Dolly and the Bird of Paradise - Dorothy Dunnett - Johnson Johnson 01 (30 page)

‘Rita. Stay where you are. We’ll get him out this way.’

With a younger man, I expect they would. A few hours ago, even Old Joseph himself would have listened, scowling, to such instructions and would have carried them out well and defiantly.

Tonight was different. Tonight, his whole view of his family had been turned upside down. Tonight he had just seen his son giving himself up to the police. Tonight he was old, and very tired, and probably already in pain. The megaphone boomed, and he tried to follow it, but he didn’t succeed.

I didn’t know if I could follow it, if I were standing where he was, but I could try.

I started moving again.

I had got halfway towards him by the time the bigger pools were coming close, and I had to find them and watch every flurry. The steam itself helped, white as milk in a brook, showing the swirls and the currents.

There was no way to guess how the spray would fall. The splashes pricked and bit like the sand-flies that annoyed you at Marigot, as you ate your candlelit dinner on
Dolly
’s satiny deck.

But the sand-flies didn’t leave blisters, or the breeze from the frangipani thrust your nose and throat full of dry sulphur, so strong and so choking that breathing was like inhaling a pepper-pot.

I caught a bad gush just after that: a ladleful of bubbling grey custard that draped my shoulder and sank into the skin, even though I tore the thin cotton straight down from the neck.

The booming of the megaphone was an enemy as well as an anxiety. I needed my ears, to hear the warning cluck of the mud, and the change in tone of the wind. I saw Joseph had stopped, and was neither looking about him, nor paying attention to what he was being told.

The megaphone noticed it too. After a pause, it addressed me instead.

This time, it didn’t try to tell me to stand still, or how to get to Joe, or how to take myself back to the rim. It just said, in a new voice; a voice I didn’t know:

Rita. There is a ridge on your right, with a hollow behind it. Get there quickly.

To my right.

The megaphone said,
Towards me
.

I turned towards the sound, and I jumped, and I rolled to the bottom of a hot, gritty dip that was not full of boiling liquid, so that it was the correct right.

As I jumped, I saw Old Joe still standing. I think I yelled at him to lie down, but of course a voice wouldn’t carry, and in any case it might have been the wrong thing, otherwise they would have told him.

They hadn’t told him to do anything.

It wasn’t that they didn’t care. I had heard them trying.

It must be that there wasn’t anything that would help.

Which was right, of course.

A second later the squall hit that they’d had warning of, and churned round the big pool of boiling grey mud like a butter paddle, and lifted it into the air.

I saw it come. I saw it arch like a tongue over the spot where Old Joseph was standing, the friend of Louis B. Mayer, the confidant of the Warner Brothers, and begin to fall.

I put my head in my arms and heard it spattering, too, on the other side of the ridge where I’d been standing.

It didn’t hit me.

After a while, the megaphone started again.

The new voice said, ‘Rita? Stand up if you can.’

I stood up, and turned to where Joe Curtis had been standing, and there was nothing there.

After a bit, I turned the other way, and faced the necklace of car lights round the rim.

The voice said, ‘He’s gone, Rita. Now we want you out fast. Listen, do what I tell you, and hurry. Now. There’s a hot pool three steps my way. Take three steps instead straight ahead. Now four steps away from me. Right? Now another four towards me and stop. Wait. Right.’

I waited.

To me. Away from me.

Right. And left.

Someone who knew the crater, and had a map, and binoculars, and a lot of briefing about Rita Geddes.

I didn’t wait long, and then the megaphone produced another burst of directions, another pause, and even at one point some questions which I answered by waving my arms.

He made one mistake, and I got splashed, but only a little. By the end, I was mostly out of the steam and it was just a case of climbing uphill.

It was a nuisance, climbing the soft grit, and I stumbled a lot, and wasn’t helped very much by the glare of the lights just above me. When there was no more use for it the megaphone stopped, and instead the speaker’s ordinary voice, just above me, said, ‘That’s a tough slope. You’re in all the rubble. It’s better this way. Over to me.’

He came down and helped me the last yard or two, his binoculars banging my shoulder, but I didn’t actually see who he was, because when I got to the top, I appeared to pass out.

I woke as they carried me into Amy’s house.

I was no longer in my borrowed pants and ripped top, but in a man’s shirt and what seemed to be someone’s loose overalls.

I had, what’s more, been in the hands of a party who knew his medical stuff. I was covered in ointment and bandages.

