The Tropical Issue

by Dorothy Dunnett

  Through from that, a passage led you past a single room on one side, and a bright fitted kitchen on the other.

  Galley, Johnson says.

  At the end of the passage was the neat, two-bedded room that I’d been in before, when Lenny pounced on me. And in front of that, reached by a hatch, a small room for a hand or someone to sleep in.

  If you used that, and two hammocks, ten people could sleep on Dolly, five of them in beds. Bunks.

  Bunks with merino blankets and perchance sheets and tailored covers that matched the fringed curtains. And wash in washrooms that had American towels and handmade soap, and mirrors, and boxes of tissues and cupboards full of suntan lotion and toothpaste and shampoo and sting cream and elastoplast. And Tampax. Man of the world, Johnson was.

  Man of the world, and stacked, with a yacht valued in hundreds of thousands.

  A stacked heel.

  And since galleries don’t pay this kind of money, or Government departments, Dolly must be financed, as I was, from vanity. From what people would pay to look better. In my case, to look well in photographs. In Johnson’s case, to look well for ever, stuck on somebody’s wall.

  The work of Mormon, as my aunt would enjoy saying.

  How she would be impressed by Johnson. Two heels, but only one of them stacked. Financially, anyway.

  Sailing is different from being in a motorboat. Natalie knew all about it. She knew when to duck when Johnson remarked, ‘Ready about,’ and this bloody great pole began swinging over.

  The boom, Johnson says.

  She knew how to lower the morning papers and lift her elegant legs out of the way when Raymond or Maggie made a dive for the thing that twirls the ropes round and tightens them.

  The winch. The sheets. To hell with Johnson.

  And when Lenny came up from below with chilled Buck’s Fizz and coffee and flaky buns, and then took over from Raymond and Maggie – she knew how to pump Johnson about Dolly, in a way so idle you’d hardly notice it.

  She supposed, said Natalie, that they’d find they had quite a lot of friends in common, in Antigua and the B.V.I. and so on. Dolly must know every inch of these waters.

  The British Virgin Islands, the millionaires’ playground. I’d made up quite a few golden ladies who went there. If Johnson was one of the golden layabouts who played with them, he wasn’t admitting it.

  No, he remarked. He’d had the yacht quite a long time but only used her occasionally.

  Natalie was surprised. You could sail the world, she imagined, with that amount of electronic equipment. But perhaps he was keen on gadgets?

  I knew what she meant. There were Sci-Fi dials all over the cockpit and behind some of the cupboards below decks. Seventy thousand pounds’ worth, according to Raymond.

  Johnson had his eye on the sails. ‘I used to need them for racing,’ he said. ‘Very scientific, these days.’

  It wasn’t often Natalie made a blunder. She had sense enough not to add to it. It was Raymond, collecting plates, who said crossly, ‘You’ll race again.’

  ‘Oh, I expect so,’ said Johnson, peering over the side deck. ‘And if not, I’ll use her for painting. Good as a wheelchair, a yacht. Raymond, get the binoculars for Mrs Sheridan. There’s Diamond Rock coming up, and I’d like her to see it.’

  He knew the coast. We all watched, shading our eyes, while Johnson produced jolly snippets and instructive snippets about what we were passing, and Natalie gave him all her attention, while the blue sea sizzled beneath us, and the morning sun shone and shone from a cloudless blue sky.

  Then Martinique fell behind, and the currents began to kick a bit, and Natalie went below, to freshen up her suntan oil unaided, she said, and Maggie lay on the side deck with half her bikini off, and began again on the fast, sexy double-talk she had been throwing at Johnson ever since Ferdy dropped her on Madeira.

  I thought he’d freeze her, but he wasn’t interested enough. He gave her the kind of polite answers I’d heard him give in 17b, in his pyjamas, with a kick like a mule somewhere behind them.

  Then, although I didn’t see signals passing, Raymond suddenly appeared again with a chart, which he spread out beside Johnson. A moment later, Raymond was at the tiller and Johnson’s stateroom door was swinging gently behind him.

  Raymond said, ‘Do I have to call you Miss Geddes?’

