Ibiza Surprise

by Dorothy Dunnett

  Everyone began to move back to the cars. I hoped he wouldn’t ask her to lunch, or I’d have to cut some more melon balls, but he did, without even glancing at me.

  Derek came to luncheon as well, and he got melon squares, because I was damned if I was going to sweat all day in the kitchen for him.

  I didn’t sit with them: there were too damned many, and although Mummy never stopped looking at Mr Lloyd, I knew perfectly well she was enjoying herself. At least I got Austin to myself. Between courses I ran in and out with some white wine and an egg souffle in brandy; he was looking tons better, with his ribs done up in crepe, and talking of getting up later. I discouraged it. I needed time to think about Clem. I had already told Austin about Jorge and Gregorio, and he said good riddance. On the whole, I think he was glad not to take it up further.

  Then, after I’d shoved the petits fours on the plates, Clem came into the kitchen and said: ‘For God’s sake get out there and relax,’ and hurried me into the dining room while he helped Helmuth with coffee. It was Anne-Marie’s afternoon off.

  There was an empty chair next to Gilmore. It wasn’t fair to Clem, but I couldn’t resist it. Gil had been swimming: his hair was still damp and curling a bit at the edges, and he had a new coat of suntan. I was a little alarmed by his smile.

  He said: ‘When are you fitting in Johnson?’

  I knew perfectly well what he meant.

  ‘This afternoon, maybe,’ I answered. ‘He’s painting my portrait.’

  ‘Before Monday?’ said Gil. ‘Or are you taking up residence on Dolly?’

  I’d forgotten I was going home on Monday.

  ‘He’ll need a cook,’ Gilmore suggested. ‘Someone to sew on his buttons. He could even teach you to sail. And there’s Clem, for variety. Two in the hand, She-she. After all, you can’t count Austin now.’

  I raised my eyebrows. Steam always makes my hair come down like a broken umbrella, and my nose had peeled, but you have to have dignity.

  ‘Austin is a sweet boy,’ I said. ‘So is Clem. I don’t know why you should be so stroppy about them. You’ve got Louie and Petra.’

  The names I had had, in confidence, from Janey. But there comes a moment in everyone’s life when they’ve got to use every weapon they have.

  ‘That’s true,’ said Gilmore. ‘And they’re very sweet girls. I’m water-skiing with Louie after lunch. What a pity you’re going to see Johnson.’

  I could have screamed.

  I went down to Dolly after the siesta, leaving Janey talking to Austin in two lounging chairs by the pool. I couldn’t get her away. Mr Lloyd and Mummy had disappeared, I suspected to look at Mr Lloyd’s paintings and/or listen to his new classical records, and Clem, bodyguarding, was lying full length in the lounge, a thing I suppose he finds hard to do, if not impossible, on Dolly. Gil had gone off in the Cooper, with his towel, surf pants, and skis, and also with Derek, who was going back to Ibiza. I took the Maserati, without asking.

  There was no one on Dolly. I have never in the whole of my life had such a stroke of good luck. What was more, I knew where Louie’s beach was: her uncle had a house party in a villa near Portinaitx. I turned the Maserati and set off north, singing, with Janey’s water skis snug in the boot.

  Last summer, I spent two whole months cooking for a family with an estate on the banks of a very cold loch in Scotland. It rained. Except for me, everyone came down with flu, and no-one wanted to eat. There is absolutely nothing like a very cold loch in Scotland for teaching you to stay upright on water skis. I stopped at the edge of an orange grove and brushed out my hair, remade my eyes and put on my dark glasses, which is not at all the waste of effort it may seem, and starting the car, did a bomb round the bend and screeched to a smoking dead halt on the road above Louie’s beach. Then I played all the chimes on the horn.

  Gilmore got to the car first, with two others whose vaccinations I recognised.

  I said: ‘He wasn’t in.’

  ‘But you’ve brought your water skis,’ said Gilmore Lloyd.

  ‘Why should she waste her time water-skiing?’ said the shorter of the two others. I gave him a polite smile. With me, it is either the wrong kind or the right kind trying to make their established girlfriend jealous. This was the wrong kind.

  Gilmore said: ‘It’s Louie’s party really, but come down and have a drink anyway.’

