Ibiza Surprise

by Dorothy Dunnett

  By the time I got back, Austin and Janey were drinking big sherries, and I made out I’d been to the loo. I had a big sherry as well and asked craftily if Austin lived in the basement, but he said: ‘No, only Gregorio,’ but if I liked to go down I should meet the company craftsman. Jorge. Dead loss.

  Then Janey said: ‘Christ, look at the time. Austin darling, if you’re going to show us your balloons, you’ll have to do it on wheels.’ And we got back into the hall and climbed the white marble stairs to the gallery.

  The shop on the ground floor had been dark. The shiny landing at the top of the stairs had a door on each side, and when Austin flung open the one on the right, the flood of ripe yellow light was quite blinding. In the first place the room was big, with long windows looking on to the street. And at the far end, standing open, were shuttered doors leading out to the garden, the gorgeous garden we’d spotted below, full of little pineapple-shaped palms, and pink and white roses, and a magnolia tree. And, oh Maurice Woodruff, arum lilies.

  This time we got in a rut, Janey and I. We both rushed towards the French windows, emitting girlish expressions of joy, and this damned thing first whacked me hard on the head, and then bounced back to do the same thing for Janey. Janey sat down, and I ducked, and we both glared at Austin, who swooped on us, cawing. I thought he was going to cry. The thing that hit us was still swinging. I got to my feet and examined it.

  The label said Cumulus Cloud with Tartan Carrying Case, and the label was a hundred per cent on the ball. It hung from a string on the ceiling, an irregular, inflated pillow of tartan with handles, maybe eight feet, in all, round its zip. At a distance, I suppose its outline could be regarded as cloudlike, but the tartan was a definite caprice. It stopped swinging, and Janey and I gazed at it without comment.

  ‘People,’ said Austin, ‘say the artist today has no sense of humour. On the contrary, while most of his work is sober and sometimes even tragic, he has his moments of gaiety. One may smile, while enjoying the freshness and spontaneity of the idea. I do hope it didn’t give you a bruise?’

  ‘No,’ I said. Janey was speechless. Austin looked at her compellingly. ‘There are more.’

  There were, hung along the whole gallery. They weren’t all clouds. One had cotton Easter chicks in all sizes inside it, and one a pailful of blue water and a lot of toy plastic ships. There was another thirty feet long.

  ‘I like them,’ said Janey. Austin floated before us in a sort of high-voltage, intellectual euphoria.

  ‘I knew you would,’ he said. ‘Aren’t they just darling? Now come and see these.’

  The fish for the Russians had to bake for thirty-five minutes. I’d rolled and stuffed it with shrimps, with just a flavour of onion and mushroom, and a little minced celery. There was an American salad to go with it, and a sort of orange cream with Curaçao to follow. They were also getting stuffed artichokes and a croquet-monsieur as starters. No-one was going to go away from the Casa Venets starving. It was the first meal I’d done for the Lloyds, and I wanted it to be just right. It had been after twelve when we got to the gallery. But in spite of that, I stared at Austin’s big, regular well-shaven face, and his shirt with the button-down collar and a very faint shiny stripe, and the grey nugget cuff-links, and I got the link between Austin, the wolf in the Cadillac, and the travelling exhibition of Art in the Round.

  It wasn’t the tapestries of goats’ hair and feathers. It wasn’t the towering lanes of green plastic bosses, the labyrinths of quilted-cloth hangings based, said the card, on recurring genitalian contours, or the rows of nailed wooden disks on which lines of verse, or at any rate original expressions, sober, tragic, or gay, had been stencilled. I walked between ‘Masculine Presence,’ made of welded car grilles and bumpers, and ‘Little Eyes,’ a board studded with pairs of dolls’ eyeballs, and down an avenue of stamped crates and plumbing fixtures, before I found it. ‘. . . perfectly legitimate,’ Austin was saying, quoting Apollinaire, ‘to use numbers and printed letters as pictorial elements soaked with humanity. ‘ I passed by Arteriosclerosis, forks and spoons in a glass-covered box. I turned through an avenue of life-sized cloth figures, and there was Austin’s psyche, plain as could be, all among the big hoardings that showed us Op Art.

