Roman Nights: Dolly and the Starry Bird; Murder in Focus

by Dorothy Dunnett

  No one was watching their food more carefully, damn it to hell, than I was.

  We reached Lipari just before lunchtime, and the first thing we saw was the Sappho.

  The next was Di Minicucci, hanging over the rail in denim pants and a jersey slit to the navel. There were about five other heads with her, all plentifully covered with hair. Innes gazed at them all with an expression of impenetrable scorn, but you could have heard Jacko breathing in Jugoslavia.

  Johnson began to gentle Dolly to lie in beside her, and Di came and hung over the other rail like a popped pod all ready for Birdseye. She had a book in her drooping left fingers. ‘Hullo, darling,’ she said. ‘We’ve all found the most super guidebook.’

  ‘So have we,’ I said with resignation. ‘There is a big talking about the isle of Lipari: some people are convinced that Lipari does not outstand in character as the other islands do?’

  The pod popped further and Di did nothing about it. Jacko moved up the rail, as if trying to get back to his reservoir. She said, ‘Have you seen the bit about George Sand?’

  The engine cut out. Under a large notice saying benvenuto a lipari large numbers of workmen were congregated, listening to every shrieked word. I had seen the bit about George Sand. I thought, for a hysterical moment, Di was going to read it all out:

  George Sand was much impressed by these islands. He was struck by the beauty of the sea and the sky. Perhaps Sand had found here a new valley of Eden? That is how these islands appeared to him.

  ‘We’ve read that bit too,’ remarked Johnson. ‘It must have been a hell of a shock for poor Chopin. You haven’t met Professor Hathaway. Professor, this is Diana Minicucci.’

  Diana Minicucci leaned on the rail, looking at the knitted cap and the blue baggy trousers, and the Professor looked at Di Minicucci.

  ‘Very charming,’ said Professor Hathaway with pleasure. ‘You will have no recollection of it, but I spent a short period many years ago working for one of your father’s laboratories. Is Mr Frazer on board?’

  ‘We dropped Maurice and Timothy at Messina. They’re in Taormina now,’ Diana said. ‘They got bored with Vulcano. Too awful.’

  The beautiful person on her right, in a masculine voice, added, ‘They got bored with Diana. Poor Maurice was sitting about in his mud baths, and Di kept lighting pieces of paper and erupting them. She sent the volcano up once. It was rather a pity, poor elderly Maurice, hopping out of his hole like lychees in neat whisky flambees.’ As he said this he grinned at Diana, who kicked him expertly in the groin but lightly, I couldn’t help noticing. He slid back, protesting, and Diana, turning back to Professor Hathaway, said, ‘Why not come aboard, all of you? We’re just going to have drinks.’

  If the idea was to indicate that they hadn’t just been having drinks all the morning it was a dead loss, because the icebox was empty and there were unwashed glasses on every available horizontal space including the loos. I collected the glasses and took them all back to the galley for washing. No one was there; even the little man who sat and sang to the engines. I said to someone else of indeterminate sex who came in to dry for me, ‘Who’s running the boat?’

  ‘We are,’ said the dryer, who proved to be a female called Charlotte. ‘That is, Di’s little man works the engine and sails her and we do the rest.’

  I didn’t say ‘What rest’ although I had caught a glimpse of the cabins, which were three feet deep in towels and ragged handmade underwear and screwed-up sheets with coffee stains on them. Since anything Timothy lived in always looked as if it had come fresh from Asprey’s, I wondered why Maurice had let Di and her crew come aboard Sappho. Then I realized what Charlotte had said. I said, ‘Doesn’t Sappho belong to Maurice?’

  ‘He likes to think so, doesn’t he?’ Charlotte said. ‘No, darling, it’s on permanent loan from Prince Minicucci, doing his Renaissance patronage bit. Not that Maurice couldn’t buy a yacht if he wanted to, but it’s so much less trouble this way. And it brings Di around. You know how Maurice adores being grand seigneur with all us golden children devotedly draped around his kneecaps.’

  One of the hallmarks of Di’s personality is the number of extremely shrewd golden children she is able to gather around her. I said, ‘So Maurice and Timothy are alone at the moment in Sicily?’

