Dolly And The Cookie Bird - Dorothy Dunnett - Johnson Johnson 03 (12 page)

Then the Chinese suddenly hopped into action. He really was dolly, with a long yellow face, loads of black hair and sideburns, and his chins crammed right down into his white frilly shirt. He stood doing nothing, just scowling, and I could have screamed with suspense. Then he began very slowly to do a zapateado, kicking his boots, first on one side, then the other, his fingertips in his bosom and his mouth down round about the second last frill. In his underpants. He was fantastic. It was utterly fabulous. The girls were whirling around with their chests out, their beads all lassoing their Maidenforms, and their surplus frills hooked up like curtains, and from time to time he would break off and stalk round beside one of them, his elbows bent inside out too. The Russians were still doing backflips and not looking very much where they were going, stopping occasionally to cock an elbow and charge up and down sideways, one brawny arm stabbing the ceiling. They gave tongue to intermittent, very loud shouts. Then they got tired of that and made back for the girls.

I never could find anyone who remembered very clearly what occurred after that. The gorgeous Chinese was on one knee by that time, handing a distraught girl in a circle around him, and the guitarist was singing flamenco, very mournfully, in long, minor rises and falls, and short, soulful runs. He had his eyes shut. Possibly the flamenco irritated the Cossacks, or maybe the vodka simply came to the boil. Anyway, one minute the red-and-white underpants were spinning like wheels round the room, arms flipping over and over, like four crazy propellors, and the next, the girls were both on the floor, in a wallow of frillies, and the Chinese, also in a wallow of frillies, was trying to throw the attaché over his shoulder. An earring flew past my ear, and I saw Mummy’s mouth open. She ripped the rose off her towel and bowled it straight at the electric portable organ, and Basilio y su Conjunto, cottoning on, struck up the conga. God knows how they knew what to play, for it went out with crinolines; but there was a sort of struggling and heaving and suddenly everyone was attached to everyone else in one long, semi-nude snake and kicking all round the playroom. They went right through the house again too, in and out of the showers, and through the wreck of the drawing room, nicking all the rest of the Smirnoff. Finally, with paper bags and balloons bursting all over the place, they staggered out into the garden. I was stuck somewhere in the middle with Clem and Austin, and almost got the breath squeezed flat out of me. The torque was frantic. It was the hardest-pressed conga I’ve ever been part of, and if you saw the number of towels left behind on the floor of the playroom, you wouldn’t take long to guess why.

Outside, the fountains were still playing and the aluminum flickered under the trees. Pebbles, let into the gravel at intervals, said,
to dream is an orgasm
. Most of the conga tripped on “orgasm,” but none of them was in a state to dig it but Mummy, who turned round and said, “That was rather a nice one of Coco’s. The theme is developed in those plastic bullrushes.
dream no more lightly
.”

The bullrushes were on the other side of the fancy lake, under the trees. Basilio y su Conjunto, just behind, changed the tune and the conga gave a convulsive shudder and began twining in and out of small arbors, leaping. Someone had put a towel round a very nude statue and was saying anxiously, “You must go in and get warm.”

“Coco always did take such trouble,” Mummy said wistfully. “The words are all written up the stems,
dream no more lightly. eff and make poetry tonight
.”

“What and make poetry?” I said. The band had stopped. Clem, his arms crossed in front of me, was nibbling the back of my neck.

My mother turned. “F—” she said impatiently, into the sudden abatement. I said “Oh,” and Clem lifted his head and said, “Something’s happened.”

All at once everyone was running toward the far side of the fountains. I ran, too, with Austin on one side and Clem on the other. I didn’t see what happened to Mummy.

The paper bags were all round the bullrushes. Among them, floating like Moses but without benefit of basket, was the fully dressed figure of Coco, with three plastic bullrushes clutched in his dead hand. I had a good look at them. They read,
no… more… poetry
.

