Operation Nassau

by Dorothy Dunnett

  There was a long silence. He was filling his pipe, leaning back on one of my father’s Chippendale dining-chairs. I realized we had been sitting there a long time, and rising, led the way back to the sitting- room.

  Gracious living. The hi-fi radio caught my eye and, kneeling, I switched it on and moved one or two unthinking knobs, while Johnson settled back, prodding tobacco. The soulful inanities of the song called ‘Yellow Bird’ floated round the air conditioning:

  Yellow Bird, up high in banana tree Yellow Bird, you sit all alone like me - You can fly away

  In the sky away

  You are luckier than me.

  I switched it off sharply. I said, still kneeling, ‘I didn’t ask you. You said until Edgecombe had my notes, I was sacrosanct. So why was I hit on the head?’

  Johnson, head down, puffed devotedly at his pipe. He took it out of his mouth, looked at it, and inserted it between his teeth finally, as if forced to a distasteful concession. A haze of smoke wandered after ‘Yellow Bird’, unaccompanied by sound. I said, with growing suspicion, ‘What have I said to cause that kind of gap?’

  ‘You have posed,’ said Johnson, ‘a problem in ethics.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. I allowed myself, slowly and lucidly, to think of Miami, and the dog-track, and that unpleasant race through the car-park. I said, ‘Krishtof Bey doctored my tomato juice. On the Begum’s instructions?’

  ‘Right,’ Johnson said.

  ‘The Begum?’ I said, frowning in uneasy thought. The Begum, who had been distinctly troubled by the extent of my injury, the next day at the hospital. Troubled and guilty. Why had they taken my dress, I had asked myself often enough, and yet hadn’t assaulted me while I lay there in the car-park unconscious? How had they known that a call for a doctor would bring out a woman? Why had they stopped to do something so senseless as crop my hair into bristles?

  So that the Begum, began an incredible thought, falling into my labouring senses - so that the Begum could bring me a wig and a dress, and so that Johnson . .

  ‘Pally Loo-loo?’ I found myself saying, accusation ringing in every ludicrous syllable.

  ‘A very fine bitch,’ said Johnson guardedly. His pipe emitted a column of protective black smoke.

  ‘Who never won a race in its life,’ I said. I could feel my face as stiff as washed unwashable leather. ‘Whose money was it? The Begum’s?’

  Johnson said, ‘I thought you’d got over this hang-up about money? You can’t deny we gave your social habits a skin-pop.’

  ‘I don’t deny it,’ I said. ‘The lesson was made all too blindingly clear. Without the wig and the wardrobe I was Dracula. Who was going to look at me twice?’

  ‘No one,’ Johnson said. ‘Because the first time round, you sank your teeth in his jugular. We all know James Ulric didn’t read Spock. And since James Ulric did all the harm, you may as well let James Ulric’s bank account fix it. There are three men hanging about wanting to know if you’ll marry them.’

  Mr Tiko, Wallace Brady and Krishtof . . ‘Three men?’ I said, frankly astonished.

  ‘Two men,’ Johnson corrected himself on the instant. ‘Krishtof Bey is anxious to live in sin with you, but will marry you if you’re going to be fussy.’

  The mild figure puffed at its pipestem, and I gave him the same alarmed attention you would give to a circular saw. ‘The Begum phoned,’ I said casually, ‘asking if she ought to get married. I referred her to you.’

  ‘She phoned me as well,’ Johnson said. ‘I said yes. Beltanno, I told her, will be permanently attached one way or the other by the end of the MacRannoch Gathering. Six p.m. on the 30th at Great Harbour Cay, tickets five guineas a whack. Only genuine MacRannochs need apply.’

  ‘My God,’ I said, and I said it with reverence. ‘What’s he doing?’

  ‘Continuous flights,’ said Johnson, ‘from Nassau to Great Harbour Cay, where at 7.30 p.m. the Combined Tattoo and Highland Event will be held by floodlight in a new stadium built at the airport, followed by a State March with pipers to the new MacRannoch residence on Crab Island, where the Grand Banquet will be held. There have been two thousand acceptances.’

  ‘Tattoo?’ I said flinchingly.