Under them, my shoulder felt pretty awful, and my skin seemed to have caught fire all over, including my face. My lips wouldn’t work. The sulphur I’d been inhaling seemed to have stuffed my head to twice its normal size and my lids felt thick and swollen.

I had an impression of passing a police van already parked in the yard, and seeing lights in the store room where the cocaine was, and where the shootings had happened.

I also had an impression of Porter’s voice in a squabble, but I couldn’t make out what about.

Then Raymond laid me down on the sitting-room sofa, and Amy brought in a thing like a vet’s bag which probably was a vet’s bag, and prepared to check over the results of the journey.

When I opened my eyes, she seemed to be pleased, and so did Raymond and Johnson, who stopped murmuring together and came over and looked at me.

Johnson’s glasses were cordial. He said, ‘You look like a mock-up for an onion, but you’re going to be fine. Join the club. Any club you want to join would be proud to have you.’

‘Hear, hear,’ said Raymond. ‘They clapped as you climbed out of the crater. The whole island would be agog, poor sods, if they hadn’t to deal with this bloody visitation.

‘We’ve had a ham message through three relays from Maggie, stuck all night at the airport. She and Ferdy weathered it all out together.

‘They’re O.K. Total frenzy of excitement and frustration because she missed everything. Other garbled greetings to you. Wants to start up a meaningful Lesbian relationship, if I got the French patois right.’

He wasn’t tight. It was just the kind of relief Ferdy gets after his P.M.T. sessions.

I was terribly glad about Ferdy, and quite glad about Maggie, but not much about anything else. Johnson said, ‘Amy, what about brandy?’

‘There it is,’ Amy said. ‘What there is of it. I’m going to take this lady off to bed.’

‘But a drink first,’ Johnson said.

I looked up.

He said, ‘A lot has happened. We should talk about it.’

Amy said, ‘Can’t it wait? What’s that effing banging? Where’s Lenny?’

On cue, the sitting-room door opened, and Lenny’s head came in.

He smiled at me, and,I smiled back, painfully. He said, ‘Mrs Faflick… Mrs Sheridan’s maid.’

He didn’t get any further, because he was pushed aside by the person he was talking about. Dodo strode in.

We all looked at her, and I heard Porter draw in his breath.

She looked the same as she had when she had come to report that Natalie had vanished. She looked unslept and rather cross and rather worried and extremely surprised as she looked at the sofa and saw me.

She said, ‘My good Lord, you bin scalded, girl?’

The hostile stare moved to Amy. ‘You-all lock your guests up when you go out? But for that Porter I might still be with those animals.’

Johnson said, ‘You didn’t go out, Miss Dora?’

Dora. I never knew that was her name.

She stared at him. ‘In that storm?’ she said.

Of all the events of the night, she had heard nothing.

I wondered how they were going to tell her. I saw Porter wondering the same thing, and realised suddenly what was going to happen.

It happened. Porter said, ‘You missed something,
Miss Dora
. You missed the shooting-match along near the yard there. You missed seeing Johnson shoot and kill Mrs Sheridan.’

‘Miz Sheridan?’ Dodo said.

‘Yes?’ said a charming, effectively-pitched voice from the doorway behind her.

Dodo moved to one side.

Natalie stood on the threshold. Her golden hair was a little ruffled, and the dress she wore was not her own but one I guessed Dodo had found in Amy’s room.

But the well-photographed face was the same, and the smile, and the large violet eyes sweeping the room, and finally dwelling on me.

‘Oh, dear. Poor girl,’ she said. ‘Has she pulled the kettle over?’

Johnson was watching Porter, and so was I.

Natalie was alive.

We saw Porter work out what that meant, the thoughts crossing his handsome face one by one.

The woman Johnson had shot, the woman whom Clive Curtís had tried to make us believe was his hostage, had not been Natalie Sheridan. It had been someone made up to look like her.

Someone wearing a make-up so perfect that we had all been taken in. All except Grampa Joe, the oldest hand in the trade, who had seen the face from outside and recognised it.

And who, from that, had known at once that the cockerel mask must hide Clive.

You could see Porter’s thoughts reach that point and then boggle.

And you could see him begin to realise, slowly and finally, who the woman with Clive and Roger van Diemen had been.

Porter turned to Johnson. He said, ‘
You shot my mother
.’

He began talking in short, howling breaths. ‘You turned your gun on my mother. But for you and your ridiculous tart, she would be alive. My uncle would have gone on with his career. My grandfather would have kept the
Paramount Princess
, and he would never have known. He’d never have gone to that damned volcano. He’d never have died that disgusting death…’

His face was all spoiled with amazement and fury and venom. There was no sorrow in it.