AUSTIN AND GIL took me home. I wondered whether I ought to stay with Mummy, but when I looked for her, I found her in the study, telephoning the Consulado de EE UU with Clem standing by her, and Clem told me to push off. I didn’t see Derek and Janey. But by then people had started to melt, walking fast round the side of the house with their clothes in bundles under their arms. We saw the gleam of cars, where we had missed them when we first arrived, discreetly tucked under the trees. The party must already have started when Gil, Austin, and I first arrived. Clever Coco. I wondered how many towels Mummy was going to lose, and then if she would lose something more than her towels. Coco had drowned while under the influence of a lethal dose of cocaine, according to a paper bag who claimed to be qualified. But if anyone in that household had good reason to have it in for Coco, it was certainly Mummy. I wondered if I were the only former pupil of St. T’s to have cause to suspect my mother and my brother of murder, each within the same twenty-four hours, and lay back thinking while Austin fondled my polythene. Then I made up my mind, and collected his hand idly, and said, “I’m leaving on Monday.”

Gil, who was driving, said nothing at all, the rat. Austin brought his damp, white, Virgul arm closer around me and said, “I guess you’ve had a real fright. Those boys and girls don’t mean any harm, you know. Anyone dealing with the creative arts gets out of line a little bit, sometimes. It’s the price they pay for their talent.”

I shifted my head off his shoulder. I said, “Austin, honestly, it’s no news to me. I’m just bored.”

“
Bored
?” said Austin.. He gave a perplexed sort of grin. “You sure must be expecting some excitement in London.”

“It’s the only place I’ve a return ticket for,” I said. “Likewise, goodbye to the real Spanish dancing. I must say, I’m sad about that.”

Austin said, “If you had an older relative with you, I’d sure ask her permission to take you with me to Seville.”

My better nature staged a brief battle and won. “I don’t need an older relative,” I said. “People don’t get chaperoned any more, you know, Austin. You just get up and go.”

“Some people get up and go sooner than others,” said Gil, still staring at the roadway in front of him. He drew in, and a Rolls-Royce bearing the Soviet flag swept ahead. You couldn’t see who was inside, or if they had any clothes on.

Austin said, “You mean you would come?”

I said, “I don’t see why not. Tomorrow, or whenever you want it. If Mr. Lloyd doesn’t mind,” I added quickly. Gilmore said, sarcastically, “I’m sure he won’t mind in a good charitable cause. Are you going to marry her, Mandleberg?”

I could have killed him. Austin gave an unnerved smile and said, “It’s a little early for that?”

“Not for Sarah, it isn’t,” said Gilmore. “Better make up your mind now. Or you’ll see a lot more of Seville than you ever expected to.”

“I already,” said Austin, “know Seville extremely well. I have a gallery there. And in Gibraltar. And my only purpose in taking Miss Cassells there is to show her a good time and enable her to see a little of that glorious city. I shall make it clear to Mr. Lloyd that my intentions are purely platonic.”

I didn’t hear what Gilmore said, but I know he jammed on the Cooper’s brakes so that I fell off Austin’s lap. An old Seat, which had been dogging us, hooting, passed us asthmatically, drew in, and groaned to a stop. The driver’s door opened and Johnson got out and came over, followed by Derek and Janey. Derek was white with emotion.

“Hallo,” said Johnson. “Their Maserati conked out. I hear it’s been quite a party.”

Gilmore said, “How did you hear?”

“Clem phoned the Club Náutico,” Johnson. “I drove over as fast as I could, but everyone was dressed by the time I got there. All I could find out was that Coco Fairley seems to have drowned himself at a party for eight or ten people, who went through three-hundred quids’ worth of booze and used fifty-three dirty bath towels. What happened? Did the Trade Mission liquidate him for the ideological corruption of Portland cement?”

“Don’t be an ass,” said Janey soothingly, and she wasn’t being soothing to Johnson. She sat on the Cooper’s window, steadying herself with a hand on Derek’s shirt.

“He’d had a row,” I said, “with Mrs. van Costa. She told him to get out just before. Why ask? Clem must have told you.”

“Clem,” said Johnson, “was on the long-distance telephone to New York, London, and Paris, and also, if it matters, to Birmingham, to get a new screw for the heads. Mrs. van Costa was otherwise engaged. Derek says she’s your mother.”

