The Tropical Issue (17 page)

I wasn’t afraid of doing a duff sketch either. I was as good as he was, I was bloody sure, at a likeness.

He looked at my face of Eduardo, and the outline sketch I’d done of his figure, with his sledgeman’s hat and white shirt and trousers. He said, ‘You think it wasn’t an accident?’ My drawing style, it seemed, was beneath comment.

‘Well, my God,’ I said. ‘Your bananas pal threatens me and Kim-Jim, and next day, Kim-Jim and I are just about killed in the street. How could it not not be an accident?’

He appeared to get it. Lenny came to take away the tea, since I seemed to have finished it, and I hooked the towel up again. Johnson said, ‘I told you I didn’t know van Diemen all that well. Anyway he had left the airport just before you did. How could he have had time to have a sledge doctored? How could he know you’d go to the sledge run?’

His voice had that patient touch I can never stand. I said, ‘He could have seen Eduardo change hats with me from his window. He could have paid Eduardo to find and chat me up in the first place.’

‘And getting the right sledge to you at the right time? How did he do that?’ Johnson said. ‘If, as I understand it, Eduardo wasn’t there at the time of the race?’

Which of course was the snag. I’d swear the two guys who pushed us off were as amazed when the rope broke as we were. I’d found that anyone could shine up the runners and put in old rope. I hadn’t found out who had actually put that sledge first in the queue.

Since he was waiting, I admitted all that. I added, none the less, that it seemed very funny that Eduardo had disappeared so completely. From his wife’s home. From his in-laws. And the in-laws, I had thought, were distinctly against visits by strangers.

I could tell Johnson was going to disagree, and he did.

‘I should have thought,’ he said, ‘a mark in their favour. Guilty, they’d be keen for you to meet Eduardo, and prove he was just a randy father of five who happened to have a perfect alibi for all the times he could have fixed up that sledge.’

I said, ‘Then why not let us in anyway?’

His bifocals tilted upwards.

I said, ‘Your Mrs Margate did.’

‘The security men didn’t,’ Johnson said.

I said, ‘It’s pretty small, to hold that against me.’

‘I don’t. Nosiness gets all it deserves,’ Johnson said. ‘Would you like another dry towel?’

I have seldom met anyone I disliked more. I said, ‘So you think it was an accident as well.’

‘What else?’ said Johnson. ‘I think we should all forget it. Your unfortunate attacker is safely out of the country, nursing his septic hand and scarred face. Mrs Sheridan’s reputation is unblemished. Mr Braithwaite can get on with his brothanical snaps and his girlfriend. And Mr Curtis can foster the romantic attachment which, I suppose, is the mainspring of your touching anxiety. Why not go on back to Troon, and set up house with him?’ said Johnson Johnson.

Under the towel, I suddenly felt rather queasy. I looked at his glasses, but the orange glare from my hair hid his eyes.

‘You
are
a friend of Roger van Diemen,’ I said.

He studied me, with his pipe in his mouth. Then he took it out.

‘But for Lenny and me, you would have been killed,’ he said.

‘And your pal arrested for murder. You didn’t want that,’ I said. ‘But O.K., what if he does it again? To someone else? You don’t know what addicts are like, or you don’t care?’

‘You think he’s an addict? Of what?’ Johnson said. Not excited.

I said, ‘Nothing slight. It looked like heroin. That’s what Mrs Sheridan’s covering up, more than her love life I should think. Don’t tell me you didn’t know.’

‘I won’t, in that case,’ said Johnson. ‘It didn’t occur to you that Mrs Sheridan might be arranging for a cure in Frankfurt?’

I sat up. ‘Is she?’

‘Ask her, if you think it’s any of your business,’ Johnson said. ‘I’m just pointing out that the affair does involve a number of fairly well-known grown-ups with big, important jobs who may even be capable of arranging their own affairs, if left to get on with it.’

‘On the other hand,’ I said, ‘I’m the one who got roughed up and tipped down a hillside. Excuse me if I complain.’

There was a silence, during which smoke filled the space between us, and thickened.

‘All right. You’ve complained. You don’t like being roughed up,’ said Johnson. ‘So why not go back where you came from and leave them to it? If it’s revenge you want, you’ve made them all dance quite a bit. Nothing more’s going to happen now. How can it?’

