Rum Affair (12 page)

In the warm, dark air of the terrace, Johnson’s bifocals shone like old bottles. “Of course. Of course,” he said. “I’d forgotten. The wolf of Crinan. You’ll enjoy seeing over his boat, but don’t let him bore you. I’ll send Rupert over if you like in about an hour to fetch you both over. Or is that presumptuous?”

“No, Johnson,” I said suddenly, “you are a man, I find, of considerable experience.”

“In some things.” He took out his pipe, and the harbour lights flashed on his glasses. “I have only one rule. I never offer advice.”

To hell with Johnson, as well.

Stanley Hennessy’s yacht was magnificent and so, I must say, was he. Large and charming, he waited by the companionway, and below my feet sank into bearskin while one of the three silent helpers, in white jacket, served coffee and salignac. Later, brandy in hand, I was taken on tour.

I had never seen so much electrical equipment.
Symphonetta’s
engine room was like a small bakery plant, so hygienic and sparkling. Her electronic gear was the equal nearly of
Evergreen’s,
and she had a wardrobe of sail that would outfit the Americas Cup.

Nor did Mr Hennessy swear, as do the Buchanans, by the maps and tips of the Good Book alone. On the chartroom shelves were over seventy Admiralty sheets, all of the Scottish west coast.

When I mentioned
Evergreen
back in the saloon, Hennessy was amused. “My God, the pride of the Fol de Rols! Don’t say you had to spend an evening in the only floating Wimpy Bar with its own cabaret. I should think these two poor old things are certifiable by now.”

He got up, after knocking the third brandy back. “Madame Rossi, I’m a lonely man, and you’re good for me. Come. I’ve boasted about my boat long enough. Come and show me where this lovely drawing should hang.”

Guess where. I let him take me as far as the master stateroom, because when he got there, he slid open a baize-lined drawer in a dressing table and produced, not the drawing, but a small leather case containing a marquise and baguette diamond bracelet worth maybe four thousand pounds. The case said Wartski, and it looked new. He must have followed my thought, for he said thickly: “It wasn’t my wife’s. It’s for you, Tina. For you.”

It was a gamble he took. It is a gamble they all take. I have a name, a standing; I cannot be forced. If I choose to sleep with them, they have been lucky, this throw. If I do not, and nine times out of ten, ninety-nine out of a hundred I do not, then they must act the good loser, and hope for my interest next time. For the jewels I keep, always.

Anyway, that night I had enough on my mind without Stanley Hennessy. I smiled; I heard my voice automatically saying the right, the routine things; and I brought him back to the saloon because he had drunk a good deal, and I did not want to use blonde Blue Grass make-up tonight. With the bracelet clasped on my wrist, I allowed him to kiss my hand, and then my arm. Then I retired for a cooling period to a room with a lock; and when I returned we talked about his sugar and cotton estates, and his family shipping line to Latin America, and his other interests abroad. He was like all tycoons, utterly hypnotised by himself. I did not mind. These days, if I subjected myself to boredom, I first made sure of my fee.

All the same, I was glad when Rupert’s hail came from the quayside. It was amusing to see Hennessy’s temper flare: he had spent an hour creating for me an image, and here was Rupert, all careless young gentry, to spoil it. “I really doubt,” I heard Stanley saying on deck, “if the lady is interested in beer parlour juvenilia.”

Rupert’s voice, still mild, said: “It’s not quite as ripe as that, sir, although I won’t claim that everyone is stone cold sober like yourself. We thought she’d like to hear some mouth music and a bit of piping, maybe. Won’t you come yourself, sir?”

“Where? To
Blue Kitten?” Blue Kitten,
I recalled, had the pipes.

“No – we’re all on
Cara Mia,
Tom Moody’s boat. Madame Rossi?”

I was up on deck, in the lamp-lit darkness, by the time he called me, but Stanley Hennessy, his back to me, did not give way. Instead he said drily: “I imagine your young beat friends would interest her even less. Mouth music! More likely readings of Genet and reefers.”

Rupert was angry too. “No doubt. Do come sir,” he said, “then if anyone falls in the oggin, you’ll know what to do.”

For a big man, Stanley Hennessy was very light on his feet. One brandy less, and he would have lifted Rupert clean over the side. As it was, he caught him a glancing blow on the jaw which Rupert, swaying, almost entirely deflected. For a moment, he looked like replying; then turning quickly, he stepped down to the quay, breathing hard. He had seen me.

