café slide behind, and a dark field full of goats. On the right, the road crumbled into a sort of dusty red ditch, overhung by a little wood with a lot of juniper undergrowth and an old car with no wheels at one end. Austin turned into the dirt and drew up. At last.

It wasn’t even off the road: not properly, but I’d forgotten how soon it gets dark. My hair settled all over my face, like Brigitte Bardot, and I pushed it back, carefully, with my hands, which cleared the way for Austin’s Sahara suede cuffs to go right round my back. “You’re so lovable!” he said, the rest of him following, so I put my hands comfortably round his neck and we had a very soft, long-winded kiss. He was good; and I must say I was glad of every bit of practice I’d ever had. Then he took his hands away and sat back a bit and said, “I beg your pardon. You’re too lovely a person, and I want you to forgive me. I don’t know… I just couldn’t help myself.”

I thought of the last hunt ball I’d been to, and kept my face straight. “It was nice,” I said. “But we don’t really know each other. I think perhaps we’d better get on.”

Either I hadn’t managed to keep my face straight, or he was normal after all, for instead of driving on he suddenly grabbed me in quite a definite way and stuck his mouth on mine in a much more advanced method, doing lots of fancy things, on the side, with his tongue. It was super, but I was being slowly shoved back into the side of the car, and I was just thinking of feeling for my shoe when the car door gave way and we both fell, headfirst, backward into the ditch. We landed just as a seedy old Seat came wheezing up round the bend and slowed, its headlights picking out the whole scene like an art clip from Ulysses. “
Perdone-me
,” said an English voice in horrible Spanish. “Does the Señor require assistance?”

I could see a pair of spectacles winking in the Cadillac’s dashboard light: Flo would have killed herself laughing. Austin said, “No, sir; I thank you. There’s no trouble at all,” in a loud, hearty voice and after hesitating, turned and helped me to my feet. I’d busted my tights, which was more than a bit sad. Austin said one or two bright things about tripping and dark nights and fine weather, and handing me in, got seated and started the engine. I gave the other driver a wave. He stood and watched us go in a bemused kind of way, before turning back to the Seat. Austin drove the rest of the way to Santa Eulalia with a hand on my knee, pressing it.

It was just before we got into Santa Eulalia that I missed my handbag. My hair was a mess, and God knows what had happened to my mouth outline. I grubbed all over the floor of the car, and it just wasn’t there.

Austin stopped the car, and by the time we’d made a thorough search it was quite certain it must be back in that ditch where the Seat had interrupted us. Austin said, “You go on. I’ll drop you at the Lloyds’, and then go back for the bag.”

There was nothing else I could do. I drove up to meet Gilmore Lloyd after seven years with my tights wrecked and my hair hanging in hanks and my lipstick all over my chin. All right. At least he could tell I was sought-after.

The Casa Veñets is set on a hillside in five acres of tropical garden, which go right down to the sea. Arriving there in the dark, with the palm trees showing against a big yellow moon like an advertisement for coconut candy, and the cicadas making the sound the B.B.C. always makes them make, and the lizards flicking up and down the house walls, it was a bit breathtaking suddenly, and I wished Flo or someone had been there. Then we got round to the front of the house, where there was a great sweep of drive all done in little honeycomb circles and a £6,000 Maserati with this girl just getting into it.

I’d have known those legs anywhere. “Janey!” I yelled.

I saw her take in the Cadillac. Then she turned, giving Austin the whole view of 32-21-34 and looked at me through two bounces of thick auburn hair. “Darling!” she said, and took me by the shoulders as I got out of the car. “It’s grown up. Did you ask Aunty’s permission?”

“It all happened in the woodshed before I could help it,” I said, before I remembered Austin behind me. “Oh. Janey, I think you know…?”

“Austin!” said Janey, and kissed him with absent fondness on one cheek. “Treasure! Was Paris naughty? Tony is looking for ikons: you must come to dinner next week. How did you meet Sarah?”

Austin explained, and refusing a drink with prolonged American courtesy, said goodbye to us both and drove off. He didn’t say anything about coming back with a handbag: I supposed he’d just hand it in. It wasn’t the easiest thing to explain.

