I said: ‘Where are you going?’
He couldn’t kill me here, not unless he were cornered. But if he were cornered. I thought, he would do it, out of sheer bravura and hate. You would have to hate people to kill as he must have killed – Austin. Coco. Father.
He didn’t answer. But suddenly, as the silence continued, as we made our way to the quayside, I knew where he was going. He had to get out of Ibiza. No man could hide on an island. No plane would take him. But there was a boat which would take him very well. . .
Dolly. Dolly, with her powerful engine, sitting unattended in her berth, along by the yacht club.
By the quay, he found Mummy’s Humber, parked there by Dilling through the gentlemanly offices of the chief of police. The keys were still in it. Clem stopped, drew a breath, and then, flinging me in by main force, got the thing started and the gun again in my side before I recovered. Moving like a runaway hearse at a funeral, the Humber thundered across the wide space of the quayside and along to the right, on the road to the clubhouse. Clem drove all the way without changing down, with one hand on the wheel, and made the turn into the yard of the yacht club at the same speed, putting both feet on the pedals with such force that I was nearly flung through the windscreen. Then he snapped up the handbrake and motioned me out.
The gates were shut. For a moment I hoped they’d be locked and realised, then, that they wouldn’t be. Men living on boats could hardly be held to a curfew. In fact, Clem heaved at one of the new, silvery leaves and, pushing his gun in my back, forced me through. Then, pushing me, he began to run down the steps and along the quay towards Dolly.
We passed them one after the other, the beautiful boats with the yacht-club hieroglyphics: kyc; nrv; cni, and the orange and blue nylon ropes. Boats whose owners liked swimming and sunshine and had no need to count time. Those who could leave their offices, if they had offices, to fly to the Med and take on a casual boy, the son of a friend, a student down for vacation, and float with a party of friends – a bridge four, a drinking party, a sex foursome with congenial wives – from port to port and island to island, while the weather went along with the whim. I knew all the names. I knew some of the people. Daddy, probably, had known them all. We came, running, to the bollard where Dolly was berthed.
And Dolly was missing.
I heard Clem’s breath go in like a whistle. He looked round, heavily, like a bull. Had she changed berths? Was she out at a mooring? Was she sailing?
I looked at him. It mattered to me. Pushed to the end of his nerves, he was unpredictable. I didn’t know what he might do. I couldn’t see Dolly either, not anywhere: although we ran back along the whole frontage, desperately, and then retraced our steps. He stood gazing at the space where she’d been, his eyes black and open, as he wondered if he’d gone mad. Perhaps he had. His face was heavy and unlined, without any real stamp of living, as it had always been. I had envied him his lack of anxieties, in the simple, open-air life he had chosen. I hadn’t realised that, perhaps, his brain didn’t accept normal worries, that its scale of reference was quite different.
He stared at the water, and then for the last time he turned round, and I turned with him. We both saw Dolly, I think, at the same moment.
She wasn’t in the water at all. She was lying, her masts sloping above us, in the boatyard, and she was moving slowly as the chains pulled her up, up to where a blinded horse walked in a circle, loading the core of the winch.
I think then Clem went crazy. He left me. He dropped even his gun and ran through the gate, scrambling into the boatyard past tar barrels and lumber and tarpaulined boats. Then, seizing the horse, running after it as it shook its head and tried to jerk free, he tried to get it to turn, to reverse the laborious circle and unwind, so that the chains would slacken and Dolly would slip back into the water again – the life-giving water, where his only hope lay.
He was on the horse, urging it, when the Maserati flew down the road, and Johnson piled out, with Spry and Dilling and three Spanish police officers, hanging on by their eyebrows. A moment later, the Buick came along too. driven by Gilmore, with his father and my mother in the back. I didn’t see what happened as they streamed over the weedy sand into the enclosure: I had stopped looking as soon as Clem got near the horse. In fact, I think I was crying, in horrible, great, uncouth gulps, when Mummy came over the rubble, picking her way with her flounces hitched up round her calves, and sitting down, proceeded to fish out and light a cheroot.
