Ibiza Surprise

by Dorothy Dunnett

  ‘That’s your reality,’ I said. ‘It’s not the same as mine. Mine is Daddy’s.’

  ‘I know,’ Derek said. I could feel him standing, watching me as I went out, but he didn’t say anything more.

  I stopped at Spar on the way home and returned all the Fantas.

  I was having breakfast in the kitchen when Gilmore came in juggling three tennis balls, kissed Anne-Marie, and hitched himself on to the edge of the table. He had on a voile shirt and pale hipster pants, and he still looked like Cary Grant.

  ‘Your nose is red, She- she,’ he said.

  I said: ‘I’ve been drinking.’

  He caught the balls and began to throw them up one-handed, his eyebrows lifted right up. His eyes were blue, not green like Janey’s. I wondered if he wore contact lenses too.

  He said: ‘I gather Janey has made a botch of her public relations. Has the worthy engineer gone back to his engines?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. I didn’t care, either. I’d given up thinking about Derek. And about Daddy, for that matter.

  ‘Um,’ said Gilmore. He remained. ‘Well, now we know you drink. You also cook. You swim. What other talents can you produce?’

  I held my coffee cup with both hands and studied it. ‘I dance. I play tennis and cricket. I skate. I water-ski. I ride. I can type. I think I can wear clothes. And I know how to sew and to nurse and to look after babies.’

  ‘Come and look after me,’ said Gilmore Lloyd, getting off the table. ‘I want to go riding.’

  ‘I have,’ I said, ‘your lunch to get ready.’

  ‘Anne-Marie got the breakfast and she can perfectly well cook lunch for Janey and Father as well,’ said Gilmore, pleasantly. Anne-Marie, catching my eye, smiled and nodded. ‘We shan’t be in.’

  It was the kind of day Celeste sometimes hints at, but never for Capricorn.By the time I’d changed, Gil had brought round the Cooper S, dark green and we took off for the stables, where we switched to the horses. Gil had brought saddlebags with him. I knew there’d be cold chicken and a bottle of martinis in one, and a large towel in the other, and that they had all been packed long before I got back from Derek. Men like Gil Lloyd don’t take a girl out to watch rugby or to teach her to drive. That was all right. We spoke the same language.

  The morning was super, blue and clear with gorgeous fresh heat. And we made our own breeze, cantering over the scrub and between the rows of little green trees, with the fig trees, like ghosts, staked out like maypoles all round their elbows. We passed a bent olive tree with a prop under its knuckle, like The Thinker, and I asked Gil if all this wasn’t someone’s land. He said it was. It was his father’s. The sun shone harder, and all the cicadas sang, and so did Gilmore and I.

  We stopped at a place called San Jose for a beer and a fizzy stone ginger, and made our way across unwalled country down to a beach. It was a wild ride, up and down crumbly, overgrown gulches, with a motor road winding in and out in hairpin bends beside us, through a mass of little hot hills, dotted with conifers and bushes and flowers, and all scented by pine trees and thyme.

  A flock of little birds barred with bright lemon, like butterflies, got up and fluttered away. A goat, chained and muzzled, looked up as the horses moved past. We rustled at times hock deep in a thicket of flowers: tall, feathery, pink spikes even Gil didn’t know and miles of enormous white daisies, their centres all stained deep yellow. There were bushes and bushes of starry things like Christmas roses in lilac and white, and short purple flowers, some with spikes, some with trumpets, and things like vetches, and miniature iris, and oceans of bright yellow stuff that looked like charlock. There were patches of tall sisal cactus and thickets of prickly pear like a crowd of cheering green bats. Gil told me what everything was and the names went straight out of my head because he looked so super, with his French needle-cord jeans, his suntan, and the way he moved with his horse.

  We picked our way down to the beach, just about midday. It was simply out of this world: a cut of fine shelving sand underneath a towering cliff of stacked orange sandstone. The cliff had a fuzz of greeny-grey stuff here and there seeded into it and a litter of dead branches and trunks in a queer, electric blue-grey that would fetch a packet at the biennial, I promise you, as Art in the Round. Patching the sand were big fallen boulders and beds of silver-brown flakings of seaweed, so deep it was like walking on cushions. Under the noon sun and the reflected heat of the sandstone, you could see the beach sizzle. It was perfectly empty. We let the horses loose to find shade somewhere under an overhang, and Gil hauled out the towel and spread it for me to lie on, then unpacked the goodies.

