I asked Johnson Johnson if he kept tropical fish. The bifocals turned all merry, whether with the recollection of me in my bath or the question, I wouldn’t actually know. He shook his head.
‘Too sexy,’ he said.
‘Fish?’
‘Have you ever watched them?’ he said. ‘You can’t cure it, either. Friend of mine used to give his guppies a session of group psychotherapy.’
‘What happened?’
‘They were found making suggestions to a small party of fry,’ Johnson said. Then Janey got him again.
After dinner we walked in the garden, where the Greek gods had all gone from the swimming pool, although there was still a nymph or two under the bougainvillea, and the fountains were on. I was beside Gil, and it was rather warm and cosy and hopeful when Father Lloyd flicked on a switch and all the floodlighting came on. I swear they had tungsten halogen behind every mosquito. There was also a grotto with fibreglass stalactites. Gilmore vanished, and I said to Johnson: ‘What have you done with my letter?’
I thought he’d say: ‘What letter?’ and he did.
I said: ‘The one in my handbag. From my father.’
He could have had the bloody pills. When I found the letter was missing, I felt rotten, I can tell you. It was sheer chance I had got it at all. I’d left Flo with her mother and gone back to the London flat to pack for Ibiza, the day after poor Derek went back to Holland. And there it was, with a lot of other stuff on the mat, in Daddy’s writing, dated the day he had died.
It didn’t say anything about cutting his throat. I telephoned Derek that night to tell him: I thought it might help. He hadn’t been brooding or suffering cancer or something, he’d just been so stoned, I think, that he suddenly got fed up and did it. He was stoned when he wrote the letter: there was a bit in the middle that made no sense at all. But it was all I had, the last thing from Daddy, and Johnson had taken it.
Johnson wasn’t indignant or offended or even very excited.
‘I hadn’t, you know,’ he said mildly. ‘I don’t even collect stamps. But your bag was open when I found it.’
‘The pills didn’t fall out,’ I said coldly.
‘Well, they did, sweetie, and I picked them up because they were white. What else is missing?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Well, let’s borrow a torch and go look for it,’ said Johnson. In the son-et-lumiere, his face looked just like uncut moquette. It was all right by me, except that Janey insisted on coming. I had a little knitted coat in the bedroom. I let down my hair, which had dried, from its wraparound, squirted Caleche all over, and sprinted off down. He was on the mature side, but he wasn’t married, and I didn’t see why Janey should have it all her own way. I couldn’t pay for a portrait, but maybe Austin Mandleberg could.
It was jolly dark in the ditch, even with a couple of torches, and the old Seat’s headlights simply lay over the top. Janey found a dead brown rat, with its four pink feet all pointing upward, which put me off looking for a bit, so I got the storm lantern and went off under the cork trees, in case the letter had bounced or got blown out or something. It was a bit odd, because the lantern made all the tree shadows slide backward and forward, and if you looked back to the road, I swear you could see bats. I kept looking down, for the letter, and then I thought I had found it, but it was only an old blue empty packet of Ducados, largos con flltros. Beyond it, just at the edge of the light, was the battered old wreck of a car. And behind the car, and just visible under the chassis, was a pair of masculine feet, wearing white canvas shoes.
I got the quarter-mile cup at St Tizzy’s. I had dropped the lantern and lit out of the wood before you could draw breath for a sneeze, and I fell into the ditch just as Johnson was shouting.
‘I’ve got it! Miss Cassells! We’ve dug up your letter!’
‘There’s a man in there,’ I said, still rolling.
‘You surprise me,’ said Johnson. ‘They must call this lovers’ corkwood. Was it any two people we know?’
‘It was a man,’ I said and sat up. ‘Alone. Standing. Not speaking. Right inside the wood.’
‘Austin,’ said Janey. ‘You ass.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘They weren’t American shoes.’
‘Well, for heaven’s sake, She-she,’ said Janey. ‘Run back.’
No one was taking me seriously, and so long as we weren’t staying in that wood any longer, why should I care? As Johnson said, at least the feet weren’t bare. He handed me Daddy’s letter as we all got into the Seat. It was a bit crumpled, but quite intact.
‘My dear She-she,’ he’d written.
