Dolly and the Bird of Paradise - Dorothy Dunnett - Johnson Johnson 01 (10 page)

Then Natalie arrived, took a look and said, ‘It’s a free world. Kim-Jim loves horror films, don’t you, darling?’

She turned. ‘Where shall we have coffee? On the terrace?’

Kim-Jim had jumped to his feet with American politeness, but I wasn’t going to have my viewing loused up. I went on watching.

Gluttenmacher took off his dark glasses. He said, ‘What an extraordinary film!’

A royal command, under the circumstances.

Natalie pushed the door further open. Her voice was husky and smooth. ‘Would you like to see it? Then we’ll all have coffee here. Kim-Jim, Rita… You don’t mind, do you? Is it near the start? Could we just wind it back?’

Hell.

Kim-Jim said, ‘Of course. Come in,’ and knelt forward to switch off and rewind. The two men and Maggie came into the room, followed by Aurelio, who began pushing about chairs. Natalie’s voice, in the distance, could be heard giving orders to a number of people including Ferdy, who seemed to have dozed off somewhere not very convenient.

Natalie came back in, followed by trayfuls of coffee and brandy meant for the four easy chairs now with the best view of the telly.

Kim-Jim and I sat on our desk chairs behind. The parrot, which had fallen asleep on its perch, woke and did a quick fail-safe check on its transport, stretch-pointing each wing with a creak, like pulling down eyelids.

It lifted its feet once or twice, ducked its neck, ruffled its feathers, and in a cloud of dandruff made a short, clear statement in Portuguese.

Aurelio spilled the coffee.

Kim-Jim jumped up, got a handful of tissues, mopped up the damage and tried to take out the parrot, which bit his finger and, fluttering sideways, began to walk up the curtain, looking at us. The door shut behind Aurelio, and Maggie burst into Swiss-finished laughter. ‘What did it say?’

‘Roughly, “What’s she got that I haven’t got?’ ” said Natalie calmly. ‘Aurelio, as you might gather, is much sought after. Shall we look at the film?’

We switched the lights out, and Kim-Jim pressed the button and sent my cassette for the second time on its way.

It wasn’t a blue film, but it was badly made, and so had never been released. One or two of the players were pretty well known, and bits of their performances were worth looking at. And the horror sequences too had one or two things in them that were novel enough to have an effect on your stomach.

It was the kind of film I watched a lot of, and Kim-Jim did as well, while other people were looking at clean healthy things like football and racing.

Quite early on, it got home to Ferdy’s girlfriend. The Hon. Maggie said, ‘Oh my God, I shall vomit. My dear darling Natalie, what are your little brood thinking of? It’s an
orgy
of nastiness.’

Kim-Jim and I said nothing, nor did the two men. Even Gluttenmacher seemed to have forgotten Maggie’s top half. Natalie said, ‘Ferdy’s outside.’

‘I couldn’t
move
,’ Maggie said. ‘My insides aren’t that colour. I deny it absolutely.’

‘Christ!’ said one of the men.

The story unfolded. There was a lot of interesting detail. If only Kim-Jim and I had been alone, it would have been great.

In fact, after a while, it wasn’t too bad, because it really did seem to turn Maggie’s stomach and she stopped saying anything, until Natalie noticed her swallowing and took her out to the powder-room.

The film came to an end, with the credits.

Kim-Jim put the light on.

Fred Gluttenmacher wiped his face, found and drank off his brandy, put on his dark glasses and then turned round. ‘Natalie called you Rita,’ he said. ‘Rita Geddes?’

Film buffs not only watch unusual films, they watch the credits. Such as, Special Effects, Rita Geddes.

‘I did it three years ago,’ I said. ‘Rotten film.’

‘Of course,’ he said. The lawyer had turned round as well.

Fred Moneybags added, ‘You did the Hadley comedy series make-up. Didn’t you? The impersonation sketches?’

‘She still does it,’ said Kim-Jim. ‘You don’t hear of her as you should, because up to now she wouldn’t work overseas.’

They both looked at me.

‘Why?’ said the lawyer. He had a soft voice that went with the silvery hair and rimless glasses.

‘You get mugged,’ I said.

They laughed. ‘And you come from Glasgow?’

‘Troon,’ I said. ‘Next to Kilmarnock.’

It was a man from Kilmarnock who founded Reid’s Palace Hotel, Funchal, Madeira, but they didn’t seem to know that. They were dead ignorant.

But quite decent to talk to. We chatted to them, Kim-Jim and I, for quite a long time, until wherever she was, Natalie realised that the film must be over, and came in with Maggie.