I won’t say I had never considered going back home. Or leaving Natalie and going somewhere that wasn’t even home, such as that place in the sun with Kim-Jim. Where there would be enough work to keep both of us.

I still thought it would be nice.

But not yet, oh brother not yet; until I’d got my own back on Mr Roger van Diemen and pals.

And superior pals, especially Mr Owner Damn Johnson.

Just a few weeks ago, he’d been a rich bedridden crock I’d been cooking for. I didn’t know how I’d got to be scared of him.

I wasn’t scared of him.

I said, baldly, ‘I’ll stay if I want to.’

The smoke developed a hole, because he had exhaled sharply into it.

He took a fresh breath.

‘Miss Geddes,’ said Johnson. ‘In a world full of contented, consenting subordinates, how is it that you and the blue-arsed fly have survived?’

‘I have no more to say. Lenny will assist you to leave. Unless you specially want it, I should like the towel back. It is one of a set.’

I suppose he thought he’d had the last word.

They sent me back to Funchal in the Avenger, with Lenny at the wheel. The man on the ski platform didn’t seem at all surprised to find the launch under different management, and lost all his grasp of English the minute I began asking questions.

I got my things and left him, to find a cab to take me back in time for Natalie’s next beauty fix.

But for that, I could have stayed away all night, for all anyone at the villa seemed to have noticed. The Hon. Maggie had appeared to patch things up with Ferdy and was in the workroom, Aurelio said, helping Mr Braithwaite with his flowers.

I bet.

The other thing that had happened was a hand-delivery of handsome thick envelopes from Reid’s Palace Hotel. There was one for each of us, including me but excluding the help and the parrot.

Each contained an elegant summons to a dinner party being held by Mr Johnson Johnson in a private room at Reid’s the following evening.

And that, one and all, was an invitation it was going to give me the greatest joy to refuse.

The funny thing was that it was Kim-Jim, whom the Owner had sneered at, who was cross, and wanted me to go to the party.

He wasn’t going himself. Since he told Natalie about his retirement, he took, I saw, a fairly wicked pleasure in excusing himself from things that didn’t interest him, and sending me in his place, if he could get away with it.

We spent that evening, he and I, with the video, since Ferdy and Natalie were at the Sheraton, cutting up Josephine over dinner with the money-man.

Between films, Kim-Jim kept coming back to the invitation; kept insisting that big dinner parties could teach me a thing or two.

I had already recited to both Kim-Jim and Ferdy how I’d been hang-shied by Ferdy’s pal Johnson, and bloody ticked off for annoying the grown-ups.

Ferdy, who was on Johnson’s side anyway, just jangled with laughter, and said that after buggering up his morning’s photography for nothing, I ought to concede that Pal Johnson was right. Ferdy was satisfied, he said, that the Great Group Jeopardy Plot was just a figment of my imagination.

Which just meant that, now Maggie was back, he didn’t intend to waste time Hemlock Chauffeuring. And that he liked to please Natalie, anyway.

Kim-Jim was gentler. But with van Diemen gone, he couldn’t really believe there was any danger. Or that when van Diemen was here, his threats had been due to more than a fit of jealousy, heightened, poor guy, by drugs, and probably already regretted.

I could see that each of them, in his way, was quite impressed with the way Johnson had handled young Rita. I could see the ‘young’ attached to my name like a feeder.

The talk with Kim-Jim got so fraught in the end that I told him I would go to Reid’s, just to content him. I even let him write the letter of acceptance, and discuss what clothes I’d wear.

The parrot kept saying
‘
Oh Cathy! Cathy
!’ all evening, and attacking my ear. Kim-Jim eventually chained it to its perch, not liking to put it out on the terrace, where it would miss all the films.

We saw the last of the ones I’d brought, and a new one of his, and talked into the small hours.

About work. Sometimes I thought he was going to talk about something else, and then it seemed as if he stopped himself, because it wasn’t time yet.

As long as he didn’t plan to leave yet, there was no hurry.

Dodo came in once, without knocking, and it wasn’t hard to guess what she hoped she would see. The movie we had on, as it happened, wasn’t even blue, so it must have been an all-round disappointment.

It was irritating, but nothing more. When I went to bed, I slept like a log.

I was busy the next day.

Natalie had a lot of dictating to do, which she did at a desk in her bedroom, into a tape recorder. Then an English Agency girl from Funchal came and audio typed the letters and memos. Meanwhile I sat and worked, with Kim-Jim’s help, in the study.

