Dolly and the Bird of Paradise - Dorothy Dunnett - Johnson Johnson 01 (4 page)

I tumbled back to my room when the voices stopped. But instead of Johnson’s door opening, there was a rattle of curtain rings. His guest was using the window, the balcony and the fire escape.

There was a view of the fire escape from the studio. I didn’t switch on any lights. I just stood in my quilt, and watched this broad-shouldered menace in black come out of the Owner’s room and whizz silently down.

I saw his face in the mews light, and it was battered and tough, like those guys who get sent to the Sitwells. His hair was curly and yellow.

I slipped back to the hall. In the room of the Owner and host, a window closed and I heard curtains shutting again. No wonder he hadn’t wanted the building roused.

Whatever the quarrel had been, no one had slugged him, it seemed, at the end of it.

Pity.

I didn’t know what he was up to, but in his state it couldn’t be much. You meet all sorts in show business and nothing in the sex line surprises me, which is not to say all of it appeals to me.

I had no doubt, really, that Ferdy’s pal hadn’t been murdered, but it was a shame to go to bed without checking it.

I tapped on Johnson’s door, neatly wrapped in my quilt, and asked him if he would like a wee cup of tea to send him over.

I was ready for most things except absolute silence.

I gave him time to be in the bathroom, get his glasses on, find his stick, put on his dressing-gown, get the other three guys out from under the bed.

I gave him time to die, and then stopped tapping and turned the door handle.

This time the door was locked. No punk with pink and blue hair was going to turn over his bedroom again.

I nearly went to phone for help. He must have realised, then, that if he didn’t answer, that’s what would happen.

He spoke.

He said, ‘Miss Geddes. Will you get the hell back to your room and
leave me alone
?’

That looks almost polite. You didn’t hear the voice that he said it in.

I picked up my quilt and got out of it.

The next time I woke in 17
b
it was daylight, and the streets were full of window-cleaning vans and bankers and shop girls, which meant that eight-thirty had not yet clanged everywhere. As I got up, one of the Persian carpets shut off its alarm, and soon the other did.

My hair was a mess. Leaving my lashes lying, I went to the kitchen, and found the Enemy already there with his stick, boiling a kettle.

His hair was combed, and he had his glasses and his dressing-gown on and an unsurprised expression, which meant that he had heard me moving about although I hadn’t heard him.

I wasn’t sure what he would say, but he’d brought back his manner to neuter. ‘Good morning,’ he said.

No skin off my nose. (More’s the pity, as my Geddes aunt in Troon was happy to say.)

I hadn’t expected to see him. My feet were bare, and I hadn’t yet pulled on my gauchos, but I wasn’t bothered. I had a long shirt on.

I said, ‘Oh, hullo. I came through for some eggs. Don’t you do something, all of you, about those shop alarms?’

His kettle was singing. Using his stick, he moved about, collecting tea and a teapot and stuff with one hand. ‘The eggs are over there,’ he said. ‘Did the alarms keep you awake as well? I’m sorry about the excursions.’

Excursions wasn’t what I would have called them. I took four eggs, cracked and separated them, and put the whites into the mixer. ‘It didn’t worry me,’ I said. ‘You’ll scald yourself with that kettle.’ Ferdy wouldn’t like it, and I didn’t know where the lint was. I lifted the kettle for him, filled his teapot, and went back to scoop my eggs into a bowl ready to take out.

He didn’t ask why I wasn’t cooking them. He just said, ‘I suppose everyone asks you this. What do you do with the yolks?’

‘That’s for your diet,’ I said. ‘If I have to go, I’ll leave you some lunch. Just general invalid mush?’

It was pretty rude, the way it came out. Instead of pouring his tea, he put his back against Poggenpohl’s best, and apparently settled for entering the contest. In a sort of a way.

He said, ‘Do you have a boyfriend?’

None of Ferdy’s queer friends are anything to do with me, but I like to know where I am. Now I knew where I was. I said, ‘It doesn’t bother me, what people do. Don’t drag me into it.’

He gave some thought to that. Then he said, ‘Last night… I didn’t mean to be short. It was awkward.’

‘Pass him to me when you’ve finished with him,’ I said. Stupidly.

I saw him field that. He knew I’d heard something, but not that I’d seen anything. He said, taking it in, ‘You were watching.’

It was time to get out of the subject. He was well-known, and loaded, with a reputation to protect. I didn’t want him to see me as a danger. An annoyance, O.K., but not a danger. I wanted friends in high places, not enemies.

I said, ‘I’ve got a very short memory. You’ll have noticed.’ I tried the whipped whites with my finger.

The bifocals remained trained on my face. Then, whatever he saw, his lips almost appeared. He said, ‘Yes, I’ve noticed. Who rang last night?’

‘Mr Braithwaite,’ I said. ‘Just to say he couldn’t come back.’

He waited, and I let him. He didn’t prompt me. After a bit, I said, ‘Well, there were others, but I don’t remember them. Just get-well calls. I hadn’t a pencil.’

