The Tropical Issue: Dolly and the Bird of Paradise

by Dorothy Dunnett

  One of the T.V. companies said the same thing about their new thriller series.

  I rang off feeling thoughtful. The Curtises weren’t to blame. They’d just about offered to help, and Natalie had butted in with her bit about Owner’s Rights.

  All the same. The Curtis family had never worked in Britain before. It would be a bit silly if I moved out with Natalie to the West Indies, and came back to find they’d moved in.

  I began to wonder if I ought not to stay in Britain after all. And let the Curtises have the Josephine film if they wanted it.

  No hassle. It just meant that now, Rita, you have to make up your mind.

  I looked at my two yellow cats in the Hilton, and thought I would help myself make up my mind by an afternoon in the country.

  PETS INC was the name on the smart green and black board by the driveway, but you didn’t need to read it, because you could hear them.

  Kennels for pets and some breeding were all that Lee and Amy Faflick went in for when they started their farms in the ‘fifties. Later, they got to be something else.

  So I wasn’t surprised at the tall security fence, or the double gateway at the entrance where you had to phone to be let in.

  I’d rung for an appointment. Lee and Amy were in America, but I knew the guy, Jim Brook, who ran the English end of the business, and he came to let me in himself.

  A plain-spoken guy with basin-cut brown hair, and an old jersey and leggings, he looked like one of your good local vets, which is what he used to be. Except that vets don’t usually have big sewn-up scars on their forearms, unless they have to do with circuses, which gives you a clue.

  The Faflicks didn’t service circuses: they provided trained beasts for film companies.

  Any time you’ve seen a Rin-Tin-Tin flick, or a series about pirates or cowboys or Mounties or otters, or an ad . for beer, or choc bars, or petrol, or toilet paper, you can bet that the animals came from a farm like the Faflicks’.

  Like make-up, it’s big business now, compared with the old days. The first Brooke Bond chimps just came from a zoo. The Lloyd’s black horse had been a circus high school act and a Black Beauty before he got led into banks and died in his thirties, leaving a helluva rich mare, I should think.

  Companies like the Faflicks’ don’t keep all the animals themselves, since the Esso tiger and suchlike could be a worry to the cats and dogs, but they take fees for training and grooming them, and they’ll act as importing agents when a Raiders of the Lost Ark wants more snakes and tarantula spiders than you get round the house.

  Go to any television or film studio, and at one time or another you’ll see the Faflick green and black trailer parked in the yard, with a box of rats or a camel being eased out of it.

  I’d first met Jim Brook and Celia, the girl who headed the training team, on emergency call outside the B.B.C. when their kangaroo needed a quick cosmetic job done on a bitten nose.

  The bite wasn’t their fault, but the programme couldn’t go ahead without disguising it. I’d been making up the rest of the cast, and had something in my fishing-tackle case that would do.

  Since then, there had been a couple of other things, and I’d given them some free tips. Getting animals to look good on the telly is a bit like getting food to look good for a magazine: colour and varnish.

  We talked about it, Jim and I, as we walked up the drive to the converted farmhouse they use. They do grow some of their feeding stuffs, and they have hay, but most of the fields round about were used for livestock, mixed where they would mix without doing any harm, but not too many of any one kind. One or two horses, one or two pigs, one or two cows, one or two sheep fabulously clipped, with no barbed wire in sight to ruffle their gorgeous Woolmark.

  Two fields away, making a clanking sound, a man in armour was riding heavily round and round on a horse with tassels all over it.

  There was no sign of Celia in the house, so we walked round, still talking, to the back.

  The old laundry was the grooming shop, with rows of shears and scissors and curry-combs hanging from nails on the wall above the dog and cat benches, and a sunk bath in the middle where Celia, in a rubber apron and wellies, was just finishing shampooing an Old English sheepdog in a cloud of green bubbles.

  At first, I thought it was Bessie.

  Then I remembered the Owner’s stupid crack, and saw that this was a young dog, anyway. It liked Celia and kept trying to lick her with a tongue like a Tongue. She said, ‘Hi, Rita. Give her coffee, Jim. Be with you in minutes.’

