Ibiza Surprise (12 page)

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.

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 palms, 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.

He said: ‘If you want to go in, I guess we might do it without embarrassing Mrs van Costa too much. I met the Mission when Janey brought them round to the gallery, and they invited me to take a glass of wine with them afterwards. That is, if we’re not too informally dressed.’ Gil was wearing a loose silk shirt hand-woven in Siam over beautiful trousers, and I had on my polythene. Austin wasn’t looking at me.

‘Come on,’ said Gil.

Mrs van Costa had brought her own butler. He opened the door in a white jacket, American as a Yellow Cab driver and about as generally welcoming. We asked after Coco and were taken sourly into a large study lined with stamped Cordoban leather and the finest collection of banned books I’ve ever seen outside St Tizzy’s, all bound in morocco. Gilmore and I took one each and sat down and got on with it while Austin, who had more inhibitions, prowled round inspecting the bric-a-brac. He came back grinning and mentioned that there were more brics than bracs. Then Coco came in, formally dressed, with his long golden sideburns glittering and his face full of early warning signals, and said that Mrs van Costa had heard we had arrived and would we care to join her in the drawing room. The butler was just behind him.

We trooped upstairs, Coco staring at Gilmore. I heard him hiss, dramatically: ‘What the hell are you playing at? You’re too bloody early!’ but I didn’t hear what Gilmore replied. My polythene crackled.

The TV soap-opera star’s drawing room was done in Hollywood Regency, with a fibreglass Adam chimneypiece and Venetian chandeliers and crimson satin Knole suites. The floor was parquet, with a carpet made of a whole flock of goats sewn together: the air had that strong, randy smell billy goats have. The Russian Trade Mission sat dotted about, drinking vodka.

I had seen them before, of course, at Mr Lloyd’s luncheon. They still looked burly, sweaty and amiable, sitting in their neat cloth suits, grinning at Mrs van Costa.

Mrs van Costa was sitting in one of the armchairs with her legs up on a pouffe, her face without makeup, her short, grey hair sculpture-cut by Mr Kenneth – who else – and wearing a high-necked, navy crepe trouser suit with a long chiffon scarf that showed every elegant bone in her long, angular body. She was smoking a cheroot in a long ebony holder.

It was Mummy.

I think I mentioned she was an actress. There was the polythene peep-dress, of course, and then I had my hair all done up in loops and plaited through with ribbon, with three Littlewoods’ Asian hairpieces added in for good measure. My face was the last thing she looked at.

Even then, she only swung her feet down from the stool, and getting up said: ‘What a pretty little girl. I don’t think we’ve met before. Coco, introduce us.’

Her neck was stringy and her features were bony, and she hadn’t the pink hair any longer, but she still had the huge saucer eyes I remembered, with false eyelashes and then spikes drawn in under the lashes. She wore no other paint. I had the passing thought that Janey would find her common, and then I thought Janey probably wouldn’t. Whatever else she hadn’t got, Mummy had always had style. I walked forward, and I could read her expression as if she had spoken.

‘I’m sorry, honey. But we can’t let it be known that poor old Forsey’s wife and her boyfriend were living only a stone’s throw from where he was killed.’ I wondered if Coco knew, and then I saw his face and realised why I’d been brought here, and why the whining back there on the stairs hadn’t seemed to ring true. And just who the mystery woman was with whom Daddy had had his assignation that Saturday night.

I said something, I suppose, and sat down with my knees trembling while the general chitchat began. The Russian who had sat down beside me was asking me in a smiling way what I thought of Ibiza and how I liked swinging London. I must have answered him, because he kept getting nearer, but my brain was pinking like the old Morris.

Whether Daddy had come to the Lloyds’ by sheer chance or whether he had followed Mummy to Ibiza, there was no way of knowing. What did seem certain was that somehow they had come together. And that they had been meeting each other here, in secrecy, or at any rate without it being known they were husband and wife. Except, it was apparent, by Coco.

When had he found out? Recently, I suspected. Or perhaps his jealousy hadn’t become sufficient earlier to make it worth his while telling the police. Or maybe he didn’t give a hoot either way until Mummy showed signs of finding him tedious, and he thought he’d take his revenge by springing her secret on me.

In any case, that let Derek out. No doubt Coco’s silence would have to be bought off by somebody, but for Mummy’s sake, not Derek’s. And I didn’t give a damn about Mummy.

The trade attaché moved a bit nearer and Mummy’s voice said: ‘Coco honey, will you do the honours? There’s something I just must have your little friend look at. Sarah, will you come here with me?’

Voice from the past.
Sarah, you know that your father and I are just not too good at getting along? Sarah, there are schools in America just as good as St Tizzy’s. Sarah honey, I’m afraid if I had money to buy you a fur coat, I’d have one myself.
I followed her into her bedroom, and she shut the door and said: ‘Hello,’ without moving, with that still, smiling stare that Daddy used to call Bemused Duse.

Then she subsided in front of her mirror, without taking her eyes off my face, and said: ‘How are you, She-she? Are you well? Who’s the act for?’ Her mouth got wider, and she gave a sort of cluck of amusement. ‘I don’t think I’ve seen so much of you since you were about five.’

I said: ‘Why van Costa? Have you married again?’

‘In a month? Poor, darling Forsey,’ said Mummy. ‘It’s my incognito, honey. I’ve had it for ages. Did I give you the most terrible shock?’

I sat on the bed, crackling.

‘Terrible. Did you know I was around?’

‘Of course, darling, but I could hardly step out of character now. I’d even had a cable sent from New York saying I was too ill to go to the poor old thing’s funeral. I don’t know how he died,’ she added quickly and, turning round, took another small black cheroot from a box on her table and started to fit it into her holder. ‘I don’t know why or how or anything. I’m just sorry it happened that way, and I’m going to remember him the way he was, when we first married.’