Rum Affair: Dolly and the Singing Bird; The Photogenic Soprano

by Dorothy Dunnett

  I moved on from one to the other without regret, and bent all my mind only to making myself acceptable and useful as quickly as possible. I worked hard, and I smiled all the time. And while I was smiling, I decided that one day I was going to be rich, and famous, and sought after. I would imagine, while writing my weekly letters to all my foster mothers and to the lady superintendents of the homes, how I would gradually break the news. I was a constant letter writer in those days.

  Not all of this I told Johnson, but enough. He made few comments, but neither did he express surprise or pity, or even admiration. He was, after all, wealthy and spoiled. Perhaps because of this, I went on to tell him of the later years, when I was put out to service in my northern village; and when, taken into the shooting lodge that season, I met Chase Ruddyman and his friends, over from Hollywood. He was due to make a big film in London when the shooting was over; and he took me back with him, to help staff his leased house. I was a very hard and a good worker; and this was what I had worked for. Also, I sang as I worked.

  The rest is very well known. I was cheerful, I was hardworking, I had no self-pity. I made Chase laugh with my mixture of shrewdness and naivety, and in time he discovered my voice. Chase and I have never been lovers. I was too remote from his world for that; and besides his taste never ran to women – all the world knows that. All the world knows too of the household he kept; actors and adventurers and artists, all the café society of the interpretative arts. He was the first man I had ever known to be careless with his wealth. All he got, he spent – on luxury, on sensation. His presents were kingly; but next week, after playing all night at a gambling club, he might be a pauper, and his secretary would be on the phone to Madrid, feverishly fixing up a new contract, a new film. Or, unexpectedly, a new backer would be charmed into the circle, and his tailors and his wine merchant would breathe again.

  It was he who sent me to the Vienna conservatoire for my initial studies; and then, when the money ran out, it was my teacher in Austria who passed me, on his own account, on to Vittioni in Milan. I repaid my debt in work – and sometimes by selling a sudden, fabulous present from Chase Ruddyman. I wrote all the time to Chase, and his secretary wrote back sometimes. He would have honoured his obligations to me, I know, if he had not been killed in that plane crash. Planes have been fateful for me. But in this world you can get anything you want, if you are ready to work for it. I have no time for the idle.

  I was launched from Milan, through an introduction to Giulini by the Conte and Contessa, who paid for my last year of training. They are still my very good friends.

  “The prettiest coloratura soprano in the world,” said Johnson, setting down his glass. It was hot. We were tied up beneath the willows in a stretch of water so quiet that one could hear the bees humming in the meadowsweet. The towpath was deserted, and beyond there were only the flat bogs and mosses of Dalriada, and the blue sky. Lenny was below, passing up fresh salmon sandwiches, while Rupert did something among the ropes for’ard. Soon, we should be at the end of the canal, and the next day we should race.

  “And it was then that you met Michael Twiss,” added Johnson, tilting his hat over his bifocal glasses. The cockpit smelled of varnish and salmon and Chablis and turpentine and the oily reek of paints; and then there was a little lift of air in the heat, and it smelt of meadowsweet. I glanced forward, where Michael was lying, stripped to the waist, in Bermuda shorts of impeccable cut. I could see the top of his thick lacquered hair, and his ribcage, and his feet. Michael never put on weight, whatever he ate.

  Yes, it was then that Michael Twiss, ambitious and out of work, stranded by a cheap engineering company that went bankrupt behind his back, met the Conte and the Contessa, and smiled and worked hard for them too, and finally met me.

  I wasn’t interested. I have seen back in Scotland what happens when one meddles with men. Children happen, and a room and kitchen in Pollokshaws, and hard work where there is no point in smiling, for most people you meet are worse off than yourself.

  Then I realised that Michael wasn’t interested either. That I was not a girl, or a passing entertainment, but a pay cheque in prospect for the intense Mr Twiss.

  I had never known Michael’s origins, and I had never asked. He had been in his time many things, and had had many trades, but always his work had ended in disaster not of his making. Unlike me, he was embittered. He blamed not his intelligence but his birth, his accent, his lack of schooling, his lack of friends. But in fact he possessed many virtues: a quick brain, an ability to copy and to learn, and a capacity for work like my own. By the time he joined Milanese society he could pass for a gentleman, and when he left it he was a gentleman, and dressed and spoke like one. For he had made himself indispensable to my sponsors, and was fast becoming indispensable to me, too.

