The Tropical Issue: Dolly and the Bird of Paradise

by Dorothy Dunnett

  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 forever, 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 wine glass 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 houseguest?’

  ‘She goes in for houseguests,’ 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.’

  ‘I have?’ he said. He lay down his fork and pushed his plate away. He hadn’t finished all of the quiche.

  ‘She’s been a great dog, but she’s a ruin,’ I said. ‘It isn’t fair, really. The doctor wants her put down.’

  My hair appeared, twice over, straight in his glasses. It was quite a change.

  ‘Oh?’ he said, in his complete Owner voice. ‘And did he mention which day?’

  I said, ‘Her legs are bad, she’s half-blind and she makes messes all over the foyer. You have to say which day. The doctor can’t and the vet’s scared.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Really, it’s just as well you’re going, isn’t it? Who knows whom you’d feel compelled to have put down next?’

  I got up and collected his plate. ‘You didn’t enjoy your lunch?’

  ‘It was charming, thank you,’ he said. ‘Let me know when you leave.’

  He had a short bloody fuse. I left him the bottle to get thoroughly sloshed with if he wanted, and let off steam with a good bash at the piano.

  I had unwrapped the pot plants in the studio, and rearranged it all like a teashop. There were no grapes or chocolates left.

  I fed Bessie, I supposed for the last time, and took her out to the pavement before I washed up. Then I got my shawl and my fishing case and went to say goodbye to Johnson.

  Unfortunately, he had finished the bottle and was sprawling asleep on his face again. There was no way of telling if he had been going to give me a cheque.

  I rubbed Bessie’s ears, and then shut her in with her master.

  I went off to my date with Mrs Sheridan.

  She was staying at Claridge’s but the doorkeeper and the desk clerks were well warned beforehand, and they treated me like a guest, even if I found myself in the lift p.d.q.

  Natalie had got Ferdy’s photographs and was taken aback, as I knew she would be, to find how well she could look on her left side. She wanted to ask me about it. And she wanted a special make-up for that evening.

  As before, she was sharpish but business-like, which suits me all right. The maid Dodo, a dead ringer for Eleanor Roosevelt, stood around glaring at me, but that was all right too.

  I didn’t tell Natalie all my tricks, but I told her I could fix both sides again any time she wanted it done. And for that evening, I made her look stylish and different.

  She asked me to stay while she dressed, and before she went out, she sat down and poured me a sherry, and told me what I knew already: that Kim-Jim was out of action for a short time, and she needed someone on call for her make-up.

  ‘I like your work, Rita,’ she said. ‘I know you don’t take jobs abroad, but it’s only a plane hop to the villa. And now this film idea has turned up, I’ll be in London for quite a few days yet, and I’d like to suggest an arrangement. Would you care to stay on call while I’m here? Will you come and work for me at the villa while Kim-Jim’s away? If, of course, my fee is agreeable.’

  It was what Kim-Jim had wanted. It was why he had arranged my engagement with his employer. I knew w
hat he had in mind. People retire. People like the chance to pick the person who will fill their shoes after them.

  A pretty innocent plan, and a generous one. For an American at the top of his profession, Kim-Jim was a pretty innocent guy. And he and I were good friends.

  Just professional friends. We’d met only once.

  An innocent plan.

  The laugh of the year. I really thought, accepting Natalie Sheridan’s offer, that it was Kim-Jim’s scheme and mine, and had nothing to do with anyone else.

  The plan to make a break. To go abroad for the first time in my life. To help Kim-Jim. To do the work I loved doing. To have a great time, staying with Natalie Sheridan, in her hideaway house in Madeira.

  Of course I said yes. Nothing warned me. The only man who could have warned me had been in a wheelchair.

  I flew to Madeira in April.

  Madeira, so my mother said, was a place you used to take your aunty to in the winter.

  It depends what sort of aunty you’ve got, but I wouldn’t take one in April: not if she’s easily shot.

  You can’t wear wool there in April either, so I had clothes to buy first, and a passport to apply for, and my accountants in Glasgow to visit.