  As we turned away she called after me, ‘What’s with the suntan? Costa del Clyde in April?’ and screeched, as she deserved to, as the dog got out and shook itself.

  By the time we were on our second coffee indoors she came in, in her stocking soles with the apron off. The dog came in after her, already half dry and smelling of Liquid Fairy.

  Celia said, ‘Did you show Rita the elephant wash?’

  He had. It was the same as a car wash only adapted. The elephants could work it themselves.

  Somewhere a whistle blew, and the door noiselessly opened on a scrap of a dog who scampered to Celia’s chair and, rising, pawed her knee anxiously.

  ‘Oh, what a good boy!’ said Celia. She picked the dog up and rose, making a fuss of him. To me she said, ‘That’s the kettle boiling. Any more Instant?’

  She disappeared, carrying orders for two more cups and a refill of the sugar bowl, the dog’s tail flapping under her arm like a duster.

  ‘Tibetan terrier, name of Tiki,’ said Jim. ‘Owner lives with a deaf relative. Celia’s trained him to tell when the kettle boils. And when the doorbell or the telephone rings. Clever tyke.’

  ‘Clever Celia,’ I said. Celia began her professional life as Consultant in Animal Behaviour to a pet food research centre, but Amy had brought her a long way since then. So had technology. I had heard the tapes they used, added to all the patient teaching, over and over.

  You can teach anything nearly to anything. The Harvard Shrink Department say they can teach a pigeon to walk a figure-of-eight in fifteen minutes flat.

  Celia came back with the coffee tray and the knight in armour, who took off his head, showing a lot of tight-curled yellow hair and a bashed and suntanned face I unfortunately knew.

  ‘Raymond,’ I said.

  ‘You know each other?’ said Celia, handing out refills. ‘Can you sit down in that stuff?’

  ‘No,’ said Raymond. ‘Miss Geddes and I met on Mr Johnson’s yacht in Madeira.’

  He stopped, with a buckle half undone, and looked at me, apparently struck by something. ‘You’re not here to choose his new dog as well?’

  ‘No, I’m not,’ I snapped through the noise of unknighting. It was like someone unloading a dishwasher. When he got down to the cutlery racks he sat and took Celia’s coffee.

  ‘Just as well,’ he said. It could have been a threat: it was hard to tell. I would dearly have liked to know where Johnson was at this moment, but I wasn’t going to ask this guy.

  Then I realised what he was saying.

  I looked at the landslide of white fluff asleep at our feet, and at Celia. I said, ‘Don’t say Bessie came . . .?’

  ‘From here? Yes, of course,’ Celia said. ‘Trained, too. Big stage career, that bitch had.’

  ‘As Nana,’ said Jim. ‘The Peter Pan nursemaid. Used to carry the postman on his rounds every morning. Should have been put down long ago. The bitch, not the postman. But there you are. Well, now.’

  He had glanced at the clock, but briefly. He was always busy. He said, ‘Here’s Mr Johnson’s henchman come to look over dogs, and he finds himself dragooned into training a warhorse.’

  ‘I volunteered,’ Raymond said.

  ‘You did. So what can we do for you, young Rita?’

  Young Rita.

  Hell.

  And with Raymond present, double dammergung.

  I said, ‘Just advice. I’ve been left one of your parrots by someone living abroad. It’s great, but
I’ve nowhere to keep it. D’you want it back?’

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw Raymond put his cup down, very carefully. Jim Brook said, ‘One of ours? We don’t usually keep them.’

  ‘An old one. One of Lee and Amy’s, I think. I brought a photograph of it,’ I said.

  Raymond was still staring at me. I brought out the picture. It was a colour one, taken for me by the man who photographs tourists in bullock carts.

  Jim looked at it, and Celia got up and bent over it, too. Jim said, ‘It’s a St Lucia.’

  ‘Red Data Book. That’s a shame, honey,’ said Celia.

  Apart from its language, it was a perfectly ordinary green parrot, quite big, with a blue head and bits of red here and there. ‘A what?’ I said.

  Celia sat down and took pity on me. ‘It’s a rare parrot,’ she said. ‘Comes from the island of St Lucia. That’s in the West Indies. Eats bananas, so the banana people haven’t been kind to it. As a result, it’s in the Birds and Mammals Red Data Book, the internationally agreed list of rare and endangered species.