The Hon. appeared quite restored. The Vidal hair shone like boot polish and she was carrying a shoe in each hand. She was also followed by Ferdy, definitely wakened, and bearing nightcaps.

‘The Honourable Maggie!’ said Ferdy, doing the courtly, as he handed his girlfriend her chaser.

‘
And bugger the bitch
,’ said the parrot. In Ferdy’s voice. You couldn’t fault it.

Next morning, I sized up Ferdy’s hangover and offered to be his Sexy Flower Assistant, provided he brought his Portuguese dictionary and helped me, as the crime series say, with a few enquiries.

I didn’t trust anyone else not to suck up to Natalie and cover up Roger the Damned Van’s tracks for him.

Ferdy had sucked up to Natalie too, at the beginning. He hadn’t told me Natalie knew my attacker. But since then, he had joined the bleeding band of the attacked. He had a grudge to pay off .

He had also had, it seemed, a flaming row with the Honourable Maggie after he drove her back to her suite at the Sheraton.

In my opinion, the flaming row was probably caused by disappointment as much as by the parrot’s slip of the tongue. I don’t know how he drove there and back, never mind being expected to manage his buttons.

As a result, Ferdy and I had a sort of silent breakfast, helping ourselves in the morning-room.

I was silent because I was thinking. Natalie had already phoned me, through three walls, and I had reported to her in the study.

The study looked normal again, with the chairs in their usual places and the video covered. The cans on the parrot-perch had been refilled but Cone itself had been whipped out, I noticed.

At first, I thought Ferdy had broken its neck and stuck it in his breast pocket. I came across it later on in a big fancy cage on the terrace, copying the noise-patterns of the pool-pump, and the sound of Dolores being nice to the goldfish, and the sound of Aurelio being nice to Dolores. Cone couldn’t tell them apart any more than the rest of us.

Natalie sat behind the big desk, shining, fresh and expensive in candy-striped linen, ticking things off on a pad as she told me about them.

There was an American magazine arriving that afternoon. Interview in the house; photographs in the house and the garden. She required me at one sharp for make-up. After that, I was free until five. Tick.

At six she was going to a drinks party. At eight, she and Mr Braithwaite and her lawyer were to dine at the Sheraton with her guest of last night. Fresh make-up, of course, and an evening coiffure. Had I got it? Excellent. Tick.

She would also like to say, while she remembered, that Mr Curtis had always been discreet when watching adult films, and she would prefer me to do this, if I must, when staff and visitors would not be involved. Tick and double tick.

I agreed. She was entitled. And her voice was still five pegs down, with no edge to it.

In fact, when she spoke again, it was almost social. She said, ‘Which leads me to two further points. Mr Glutterimacher was interested, it seems, in what he saw. He has asked me about you, and about Mr Curtis. Following that I had a talk late last night with Mr Curtis in which he told me what perhaps you already know. That his health may force him to give up his job with me permanently.’

She had her dark glasses on, with her eyes fixed on me from behind them. I didn’t know Kim-Jim had had to tell her so soon. I did know the answer we’d agreed on.

I said, ‘No, I didn’t know. I thought he was just on vacation. What’s wrong, then?’

She went on looking at me while she made up her mind. Then she hauled in a back-straightening breath, balanced it, and used it like celery.

‘I think I should leave him to tell you himself. The point is, he believes you capable of taking over.’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It’s make-up I’m keen on. Not desk-work.’

‘I can hire help for desk-work,’ said Mrs Sheridan. She took off her glasses and fixed me again with her showy blue eyes. ‘That is the other point. I have always done a certain amount of filmmaking. You may know. Documentaries, of course.’

I did. I gazed at her. It didn’t put her off .

She said, ‘I shall be doing more. I shall need help. It will involve travel. And immediately, I have a large scheme in prospect. A four-part television serial on the life of the Empress Josephine. I shall write and present it. Some, but not all, of the scenes will use actors. Mr Braithwaite will be responsible for the art direction, and he and I will travel together, very soon, to look at possible sites, and take photographs.’

She paused, but I knew what was coming. I said, ‘Who’ll direct and co-produce? Is it fixed yet?’

It was, provisionally. And the two names she mentioned were good ones.

She said, ‘I have asked you to think about a long-term arrangement, Rita, because Mr Gluttenmacher thinks, and so of course do I, that your work would be an asset to such a series.

‘It would mean that, once filming starts, you would split your time between that and my personal service. Since Mr Gluttenmacher would be taking the financial risk, I have told him I should be agreeable. I am offering you therefore a permanent job, with the prospect of some very lucrative film work.’