  A nice girl would have said, ‘No, thank you,’ and punted off on her scooter. People always call me a nice girl, and truly, I can never see why a nice girl isn’t supposed to want to get married. I want to get married, terribly. It’s the only thing I do want. I mean, I want a great many things, and there’s no other way to get them.

  I said: ‘Thank you, I’d love to,’ and Gil squired me just long enough to get me introduced to Louie and one or two well-mannered men, and then took off on his skis. I waited until he came back, having shown off until he was exhausted, and asked, very sweetly, if I could possibly try.

  I hadn’t got a Pucci swimsuit or a Tobago suntan or a rich father, or a father. But I had long yellow hair, natural, and a bloody good figure, natural, and a Jantzen swimsuit that a cousin had grown out of, and a strong sense of discipline. I did my nut on those skis, and if there wasn’t a soul looking except Gilmore, it was worth it.

  On the next trip he came with me, zooming backward and forward. I was meant to be scared. I felt scared all right, but I was too busy to show it.

  He shouted: ‘You say you can cook?’

  ‘And dance,’ I shouted back. When he whizzed back again, I said, ‘Does Louie ski?’

  He swooped away, the spray flying. When he came back, he said: ‘Not till June. She had a crash at Zermatt in her whirly-bird.’

  ‘Hard luck,’ I said, and capsized. You can’t win all the time. But you can try.

  We had a sort of snack on the beach of French loaves and whole stems of lettuce, with anchovies and tomato and chicken and salami and red peppers and olives and rounds of small hard-boiled eggs.

  It was a marvellous party. The crowd were nearly all English. I’d met some with Janey. There was also a party of Spaniards who roared up a bit later in a Mercedes and a lot of grey-green Lambrettas. I’d seen one or two of the girls in Ibiza. They wore cloaks, long brown boots and little white kilts with bright, high-necked silk jerseys, and wore their hair tied severely back in pearl rings. They were wearing a lot less, I noticed now: in fact, their suntans seemed to be all over. The new way to wear dark glasses, I noted, was not goggle-like on the forehead any more but with one leg hooked into your bosom. Louie’s specs were like Catherine wheels. There was also a boy who stood around, hands on hips, with two-inch sideboards, a gold locket, and a beach towel hung straight down from one shoulder. He stood just like that for ten minutes, and you could hear all the Englishmen hissing with hate. Then a couple of cruising yachts put in with some boys from Minorca.

  They all knew Mr Lloyd. One of the really good-looking boys, who was already engaged to a Portuguese heiress, lay down beside me for some courtesy snogging over the doughnuts and said:

  ‘Janey’s a nice girl, but her old man keeps her wrapped in cotton wool, doesn’t he?’

  ‘Janey?’ I said. Anyone less needing to be wrapped in anything but maybe asbestos I have never met in the whole of my life.

  ‘Well . . .’ said the nice boy, offering me a pack of sugar almonds like curling stones. He had had four gins and half a bottle of Sauterne, but you really would hardly notice it. He said: ‘I dunno why he doesn’t tell Janey. Janey’s broad-minded. Would Janey mind?’

  ‘Mind about what?’ I said, stroking his biceps. He had a beautiful tan. ‘Go on. Gil isn’t listening.’ I wasn’t sure if he was out of earshot, but I didn’t care.

  The nice boy rolled over and began to experiment, in the same mannerly way, with my bikini.

  ‘Oh, you know. The love
nest in Palma,’ he said. ‘Why not bring the woman back home and be done with it? I can’t see why Janey should mind.’

  Palma. Where Janey’s father had actually gone on the night of my father’s death, although claiming to be in Barcelona?

  A shadow fell over us both, and Gilmore Lloyd, bending down, cuffed the nice boy in a cursory way off my back.

  ‘It’s hooked on the other side,’ he said calmly. ‘And despite what She-she may fancy, her trustees, I’m sure, would prefer it to stay hooked.’

  Then he jerked me to my feet with a snap that nearly knocked the fillings out of all my back molars and returned with me to Louie.

  ‘We’d better be going. Johnson’s expecting you, isn’t he, She-she? And Father’s making up a party to watch the high jinks tonight.’

