Dolly and the Starry Bird-Dorothy Dunnett-Johnson Johnson 05 (19 page)

The parting was so sudden

We often wonder why

But the saddest part of all, dear,

You never said goodbye.

We dined that evening with Maurice and Timothy, by which time Di and Jacko had spread the glad tidings and Maurice, who liked little Finnish birds in his entourage as well as great helpings of portrait artists and astronomers, was clearly devising how to maintain his offer of a sail north for Sophia without putting out Di or the rest of us.

He needn’t have worried. Di’s greatest enemy was boredom. She had already let herself be used by Sophia as a means of an introduction to Maurice; There was nothing Di would enjoy more than a couple of days pumping Sophia about her love life.

And so long as Sophia was on
Sappho
, I can’t say I minded all that much now either. I had been worried about Sophia before I met her, but I wasn’t worried now — not in the slightest. If I am sure of my boy friend, I don’t make dramas over possessing mementos. I had Charles. I didn’t care if she had his bloody wristwatch or not. But until Charles said she could have it, I wasn’t handing it over.

We had a sparkling evening during which Maurice received fifteen people at his table and was photographed twice. We didn’t even glimpse my late colleague, Sophia.

I cornered Johnson on the way downstairs to the rubber dinghy and he confessed that he had known she worked in Capri but hadn’t told me in case I jumped to conclusions. “If it pleases you to know it,” said Johnson, “I have had her investigated. Her career is impeccable; her life is an open book. It would be interesting to know however whether Sophia or Charles arranged that meeting in Naples —”

“Wasn’t it obvious?” I asked sarcastically.
Dolly
and Lenny had been in Naples while Charles was there. Watching, I made no doubt, his every movement.

Johnson was unperturbed. “All that was obvious was that they met by prearrangement. It was a short meeting, in the bar of the hotel where Charles had been visiting a client in connection with a photographic assignment. They separated half an hour later. Much of the time, I am told, they seemed to be arguing.” We had emerged from the hotel and were walking down the tiled steps past the swimming pool. “I notice,” said Johnson, “that the situation doesn’t disturb you. Do you think therefore that Sophia sought that meeting? Is she still in love with him?”

I said, “I don’t think she’s in love with anybody. I think she wants him back because her pride is hurt.” I thought and — since there didn’t seem any point, as Di would have said, about being coy over it — I added, “According to Charles, she is very Scandinavian in bed.”

“And Finnish-type partners are hard to come by? I shouldn’t have thought she had far to look, on Capri. I should tell you,” said Johnson, “that the Rome police have not yet been told about Sophia. We know she works on Capri. We know that Mr. Paladrini was arranging for some exchange of what was possibly classified information on the twentieth in San Michele, Capri. We know Sophia has been meeting Charles. But we also know that from the outset Charles’s movements have been made to look suspicious. Sophia is scornful of Charles in jail on a gambling charge. How would she react to Charles in jail for something more serious? Would that salve her pride?”

This was playing the field with a vengeance. I stared at him. Below, Lenny had brought the dinghy to the water’s edge and was steadying it, while I could hear Innes and Jacko and Professor Hathaway stepping out of the lift doors above us. Di was sleeping, or something, in the hotel.

“You mean,” I said, “is Sophia framing Charles somehow? I don’t know. She’s certainly inviting publicity: that little scene by the swimming pool will have flown all over Taormina by this time. The payoff, I suppose, would be Charles turning up at San Michele, all set apparently for the appointment. You’ve saved him from that, anyway.”

For the first time, I was grateful that the Rome police had put Charles in clink and Johnson hadn’t done anything to rescue him. He had wanted ten days, Johnson said, to back his fancy. Six of the ten days had gone, and with Charles still in jail the yacht had been searched and I had been attacked and searched also. We had not, as we had hoped, surprised two of Mr. Paladrini’s clients in the act of trading secrets but the more I thought about that, the more it surprised me that, without time and place, Johnson ever thought we should.