  ‘Supervised by Brigadier Walter McCanna, Sergeant Trotter’s superior,’ Johnson said. ‘The Army felt they had been put on their mettle. Nothing has been lost. Except, I believe, the trained sheepdogs rounding up the flamingoes, excised because of the rabies laws.’ He grinned. ‘You really ought to attend. It’ll be an occasion unmatched in history. Especially when the two thousand walk over the bridge from Great Harbour Cay to Crab Island.’

  In my mind’s eye, clear as a photograph, sprang a picture of the cold green straits between Castle Rannoch. Scotland and the mainland, running deep over the sea-rounded boulders of James Ulric’s five spavined bridges, buried with his virility.

  ‘Oh Christ!’ I said, varying it. ‘It’s got to be stopped.’

  ‘You won’t stop it’,’ said Johnson with ghoulish cheerfulness. ‘But I’ve organized a sort of Dunkirk of small boats round the piers, and we’ll save them all if their kilts keep them afloat long enough. They deserve a resident doctor.’

  I thought of it. I forgot the thirteenth hole and Denise’s body, lying in its gully under the tarpaulin. I forgot the burning wreck of the car with Trotter’s body lying inside, Johnson’s bullet in his head. I forgot about Edgecombe and the insane singlemindedness which had involved us all in his own sordid game. Instead I considered, fascinated, the spectacle of James Ulric MacRannoch and his affianced if elderly bride, greeting two thousand filibegged MacRannochs and arraying before them a Bahamian steel band jumping through flaming hoops.

  I thought of Brady. I thought of Krishtof Bey. I thought of a dress I had seen in the window of Bonwit Teller’s at Christmas time, set in salt snow and swansdown, with silver lights running down the shop shades. There had been a matching long silver wig.

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ I said. ‘Are you going?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m not a MacRannoch.’

  ‘Sailing off,’ I said, ‘into the sunset?’ I said it collectedly. I had had a good deal of practice.

  ‘Sailing off,’ he said, ‘to paint a stout Italian princess who runs a shoe business in Naples. Don’t think I don’t regret it. As jobs go, this one would have sickened a soap-boiler. If anyone made the thing bearable, it was B. Douglas MacRannoch. The one person who, through thick and thin, continued to say what she meant.’

  ‘I shall miss you.’ I said. ‘I think you’ve been a good teacher.’

  ‘I should like to be missed,’ said Johnson. He kissed my hand on the doorstep and then my cheek, but not in the manner of Dolly. The lesson was over.

  I closed the door slowly, and went and looked at his picture.

  The MacRannoch Gathering, Tattoo and Highland Event on Great Harbour Cay is of course a matter of history.

  I flew there into the sunset with a cloak over my trouser suit of silver lame and white ostrich feathers, and my long silver wig sparkled in the plane windows. The Begum and James Ulric waited to greet us on a dais covered with MacRannoch tartan and a row of grey potted thistles slumping ear to ear in the still, tropical heat.

  The Begum, her hair dyed black and her eye make-up thicker than ever, was wearing a stiff brocade sari with the MacRannoch sash over it. My father in full Highland dress looks like a small wishing-well in need of a tidy. His mouth dropped open when he saw me, hitting the amethyst in his jabot with a crack. Then he said, ‘Beltanno! Well, this is just what we were hoping for. B. Douglas, meet your new stepmother.’

  The Begum’s smile was broad, and gave nothing away except a general sort of satisfaction. ‘You haven’t been hasty?’ I asked.

  The Begum’s smile became broader. ‘Not while you look like that, darling,’ she said. ‘And look who’s behind you.’

  It was Wallace Brady, in a white tuxedo and rosebud, with a smile like a rutting stud oyster. I smiled back. ‘Hullo,’ I said. �
�Where’s Mr Tiko?’ There is no point in fostering too great a sense of security.

  ‘He’s coming,’ the Begum said quickly. James Ulric was having his pipecleaner hand kneaded by a stonehenge of New Zealand MacRannochs. ‘There are still quite a few planes to come in. I’ll send him along to you. Wallace, will you take her into the stadium?’

  We walked off arm in arm, and he was telling me how wonderful I was, and how much he had missed me. which was pleasant. They had laid a tartan-lined walk on the runway, which was almost impassable for crowds of people studded with cairngorms and daggers and milling round discussing their feet. ‘What have you been doing?’ said Wallace Brady. I told him.