  Op Art was just black lines on white: whorls and spirals and fine jagged mesh that did something to the backs of your eyeballs and sent your optical nerves into a frenzy. Or it took the form of fifteen-foot circles of plywood, spiralled in thin bandings of shocking pink, lime green, and orange. Janey stood before one of those with her eyes under the contact lenses so dilated that I thought she was going to faint, and Austin asked her if she was all right.

  ‘Frankly,’ said Janey, ‘I think it’s procuring.’

  ‘Now, this interests me,’ Austin said. ‘I consider that this art shows a person his innermost being. Great art is a catharsis.’

  ‘All I can say is,’ said Janey, ‘if I had that in my bedroom, I’d need Dutch caps for my eyeballs. She-she, we’re going to be late.’

  He saw us into the Maserati, holding Janey’s hand, and then mine.

  ‘You’re coming to dinner,’ said Janey. ‘I’ll ring you. Who was the boy who did all the quilting?’

  Austin told her. He was, as I remember, a male nurse in a Sun Valley health farm.

  It had been a tough match. My opinion is, Austin won.

  The fish was a howling success. I helped Anne-Marie serve it, and Janey’s father introduced me to all his guests, two silent Spaniards and four pasty, rectangular gentlemen with hearty smiles and uncertain English. One of the latter group was the commercial attaché at the Russian Embassy in Madrid, and the three others were straight from Moscow on a trade fair excursion. The attaché, whose Spanish was fluent, finally lapsed into that language and interpreted for the other three. It was a dead groovy lunch, I can tell you.

  Janey sat at the head of the table, speaking Spanish as well and looking quite elegant. I suppose she’s been her father’s hostess half her life: her mother died before I even knew her, and her father seems to have gone on just as if nothing had happened, only assuming Janey would carry on in her place. She’s been away a lot, of course, but on every return home she seems to have taken control. She has a good brain. And of course she’s had Anne-Marie and Helmuth, and any other help that she wanted.

  After lunch I served coffee and cognac, and Mr Lloyd asked me to stay and have it with Janey. He and the six visitors left almost immediately to talk in his smoking room.

  Gilmore hadn’t come in.

  ‘He’s at Coco’s,’ said Janey. She had had two cognacs and hadn’t even turned pink. ‘They’ve got a living-in tennis professional, and Giller is either going to make Wimbledon or spring a coil in his chesterfield.’

  ‘Isn’t he keen on the business?’ I said. A playboy-sportsman is all right. A middle-aged playboy-sportsman is slightly pathetic, especially to a middle-aged, playboy-sportsman’s wife.

  ‘You’re joking,’ said Janey dispassionately. ‘He took a law degree because Daddy wouldn’t give him an allowance without it, and he went to Harvard because he was dead keen on baseball and rich American girls’ legs. He’s got the allowance and had the American girls, so why work?’

  I cleared up, and lifted an English newspaper three days old off the hall table on my way up to the siesta. It promised Scorpio a good day and Virgo a slight disappointment. Clem Sainsbury was the same as me, Capricorn. Capricorn, said the paper, should treat foreign interests and matters of law with extreme caution, for they are not in control, and there may be conflict, perhaps disaster.

  And, I thought, you can say that again.

  I don’t think Janey actually wanted to be painted. I mean, she’d cheerfully spend days being photographed, but sitting still being turned inside out by another person was something different again. Janey liked to be in charge, on her own terms.

  Anyway, afte
r the siesta when it came time to leave for Johnson’s boat Dolly, I found that Janey had got herself completely tied up in showing the three red squares round the island, and I had to set off alone. I didn’t mind. Maybe Johnson would paint me instead. And Janey had lent me the Maserati.

  The road from Santa Eulalia to Ibiza is a good one, as I’ve said, seldom built up for long and mostly running in long, level stretches, above or below the farm country. At places the speed is controlled, but a good, easy sixty to seventy is generally all right. On empty roads, you could pick your own speed. Between six and seven in the evening, as now, it’s fairly constantly busy. Workmen in Spain stop at seven.

