Dolly And The Cookie Bird - Dorothy Dunnett - Johnson Johnson 03 (9 page)

My brother took three strides toward me. He bent down, and clamping his hands on my forearms, raised me out of my chair and held me, barely erect, his face so close to mine that I could see his eyes were all bloodshot. Until then in all our lives, a peck on the cheek was all we had ever exchanged. Now, I could feel the heat from his skin, and smell the whiskey, and see the stubble glittering round his jaws and his chin. He said, “You think that, as a matter of course. People kill other people… Why not someone you know? Why not me? I say I have principles, but talk doesn’t mean anything, not in your circle. Trust doesn’t mean anything. Kinship doesn’t mean anything.”

My heart was behaving all at once like a body-skin hammer. “It doesn’t seem to matter all that much to you,” I said. “You need to see a bloody psychiatrist.”

He said, “Ha!” and opened his hands so that I lost my balance and sat down again, with a bump, in my chair.

I found I was crying hard, but silently, at least. I got hold of the handkerchief again, my hand shaking, and mopped up till it had stopped, taking deep breaths until the hiccoughs had gone. Then I collected my bag and the carryall with the Fantas and got up. My legs were still shaking. I said to Derek, “I think you’re all wrong. I think there’s something wrong with you, too. I don’t want to hear any more. I’m going back to Janey’s.”

“Of course,” he said. “Curl up in your fantasy world. This is reality, Sarah. You’ve got to face it some time.”

“That’s
your
reality,” I said. “It’s not the same as mine. Mine is Daddy’s.”

“I know,” Derek said. I could feel him standing, watching me as I went out, but he didn’t say anything more.

I stopped at Spar on the way home and returned all the Fantas.

I was having breakfast in the kitchen when Gilmore came in juggling three tennis balls, kissed Anne-Marie, and hitched himself onto the edge of the table. He had on a voile shirt and pale hipster pants, and he still looked like Gary Grant. “Your nose is red, She-she,” he said.

I said, “I’ve been drinking.”

He caught the balls and began to throw them up one-handed, his eyebrows lifted right up. His eyes were blue, not green like Janey’s. I wondered if he wore contact lenses too. He said, “I gather Janey has made a botch of her public relations. Has the worthy engineer gone back to his engines?”

“I don’t know,” I said. I didn’t care, either. I’d given up thinking about Derek. And about Daddy, for that matter.

“Um,” said Gilmore. He remained. “Well, now we know you drink. You also cook. You swim. What other talents can you produce?”

I held my coffee cup with both hands and studied it. “I dance. I play tennis and cricket. I skate. I water-ski. I ride. I can type. I think I can wear clothes. And I know how to sew and to nurse and to look after babies.”

“Come and look after me,” said Gilmore Lloyd, getting off the table. “I want to go riding.”

“I have,” I said, “your lunch to get ready.”

“Anne-Marie got the breakfast and she can perfectly well cook lunch for Janey and Father as well,” said Gilmore pleasantly. Anne-Marie, catching my eye, smiled and nodded. “We shan’t be in.”

It was the kind of day Celeste sometimes hints at, but never for Capricorn. By the time I’d changed, Gil had brought round the Cooper S, dark green and we took off for the stables, where we switched to the horses. Gil had brought saddlebags with him. I knew there’d be cold chicken and a bottle of martinis in one, and a large towel in the other… and that they had all been packed long before I got back from Derek. Men like Gil Lloyd don’t take a girl out to watch rugby or to teach her to drive. That was all right. We spoke the same language.

The morning was super: blue and clear with a gorgeous fresh heat. And we made our own breeze, cantering over the scrub and between the rows of little green trees, with the fig trees, like ghosts, staked out like maypoles all round their elbows. We passed a bent olive tree with a prop under its knuckle, like “The Thinker,” and I asked Gil if all this wasn’t someone’s land. He said it was. It was his father’s. The sun shone harder, and all the cicadas sang, and so did Gilmore and I.

We stopped at a place called San José for a beer and a fizzy stone ginger, and then made our way across unwalled country down to a beach. It was a wild ride, up and down crumbly, overgrown gulches, with a motor road winding in and out in hairpin bends beside us, through a mass of little hot hills, dotted with conifers and bushes and flowers, and all scented by pine trees and thyme.