Capri, of course, was another matter. San Michele meant the most famous villa on Capri, now a monument and a museum. And 1500 meant 3 p.m. One was still left wondering who, after all the police intervention after Mr. Paladrini’s death, would be fool enough to meet there.

Unless they had no alternative. Unless they had been advised well in advance and didn’t even know Mr. Paladrini’s death had a bearing on the matter. Unless someone trying to frame Charles had invented the whole rendezvous with the intention of enticing Charles there from Naples, and then blowing the whole thing to the police.

But you would have to be very deeply involved yourself, and very scared, to need to unload the blame like that on an innocent person. And Sophia’s life, Johnson had just said, was blameless. Nothing might now happen on Capri, which would be a pity. For everything that happened, every act of violence, every interference with us or our liberty, was a step toward finding the truth and freeing Charles.

And that was a laugh. For the next act of violence did neither. It happened the next day in Taormina, the old, picturesque town on the mountain behind us.

I explored Taormina with Innes and Professor Hathaway, having swooped up the hillside by cable car. We saw Johnson once through the arch of the clock tower and again hopping down one of the little steep streets with pink houses and wrought-iron balconies and colored shutters and great earthenware pots of cacti and flowers and creepers streaming everywhere. Every time we came out of another old church we spotted Di going into another boutique, generally with Jacko protesting behind her. She was got up as Ariadne with a long floating caftan thing trailing behind her and dark glasses, which would have blown Theseus and made even Bacchus think twice, I shouldn’t wonder.

Maurice and Timothy were easiest of all to find. They spent the day sitting on the paved edge of the Corso Umberto having coffee and diet pills and being universally admired. It wasn’t that the place was full of raven-haired bandits. In fact, there seemed no middle course between fat Sicilians with black berets and boleros and lissom Sicilians in long sprigged shirts and shrink-wrapped trousers who smiled at Timothy.

Timothy, who was used to his reputation having preceded him, sat very correctly in his chair beside Maurice and played with a long, thin gold-plated ball-point from Gucci which Maurice had given him for his birthday. The boys’ eyes followed it to such purpose that a kind of Inner Ring Road developed in the region and they had to rise periodically and change stations. At two o’clock, by prior arrangement, we all met to allow Professor Hathaway to feed us, which took, agreeably, most of the afternoon. At the end of it, Maurice announced that we were all going to the ruined Greek theater.

When Maurice mentions the word theater, no one contradicts him. We all, dammit, went.

The ruined theater crowns the ridge at Taormina and commands, I suppose, one of the six most beautiful views in the world. No one told me. I plugged up a road behind Timothy. All the shops were selling Greek masks and Maurice walked past them with grace, faintly smiling. No one recognized him. At the top we paid at a ticket office and filed through a boulder-strewn yard to the monument. Bits of building loomed over us, patched together from thin, oblong red Roman bricks and dove-gray Greek marble. With all his Player King instincts Maurice plunged through a high arching hall lined with fragments of marble which proved to be the fastest way onto the stage.

I was about to follow him when I noticed Johnson. With Professor Hathaway and Innes in close attendance, he had turned away from the arch and was climbing the steep flight of steps to the amphitheater. I cast a glance after Maurice, who was swimming gently along with Di on one side and Jacko on the other, while Timothy ran with little cries from sculpture to sculpture. Then I too turned, and climbed the wide, shallow, steps leading upward.

We had, of course, like dried-out alcoholics, become overconfident. Nothing had happened to us since Ischia. Lipari had been devoid of incident, unless you counted my involuntary swim. Taormina so far had been equally devoid of incident, unless you counted Sophia’s involuntary swim. From the top of an ancient Greek amphitheater, at least none of us could fall into water.

So no one stopped me when I hopped up the steps after Johnson, although at the top Johnson and his little party were nowhere to be seen, and I came to a dead halt myself from simple astonishment.