  It was, actually, the bloody ham with the olives that I’d bought that morning in Spar, with some fruit and some yogurt and a long roll with a packet of butter and some Queso Gruyere ahumado at forty-two pesetas the whack. I’d forgotten who was doing the catering. But at least we didn’t have Fantas: we didn’t even have martinis. He’d brought a full bottle of Veterano Osborne.

  On every first date with a boy, there’s a key moment when you know someone’s got his finger on the button, and any second now you’ll have to choose your line and scamper through all your resources. There’s no kick quite like it.

  Gil poured two stiff drinks, downed his, chucked a corner of the towel over the food and said: ‘Come on. I’m cooking. Let’s cool down first.’ And leaning down to where I was lying nursing my own empty glass, he slid the zipper neatly from top to bottom of my pink jump suit from Jaeger’s.

  They all do that. I put my glass down and got up, shaking off the rest of the jump suit. I had my bikini on already beneath.

  He said: ‘You little bitch! Where do you think this is, Filey?’ And he pounced.

  That was OK, too. I ducked and fled for the sea, with Gil grabbing, but I got into the surf first and kicked a load of it into his face. He still had on his voile shirt and trousers. Then while he was still gasping, I struck out into the water.

  He came in, just as he was. He could swim, too, but you can’t rape anyone in deep water, or at least if you can you ought to get a certificate. By the time he’d got one strap off my bikini, we were both laughing so much we were spouting up brandy, and before very long I made off back to the beach. I got the towel before he did too, and lay face down on it gasping, while he dropped on the sand, his chest going up and down. The voile shirt had a great rip in it. I don’t remember doing that, but I must have.

  I said: ‘I’m starving.’

  ‘Are you, ducky?’ said Gil. And sitting up slowly, he pulled his shirt right off and rolled over, trapping my hand. Then he got my other one, before I could kick out, and transferred it till he had them both in one grip. ‘So am I, ducky,’ and like a man trained in Spirella, he sprang the clip of my bikini top and followed it up, one-handed in the time-honoured way, breathing salt water and brandy. A woman in high-heeled shoes and a man in a suit came on to the beach.

  I honestly think he wasn’t going to stop. My chin ground into the sand. I could feel his hand turn and get ready, sneakily, to slide in another direction. It wasn’t that it was anything but absolutely delirious, but one has to think of one’s ground plan. I heaved up my bottom, and as his hand came off, bit him. The yell made the woman look round, but I had the towel round me by then, and Gil was sitting back on his heels, holding his arm and swearing. I stared back, deadpan. His eyes had gone cold, and I hoped suddenly that the couple was going to stay for a while. Then, without saying anything, he got to his feet, found my glass, and filled it slowly and deliberately with brandy. Then he held it hard, against my teeth.

  I drank it all, with my hair falling back over my shoulders, and my eyes half shut, gazing at his. By the end he was smiling. I smiled too.

  ‘Hard luck, Gil,’ I said. ‘No pills since Sunday, remember?’ The smile slowly faded from his face, and I lay back and went straight off to sleep. I like to be organised. />
  I woke much later, with my tummy rumbling, and lay there getting up the nerve to turn round. But he was still there, asleep also, with the brandy bottle half finished beside him. When he woke, he’d be chocker. I couldn’t count on him now at the party, but I should have Austin then. And there would be another day coming. He looked nice, asleep. Spoiled, but nice.

  I looked round, and the other couple were just going, still dressed. They were both heavily built. She wore earrings and a black velvet waistcoat suit over a satin striped blouse. I wondered why on earth they had come to the beach. I wondered if I was sorry they had.

  I lay for a bit watching the ants, and a thin brown sparrow with large Spanish eyes stood on a rock and inspected me. The rock was grey, with scraps of yellow netting, you’d think, dragged all over it. But it was really a network of hard yellow stone inside the rock, sticking up as the rest wore away. It was funny.