In the hall, which was white carpet on white marble with those cut-glass German wall lamps, Janey looked me over and said, “Austin’s coming on. The work I’ve put in with that boy. How
are
you, She-she? The lineup’s pretty average, but I think I’ve one or two possibles. You’re not hooked already or sold on girl friends or whatever, are you?”

“Janey,” I said. Warningly. Janey is terrible.

The plucked eyebrows got right up, along with her smile. “Why not, honeychile? I bet you Derek’s a poof.”

It had never struck me. Janey’s like that. Even while I was thinking hard I said indignantly. “He’s jolly well not,” and of course was caught in mid-bleat, sophistication minus a hundred, by Gil Lloyd, coming downstairs.

You would say he made Cary Grant entrances except that he wasn’t the kind who would bother. He dressed in silk and cashmere and had thick, dark hair and a tan and a prowl that was second nature, like Janey’s. There is something about them that, sooner or later, makes you want to kick their teeth in. Only, so far, their defense has been smarter than anyone else’s attack. And Gilmore Lloyd’s defense, so help me, is bloody disarming. He swooped smoothly and kissed: it was like being held by packing-case wire, and my lip started to bleed. I opened my mouth to breath, and he stepped back and said, “Poor She-she. Did Austin try some rough American tactics? We must teach you how to handle him.”

Good humoredly, Janey used a very off word. “She’s not wasting time on Austin Mandleberg. Wait till you meet Lobby du Cann. And if you’re bored with Americans, we’ve Joe Hadley, and Guppy Collins-Smith and Coco Fairley…”

Coco Fairley had been a boyfriend of Mummy’s. Good old Janey. “Keep it clean, Janey,” I said. “Son of Coco, or nothing.” Gilmore laughed, genuinely. The touch comes back to you, after a time.

My room had a balcony, and a bathroom off, and wall-to-wall washed Chinese carpeting in quiet shades of money. On my way there, I was introduced to the Couple. The Couple, Anne-Marie and Helmuth, looked after all the Lloyds’ houses. Like the wall lights, they were German and efficient: with the help of Concha the chica, they cleaned and cooked and chauffeured and laundered and mended, getting in local staff when the Lloyds had houseguests or a party. That was where I came in, Mr. Lloyd had said. Anne-Marie needed a rest. I was to take over the cooking.

I found I wasn’t meant to take over the cooking that evening: or at least Anne-Marie wouldn’t hear of it. She was fair and cheerful and pillowy and spoke perfect English. Like Flo, I’ve had a few dodgy times with backstairs diplomacy, but I could see this was going to be all right. I’d hardly opened my suitcase when there was a tap at the door and Anne-Marie came in carrying a plate of fat, pink langostinas and a half-bottle of champagne sitting in ice. She put them down and ran me a steaming hot bath, chatting softly, while I hauled my things out of my bag. They were in a horrible muddle. From the look of it, I should think the Customs had taken out and chewed every garter. I’m a neat packer, and I resent being made to look untidy. I opened my own champagne, to show I could, and after cracking a joke or two about the mess I was going to make in her kitchen, saw her out of the room. Then I took the champers into the bathroom, undressed, and lay back in the steam, drinking. After a bit I got out and putting off the light, opened the shutters and got back into the bath again.

Outside, the moonlight fell on the sea and the palms and the flowers and this enormous swimming pool, all floodlit with statues of Greek gods, starkers, all round the edge. Inside, the warm water sloshed about over my skin, and the champagne, very cold, made its way down the bottom of my throat and I lay for a long time, feeling very sad and happy, expecting to wake up.

I was just thinking, rather fuzzily, that it was about time for dinner when this great bang came from the shutters and I slopped half the fizz into the bath. The shutters swung quickly out and a pair of legs swung neatly in, and before you could yell for your chaperone, one of the Greek gods from the garden, without a stitch on so far as I could see in the darkness, was saying in Giller Lloyd’s voice, “A little bird tells me you’re drinking champers, sweetie. Do tell me there’s a drop for a friend.”

Janey always told me I react the old-fashioned way. It isn’t true. At least, I don’t mean to. It’s just that you’re brought up to act like a lady and it sticks. I said, “Get the bloody hell out of here Gilmore Lloyd,” and heaved a towel into the bath just as the door opened, the light came on, and another masculine voice said mildly, “Excuse me, is this your handbag?”