When we got back, I telephoned Austin. He wasn’t in, but a voice in a thick Spanish accent promised to tell him that my bag had been found. Gil was still absent, sulking, and Johnson, though polite, clearly wanted to get back to the harbour, where he was staying on board his yacht, Dolly. He invited me, after a broad hint or two, to visit him for a drink the next afternoon, and then asked Janey as well, which was mean, because that meant I had transport. I suppose he had to—no—that’s just being draggy. Janey really is gorgeous.
I slept like the dead.
The market in Ibiza opens between seven and half-past in the morning. I was up by six-thirty and leaving the house half an hour later with Helmuth in a hefty old Land Rover with a tyre on its bonnet and room for a small horse at the back. I had a lunch party of nine to cook for, or I’d volunteered, anyway. I was rather pleased that Janey’s father accepted the offer without the least bit of fuss. He was quite the nicest of all the rich men Daddy had ever stayed with, big and athletic and clean with a great, jolly laugh. For instance, for goodness’ sake, he’d no need to offer to entertain a minor Russian trade mission, on a brief break from treaty talks in Madrid, even though he’d met the attaché before. He said he owed a favour to the official delegate for Ibiza and Formentera, who was away till tomorrow. I suspected that the reason actually was that the Reds knew they’d get a jolly good tuck-in at the Casa Venets compared with anywhere else there in Holy Week. At any rate the four Russians were coming, and the chief Balearic mining engineer and the municipal vet had been thrown in for good measure, and between now and half-past two, which was lunch time, Mother Trudi was going to work like a runaway self-propelled two-speed gear lawn mower, between breaks. Such as visiting Gallery 7 with Janey, for instance.
We left Anne-Marie flowing about with the vacuum, but upstairs all the blinds were still drawn. Janey doesn’t like getting up early. I didn’t know what Gil’s habits were. I spread myself over two seats beside Helmuth and prepared to enjoy the calm pre-dawn country run into Ibiza. It was cool in the garden, and a cock was crowing somewhere beside Santa Eulalia, to the right. There was a pink band along the horizon, over the sea, but the tall, concrete hotels beside the village were all dark, and the whitewashed church-fort on its hill. We turned our backs on a sky filled with chalky-blue clouds with a sort of peach-coloured glitter between. After a bit, the sun burst through and shadows sprang out on the road in front of the Rover and were promptly mown down by the traffic.
Seven am is rush hour in rural Ibiza. Between the unwalled fir woods and orchards, the scrub, the small farms, the walled crops, and the bony sheep, the goats, the fat hens, the occasional chained cow, and all the busy, undulating fields that spread in the distance to the low, bald, furzy hills, the greater part of the island seemed to be shifting on wheels towards us. They came in Seats and Simcas and whopping great lorries, on push-bikes and every kind of motorised cycle ever produced outside of acetate locknit: Vespas, Mobylettes, Lambrettas, and old vibrating models with old vibrating workmen in black berets, their lunch in a strapped-on reed basket. Once a real motorbike came by with a crouching rider in fur-collared leathers and goggles and big fur-lined gloves, his mouth and chin concealed by a scarf, making straight for Toad Hall. Then we passed the famous wood with the ditch and join
ed the Portinaitx junction where I had felt Austin take the bend yesterday, and from then on the traffic was going more with us, to Ibiza.
I got to know that road far too well. But I never saw it again as busy as I did on market mornings, with the tile factory steaming and chaps loading grey, honeycomb bricks on to a lorry like mice in a Mack Sennett comedy. The cement factory past the San Miguel junction was going a bomb. The Gasolina was open. Even in fields deserted to little round olives and carob trees, or among the orange and fig trees and pink-and-white blossoms, old Spanish grannies in straw hats and pigtails were whizzing to and fro, the bundle of reeds or whatever under one black-shawled arm, the top two or three skirts kilted. I taught Helmuth to sing One Man Went to Mow in English, and we bowled along in the Rover a bit over the stipulated 80km, bawling it out until we got to the long, straight avenue of trees just before Ibiza.