Had he twisted her arm? Had she really wanted me? I couldn’t tell. I wanted to say yes, fast, and get her to sign something. Instead I said, ‘The film sounds great. But Mr Curtis should do it.’

She gave no sign of recognising nobility when she saw it.

‘Naturally,’ she said, ‘I have asked him. His health, he says, makes it impossible. You are interested, then?’

Chief make-up artist even on a prestigious documentary series was no peak in anyone’s career. My name would come a foot and a half after the actors’ credits, and wouldn’t appear in the papers at all. But it would get me known in the trade outside Britain. If I wanted to work outside Britain. And some real plums might come my way next time.

On top of that, I should be working with Ferdy, who was good news, even when hung over. And who might tell me what the film was about.

I knew one thing about the Empress Josephine. She married Napoleon, and blew it. To people like me, Napoleon’s career might be a blank. But his one-liner ‘Not tonight, Josephine’ is the sort of thing that stays in your software for ever.

I didn’t know where Napoleon lived, but it wasn’t Madeira. I said to Mrs Sheridan, ‘I’d have to go away with you? Now?’

I must have sounded unwilling. She used her smile. ‘Not quite as quickly as that. We leave in two or three weeks. I want to start work where Josephine started. I want to look at Martinique.’

‘Oh,’ I said.

Her eyelids shut slowly, stretching like Cone, but she was still smiling when she opened them. From a shelf at her side she lifted an atlas like Atlas, heaved it open, and turned it round to show me.

‘Martinique. That island there, in the West Indies. That’s where Josephine lived.’

‘Across the Atlantic,’ I said.

She was following my thoughts. She was good at it.

‘A long way from Scotland,’ she agreed. ‘Beautiful, though. A lot warmer than here. Flowers. Coconut palms. Excellent beaches. And a chance I think you’re ready for, if you’re not afraid to take it. And worth, Rita, a very good fee.’

She told me the fee. It was great. Again, I nearly said yes, but I didn’t. I said I’d like to, but I had to think about it. I had a mother in hospital. I didn’t know if I could get out of other things. I told a lot of lies, and she accepted them, and said that she quite understood.

She didn’t really.

It was true about Robina, but I was thinking of other things too. About the nutter. About Kim-Jim in the months ahead when even a voice at the end of a phone might be nice for him. I didn’t want to leave Madeira just yet.

But she had made it pretty plain. No film, no job with her. You don’t offend the Fred Gluttenmachers.

I said it sounded great, and I should give her my answer as soon as I could, and I thanked her for her really nice offer.

She wasn’t worried. She assumed I was mostly working to screw up my salary. She said, ‘That’s fine then,’ and threw me a smile. She had already made her tick on the notepad.

I was at the door before she added something.

‘Oh, by the way. I phoned the airport this morning. Our friend Mr Roger van Diemen has flown out. On the 7.15 for Frankfurt via Lisbon. I hope you’re as pleased about that as I am.’

I was pretty pleased.

I was pretty pleased about everything, but it wasn’t going to stop me. It wasn’t going to stop me nosing about until, somehow, I got my own back on the absent Van Damn, and made sure that Kim-Jim was safe from him.

Safe from him, and from any bastards who worked for him.

I spent the morning nosing with Ferdy. It put me off flowers for life. We borrowed Aurelio’s station-wagon, and filled it with Ferdy’s camera case and satchels and the text of Dr Carl Thomassen, the botanist, sexy or otherwise, who was writing the book Ferdy was illustrating.

We also put in a pair of steps and some bluetack and drawing-pins and a lot of green cord, for photographing flowers growing naturally in the wild but not in the right attitudes.

Then we added some gardening gloves, a lot of polythene bags and some wet cotton wool in big baskets, plus two sharp pairs of tacky-sewers for cutting wild flowers and photographing them growing wild in Natalie’s workroom.

I asked Ferdy, during this, what he thought of Natalie’s offer and he said, Grab it. Natalie Sheridan was not, I would notice, Mrs Tiggywinkle, but she was a clever, professional lady used to getting the best as well as giving it. Anyone who worked with her was bound to be noticed.

About Kim-Jim, he was helluva sorry, but there were compensations. I could help him, Ferdy, load his cameras. And at last he would get all the dirt about Natalie, without having to extract it by water cannon.

I promised to tell him, if I took the job, the minute she took up with Andy Warhol. I was glad to see his hangover go. I felt quite a lot better myself. Ferdy did that to you.

We drove to the Rua das Dificuldades, what else, at the bottom of the Carro do Monte, or sledge-run, and found out that the sledges, when empty, were stacked in the Rua do Comboio with their ropes out.

