Dolly and the Starry Bird-Dorothy Dunnett-Johnson Johnson 05 (15 page)

“You lucky bitch,” said J. Middleton enviously. “And if they spring Charles, I suppose you’ll do it together.”

“I suppose so,” I answered. I didn’t tell him they weren’t going to spring Charles: not for ten days at least, if ever. I didn’t tell him the reason for the itinerary either, but he hit on part of it.

“Hey,” said Jacko. “You’ll be at Capri on the date of the meeting. The date on the fish in that balloon-vendor’s flat? You sneaky blighters!”

“Want to come?” said Johnson lightly.

He had Jacko around his neck before he got quite through speaking. We went through the same thing with Innes. Innes remembered the date in Capri as well, and we didn’t tell him about the others in between. We didn’t tell Innes any more than we told Jacko, but he fairly jumped at the invitation when Johnson made it. I said crossly, “What about Poppy?” and Innes said his landlady would look after her he was sure, and he had a very strong stomach. Then I thought that maybe I was denying Innes his first anthropological experience, and felt ashamed of myself.

But it was uncanny how all Johnson’s predictions came true. Even to the interview in Maurice’s villa when we related our plans to Professor Hathaway, and she gave her rabbity smile and said that she was hoping the invitation included herself.

There was the very beginning of a silence, swept away by Maurice’s most delicious cries. Of course she must go. And he and Timothy would fly south to meet her. “I have a yacht there,” said Maurice. “A little thing called the
Sappho
, so appropriate, although I warn you, the heads are too tiny. You will dine on her. They will dine on her, Timothy. If the weather isn’t too dreadful, you may sail on her… Such nights. You will see stars on
Sappho
, I promise you, Lilian, such as your dull telescopes have never shown you before. You may never come back…”

If the film had gone from Maurice’s vase, Johnson had once agreed, then one of us must have taken it. Mr. Paladrini was dead, but we — all of us — were still living. And we — all of us — for one reason or another, it seemed, were to share in some part of
Dolly’s
voyage.

We left for Naples the following morning, Saturday, November 11, in a rainstorm. I had been warned that Charles couldn’t have phone calls. But before we set out I posted him a long letter with SWALK on it to make him laugh, telling him everything and ending

Silent thoughts and tears unseen,

Wishing your absence was only a dream.

It crossed with one of his to me which came with another obituary:

We said farewell that autumn day

My heartstrings felt the tug

You laid your hair down far away

And left your heart in jug.

It takes four hours to drive to Naples and it rained all the way. Sheets of water sprayed up on each side of the Fiat, in which I was cravenly sitting with Jacko. Maurice’s chauffeur-driven limousine rolled majestically behind, bearing Innes and Professor Hathaway, talking.

The Fiat did a hundred and twenty on the autostrada and got to Naples ahead of the Maserati, with Jacko slumbering heavily in the back, on the way to rehabilitation after a brisk farewell warm-up of pages one to six of his address book. The yachting haven is on the north side of the bay. Johnson wove past all the stalls selling varnished shell ashtrays and splashed over a long concrete jetty lined with covered boats.

There was only one with the cockpit canvas stripped off and she was a gas: a big, snow-white ketch with two tall pitch-pine masts, glittering with naval brass and expensive teak and fine paintwork. A man in a peaked cap standing under the waterproof awning nipped up to the aft deck as the Fiat drew up and, hopping ashore, sprinted up to us with a broad grin on his face. He was a short, powerful man with large ears and the gold lettering around his capband said
Dolly
. His name, it turned out, was Lenny Milligan, and his accent, greeting us all, was ripe Cockney. He helped haul out the luggage, and we walked toward the lushest seagoing pad in the harbor.

I don’t know why it surprised me. Next to
Who’s Who
, Maurice kept an up-to-date Lloyd’s Register in his library. We all knew the
Dolly
was a gaff-rigged auxiliary ketch of 59 tons with a 60 BHP auxiliary engine. What’s more, the owner’s name in the list bore an asterisk, which meant that Johnson Johnson held a Board of Trade Master’s Certificate.

I was glad of it. The Tyrrhenian Sea in November is no place to be without the Board of Trade Master’s Certificate, and perhaps even with it.

Below decks, Johnson’s yacht was deep-carpeted and warm and candidly comfortable. In the desperate silence of ignorance, Jacko traversed with me the cushioned saloon whose paneled walls contained all the civilized comforts. Johnson had a television set and a stereo record player and a radio and a fridge and a full-scale bar within which Lenny, in a white jacket, was already making himself busy. We passed through a door at the forward end and into a passage which contained the door of the galley on its right and that of a single-berth cabin on its left.

