Johnson Johnson 04 - Dolly and the Doctor Bird (8 page)

“Golf,” I said. I felt overrelaxed. Indeed, I had to exert myself to say it quite clearly. Lady Edgecombe showed, for some reason, slight apprehension. I added, “But surely, Begum, Mr. Brady has told you of our game on Paradise Island?”

“He told me, yes,” said the Begum. She hesitated, as if reflecting how to phrase her next comment. “He feared you considered the whole encounter as a means to force an introduction to your father. I hope he was wrong,” said the Begum calmly. “He is an extremely talented young man, with no need to solicit his orders. Furthermore, I gather it is not at all likely that James Ulric will see Castle Rannoch again.”

I was angry, but I took time to make myself clear. “It’s not impossible,” I said. “If his condition should stabilize. If he avoids exerting himself with large-scale entertainments, for example.”

“But how dull he would find it,” the Begum said, smiling. “Shall I quote René Sand? ‘The place of medicine is in the stream of life, not on its banks.’ And ihat applies not only to the MacRannoch but to his daughter. I embarrass you, Beltanno. But I wish you to be friends with my Mr. Brady. Did you know he was building a bridge for me?”

“How is it?” said Johnson.

The Begum said, “He thinks he can solve this last problem. But the currents are quite impossible, you know. Everyone has tried it. But I think he will succeed.”

Krishtof Bey’s almond eyes were still watching me. He said, without moving them, “A bridge? But how exciting, Thelma! Where does it run from?”

“Lady Edgecombe will have seen it,” the Begum said, smiling at us all with that regal tilt of her head. “Indeed, it will be quite spectacular when it is finished. It runs from my scrap of land to the nearest large island. It joins Crab Island to Great Harbour Cay.”

“I didn’t know,” I said slowly, “that you lived so close to Great Harbour Cay?”

“Didn’t you? But then, James Ulric hates Crab Island because it has no proper harbor,” the Begum said. “I couldn’t build him a landing strip, but at least I could give him a bridge. Do you think he will visit me now? Will you, Beltanno?”

I looked at her. “I am afraid,” I said, “that working hours don’t make such trips very easy. But it was kind of you to suggest it.”

“But you get weekends?” Lady Edgecombe said unexpectedly. “Bart was saying you must get weekends. He wanted you to fly back with us to Great Harbour Cay and stay awhile. We owe a great deal to the doctor,” she added apologetically to the Begum.

“But of course. And then she can come visit us,” said the Begum with satisfaction. “It is arranged.” She signed the bill with a flourish; it went into three figures. “Now, shall we go? Johnson, you have to go back to your egocentric display?”

“I’m a working man,” said Johnson. “If I weren’t, you wouldn’t have that historic painting to show for it. Like Doctor MacRannoch, I have to clear my desk before I come and loll on Crab Island.”

“You’re going to stay with the Begum?” I said. I was suspicious. Suddenly the center of equilibrium had shifted quite away from Nassau and the United Commonwealth Hospital. Victim, suspects — all the protagonists in this threatening disaster seemed to be slipping away, to Crab Island. To Great Harbour Cay. Or nearly all. I thought of Sergeant Trotter.

Johnson said, “Krishtof Bey has asked me to paint him, and I’m tempted, but you know what a sartorial dropout I am. Do you all dress at Gina Fratini?”

“We don’t dress at all,” the Begum said in her calm way.

“Or just a little rose sometimes,” said Krishtof Bey, slanting his faun’s eyes at me.

And I made a discovery. I knew why my enunciation was giving me trouble, why my limbs were ataxic, my responses badly impaired. Like poor Sir Bartholomew, I had been forced to ingest foreign material. My tomato juice had been doctored with vodka. My tomato juice from Krishtof Bey.

I do not refuse alcohol because I cannot drink alcohol. I refuse it because it is a frivolity I cannot afford. While therefore I will not pretend that the look I cast the dancer was friendly, I rose to my feet at the end of that meal with perfect success to say good-bye to Johnson and Krishtof Bey, who were returning to the exhibition. I then accepted the Begum’s invitation to attend to routine comfort in her suite. Lady Edgecombe came with us.