I’d guessed by now that he knew. She couldn’t very well telephone with a paper bag on, and if Derek passed by, he would spot her. I wondered why he couldn’t have kept his fat mouth shut and recalled that there was no reason from his point of view why he should. If he despised Daddy, he loathed Mummy as well. Maybe he thought she killed Daddy: although I couldn’t see how a woman could have heaved a well-built man like my father up onto a tall horse. He had believed Daddy to be a spy. Maybe he thought Mummy was in the thing with him. Anyway, the shock, on top of whatever Janey had done to him, had done Derek no good. He said to me suddenly, ignoring Janey’s fingers pressing his arm, “You didn’t think of telling me that. You could accuse me of killing Father with that woman sitting not ten miles away…”

Janey said, “Sarah’s father committed suicide, and if she accused you of killing anyone, she was getting as bored with you as I am. Also, she had no idea Mrs. van Costa was your mother. Neither had I. My God, would I have taken you there tonight if I had?”

They stared at one another. She had diverted him all right. I shut the book on whether they’d got there ahead of Dilling’s towels or not. Johnson said, “Mrs. van Costa sent him packing? Tonight?”

I said, “Dilling and Clem took him off to dress and shove stuff in a suitcase. Someone was going to drive him to a hotel in Ibiza tonight.”

“Dilling,” said Johnson. “He left him to get the car keys, and when he came back, Coco had gone. Clem had already gone back to the party.”

“Yes. I was with him,” I said. “So, Coco gives himself a good fix, overdoes it, and wanders into the pond?” I had meant to sound scathing, like Janey, but my voice sort of tailed away. The letter. The fake letter, I thought. Coco might have known I was sometimes called She-she. Coco might have suspected already that Mummy was going to give him the push. Coco might have had the whole nasty idea already written out in concrete poetry in his nasty little overcreamed head…

“Picking three bullrushes first?” said Janey.

“If he were drowning,” said Gilmore, “he might have come half awake and grabbed whatever he could.”

I felt suddenly very depressed. “I believe in Fate,” I said. “I bet he was Capricorn.”

“Are you Capricorn?” asked Johnson. He was wearing a nameless, open-necked shirt and a botany jersey. He said, “I saw the papers today. It said your day would end drinking a modest white wine in the company of a dark man in glasses. Sarah, I know a place in the Alt Vila where they continue to serve inebriating liquor until three in the morning. Will you join me? And of course, if anyone else…?”

Derek nearly said yes, he was spoiling so much for a showdown. But in the long run, intimidated by the flashing smile, they all turned it down, mumbling. Janey, turning the full lime on Austin, persuaded him to go back to the Lloyds’ house for the night, where he could dry out and recover, and then climbing into the Cooper, sat where I had sat on his lap. Derek, hamstrung by Johnson’s presence, sat in the back of the old Seat and glared, without a backward glance at the Cooper, while we rattled on into Ibiza and dropped him at his hotel. There had been a notice today in the market: no outside traffic in the town till 7
a.m.
, Saturday; no public music till Sunday. Johnson ran the car down to the quayside and parked it, and taking me by the hand, walked me up through the Perta de las Tablas into the Dalt Vila.

After the heat and the noise and the beastliness, the old city was quiet and cool. Lamps lit Juno and her headless Roman Senator guarding the walls under which they’d been found, and there were lamps in the roofless courtyard inside and on the houses, blue and yellow, in the square to which it led. We stood there for a moment. Two dark-bereted workmen sat outside the bar, where in the daytime you could see Janey’s friends, with their long brown legs, their Labradors, and their casual boyfriends, reading the
Daily Express
. Or alone, in skinny sweaters and bell-bottomed corduroy trousers, sitting with a pack of cigarettes and an English paperback and some yogurt. In the old town were lonely people and dedicated people and people having fun working hard. The hippies were in the other town, outside the portals. Among the people whose island it was, life seemed to go on regardless. They had been there since Carthaginian times. Hairy coats and bare feet and Zapata mustaches weren’t likely to have much effect, I supposed, now.

Johnson said, “Death is a sobering institution, isn’t it? Even Coco’s.” He put his hand lightly on mine and said, “Look up, Sarah.” I looked up.

High in the sky, caught between the palms and the thick-ridged tiles of the roofs, stood a round, yellow moon, of the kind you always think you’re going to stand under one day, with a man. Somewhere, Coco was lying under it too. I wondered if there had been a moon when Daddy died.

“A much-debased image,” said Johnson’s voice, coolly. “But then, you can’t live on nothing but sugar. You can’t paint in nothing but pinks. You can’t pass your existence indulging in sex. Moons for romance are cheap moons.”