“Mine,” said Johnson, indicating the last. He opened a third door facing us at the end of the short passage and ushered Jacko gently in. “The forward stateroom. You’ll share this with Innes. Lenny sleeps in the fo’c’sle beyond it, but he won’t disturb you if he can help it. He comes and goes by a hatch to the deck.”

There were two single bunks in the stateroom, and the covers and curtains and cushions were Swiss and patterned in pure fadeless dyes of bright color. What Johnson didn’t put on his person, he put, it seemed, onto his ship and his palette. I said, “I can’t wait to see where the Professor will doss.”

Jacko was trying the bed. Johnson led the way back to the saloon. He said, “She’s not a very large yacht, remember.”

I stopped where I was, which was in front of a bookcase. I said, “You wouldn’t dare.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” said Johnson, his bifocals perfectly limpid. “Very few boats have double beds. Double feather beds with monogrammed sheets and four pillows.”

I sat down. Jacko, emerging behind me, said, “Oh, my Gawd,” and started to cackle. The cackle became a shriek. “You can put each other’s rollers in, Ruthie.”

I said, “I am not sharing a bed with Professor Hathaway.”

“No, you’re not,” said Johnson comfortably. “Although it was an enticing vision of splendor, I must confess. You are, however, sharing a stateroom. Come and see.”

I glared at him, smacked Jacko’s head, and tramped out of the saloon and up into the cockpit. There, he opened a door leading aft.

He had given us his own master stateroom. It didn’t contain a double bed, but it did have every other amenity known to man, including two quilted bunks and a bathroom. I wondered who occupied the other bed when he had the boat to himself. He brought in my case and said, “She’s a nice old stick. I hope you won’t find it too awful.”

I said, “Who was Dolly?”

Jacko was unpacking. Behind me, Lenny was laying glasses out on a tray. Johnson put his hands in his pockets and leaned against the stateroom door and just grinned. “A one-eyed colored Gay Power bus driver in Peckham,” he said sweetly. “Why do
you
come to the clinic?”

“Sorry,” I said.

“Granted,” he said.

Then we all went into the saloon and drank gin until the Maserati arrived. We’d got the Professor but we hadn’t, thank God, brought the telescope.

After lunch, the Director left to make her statutory call on Bob and Eddie in the training post, taking the three of us with her. The trip to the hills was uneventful, if you discount a series of mid-brown torrents which poured down the mountain on top of us, and the hideous discomfort of the student establishment, which had been shipped out piecemeal from England and erected by none other than Bob and Eddie, who would never add a touch of distinction to your rock garden.

They were birds of passage, in any case, creating a center for others to live in. Professor Hathaway complimented them on their logbook, and they became even more cheerful when they heard that they were to drive down to
Dolly
for dinner. Jacko, Innes and I hung about adding the light relief till it was over. Then we all piled into two cars and slid down the hill to the harbor.

Lenny did the dinner. We had baby clam soup poured over toast squares, and breaded veal escalopes with frail bones like thrushes and fried slices of salty, crumbed artichokes, frilly green inside their brown coatings. And sweet pastry rings made with brandy, and served red hot and with a sifting of sugar and cinnamon. And coffee.

I ate my way through it all, and Johnson filled my glass from a tinseled Murano glass wine jar and I didn’t stop him. I had a liqueur called centerbe, and maybe another one.

So did Bob and Eddie, who were wearing collars and ties in honor of Professor Hathaway, and red satiny faces in tribute to Johnson’s centerbe. Eddie, enunciating like an elocution teacher, said “You’ll never guess who we met the day Charles came to Naples. Sophia Ow.”

The
Ow
was because Bob had kicked him. It was no news that they had had a drink with Charles during his visit to Naples. Anyone who knew me in England also knew Charles. Eddie had been loud in his indignation over the jailing and I had explained how it was all a mistake because of Charles’s flatmate. They told me a few stories about Sassy that had been going round the network that not even I knew.

But I didn’t know about Sophia. Sophia Lindrop was a sharp little blonde who had been educated at Roedean and Zermatt and three foreign universities, including Hamburg. She was in the same circuit as Charles. She was engaged to Charles when I first met him.

There was no point in embarrassing anybody, so when Bob launched into a desperate account of some Italian pop concert, I let him get on with it. I didn’t have any more centerbe. In fact, to be candid, I excused myself pretty soon and got rid of the centerbe I’d had already, as well as the clams and most of the veal cutlets. It was a terrible waste.

I was standing up on deck after, feeling low and looking at the lights of Naples over the water when the saloon door opened and shut on the chatter and Johnson vaulted up and strolled over beside me. He had left his pipe behind. He was altogether too damned perceptive. After a moment he said, “A little fair girl, isn’t she? Lenny saw them together, as it happens. Not, I should have thought, very disturbing competition.”