  ‘Darling, how romantic it sounds,’ said Charlotte, breaking a glass and throwing it gracefully through the porthole. ‘But I expect you’re right. In any case, we’ve all to get off before you join him in Taormina, Timothy’s orders. I expect eighteen charwomen will come on board tomorrow and make everything simply gorgeous for everybody. Do you smoke?’

  ‘No,’ I said. I wasn’t thinking. ‘Professor Hathaway does.’

  ‘Does she?’ said Charlotte, looking astonished. ‘I must say, she looks a sporting old horse. Well, you’ll find it behind the netting on the second shelf of the cold store, but Timothy says don’t use it all. His little man with a rowboat was picked up last week and he says the rising profits trajectory could accelerate any moment . . . I think that’s enough glasses.’

  I had been going to wash them all, to preserve the Sappho’s passengers from more cross-infection, but their microbes were already probably mixed more than anyone else would ever know. We carried a trayful up the galley steps and into Sappho’s palatial saloon, where we proceeded, with some justification, to dirty them again. Innes came and sat beside me.

  Jacko, it was clear, was having a lovely time and all the other extroverts were lounging over beside Johnson with their best profiles elaborately displayed. I suppose they thought he was going to be like Maurice except that instead of putting them on the stage he would say, ‘My dear, you must let me paint you.’ Then some of them began to giggle and the next time I looked they were all sitting anyhow and laughing. He appeared to be talking about revolving bookcases, but you never know with Johnson.

  Professor Hathaway was having a long talk with Di Minicucci and enjoying herself so much that it was quite hard to get her away for lunch. We arranged to gather for dinner that evening. There was a restaurant on the shore just beside us, standing on stilts overhanging the water. Then we went back to Lenny for lunch, and in the afternoon emerged en masse with guidebooks for a scientific exploration of Lipari.

  ‘”Somerset Maugham once said,”’ said Innes, reading from our favourite literature, ‘“No word/can do justice to this paradise.”’

  ‘Did she?’ said Jacko.

  I tell you, we shall make a scholar of J. Middleton yet.

  Like them all, Lipari is a green and mountainous island, with the fiat-topped white houses piled up around the harbour and topped by more ancient ruins and a cathedral and a wide flowery terrace with trees. We walked to the edge of the piazza and looked down on the white curve of the quay, lined with shops and with parked cars and shelving down at the end into a strip of coarse pebble beach with boats on it. Nearer was the blue roof of the Ristorante Mistral, and the long thrusting strip of the jetty, with Sappho moored on its far side, next to Dolly.

  From above you could see the enormous beam of Maurice’s boat compared to the long slender lines of the Dolly. Sappho was all motor cruiser, with a canopied wheel house and afterdeck big enough to hold a dinner-dance on.

  I didn’t spot anybody meeting anybody and handing an atomic warhead to him or her. Johnson didn’t even come over and speak to me. I thought again what a dim idea it had been to come here, and then considered Sappho and thought maybe it wasn’t so dim.

  The entire payload of Sappho could be trading Plans like a roll-on roll-off ferry service, for all Johnson and I should know about it. But if, for example, they were still doing it in Taormina on Friday, and on Capri come Monday, there was a chance we might catch them at it.

  Except that we hadn’t caught them at it on Ischia. And they were getting rather good at catching us.

  Seeing it was Di’s party, I spent an hour and a half on the bodywork for that evening’s dinner and subsequently climbed on to the jetty and walked a
round to the Mistral with the rest with some sort of restored confidence. In fact, when we climbed the stairs and found our way to the table, it became quite easy to sort out Di’s males from Di’s females from the way their eyes glinted above all the necklaces. Di said, ‘You rotten cow, I saw that in Fratini’s and I was going to buy it. I hope you freeze to death.’

  The black velvet top was joined to the black velvet slacks by a lot of loose satin ribbons. I must say, I do take to Di. She has a gift for saying all the right things. Then we sat down, thirteen of us.

  I stuck to my diet and had orange juice to drink, instead of buckets of Val di Lupo, which explains why I was still sitting opposite the disapproving presence of Innes listening to Johnson giving an excruciating performance in Englishman’s German of a complete bowdlerized version of Hamlet with all the speaking parts and most of the action, when the passengers from Sappho began splashing wine and throwing cassata ice cream at one another.