  I had given up trying to wear the Bakoua straw, and had settled for a check napkin under a blue berry with a red pom-pom on it, which Johnson said he’d pinched off a coconut.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘O.K., Miss Geddes,’ said Raymond. ‘God gave people punk hair to cover something, I take it. In a minute I’m going about, in the hope that Maggie’s boobs will slide off under the rail, and Natalie and I will be alone together. Are you capable of following a few simple orders?’

  ‘Don’t answer that,’ said Maggie’s voice. ‘He wrote the Kama Sutra’s bloody appendix. He is the Kama Sutra’s . . .’

  ‘If you don’t mind being wrecked. More than usual, that is,’ I said.

  I’m not stupid. Even if I turned out to be stupid, all I could do was sink his bloody boat, and he’d deserve it.

  ‘O.K. Listen, Miss Geddes,’ said Raymond nastily.

  I had my left ring on my left hand and my right ring on my right hand. We went about, and we didn’t sink.

  Later, I tightened the mainsail.

  Later, I went forward and freed a sheet on the jib.

  Later, I climbed the mast, and swayed above the blue of the sea, and watched flying-fish sparking up, and dolphins roll, and below me, Dolly’s white coach-house roof and long, satiny deck, with the sun twinkling away on the brasswork, and on the tray of rum and pineapple fizzes coming up, carried by Lenny.

  I slid down and Natalie said, ‘How agile of you. You are making us all feel quite sick. Have a fizz, darling. If anyone deserves it, you do.’

  Johnson had long since reappeared. Across the cockpit, his bifocals glittered peacefully. He said, ‘God, guns and guts made Miss Geddes. Raymond, try her on jet-skis.’

  ‘Here?’ said Raymond. ‘She’d end up in Mexico.’

  ‘There,’ said Johnson. ‘St Lucia. Mr Christian, ladies and gentlemen, we are making landfall. Three cheers for the navigator. Third dial from the left.’

  It was St Lucia, straight ahead. Birthplace of Josephine. Green and lush and mountainous and romantic. A place I shall never forget so long as I live.

  With good reason.

  We had lunch at anchor in Marigot Bay, where they shot Doctor Doolittle.

  I could hardly believe I was there, in this deep blue lagoon in the hills, hidden among flowers and a forest of coconut palms, just like the photographs I’d seen, where they had all this pain with the snail.

  Kim-Jim had known the people who did the pink snail, and also the make-up for Rex Harrison. From Kim-Jim too, I knew that the Curtises had expected to look after Sophia Loren when she came here for Firepower, but the deal had misfired. It was the contract that Clive got after that, Kim-Jim said, that got him into really big money.

  Martinique is a department of France. St Lucia batted about under the French a lot as well, but after changing hands thirteen times, ended up as an independent state inside the British Commonwealth, which is fine if you can speak pidgin French, and are not having enough trouble with pidgin English.

  There were half a dozen other big yachts in the anchorage, and some small ones, and quite a lot of boats dodging about, and people swimming. A hotel on the other side of the inlet had a ferry service. There was another hotel hidden behind flowers on our side, where Natalie and I were to stay the night. Nothing but Bounty-grove greenery and white beaches were to be seen anywhere else, apart from the road-end jetty and Customs.

  Paradise.

  Johnson had already been on the radio-telephone to Castries, the capital of St Lucia, seven miles up the road, to arrange a welcome committee for Natalie, and transport to take her Josephine-hunting next day. Asked about his own plans,
he just said it depended on the Rotary Club, and he was going to give them a spin in the morning.

  Natalie, after a late night and a long morning of sunshine and sea air and two rum and pineapple fizzes, was happy to let someone else do it all. When Johnson mentioned that he had been on to the Deputy High Commissioner at Castries, and there was no word of Ferdy, she just looked resigned and said in that case she would take herself off Johnson’s hands and book into the hotel before she made any other plans. She was sure they could all do with a siesta.

  I suppose if anyone needed a siesta it was Johnson, but since neither of his nurse-companions was around and Maggie’s siestas aimed only at sleeping with people in the most energetic sense, he didn’t seem to be bothering.

  Indeed, while Natalie was gathering her things together and Raymond began lowering the boat to take us ashore, Johnson said to me, ‘Unless you really want a rest, why not come back and try the jet-skis once you’ve dumped your stuff? Unless Mrs Sheridan needs you?’

  Mrs Sheridan, it turned out, didn’t need me. She thanked Johnson warmly for the ride, arranged to have him and Maggie and Raymond to dinner at the hotel in the evening, and got athletically into the boat, followed by me and the luggage.