It was none of his bloody business. I wasn’t going to go through life spending every second day crying on Johnson. I didn’t answer. He waited and then put his arms on the rail and said thoughtfully, “So. Disturbing competition. Perhaps even the someone else he was engaged to, who was so furious.”

I had forgotten I had ever told him that. I talk too much. I blew my nose and glared at Vesuvius. Johnson said, “I wonder just how much she dislikes you. Enough, would you say, to have your cabin searched?”

I ran away from him. I got down to the loo just in time to part company with the rest of the veal cutlets. I heard the saloon door open and shut, and then open and shut once again. When I came to the door of the stateroom Johnson was standing there, with a bottle of mineral water in one hand and a glass in the other. He said, “I think this might help. May I come in?”

He came in anyway and I backed and sat on the bed. When you came to look at it, the cabin was perfectly neat. I took the glass and held it chattering against the neck of the bottle as he poured. I said, “You said our things had been searched.”

He put down the bottle. “The whole ship had been searched. I called in the carabinieri but there was no trace of the intruders. It had been done very neatly. And nothing that we know of had been taken.”

There was the least firmness in the words
that we know of
. I said, “I burned the negatives from the meat safe. I told you.”

“I know you did,” Johnson said. “But the character who pinched the dud film from Maurice’s vase doesn’t know it. He’s developed that roll, and
he
thinks the blank pictures were planted. Now he means to find out which of us has the real film.”

There was a long silence. I found I was still holding the glass of mineral water. I drank it off and put it beside a guidebook lying beside the Prof’s bed. It said, “STROMBOLI —
an unimaginable and stupendous reality in a painting of both exultant and terrifying eurhythmy. The Exhaust Pipe of the Thyrrhenian Sea
.” I said, “So now he knows we haven’t got it. Maybe he’ll try Di and Maurice and Timothy. And when he finds they haven’t got it either he’ll give up. After a while, even couture pictures, surely, lose their value.”

My hands were cold and I gripped them together. “Look. It’s Charles’s film he seems to be hunting, and I’ve seen it. Girls and fashion shots. No desperate international espionage, only skirt lengths.”

“You’d be surprised,” Johnson said, “what you can get into a skirt length. That’s why I wish you’d kept Charles’s pictures. There are some ingenious men about in this business. Men who’d print a formula on a model’s hatband and persuade an innocent photographer, say, to take a shot of her. Charles himself may not have known what was in his roll of pictures.”

There was another silence. Then I said, “In that case, you think the hunt for the film will continue?”

“My dear, I hope so,” said Johnson patiently. “Because, don’t you see, we must try and catch him? The man who is hunting that film is the man who can vindicate Digham.”

I said, “Of course,” but I found it hard to be cheered by the prospect. Then he asked about Sophia Lindrop, and I told him.

We went back to the saloon after that, and in due course saw off Bob and Eddie, who had some trouble getting from deck to jetty. The night with the Prof in the stateroom went off rather better than I had feared. She retired just after we speeded our dinner guests, and when I eventually got to the cabin, primed with two pale blue liqueurs and a lot of juvenile exhortations from Jacko, I found her already in bed, buttoned up to the chin in Viyella pajamas and deep in her paperback guidebook with the chapter headed VULCANO: Rich of Fenomena. The stateroom was foggy with Manikins.

She continued to smoke and flip the pages while I undressed. I was in my nightdress and sitting down oiling off eyeliner when she laid the book down and said, “You don’t quite fit your clothes, do you? What is it? Nibbling for comfort? Too many patisseries at Donay’s and Aragno’s?”

I was so taken aback I looked at her in the mirror with my mouth open and the smudgy black pad in my hand. It was perfectly true. In the first six months of living with Charles I had been about fourteen pounds underweight: edgy but interesting. In the last few weeks on the other hand I had found it hard to avoid those small nighttime visits to Innes’s grandmother’s cookies. I wasn’t fat. I wasn’t feeble-minded enough to be pregnant. But the hook and eye above the zip didn’t get done up so often anymore.

Lilian Hathaway said, “I’ve got some sewing of my own to look after. If you leave your things out, I’ll fix them once we are sailing.”

It had never occurred to me that the professors of this world would ever know what to do with a needle unless it was oscillating. I looked at her and said defensively, “It’s all right, you know. I can manage.”

Professor Hathaway stubbed out her cigar, switched off her bed light and plumping her pillow prepared to lay herself down for some slumber. “I am not proposing,” said the Director of the Trust with some resignation, “to psychoanalyze you. I think, however, you should adhere to some sort of diet. Otherwise we should both have our work wasted, shouldn’t we?”

I said something. Her eyes were closed already. The pebble glasses lay at her bedside, long-legged and lifeless as locusts. She went to sleep right away, with a quiet, bubbling snore which you could almost call comforting.