  I wrenched open my teeth, and said to Louie: ‘It was super of you to let me gate-crash, and it’s nearly my last day: so sad. Could we have a meal maybe back in London? Gil can give me your number.’

  Louie, who was a heavenly brunette, linked her arm in mine and Gil’s and made all the right noises, much more sweetly than mine, right back up to the road. She was going to San Francisco after Easter. I remembered an aunt of mine who used to stay in San Francisco and gave her the address. She left us by the cars.

  ‘Goodbye,’ said Gilmore.

  There were a lot of things I had been going to say, but at the look in his eye, I didn’t say one.

  ‘Goodbye,’ I said. ‘Thank you for having me.’

  It might, I thought, sting him into a little action tonight. After all, I’m not really a prude. It’s simply my code of ethics needed a little revamping to meet changed conditions. Such as having four steadies and going back to London with none.

  Driving back through the corniche road south, I had time to think of a great many things, alone in the car. Until Gilmore mentioned it, I had forgotten that tonight was the big Easter procession in Ibiza, the Procession of Silence, when the floats would be carried down from the Cathedral by the faithful and all round the town.

  Today was Good Friday. Someone had said Coco’s party would offend the natives. It hadn’t, because Mummy’s house happened to be secluded and her staff were discreet. The beach party I’d just been to was innocent enough, too, compared with some barbecues we’d all attended back home. We could all look after ourselves: we’d been brought up to it. But there was a shocking difference, one could see, between that and the people one passed in the Maserati, dressed in their best black lace and silk shawls, going with worn faces and knotted hands to and from Mass.

  The odd thing was, I felt at home somehow with both. I mean, one has to meet the right sort of people, and no one can say it isn’t fun playing footsy in snorkels or whatever. But I could enjoy chaffing the children that morning in the Salinas buildings, and the teasing I got in the market. Come to that, there was more life in the fishwives than in Louie’s lot, never mind poor Coco and his sad paper bags. But that was their life, and this was mine. I’d seen the English girls in stained anoraks and torn jute-soled shoes, bargaining in guttural Spanish in the market. The market women didn’t like them. You couldn’t go native. You just went into a limbo between their nationality and your own.

  I noticed Janey was different. At home, Janey treats every shopgirl like dirt, and she did the same here. The funny thing was, they didn’t seem to resent it.

  Driving along, I ran my mind over the others. Austin condescended to his inferiors. Very politely, but a complacent self-centredness was certainly there. Mr Lloyd was plain and brisk and rather impatient. Maybe his staff didn’t love him, in any of his lucrative businesses, but they’d respect him, I thought. Gilmore was exactly like Janey. The only two who treated everybody the same, high and low, were Johnson and his mate, Clement Sainsbury. And Mummy, I suppose. But she could hold forth by the hour about Bartok to a hopped-up Chinese waiter in Soho and come away firmly in the belief that she’d had a useful and intelligent chat.

  I suddenly wanted to see Johnson. I passed the turning to the Casa Venets and ran right on into Ibiza, where I parked the car on the right, opposite the boatyard. Then I crossed to the Club Nautico and walked quickly inside the gates and along the quayside to where Dolly was berthed.

  They were winching up a sardine boat. The big, powerful horse plodded steadily round the dirt circle, in his straw hat and worn leather harness, the round woven pads like reedy bifocals, fixed over each eye, as the chains inched slowly up. I didn’t look at it much: you had to watch out for the hose pipes and the bollards. Johnson said it took twelve hours to fill Dolly’s water tanks for a bath, and looking at the bore of the pipe, I could believe it. I ran up the gangplank and stood on deck, calling his name.

  There was a movement inside the cockpit, and my mother climbed out, wafting the odour of cheroot smoke before her.

  ‘Hello, honey,’ she said. ‘Johnson’s clean out of ice. Be a darling and run along to the store. You know where it is?’

  I did, as a matter of fact. It was just along the main road. But I kept on coming and said: ‘Mummy, I just don’t care who you’ve got in the cabin. I just want to see Johnson.’

  ‘He isn’t here,’ Mummy said. ‘I don’t know where he is. The skipper isn’t here either.’

  ‘Then who do you want the ice for?’ I asked. I was getting fed up calling on Johnson.