I had stepped from the stairs onto the outer rim of the shelving amphitheater, which plunged down to the ruined orchestra where I could see Maurice and his three companions picking their way, small among the blocks of pale gray and red fallen marble. Behind them towered the crumbling arches and walls of the scaena, the cracked white Corinthian columns shining against the wooded slopes of the mountains, spiked with poplars and dark green with orange groves, dropping through village and town to the scalloped blue rim of the sea. There was no horizon. Sea and sky met in a china blue haze in the sunshine and behind it all, glittering and magical, rose the snow-covered cone of Mount Etna.

A bloody, stupid voice somewhere said, “You will now give me that watch.”

I don’t think I was even frightened. I had been wrenched away from a private experience and I was angry. Irritated, exasperated, and this time, unforgiving. I looked about me.

The terrace on which I stood was empty, and so were all the wooden benches below me. Farther down, the original marble seats were still there, the Greek names of their owners carved on the backs. Farther down still, on the municipal stage which filled part of the orchestra, Maurice had raised his stick and appeared to be lecturing. Everything he said floated with terrible clarity to where I was standing and beyond. He had just begun to realize this, and, as I stood there, tossed off a couple of accurate epigrams and a clerihew. The voice said, “My watch.”

Sophia, of course. I looked around again. I had seen, a moment after I came in, Professor Hathaway appear far below and vanish into a ruined corner of the Parascaenium, Innes beside her. There was still no sign of Johnson. A low broken wall lay between me and the seats. Between this and the outer wall, also broken, were a number of odd tumbled buildings with weeds and bushes growing beside them. I began to walk very slowly from one horn of the terrace around to the other. I wasn’t afraid of Sophia. Or at least I wasn’t afraid of a private discussion, however nasty, with Sophia. I didn’t want another public battle, if I could help it. The voice of Maurice, quoting Sappho, intoned:

“
This is the dust of Timas, who died before she was married

and whom Persephone’s dark chamber accepted instead.

After her death the maidens who were her friends, with sharp iron

cutting their lovely hair, laid it upon her tomb.
”

I ask you. If ever there was a moment when I didn’t want to hear an obituary, that was it. Good for Timas. If Sophia cut my throat in the next two minutes, Di wouldn’t so much as chuck me an Asiatic bang from Elena’s.

However, I have never yet heard of trained astronomers giving way to crimes passionels over a wristwatch, so I soldiered on. I got halfway along, too, and was just circumventing a low Roman blockhouse, or perhaps ticket office and candy stall, when someone came up and grabbed me.

It was Sophia, with her long yellow hair coming out of its ribbon and her face livid under the suntan. I tried to drag my arm out of her grip but she had such a tight hold of me that I couldn’t do it. I said, “You silly twit; I don’t care whether you have it or not, but it isn’t mine to hand over. Ask Charles for it, if you’re so thick with him.”

It made sense to me, but it didn’t seem to reach Sophia. She not only continued to hang on, but struck my free hand out of the way with a blow that made my eyes water and proceeded to scrabble with my watch buckle, her hair hanging all over the place. My wrist sawed up and down as I hauled it away from her and she dragged it back, still unfastening it. I continued to reason with her until I saw that she really had got the leather half out of the buckle and then I did what I should have done in the first place: swung my elbow around sharply.

It caught her just under the chin. As her jaws snapped shut, I kicked her legs backward from under her and she went down, dragging me half on top of her. I could tell she’d never played hockey at school. Down below, Maurice, pleased with the sonority of his vowels, had begun on Pindar, of which he seemed to know a great quantity. He had started to throw in some gestures. I scrambled to my knees, whipped my hand at last from Sophia’s slackened grip and got to my feet quickly.

I had got two paces away from her when her hand around my ankle brought me down again. I no sooner hit the ground than she was over me grimly, one hand grasping my forearm and the other attempting to drag off the wristwatch. Her teeth were sunk in her lip, and covered with Waikiki Coral Ultracreme lipstick. I foiled her that time by dragging my hand to my waist and folding over it, so that she couldn’t get at it properly. I said, gasping, “Sophia, I’m
not
giving it to you. Why on earth do you want it?”