I honked. I couldn’t help it. First there was Giller caught knees up on the windowsill in his bare skin and two hundred watts of Phillips’ best. And then in the doorway stood this poor, poleaxed Charlie in seventeen-inch bags and woolly sweater and bifocal glasses He ran his eye over Gilmore and then over me and said again, his voice half an octave lower, “Excuse me, is this your handbag? It’s got birth pills in it, popped out to Sunday?”

Poor, poleaxed Charlie, hell. I knew him. It was the man with the Seat. The wag who’d found Austin being overkeen in the ditch and had offered to help. It
was
my bag. “Don’t you knock,” I said freezingly, “when…”

“
He
didn’t,” said Bifocals, surprised, looking at Greek God. “And I’m dressed.”

“Not for long,” said Gilmore Lloyd coldly. “What bloody manners.” He wasn’t jealous, I think. He was just asserting his territory. He launched himself from the sill and adopting a classical and rather beautiful stance, drove to the jaw with his right.

Bifocals sort of didn’t wait for it. I saw Giller’s jaw crack against the white marble wall, then he fell down it, and Bifocals stepped over him very carefully and said, “If you don’t mind… I’ll need to take the bag back, if it isn’t yours, in case someone is looking for it. It may be a regular…”

“It’s mine,” I said. “And thank you for bringing it. Although I really don’t see why you had to walk into my room. Mr. Lloyd would be…”

“Mr. Lloyd told me to go right up,” said Bifocals. He put one foot on Gilmore’s rising chest and immobilized him. “Didn’t you hear the last bell for dinner? He didn’t know you were getting sloshed under the hot tap.”

“I’m not!” I said. I nearly sat up.

“Say
cessation
,” said Bifocals.

I changed my ground. “That,” I said coldly, “is Mr. Lloyd’s son.”

“He didn’t hear the last bell either, did he?” said Bifocals. “Did Mr. Lloyd send him right up too?”

He removed his foot and Gilmore, rising like Cary Grant, said, “Do I have to ask you again to leave this lady’s room?”

“You didn’t ask me the first time,” Bifocals pointed out. “But that’s all right. I hear the tiny voices of dry martinis calling.” He looked over Giller’s shoulder at me. “Why didn’t you pop Monday’s pill?”

“I forgot,” I said.

“Mistakes,” said Bifocals firmly, “are expensive. You’ll be late for dinner.”

Gilmore grabbed both his arms.

“So shall I,” said Bifocals. “I shouldn’t do anything dashing. I’ve just rung for Helmuth.”

Gilmore dropped his hands and said, “Are you dining with Father?”

“He did ask me,” said Bifocals. “He’s rather keen. In fact, he’s just offered me twelve hundred pounds to do a portrait of Janey. Miss Cassells, you’re stoned.” He leaned forward and turned on the cold shower; then leaving me under it, walked through my bedroom and got to the door just as Helmuth tapped on the outside. The door closed. By the time I got the tap off and the freezing water out of my eyes, Gilmore also had gone. I dressed and went down to dinner. I’d been in Ibiza two hours and I’d had a near rape and two uninvited men in my bathroom. It was better than cooking for dentists.

THAT WAS THE WAY I first met Johnson Johnson, and after the drinks and the introductions, I had a good look at him, bifocals and all, over the dinner table. He looked the sort of man who kept spaniels and went in for old beams and growing delphiniums, or maybe tropical fish. His hair and his eyebrows were black, but there really wasn’t much of his face that wasn’t covered with glasses. On Ibiza, the Lloyds don’t wear DJ’s except for a party, though of course everyone changes. If Johnson had changed, I wouldn’t like to have seen what he had on beforehand: I could see Janey eyeing the woolly and the old crumpled bags, and I could guess she was storing the lot inside her Jane Austin hairdo. Janey can imitate anybody. So can I. We used to do a couple of Cockney charwomen in our Thursday free period, when we had to sew for the poor; and we’d have the whole form in hoots. But of course, Johnson hadn’t come to dinner, really: only to give over my handbag.