  ‘Oh, that’s for Clem. You know,’ said my mother, ‘he’s lying on the floor right in there, and I think that he’s dead.’

  NINE

  There was a smell of paint in the saloon, of good food and alcohol. The table hadn’t been let down after lunch, although Spry had cleared it. Under it, folded upon the floor, was the solid person of my suitor, Clem, still wearing the blue levis and crumpled shirt he’d had on up the lavender hill. His hair was too short to be ruffled, but his fresh skin was very pale, and he didn’t move when I got down fast beside him.

  ‘I never could take pulses,’ said Mummy, looking over my shoulder. ‘Either he’s alive and I’m dead, or the other way round.’

  ‘I think you’re both alive,’ I said, letting his wrist go. The banging inside my chest settled down to a steady jog trot. ‘He’s been hit on the head.’ The deck was sticky with blood. ‘Look, if you take that arm . . .”

  We heaved him on to one foam-padded side bench. I’d forgotten how strong Mummy was, in spite of the stick-insect physique. I found a cloth, wrung it out in the galley, and began to wash the blood out of Clem’s hair.

  ‘How did it happen?’

  ‘Search me,’ said Mummy. ‘Use my hankie. That cloth’s got paint on it. We dropped by to see Johnson, and I walked to the front to get a good view of the town while Clem went down below to find someone. Then when he didn’t come back I came down myself, and there he was. Wham.’

  ‘Alone?’ I said.

  ‘Alone,’ said Mummy. ‘It seemed mad to me, too. I went up on deck to look for anyone running, but there wasn’t a soul. Then Pepe came along – you know, the man who looks after the quay – and I sent him along to the Club Nautico to fetch Dilling, you know how he goes in there to gossip. I’d just come down here again when you arrived.’

  ‘You came here in the car?’ I said. ‘With Dilling?’ You could see the neat, white face of the yacht club from where Dolly was tied.

  Mummy took the holder out of her mouth and said: ‘If that mechanised mating call of yours is in the car park, you must have noticed the Humber.’

  ‘I didn’t. The Humber isn’t out there.’

  There was a lump like a tennis ball and a cut that looked awfully deep to me under Clem’s hair. He showed no sign at all of wakening.

  Mummy sighed. ‘Dilling’s on hash again. Sweetie . . .’

  ‘Listen,’ I said.

  ‘Drums?’ said Mummy. ‘Those drums give me the creeps.’

  ‘No, listen. Someone is c
oming.’ You could hear the footsteps now quite clearly, on the uneven dirt of the quayside, getting nearer.

  ‘Johnson?’ I said. But I knew that it wasn’t.

  Mummy got up, rather gracefully, and took down the aerosol fire extinguisher. Sitting, she appeared surprised at my stare. ‘A woman’s got to think of her future.’ We heard the footsteps slow down, and then become light and hollow as they traversed the gangplank. They arrived on deck and crossed it heavily.

  ‘Hullo?’ said the capped head of Spry, appearing upside down at the top of the gangway. ‘I beg your pardon, Mrs van Costa. I thought there was no one aboard.’

  ‘By no means. It’s like the Schweitzer settlement down here,’ Mummy said. ‘Someone’s attacked Mr Sainsbury.’

  I wanted to stay. Clem still hadn’t wakened, and he looked awful. But Mummy was adamant.

  ‘There’s nothing you can do that Mr Spry can’t do better. He knows where to get a doctor, and he knows all the yacht-club men who can help him if need be. Impulse buying is no good in your situation, She-she,’ said my mother gently. ‘Less than twenty-five thousand a year is not truly advisable.’

  My cheeks were still burning as I marched back through the harbour beside her.

  ‘I suppose if Coco had had twenty-five thousand a year, you’d have suggested him for a husband.’

  ‘Goodness gracious me, no,’ said my mother. ‘You’d have killed his art in a week, and anyway, he was perfectly impotent. I guess you’ll set out to have six children and call a halt about three.’

  ‘I happen,’ I said, ‘to think children are important.’

  ‘I know,’ said my mother. ‘That’s why I said three. Forsey always thought you d be fecund. You don’t mind, do you, giving me a lift home?’

  I stopped dead. ‘Honestly. I think you’re the most selfish . . .’