Ibiza Surprise (13 page)

‘It was just coincidence that you were here when he came?’ I said. ‘Or did he come first?’

‘How old are you, She-she?’ said Mummy. She knows damn well how old I am: she bloody well ought to. She’d got her black cheroot lit. ‘Twenty, yes. And not married and with no regular boyfriend.’ She was silent, smoking, and as I didn’t contradict her, she took the holder out of her mouth and said gently: ‘You organise, honey. You mustn’t organise. Men just don’t like it.’

‘Women don’t like it much, either,’ I said. Somehow, whatever I did, I ended up being insulting to Mummy. ‘Did you meet Daddy before he was found dead? Did he come here?’

She got up and roved around, smoking. Her bottom was little and angular, like a twenty-five-year-old gym mistress we once had. God is bloody unfair. Then: ‘Of course,’ she said softly. ‘We talked. We were thinking of living together again.’ She stared at me, smiling. ‘But that’s not why he went off and killed himself, She-she. I don’t know why he did that.’

I said: ‘Derek thinks he was a spy.’

She dropped her holder. I’ve never known her make an unpremeditated move in her life but this was, I swear it, although she merely stood, thoughtfully watching it roll, and said: ‘Don’t move, for God’s sake honey, or your nice dress will melt. Thank you, darling.’ She took it from me and sat down, laying the whole thing back on the table. ‘I didn’t know Derek was so romantically minded. Was this at the funeral?’

‘No, this morning,’ I said. I didn’t know whether my brother had ever heard of Mrs van Costa, or if he had, if he knew who she was. But I wasn’t going to let on I didn’t know. I added: ‘You remember, he was over here just before Daddy died as well, and saw quite a bit of him.’

She stared at me, and a silence developed again, at least a kind of a silence. The house was no longer as quiet as it had been. I wondered how Coco was managing to entertain the Trade Mission in Mummy’s absence, and it occurred to me that if it were to lose none of its dewy happiness, the Trade Mission ought to be got out of the villa pretty damn quick. But there were one or two things I had to find out first.

Mummy said: ‘So far as I know, Derek doesn’t know that I’m here. I’d rather he didn’t know, really. What has he come back for? I thought his test tubes caught cold if he left them.’

‘I sent for him,’ I said, and then slid it on the line. ‘I thought Derek killed Daddy.’

The stare was enormous. I think she had had an injection as well. ‘And did he?’ Mummy said. She was sitting quite still.

‘I thought Coco knew,’ I said. ‘That’s why I’m here.’

‘Coco is a traitor to his art,’ said Mummy, beautifully. ‘And will have to be dealt with. Come, She-she.’ And she got up and walked firmly out of the room.

Coco’s was a paper-bag party. They had them in New York in the twenties, and they were just reaching London when I left it that spring. Flo had been to one and her paper bag split, always inefficient. A paper bag is all you wear. On your head.

Not that Coco had mentioned this when inviting Gilmore and Austin and myself to his party. And not, of course, that he had told Mummy, who wasn’t expecting a party at all.

I was running after her as she swept out of the bedroom to tell her, but she had opened the drawing-room door before I could catch her, and then she stopped and just stood. I looked over her shoulder. Coco had disappeared. The four red squares were still there, and so were Austin and Gilmore, and I never saw six men so plastered in the whole of my life. If he had been pouring vodka into them with a siphon since the moment Mummy and I left, he could hardly have got a more positive effect. They were singing. I think it was
Auld Lang Syne
, but the melodic line was a bit out of the true, and Gil thought he was singing in harmony.

Mummy said: ‘What the hell,’ very slowly, but they didn’t even unwind their arms from each other’s necks. She looked round at me.

‘Coco’s planned a wild party,’ I said. ‘For tonight. We were all supposed to be his first guests. We didn’t know you didn’t know.’

‘I didn’t know,’ said Mummy. ‘What kind of party?’

It was then that one of the guests came wandering along the corridor behind us, clearly in search of a loo. It was a girl, in a Heal’s carrier bag, and she had pink sequins everywhere. When she saw Mummy, she stopped rigid, but Mummy just said gently: ‘It’s third on the left, Madeleine,’ and went on smoking. The girl disappeared. Then another door opened and Clement Sainsbury came out, his arms full of vodka. He was fully dressed.

‘Hello, Cassells,’ he said. ‘Mrs van Costa? You have a problem.’

‘This is Clem Sainsbury, Flo Sainsbury’s cousin,’ I said. ‘He’s helping on one of the yachts in Ibiza. He holds the track record for helping.’