‘I see,’ he said. That was all. Not the world’s greatest talker. He turned round, propped himself up and began pouring tea. I went back to my room and rubbed the eggs into my hair to fix the spikes again.

The doorbell rang twice while I was doing it: once with milk and the papers, and once for the post. The kitchen was empty again, so I put the milk in it, and left the papers and mail on the hall table.

Bessie appeared in the hall, and stood at the door hopefully in a cloud of old dog. I’d forgotten her.

I went to look for my gloves, but couldn’t find them. I put on my gauchos and stockings and boots, and lifting my shawl, went to ask Bessie’s boss where the leash was.

He was making his bed, I was glad to see. He told me what I wanted to know, thanked me on Bessie’s behalf, and asked me to wait while he looked for something.

It was a fresh, sharpened pencil. I didn’t give him the papers or the letters. If he was feeling that full of beans, he could get them himself.

This time Bessie didn’t make it out to the pavement. It was Ned and Josser on duty and, for a moment, the smiles disappeared, but Ferdy, whatever his faults, must have done them proud before leaving. The doorkeeper took a deep breath, and the last I saw, he’d got a pail out of the cleaning cupboard, and had gone to look for hot water.

I walked beside Bessie past the most interesting shops and then lost my bloody way. I got back, with some trouble, through the Rolls parade.

I had meant to be earlier. Mrs Sheridan, for example, might be trying to phone me.

Outside 17
b
an elegant, youngish woman in a tweed suit and scarf was raising her hand to the doorbell. She turned at the sound of the lift, clucked to Bessie, and then gave me a doubtful smile. ‘Is Mrs Margate still away?’ she said. ‘I’m an old friend of Mr Johnson’s. I just wondered how he was this morning.’

It was the voice of Joanna’s mother, from yesterday’s overheard phone call. Come, no doubt, to see what was small, tough and Scottish.

I said, opening the door, ‘He was sweeping the floor when I left him. What name shall I say?’

She followed me in, gazing at everything. ‘Emerson. Lady Emerson,’ she said. There was a new pile of letters, stamped and ready for posting on the table, and I saw her glance at them, while she petted Bessie. She was good-looking.

I left her there while I looked for the Owner, who had moved, I found, to the sitting-room. He heard, without comment, that he had a female visitor. His face kept itself to itself, as well, when he heard who it was. He just asked me to show her in.

I heard her say, Jay, you look awful. I have an ultimatum.’

I didn’t hear his reply, but I heard the tone of it, before the door shut firmly behind her.

I now knew how he felt about female visitors. If he’d been bleak with her on the phone, now he was freezing.

There were three phone calls. Two were from friends of the Owner. One was for me. Mrs Sheridan required the services of Miss Rita Geddes, that afternoon at her hotel.

Miss Rita Geddes said she’d be there, thank you.

The Emerson woman stayed for ten minutes, and then came into the hall to ask if she could make coffee for Mr Johnson. Her expression, before she changed it, could be called grim.

I had switched a pot on for myself, and found some jazz on a portable radio, which I hoped no one wanted back in the sitting-room. While I got cups, she went to fetch milk from the cupboard.

She said, ‘He gets a lot of letters, doesn’t he? Are they still coming?’ She had to shout a bit, so I turned the jazz down.

The second post had just come. I went out and scooped the mail up and showed it her. She put down the milk, and sorting through it, took out all the stuff that was handwritten.

‘Do you suppose,’ she said, ‘that all the private ones, the ones like that, could get themselves lost for a day or two?’

‘He’d notice,’ I said.

‘Give him a few at a time, then,’ she said. ‘But not all of them. In a week or two, it’ll be different.’

I said, ‘It’s up to Mrs Margate, not me. I’ll give him his lunch, though.’

The devoted correspondence took on a new meaning. I was safe as houses if the Owner was the bedridden organiser of a Gay Club.

The coffee was perking, and I poured it. She said, ‘You’ve been very good. You work for Mr Braithwaite, don’t you?’

‘I’m a freelance,’ I said. ‘I’m with Natalie Sheridan this afternoon. So Mr Johnson will have to manage, I’m afraid, if his housekeeper doesn’t come back before evening.’

‘Of course, I understand that,’ said Lady Emerson. ‘I phoned the agency this morning to get a capable woman along. Someone with nursing training, who could take telephone messages and exercise Bessie.’

She hesitated, and then went to her handbag and lifted it. ‘It occurs to me that, cut off from his bank, Mr Johnson maybe hasn’t been able to thank you properly?’

She opened her bag.

‘Oh, not at all,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t dream of it. He can always write me a cheque anyhow, can’t he? The coffee’s getting stone cold.’

I put the two cups on the tray with the spoons and sugar and milk, and she picked it up and went off to the sitting-room. I switched to the news and enjoyed a cup on my own, with some biscuits I’d discovered. I’d already found a place for the unwanted letters.

There didn’t seem much sense to me in answering letters and not answering phone calls. But you never know what the boss class is playing at. Anyway, it wasn’t my funeral.