  A passport, because I’d never been overseas before. Britain for Rita, I’d sworn. I felt a traitor, going now. Not afraid, but a traitor.

  I had a story all ready to spin my mother, but I didn’t need it. When I got to the nursing home, they said she had gone a bit confused again, and I wasn’t to mind if she was bad-tempered.

  She wasn’t, and she knew me, although she thought I was still at school. It wouldn’t be Robina to be bad-tempered. We talked about hockey.

  The rest of my things were in Troon, including my tape recorder and radio and cassette player, and all the make-up stuff I’d need for Natalie Sheridan. I went to pick them up, not liking the house without my mother in it, and had words with my Geddes aunt, as I always do.

  That’s one aunt I wouldn’t take anywhere. She wouldn’t go with me anyway. She has a motto as well: ‘Your Dad, God rest his soul, would never have let you.’ But she runs the house while my mother’s away, and sees the gutters don’t leak and the taps have washers on them. And takes messages for me, on the telephone.

  The night before I left Glasgow, I went on the town in Byres Road with a bunch of old pals from show business. Two were girls I’d been friends with at school. One of them was a singer and the other had become a producer.

  Put together, they earn half what I do, and that’s leaving out my investments.

  They can spell.

  They liked these clothes I’d bought, and my hair. I’d had my hair cut and made a new colour. It finished up quite a nice shade of chrome with some blue in it.

  They asked about the new job, and I told them.

  Natalie’s villa had a swimming pool, Kim-Jim had said. He never had much time to swim, but I wasn’t to let her work me so hard. I would be there as her beautician, and anything else I did was up to me. The most I might have to do was book the odd plane or hotel, or phone up people with messages. There were English girls Mrs Sheridan could hire for dictating. Everyone else spoke Portuguese.

  Phone up people with messages.

  I was glad that Natalie had had no more chats with Johnson Johnson before she left London.

  Ferdy, who was busy on the artwork for a big, glossy book on Sexual Strategy in Flowers, to be printed in Luxembourg, reported that Johnson was apparently still making great strides considering, and had mentioned something about a bill for phone calls to Troon and Glasgow and Lisbon, as well as blue and magenta stains in the bathroom.

  I thought of the blond boyfriend, and the security men, and all those bloody phone calls and the perfectly good quiche I’d made him, and told Ferdy that if his pal Johnson was fussed over anything, he could get Lady Emerson to pay for it.

  Once, on my way past from Claridge’s, I’d seen a po-faced woman out walking Bessie past the flats, and another time, Bessie with Mrs Margate. Then, just before I went north, I saw Mrs Margate ouside a coffee-bean shop by herself.

  I didn’t ask Ferdy, but it looked to me as if the capable woman had soon got her books.

  And maybe even that old Bessie had got hers as well, if the Owner had crawled from his expensive new sickbed and coped with something apart from mail orders.

  Male orders?

  It was, luckily, none of my business. I was going to a new job, a rather special new job, in Madeira.

  Chapter 4

  Abroad, it turned out, was very like Troon on an English Bank Holiday. Waiting early that evening to be met at the airport, I couldn’t understand what anyone said, even when they were speaking English.

  I expected Mrs Sheridan’s car, but she had sent a hired driver who stood about, with a peaked cap and dark glasses and a big placard saying SRA RITA DA GODES.

  It was some time before we found one another, even after the Arrival Hall was quite empty.

  To get to Mrs Sheridan’s villa, I’d been told, you have to go from the airport through Funchal, the main town of Madeira. You begin by driving along the coast.

  It was warm.

  I expected that. The B.B.C. had filmed a programme about it, Volcanic Islands of the Atlantic, and a pal had taped it. Madeira the Floating Garden; the Island of Gentle Summers and Mild Winters.

  Before my dark glasses got too dark to bother looking through, I noticed a lot of blue water and red roofs and purple creeper, and a harbour with the sun about to fall into the water.

  Then the Mercedes turned uphill to cut out the town, and ran into a lot of rutted roads with no walls and steep paths going up to farm cabins, and finally into a side lane that seemed to lead nowhere.