‘I hope I’m helping right now,’ said Clem. He seemed anxious to accommodate his language to Mrs van Costa’s. ‘There’s a rather extreme sort of . . .’

‘We know all about that,’ said my mother. ‘And the slug among the delphiniums. Where is he?’

‘Running the party, down in the playroom. They all came in the side entrance. They’ve got your Spanish dancers as well, I’m afraid, Mrs van Costa.’

‘Good heavens above,’ said my mother. ‘In paper bags?’

‘Not yet. But since the Trade Mission were still on the premises, and it seemed very likely that Mr Fairley would try and involve them . . .’

‘You got them plastered,’ said Mummy. She stared at him, with her eyes very wide, and he blushed down to the neck of his dinner suit. ‘You have the makings,’ she said, ‘of a genius. Put those bottles down. Sarah, ring for Dilling, will you, while I put a disc on the radiogram?’

It was a conga. As soon as the sound came through, on six stereo speakers, my mother laid down her cigarette holder, and snapping her fingers, grabbed a swaying Austin by the hips. I got hold of Gilmore and, shunting, closed him up to Mummy. The Russians, after a little confusion and laughter, tacked on with Clem pushing behind, and clicking and swaying we stamped our way twice round the drawing room to the boom of Latin American hiccoughs, and out the door and down the hall to the shower room. Mummy snaked them right up to the showers and stepped back smartly, pulling me by the arm, and Clem turned the water on full. We closed the door on them quietly.

The butler Dilling was waiting outside in the passage, and Mummy gave him his orders. Then, with Clem on one side and me on the other, she returned and sat down in the drawing room. A moment later, Dilling ushered Coco in.

He was wearing a bathrobe and he was smiling, although his eyes glittered a bit. He said: ‘I’m rather busy, Geraldine sweetheart, but I got the silliest message from Dilling, so I came for a second.’

‘It may have been silly, but I hope it was also quite clear,’ said my mother. ‘If there are going to be nude parties in this house, I prefer to throw them myself. Your main possessions are being packed and should be ready for you in the time it will take you to dress. You will then be driven into Ibiza where you may obtain a room in the hotel. Your flight back to New York will be arranged and paid for by me tomorrow, and the rest of your belongings sent after. As you would say perhaps, Coco,’ she ended with eloquence, ‘poetry is life, but life is not all poetry.’

He was sitting down with his hands in his pockets, and he continued to sit while he called on every form of repulsive imagery in his repertoire to describe the appearance, habits, morals, and cultural pretensions of my mother. Clem started to get up at the beginning, but my mother shook her head and motioned him back. From time to time, Coco spat at him too. ‘Proud of knowing the daughter of the fifth Baron Forsey of bloody Pinner, aren’t you? Now you know what sort of stock she was bred from. An alcoholic goat, alias a penniless sponger, and an old bag who likes sleeping with poets.’ He waved a hand. ‘Meet Geraldine Lady Forsey, Mr Sainsbury.’

Clem was quite scarlet, with his jaw set like the ellipse on a turnip. But at this point he got up, said: ‘I beg your pardon,’ to my mother, and took Coco Fairley by the neck and the seat of his bathrobe. I suppose he must have refereed worse matches. At any rate, he made light work of lifting Coco clean off his feet, which were kicking madly.

Coco screeched: ‘You’ll be sorry. You don’t know what I saw the night the old man was killed!’ and then his voice died away as Clem carried him out of the door and along to his room. Dilling went with them.

I didn’t think it was going to be possible to look at Mummy, but that did it. ‘Killed!’ I repeated, and met her large, open eyes.

After a bit: ‘Don’t rely on it,’ she said. ‘He was trying to bargain. I doubt if he knows anything about Forsey’s movements.’ She always called him that, never Eric.

I said: ‘If he does, won’t he make trouble?’

‘Not if he wants me to publish his poems,’ said Mummy. ‘And on reflection, he will.’

‘You’ll have to find a publisher first,’ I said cattily. What I had seen of the stuff in the garden hadn’t impressed me overmuch.

‘No, honey. A cement mixer,’ said my mother. ‘That’s easy. It’s only the postage that’s killing.’ She got up, and I could feel her looking me over. ‘You came out of that real well, She-she. You’re tough. You’re nearly as tough as I am. Maybe that’s a good thing.’ Then she took my arm. ‘Come along. Let’s put on a towel and join the real sophisticated people downstairs.’