“I’m sorry, Madame Rossi,” said Rupert. “Mr Hennessy, I apologise. But you’ll admit you’re pretty damned ready to run down me and my friends. You can’t expect everyone to lie down and take it. Will you ask Madame Rossi if she wants to come?”

“Stanley.” I put my hand, with the diamond bracelet on it, on Hennessy’s arm. “We’re all tired, but I mustn’t offend Johnson: he
is
my host. Forgive the boy. To be young is to be silly, we know.”

“The boy can go to hell,” said Hennessy forcibly.
“After
I’ve seen the colour of his five thousand pounds.” And, white with temper, he led me onto the quay, whence, in silence, Rupert and I walked to Moody’s big motor yacht.

Really, men are impossible.

On
Cara Mia,
which was an expensive mess, there was everybody, except perhaps Cecil Ogden. The dotty subdebs had become, if possible, a little more undressed, and the resident males had become a little tight. But Johnson was there, his feet up, and there also were the QC from
Blue Kitten
and
Mina’s
professor with guitar, and a CA’s family, and the two Buchanans from
Binkie,
in clean shirts, exchanging blood-curdling reminiscences of something named, impossibly, the Cooing Sound. I recalled one of Johnson’s remarks during dinner. “You haven’t lived,” he had said, “until you’ve had a ten-tonner read you his logbook.”

The tape had changed to what Rupert, jeering, referred to as quiet, showbiz pop. And indeed, it was not overloud, except when the pipes and the guitar were playing together.

That was the party I sang at. I remember in the middle saying impatiently to Johnson: “Shall I sing?”

He didn’t even lift his damned glasses from the duet of
Westering Home,
but merely remarked: “Depends what you charge.”

So, of course, I sang. There is a rather good ballad, which takes a lot of experience and breath control, but has an impact quite its own, particularly at drunken parties. I launched into it in the first perceptible pause in the riot, and you could have heard a mouse sneeze by the second bar.

Whatever Michael may say, absolute rest does my voice nothing but good. It came, high and pure and childlike, and I can tell you, sustained head notes are hell. Victoria was crying.

“Perhaps the moon is shining for you in the far country ...

But the skies there are not island skies ...

Do ... you not remember the salt smell of the sea?

And the little rain?”

I gripped the last note in my diaphragm like a nut in a nutcracker and diminished it, and it was magnificent. I can usually tell to a second how long a silence will hold before the applause breaks out, but that was a record. Then I sang the Waltz Song from
Romeo and Juliet.
It couldn’t miss. And it didn’t. Who needs Michael Twiss?

When we finally went home to
Dolly
the sky was pale in the east and Rupert’s arms were tightening round the matelassé as he lifted me on board in a way that made Johnson’s bifocals twinkle like butter dishes. I said: “What a silly encounter that was, Rupert, between you and Hennessy. What on earth did it mean?”

Rupert put me down in the cockpit. Johnson, following, said with interest: “Yes. Tell her. Me too, Rupert. What did it mean?”

In the flood of light from my cabin, Rupert visibly blushed. “It was my fault. I took a swipe at him. But he has bloody bad manners at the best of times. And to imply that everyone under twenty is a layabout or a junkie or a ponce just because his Frederick got hooked on Amphetamine and jumped into the sea is a bit this side of too much.”

“His son?”

Johnson had switched on the saloon lights, and forward I saw Lenny busy with cocoa in big jugs. “Yes. His wife died of cancer some years ago, while Hennessy was playing about with some starlet. Then the son drowned himself off
Symphonetta,
and Hennessy wasn’t a good enough seaman to save him. Hence the killing drive for perfection ever since. He’ll blame anyone except the boy. Rupert went to school with him, you see. Hennessy can never forgive him for knowing the story.”

I took my cocoa from Lenny. It was steaming hot. And in my bed, I knew, would be an electric blanket, with my nightdress on it, folded and warm. Already, the dawn air was stirring my hair. On my arm, Hennessy’s diamonds sparkled and danced. I said: “All the same, Rupert, it was unfair, surely, to throw the thing in his teeth.”

“All right, I apologised,” said Rupert, eyeing Johnson as if he and not I had made the remark. “But don’t run away with the idea that Mr Stanley Hennessy is a figure of tragedy. It’s a safe bet that a few hundred daddies lose their Fredericks for every cargo the Latin Shipping Line carries.”