She said: ‘Organised games: I never could go along with them. I didn’t tell you, She-she, at the time, but I got real worried when St Tizzy’s made you captain of cricket. If your body’s all that healthy, I reckon there’s something gone soft in your mind. Look at Derek. He was never the same after those nut cutlets.’
I swallowed. I don’t know why Mummy doesn’t talk like other people.
I said: ‘Oh, for Pete’s sake. I suppose you’d prefer Coco.’
‘But that proves my point,’ Mummy said, taking her cheroot out of her mouth. ‘Think of the tennis. The fact that he was doped to the eyeballs doesn’t make all that difference.’
I said, carefully: ‘I’m not sure, but I think you’re saying Coco was soft in the head?’
‘Well, he’d have to be, to let me keep him, dear, wouldn’t he?’ said Mummy. ‘He poured all the rest of himself into his concrete, poor darling. To die young is not always a sorrow. Look how fat your gym mistresses always used to become.’
‘But you don’t want to kill off my gym mistresses,’ I said. The running, the scuffling, and the subdued shouting had retired in the direction of the yacht clubhouse.
‘Where would we be without all those chest-developing exercises?’
‘You wouldn’t have had to wear your girdle under your armpits during all last year’s fashion,’ pointed out Mummy, with justice. ‘The healthiest people are those who never think of their health.’
‘Well, Christ, they don’t need to,’ I said, ‘if they’re healthy. They’ve got leisure then to stir up trouble sticking their noses into other people’s business. You don’t find hypochondriacs staging a thirty-six hour sit-down protest in sleet outside the Central Iguanian Embassy. Or Olympic medallists, either.’
Mummy stared at me. ‘There’s no such place as a Central Iguanian Embassy.’
Johnson’s pipe glowed, suddenly, in the dark close beside us.
‘But there ought to be,’ he said. ‘If you’ve finished the cross talk, Mr Lloyd has kindly offered to run us all back to his house for a meal.’
‘He what?’ I said, straightening my knees.
‘Oh, hard luck, She-she,’ said my mother, shaking the dust from her flounces and rising, cheroot holder extended, to touch me absently on the cheek. ‘I don’t suppose it has struck him that you’ll have to cook it. If you would bear in mind my small problem. My diet doesn’t permit me to take any fat.’
‘Your diet,’ I said. ‘Did you say your d . . . ?’
Mummy’s stare would have impaled a lizard.
‘Beauty,’ she said, ‘and symmetry. To have regard for the case of one’s instrument is a matter of simple aesthetics. I believe we are summoned.’
She stalked off into the darkness in the direction of the cars. Johnson tucked his arm around mine.
‘High-speed wander in the steering-unit,’ he said. ‘But the engine’s terrific. Come with us and get drunk.’
I cooked the dinner. Everyone was hollow-eyed and sickly, except Johnson, and they kept coming and patting me, which was sweet. They really needed a good meal. I wasn’t feeling frightfully Spanish, so I warmed up some thick lentil soup and fried them bacon and eggs. The bacon wasn’t fearfully appealing and the eggs were the usual, like ping-pong balls filled by a fulmar, but it was something like home. I switched on all the lights in the dining room and pulled all the blinds, and if I’d had an LP of Elgar, I’
d have put that on too. Then I banged on the gong.
There were only seven of us: Janey and Gil and their father, and our three guests, Derek and Johnson and Mummy. Mummy had taken off all her flounces and was wearing a Jean Harlow thing Janey had bought in Neiman Marcus once for a lark: it was floor-length pink, edged with white swansdown. She is so damned sure of herself, she made her entrance quite straight, just glided in puffing cheroot smoke and sat down, without being directed, on Mr Lloyd’s right. Janey, balked of her little amusement, glanced in Gil’s direction and sat down also, making a face. She had changed into a sort of light trench-coat dressing gown, and both Gil and his father had polo-necked cashmeres and slacks. Comfort was what we all wanted. I’d had no time to refurbish at all. Gil looked at the crochet thing as I brought in the soup, and getting up, disappeared and came back with a cardigan. It was Janey’s best, made of white cashmere with pearls and a mink collar, and I put it on, keeping my face straight as well. Johnson, who was wearing the same as he’d worn all day, put his pipe in his pocket and also came and sat down.