I thought she was joking, but she wasn’t. We walked downstairs to that playroom with barely a stitch on but a white Turkish towel wrapped Mother Hubbard-like under the arms. With her good legs and flat shoulders, Mummy looked incredibly elegant, but my hair was still up in loops and I felt like a sugar in search of its Daddy. Not, you understand, that I wasn’t bursting to get down below.

Coco must have hired a small group from Palma, no doubt at Mummy’s expense, and there was a general impression from the noise that a turntable must be going as well. Apart from the music, the shrieking was quite something, enough to tell you that Coco must have imported pretty well all the playmates who have their reasons for lounging around the Mediterranean in the springtime: society, cafe society, artists, athletes, flower-people and shady expatriates, to choose a few types from Janey’s circle at random. I must say I slowed down a bit as we got near to the playroom door, but Mummy just steamed on like a Monorail in a Harrington square, and I followed, right up to the playroom. Without hesitation, Mummy flung the doors open.

It was like a testing shed for jet engines. The sound came out of a reeling, light-spattered darkness made by dozens of revolving glass lights hung all over the ceiling, which threw heaving, sequin-shaped splashes over the dancers, who were going up and down like ships’ pistons. There was a group at one end dressed in boots, white tights, and ponchos, and a lot of sharp shouts and Castanet clacking and rolling of r’s at the other end from a small party of three Spanish dancers and a guitarist who were deep in a performance. The Spanish women wore high combs and skin-tight decollete dresses, with loads of frills bouncing along after. It reminded me of the caterpillar on the beach. I noticed that the male Spanish dancer, who also wore frills, was a Chinese.

Everyone else was headless in obscure hoods over which the lights slid in a Hammer-films way. Everyone else was also dressed, as we were, in a natty white towel, fastened under the armpits. No one had seen us come in.

Mother smiling, was fitting another damned cheroot into her holder. I said: ‘How the hell did you pull that one off?’

‘I didn’t pull it off, honey, I put it on,’ Mummy said. Her saucer eyes stared at me in surprise. ‘I had Dilling tell them that Coco had infrared cameras hung all over the room
that could see through paper bags.’
She paused. ‘The lucky thing is, there seem to have been enough towels. Now you go right on down there and enjoy yourself. I’ll send Austin and Gilmore down to you.’

‘In towels?’ I said. ‘You’re not going to be very popular with the Trade Mission. You must have soaked them all to the skin.’

‘I think it’ll have to be bathrobes,’ Mummy said. ‘Why not? They shouldn’t have gotten high in a well-bred lady’s drawing room, but if she’s prepared to overlook it, I don’t see why we shouldn’t show them quite a good time.’

There is a kind of dreadful fascination about Mummy. She has an attitude to life which would drive a phenobarbitone pill up the wall, never mind a civilised drifter like Daddy. But she has Personality too, with a capital P, which is what must have brought them originally together. Then she found that Daddy was nothing
but
personality, and I suppose that was it. Mummy disappeared, the music rose to a kind of frenzied crescendo, and I stepped down into the fray.

I think it was the most energetic dance I’ve ever been to. And that includes even Highland balls, where you have a houseparty and have to defend your virtue half the night after, as well as dance all the reels. I stepped down into that orgy, and someone got me by the hand and started jogging me up and down, and I got handed from bag to bag for ten solid minutes until the group finally let up, and we collapsed on the floor. My current bag had a beard which brushed up and down inside the paper all the time he was smooching: with no lips to smooch with, they all made great play with their hands, and it was their hard luck I had all my underwear on. The tennis pro brought me an icy Tom Collins, and I was still breathing hard and parrying his right backhand drive when the lights went up from near-total to mid-total darkness, and a lot of balloons came drifting around.

It was that gruesome game where you have to roll the balloon up and over your neighbour by using your head: one of the Group MC’d it, and there was a fair amount of slipping towels and tearing of bags. They next wanted to do the one where you pass the string down inside the back of your clothing, but after a bit they reckoned the fictitious cameras ruled that out and went back to frugging or whatever.

I was getting so used to recognising people by their birth marks that I hardly realised Austin had me in his grasp.

His hair was still brushed forward, but it was fluffy with drying, and he had on a rather nice bathrobe in pink. I guessed it was maybe one of Coco’s. His eyes had matching pink rims, and he looked very bemused. He said: ‘I guess I ought to apologise. Over getting plastered back there, I mean. Those guys can sure put back the Smirnoff. Mrs van Costa’s been most considerate . . .’ He stopped again and said simply: ‘I don’t get it.’