  A sort of caterpillar went by, dragging a grey, soft cone of seaweed like a wedding dress. I stirred, put on some sun cream, and decided to occupy myself making the ham into sandwiches. Then I had some yogurt and watched two lizards fighting over the drips in the lid. They were blue-green with thin, black speckled stripes, and they stood with their forelegs braced on one stone and their hind legs and tail miles away, on another stone altogether. I wondered what it felt like. Their black tongues licked the lid, leaving a band of clean silvery foil, and the lid gave little clinks on the stones. Then there would be a dry scrape of feet as they flew at each other and somersaulted apart, streaming up the red rocks into cover. They seemed to like strawberry flavour. I finished my yogurt and woke Gil by laying two cucumber rounds in his eyes.

  He was a little cool at first, but he joined in after a bit while I chatted, and by the time we got to the fruit, we had gone through all the people we had in common and found that there was a second cousin of Daddy’s who was related to an aunt by marriage of his, that when he was a boy, his father used to take a chalet at St Moritz near the chalet of some people I knew, and that we had once been to the same bit of the river at the same time for the boat race and hadn’t known it. He took all these coincidences fairly easily, but I didn’t. I thought it was fate.

  I told him what Celeste said about Capricorn and Scorpio, and he said: ‘Honestly, Sarah. You don’t believe all that punk?’

  ‘Yes!’ I said indignantly. Men always said this. But they usually managed a grin. ‘Some are phoney, perhaps. But Celeste is marvellous. She’s got me right over and over and over. I promise you. I find it terribly useful.’

  ‘As bait?’ said Gilmore. Lying on his back, he had lit a cigarette with tobacco in it.

  I said: ‘You’ve got to talk about something.’ I recognised that this was all my own fault. I was glad that I still had Austin and Clem and Johnson, though.

  ‘What do you want, Sarah?’ said Gil. ‘Marriage at any price to anybody?’

  I lay on my elbow and looked at him, but he wasn’t looking at me.

  ‘Don’t you think I’d make a good wife?’

  ‘For someone who doesn’t mind being picked by a pin,’ Gilmore said.

  I picked up a handful of sand and dribbled it down his bare arm. ‘I think I’d make a good wife. But I wouldn’t marry just anyone.’

  ‘You’d marry someone rich,’ said Gilmore. ‘With a good social position, who didn’t mind being bossed around for good by his wife.’ He opened his eyes. ‘You should put an advertisement in the papers. Come on, let’s pack it in. You’ve got to get back and cook something sensational for Austin.’

  The sky was flat milky blue, and the sea to the west was full of running bands of thin sparkle, widening as they came near the shore. We began to pack up.

  We got back mid afternoon, without talking very much more, and Gil disappeared to bounce tennis balls in the garden. But that was an absolutely typical encounter. I mean, something always, sooner or later, comes apart in the middle when a boy takes me out.

  I cooked a six-course meal for Austin, using every pan in the kitchen, just to show the bloody Lloyds what was what. Gil kept out of the kitchen, and he was brief and bored-sardonic when we met. Janey came in once, and sat on the edge of the table while I was stoning olives to stuff in the veal, eating them as fast as I got the stones out.

  After a bit, as I expected, she said: ‘What do you think Derek will do? Did he tell you after all what he’d been doing?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. It was the half-truth, anyway. I knew why Derek had come back and that he had seen Daddy. What I didn’t know was what Daddy had told him and what Derek had done about it. I added: ‘It was a family thing; nothing to do with why Daddy died. I think it was suicide after all.’

  Janey stared at me, an olive still in her hand. ‘You what?’ Then she looked again at my face and said: ‘Oh, no you don’t. You think Derek killed him.’

  ‘I don’t,’ I said. ‘I just don’t want to think about it again, that’s all.’

  ‘Well, you’re going to have to shut Coco’s mouth for him tonight then, dear, aren’t you?’ said Janey. ‘And what about your precious letter?’

  I didn’t want to know any more about the letter or about why Janey’s father hadn’t gone to Barcelona: for all I knew he was the nightclub queen of Majorca.

  I said: ‘I think, honestly, if anything had been wrong, the authorities would have found out before now.’