He said, ‘A famous old man. Everyone knew him. Everyone had heard of him. And now, because of your Mickey Mouse conscience, Joseph Curtis can’t even be buried. I watched my grandfather boil to death in that cauldron tonight.’

‘So you did,’ Johnson said. I have never heard such chilly dislike in anyone’s voice.

‘So you did, you squalid, unmentionable brat. You stood still and watched him without lifting a finger. He would be alive now, and so would your mother, if you had kept your mouth shut when you were told to.’

Porter started to speak. Johnson’s voice splintered his words like an ice-pick.

‘And if you found your grandfather’s end horrifying, spare a thought, won’t you, for Rita? She had to stand inside the crater, inside the cauldron, inside that hellish place.

‘She had to stand there and watch, as you did, your grandfather boil to death, as you so graphically put it.

‘Except that he wasn’t Rita’s grandfather. He was her father.’

‘Rita’s father?
Joe Curtis
?’ Natalie said.

Her amazement was absolutely genuine.

She stared at me, seeing me, and then not seeing me, as the rest of what we had been saying took hold in her mind.

Then the amazement faded, and in its place came the look I now knew well. The look of the clever woman. The political observer. The syndicated journalist.

Natalie sat down gracefully, as was her habit. She crossed her ankles and, smoothing the terrible dress she had on, folded her hands equally gracefully in her lap. Then she looked at us.

‘Put me in the picture,’ she said.

Johnson left Raymond to tell her. While he did, Amy found a half-bottle of brandy, which she handed to Johnson before seating herself, and Johnson gave me half of it immediately, in a very large tumbler. Then he took a chair at my side, rather carefully.

I drank quite a lot of it quite quickly, and didn’t listen too hard to what Raymond was saying. I hadn’t got used, yet, to what I’d lost. What I’d never had, anyway.

I suppose Raymond knew it. He gave only the barest bones of the story, beginning with the boarding of
Dolly
and the lining of her bilges with dope, which the Customs had discovered in Marigot.

I didn’t know they had discovered it. I thought Amy had. But he went quickly on, and ended with Clive and Sharon finding a temporary home for the dope in Amy’s place, thinking her in Castries, or safely indoors in the storm.

Halfway through, I realised that Natalie didn’t know yet that Roger van Diemen was dead. I wondered what she would say, and what capital Porter would make of it all.

But Raymond had thought of that. He didn’t go back to Natalie’s affair with van Diemen. He left out Coombe’s altogether, and just said that there had been another man helping Clive, and that he had been shot dead.

Later, no doubt, someone would break the news to her. She would probably be quite relieved. And then, when she thought of the publicity, she wouldn’t.

All through, I could see Porter walking about, and picking up things, and putting them down with a thud, even though Natalie wasn’t looking at him. The police had been quite satisfied that Porter and his grandfather didn’t know of the smuggling. Raymond had told Natalie all that as well.

She wouldn’t forget, either. You could see the computer brain, filing and docketing. She hadn’t forgotten what Johnson had last said, either.

She looked with sympathy at me, and said helpfully, ‘And Rita was part of the family? How does she come into it?’

‘She doesn’t,’ said Porter. He walked past Dodo and Lenny and Raymond, and found a dog dish at his feet and flip-kicked it out of his way. It broke neatly, and he watched it with satisfaction.

Then he looked at me and flashed his perfect, spaced teeth.

‘You spinning some tale that Old Joe was your
father
?’ he said. ‘Boy, the lawyers’ll have some fun with that. Pity the old man isn’t here to take you to pieces himself.’

He received, full front, the Owner bifocals.

‘The famous old man?’ Johnson said. ‘Whose reputation you found so handy? Or the crazy old coot you weren’t going to risk your skin for? Whichever it was, I’d like to see his lawyers try. They’ll get a shock.

‘Rita is Joe’s legitimate daughter. Her parents were your grandparents. Your mother Sharon was her full sister. Your uncle Clive is her brother. So was your other uncle Kim-Jim, who died on Madeira.’

Natalie looked surprised. Natalie said, ‘I always rather thought Kim-Jim was her father.’

Sitting there, wearing Amy’s terrible dress, she still looked alert, and sociable, and intelligent. But when the coldness in Johnson’s face didn’t alter, moving from Porter to her, I saw her eyes narrow and open again.

‘If you did, I must say you concealed it very cleverly when Kim-Jim was found dead,’ Johnson said. ‘He was her full brother. As I’m sure you noticed, they were both dyslectic. And their colouring was the same. Rita, may I?’