Anyone could have produced an old, doctored sledge. Anyone could have put a grotty rope in, instead of a good one.

No joy from that.

On the way we stopped and photographed a Fetish Tree, which was bare. Dangling from it were a lot of unhealthy green globes like grenades. I supposed Ferdy was clearing the text with the Vatican.

We also nabbed a high-angle shot of a mimosa tree at the bridge by the dockyard. I let the steps rock, and got bawled out. I was looking at Pal Johnson’s yacht, and wishing I’d taken up portrait-painting.

We drove up to the top of the sledge-run, watched in fear and trembling by all the Hammers, who thought we’d come back to sue them.

It turned out that the two guys who’d pushed off our sledge were on their way in a taxi to Ferdy, Kim-Jim and me with bunches of flowers and written apologies from everybody from the Delegacao do Turismo da Madeira downwards.

They were also briefed to point out that it wasn’t their rope, and the sledge had been tampered with. And that their normal Sledge-Hammering safety record went back unbeaten to before the invention of wood.

Actually, I believed them, and after a bit, I could see Ferdy did too.

‘O.K.,’ I said, ‘but what about Eduardo?’

Eduardo was at home, they all said. How could I think Eduardo was responsible, when Eduardo had been away, because of his mother-in-law’s baby?

Which had arrived, I was interested to hear. A boy, nine pounds in weight and made by nature, Senhora, for a career on the Carro do Monte.

A bouncing boy, it would seem.

I thought I would like to visit Eduardo.

Eduardo lived at Camara de Lobos, a village built on its ear on the coast. We photographed a thing covered with sort of scarlet bananas, called a Coral Tree, and a thing with red drooping leaves called a Custard Apple Tree, and a thing like a green pin-cushion called a Dragon Tree.

At Camara, we got directions to Eduardo’s house from a guy selling turtles at the fish market. The turtles were all rocking about on their backs with their wee mouths tight shut and their flippers out.

My wee mouth wasn’t shut. Ferdy got me away, and we ran for it.

The sun was getting hot. The sea in the harbour was blue, and there were a lot of palm trees with shadows like mine. We jogged up a steep cobbled path and found Eduardo’s wife sweeping the steps of a shabby, red-roofed white house, with five assorted kids and some cats playing round her.

From the size of her apron, Eduardo’s mother-in-law’s baby was nearly an uncle. I don’t know how that man ever got time to sledge anywhere.

She didn’t have any English, so we got out the dictionary. It ended up as a sort of committee job including the neighbours.

We needn’t have bothered. Eduardo had never mentioned his hat. She didn’t know anything about an accident at the sledges. Eduardo wasn’t here anyway, but at his mother-in-law’s on the San Vicente road. Drive west, and turn up to the right.

She gave us the address when we asked for it, once she understood the accident wasn’t Eduardo’s fault. She also took the money Ferdy gave her, for the children.

We said our
obrigados
and got down to where we had parked the wagon, which was full of pale blue clusters of Plumbago, which I thought was a pain in the back, and red Mexican creeper, and those seamless white lilies you see at weddings and funeral parlours; all covered with pages of the
Diario
to keep off the sun, which was going to bleach the chrome out of my hair if it got any hotter.

I had to get back soon. We looked at the time, and decided to try for Eduardo.

We drove along the coast past the bougainvillaea and the palm trees and the little houses with pots of orchids on the steps, and cacti, and zulus, and patches of pink and white flowering fruit trees, and, growing wild, clumps of red-hot pokers like Robina my mother grows. Grew.

We turned up the San Vicente road as directed, and it was snowing.

Ferdy, who spends all long car journeys singing opera in the original tongue, finished a very low part from Prince Eager, and started swearing instead as the wagon began skidding and squelching through cuttings as steep as the sledge-ride, with snowy pine forests on top of them.

Around us suddenly were these Disney-type mountain peaks, with lower hills all ridged with terraces, as if someone had taken a palette knife round them. Joining them were ladders of little green steps, cut into the slope, with grey reed cabins dotted about, with their thatches bound neatly with willow.

Perched on the ridges were square buildings with black boilers beside them, sending up white steam beside faggots of cut cane.

Low down, there were plantings of cabbages, and bananas with potatoes between them, and thickets of lilies, their big fleshy leaves mixed with mummified Rangers.

The slush slid off into deep roadside gutters of rushing white water. The road got higher, and small peaks in valleys began moving past big peaks in the distance, with snow on them, and waterfalls like bits of frayed cotton.

The snow turned to rain and you saw there were farms about, and people working. Someone forking seaweed on to a patch. A lot of people moving about in a vineyard, with their black umbrellas hanging open upside down on the boughs.