In front of us were two mule carts just negotiating the sharp, right-hand bend, where the Talamanca path joins the main road in a huddle of buildings. Between the upright lath sides of each cart, a woven mat had been slung, like a dipped carpet, and each mat held a bouquet of round, green, dewy lettuces. They nodded before us, and the sweep of the harbour lay blue behind them, and the high town of Ibiza lay behind that, not like a bride’s cake this morning, but a hazy stockpile of windows, with old yellow buildings on top and some trimming, like a club sandwich, of green. Somewhere up there was Gallery 7.
The clock on the Cathedral tower said 7.15 am, and the seagulls on the quay were warbling seagull flamenco. I sighed and got out Anne-Marie’s list and a purse full of paper money like bits of old blanket, while Helmuth trundled behind the lettuces round the bay past the yacht marina and into the sort of thicket of shops and offices and workshops that edged up to the hill of the high town. The high town in Ibiza was called the Dalt Vila and had an old wall right round it, Helmuth said.
We parked by the Philips building in the Mercado Nuevo, and you could see the town wall from there, tall and flat and yellowish-white, with palms and creepers, and the sandy roof tiles of buildings behind. It ran just beside us as we walked through narrow, shadowy streets filled with traffic, scurrying men, women mopping out offices, chaps washing their taxis, and housekeepers, like me, with a big woven basket folded over the arm. A boy passed in patched trousers and sneakers, selling the Diario news-sheet, and Helmuth gave him three pesetas for it.
I wasn’t looking. I’d found a panateria by following the smell of fresh bread round two corners, and there was the window, piled with crystallised pears and cherries and peaches, and plates of soft, glistening iced cakes and small toffee custards in chocolate papers, and rounds of frilled, sugared shortcake and thick patterned cream in the jaws of golden, flaked pastry, and chocolate sponges filled with whole cherries, soggy with rum. Inside there were stacks of long, hot, crunchy loaves, and soft, sugared cushions of bread-cake, limp and warm on the hand. I bought enough to put pounds on Janey, and five chocolate Easter eggs. Helmuth dragged me out.
The market was even better. You could find it by the noise, or by following the high walls of Dalt Vila, for the market square footed the ramp that led up to the Dalt Vila gateway. The square itself had shops on three sides, most hardly open. In the middle was a small Doric erection clobbered with people, like the Temple of Diana of the Ephesians in the middle of the Aldermaston March. The building was set on an island, and patched blinds stretched out from its roof to cover the rickety stalls which surrounded it. Inside, between classic columns, was a landscape of counters, with fat, jolly women in jerseys helping to load them from the jam-up of trucks, lorries and carts in the square round about. Helmuth plunged into the middle, and I followed, my hair stuck to my neck.
If the sun had been on the market, instead of on the high town behind it, I should have needed dark glasses. At Mother Trudi’s, the fruit and veg were all washed and graded and delivered in polythene. These would have punched their way out of the bags. The lemons were all Wallace Beery: husky, belligerent brutes with cauliflower rinds. The tomatoes were like pumpkins: green heavy-lobed monsters, all blotched with dark red. The radishes reared in a wet, scarlet pile, the size of young carrots. Instead of the neat bunch of bananas I was used to, was a thing like a thick green umbrella stand, with the cringing bananas growing down on the stalk. Heaps of peas in the pod lay on old sacking, knotted like golf balls. There were baskets of muscadel raisins and crates of matt carmine apples and atolls of oranges; and onions, like gold Chinese lanterns, hung about in red nets. There were artichokes, common as sprouts, and strings of dirty-white garlic, and crates labelled Sanguinas full of portly blood oranges. The profusion was stunning. I gaped at Helmuth, and he took my arm and pushed me right in.
I knew, of course, about buying: I’d learned the hard way, through indignant employers. I’d also had a year’s Spanish at school. I’ve forgotten most of it, but I’ve a good ear for accents, so I’d listened to what Helmuth said and scribbled down the words I knew I’d need to use. He steered me from stall to stall and introduced me. They all knew Helmuth; the women waved their arms and their voices swooped. They grinned, showing white gappy teeth, and laughed at everything I said, and gave me twice what I asked for. The young ones were sallow and merry and fat, with old jerseys and skirts and flat shoes, and the old ones all wore long black skirts and shawls, kerchiefs over their hair, and sometimes a straw hat with a big brim on top. When they spoke together it was a long sort of industrial rattle, like a macaw talking quickly. They asked a great many questions, personal questions.