A flock of little birds barred with bright lemon, like butterflies, got up and fluttered away. A goat, chained and muzzled, looked up as the horses moved past. We rustled at times hock deep in a thicket of flowers: tall, feathery, pink spikes even Gil didn’t know and miles of enormous white daisies, their centers all stained deep yellow. There were bushes and bushes of starry things like Christmas roses in lilac and white, and short purple flowers, some with spikes, some with trumpets, and things like vetches, and miniature iris, and oceans of bright yellow stuff that looked like charlock. There were patches of tall sisal cactus and thickets of prickly pear like a crowd of cheering green bats. Gil told me what everything was and the names went straight out of my head because he looked so super, with his French needle-cord jeans, his suntan, and the way he moved with his horse.

We picked our way down to the beach, just about midday. It was simply out of this world: a cut of fine shelving sand underneath a towering cliff of stacked orange sandstone. The cliff had a fuzz of greeny-gray stuff here and there seeded into it and a litter of dead branches and trunks in a queer, electric blue-gray that would fetch a packet at the biennial, I promise you, as Art in the Round. Patching the sand were big fallen boulders and beds of silver-brown flakings of seaweed, so deep it was like walking on cushions. Under the noon sun and the reflected heat of the sandstone, you could see the beach sizzle. It was perfectly empty. We let the horses loose to find shade somewhere under an overhang, and Gil hauled out the towel and spread it for me to lie on, then unpacked the goodies.

It was, actually, the bloody ham with the olives that I’d bought that morning in Spar, with some fruit and some yogurt and a long roll with a packet of butter and some Queso Gruyère ahumado at forty-two pesetas the whack: I’d forgotten who was doing the catering. But at least we didn’t have Fantas: we didn’t even have martinis. He’d brought a full bottle of Veterano Osborne.

On every first date with a boy, there’s a key moment when you know someone’s got his finger on the button, and any second now you’ll have to choose your line and scamper through all your resources. There’s no kick quite like it. Gil poured two stiff drinks, downed his, chucked a corner of the towel over the food and said, “Come on. I’m cooking. Let’s cool down first.” And leaning down to where I was lying nursing my own empty glass, he slid the zipper neatly from top to bottom of my pink jump suit from Jaeger’s.

They all do that. I put my glass down and got up, shaking off the rest of the jump suit. I had my bikini on already beneath. He said, “You little bitch! Where do you think this is, Filey?” And he pounced.

That was O.K., too. I ducked and fled for the sea, with Gil grabbing, but I got into the surf first and kicked a load of it into his face. He still had on his voile shirt and trousers. Then while he was still gasping, I struck out into the water.

He came in, just as he was. He could swim, too, but you can’t rape anyone in deep water, or at least if you can you ought to get a certificate. By the time he’d got one strap off my bikini we were both laughing so much we were spouting up brandy, and before very long I made off back to the beach. I got the towel before he did too, and lay face down on it gasping, while he dropped on the sand, his chest going up and down. The voile shirt had a great rip in it. I don’t remember doing that, but I must have. I said, “I’m starving.”

“Are you, ducky?” said Gil. And sitting up slowly, he pulled his shirt right off and rolled over, trapping my hand. Then he got my other one, before I could kick out, and transferred it till he had them both in one grip. “So am I, ducky,” and like a man trained in Spirella, he sprang the clip of my bikini top and followed it up, one-handed in the time-honored way, breathing salt water and brandy. A woman in high-heeled shoes and a man in a suit came onto the beach.

I honestly think he wasn’t going to stop. My chin ground into the sand. I could feel his hand turn and get ready, sneakily, to slide in another direction. It wasn’t that it was anything but absolutely delirious, but one has to think of one’s ground plan. I heaved up my bottom, and as his hand came off, bit him. The yell made the woman look round, but I had the towel round me by then, and Gil was sitting back on his heels, holding his arm and swearing. I stared back, deadpan. His eyes had gone cold, and I hoped suddenly that the couple was going to stay for a while. Then, without saying anything, he got to his feet, found my glass, and filled it slowly and deliberately with brandy. Then he held it hard, against my teeth.

I drank it all, with my hair falling back over my shoulders, and my eyes half shut, gazing at his. By the end he was smiling. I smiled too. “Hard luck, Gil,” I said. “No pills since Sunday: remember?” The smile slowly faded from his face, and I lay back and went straight off to sleep. I like to be organized.