  Professor Hathaway, who had been holding a very lively conversation herself with three or four surprised young men at her end of the table, immediately got up, bent over Di and said, ‘You will excuse an elderly scientist, my child, but I think the night, outside the Dome, is for the young. Thank you.’ She kissed her. ‘I have enjoyed myself.’

  What with paying for the damage and arguing about the bill and compensating fellow diners for the splotches of ice cream on their priceless jackets and blusas, the last chance of making a quintet of graceful farewells vanished when the Professor did. In any case, we couldn’t leave without Jacko, who had a girl on each buttock and appeared to be trying to throw them into the cassata-granita, or perhaps they were throwing him. Somewhat hampered by Innes, who kept attempting to hustle downstairs, dragging me with him, to the scornful delight of the mob, Johnson finally managed, with incredible calm, to find a guitarist to play for us. He then contrived, after two sets of Lancers and an Italian version of Strip the Willow which rocked the place on its piles, to charm the guitarist into playing down the stairs and along the long, sloping landing plank which joined the Mistral to the quayside.

  It was bound to happen, and it did. Someone pushed someone and he fell into the water. Someone else jumped in beside him. Two other people thought a swimming party had developed and, diving in, began to splash about, ducking bodies and sitting on heads. Someone hit me a swinging punch between the shoulder blades and I went in as well, head first, with my black ribbons flying.

  The first person to jump in after me was Innes, and the second, Diana. I hardly got my eye make-up wet, they were so quick to retrieve me. Charlotte, squealing, came by doing a moderate butterfly, followed by one of the boyfriends, his hair streaming and his teeth shining.

  The bow wave they created washed over us and I did get my make-up wet but not for long. I shot up with Innes’s hand under one arm like the prong of a fork-lift tractor while Di’s hand sought anxiously to heave my chin out of the water. I shook my head and said, ‘For God’s sake, Innes. I’m standing.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Innes. He took his hand away. The water was all of three feet deep.

  ‘And in any case,’ I said aggressively, ‘I like being in water.’

  I suppose it was a back-kick from being too sombre. I wanted to show that I could be crazy too, man, on straight old orange juice. I kicked off my sandals, and turned, and launched into a good strong racing crawl, pointing straight out to Sardinia.

  Sardinia turned out to be nearer than I had thought, and to have an iron stomach and a pair of uncompromising hands which closed on my arms, arrested me, and then turned me about to face the way I had come. ‘Oh, no,’ said Johnson. ‘I have a consistent dividend record, and you’re not going to spoil it. Are you decent?’

  I didn’t know he’d jumped in. He must have gone in ahead of me. He must have swum faster than I had, if he hadn’t. I felt about. ‘I’ve lost my trousers,’ I reported. I had my pants on, and a bra. I was decent. My God, I was more decent than Di when she was dressed for the Via Veneto.

  As I was thinking this, Di came up with Innes not far behind her. There was a discussion, growing steadily chillier, over whether I should attempt to swim to the boat, or go back to the Mistral with Diana, where at least I could borrow a tablecloth. Innes, in the most fluent speech I have ever heard him make, pointed out that the two swims were equally lengthy, and to expose my condition to the already upset diners in the Mistral would be tantamount to having me arrested.

  I must say he seemed to have a point there, or at least Johnson thought so. In the end I swam to Dolly with Johnson, Innes and Di around in convoy and waited, hanging on to the side, until Lenny came and let down the ladder.

  Di came aboard too, which did nothing for the saloon carpeting, followed shortly by Jacko, bone dry and confused. Di said, ‘My God, darling, I am sorry. I’ll get you another Fratini. And your poor bloody watch.’

  ‘I can maybe save it,’ Innes said. We were all standing wrapped in towels. ‘It needs to be plunged in pure alcohol.’

  Di bent upon him the gaze of the daughter of Prince Minicucci and the top earner in Gene Kelly musicals. ‘Why bother?’ she said pityingly. ‘Hand over what’s wrecked, Ruth, and I’ll have it replaced for you, gratis. Unless you’re too bloody coy to take presents?’

  ‘No,’ I said with real gratitude and, wriggling under the towel, detached and held out the top half of the Fratini pants suit. ‘Another of the same, and I’ll love you forever. The underpinning will wash. And the watch doesn’t matter, it’s waterproof.’