Since routine comfort with Lady Edgecombe appeared to entail stripping off the entire supra-coating of creams from her hairline to her jawbone and replacing it with a similar one, the Begum and I were left alone in her sitting room a long time. Mr. Frost appeared on the television. She switched him off. “Well, Beltanno,” she said, sitting down in expensive folds of azure and silver. “So you don’t drink and you don’t smoke and you aren’t interested in people. No wonder the MacRannoch is behaving like a mad broker in a sweat-box stock exchange. Why won’t you let him spend his money on you? Pride?”

I put my bag neatly between my feet and sat back. “For reasons that seem good and sufficient,” I said.

“And isn’t it normal in extreme cases to take a second opinion?” the Begum said.

“It is,” I said. “But only from qualified persons.”

She smiled. I had expected her to get up and leave me. But instead she murmured, “But James Ulric has asked me to marry him. Didn’t you know? Repeatedly.”

That was all I needed. A bloody mother as well. I beg your pardon. The vodka. I said, “And you’ve refused him?”

“I have refused to consider it,” said the Begum, “until I met you first.”

I sat and stared at her. Because the implications of that struck me for the very first time. My father could have no further children. The Begum, in any case, was well past the reproductive years and had no children from her previous marriage. And that meant that the combined fortunes of the Begum and my father would descend eventually to me.

No wonder she wanted to meet me. To influence me. To present me. To marry me off to some effing man. I beg your pardon.

I said, “It may help you to make up your mind if I say I have no intention of marrying.”

“I know,” said the Begum thoughtfully. “You’re scared of not being top dog.”

“I am unwilling,” I said calmly, “to spend the rest of my life tied to inferior company.”

“Does it follow?” said the Begum reflectively. “I wouldn’t say that the company of poor dear James is all that superior. And what about Johnson?”

One of the anterolateral muscles of my abdomen, whose name I could not quite place at the moment, produced a soft thud. I said, “I am talking of viable probabilities.”

“I’m talking of liking people,” said the Begum. “Ah, here is Lady Edgecombe. How charming. Beltanno, all this elegance must not be wasted. Come. Get ready quickly, and leave that ridiculous bag on the floor. Lady Edgecombe and I are going to show you Miami.”

The first language in Miami is of course Spanish: the shop girls discuss you in it, the cinemas advertise their program
Hoy
and the drugstores sell
perros calientes
as well as the jumbo dog sauerkrauts of everyday life. The admonitions on the freeway from the airport are however wholly American:
keep off the median. walk. don’t walk. have a nice day
.

To be wished a nice day by a bored distributive trades employee is an American compulsion which never fails to incense me, as do the personal good wishes of junior disc jockeys relayed over the radio at home. The ultimate end of mankind is not necessarily to have itself a good day. I was not having a good day.

I was being dragged by the Begum Akbar and Lady Edgecombe through the nerve center of the Sunshine State. The impossibility of guessing from one moment to the next what would catch the Begum’s fancy both heightened my blood pressure and confused my recollection of the hours which were to follow.

The infinity of possible entertainment was frightening. So were the placards:
roller games, florida jets versus new york bombers. the boom boom room. sammy davis, junior. mini adult show for the liberal minded. georgie porgie and the cry babies. deauville, hotel of the stars. miami international boat show, sunday through wed
. (Was that where Johnson had gone?)
adult village of garden apartments
. (What adults, for goodness sake?)

I remember big shopping blocks like New York. I remember a freeway built over the sea, with pelicans flying like dirty washing in the blue sky, and expensive houses set among palm trees. I remember endless shops selling thin fancy clothing set among The House of Pancakes and Big Daddy’s and Lum’s Famous Lumburgers, and small packed hotels with sweating guests sitting out in the porch. I remember avenues of hotels and apartments which were the living prototype of every agency illustration from London to Australia: soaring foreshortened up to the sky behind their floodlit strip of bushes and palms, their banded balconies, their ribbed walls, their double-lit pierced concrete façades, their rows of twenty-foot bronze male caryatids, their buttressed porches underlit by a hundred cut lamps, with the Chevrolets, the Cadillacs, the Chryslers, the bronze soft-top Buicks nosing like ants up the drive to the steps, and groups of people in evening dress being handed in. The apartments had names: Ivanhoe, Kenilworth. The Starlight Room floated by: a galaxy pinned by a roof to the top of a skyscraper building. On the left, gleams of water with white motor cruisers lined up.

