Dolly And The Cookie Bird - Dorothy Dunnett - Johnson Johnson 03 (4 page)

I knew, of course, about buying: I’d learned the hard way, through indignant employers. I’d also had a year’s Spanish at school. I’ve forgotten most of it, but I’ve a good ear for accents, so I’d listened to what Helmuth said and scribbled down the words I knew I’d need to use. He steered me from stall to stall and introduced me. They all knew Helmuth: the women waved their arms and their voices swooped. They grinned, showing white gappy teeth, and laughed at everything I said and gave me twice what I asked for. The young ones were sallow and merry and fat, with old jerseys and skirts and flat shoes, and the old ones all wore long black skirts and shawls, kerchiefs over their hair, and sometimes a straw hat with a big brim on top. When they spoke together it was a long sort of industrial rattle, like a macaw talking quickly. They asked a great many questions, personal questions.

I didn’t mind. I was wearing a high necked shift, in a sort of thick orange fibre, my hair loose, and sandals, with a fine chain and Mummy’s leaving-school pearl thing tucked in where the neck hid it. I told them the worst, and we all shook our heads over the lack of a husband, and one of the younger ones said I’d need to find a good strong Ibizenco.

I said good and strong didn’t matter, only something in trousers; and another one with a voice like a saw said, “Watch out, you never know what comes in trousers these days.” We all shrieked with laughter. It’s easy. It makes you go all sweet and old-fashioned, like visiting old ladies in hospital. I don’t know why, but I only think of using four-letter words when I’m with people like Janey and Gilmore. And Mummy, of course.

I bought what we needed and got some carnations for Anne-Marie. The Lloyds never seemed to cut what was in the garden. I remembered, too, that I must come back and get something for Flo. I choose nice presents, or so everyone says. If you know anyone as well as I know Flo, you know what they really want. Her mother always gives her long Johns. I was going to spend three of my pounds on a sexy mantilla. Two were earmarked for something for Janey later, and a trifle for the woman owning the flat. I stood a minute, counting Anne-Marie’s housekeeping and ticking off lists, and wished a bit that I’d waited for breakfast. However. “Fish,” I said to Helmuth, and we set off again.

They were jolly nice in the fish market as well. That was a funny round tiled building with a roof like an umbrella with a hole in the middle. Inside, you walked between two rings of stalls: the first few were meat, with long, pale chickens hanging, all thin legs and bunched feet, and a pig’s head in solid pale pink, its eyes little closed slits. It seemed to be laughing.

I didn’t need meat. Spanish beef isn’t to Mr. Lloyd’s taste, so he has two 15-cc freezers stocked with chicken, whole butchered lamb, and cuts of Aberdeen Angus flown out from home. Anne-Marie had shown me the freezers, proudly. There were ten pounds of raspberries in one, and American ice cream and asparagus tips. “See? There is no one else on Ibiza has this. Not with food. But the Casa Veñets has its own generating plant, Miss Sarah.” I got the point. The light had failed twice that night already. I moved along.

There were trays of crushed ice on the squared concrete paving, with coral prawns in them, strung like a necklace. Seamen, in faded trousers and big rubber boots, were bringing trolleys loaded with boxes to the stalls as you watched: octopus and squid in grey, sloppy envelopes; heaps of whitebait like needles. Fat silver fish lay interleaved on one counter; on another, eels lay beside a tangle of blue mussel shells. There were nameless fish, purple-blue and bright pink, and big silver fish pinstriped in yellow, and green fish, with yellow-white speckled bellies. The names and prices, in Spanish, were chalked on small blackboards or stuck in a cork float. I looked at Helmuth again, and he grinned and took me by the hand and led me forward. The queues parted and then closed around me. We were in conference.

We got back to the car about an hour and a half later, and heaved in the baskets: compared with me, the fish all looked dynamic. Helmuth dragged out the big wicker-cased wine jug he and Anne-Marie use in the kitchen and went off to fill it, and by the grace of God, I trailed off to watch him.

He went into a little bodega at the edge of the square. After the dazzle of sunshine outside, it was cool and dark, and smelt of wet wood and alcohol and the plant house in Kew Gardens. I looked around while the shopkeeper filled the big bottle from one of the kegs. On the other side was a row of small barrels: crème de menthe, jerez. A red plastic pail was hung from each tap. The walls were shelved high with bottles: wine, gin, whiskey, martini, vodka. Beside the door, a jumble of cards were pinned to a notice board. Half of them were in English: a cinema club advertising a showing of
Gentleman Jim;
a list of desirable flatlets to let; someone with a Gerrard stereo record player for sale.