  ‘And the sandals?’ said Diana briskly.

  ‘They were Samo’s,’ I said readily. ‘Handmade with foiled vamps at thirty-five thousand lire.’

  I was afraid she had noticed them, and she had. ‘You lying rat,’ said Diana comfortably. ‘They were Marks and Sparks; I saw them. Good night, alcoholics.’

  She blew me a kiss, and went and gave one to Johnson, and patted Innes, a little patronizingly, on the shoulder. Jacko, standing still by the door, continued to look at us all as if he were thinking in very simple phonetics. Di came up to him, placed her two hands in two very strategic pressure areas and, arching him slowly backward, sank a kiss full in the primary foliage of his Zapata moustache.

  When she left and went out the door he was still laid on the bench seat, crepitating.

  ‘The more we walk around,’ said Johnson, towelling himself slowly with an expression of ineffable smugness behind the steamed glasses, ‘the more we are amazed by this multicoloured stage on which Nature likes to chisel and shape things following a skilful game and a genial whim. Every dawn, a new painting, an inexhaustible source of life, of love, of beauty, of peace . . . The too-marvellous-for-words beauty of this happy piece of earth smiling under ever-blue skies and subsiding into iridescent waters, harmoniously smiling, in an atmosphere of dream, life and beauty . . . Lipari!!!’

  I went to bed.

  FOURTEEN

  We sailed out of Lipari next morning leaving Sappho behind, the curtains still closed over her portholes. Five hours later we were in Messina, Sicily, Johnson having won the argument over whether to press on to Taormina by mentioning casually that both water tanks were empty and unless we called at Messina we shouldn’t have any ice for the gin.

  We tied up to a vast concrete waterfront filled with sightseers, whose feet were the first thing we saw through the portholes next morning. Then Lenny started up the engines, and we got going again for Taormina. On the way there we lost Italy, which receded gently into a long, light blue shadow and ceased altogether in a pale apricot scar.

  I didn’t like losing Italy. I felt cut off, somehow, in a way I hadn’t before. In Sicily, people said, anything could happen, and people, as it turned out, had it right on the button. The first thing we saw, entering the bay below Taormina, was Sappho, sitting shining, smug and clearly deserted.

  The next was Sophia Ow, alias Lindrop, decorating the Atlantis Bay Hotel’s sunbathing piazza alongside Di Minicucci.

  We all went a
shore in two goes of the rubber dinghy, admiring the scrubbed flanks of Sappho, which had clearly lost its passengers and gained a number of charwomen. Bodies littered the beach and the lounge chairs around the waterfront bar, indicating that the wind had dropped, and the sun, shining mildly, was doing its best to remind everyone that they were in Sicily.

  Di, nearest the bar, was reclining face down in a bikini, of which the top half was patently unfastened. Lying beside her, as I have said, in a gorgeous one-piece black bathing suit which showed off her last summer’s tan, and her this autumn’s figure and all that spectacular Finnish blonde hair was Sophia Lindrop, the dish Bob and Eddie had seen with Charles in Naples. The girl Charles was once engaged to.

  Di saw us and sat up, and the top half of her bikini fell off, and Jacko leaped forward to fix it. My blonde friend preferred to phase her delivery. She turned her head. Her white-lidded eyes fell on Jacko, whom of course she had known through the Trust. She smiled at him and at Lilian Hathaway, cast a long, studied glance at J. Johnson and then discovered the enemy: me.

  Of course, she knew we were coming. She was in Di Minicucci’s company. She knew about Johnson and Dolly. She would know Charles was in clink and she probably knew all about the row we had had in Velterra. That didn’t prevent her from studying me with vivid astonishment.

  ‘Ah. The cradle-snatcher,’ said Sophia, and giggled at Jacko.

  I am the same age as Charles; she is three years younger. With the others looking on I was damned if I was going to be childish. I grinned and said, ‘Hullo, Sophia. I’ve got a holiday pass from the geriatric unit.’

  Professor Hathaway smiled and shook Sophia by the hand. ‘You will be fascinated to hear what developments we have been making in your field, Ruth and I. How nice it is to see you. Are you on holiday?’

  ‘I am here with friends,’ Sophia said. ‘I have to be back at the observatory on the twentieth. Old Mr Frazer has so kindly offered to take me on Sappho.’