  ‘They don’t get exported from St Lucia at all, and anyone wanting to move one from anywhere to anywhere has to go through hoops till kingdom come, explaining what they want them for, and why. Where is it?’

  ‘Madeira,’ I said.

  ‘It’s an old one,’ said Jim. He held the picture up. ‘Must have come in before the regulations. Before quarantine even, probably.’

  ‘Quarantine?’ I said. ‘Six months in solitary, like dogs and cats?’

  ‘No,’ Celia said. ‘Or at least, I’m pretty sure not. As I say, we don’t have parrots now. But it used to be sort of house arrest only. That is, you could keep it in your house for the quarantine period, provided that it was in a special room, and it had no contact with other birds. A terrible fuss, but at least it didn’t interrupt the lessons if you were training it. Is this one trained?’

  ‘On film dialogue,’ I said. ‘It knows the catchphrases of every old film you ever saw. Its owner used to watch them on video.’

  ‘It might be more than that,’ said Jim Brook suddenly. ‘If the owner had had it a while, it might have come before the regulations from America. If it was a Faflick parrot, it probably did. So what was its name?’

  ‘Cone,’ I said. And a damned stupid name, although I didn’t say it.

  Celia and Jim Brook looked at one another.

  ‘Then there you are!’ said Jim.

  I looked at him.

  ‘Call yourself a film buff and don’t know the name of one of the biggest studio bosses? Who do you think had that parrot in his office in Hollywood?’ said Jim Brook.

  Upon which, I got it.

  Not Cone, but Cohn. I should have known. It hadn’t stopped talking since its Bar Mitzvah.

  And that would be why Natalie had given it to Kim-Jim all that time ago, when she first bought a house on Madeira, and Kim-Jim had moved in. There hadn’t been any import certificates and there would have been, if the parrot had popped in and out.

  It had been another bit of proof, if I’d needed one, about Natalie’s relationship with Kim-Jim.

  When I’d asked her, she could remember nothing of interest about the parrot’s past. Except that it had struck her, as she put it, ‘that he and Kim-Jim deserved one another’.

  She was perfectly content that it should pass to me, with the rest of the things he’d been fond of.

  I said, ‘If it’s too much form-filling, maybe I should ask Mrs Sheridan to let it stay in Madeira. You could let me know if Lee or Amy would like it here, or on the American side. It’s a piece of history, sort of.’

  ‘That parrot,’ said Celia, ‘is coming here, if I have to threaten to walk out to get it. Yes, Jim?’

  ‘If Rita doesn’t want it,’ said Jim Brook. ‘And if she changes her mind, she can always get it back. You leave it to us. I’ll write to Lee. And the regulations will be our affair. We do it all the time. O.K., Rita?’

  I’d got all I wanted, and they were busy. I got up, and Raymond said, ‘Run you back to town?’

  He still had his leg-plates on. I said, ‘I thought you had to see a man about a dog?’

  ‘Oh, I’ve finished,’ he said. ‘Arranged a short leet for the boss, when he’s back. I’ll get my shoes.’

  I let him go to get his shoes, and left while he was away. The taxi I’d ordered, thank God, had arrived and stood at the end of the drive.

  I got the taxi to drive into the next sideroad and stop, until a red sports car came snoring out of the Faflicks’ and roared up the London road, with Raymond at the wheel.

  I gave him five minutes, and then the driver got me to the station in good time for the next train to London. He thought that young Hurrah Henrys that pestered a girl ought to be told off by the authorities, and I agreed.

  I rang Natalie from the Hilton but she didn’t need me that day or next.

  Clive Curtis’s nephew, young Porter, had dropped in, she said, and been very helpful. He might as well come along next morning and finish what he’d started, since he seemed to be at a loose end, and didn’t mind.

  I wondered what he’d started, and reminded myself what I’d already decided. It was time to make up my mind what I wanted.

  I was thinking about parrots when the phone rang.

  It was one of my nicer Debrett’s cancelling an appointment, but asking if I would mind, as a personal favour, transferring it to a delightful friend, whom I would like very much.