Then as the night darkened and we drove north through the red and green and blue neon lighting, Hollywood Art School design took the tourist trade over. The buildings on either side were lower and had dramatic legends and labels:
Vagabonds. Hawaii. Sahara
, with two groups of life-sized figures with camels. Floodlit fountains and jets. A stagecoach with six horses. A series of thatched buildings with green-lit jungly pools and cascades.
Two swimming pools. Air-conditioned
. French motifs. Old English motifs.
Burlesk
. More
burlesk
. Darkness.

“Beltanno?” the Begum said at one point. “Have you fallen into a stupor?”

I forget what I said.

They took me to a nightclub. Johnson joined us there. I stared at him in his suede tie with the threads still hanging out where he had cut off the nude, and he grinned and said: “Krishtof Bey has gone to bed with a hot water bottle. I think.” And ordered us supper.

We didn’t talk during supper. You can’t, through two electric guitars, drums, three trumpets, and one saxophone. We were blighted with polyhedral whirling chromium balls and more ultraviolet. The nudes were dressed as sixteen Jean Harlows; in the next scene they rode motor bikes in crash helmets and boots. One of them had quite the most beautiful abdominal scar I think I have seen. I had a tomato juice. “What have you done to her?” said Johnson to the Begum.

The Begum looked at me and smiled. I paid no attention. “Given her a little concentrated experience,” she said. “I think she is tired.”

“All right. But I insist on one more thing,” said Johnson. “Beltanno, how would you like to make yourself some money?”

My view of him was not very clear, but I got the words out all right: “What do you mean?”

“Dog racing,” said Johnson.

I think I protested. I am not in principle against gambling; I simply cannot afford it. But my protests seemed to be overridden. It was in any case hard to keep track of what they were all saying in the crosslunge of American voices.
It’s going to be lousy. So we should go somewhere else
? …
This real dumb blonde… Right? Righty
…
So I wouldn’t even go there no more
…
Like I used to like candy… I tell you, I’m going to lose control of myself
.

That rang a bell. I thought hazily: damn it… More vodka in the tomato juice? But Krishtof Bey wasn’t with us.
I like a tight little ass
, someone said.
She’s got an ass like a tight little brick
.

“Come on, Beltanno,” said Johnson.

The Hollywood dog track is a large, brightly lit family stadium between West Palm Beach and Miami. It is clean, cheerful, and well serviced, and full of merry neighborhood groups in fresh dresses and sweaters drinking cola and buying chili dogs, as a change from
perros calientes
, at the well-stocked snack stalls. Johnson got us seats in the upper tier, which looks down on the round floodlit track with a tidy green plot in the center, and got us some programs.

Lady Edgecombe disappeared to restore the natural bloom on her face. The Begum also retired, but returned with her bag full of betting slips. She and Johnson had a discussion. I focused on the program, which contained a great deal of valuable information such as win:
Your dog must finish first;
and less obvious things such as quiniela:
Your dog must finish first and second
.

I said aloud, “I haven’t a dog.”

Johnson put an arm behind my shoulder blades and said, “Beltanno, you are my utterly favorite suppressed doctor, but we mustn’t overdo things. Choose a dog and let me place a bet for you, and then Thelma will take you down and give you some air.”

I felt the Begum look at me critically. “She seems perfectly happy,” she said.

“Yes, but I’m not,” said Johnson. “In fact, we are due a little talk, you and I, in a moment. Beltanno, choose a dog.”

I focused. “Pally Loo-loo?” I said. It was the first dog on the list, and I was simply trying to discover if it was true, but Johnson took me up. “Pally Loo-loo it shall be. It doesn’t need to be much. Ten dollars?”

I frowned. Ten dollars is ten dollars. On the other hand, I had two free meals to take into account. I hauled my handbag up and got out two five-dollar bills. “Right,” said Johnson. “Thelma, you are a dangerous Begum.”

“Not at all,” said the Begum serenely. “I shall take her downstairs.”

Which was how we came to be near the turnstile when the Negro rushed in from the parking lot, calling for help.

He wanted a doctor. My head had cleared enough by then to register that. I felt the Begum’s hand on my arm, but I couldn’t have stopped. It is a conditioned reflex, and nothing whatever, I believe, to do with one’s personal ethos. One hears a call for medical aid and one runs.

So I called back and raced out of the dog track entrance after the Negro. He ran ahead through the parked cars, gesticulating and shouting hoarsely over his shoulder. Someone had been run over, I gathered. I hoped the Begum would have the sense to summon an ambulance. I regretted, for the first time, that I had left my medical bag at the Columbus.