The Tropical Issue: Dolly and the Bird of Paradise

by Dorothy Dunnett

  Then he looked at me and flashed his perfect, spaced teeth.

  ‘You spinning some tale that Old Joe was your father?’ he said. ‘Boy, the lawyers’ll have some fun with that. Pity the old man isn’t here to take you to pieces himself.’

  He received, full front, the Owner bifocals.

  ‘The famous old man?’ Johnson said. ‘Whose reputation you found so handy? Or the crazy old coot you weren’t going to risk your skin for? Whichever it was, I’d like to see his lawyers try. They’ll get a shock.

  ‘Rita is Joe’s legitimate daughter. Her parents were your grandparents. Your mother Sharon was her full sister. Your uncle Clive is her brother. So was your other uncle Kim-Jim, who died on Madeira.’

  Natalie looked surprised. Natalie said, ‘I always rather thought Kim-Jim was her father.’

  Sitting there, wearing Amy’s terrible dress, she still looked alert, and sociable, and intelligent. But when the coldness in Johnson’s face didn’t alter, moving from Porter to her, I saw her eyes narrow and open again.

  ‘If you did, I must say you concealed it very cleverly when Kim-Jim was found dead,’ Johnson said. ‘He was her full brother. As I’m sure you noticed, they were both dyslectic. And their colouring was the same. Rita, may I?’

  He was indicating my filthy Bird of Paradise hair.

  I had nothing to lose, the way I was looking. I took my wig off myself. Underneath, my cropped hair was still white at the ends. At the roots, the natural red had begun to grow in.

  I have the skin to go with it. I always try to wear hats and cover myself up in sunshine, or else I blister.

  Blister. My God.

  Johnson went on telling them about the Curtises and I let him, because he was really telling me. Standing outside all the emotion and telling the straight facts, as they were, to let me see them.

  Since this evening, I knew that he knew. Since Sharon made her mistake, and he saw me recognise her, and asked me, in four words, for permission to shoot.

  He said, ‘What’s the age difference, Rita? More than twenty years between you and Kim-Jim? Less between you and Sharon, who was born at the very end of the Second World War.

  ‘Robina must have been in her mid-thirties then, and everyone thought, including herself, that she had completed her family with these three children: Clive, and Kim-Jim, and Sharon.’

  ‘Colin, and Kenneth James, and Robina. Sharon was called Robina, after my mother,’ I said. ‘They all changed their names in Hollywood.’

  ‘After your father made himself a great name in the new movie industry,’ Johnson said. ‘After the money began to come in, and the keeping up with the M.G.M.s, and the pretty ruthless ambition. You didn’t think much of your grandfather, Porter. But all that vulgar display was just a show of pride, because he’d risen from nothing.’

  ‘Barnum and Bailey,’ said Porter. He walked across to the brandy bottle, lifted it, and emptied it into a glass for himself. His hand was shaking. ‘Happens in the best families,’ he said. ‘What sort of bums did you have for parents? House painters?’

  ‘Don’t be childish,’ said Natalie. ‘Amy, is that all the brandy you keep in the house? I think we have all had a trying time. Although, of course, this is fascinating.’

  Amy looked at her. ‘Glad you think so,’ she said. ‘Always try to put on an effing cabaret. When this is over, you can have some tea, if you want it. Meantime, I think you should effing shut up.’

  Down, Fido. Back to the kennels.

  Natalie’s expression was one of controlled patience, but her foot tapped. Johnson, rearranging his position, didn’t pay any attention to either of them.

  I held out my brandy glass until he noticed, and looked at me, and then borrowed it, saluting me mildly.

  I had seen him do that once before, when Ferdy had made a joke I hadn’t followed. It was different now, since I’d begun travelling. I took the glass back. He had left quite a lot. I said, ‘Next chapter?’

  ‘Next chapter,’ Johnson agreed. He still looked rather rotten. He went on.

  ‘The trouble was, that Joseph’s family had grown up accustomed to plenty, so that when the old man’s work slackened off, and there was more competition, and their tastes needed more and more money, they began to cast around for other ways of making the fast buck or bucks.