The Emerson woman left fairly soon, and then someone called Ballantyne phoned, and I remembered just in time to tell him so that he could take the call himself, after I had plugged in the phone under his bed.

When I heard him ring off, I went in to unplug it, carrying the Oscar Peterson programme I was listening to while I was cooking. I didn’t realise he was speaking until he asked me the same thing twice over.

It was something about the other calls. When I told him my pencil had broken he was distinctly not amused. He seemed, however, too fed up to go on about it. Or thought it wiser not to.

I hoped the capable woman didn’t mind queer invalids who fussed about telephone calls.

The doctor came just as the steamed fish was ready.

Like all the Owner’s well-brought-up friends, he greeted me as if he’d known me for ever, and asked after the housekeeper and Bessie, who came out and drooled over his trousers.

He seemed surprised to find Mr Johnson not in his bedroom, but opened the sitting-room door and went in with a broad doctor’s smile. I heard the Owner calling him Henry. You couldn’t tell, of course, whether anyone was on first-name terms with Johnson or not.

He was in a long time, and I ate the fish, since it was spoiling and I was hungry. After a while I thought I heard a voice in the hall, and turning the radio down, went out to find Henry leaving.

He did not, thank God, mention kindness to cripples, but just talked about Bessie. He’d had a look at the poor dear old bitch, and he agreed with the vet that she couldn’t last, although it wasn’t the time to tell Mr Johnson.

I said, ‘He’ll get more of a shock if she dies on him. Would the vet put her down?’

‘He’s been waiting to do it,’ the doctor said. ‘Should have done it, to my mind, when he had the chance. On the other hand…’

He stopped, and then said, ‘Anyway, it’s lucky you were here this morning. I’m sorry I’ve interrupted your lunch. It smells good. You keep cheering him up now, eh?’

Another bum. The way I felt, he’d be lucky if we just kept life ticking over, never mind bombarding the Owner with cheerfulness. And he’d be still less cheery when he found out I’d eaten his fish.

When I carried his lunch in, he didn’t seem amazed to find it was based on four egg yolks. Asked what he wanted to drink, he suggested a glass of red wine each, and told me where to look for the bottles.

I’d seen them, actually, every time I took out the vodka.

I opened a chloride and poured him one, and then one for myself, and took it to the other coffee-table in the sitting-room, since he asked me. As the wine mixed with the vodka and I began to feel less unfriendly, I told him I was leaving for Mrs Sheridan’s.

‘Of course. You make her up, don’t you?’ he said. I had cooked him a good, nourishing dish, with cheese and onions and bacon as well as eggs in it, and he was working on it through his bifocals.

I was about to agree, when I remembered he and Natalie knew the same people. I said, ‘She has her own man for that usually. Kim-Jim Curtis. I do her in London.’

‘Kim-Jim Curtis doesn’t mind?’ he said. His wineglass was empty, and I got up and filled it.

‘Kim-Jim? No,’ I said. ‘He recommended me to Mrs Sheridan.’

Johnson said, ‘I suppose all make-up professionals know one another?’

‘We all know
of
one another,’ I said. ‘We all watch one another’s work, and use the same materials, and listen to all the new discoveries and everything. Some people do private work only, and some do magazine and society photographs, and some do general T.V. and screen work, and some specialise in characters or special effects.’

I broke off. He had had a lot of wine. He said, ‘Go on, I’m not bored yet.’

He was just being cheeky, not patronising. I like talking about what I do. I said, ‘Well. Some people are rubber specialists, like Chris Tucker and Stuart Freeborn. That’s working in prosthetics. Masks and noses and cheek pieces and everything. Karen Bauer does severed heads. Some like animal masks. Some people, like me, like doing work for impersonators. But I do a bit of everything.’

He said, ‘You sound as if you like screen work more than painting up Natalie Sheridan.’

I’d had a lot to drink too. I said, ‘I’d like to work for her for a bit. She knows how to dress. You can make a lot of her. And she knows a lot of people. That’s useful, when you’re a freelance. But I do sort of like the creative side. When you’ve got to find your own way through a problem. It’s an awful new industry. There are lots of things you’ve got to think out and invent for yourself. I like that.’

‘I can see that,’ said Johnson. He gazed at a forkful of quiche. ‘Is it such a new business? I thought you had families in the trade already. Like circuses.’

I’d forgotten he was an art college man. I said, ‘That’s true. I expect you know them. The Nyes. The Partleton brothers. Tony Sforzini and his daughter. Mrs Sheridan’s make-up man is one of the American Curtises, and they go back to the old M.G.M. epics. Of course, face paint is as old as Time, but it only really came into its own with the film industry.’

‘That’s the Kim-Jim Curtis you mentioned,’ Johnson said. ‘Does he stay with Mrs Sheridan?’ Invited, I had given myself more of the chloride. ‘What’s known as a house-guest?’

‘She goes in for house-guests,’ I said. ‘But he’s the permanent one. Works like a dog.’

I remembered something. I didn’t want to talk about Kim-Jim anyway. I said, ‘You’ve got a problem with Bessie.’