I don’t know whether he expected Janey’s father to pounce on him, or why he didn’t dodge him if he did: he can’t have needed the money. If you believe William Hickey, Johnson Johnson makes more money than Annagoni and Kelly and Hutchinson all rolled into one, painting portraits, and he can afford to be choosey. Mind you, Janey is elegant, and over dinner she had decided to fascinate: I could hear her going into her act. It was just as well she did, for Gilmore, beyond her, was sulking. He’d been even later to table than I was and hadn’t looked at me once. He had a pink place on his jaw where it had hit the wall of my bathroom. It was a bit of foul luck, for I really had been looking all right, with my hair piled up on top and my eyelashes wet. He was Scorpio: I asked him over a swallowed martini.

We had artichoke hearts, but Mother Trudi wouldn’t have been too delighted over the veal. Once, when Janey let go for a minute, I asked Johnson Johnson if he kept tropical fish. The bifocals turned all merry, whether with the recollection of me in my bath or the question, I wouldn’t actually know. He shook his head.

“Too sexy,” he said.

“Fish?”

“Have you ever
watched
them?” he said. “You can’t cure it, either. Friend of mine used to give his guppies a session of group psychotherapy.”

“What happened?”

“They were found making suggestions to a small party of fry,” Johnson said. Then Janey got him again.

After dinner we walked in the garden, where the Greek gods had all gone from the swimming pool, although there was still a nymph or two under the bougainvillea, and the fountains were on. I was beside Gil, and it was rather warm and cosy and hopeful when Father Lloyd flicked on a switch and all the floodlighting came on: I swear they had tungsten halogen behind every mosquito. There was also a grotto with fiber-glass stalactites. Gilmore vanished, and I said to Johnson, “What have you done with my letter?”

I thought he’d say, “What letter?” and he did. I said, “The one in my handbag. From my father.”

He could have had the bloody pills. When I found the letter was missing, I felt rotten, I can tell you. It was sheer chance I had got it at all. I’d left Flo with her mother and gone back to the London flat to pack for Ibiza, the day after poor Derek went back to Holland. And there it was, with a lot of other stuff on the mat, in Daddy’s writing, dated the day he had died.

It didn’t say anything about cutting his throat. I telephoned Derek that night to tell him: I thought it might help. He hadn’t been brooding or suffering cancer or something: he’d just been so stoned, I think, that he suddenly got fed up and did it. He was stoned when he wrote the letter: there was a bit in the middle that made no sense at all. But it was all I had: the last thing from Daddy; and Johnson had taken it.

Johnson wasn’t indignant or offended or even very excited. “I hadn’t, you know,” he said mildly. “I don’t even collect stamps. But your bag was open when I found it.”

“The pills didn’t fall out,” I said coldly.

“Well, they did, sweetie: and I picked them up because they were white. What else is missing?”

“Nothing.”

“Well, let’s borrow a torch and go look for it,” said Johnson. In the son-et-lumière, his face looked just like uncut moquette. It was all right by me, except that Janey insisted on coming. I had a little knitted coat in the bedroom. I let down my hair, which had dried, from its wraparound, squirted Calèche all over, and sprinted off down. He was on the mature side, but he wasn’t married, and I didn’t see why Janey should have it all her own way. I couldn’t pay for a portrait, but maybe Austin Mandleberg could.

It was jolly dark in the ditch, even with a couple of torches, and the old Seat’s headlights simply lay over the top. Janey found a dead brown rat, with its four pink feet all pointing upward, which put me off looking for a bit, so I got the storm lantern and went off under the cork trees, in case the letter had bounced or got blown out or something. It was a bit odd, because the lantern made all the tree shadows slide backward and forward, and if you looked back to the road, I swear you could see bats. I kept looking down, for the letter, and then I thought I had found it, but it was only an old blue empty packet of Ducados, largos con filtros. Beyond it, just at the edge of the light, was the battered old wreck of a car. And behind the car, and just visible under the chassis, was a pair of masculine feet, wearing white canvas shoes.

I got the quarter-mile cup at St. Tizzy’s. I had dropped the lantern and lit out of that wood before you could draw breath for a sneeze, and I fell into the ditch just as Johnson was shouting, “I’ve got it! Miss Cassells! We’ve dug up your letter!”

“There’s a man in there,” I said, still rolling.