She was so excited that she answered in Finnish. Then she said, “Because you stole Charles from me. You shall not have my present. You have taken him and spoiled him and dragged him down. Look at what you have done to him! He cannot marry. You will not let him meet other girls. What can he do, but have sordid, illicit affairs and then come home to you, like a fat German hausfrau, always there, always waiting. He worries about his parents, his family. His friends are married; there is nowhere he is not invited. What does he say?
I have no wife because I have an old mistress who will not go away and I am sorry for her. May I bring her? Her manners are quite good
.”

It hurt all right. It hurt a lot, as a matter of fact. But you had to allow for the Northern sense of drama. There wouldn’t be any Ingmar Bergman films, for God’s sake, if Nordics didn’t go on like this as a hobby. I said, “Well, this bloody hausfrau is going to hang on to her gigolo’s wristwatch, Sophia. And if it gets into the papers, it will all be too bad. Because the person it will damage most is your precious Charles. Think of it,” I said, hissing at her. “He might even be forced to ask me to marry him. And I might even have to accept him.”

Which was a mistake, and it was too long since I had seen any Scandinavian movies at that. Sophia leaned forward and sank her teeth in my left ear, and as I yelped and flung up my left hand to stop her, she whipped off the watch and raced off with it.

I staggered onto my feet and zigzagged after her. Through the fingers clapped over my ear, I could feel the blood pouring down inside my collar. It didn’t stop me from running. Sheer blazing fury, quite apart from the pain, kept me belting after that Finnish maniac until our pounding feet drew even the attention of Maurice. He broke off in the middle of saying, “I wonder, Timothy. A little rebuilding, dear boy, and I think my old
Mistress in China
might do here…” and looked up, put out, at the terracing. Innes turned, guidebook in hand, and Jacko shouted “Yoo-hoo!” smiling and waving.

I suppose he thought we were playing catch-as-catch-can. Di, who was wearing a crochet cap with swinging bead drops and her Ariadne outfit, stared up at us without moving but without shouting “Yoo-hoo” at us either. Professor Hathaway and Johnson and Timothy were nowhere visible.

Sophia didn’t know the geography of the place. She probably didn’t know what to expect at the sides of the amphitheater, and it was on the cards, of course, that any exit there might once have been would have collapsed long ago into a low stack of stones, or a hole. It was because she slowed up, looking about her, that I caught up. That, and the fact that, before or since, I have never run so fast in my life. I got my hand out to grip her just as she hesitated at the end of the terrace. In front of her was a platform with a choice of two possible exits. Beside her was a sheer drop of about thirty feet. At the bottom, looking upward, was the author of
Mistress in China
, the next lot of Pindar struck from him.

She heard me coming behind her. She stopped dead and turned, and I thought she was going to scratch me. She didn’t. She put out both arms and came at me, her hair flying, her aim perfectly plain. She was going to push me over the terrace.

She struck me before I could stop her. I felt myself thrown staggering backward. I was thinking of Maurice’s poor white mink scalp when a hand gripped my arm over the elbow and, swinging me around like a rotary blade, dragged both my feet onto paving again.

It was Johnson. I think Sophia saw him. I think only then, probably, did she realize what she was doing, because I saw her eyes go suddenly all white, as if the blue bit had vanished under her lids. She was running strongly herself, with her own impetus, but I think she could have stopped herself if she had wanted to.

I saw her decide suddenly not to want to. She went plunging right on to the edge and Johnson, releasing my arm, made one stride after her, found her hair flying past him, and grabbed it.

It was, if you thought of it, a comic tableau. For a moment she looked like a figurehead, bosom forward, chin up and hair straining back in the sea breeze. He had a good grip of it: the full hank with his two hands tight around it. It must have hurt like the devil and she screeched, I was delighted to discover, a damned sight louder than I had. Then she turned her head and came lurching backward, and slithering down at his feet, sat on the paving and had screaming hysterics.

“Silly girl,” said Johnson.

He wasn’t talking to me, but I yelled at him. “Did you see all that?”

“Yes,” said Johnson.

“Then why didn’t you stop it?”