  ‘Hence dope. Hence a number of other dubious things. Their mother, Robina, saw the way things were going and tried to stop it in the early stages, but couldn’t. Her husband simply didn’t care. He had lost all interest in his family. He wanted to be accepted as the big man, and recognised. He expected his children to make a splash, impress people, throw money about, get their names in the papers.

  ‘Robina couldn’t do anything about it. She hated the life. She left, and came back to Scotland, and divorced Joe, and married someone else, a schoolmaster called Gordon Geddes.

  ‘Two of the three children she left behind in America were fully grown-up. The third, now called Sharon, was seven or eight.

  ‘Sharon never forgave her mother for leaving her. Old Joseph never forgave her for wrecking the great public image. He never wrote to her again. He never saw her again. So when Robina arrived in Scotland and found that, in her early forties, she was pregnant again, she didn’t send to tell Joe that they were to have a fourth child.

  ‘Rita was born in Scotland, and Gordon Geddes, her step-father, became known as her father. When she was old enough, her mother told her the truth, so that she could decide for herself whether to make herself known to the rest of the family.

  ‘Rita’s reaction was to take her mother’s part. Her step-father was, I think, a good man, though strict; and of course he couldn’t understand Rita’s word-blindness. Nor could the schools of that time. Until recently, it simply wasn’t recognised. He just thought her stupid, which she most emphatically is not.

  ‘So, academic training being out of her reach, she turned to the thing that was in her blood. Show business, or the branch of it that the family did best of all. She became what she is, a superb make-up artist.

  ‘Her step-father hated it. It’s a pity, perhaps, that he died before she got to where she is now, on the verge of making it to the very top. She would have got there long before now except that she had given herself an embargo. She would never move out of Britain. She would never go where she might meet and compete with the Curtises.’

  ‘It’s quite a case history,’ Natalie said. She was listening with real attention. I could see the syndicated articles fattening up inside her clever mind.

  She considered further. ‘So Rita stayed in Britain until she went to work on a joint-production film, and came across Kim-Jim, her brother. Of course. And was Kim-Jim in the drugs business?’

  So clever. So stupid.

  Johnson said, ‘Don’t you really know what he was like, after all these years? Rita knew who he was. After hearing her mother, she probably expected a monster. After the kind of beastly childhood she’d had, she didn’t trust people much anyway. All that, Kim-Jim overcame simply by being a genuine, decent, rather simple man, who had the same disability she had.

  ‘You knew what it was, although his family didn’t. He was dyslectic. It runs in families.’

  ‘My mother, too,’ I said.

  All the T.V. sets. All the video tapes. We were experts on old films, in my family.

  ‘So that was the first bond,’ Johnson said. ‘But you liked each other from the start. You kept in touch. You couldn’t write to each other, but you exchanged tapes. And then, when he knew he was ill, and not going to get better, Kim-Jim wrote and told you that he was thinking of retiring, and suggested that he should arrange for you and Natalie to meet, and work together.’

  ‘Bloody traitor,’ said Porter. ‘There’s a car.’

  I didn’t want to know about cars.

  There had been movement outside since we came in, as the police worked in the storeroom and yard. I thought of them unloading, laboriously, all those bags of cocaine. I had trie
d not to think of the stretchers coming out of the jeep, and my sister Sharon being carried away, and Roger van Diemen.

  Clive was the only one left untouched, somewhere in a prison in Castries. Like the survivor of the Martinique earthquake. About to hit the news, a freak for the rest of his life.

  Clive, and me, and Porter. A great monument to Old Joe.

  Johnson flicked my hand. ‘Let it be,’ he said. ‘Look who’s come, and look what they’ve brought.’

  And when I turned my head towards the bustle at the door, I saw it was Maggie, laden with bottles, her Vidal haircut stuck to her skull with fright and salt, and her eyes beaming.

  And Ferdy behind her, his arm in a sling, and flapping a large square of cardboard. A large square which, reversed, turned out to be a ravishing photograph, in colour, of a small fat bird with this great fancy tail.

  ‘Bird of Paradise, darling!’ he said. ‘Forgot to give it to you. My God, nearly never got the chance. Dear Jesus, what the hell have you done to your hair?’

  Ferdy was back.

  And after that, it was great, because Amy went and got all the food she and I had made while the others were resting, and Raymond opened all the new bottles and told the story all over again, and Porter, because he was forgotten, managed to give his temper a rest, and settled down to drinking himself steadily senseless.