Mr Lloyd finished handing round very large whiskies, and sat down heavily, at the head of the table, saying: ‘Now, Johnson,’ in a definite voice. Ever since he had spotted that Johnson had something basic to do with it all, he had been very hard to put off. When we’d finished exclaiming, we’d all been inclined to badger Johnson on the way home, but he had remained uncommunicative and calm.
‘It’s a long story, and I’d rather tell it all at once and to everyone at the same time. Wait until we get in.’
We’d left Dilling and Spry behind in Ibiza, with what looked like the entire Spanish police force. I gathered they were all going to Mummy’s villa to take official custody of Jorge and Gregorio: Clem and the Saint Hubert rubies were already safely locked up. It hadn’t dawned on me until then that Dilling, as well as Spry, was Johnson’s man. Even then, I couldn’t really absorb it, but just sat with my teeth chattering somewhat until the Casa Venets came into view. We were all, I suppose, really getting over the shock.
Johnson sat, staring into his soup, and said:
‘Mr Lloyd, you are the only person here, I believe, who doesn’t know that Mrs van Costa is Sarah’s mother. The deception was a perfectly innocent one and had a great deal to do with what has happened today. If the children hadn’t stumbled on the fact rather by accident, they wouldn’t have known either. I tell you this so that you will see there are only two families here tonight, apart from myself, and I want a promise from you both that what I am now going to tell you won’t go beyond these four walls.’
Mr Lloyd’s eyes, swivelling, met my mother’s. She stubbed out her cheroot and absently patted his hand.
‘You have my word,’ said Mr Lloyd to Johnson. ‘And you may take it I speak for my family.’
‘Now listen to that, She-she,’ said Mummy.
‘Their family’s normal,’ I said. ‘I won’t tell anyone, Mr Johnson.’
‘And I certainly won’t,’ Derek said. ‘What are you, sir? MI 5?’
‘They never gave me a number,’ said Johnson with regret. ‘I just knock around with a boat and some paints, and they call me in if anything happens to the genuine men in the field. If they go off the rails or get themselves into trouble or get murdered, for instance.’
There was a short silence, as all the spoons stopped. Mummy was smiling into her plate like Mia Farrow by Leonardo da Vinci. I stared at Derek, and he stared back, going slowly red in queer patches.
I said: ‘Daddy?’
‘Yes. Schuytstraat got it wrong, Derek,’ said Johnson. ‘Your father was, as it happened, an agent. But for us, not for the wrong side.’
‘You knew?’ I said to Mummy. It was absolute rubbish, of course. Daddy had been a charming old, liquored-up peer, and of such, secret agents are simply not made. I remembered the offer he’d made Derek of five thousand a year to leave Schuytstraat’s and opened my mouth to continue, but Mummy forestalled me.
‘Yeah. I knew,’ she said. ‘I guessed last time I saw him. He dropped by, you know, when he was staying with those friends in Bermuda. He looked much the same and he talked much the same, but there was a kind of difference. You wouldn’t notice unless you’d gotten kind of used to him over a period. It seemed to me half of it was acting.’
‘Only half,’ said Johnson gently. ‘We couldn’t entrust him with anything major. But he helped me once, quite unwittingly in a . . . small contretemps. He was sober at the time, and he acted with such speed and such imagination that it struck me that here was something to be salvaged. Forgive me, Lady Forsey, for putting it like that.’
‘Mr Johnson, you may put it any way that you like,’ said my mother. ‘However he died, Eric owed the whole of the last part of his life to you people. We had nothing in common, Lord Forsey and I, when we parted. When we met again, I found things were quite different. Nothing was said, not at first, but we formed the habit of writing, and we arranged to meet the next year, briefly, on a friend’s yacht. It was after we had become quite close again that I got out of him the cause of the change. I am telling all the rest of you this, as I have already told Mr Johnson, so that you will understand that Lord Forsey did not regard me as an outsider when finally he told me of his new work. All the time, of course, he continued to travel and visit with friends, and present the same impecunious face to the world. It hurt him. She-she and Derek, to have to deny you some of the luxuries he felt you should have, and it hurt him even more that neither of you would ever realise he was not the man you both thought he was. I don’t think it harmed either of you not to have money, although it may have been hard on you, Derek, not to have a parent whom you could respect. You placed him in a really awkward position when you accused him of betraying Schuytstraat’s secrets. He didn’t want either you or the firm to investigate any further, and the only way he could think of to stop you was to buy you off with a pension. He was rather proud, I may say, that you refused.’