  For my debut was a sudden, overwhelming success. I touched on it lightly with Johnson, but when I speak of it, to myself, my throat is choked with the thought. At last it came, what I had worked for; and because of Ruddyman’s friends, and all the others I had met and cultivated since, other things came, far more quickly than I had a right to expect: recordings, concerts and, finally, films.

  For all this I needed a manager. For my money I needed an adviser. For my new career, I needed grooming. For my voice, I needed a coach.

  Michael became all these. It was Michael who, watching the Italian society we moved in, changed my hair to its present French roll; and then employed a hairdresser, whenever I appeared, to vary its style so that I photograph always differently. All my clothes were made finer: my shoes were made of thinner leather, my gloves were kid wisps; my underwear and dresses were of silk that made me more slender yet. And the pounds he forced me to lose!

  I was given a style: the jewellery I must wear: the hats I must eschew. And then, he set to work on my voice.

  He cannot have known that this talent lay within him, this understanding of music. He had always been fond of it, he said. He possessed, I know, at a time when he had few possessions, an ancient radiogram with bakelite records, which went everywhere with him then. To begin with, he heard me with Vittioni, listening to my faults being explained; and to Vittioni’s interpretation of the arias. Then, when he found me practising, Michael would act as Vittioni, correcting, reminding, forcing me to work on and on, improving until I was reproducing exactly what the master had said. He grew to know my voice better than I did myself; and then, as it came to light, to have a feeling for the music as great as my master’s. The day came when, having done all that could be done on my Mozart for the next study, Michael made me go on to tackle a recitative and aria I had never before sung. I learned afterwards that he had spent all the previous night poring over it in manuscript. In any case, the result was climacteric. Before Vittioni, next day, I sang Michael’s interpretation of Donna Elvira; and the master, silent for a long moment, suddenly rose and kissed me on both cheeks. Michael had made of me not a pupil, but a singer.

  He went everywhere with me after that. I paid his living expenses, and a tenth of what I earned he took, and probably much else of his own on private business besides. He was rich and wore only silk shirts, and referred to the owners of opera houses by their Christian names – but very occasionally he still dropped his aitches. He had women friends, I knew, but he was discreet about them. And nothing, ever, was allowed to come between him and his chosen vocation, which was Tina Rossi.

  But I said nothing of this at all to the bifocal glasses reflecting the bright cushions of Dolly. I merely said: “Yes. I’m very lucky to have Michael: he’s a genius for management. And he makes me work far too hard. But for Michael I should spend all my life lying on beautiful boats such as yours, being painted. Michael! Do you hear? You are a slave driver.”

  “Do I look like a slave driver?” said Michael lazily. But I knew that this evening at Crinan there would be a handful of telegrams waiting for him; and he would go ashore and make phone calls; and then out of that damned pigskin dispatch case would come the s
core of someone’s interminable opera, which I should then have to learn. I found I was frowning, and smoothed out my face. It was silly to be angry with Michael. Without him I should still be striving to do all these things. Without me, he would be nothing.

  Then, it seemed, almost at once, we were on the last sunny stretches, and the canal basin, where we were to spend the evening and night, lay there before us.

  Folded in greenery, with the blue sea beyond the lock gates and the green coastal hills and isles in the distance, the last stretch of the canal and the basin at Crinan itself was packed with yachts as with groceries. And not only yachts. Motor launches, small puffers, wartime conversions of ungainly size and unforgettable shape crowded the water, where also I could see the stout dark red belly of the Buchanans’ sloop Binkie, the shabby decking of Ogden’s string-tethered Seawolf, and the shining twin masts of Hennessy’s yawl, the suave Symphonetta.

  “Well, there it is, Tina,” Johnson was saying. He stood, pipe in mouth, conning her in, and waving cursorily from time to time as he was hailed from either side. “All the essence of a paranoic scout camp financed by a brewery. Port, Rupert. We’ll get in beside Cara Mia.”