He was indicating my filthy Bird of Paradise hair.

I had nothing to lose, the way I was looking. I took my wig off myself. Underneath, my cropped hair was still white at the ends. At the roots, the natural red had begun to grow in.

I have the skin to go with it. I always try to wear hats and cover myself up in sunshine, or else I blister.

Blister. My God.

Johnson went on telling them about the Curtises and I let him, because he was really telling me. Standing outside all the emotion and telling the straight facts, as they were, to let me see them.

Since this evening, I knew that he knew. Since Sharon made her mistake, and he saw me recognise her, and asked me, in four words, for permission to shoot.

He said, ‘What’s the age difference, Rita? More than twenty years between you and Kim-Jim? Less between you and Sharon, who was born at the very end of the Second World War.

‘Robina must have been in her mid-thirties then, and everyone thought, including herself, that she had completed her family with these three children: Clive, and Kim-Jim, and Sharon.’

‘Colin, and Kenneth James, and Robina. Sharon was called Robina, after my mother,’ I said. ‘They all changed their names in Hollywood.’

‘After your father made himself a great name in the new movie industry,’ Johnson said. ‘After the money began to come in, and the keeping up with the M.G.M.s, and the pretty ruthless ambition. You didn’t think much of your grandfather, Porter. But all that vulgar display was just a show of pride, because he’d risen from nothing.’

‘Barnum and Bailey,’ said Porter. He walked across to the brandy bottle, lifted it, and emptied it into a glass for himself. His hand was shaking. ‘Happens in the best families,’ he said. ‘What sort of bums did you have for parents? House painters?’

‘Don’t be childish,’ said Natalie. ‘Amy, is that all the brandy you keep in the house? I think we have all had a trying time. Although, of course, this is fascinating.’

Amy looked at her. ‘Glad you think so,’ she said. ‘Always try to put on an effing cabaret. When this is over, you can have some tea, if you want it. Meantime, I think you should effing shut up.’

Down, Fido. Back to the kennels.

Natalie’s expression was one of controlled patience, but her foot tapped. Johnson, rearranging his position, didn’t pay any attention to either of them.

I held out my brandy glass until he noticed, and looked at me, and then borrowed it, saluting me mildly.

I had seen him do that once before, when Ferdy had made a joke I hadn’t followed. It was different now, since I’d begun travelling. I took the glass back. He had left quite a lot. I said, ‘Next chapter?’

‘Next chapter,’ Johnson agreed. He still looked rather rotten. He went on.

‘The trouble was, that Joseph’s family had grown up accustomed to plenty, so that when the old man’s work slackened off, and there was more competition, and their tastes needed more and more money, they began to cast around for other ways of making the fast buck or bucks.

‘Hence dope. Hence a number of other dubious things. Their mother, Robina, saw the way things were going and tried to stop it in the early stages, but couldn’t. Her husband simply didn’t care. He had lost all interest in his family. He wanted to be accepted as the big man, and recognised. He expected his children to make a splash, impress people, throw money about, get their names in the papers.

‘Robina couldn’t do anything about it. She hated the life. She left, and came back to Scotland, and divorced Joe, and married someone else, a schoolmaster called Gordon Geddes.

‘Two of the three children she left behind in America were fully grown-up. The third, now called Sharon, was seven or eight.

‘Sharon never forgave her mother for leaving her. Old Joseph never forgave her for wrecking the great public image. He never wrote to her again. He never saw her again. So when Robina arrived in Scotland and found that, in her early forties, she was pregnant again, she didn’t send to tell Joe that they were to have a fourth child.

‘Rita was born in Scotland, and Gordon Geddes, her step-father, became known as her father. When she was old enough, her mother told her the truth, so that she could decide for herself whether to make herself known to the rest of the family.

‘Rita’s reaction was to take her mother’s part. Her step-father was, I think, a good man, though strict; and of course he couldn’t understand Rita’s word-blindness. Nor could the schools of that time. Until recently, it simply wasn’t recognised. He just thought her stupid, which she most emphatically is not.

‘So, academic training being out of her reach, she turned to the thing that was in her blood. Show business, or the branch of it that the family did best of all. She became what she is, a superb makeup artist.

‘Her step-father hated it. It’s a pity, perhaps, that he died before she got to where she is now, on the verge of making it to the very top. She would have got there long before now except that she had given herself an embargo. She would never move out of Britain. She would never go where she might meet and compete with the Curtises.’

‘It’s quite a case history,’ Natalie said. She was listening with real attention. I could see the syndicated articles fattening up inside her clever mind.