  The stadium had been contrived from a section of runway flanked by two broad raked stands hung with tartan. At the far end, the runway disappeared into the maw of a marquee from which, clearly, the performers were to emerge. Flags fluttered above it. I said, ‘Will they have a Fat Woman?’ and Wallace Brady said, ‘No, but I hear the clowns are really something.’

  I began to warm to him once again. I let him lead me to the row of armchairs behind the first garlanded ledge. The MacRannoch’s pew, I deduced. I said, ‘But you’re not a MacRannoch?’

  ‘I’ve got special dispensation,’ said Wallace Brady, and followed me along the front row of the stand. A figure in full Highland evening dress rose from the furthest seat, bowed, and said, ‘And so have I,’ in a strong Turkish accent.

  I stared at Krishtof Bey. He had his false eyelashes on.

  Wallace Brady laughed. ‘Where did you get it?’

  The original of Johnson’s portrait looked down at his garments with pride. ‘La Sylphide, Act 1. The Lincoln Centre forwarded them. Observe the frills at the wrist. The cross-binding of cords on the calves. The crested buttons. The buckles. The sporran.’

  Wallace Brady gazed at the sporran, which was exceedingly hairy. ‘For Chrissakes, what’s that?’

  ‘The head of a former conductor of the Budapest Opera and Ballet,’ Krishtof Bey said. ‘In the last scene of Scheherezade I excised it. He kept regrettable tempi.’

  I laughed. I suddenly felt very cheerful. I shook hands with the tall, kilted figure of Brigadier McCanna, the Tattoo Director, and watched him leave without pangs to prepare for his programme: he looked nothing like Trotter.

  The seats filled up. A message came that Mr Tiko was at Nassau airport and hoped to be with us shortly. The sun went down and the floodlights came on in a faintly dismaying eau-de-nil colour, coinciding with the distant sound of inflating bagpipes. Preceded by the Pipe Major in a cloud of red-hot fluttering tartan, my father and stepmother marched hand in hand down the runway to a storm of clapping and took their places in the principal armchairs beside us. The minister of St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, Nassau, uprising unexpectedly beside them, announced a prayer and a psalm into the public-address system, catching most of the MacRannoch men undoubtedly on the hop: their women kicked them on to their feet.

  During the eighth verse the Begum leaned over to whisper that Mr Tiko seemed to be having some sort of trouble in Nassau. My father grunted and shaded his error of pitch from a third to a full semitone. Krishtof Bey flinched. I tried to visualize James Ulric’s head as a sporran.

  The psalm ended; we all sat down; the marquee at the end grew a spotlight and the Massed Pipes and Drums of the 1st Battalion the Royal Scots, the 2nd Battalion of the Scots Guards and the Federation of Malaya Police marched out in a rhythmic, befurred body. The great MacRannoch Tattoo and Highland Event had got under way.

  There are some memories the mind works to preserve, and others which demand to be jettisoned at the earliest convenient moment. I cannot now remember precisely when I noticed that something was wrong: it was certainly after the putting of the sixteen-pound ball and the flinging of the fifty-six-pound weight, and probably after the combined display of massed limbo dancers and firefighting demonstration by units of the Nassau Brigade. (Music: ‘I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire’).

  Certainly the matter came to a head during the jeep assembly exercise by two teams of Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers (Music: ‘Pack up Your Troubles’). Hurrying wheels bisected the runway, with electrical and mechanical engineers running doggedly after them and falling on their medals with great regularity. It looked like a drunk clockmaker’s workshop.

  The moment the first jeep stood, splayed and creaking in a welter of washers, they announced the winners and shoved in the British Legion Boys’ Band blowing ‘Semper Fidelis’ while the Mechanical Engineers and their jeeps were shovelled up off the field. A uniformed lieutenant, politely excusing himself along my row of the stand, turned out to be bearing a message from the Tattoo Director. The Brigadier wanted a doctor.

  In my silver lame and feathers, silently I followed him out.

  In the marquee, the trouble was glassily obvious. Amid a dishevelment of jeeps sat or lay the giggling members of the two mechanical teams. ‘Rum?’ I said. ‘They’re all that high on rum?’

  Brigadier McCanna spoke heavily. ‘One tot. I can’t understand it.

  It’s regulation, back at the Castle. One tot to put heart into them. And see them!’