I woke much later, with my tummy rumbling, and lay there getting up the nerve to turn round. But he was still there, asleep also, with the brandy bottle half finished beside him. When he woke, he’d be chocker. I couldn’t count on him now at the party, but I should have Austin then. And there would be another day coming. He looked nice, asleep. Spoiled, but nice.

I looked round, and the other couple were just going,, still dressed. They were both heavily built. She wore earrings and a black velvet waistcoat suit over a satin striped blouse. I wondered why on earth they had come to the beach. I wondered if I was sorry they had.

I lay for a bit watching the ants, and a thin brown sparrow with large Spanish eyes stood on a rock and inspected me. The rock was gray, with scraps of yellow netting, you’d think, dragged all over it. But it was really a network of hard yellow stone inside the rock, sticking up as the rest wore away. It was funny.

A sort of caterpillar went by, dragging a gray, soft cone of seaweed like a wedding dress. I stirred, put on some sun cream, and decided to occupy myself making the ham into sandwiches. Then I had some yogurt and watched two lizards fighting over the drips in the lid. They were blue-green with thin, black speckled stripes, and they stood with their forelegs braced on one stone and their hind legs and tail miles away, on another stone altogether. I wondered what it felt like. Their black tongues licked the lid, leaving a band of clean silvery foil, and the lid gave little clinks on the stones. Then there would be a dry scrape of feet as they flew at each other and somersaulted apart, streaming up the red rocks into cover. They seemed to like strawberry flavor. I finished my yogurt and woke Gil by laying two cucumber rounds in his eyes.

He was a little cool at first, but he joined in after a bit while I chatted, and by the time we got to the fruit, we had gone through all the people we had in common and found that there was a second cousin of Daddy’s who was related to an aunt by marriage of his, that when he was a boy, his father used to take a chalet at St. Moritz near the chalet of some people I knew, and that we had once been to the same bit of the river at the same time for the boat race and hadn’t known it. He took all these coincidences fairly easily, but I didn’t. I thought it was Fate. I told him what Celeste said about Capricorn and Scorpio, and he said, “Honestly, Sarah. You don’t believe all that punk?”

“Yes!” I said indignantly. Men always said this. But they usually managed a grin. “Some are phoney, perhaps. But Celeste is marvelous. She’s got me right over and over and over. I promise you. I find it terribly useful.”

“As bait?” said Gilmore. Lying on his back, he had lit a cigarette with tobacco in it.

I said, “You’ve got to talk about
something
.” I recognized that this was all my own fault. I was glad that I still had Austin and Clem and Johnson, though.

“What do you want, Sarah?” said Gil. “Marriage at any price to anybody?”

I lay on my elbow and looked at him, but he wasn’t looking at me.

“Don’t you think I’d make a good wife?”

“For someone who doesn’t mind being picked by a pin,” Gilmore said.

I picked up a handful of sand and dribbled it down his bare arm. “I think I’d make a good wife. But I wouldn’t marry just anyone.”

“You’d marry someone rich,” said Gilmore. “With a good social position, who didn’t mind being bossed around for good by his wife.” He opened his eyes. “You should put an advertisement in the papers. Come on: let’s pack it in. You’ve got to get back and cook something sensational for Austin.”

The sky was flat milky blue, and the sea to the west was full of running bands of thin sparkle, widening as they came near the shore. We began to pack up.

We got back mid-afternoon, without talking very much more, and Gil disappeared to bounce tennis balls in the garden. But that was an absolutely typical encounter. I mean, something always, sooner or later, comes apart in the middle when a boy takes me out.

I cooked a six-course meal for Austin, using every pan in the kitchen, just to show the bloody Lloyds what was what. Gil kept out of the kitchen, and he was brief and bored-sardonic when we met. Janey came in once, and sat on the edge of the table while I was stoning olives to stuff in the veal, eating them as fast as I got the stones out. After a bit, as I expected, she said, “What do you think Derek will do? Did he tell you after all what he’d been doing?”

“Yes,” I said. It was the half-truth, anyway. I knew why Derek had come back and that he had seen Daddy. What I didn’t know was what Daddy had told him and what Derek had done about it. I added, “It was a family thing; nothing to do with why Daddy died. I think it was suicide after all.”