  Natalie got her drink first. She had quite a good story to tell, of how she had been stripped of her dress and left outside in the darkness, so that Clive and Sharon could create themselves the perfect non-existent hostage.

  She hadn’t seen who they were. Remembering Dodo and the ham radio, she had got herself taken directly to Amy’s.

  She didn’t thank Ferdy for the drink, which wasn’t surprising considering the explosion when he’d left her because of me.

  From the moment he and Maggie had come in, Natalie had been restless.

  She sent Dodo outside to ask the police if they had a transmitter. She enquired of Amy when the telephones usually came back into service and badgered her several times into sending messages on the ham radio. She tried, and failed, to persuade the emergency centre to put her in touch with New York via the Miami Hurricane Centre.

  Hurricane centres having, naturally, other things on their minds, she continued to get the brush-off, to her annoyance.

  It was, of all people, Dodo who at this point stared Johnson in the bifocals and said, ‘You were going to tell us. How the girl and Mr Curtis moved in on Miz Natalie.’

  Then Ferdy said, ‘What?’ and all eight of them, from their various positions of sloth, looked at Johnson, who had stayed rather rooted in the chair next to me, while I still reclined on my couch like Not Tonight Josephine.

  Without whom none of us would have been there.

  Jinx Josie. Compared with us, Napoleon was laughing.

  ‘Are you sitting comfortably?’ said Johnson. ‘O.K. The rest of the tale about Rita.’

  Public school people are great exclaimers. From the moment Johnson fed them the compressed story of the Curtis family and my mother, Ferdy and Maggie formed a most satisfactory audience of two, alternately whistling or yodelling and sometimes saying the same thing together.

  Maggie said, ‘It’s the sensation. So Kim-Jim asks Ferdy to use Rita for this commission he’s got to photograph Natalie. And as a result, Natalie offers Rita a temporary job, and then makes it permanent. And all the time poor Kim-Jim knows he’s going to pop, and that Rita will be left with a nice job, and lots of contacts and no more hang-ups about going abroad. You should see my bloody brother.’

  Amy got up from picking bits of meat off the carpet round the dog bowls. She said, ‘But you hadn’t told him, I thought, who you were?’

  I hadn’t told him who I was. He didn’t know who I was, I would swear it, all the time we were working together, and later, when we exchanged all the tapes. All the tapes about work.

  And then, I had begun to wonder. And after the legacy, of course, I was sure.

  I said, ‘He found out, I think. He never said. The thing is, he was quite keen on families, although he’d cut himself off from his own. He’d sort of placed me where I could meet the other Curtises if I wanted, and make up my own mind. He never talked about them.’

  Ferdy said, ‘He was a gentleman, Kenneth James. Never gossiped about anyone. Natalie thought he was your father: bloody rubbish. Brought him back from Lisbon to cope with you when she thought some funny stuff was going on. I should think he would detest his family. Probably guessed what they were up to.’

  I said, ‘No. Or he would never have brought me over.’

  Natalie caught Dodo’s eye and sat up.

  She didn’t look sympathetic any more. She had got her story. And she owed Johnson quite a few digs.

  ‘Well,’ she said. ‘It is, I must admit, a new experience. To discover oneself the gullible centre of a neat family conspiracy to arrange soft living and a fair amount in wages – what did I pay you the other day, Rita? A thousand pounds? – between brother and sister.’

  She surveyed us all coolly, ending with Johnson.

  ‘Not to mention between sister and Ferdy. How much of the thousand pounds went into that rather tight pocket, I wonder? How lucky that the Josephine film is not to have the benefit of your joint attention.’

  Ferdy stood up. He said, ‘Natalie, old lady, it sounds like sour grapes. Rita’s done great things today. You don’t want to appear in the gossip columns as the world’s most beautiful bitch. You keep quiet, and we won’t tell on you.’

  Natalie lay back and looked at him. ‘Oh dear,’ she said. ‘Of course. She’s an heiress now. Having benefitted hugely from her brother’s death, and now, one supposes, from her father’s. Doesn’t Maggie object?’

  They stared at one another. My head throbbed and buzzed. I wished I were somewhere else. In Glasgow. In Troon. With Napoleon.

  I shut my eyes.