“You surprise me,” said Johnson. “They must call this lovers’ corkwood. Was it any two people we know?”

“It was a man,” I said and sat up. “Alone. Standing. Not speaking. Right inside the wood.”

“Austin,” said Janey. “You ass.”

“No,” I said. “They weren’t American shoes.”

“Well, for heaven’s sake, She-she,” said Janey. “Run back.”

No one was taking me seriously, and so long as we weren’t staying in that wood any longer, why should I care. As Johnson said, at least the feet weren’t bare. He handed me Daddy’s letter as we all got into the Seat. It was a bit crumpled, but quite intact. “My dear She-she,” he’d written.

When we got back, I telephoned Austin. He wasn’t in, but a voice in a thick Spanish accent promised to tell him that my bag had been found. Gil was still absent, sulking, and Johnson, though polite, clearly wanted to get back to the harbor, where he was staying on board his yacht
Dolly
. He invited me, after a broad hint or two, to visit him for a drink the next afternoon, and then asked Janey as well, which was mean, because that meant I had transport. I suppose he had to… No… That’s just being draggy. Janey really is gorgeous.

I slept like the dead.

The market in Ibiza opens between seven and half-past in the morning. I was up by six-thirty and leaving the house half an hour later with Helmuth in a hefty old Land Rover with a tire on its bonnet and room for a small horse at the back. I had a lunch party of nine to cook for; or I’d volunteered, anyway. I was rather pleased that Janey’s father accepted the offer without the least bit of fuss. He was quite the nicest of all the rich men Daddy had ever stayed with: big and athletic and clean with a great, jolly laugh. For instance, for goodness’ sake, he’d no need to offer to entertain a minor Russian trade mission, on a brief break from treaty talks in Madrid, even though he’d met the attaché before. He said he owed a favor to the official delegate for Ibiza and Formentera, who was away till tomorrow. I suspected that the reason actually was that the Reds knew they’d get a jolly good tuck-in at the Casa Veñets compared with anywhere else there in Holy Week. At any rate the four Russians were coming, and the chief Balearic mining engineer and the municipal vet had been thrown in for good measure, and between now and half-past two, which was lunch time, Mother Trudi was going to work like a runaway self-propelled two-speed gear lawn mower, between breaks. Such as visiting Gallery 7 with Janey, for instance.

We left Anne-Marie flowing about with the vacuum, but upstairs all the blinds were still drawn. Janey doesn’t like getting up early. I didn’t know what Gil’s habits were. I spread myself over two seats beside Helmuth and prepared to enjoy the calm predawn country run into Ibiza. It was cool in the garden, and a cock was crowing somewhere beside Santa Eulalia, to the right. There was a pink band along the horizon, over the sea, but the tall, concrete hotels beside the village were all dark, and the whitewashed church-fort on its hill. We turned our backs on a sky filled with chalky blue clouds with a sort of peach-colored glitter between. After a bit the sun burst through and shadows sprang out on the road in front of the Rover and were promptly mown down by the traffic.

Seven
a.m.
is rush hour in rural Ibiza. Between the unwalled fir woods and orchards, the scrub, the small farms, the walled crops, and the bony sheep, the goats, the fat hens, the occasional chained cow, and all the busy, undulating fields that spread in the distance to the low, bald, furzy hills—the greater part of the island seemed to be shifting on wheels toward us. They came in Seats and Simcas and whopping great lorries, on push-bikes and every kind of motorized cycle ever produced outside of acetate locknit: Vespas, Mobylettes, Lambrettas, and old vibrating models with old vibrating workmen in black berets, their lunch in a strapped-on reed basket. Once a real motorbike came by with a crouching rider in fur-collared leathers and goggles and big fur-lined gloves, his mouth and chin concealed by a scarf, making straight for Toad Hall. Then we passed the famous wood with the ditch and joined the Portinaitx junction where I had felt Austin take the bend yesterday, and from then on the traffic was going more with us, to Ibiza.