“I did,” said Johnson. He had taken off the jersey and was wearing a very old cellular shirt with a scarf in it. His bifocals stared at me glassily.

I breathed gustily. “Why didn’t you stop it,” I said, “before she bit my bloody ear off?”

I took my hand away. Blood still poured from my lacerated earlobe. Sophia, still howling helplessly, continued to sit on the pavement. Johnson looked down at her consideringly. “Should we slap her face?” he said mildly.

“Yes,” I said with some venom. “After you’ve looked at my ear.”

Johnson peered at my ear, and then, taking out and folding a handkerchief, proceeded to tie it around my head and neck with the aid of another. It hurt like hell but he did it so carefully that I began to feel, despite everything, faintly mollified. Then I caught the look in his eye behind the glasses.

“I once read something — ” said Johnson conversationally, “I’m sure I read something about a sow’s ears during sex. It makes you think. I take it the sow finds it’s worth it.” He slapped Sophia’s face lightly on either cheek and she stopped screaming and continued merely to whimper.

“Dear me,” said Professor Hathaway, emerging from the stair-case and picking her way to the scene. Behind her and pulling out eagerly to overtake were Di and Jacko and Timothy. Maurice, leaning on his stick, was staring upward with some disapproval. Innes was reading his guidebook. With mice, these untidy events just don’t happen.

Sophia cried into Professor Hathaway’s shoulder and Jacko sat me down on his cardigan on a nice block of marble and Di said, “Good God,” rather blankly, and removing her eyes from my bloodstains, added, “Don’t tell me it was all because of Charles’s stupid watch.”

“Yes,” I said rather curtly. “Thank God he hadn’t lent me his diamond earrings.”

“Who has it?” said Johnson. “The watch, I mean. Did Sophia take it?”

“She did,” I said. “But I got it back.” It was the first thing I did when she sat down. I had it stuffed in my bra, and it was going to stay there.

“I wonder,” said Johnson mildly, “if that was sensible.”

We all looked at him. Even Sophia’s head suddenly lifted and her bunged-up eyes peered through the hair at my friend the portrait painter.

“I think it was very sensible,” I said with great distinctness. “In fact, I can think of no possible alternative.”

“Of course, keepsakes are special,” said Timothy. You could tell that, like Maurice, he didn’t much hold with untidiness, but his curiosity was absolutely overpowering.

“Yes. Well, this was Sophia’s keepsake, not Ruth’s,” said Johnson kindly. “Ruth, hand it back to Sophia.”

“
What
?” I said. I quacked. I barely, in fact, made myself audible.

“Do you want,” said Johnson, “Sophia to have a nervous breakdown? Do you want Charles’s name smeared all over the papers? Do you want your other ear bitten?”

I sat, stunned. Stunned and betrayed. “Yes, no, no,” I answered.

“Then,” said Johnson, “give the watch back.”

I stared at him. My ear throbbed. My throat felt tight and tears began to work their way into my eyes. I said, “I won’t. It belongs to Charles. He lent it to me. If she wants it back, she can go and ask Charles for it. You don’t even know that she gave it to him.”

“Don’t you?” said Johnson, and stared at me with those impersonal, indecent glass eyes, and I knew what he was going to say before he said it. “Then why else should she want it back?”

For a soft, woolly, indeterminate, badly dressed Englishman, he was the hardest man I ever met in my life. I knew it wasn’t any use for me to argue. I knew, and he knew, that he was going to get his own way.

I fished inside my sticky bra and brought out the watch and held it out, hot and filthy and covered with blood, to Sophia.

For a moment, I thought she was going to snatch it and fling it into the orchestra. She took it and clutched it for a moment, her nose running and her lips pressed together. Then she got to her feet and walked off, her head turned aside, her clenched hand still pressed to her bosom.

We watched her go. Then everyone looked down at me and began cooing.

I said a very, very bad word and stalked down the stairs and out of the Taormina Greek theater.
Mistress in China
might do all right, as Maurice said. But Mistress in Rome had been a hell of a failure.