He must have known what I was thinking. I said, “It’s an expensive moon now. And two weeks ago.”

“Yes,” said Johnson. He turned the hairpin bend round from the courtyard and began to climb slowly up the hill, taking me with him. He said, “Sarah. Why do you cook for the Lloyds? Did they ask you?”

I didn’t look at him, but I remember I stuck my chin out. “No,” I said. “They didn’t. They asked me to come for a holiday. I cook because I want to, that’s all.”

I could feel him looking at me; and I knew he was smiling. I wouldn’t look round. His nice voice said, “You may have the moon, Sarah. Your only real handicap is youth.”

He didn’t speak again and neither did I.

Johnson knew the
Dalt Vila
. We didn’t stay on the main road but went climbing through the steep, broken lanes, flattening once as a Simca loomed from the darkness reversing toward us, its engine cut off. There was, somewhere, a smell of incense among the other small, teasing smells in the air. I followed Johnson, without speaking, until he stopped and opened a door in a wall, and I walked through and found myself in a garden, small, dim, and latticed with vines, in which tables had been set under the palms, with low candles flaring.

“Come in,” said Johnson. “There’s no music tonight, but they’ll serve us some food and some wine. You don’t need to talk.”

A young man came for the order, quietly, and then went away, leaving us nearly alone. One other table was occupied, by an old man half sleeping over his copita. Behind us, someone touched a guitar softly now and then, and sang under his breath absently, forgetting the embargo: only moved by the still night and the flowers and the dimness. Far off, you could see the steady lights lining the Santa Eulalia road and the bright lights at the end of the yacht club. The apéritifs came.

“There’s
Dolly
,” said Johnson. He was a restful man, in some ways. Or maybe all men were restful, and I’d never allowed myself time to observe it. I felt the way I did the last night at school, when I had to leave, and I didn’t know what to do. That was when Flo’s mother turned up and took me home for the weekend.

I found I needed to blow my nose.

Johnson said, “Clem should be back on board later on; Spry will wait up for him. I’m afraid it will be pretty rough going for your mother, now it’s known she was in Ibiza while your father was here.”

“Does it have to be known?” I said. I shoved my hankie away. “Janey and Gilmore won’t tell, and I don’t suppose Austin will if we ask him. Derek…” I faded it out. I wanted, like an ache, to tell Johnson everything. And I couldn’t. Bloody, bloody Derek. I couldn’t.

“Derek hasn’t told anyone so far,” said Johnson. “According to Clem, who will keep his mouth shut also. Do you still think Derek murdered his father?”

My tummy turned over. “I don’t know,” I said. “But if he did, he probably murdered Coco Fairley as well. Coco was busy shrieking that he had seen something the night Daddy died, when Mummy had him turned out.”

“You couldn’t guess what he’d seen?”

“No. But from what he hinted earlier, he knew that Daddy had visited Mummy that Saturday night. He might have seen him leave or even followed him to watch where he went.”

“Who heard Coco say that, Sarah?” said Johnson.

I thought. “Clem and Mummy. Dilling, perhaps: he wasn’t far away. Not Austin and Gilmore: they were in the shower with the Russians.”

“And Janey and Derek?” said Johnson.

“I don’t know. I saw them on the dance floor later, but I don’t know when they got there. If you want to imagine Derek listening outside the door, I suppose he could have been, at that. No one could identify anyone else. They were all wearing those bags.”

There was a little pause, while we pushed down our drinks. Johnson had got me Anis del Mono. I liked it. Then Johnson said thoughtfully, “You realize. If your father was murdered, then Coco was certainly murdered, although I doubt if anyone will ever prove that he didn’t take that shot and fall into the pond by himself. And with the exception of Gilmore, who you say was certainly under the shower, every single suspect from the death of your father was equally a possible suspect tonight.”

“Except for Mr. Lloyd,” I said. “This time at least he was at home.”

“How do you know?” said Johnson gently. And of course, I didn’t. For with Janey and Gilmore away, there was no reason at all why their father should not have left the house and successfully gate-crashed that party. Why not, in a paper bag?

I finished my aniseed stuff in one positive gulp. “I give up,” I said. “I’m going to Seville with Austin.”