  I saw them. I touched one on the shoulder and he yelped. I rolled his sleeve up and he smiled and lay down on the ground. A thin white bandage, one of Currie’s best jobs, encircled his upper left arm. The United Commonwealth Hospital had run short of frigates this month.

  I said, ‘Don’t you know what happens if you give a blood donor alcohol?’ and Brigadier McCanna, staring at me, said ‘My God!’ with the greatest simplicity. He added, ‘What can I do?’

  ‘Sort out the sober ones,’ I said. (Music: ‘Reel for My Hume’). ‘And trust to the ingenuity of your MacRannoch friends.’

  Nothing short of stereotaxic surgery will ever obliterate the events of the rest of that night. The Brigadier, six feet high in cock’s feathers, holding up five Italian Bersaglieri on his shoulders in the Musical and Physical Training Display. The high jump Wallace Brady competed for in singlet and kilt, and the sixteensome reel Krishtof Bey danced as my partner before racing off to take four different parts in Fighting Men through the Ages.

  The MacRannochs greeted it all with a violent and warming enthusiasm. The applause, the cheers, the encores increased until the programme wallowed on to its end, and in the marquee Wallace, Krishtof and the Brigadier met, full of exhausted hilarity, for the Final March Past of Massed Bands and Salute. Pipes tuned, drums thudding and thundering, they would walk past the saluting MacRannoch, and behind would fall in the Chief and the two thousand clansmen, to cross to Crab Island and dinner.

  Across the bridge, I heard the Brigadier preparing his pipers; I heard Krishtof and Wallace shouting with laughter but I wasn’t laughing. Five bridges had fallen under the Chief of the MacRannochs. No MacRannoch had succeeded in building a bridge between the shore and his castle since the thirteenth, and he had had the help of the fairies. I said to Wallace. ‘I don’t want them to go over the bridge.’

  He broke off at once and came over. He said, ‘Look: I know what happened in Scotland. Believe me it won’t happen here.’

  ‘No,’ I said after a pause. ‘But you don’t know my family. It’s a legend.’

  A man in full piper’s uniform fell at my feet: someone took him by the armpits and dragged him away. Wallace Brady said, ‘I’m going to cross that bridge, and so is your father. We’ll break the legend between us. We’ll make a new one, Beltanno.’

  Brigadier McCanna said, ‘Dr MacRannoch?’

  ‘Lay him down somewhere cool and let him sleep it off,’ I said, without turning.

  ‘Dr MacRannoch,’ he said again, and I turned at the alarm in his voice. ‘That was the only damned man among them who could play the solo “The MacRannoch for Ever”.’

  They all looked at me in my silver wig and my silver suit with the white ostrich feathers, and they saw nothing at all. They saw a woman doctor who could play on the bagpipes.

 
I lifted the pipes. I tucked the bag under my arm and threw the drones over my shoulder and put the blow-pipe to my lips and settled my grip on the chanter. I nodded. Then the massed pipes struck up and we marched, Brady and Krishtof on either side, out of the marquee.

  My father fell in before us as we passed the main stand. He had the Begum with him and they were both smiling politely because of the roar of applause that had gone up when we three emerged from the tent. James Ulric patted me on the back and muttered something about Mr Tiko.

  I wasn’t playing, but the massed pipe band was. ‘What?’ I said. The pipes had switched to ‘The Bonawe Highlanders’.

  ‘He says the place on your right ought to be occupied by the heir,” shouted the Begum. The rest of the two thousand were shuffling into place behind us, but we couldn’t hear them and they certainly couldn’t hear us. ‘It’s a shame about Mr Tiko.’

  I shouted back, ‘What happened to him?’

  Wallace Brady cupped his hands round his mouth and aimed it at my father. ‘They wouldn’t let him in,’ he yelled, ‘because he wasn’t a MacRannoch.’

  ‘Mr Tiko,’ I shouted. ‘We’re talking about Mr Tiko.’

  ‘I know,’ yelled Wallace. ‘He wasn’t a MacRannoch.’

  I said, ‘But he said -’

  ‘No, he didn’t,’ yelled Wallace. ‘He just said his name was hard to pronounce. And that he was a doctor as well. It was you who said he was called T. K. MacRannoch.’

  What with rage and astonishment and confusion, I had almost nothing to shout with. I croaked, ‘But his name was on the Paradise Island golf register.’