I didn’t mind. I was wearing a high-necked shift, in a sort of thick orange fibre, my hair loose, and sandals, with a fine chain and Mummy’s leaving-school pearl thing tucked in where the neck hid it. I told them the worst, and we all shook our heads over the lack of a husband, and one of the younger ones said I’d need to find a good strong Ibizenco.
I said good and strong didn’t matter, only something in trousers, and another one with a voice like a saw said: ‘Watch out, you never know what comes in trousers these days.’ We all shrieked with laughter. It’s easy. It makes you go all sweet and old-fashioned, like visiting old ladies in hospital. I don’t know why, but I only think of using four-letter words when I’m with people like Janey and Gilmore. And Mummy, of course.
I bought what we needed and got some carnations for Anne-Marie. The Lloyds never seemed to cut what was in the garden. I remembered, too, that I must come back and get something for Flo. I choose nice presents, or so everyone says. If you know anyone as well as I know Flo, you know what they really want. Her mother always gives her long johns. I was going to spend three of my pounds on a sexy mantilla. Two were earmarked for something for Janey later, and a trifle for the woman owning the flat. I stood a minute, counting Anne-Marie’s housekeeping and ticking off lists, and wished a bit that I’d waited for breakfast. However.
‘Fish,’ I said to Helmuth, and we set off again.
They were jolly nice in the fish market as well. That was a funny, round tiled building with a roof like an umbrella with a hole in the middle. Inside, you walked between two rings of stalls: the first few were meat, with long, pale chickens hanging, all thin legs and bunched feet, and a pig’s head in solid pale pink, its eyes little closed slits. It seemed to be laughing.
I didn’t need meat. Spanish beef isn’t to Mr Lloyd’s taste, so he has two 1500cc freezers stocked with chicken, whole butchered lamb, and cuts of Aberdeen Angus flown out from home. Anne-Marie had shown me the freezers, proudly. There were ten pounds of raspberries in one, and American ice cream and asparagus tips.
‘See? There is no one else on Ibiza has this. Not with food. But the Casa Venets has its own generating plant. Miss Sarah.’ I got the point.
The light had failed twice that night already. I moved along.
There were trays of crushed ice on the squared concrete paving, with coral prawns in them, strung like a necklace. Seamen, in fade
d trousers and big rubber boots, were bringing trolleys loaded with boxes to the stalls as you watched: octopus and squid in grey, sloppy envelopes, heaps of whitebait like needles. Fat silver fish lay interleaved on one counter; on another, eels lay beside a tangle of blue mussel shells. There were nameless fish, purple-blue and bright pink, and big silver fish pinstriped in yellow, and green fish, with yellow-white speckled bellies. The names and prices, in Spanish, were chalked on small blackboards or stuck in a cork float. I looked at Helmuth again, and he grinned and took me by the hand and led me forward. The queues parted and then closed around me. We were in conference.
We got back to the car about an hour and a half later, and heaved in the baskets: compared with me, the fish all looked dynamic. Helmuth dragged out the big wicker-cased wine jug he and Anne- Marie use in the kitchen and went off to fill it, and by the grace of God, I trailed off to watch him.
He went into a little bodega at the edge of the square. After the dazzle of sunshine outside, it was cool and dark, and smelt of wet wood and alcohol and the plant house in Kew Gardens. I looked around while the shopkeeper filled the big bottle from one of the kegs. On the other side was a row of small barrels: creme de menthe, jerez. A red plastic pail was hung from each tap. The walls were shelved high with bottles: wine, gin, whisky, martini, vodka. Beside the door, a jumble of cards was pinned to a notice board. Half of them were in English: a cinema club advertising a showing of Gentleman Jim, a list of desirable flatlets to let; someone with a Garrard stereo record player for sale.
It was then I noticed a half-open door at the back which seemed to lead to some kind of patio. I could see a vine trellis against the clear sky, the edge of a bright peacock table, and a number of feet. It appeared, from the voices, to be a popular spot to repair to when shopping was done.
I said to Helmuth: ‘Come on. Let’s have a glass of something before we go back.’