  It was for the following morning, at a Knightsbridge address not all that far away from where I was.

  I agreed, and switched off the tape recorder, and rang room service to get some sandwiches sent up. I had even picked up the paper to see what the telly had to offer that might be useful, when something about that appointment struck me as odd.

  I never write appointments down. I always record them.

  I played the tape back.

  The address was quite ordinary: one of those grand terraced houses off Belgrave Square that always have horse shit lying in front of them.

  The name had seemed quite ordinary too, until I remembered where I’d come across it before.

  Lady Emerson, my new client was. The tough, good-looking mother of Joanna who had ordered Johnson about, and told me to sit on his Gay letters.

  No friend, one would hope, of Raymond’s.

  I thought about it all for quite a while, and only realised afterwards that I’d missed Lost Horizon and the Shangri-la corpses again.

  I got three more phone calls from people wanting special occasions, and one from a T.V. company and one from Porter, Kim-Jim’s nephew, saying what the hell did I mean coming back to London without letting him know, and he’d got stuck with The Hag, but could I come out with him as soon as he was free tomorrow.

  The Hag. It wasn’t nice, but my heart fairly warmed to him. I said I would.

  After that, Lady Emerson didn’t seem any great deal, either then or next morning.

  I had breakfast, and then I did what the cop thrillers always don’t do, and taped and left in my room a full note of where I was going and why, for the police, in case my body turned up under the horse shit.

  Then I packed my tackle-case, put on my white cotton blazer with drill trousers to match, and Jesus sandals, and a headband that showed both the blue and orange bits in my hair, and went off by taxi to Belgravia. In honour of the occasion, I had not painted stripes on my face.

  The door was opened by a nice maid, in uniform. The hall was floored in black and white marble and there was a wrought-iron staircase with red carpet on it.

  I was taken up to the drawing-room floor, and then further up to the private floor, and Lady Emerson’s bedroom and boudoir.

  The boudoir was more of an office, and not very well lit for make-up. I hoped she had a decent dressing-room somewhere. The maid shut the door behind me, and Lady Emerson got up and came forward.

  As I’ve said before, she was a good-looking woman, with curling hair fading a b
it at the temples, and a thin, longish face with good cheekbones.

  As before, she was dressed more country-style than you would expect for someone being made up for a lunch date, although the silk blouse was a classic and the tweed skirt fitted her hips like an ad.

  She said, ‘Miss Geddes. You must have remembered the name. I’m glad you didn’t mind coming. Perhaps a sherry, before we begin?’

  ‘That’s all right,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’

  I looked about, while she fetched it.

  It was a nice room, worn and comfortable, with an old writing bureau in the corner, its flap covered with papers. There were sweet peas on the table beside it, and photographs in heavy frames, groups and single ones.

  One of them was of a thin girl in her teens: the absent Joanna of the drippy jam, maybe. One was of a girl too old to be Lady Emerson’s daughter, but younger than me. Someone in films, maybe. She was as good-looking as that.

  One was taken in winter, at a ski-jump. A competition, by the look of the crowds. The camera had focussed on the jumper, skimming off into the sunlight, sharp and clear.

  Flying black hair, and goggles, this time, instead of bifocals. The precrash Owner.

  ‘Here’s your sherry,’ said Lady Emerson, and looked where I was looking. She said, ‘I ought to put those away. Come and sit down.’

  We sat. Women are often nervous when they’re about to be made up. I’m used to it. If they suggest a drink, I always agree. It helps them, and I don’t mind.

  Lady Emerson wasn’t exactly nervous, so much as concerned, I thought, about how I was taking it. We talked about nothing. We talked about Madeira, and she suddenly took the bull by the horns and said, ‘Well, of course, I know you were there: Johnson told me. And what happened. I’m very sorry about that.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ I said. I wasn’t going to talk to her about Kim-Jim.

  She said, ‘Johnson can be quite helpful sometimes. I hope you made use of him. I don’t think he realises yet, as I do, how much good you did, that time you stayed at the flat.’

  I wondered what she thought I’d done in the flat, apart from walking the dog and saving the grapes from going bad. And getting up the Owner’s blood pressure by suggesting he put down his life’s companion.