  Fifteen minutes later she was in her hotel room and I was back on the hotel jetty, with a towel and a Hurricane Hole T-shirt over my swimsuit, and screening cream everywhere else.

  Instead of Raymond, Johnson had brought back Dolly’s boat for me. And instead of bringing it back to the hotel, he was tying it up at the road-end, where blacks in coloured shorts were lounging on the verandah of the Customs hut.

  That landed me with a walk, and it was bloody hot, but he had the jet-skis. I set off, jogging, across the strip of grass between the two jetties.

  A Toyota jeep, screaming down the only road, just missed the hut and two palm trees and stopped in a shower of dust and white gravel as Johnson strolled up from the boat and I arrived, dripping and crusted with cream, from the shore.

  ‘Baked Alaska,’ said Johnson.

  A woman got out of the Toyota, carrying a box with a towel over it.

  She spoke to the blacks by the hut and they laughed. The Customs officer came out and laughed too. She had on long baggy shorts and thick socks and shoes and a stiff cotton blouse rolled up over her arms, which were dark brown and the kind that you connect with champion women golfers, vintage 1920.

  Her hair was short and strong and dead white, and her face was like Humphrey Bogart’s, with a long, weedy cigar sticking out of it.

  She marched up to Johnson and spoke to him.

  ‘You getting your effing dogs from someone else nowadays? How come your boyfriend’s so effing choosy?’

  ‘You know Amy Faflick?’ said Johnson.

  I was too amazed to answer.

  ‘Ever since she fixed that kangeroo’s nose for us. Nice worker, Rita,’ said Amy.

  The cigar waggled up and down. She took it out, spat, and put it back again between her big yellow teeth. She smiled at me. ‘Hullo there, girl. I hear great things about you from Celia.’

  God knew what age she was, but her voice was as English as on the day she married Lee in the States and started the business that ended by feeding every studio in the world with performing animals. I’d met Lee as well, but it was mostly Amy who dodged over to keep an eye on Jim and Celia and the English end of the business.

  I said, as if I didn’t know, ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘My God, what do you think: hatching effing parrots,’ said Amy. ‘You got that bird of poor Kim-Jim Curtis’s? Want to donate it for breeding?’

  ‘Don’t listen to her. That parrot’s worth fifteen thousand on the versicolour market,’ Johnson said. ‘Anyway, it’s Hollywood mad. It’d lay all those chicks on the casting couch. What brought the parrot numbers down here, Amy? The black market? The hurricane?’

  Amy’s cigar had gone out. She put her box on the ground and delved in her shorts pockets. Johnson held a cigarette lighter, already lit, in front of her. She bent forward, used it, and puffed.

  ‘Always were too damn quick for comfort,’ she said. ‘Yup. People pinch pretty birds. Nice things, St Lucian parrots. Friendly. Bright colours. Talkative. Numbers already well down before the hurricane. Now only a hundred left. In the world. Here. The World Wildlife people are bothered, but look at their effing funds. You got a boat that could take me over there?’

  ‘Via Dolly and a cold drink. You can sell Raymond a dog,’ Johnson said. ‘And so you’re helping conserve the parrots for the Wildlifers?’

  She jerked her head over her shoulder. ‘Lee and I have a place anyway, in the rainforest. We added a cage or two for them. Breeding in captivity. Sick-nursing if need be. Sort of busman’s holiday, when we’re fed up with the farm. The boy who runs it’s quite good, and we usually have a few beasts of our own that we’re working on.’

  She picked up the box, and it squeaked.

  ‘Such as?’ said Johnson. He lifted a bit of the cloth and I wondered, madly, if it would be budgies.

  It wasn’t. It was a cluster of darting pale furry things with long legs.

  ‘Effing gerbils,’ said Amy, dumping the box in the boat and swinging a booted leg over. ‘Got a pair and they breed like reporters. Taking them to the hotel zoo. Couple of white peacocks and a monkey and a snake that’s eaten its mother. You got Curtis’s job, Rita? Where’s the White Huntress?’

  I hadn’t heard that name before either. I said, ‘She’s in the Hurricane Hole. She’s researching for a documentary on the Empress Josephine.’