‘He could have told me,’ said Derek. His nose had gone red.
‘He was a great and good man,’ said Mr Lloyd. He looked terribly struck. ‘And this was why he was killed? Because he was an agent?’
‘He was killed,’ said Johnson, ‘because he found out the secret of Austin Mandleberg’s gallery. Lady Forsey had seen some of these pieces of art in America. She is interested in artists, she knew how these exhibits should look. It struck her, seeing the exhibits a second and a third time, that they were being tampered with. Excisions had been newly made, and joins where there had been none before. She mentioned it in a note to her husband, and Lord Forsey, in Amsterdam for a trade fair, went to see for himself. Then, while he was in Holland, these highly secret items of machinery went missing from Schuytstraat’s factory.
‘Not only that, but they disappeared utterly, and no trace of them was ever found. No doubt he asked an unusual number of questions. At any rate, for quite the wrong reasons, he roused the company’s suspicions. Meanwhile, without realising this, he had discovered that the exhibition was going next to Ibiza. He found no difficulty in inducing Mr Lloyd, who was a close and generous friend, to invite him to Ibiza for the duration of this exhibition. When he wrote and told Lady Forsey, she, too, on the whim of the moment, found means to rent a house in Ibiza, and taking Coco Fairley with her as cover, descended on the island as Mrs van Costa. Her husband was perhaps a little disconcerted at finding her here, but no one knew her: even as an actress she had long been off the stage, and she had spent the last years of her life entirely in America. When she made her presence known to him, he rather enjoyed stealing off to meet her, clandestinely, at the villa. Unfortunately, Coco saw them.’
‘Coco,’ said Mummy, ‘was actually there uninvited. I had no wish for his company. He merely bought a plane ticket for himself, as well as for me, and threatened to kill himself if I refused to let him come with me. A silly boy,’ said my mother, severel
y, ‘but he was right in the middle of a most valuable poem. I think it stands, still, as the best thing he has ever done. The letters are all formed from ten-cent New Zealand stamps with a human rights message. The impact of these words, multiplied hundreds of times, was cathartic He finished it, poor child, just a week or two before he died.’
‘Where is it?’ said Gilmore. He had a doting look in his eyes.
‘Oh. We posted it,’ Mummy said, faintly surprised. ‘She-she, I believe we’ve all finished soup.’
I tore myself, with reluctance, from my seat.
‘Where to, for goodness’ sake?’
‘Let me guess,’ Johnson said. He contemplated the whisky glass in his hand, the bifocals steady. ‘Vietnam?’
‘Check,’ said Mummy, surprised. I shot out and came back with the bacon. Gilmore got up to help me.
In the kitchen, he said: ‘Was she always like this?’
‘Who? Mummy?’ I said. ‘She was always bloody impossible, if that’s what you mean. Well, imagine having her coming down for the Eton-Harrow match, smoking cheroots.’
‘I think she’s marvellous,’ Gilmore said.
‘She doesn’t water-ski,’ I said, bitingly. ‘How are Louie and Petra?’
‘Blooming,’ said Gilmore. ‘What got into you two over your parents? They must have been quite remarkable.’
‘I’m glad you think so,’ I said, picking up a tray with the eggs. ‘But then, look at your taste.’
When we got back, Johnson was explaining how on Daddy’s death, he had put into harbour with Dolly. It had been rigged as suicide, but he saw at once there wasn’t enough blood. The body had been brought there, and death had actually taken place somewhere else. Since it was the Art in the Round Daddy had been suspicious of, there was at least a sporting chance that something had gone wrong there. He pulled strings and got the Spanish police to sit on the evidence that it was anything other than suicide.