It was then I noticed a half-open door at the back which seemed to lead to some kind of patio. I could see a vine trellis against the clear sky, the edge of a bright peacock table, and a number of feet. It appeared, from the voices, to be a popular spot to repair to when shopping was done. I said to Helmuth, “Come on. Let’s have a glass of something before we go back.”

He’d been sweet, like a quiet old janitor we once had for a term. He hung back, but I took his arm and marched him up to the back of the shop. Through the door one could now see a white well, a fish tank, and lots of pots in yellow and blue, with cacti and flowers and creepers growing up the white walls out of them. There were more tables and chairs and benches, and more feet, two of which were wearing white canvas sneakers.

Lots of people, of course, wear white canvas sneakers, although not perhaps such stained ones as these. I stopped dead, gripping Helmuth like a boa constrictor, and then started moving slowly again. It had been pitch dark under the cork trees. If it was the man I had spotted last night, he had probably seen as little of me as I had of him. And even if he had seen me, it wasn’t to say that he had been there with any evil designs against me personally. As Johnson said, it was possibly just an assignment. And finally, even if he was unfriendly, he couldn’t be unfriendly to any harmful degree in a wine shop in the open air at nine in the morning. I went on in.

The man in the canvas shoes got up and said, “Strewth.”

It was Flo’s cousin, Clem Sainsbury.

I think I said the right things. I know I went scarlet, and then probably green. I forgot about the corkwood. After an absolute four-year famine of men, I now had four in a day. Even Janey couldn’t take all of them. Clem came over and kissed me, to the silent fascination of everyone hi the wine shop, and I introduced Helmuth, and we sat down.

As I think I mentioned before, Clem is big and rugged and blonde, and instead of wearing a sheepskin, he had on stained cook’s trousers and a T-shirt and a tatty old pullover with mistakes in the cable stitch, which I bet was Flo’s knitting. He had a string bag of shopping beside him. We ordered: I had fizzy stone ginger. Then he said, “And how’s Flo and the cooking? Hard luck about the other thing, Cassells.” He always called me Cassells.

“I know,” I said. He was just the same. Clean-cut, with a rather blunt knife.

Clem said, “Were you coming to see us? We haven’t swabbed the decks yet.”

I didn’t get it. Then, coupled with his excessive lack of surprise, I got it all right. “You’re with Johnson on
Dolly
?” I said.

“He didn’t tell you,” said Clem, without resentment. “Bloody pirate. I’ve signed on for six months. It’s all right.”

“Just you and Johnson?”

“There’s a working skipper, called Spry. Two can sail her, but if the painter is painting, then time is holy. Not that he bugs himself working, so far as I’ve noticed.”

“Do you like him?” I said.

“Never met him,” said Clem. “We converse with the bifocals. If you like glass, it’s O.K.”

“That’s what I thought,” I said. “Mr. Lloyd wants him to paint Janey.”

“Wo-ow!” said Clem. When I was with Clem, I thought in four-letter words all right. You knew Clem was hog and you were sow, and even if you became chief engineer in the Russian merchant navy, you’d stay sow to him. With other boys I tried to be feminine, but Clem had the opposite effect.

I sat there drinking stone ginger and laying off about my career as God’s gift to catering, and he heard me out like a lamb.

“You must get pretty sick of it,” said Clem. “Don’t you? It’s a hell of a life, holed up in other folks’ kitchens, thumbing anchovies onto Ritz biscuits. You lose weight, and you don’t want to eat, and in a year or two’s time you’ll have slipped disks and fallen arches and a cat and a real William and Mary card table with bun feet, and that’s your bloody lot. You want to marry some nice chap and cook for him and your kids.”

“I know I do,” I said. Patiently. He just hadn’t been listening. I said, “Tell me any other job where I can take the waste caviar home and spoon it into the budgie. At sixteen guineas a whack?”

“I didn’t know you had a budgie,” said Clem.

“It jumped into the fish bowl and died.” I swallowed the last of the pop and got up. “Come on,” I said to Helmuth. His eyes were half shut.

“Bye, Cassells,” said Clem. He heaved himself up and surveyed me, his face puckered in thought. “You’ve got guts, coming here after what happened. Can you really stick it? Do you like it? Are the Lloyd people decent?”

“Oh, they’re all right,” I said. I swallowed. The great sentimental idiot. “I like it. They’re sweet, down in the town here.”