  “My God, is she there?” said Rupert, craning to see over the coachroof as he eased the tiller. “Jane! Cindy!”

  Two reclining figures, one in a man’s shirt and the other in an arrangement of string fulfilling the minimum requirements of decency, rolled over on the decks of a big motor cruiser as we slid past, and waved. Victoria was there too, in her patched trousers and bare feet, with a screwdriver, half-sunk, in her hand. “And my God, Ogden will dig that,” said Rupert as he reversed and cut.

  “He doesn’t like the Cara Mia?” It was not hard to see why. Compared with this, Cecil Ogden’s Seawolf was a cereal packet, with a hole in the bottom instead of a gift.

  “Dotty subdebs aren’t much in Cecil’s line,” said Rupert. “The boat belongs to Moody the financier – that’s Tim Moody over there.”

  True enough, a young man came into view in very small boxer shorts and a peaked cap from the Aquatic Sports Club, Barbados. Two other boys and a fat girl in a catsuit made their appearance, and there was a general clinking and pouring. Daddy, clearly, was absent at work in the City. Music, of a sort, shuddered out from the decks.

  “Huddy Leadbetter’s new single,” said Rupert thoughtfully, effecting a final clove hitch. He avoided looking at Johnson.

  “Goodbye,” said Johnson lazily. “Give them my love, and don’t smoke anything I wouldn’t smoke.

  In five minutes, Rupert had gone.

  In five more minutes Michael too had gone, hell-bent for the hotel and the telephone, leaving a fallout of Trumper’s Eucris behind him. A succession of working parties began to move round from boat to boat, like bees preparing to swarm. The clinking of glasses, competing strains of tape, radio and record player, and loud bellows of laughter, live performance, were heard all over the basin. Some of the parties came aboard Dolly, and Lenny served drinks.

  Their jokes were all very long, and some of them were in dialect. They seemed to have had a very dangerous summer. Eventually, Johnson said something about fixing dinner at the hotel and clambered ashore, leaving me to change in my locked cabin, with Lenny as watchdog. Trouble seemed unlikely. But then, trouble always seems unlikely.

  I dressed in white cotton matelassé and uncut turquoises. I was very brown, from the South America tour, and my hair had bleached itself almost silver. After a little thought I let it down smoothly over my shoulders and brushed it with Givenchy’s Le Dé. I had just finished this when a voice said: “Hey, Missus!”

  I was no one’s Hey Missus now. I slipped on little kid slippers by Jourdain, and fastened my watch, that Byng gave me, in three colours of gold; by which time I had had three Hey Missuses more. Then heavy feet sounded on the deck over my cabin, there was a thud as someone jumped into the cockpit, and the same rough voice: “Are ye there, Mistress Rossi? I’ve word from Dr Kenneth at Rum!”

  And at the same moment Lenny’s voice, damn him, said near at hand: “Now wait a bit. Let’s hear who you might be first . . . oh, it’s you, Tom.”

  And the first voice, softening, said: “Aye, man. Tom McIver. I’ve a wee note for the lady. She’ll be in?”

  I ran to open the door.

  He was from the puffer. He had a Breton beret and a three-day beard, and he stank of kippers and coal dust. But he had a message from Kenneth. I looked Lenny straight in the eye, and Lenny grinned and said: “Tom McIver’s all right, ma’am. You’ll excuse me. I’m cleaning the cooker.” And he disappeared, tactfully, across the saloon and into the galley.

  I asked McIver in, and said: “He’s here? Dr Holmes is in Crinan?”

  Mercury cleared his throat. Under the bristle his big face was scarlet. “Na, na. He’s no on Rum either. You’ve maybe no heard of the Lysander’s accident?”

  “Of course I’ve heard.” If I was short, it was because I was cold with alarm. If he wasn’t on Rum, where the hell had he gone? Or did the idiot mean he was dead?

  “Aye. Well.” The stupid man shifted from one great foot to the other. “He’s been moved from Rum to South Rona, Dr Kenneth, while they look into that business. The submarine was on trial off South Rona, ye’ll ken.”