Which reminded me why we were here.

I said, ‘We ought to be near Eduardo’s house.’

There was quite a lot of traffic. Lorries loaded with cane and bananas and workmen in round hats with earflaps and pom-poms came downhill towards us, driving round tumbled boulders, or it might be a wet black sheep with long legs like a goat. In the hiccough when Ferdy changed gear, you could hear a lot of birds singing, as well as the clang of sheep bells all over, and, of course, the sound of water pouring downhill like a dam busting.

I thought it was the hell of a place to have a nine-pound baby.

Eduardo’s mother-in-law’s house was nearly on the road, with a lot of kids walking up to it, pulling a sledge piled with green stuff, and no doubt starting their sledge training early. They all carried knives shaped like the Coombe’s banana symbol.

The house was two storeys high, with an outside stair, and its grey thatch had weathered like tidemarks. The roof corners were pegged with clay pigeons.

We got out, and found the rain easing off, and the puddles deep, and yellow as poster-paint. The door was opened by an old soul with her head in a shawl, and wellies showing beneath her black petties.

I had an idea she was Eduardo’s wife’s grandmother, and was probably about Ferdy’s age. Such things don’t seem to strike Ferdy. She didn’t like the look of my hair.

A lot of escudos improved matters, but she still wouldn’t let us come in. She had no English at all, and none of her words were in the dictionary, being made, it seemed, entirely of bullets.

Ferdy, who wanted to get back to a Judas Tree, was all for chucking it in. We were saved this time by one of the children, wearing a dress over flared trousers, who stood embracing her cutlass and told us that Cousin Eduardo was at Monte, with the sledges.

Ferdy, who earns a fortune snapping the young of the wealthy, dropped to his hunkers, admired her dress, her trousers, her earrings, her hair and her chopper, and told her we’d been there and he wasn’t.

She said that in that case, who knew?

In the end, Ferdy gave her a coin from his pocket and then, under mob attack, flung what he had to the other kids. Finally he drew out a large, healthy piece of paper money, and announced that he wished to lay something, in person, in the cot of the new little one.

It didn’t get us into the house. They brought the newest little one out, all of eleven hours old, with a white felted cap pulled down as far as the snib of its freezing red nose.

It didn’t pinch me, but it did look like Eduardo. I had even started to say so, when Ferdy put his arm round my shoulders, and nearly twisted me silly, which was just as well, when I worked it out later.

From the back yard rose a thick column of steam, and the noise of regular bubbling. I had planned to walk round the house, and even look into a window or two, but three men had come out, and a couple of younger women and a few more children and a dog, and it was like looking at a meeting of the Godfathers’ Union, Members Only night.

We turned, shivering in our gear for Madeira the Floating Garden: the Island of Gentle Summers, and made our way back to the wagon, where the Floating Flowers were dying of winter.

We raced back down to the coast, to be in time for Natalie’s make-up.

It was sizzling hot. All the hotel swimming pools were full of brown people. The palm trees shone like green varnished feathers, and all the flowers writhed about waiting for Ferdy in masses of pink and orange and yellow and purple.

No one had told us that there could be a forty-degree difference between the mountains and the coast in the spring-time. Eduardo’s wife’s parents needed their heads examined.

We got back in time, although there were moments when I thought Ferdy’s flowers had a better chance of making it than we had. We howled down to the sea with Ferdy’s bracelets jangling and his sideburns lifting like gullwings.

Among the cars that we passed was this little sports job, with open windows and water-skis strapped on the roof.

I wouldn’t have noticed, if the sun hadn’t lit up the driver. A tall, tanned young man with a mop of frizzed yellow hair.

A man I’d seen before.

Wearing black. Running down the fire ecape of 17
b
. Sneaking into and out of Owner Johnson’s posh bedroom.

I screamed for Ferdy to stop, and he wouldn’t. He said he wasn’t going to stop, even if I’d seen Eduardo. I began to say it wasn’t Eduardo, and then thought what the hell.

I didn’t need Ferdy. If this yellow-haired thug was on Madeira, I’d find him. If, on second thoughts, I even wanted him.

You might say I had enough on my plate over Kim-Jim, without taking up the Owner’s private life as a hobby.

Really, I was only interested in Johnson’s problems as a way of getting even with Johnson.

My aunty in Troon was dead right. I wasn’t a very nice girl.

All the same, I decided, as I stepped trembling out of the wagon and helped Ferdy collect his wilting sex-fiends.

All the same, I thought. When I’d had lunch and fixed Natalie for her interview, I might see if she’d loan me some water-skis.