She considered further. ‘So Rita stayed in Britain until she went to work on a joint-production film, and came across Kim-Jim, her brother. Of course. And was Kim-Jim in the drugs business?’

So clever. So stupid.

Johnson said, ‘Don’t you really know what he was like, after all these years? Rita knew who he was. After hearing her mother, she probably expected a monster. After the kind of beastly childhood she’d had, she didn’t trust people much anyway. All that, Kim-Jim overcame simply by being a genuine, decent, rather simple man, who had the same disability she had.

‘You knew what it was, although his family didn’t. He was dyslectic. It runs in families.’

‘My mother, too,’ I said.

All the T.V. sets. All the video tapes. We were experts on old films, in my family.

‘So that was the first bond,’ Johnson said. ‘But you liked each other from the start. You kept in touch. You couldn’t write to each other, but you exchanged tapes. And then, when he knew he was ill, and not going to get better, Kim-Jim wrote and told you that he was thinking of retiring, and suggested that he should arrange for you and Natalie to meet, and work together.’

‘Bloody traitor,’ said Porter. ‘There’s a car.’

I didn’t want to know about cars.

There had been movement outside since we came in, as the police worked in the storeroom and yard. I thought of them unloading, laboriously, all those bags of cocaine. I had tried not to think of the stretchers coming out of the jeep, and my sister Sharon being carried away, and Roger van Diemen.

Clive was the only one left untouched, somewhere in a prison in Castries. Like the survivor of the Martinique earthquake. About to hit the news, a freak for the rest of his life.

Clive, and me, and Porter. A great monument to Old Joe.

Johnson flicked my hand. ‘Let it be,’ he said. ‘Look who’s come, and look what they’ve brought.’

And when I turned my head towards the bustle at the door, I saw it was Maggie, laden with bottles, her Vidal haircut stuck to her skull with fright and salt, and her eyes beaming.

And Ferdy behind her, his arm in a sling, and flapping a large square of cardboard. A large square which, reversed, turned out to be a ravishing photograph, in colour, of a small fat bird with this great fancy tail.

‘Bird of Paradise, darling!’ he said. ‘Forgot to give it to you. My God, nearly never got the chance. Dear Jesus, what the hell have you done to your hair?’

Ferdy was back.

And after that, it was great, because Amy went and got all the food she and I had made while the others were resting, and Raymond opened all the new bottles and told the story all over again, and Porter, because he was forgotten, managed to give his temper a rest, and settled down to drinking himself steadily senseless.

Natalie got her drink first. She had quite a good story to tell, of how she had been stripped of her dress and left outside in the darkness, so that Clive and Sharon could create themselves the perfect non-existent hostage.

She hadn’t seen who they were. Remembering Dodo and the ham radio, she had got herself taken directly to Amy’s.

She didn’t thank Ferdy for the drink, which wasn’t surprising considering the explosion when he’d left her because of me.

From the moment he and Maggie had come in, Natalie had been restless.

She sent Dodo outside to ask the police if they had a transmitter. She enquired of Amy when the telephones usually came back into service and badgered her several times into sending messages on the ham radio. She tried, and failed, to persuade the emergency centre to put her in touch with New York via the Miami Hurricane Centre.

Hurricane centres having, naturally, other things on their minds, she continued to get the brush-off, to her annoyance.

It was, of all people, Dodo who at this point stared Johnson in the bifocals and said, ‘You were going to tell us. How the girl and Mr Curtis moved in on Miz Natalie.’

Then Ferdy said, ‘What?’ and all eight of them, from their various positions of sloth, looked at Johnson, who had stayed rather rooted in the chair next to me, while I still reclined on my couch like Not Tonight Josephine.

Without whom none of us would have been there.

Jinx Josie. Compared with us, Napoleon was laughing.

‘Are you sitting comfortably?’ said Johnson. ‘O.K. The rest of the tale about Rita.’

Public school people are great exclaimers. From the moment Johnson fed them the compressed story of the Curtis family and my mother, Ferdy and Maggie formed a most satisfactory audience of two, alternately whistling or yodelling and sometimes saying the same thing together.

Maggie said, ‘It’s
the
sensation. So Kim-Jim asks Ferdy to use Rita for this commission he’s got to photograph Natalie. And as a result, Natalie offers Rita a temporary job, and then makes it permanent. And all the time poor Kim-Jim knows he’s going to pop, and that Rita will be left with a nice job, and lots of contacts and no more hang-ups about going abroad. You should see
my
bloody brother.’