  Johnson’s voice said, ‘Are we stranded, Amy? Or can we get transport back to Hurricane Hole?’

  The dog at Amy’s feet stirred, and she rubbed its ears.

  ‘We’re stranded,’ she said. ‘The police won’t let anyone leave.’

  ‘Pity,’ said Johnson. ‘You mentioned a cabaret?’

  ‘I did,’ said Amy drily. ‘Can’t tell you how to stop a fight, though. Unless you want to watch some video. There’s a set.’

  ‘I suppose,’ said Natalie, ‘there inevitably is. But need we see it?’

  I opened my eyes.

  ‘Vote from Rita,’ said Johnson. ‘And considering everything, a casting vote. Suppose we all stop talking and let her relax. Amy, what have you got?’

  What she had, we discovered, was four cassettes of the Ty-phoo Chimps, one of the Guinness Toucan, and a very old film of Tom Mix.

  It was a very small T.V. set, and it took some time to connect it. Eventually, Tom Mix flickered on to the screen.

  Porter was already asleep. Dodo followed. In turn, Ferdy, Raymond and Maggie slumped in their seats.

  Natalie’s anger and frustration kept her awake longer. Then slowly, the self-applied eyelashes dropped and her nicely drawn mouth fell slightly open.

  Johnson’s glasses remained vertical, though his face was much the same yellow-grey as the caldera. He said, ‘Amy?’

  She jumped. ‘Christ!’ she said. ‘The effing bird’ll be missing it.’

  She got up, groggily, and went out.

  The room wheezed with heavy breathing, and the sound of the wind outside the shutters. Johnson said, ‘Are you all right?’

  I had been watching Tom Mix, with concrete on my eyelids, but I looked at him, and stayed looking. I said, ‘I’m all right. What about you?’

  ‘Nearly finished,’ he said. ‘Trust me if you can.’

  He paused, and said, ‘Amy and I exchanged a few coarse words a while ago. She overruled me about letting you go after your father. I gather she classes you roughly somewhere between a chimpanzee and a jaguar. Thought you’d like to know.’r />
  ‘I knew,’ I said. I knew they had been anxious about me. I knew they had hoped to lead Old Joe out without risking lives. I said, ‘It’s O.K.’

  ‘It’s not, very,’ said Johnson. ‘Especially as I have something else to ask. Will you do something for me?’

  I could hardly hear him. I meant to say, ‘What?’

  I said, ‘Yes.’

  ‘Will you remember, then,’ said Johnson, ‘that there is no such person as Roger van Diemen?’

  I only had time for a nod. Then Amy came back, and he turned to her.

  On her shoulder was a green St Lucia parrot, with a bright eye in a brilliant blue head.

  It was nearly midnight. After a long and terrible day, the lines on her sunken face were like the graining on teak, and her cropped white hair was limp.

  The parrot, hyped by the light and the company, was bright-eyed as a drunk, and as talkative.

  Travelling across to its stand, where Amy chained it, the raucous Californian voice drowned out Tom Mix.

  ‘Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight! You get that damned dialogue wrong once more and you can take your ass right over to Disney,’ the parrot said.

  Natalie opened her eyes.

  ‘Mr Christian!’ said the parrot. ‘Effing bread-fruit for breakfast again!’

  Raymond, Dodo and Maggie opened their eyes.

  ‘Bugger the bitch>!’ said the parrot slily, in Ferdy’s voice.

  ‘Cohn!’ I said.

  Ferdy opened his eyes. He sat up. He said, ‘My darling Toucan. You’ve never traded the Ziegfeld Parrot of 1933 for hard bleeding cash. Is it Cohn?’

  ‘Mind your own effing business,’ said Amy placidly. ‘What Rita chooses to do with her legacy is her own effing affair. Lay golden eggs, do these birds.’

  Ferdy’s eyes gleamed. ‘It’s too old, darling,’ he said. ‘Check it out, do, or you’ll give the poor thing a stroke. I’ll bet you it rewinds all the way back to The Jazz Singer. To Edison. To Bell.’

  I was tired, and I was fed up, and I didn’t want to think about Cohn. I said, ‘Do you mind? I’m trying to watch the film.’

  ‘Sweetheart,’ said Ferdy, ‘it’s your day. It’s your party. I am now shutting up.’