  There were a few trees and a lot of dry earth about, but no sign of any houses at all, never mind a posh villa with swimming pool. It wasn’t the sort of countryside you would find Natalie Sheridan in, unless she was making a documentary.

  The sun went down, and I couldn’t see much of anything any more. The driver was nothing but a dim shape in front of me.

  I gazed at it, waiting for him to slide back the partition and grovel. I wasn’t going to be ratty with him. Anyone can get lost.

  Instead, he got out of his door and jerked open mine.

  I think I still expected him to start making excuses. I took off my dark glasses so that I could see him better, or as well as I could see anything under the brim of this Humphrey Bogart fedora I was wearing.

  I couldn’t see him better because, under his hat, he had a stocking on.

  I could see he was tall. I could see his uniform jacket was too small for him. There were four inches of shirt cuff and skin between his fists and his sleeves.

  I said, ‘You’re not the man with the placard!’

  I wasn’t too put out yet, because the cuffs had cufflinks in them. The worst I was expecting was rape.

  ‘Senhora Rita da Godes?’ he said. ‘You couldn’t even read it, you illiterate bitch. You should be deported.’

  In English. In educated, foul-tempered English with loathing in every vowel.

  A nutter. I won’t say I’m used to it, but if you’re not in a home for the aged you meet them.

  The rule is get out of it, fast. He was leaning in on one side, and the door handle was not too far away on the other.

  I sent one hand along quietly, exploring for it. I may have hockey legs, but they’re O.K. for running on.

  I said, ‘Great. Let’s call the police. They’ll deport me.’ My fingers were two inches from the door handle.

  He wasn’t the kind to be humoured. He said, ‘Stop bleating, my beauty, and listen.’

  I was listening. The door handle was just an inch off.

  I lunged for it and he lunged for me in the same moment.

  He won. My hat fell off. Suddenly the car was full of him. His weight rammed me down, and his hand shoved my head back on the car ledge.

  He was breathing hard. I expected rum or whisky, bu
t his breath smelled of bacon and egg. Also something else. I couldn’t quite place it.

  ‘Scum!’ he said. ‘You and your partner!’

  You get a lot of this in Scotland, if you have coloured hair.

  I didn’t know what he meant by my partner, unless he was thinking of Satan, which was quite likely. Religious cranks, having sex on the brain, can be the nastiest in that line when they finally work themselves up and over the edge, which a lot of them do.

  I said, ‘I got led astray by older people. I’ll listen, if you want to talk to me.’

  I can’t say I meant to listen long. He must have been watching my eyes. I only glanced at the door, but a second before I tried to heave myself over again, he changed his grip quickly. One of his hands collected my wrists. The other dived for the back of my collar.

  Then it all got pretty lively. I hacked his shins, and tried to jerk my hands free.

  He’d played that game before too. Before my heels half connected he had swung himself, saving his legs. And his gripping hand simply squeezed my wrists tighter, while the other closed on my collar and twisted it, until the cloth in front of my neck nearly throttled me.

  ‘Sit, you stupid punk,’ he said. ‘And listen to me. You came here to meet Mrs Sheridan. You are going to see her. You are going to tell her you can’t take the job. And you are going to get yourself out of the country. Back to the hole you crawled out of, you and your partner.’

  Natalie. He was talking about Natalie Sheridan.

  I stopped being limp. ‘Are you nuts or what? Mrs Sheridan asked me to come here!’

  ‘Because you arranged it,’ he said. ‘Because that trickster Curtis gave her your name and told her how good you were. The old, old con. First, Curtis dupes her, and then you climb in beside him.’

  I stared at the blur of his face. I couldn’t believe it. My partner in crime wasn’t Satan. It was meant to be poor Kim-Jim Curtis.

  I thought it was silly to ask, because nutters don’t need to be logical. But I couldn’t help saying, ‘Why?’

  Thinking about it all had made him tremble. It wasn’t nice. He wasn’t listening, either. He said, ‘She’ll tell you to publish and be damned. She’s not worth as much as you think, you know. She’s willed a lot of money away. Even if Mr Kenneth James Curtis gets her to marry him, there isn’t a jackpot.’