  ‘Huh!’ said Amy. ‘Needs to go to effing Soufriere then. Malmaison Estate. It belonged to Josephine. Quite near my place.’

  There was a pause. Johnson didn’t say anything, but he was grinning. The outboard puttered, and we swung in towards Dolly, with Lenny waiting above.

  ‘Oh hell, be neighbourly,’ said Amy, scowling round her cigar. She took it out of her mouth and addressed me. ‘Tell the Sheridan woman I’ll take her to Soufriere after her siesta, if she can put up with the Toyota. Tell her not to try anything on me, though.’

  ‘Try anything?’ I said.

  Amy heaved the box up on deck and followed it, nodding to Lenny, raising her free hand to Raymond, and gazing critically at Maggie, who was sunbathing mono on the aft deck.

  ‘Hates effing women,’ she said. ‘If you haven’t noticed, it’s because she needs you for something. Had a cat like that several times. Always had to be top bitch.’

  ‘You must show me your cats some time,’ Johnson said. ‘Lenny, tell Mrs Faflick what drink you think she ought to have.’

  I left them, to try the jet-skis, which is just a motorised sort of sledge with a handle, that lets you ski without needing a motor boat. Raymond gave me a lesson, and I got it almost right away.

  You would think I’d had enough of sledges, but I hadn’t. It was great.

  By the time I got back, Johnson had disappeared for his siesta. Maggie had disappeared to another boat, and Amy had taken Natalie to Soufriere in the Toyota.

  She had left the gerbils behind, which was fair enough after an hour’s solid drinking out of Lenny’s repertoire. I hoped the road to Soufriere was a straight one.

  According to Natalie, hostessing dinner back in our hotel later that evening, the road to Soufriere was what politicians were modelled on.

  She looked quite pale under her make-up, but rallied to give us an account of her trip in the Toyota, and these two peaked volcanic mountains called the Pitons, and the drive-in crater between them, with bubbling sulphur pools and bus parties from package tour day trips.

  She had approved of Amy’s underground jungle outpost in the mountain, and had spoken to several parrots.

  She did not expect, she said, a great deal of Castries tomorrow morning, which, like every other place so far as she could see on this island, had been burned down so often that very little charred Old French and Old English Colonial was still left standing.

&nbs
p; She covered a yawn about ten o’clock, by which time we were all slapping at things Raymond referred to as No-see-ums and I, for one, didn’t want Josephine tonight any more.

  Johnson and his crew left shortly after, and buzzed over the lagoon to where Dolly was lying in a fuzz of lit mosquito coils and drunken mosquitoes.

  Maggie was with them. I went to bed happy.

  It seemed only fair, next morning, to give Johnson a lift north to Castries in the car that came to take Natalie to Government Buildings. After that, she was going north-east to Morne Paix Bouche, to the estate where, if you believe St Lucians, Josephine got herself born.

  I wasn’t getting to go to Government Buildings, even though I was wearing decent white pants and a pin-striped cotton jacket and my hair was nearly lying down, because Lenny had made Roman Punch, which needs the whites of ten eggs, goddammit.

  I did go with Natalie and Johnson as far as Castries, though. I had been given some shopping to do. I thought she was joking when she said she needed some Bee-Wee dollars, but she wasn’t. It’s what they call East Caribbean currency, and I had to get to a bank.

  I had also been approached by Raymond to bring back a bag of anything that would keep Amy’s abandoned gerbils alive without encouraging their fertility. The gerbils were still on Dolly. The zoo, it turned out, didn’t want them and Amy wasn’t answering her telephone.

  The rodent population of Dolly, to my mind, was Johnson’s problem, but I said I’d do it, for Amy’s sake.

  Johnson, it appeared, was in for a dead busy morning. He needed dropping off by Columbus Square, at Johnson’s hardware store, for which he said he had a natural fondness. He also had a call to make down in the bay at Vigie Creek, and another at a bar-restaurant called Rain’s in Brazil Street, to meet a guy called Somerset Ma’am, as he explained in the car to Castries.

  The road from Marigot to Castries, although shorter than the road from Marigot to Soufriere, is much the same as regards politicians, and Natalie’s share of the conversation got smaller and smaller.

  No one was surprised when, on a hill just short of the capital, she got the driver to draw in and stop. The reason was, she said, to pick up some screen-printed cloth while she remembered.