  I was a bit steamed up over it all, and it’s not awfully fair, in a way, digging out the old man’s lurid past. If you could put up with me to the end of the week, I’ll potter off on Monday to Kensington W and forget it.

  Three more days would be fair, I felt, to concentrate on my personal life. Austin, for example, had said something about seeing Seville. And Clem was to be at the party tonight. I looked at the clock.

  ‘You can stay as long as you like,’ said Janey. Afterwards, I realised how absently she had spoken. At the time, I just dragged the bowl of olives away from her fingers and started chopping the bacon. I had to wash my hair, yet, and I didn’t bother to look when the Maserati tuned up and rolled down the driveway a few minutes later.

  She was back before dinner, which was just as well, as I was sliding in and out of the kitchen in housecoat and rollers, nursing the veal, and doing last-minute things, like slicing and bedding the avocados in lettuce. Anne-Marie was off, but Helmuth did the last stages, which let me do my eyes and get into this thing I bought in Hung on You, which was made of kind of white moire silk with polythene bands in between, which rather showed off my suntan.

  Daddy would have hit the absolute roof, and I rather thought Mr Lloyd might wince a trifle. But it was also jolly smart. If I couldn’t frighten Gil, I could shock him. And I could glue Austin, I hoped, to my side, for most of Coco’s ominous party. On Clem, I knew, it would make no impression at all. At parties Clem was a model of boyish high spirits: he got sloshed on beer and told a number of rather good, dirty masculine jokes. Flo always said that if Clem ever really fell for a girl, he would fall awfully hard, and I always felt that someday he would meet her: someone jolly, who could live inexpensively off his overdraft. But he made a fabulous bodyguard.

  The funny thing was, I had no premonitions at all. And when I looked back in the papers, it said Capricorn was going to have a hell of a time.

  They were right.

  SIX

  Mrs van Costa’s house, the Casa Mimosa, hired, Anne-Marie said, from the star of an American TV soap opera, lay in a garden not far from the airport and was landscaped with every soap-opera cliché known to man. Spinning along through the warm night in the Cooper S, the first sight of it, long and white and floodlit among the palm trees, was a bit like finding a cruise liner at night in your bathtub: it was all plate glass and wrought iron and creepers and great wax flowers that dangled into the car as we growled round the drive. There was a fancy lake in the front, surrounded by cacti, small palm
s, lilies, and white marble seats, and floodlit like an old Korda film. Also, hosts of little strips of tinfoil and plastic hung on threads in the air, slung between all the date palms. On each strip, single words had been written in beautiful script. Walking towards the house, the sequence I saw declared, Loving is summer and hell is an electric light bulb. But as Gilmore pointed out, if you approached the house another way, it read Loving an electric light bulb is hell. There was a Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud Mark III flying the Soviet flag drawn up before the front door.

  Gilmore and I came to a complete halt, and Austin cannoned into us and then listened while we consulted. The concrete poetry party, it was clear, had not yet got off the ground: apart from the Rolls, there were no cars at all to be seen except our own Cooper S and Coco’s battered Alfa Romeo, parked rather askew at the side of the drive. The Russian Trade Mission, clearly, was still being entertained to dinner by Mrs van Costa. Whether Mrs van Costa also knew of Coco’s proposed party and had vetoed it, or whether (as Gil was convinced) she didn’t know and Coco was choosing his moment, remained to be seen.

  Austin, who had sold a couple of ikons to Mr Lloyd and felt on home ground, obviously, as soon as he took in the poetry, said: ‘Now why would Coco Fairley do a thing like that, Gilmore? After all, he’s a guest in Mrs van Costa’s house.’ Americans are the most formal people on earth, maybe after the Swedes.

  ‘It’s a happening to celebrate the fact that Coco’s being thrown out on his neck,’ Gilmore said. ‘I told him not to stop working. The trouble is, as soon as he finds a new billet, he hits the charlie again.’

  Austin hesitated. I’d expected him to be turned out in white tux, all Washington style, but he was wearing a cream wool-jersey suit by Virgul of Paris, with a strawberry cashmere polo-necked sweater. I saw the label.