  I set off then, taking it easy, and finding a path among the old battered Seats, the Peugeots, the daisy-painted Renaults and Simcas, and the bashed Ebro lorries with two sides gone from their steamy old bonnets.

  I enjoyed it. I took time to look for the orange and lemon trees and the house that was building, with the old woman hobbling in and out with her wicker dish of wood shavings. A man was ploughing, his feet on the share, his fists gripping the big horse’s tail. The fig trees were budding at last pale grey with their branches outspread like the skirts of an Infanta, a green candle-leaf at each tip. The low sun hit fields edged by warped, whitened branches and turned the soil broken orange and the dry stone walls orange too. As the road rose a little, the hills and foothills showed, patched and streaked with green, tan, and pale sandy colour, spotted with dark scrub and patched with low trees. Small white houses with tiled roofs faced the sun, shining, and the white cylinder of a well, or the tall pylons with their spidery windmills. Olives, with their brown twisted barks, and orange trees on their thin, spindly sticks. Poppies. Fir trees like thick furzy cushions of dense yellow-green, and yellow haystacks like mushrooms. A flower like a telegraph pole, with yellow blossoms on each short, outflung arm caught the sun, over and over, at the side of the road. I was happy.

  I don’t know when I first noticed the white Alfa Romeo Giolia Spider behind me: I looked in the mirror and got a glimpse of this great, yummy car roaring along at about 85, which was a hell of a rate, I can tell you, on that busy road. Coco Fairley was at the wheel, in dark glasses, with a gold locket and a lilac shirt open right down to the waist, and Gilmore Lloyd was beside him.

  Coco was one of Mummy’s first poets. His specialities were rich old cows and advanced concrete verse. When she went back to America, he found another soulmate, and his career since hasn’t been without incident: he had twice got himself slugged by his own poems. Mummy used to say they were good, and she was probably right. From this, anyway, you will gather that Coco Fairley was one of the world’s seven great fragrances.

  I trod on the accelerator, and a donkey cart sort of flinched out of the way. Behind, Coco did the same, grinning, and beside him Gilmore Lloyd gave a rude kind of cheer. Then I realised that they thought I was Janey. I was wearing a little Chinese coat, with a matching bikini under it, and a headscarf of the same stuff wrapped tight round my hair. It would be a mess when I got on board Dolly, but I thought it was worth it. I whipped off the headscarf and flung the car, hard, at the road. Through the driving mirror, I saw Coco’s cupid’s bow shut under his glasses. Then the locket glittered, and he drew out to pass.

  One thing I can do is drive. All the big brothers had cars, and you would be a bit of a clot if you hadn’t tried out half a dozen by the time you were 14 or 15. At the price of a bit of smooching in the back seat, it was a good way to learn. Clem Sainsbury had an old Rover which was always full of wet towels and Rugby gear, I remember. He was the best teacher of the lot, a bloody perfectionist and no funny stuff while you were driving. I suppose that was why most girls got fed up with him after a while. I had some final lessons and passed my test on a windfall from Daddy, but neither Derek nor I ever had a car till Flo and I clubbed together last year and got our ten-year-old Morris.

  The Maserati Mistral can do 155, the book says. I didn’t know what the Alfa Romeo’s top was, but I did know that I wasn’t going to let that indoor coffee plant pass me. I put my foot down and kept it there. An open-tile wall and a patch of garden marigolds, antirrhinums jumped past, and a woman sweeping the dirt with a long-handled broom slid back, a dark blur. The road narrowed, the fields dropping below: there was a grey retaining wall with a line of giant grasses on my right. Ahead, a Barreiras lorry packed full of cartons of Kelvinators, su seguro servidor, turned a corner and lumbered towards us, followed by a fat Ibiza-tours bus. Coco held it to the last second, and then moved in behind me.

  A black-and-white petrol-pump sign and a workman on an old Vespa, a wicker wine bottle strapped on his pillion. I cut out a second before Coco did and roared past the bike and the petrol station, the Alfa Romeo following, and found myself behind an old, high, scarlet Opel with a cloth roof, doing about twenty-five, with a big Seat 1500, a taxi, coming in the opposite direction.