There was a little silence. Then: “That’s only a rather uninformed guess, Rupert,” said Johnson gently. “Let Tina make up her own mind.”

I said nothing, but I was not very surprised. I had heard of gunrunning, of course. And at least some of Mr Stanley Hennessy’s superb equipment for
Symphonetta,
I had already noticed, was made in regions of Europe and Asia where British yacht owners rarely drop in.

I thanked Johnson, then, for this pleasant evening, and I closed the door of my cabin, warned of our early start tomorrow, when of course the race proper would begin. As I brushed my hair, relaxed in my lovely swansdown, I saw the pale sea in the distance rising from the night’s gloom, stained opal and pink in the dawning. It was beautiful.

It was coming to me that it was not impossible to survive without Michael. Now he had moulded me, the mould could not be broken. I knew I could not sing, without him, the great roles which would keep me among the first names of music. I have the voice and the application, but not the instinct or the heart.

With a great many aunts, it is safest not to develop a heart.

But I could enjoy, as I had done tonight, the applause of the herd. It would give me my living, and all I wanted in moral support. My film work would go on. And I need not, at last, work so endlessly hard.

Michael did not mean, I knew, what he said about leaving me. He would be on board still tomorrow. He had made a fortune out of me, after all. But I—I owed nothing to Michael. Not now.

I went to sleep thinking, Thursday morning. In three days I should be in Portree, and the
Willa Mavis
would give me news of Kenneth. Would he come? Would he come as I asked, to Portree? And if he were struck, if he couldn’t freely sail from South Rona, who then whispered to me in Lochgair, the night I was struck by the boom? Or did I imagine it all?

I fell asleep, and dreamed all night of Wagner.

It was a short night. At six, a cock crew, it seemed under my elbow, and I heard beyond my door and the cockpit the saloon door slide open as both Johnson and Rupert emerged to pad about on the deck. A smell of coffee seeped through, indistinctly, from the galley. From the fo’c’sle, there was no sound. Michael, I took it, was sulking. Who cared?

By six thirty we were in the sea lock with
Binkie,
and Rupert was rolling about on deck roaring with laughter to such an extent that I dressed and emerged. I wore ski trousers, a man’s printed lawn shirt and suede boots. Everyone else wore large dirty woollens with yellow oilskins. Bob and Nancy Buchanan wore their small woollen caps and sat on
Binkie’s
coachroof, subsiding with
Dolly
in unison as the lock water ebbed, and relating, it seemed, the stop press or aftermath of the Club’s night out at Crinan. There was no sign of life on
Cara Mia,
but the basin was full of exhaust fumes, as the competitors moved about, ready to emerge.

The puffer
Willa Mavis
had gone out long ago, on the same course as our own, bound for the south end of Mull, but not before losing a coil of old rope and a loo lid to Ogden. Victoria, with the seat round her neck, strolled along the lock gate high above us just before we sailed through, and confirmed this, grinning. Her feet were still bare, and she looked as if she could do with a long sleep and a bath.

“Cecil Ogden should be in a bat house,” said Rupert irritably after she had gone; but Johnson, perched up at the tiller with his bifocals repeating the first sun said: “For God’s sake don’t go all Bunny Mother now over Victoria. She collects bums. If you want her, you’ll have to go round the twist first.”

We were jilling about in a brisk wind, manoeuvring for the starting line, and Lenny, Johnson and Rupert appeared and disappeared among ropes and sails and tackle while they talked. “She’ll get no thanks for it,” I said. I know the Victorias. It begins with their ponies, at seven years old; and then they look for a man pony, because a grown-up man they could not manage or match.

The sail to Iona at least was fast: this much nearer to Kenneth, although Johnson and Lenny and Rupert were too occupied to be entertaining, and Michael was sulking still, with occasional bursts of chat directed at Johnson, usually about some fat cow of a soprano he once knew in Florence who ended up doing budgie seed jingles. No one could be more childish than Michael when he didn’t get his own way. I hoped he was going to be sick.

On either side, the sunlit islands slipped, past, wooded, pink with heather or rusty with bracken; some with small white houses, some with sheep. Soon we turned our backs on the mainland on our right and flew west, our main and mizzen sail full, for the south end of the island of Mull. Somewhere ahead of us, over the blue glittering water, was Hennessy’s
Symphonetta
who must not be allowed, Lenny said, to obtain too much of a lead in case the weather changed and we had a bad beat to Barra. Rupert said nothing.