“Um,” said Clem. He studied me a bit longer, then grinned, and stopped to fish in his net bag. Then he straightened and looped me a double cherry over each ear. “Olé,” he said. “O.K., Cassells. Be good.”

“Look where it’s got you,” I said. All right, he was a bore. But a nice one. I left, trailing Helmuth. To work.

Anne-Marie had got breakfast, but no one was down. I had mine and did my stint in the kitchen: by half-past eleven everything was laid out and covered with foil, and I went for a swim. Janey was in the pool, without anything on. I suppose Helmuth was used to it. Afterward we lay in the sun for a short fry before driving to Gallery 7. She has a beautiful body.

We had a lot to catch up on. Janey had had a mink coat at fourteen and a Daimler sports car for her seventeenth birthday: name-dropping and place-dropping didn’t occur to her. But she knew all the jet-set gossip all right. We had just got through her love life, which was like the haberdashery at Harrod’s and of about the same lasting significance, when Janey said out of the blue, “Will you mind going to
Dolly
? To the yacht marina, I mean? That bloody boat-winch is there.”

“I don’t mind all that much,” I said. “I mean. If you knew Daddy.”

“You’re a born prig, She-she,” said Janey. “That’s your whole trouble. He knew how to live. Daddy never had a decent party in his life till old Forsey swarmed in and the whole of Cine Citta and the Almanachs de Gotha poured in after.”

“You got value for money,” I agreed. I added quickly, “It was sporting of your father to ask me. I can imagine what a shake-up it must have been, without taking me on as well.”

“Well, don’t start groveling,” said Janey. “He was probably just afraid of the talk. It was a rather wild party.”

“Derek didn’t tell me how it happened,” I said. It was one way to make her talk.

“God knows how it happened,” said Janey. She turned over, her red hair bouncing over her face. “Daddy had to go to the mainland, and Gil and I threw this party. Lobby was there, and Coco Fairley, and Guppy—I told you. They’d come round from St. Tropez, and the Hadleys had flown over from Formentor, and a whole bunch who were sharing a villa at that place in Minorca. You know how it happens. Parlor games in the house and more parlor games in the pool. You couldn’t see the water for Ping-Pong balls and bottles next day. So they tell me. Then Coco started handing out sugar.”

1 am a prig, I suppose, since Janey says so. Certainly, LSD on sugar was one of the trips I hadn’t yet tried. “Did Daddy take it?” I said.

“In general? I shouldn’t think so,” said Janey. She slid a blade of grass, delicately, along a thin trail of ants. The ants swerved. “He used to say his acid content was too high already. In any case, that night he was out of the house.”

Of course he would be, I thought. If Lloyd was away, Daddy wouldn’t be interested in a romp with a lot of boring teen-agers. “Out to dinner?” I said.

“He didn’t say. But he hadn’t eaten when he went out at eight.”

He had eaten somewhere, though. Or so the Spanish police report had said. But not in any restaurant anyone had been able to trace. Janey was still tactfully pursuing her ants. But, I thought, Daddy didn’t make secret assignations. Daddy was a person who had friends, publicly and at the highest possible level, and when he visited them, all the world knew it. Janey said, “He’d popped out before, of an evening. He maybe felt a bit rotten, and just wanted to be alone. Or maybe he was just bored.”

“But he’d
eaten
,” I said.

“Maybe he had an evening with Derek,” said Janey. She moved the grass, and the ants all straightened their lines.

“Oh, hardly,” I said. If she had lost interest, I wasn’t going to flog the conversation to death. “Derek was in Holland. He didn’t come to Ibiza till after the suicide.”

“He did, actually,” said Janey, and turned her gorgeous made-up green eyes in my quarter. You couldn’t see her contact lenses at all. “I saw him up in the Vila the day before your poor old progenitor did himself in.”

I finished sitting up. “Today’s joke. Janey, you wouldn’t know Derek if you fished him out of your face cream.”

“I should. I remember him from St. Tizzy’s,” said Janey. She got up and slung on her bathrobe. “I’d had drinks in the old town with the Rothas, and we were larking about. I thought he saw me too, but if he did, he dodged away. It was Derek.”

“He didn’t tell me,” I said.

“I thought maybe he put it in the letter,” said Janey.

My dear She-she
. I don’t know what made me say it. I hadn’t meant to say it to anybody. I think I was getting a bit frightened. “The letter wasn’t from Daddy,” I said.