  It was coming fast, but it wasn’t here yet. The Bar los Cazadores was coming up on the right, and the Atencion sign for the long, wire-netted swoop round to the Portinaitx junction. There we joined the main road, and I’d have to give way. I put my hand on the horn, shoved my signal light on, and drew out and found the red Opel right in the path of the taxi.

  He didn’t even have time to brake. I saw his face and heard a yell from the Opel as I skimmed past, and then I was bearing round the red-and-white netting and up to the Portinaitx junction. It said Ceda el paso. The road to the right was quite empty. A little distance away on the Ibiza road, a cart was coming towards us, an old man holding the reins. I changed down and looked back.

  The Alfa Romeo had got past the Opel and was halfway along the big curve towards me, at the point where it divided in two for incoming and outgoing traffic. As I put my foot down and moved out to turn to the left, I saw that Coco wasn’t following me. Instead, he was cutting across to the left, hugging the wrong side of the junction, in order to cut the corner and strike the Ibiza road just before me.

  He got there just as the cart did. I heard, as I accelerated, an almighty screaming of brakes, half drowned by an outburst of yelling in Spanish. Then the rest was covered by the sound of my own engine as I changed up and roared up the road.

  Here, the country was flat: low, green fields dotted with trees on the left with small terraced hills lying behind, and on the right, crops and small trees stretching far out of view. They passed in a blur. I overtook a big cream Mercedes, with forget-me-nots painted all over, and had to slow down to 50 for the Santa Eulalia bus; then I was off again. The white steps of a villa, with bright pots on them. A wood with fir trees and juniper and a snatch of wild thyme.

  Ahead, the San Miguel road was about to come in on the right, with a huddle of buildings on each side. A lorry, stacked high with thin metal pipes, came out of the junction and set off before me, the long pipes swaying gently before and behind. There was traffic coming. I slowed down to a respectful distance and glanced in my driving mirror. Empty. The best bit of the road was just coming, a long, straight, well-surfaced speedway between fields and small farms. And soon, after that, the white buildings of Ibiza should show in the distance. The pipes swayed in front of me, mesmeric as a snake- charmer’s dance. On the left, another lorry was crawling out of the yard of a solitary brick factory. Salida de Camiones. Hell.

  A white blur appeared in my mirror. Coco.

  I fumed behind those waggling pipes while the other lorry got itself down to the road. It waited for two cars to pass and then lumbered across into place in front of the pipes. All the time the Alfa Romeo, with nothing in front of it, was doing a bomb down the road right behind me, and when the two lorries finally ground into action again, it was on my tail, with Gil cheering and a snide smile on Coco’s lips.

  We passed one or two buildings and an isolated block of four-storey flats without overtaking, edging in and out and getting our ears flattened for us by oncoming stuff whizzing by. Then the
re came a sharp turn to the right. I stuck my bonnet right out, with my teeth set, and looked. There was the road clear in front of me: a long avenue of tall, leafless trees as far as the eye could distinguish, with the evening sun, on the right, lighting up the sides of the piled houses up in Ibiza. I drew right out, with a long flute of the Maserati’s double-tone horn, overtook the bloody pipes and the lorry before it, and then let her right out.

  I did a ton up that road, and probably more. I remember the white walls of farmhouses, a glimpse of some palms, and the junction to Jesus coming up on the left, with a cafe. The Lloyds had got used to the idea of a village called Jesus. I thought if a lorry came out of that road now, I’d go straight to Jesus all right.

  It didn’t, but Coco was coming instead. I could see the white car in the mirror, howling along on my tail, and I could see, too, that he was going to try to get past. It was his last chance. After this there were some low warehouse buildings and a piece of waste ground, and then we were straight into the sharp, right-hand corner which led to the harbour, with the Talamanca path coming in at a clutter of walls on the left, and an old cafe-bar on the right, its pillared porch sticking out in the road with Bar - Stop on a sign. I disapproved of that bar. It was falling down anyway, and the front yard under the porch was cluttered with oil drums and crates of San Miguel bottles, odd bikes and ironmongery for sale. Someone would stop there when he didn’t mean to one day.