The phone rang a lot. I taped the messages that came in, and she told me later what to do about them. A lot of it had to do with the Josephine film.

Just before noon she rang down, through the ceiling, to tell me that I’d worked hard, and could have a swim before lunch if I wanted.

I had a swim, while Kim-Jim lay by the pool on an airbed and watched me. I was still there when the Hon. Maggie arrived, in a towelling robe and a shoe-string bikini, on Ferdy’s invitation.

After ten minutes at the poolside, she took her bikini off, which hardly made any difference, except to Aurelio, who came into the garden eight times.

I stayed in the water and swam, and then went to Natalie’s nets and practised serving.

I swim well and I play tennis well and Maggie looks great with no clothes on. Deuce.

Natalie joined us for lunch on the terrace. Maggie was covered by then, and no one fell out with anyone. After lunch it was more of the same, after a siesta.

In the late afternoon, I shaped and shampooed Natalie’s hair, and piled it in folds, with wisps in front of her ears, for Johnson’s party.

I didn’t tell her, as I went on to make up her face, that I didn’t mean to go to the party. I didn’t tell anyone, and especially not Kim-Jim, whose passion about the whole thing was more than I could understand.

I got some white of egg from the kitchen, whipped like a tornado by Dolores, and fixed my hair as if I was going. I got into the painted tunic and trousers Kim-Jim had approved earlier, and put on scent and earrings and anklets and everything, and showed them to him in the study.

He was pleased. I felt a heel. I might have confessed, but Ferdy came in to say that Natalie was waiting, and I belted out to join her.

Kim-Jim called out, ‘Goodnight! Have yourself a good time!’ as I got to the car.

I thought he was talking to me, and only realised when I saw Ferdy outside the study door, grinning, that he’d stayed to say something to Kim-Jim.

Kim-Jim added, ‘Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,’ and Ferdy posed in his ruffled St Laurent shirt with the telly flickering all over his face and said, ‘I have news for you. Tonight, old boy, you are enlarging your scope. See you tomorrow.’

The parrot clucked. As Ferdy shut the door and came bounding out, I could hear it saying,
‘I guess there’s just you and me left.’

Natalie didn’t think it was funny. Natalie was cool about having been made to wait.

I was pretty cool too, when I found out what Ferdy had been up to.

Ferdy sat in one of the let-down seats and grinned at me as Aurelio put the car into gear. ‘Last-minute orders. No sugar for Rita,’ he said.

‘No party for Rita,’ I said. ‘Mrs Sheridan, I hope you don’t mind. I didn’t want to upset Kim-Jim. But Mr Johnson and I don’t get on. If you’ll drop me, I’d rather spend the evening at the Sheraton.’

Natalie looked at me, with the street lights catching her lid-frosting and her face-frosting as well.

She said, ‘It’s a little late for that, surely? You owe quite a lot, I should have said, to Mr Johnson’s quick wits. It doesn’t cost much to be courteous.’

I said I had thanked him. I also added, unwisely, that after all, I had looked after him in London. He would understand I didn’t like parties.

Ferdy, who unfortunately had seen me at all too many parties, was grinning at me over his frillies.

He said, ‘Do you know what, darling? Kim-Jim said you’d try to flunk it. And do you know another what? I gave him my solemn word you wouldn’t.’

‘Try to stop me,’ I said.

He did. What’s more, he succeeded.

Natalie, I will admit, told him once or twice not to be silly. She complained sharply when he manhandled me into the lobby of Reid’s Palace Hotel in full view of a row of surprised bellboys.

When Ferdy picked me up in his arms and I bit him she stopped complaining and simply swept into the arms of the management, firmly ignoring us.

We were the last of Johnson’s guests to arrive. The management were indulgent. Everyone knows Ferdy. Ferdy slung me over his shoulder and pressed buttons until the lift came down again. Inside it, he put me on my feet.

He said, ‘I thought you liked Kim-Jim, young Rita. What were you going to tell him tomorrow?’

I said, ‘That I’m more honest than you. That I think your pal Johnson is a poof and a bastard, and I don’t see why I should spend a rotten evening with him.’

The lift had stopped, but Ferdy kept his finger on the close button.

He said, ‘It’s an argument. Carry a good deal more weight if he knew just how rotten an evening it was. Otherwise he might think you’re just scared.’