  Where the hell was South Rona? My face must have betrayed my exasperation and dismay, for the man added quickly: “It’s not far away: it’s a wee island next to Raasay, ye ken.” And as my face remained blank: “Just over from Portree, Skye. There’s nothing on it but a few wee huts where the sub. crew and the scientists stay. Well, he’s there now; and he canna get to Rum, and I was to seek you out, mistress, and gie ye this.”

  I snatched it. It was an old OHMS envelope, sealed over with sticky tape, with a scrap of paper inside. On that were a few words only in Kenneth’s big, personal writing. “Don’t come now. Don’t come ever – it isn’t safe. Goodbye. I love you.” There was no signature and no need of one. It was Kenneth, I knew.

  I looked at it for a long time, and I smiled as I looked. Oh, he was still afraid for me, still protecting me. He was giving me the chance to retreat. But he must know perfectly well that he had also now given me an address where I could reach him in privacy far more easily than before. For South Rona was only a short sail from Portree. And in three days’ time, I should be in Portree on the Dolly, on the race’s last call before Rum.

  I touched my friend’s kippery arm and said: “Thank you for bringing this. I know you won’t speak of it to anyone else . . . Did you see Dr Kenneth when he gave you this? Is he well?”

  My friend had removed his beret, at last. He cleared his throat. “Oh, well enough. Aye. They’re all a bit pressed, ye ken, since the accident.” He paused, and then said: “Would there be a reply?”

  I hadn’t dreamed a reply would be possible. Now I realised that this puffer was probably taking regular supplies to South Rona for both lighthouse and base. With the mellow evening sunlight all about me, and the convivial sounds from the concourse, the lap of water and the distant Niagara of the locks, the cry of gulls and the sundown song of the land birds, with all the saltwater togetherness going on all around me, I thought of a dead man swinging slowly in a cupboard in Rose Street and said: “Yes, there’s a reply. Tell Dr Kenneth . . . tell him that there has been a death in the family, and might be another. Tell him . . . particularly to take care of himself. Say it exactly like that. And tell him that on Saturday I am coming to Portree on Dolly, and that he must not fail to meet me privately there.”

  There was a pause. I could not tell whether Mercury was shocked or approving, or whether he had even absorbed what I had told him. I dared not put it in writing. The high-coloured, unshaven face showed no reaction. After a moment though, McIver said: “He mightna manage to cross. There’s a fair stramash on the now, with the submarine boys, ye understand.”

  “Then I’ll come to South Rona,” I said.

  There was another pause. “Ah,” he said. “But the boa
t you’re on isna going to South Rona, though. The race only calls at Portree.”

  “I know. But other boats must make the crossing sometimes from Portree to his island; your own, say?”

  It was a risk. I wanted no publicity. Tina Rossi in this land of porridge and peasants being smuggled from one place to the next in a puffer – that would be a manquet for Oggi. Already, as I waited for the slow-witted creature to answer, approaching footsteps resounded on the quayside.

  I drummed my fingers. Rupert or Lenny I did not mind. But I had no desire to be found by Michael in conference with this man.

  It was too late. The seaman had actually drawn breath to answer when the footsteps halted on the quay above Dolly and a loud, commanding, and familiar voice demanded: “And who the hell may you be, bothering Madame Rossi? Get off this boat before I get the owner to put you in charge!”

  I smiled. “Mr Hennessy, can’t I have an admirer in the shipping lanes? This gentleman simply wanted to shake my hand because he has all my records. Don’t be angry with him, or you’ll leave me with no public to sing to!”

  My friend from the puffer, who probably could not tell the difference between Beatrice di Tenda and the Fairy Queen from Iolanthe, looked surprised, but said nothing except: “Well, I’ll have to be getting back.”

  “I beg your pardon,” began Stanley Hennessy, a little less heated, but I was already suggesting kindly to the pufferman that he should call for a beer when Johnson returned. Anything, anything to hear more about Kenneth.

  “I’m sorry.” The fellow stared stolidly back. “I’ll have to go, mistress. We’re due out on this tide: we’re in the sea lock as it is, and the boys are waiting.” He must, God save us, be the skipper. Hennessy looked as if he were bolted to the deck: clearly he would not leave while McIver was there. It was hopeless.

  “Well, goodbye, Mr . . .”