I got to know that road far too well. But I never saw it again as busy as I did on market mornings, black-shawled arm, the top two or three skirts with the tile factory steaming and chaps loading gray honeycomb bricks onto a lorry like mice in a Mack Sennett comedy. The cement factory past the San Miguel junction was going a bomb. The Gasolina was open. Even in fields deserted to little round olives and carob trees, or among the orange and fig trees and pink-and-white blossoms, old Spanish grannies in straw hats and pigtails were whizzing to and fro, the bundle of reeds or whatever under one kilted. I taught Helmuth to sing “One Man Went to Mow” in English, and we bowled along in the Rover a bit over the stipulated 80 km’s, bawling it out until we got to the long, straight avenue of trees just before Ibiza.

In front of us were two mule carts just negotiating the sharp, right-hand bend, where the Talamanca path joins the main road in a huddle of buildings. Between the upright lath sides of each cart, a woven mat had been slung, like a dipped carpet, and each mat held a bouquet of round, green, dewy lettuces. They nodded before us, and the sweep of the harbor lay blue behind them, and the high town of Ibiza lay behind that, not like a bride’s cake this morning, but a hazy stockpile of windows, with old yellow buildings on top and some trimming, like a club sandwich, of green. Somewhere up there was Gallery 7.

The clock on the Cathedral tower said 7:15 A.M., and the seagulls on the quay were warbling seagull flamenco. I sighed and got out Anne-Marie’s list and a purseful of paper money like bits of old blanket, while Helmuth trundled behind the lettuces round the bay past the yacht marina and into the sort of thicket of shops and offices and workshops that edged up to the hill of the high town. The high town in Ibiza was called the Dalt Vila and had an old wall right round it, Helmuth said.

We parked by the Philips building in the Mercado Nuevo, and you could see the town wall from there —tall and flat and yellowish-white, with palms and creepers, and the sandy roof tiles of buildings behind. It ran just beside us as we walked through narrow, shadowy streets filled with traffic, scurrying men, women mopping out offices, chaps washing their taxis, and housekeepers, like me, with a big woven basket folded over the arm. A boy passed in patched trousers and sneakers, selling the
Diario
newssheet, and Helmuth gave him three pesetas for it

I wasn’t looking. I’d found a Panateria by following the smell of fresh bread round two corners, and there was the window, piled with crystallized pears and cherries and peaches, and plates of soft, glistening iced cakes and small toffee custards in chocolate papers, and rounds of frilled, sugared shortcake and thick patterned cream in the jaws of golden flaked pastry, and chocolate sponges filled with whole cherries, soggy with rum. Inside there were stacks of long, hot, crunchy loaves, and soft, sugared cushions of bread-cake, limp and warm on the hand. I bought enough to put pounds on Janey, and five chocolate Easter eggs. Helmuth dragged me out.

The market was even better. You could find it by the noise, or by following the high walls of Dalt Vila, for the market square footed the ramp that led up to the Dalt Vila gateway. The square itself had shops on three sides, most hardly open. In the middle was a small Doric erection clobbered with people, like the Temple of Diana of the Ephesians in the middle of the Aldermaston March. The building was set on an island, and patched blinds stretched out from its roof to cover the rickety stalls which surrounded it. Inside, between classic columns, was a landscape of counters, with fat, jolly women in jerseys helping to load them from the jam-up of trucks, lorries and carts in the square round about. Helmuth plunged into the middle, and I followed, my hair stuck to my neck.

If the sun had been on the market, instead of on the high town behind it, I should have needed dark glasses. At Mother Trudi’s, the fruit and veg were all washed and graded and delivered in polythene. These would have punched their way out of the bags. The lemons were all Wallace Beery: husky, belligerent brutes with cauliflower rinds. The tomatoes were like pumpkins: green heavy-lobed monsters, all blotched with dark red. The radishes reared in a wet, scarlet pile, the size of young carrots. Instead of the neat bunch of bananas I was used to was a thing like a thick green umbrella stand, with the cringing bananas growing down on the stalk. Heaps of peas in the pod lay on old sacking, knotted like golf balls. There were baskets of muscadel raisins and crates of matt carmine apples and attols of oranges; and onions, like gold Chinese lanterns, hung about in red nets. There were artichokes, common as sprouts, and strings of dirty-white garlic, and crates labeled
sanguinas
full of portly blood oranges. The profusion was stunning. I gaped at Helmuth, and he took my arm and pushed me right in.