Ibiza Surprise (2 page)

I wished I could have gone to Ibiza.

It was Flo’s night for having her George up to the flat, and I was sort of between boyfriends, so I phoned a few more numbers in my book, but they were all busy, or studying for exams, or something, so I had a hot dog and went to the flicks and bought a pizza pie off the proceeds of my special fruit machine on my way home. I can win up to two-and-six on it if I’m careful, but I don’t do it too often in case the Fun Parlour switches the lemons, or something.

Anyway, the pizza pie was still warm, and I charged up the stairs to the flat whistling like stink and rapped on the door before I put my key in, for good measure. George usually brings some beer. I like fizzy stone ginger.

The light was out, which was a bit off, as it was after half-past eleven, and I’d got to get back sometime. I said ‘Flo-o,’ very politely and groped for the switch, but the light didn’t come on and I forgave them. Flo couldn’t cope with a fuse. The torch in the hall drawer was flat. I went on calling Flo but no one answered except the old bitch in the flat above, who banged on the ceiling, so I dropped my coat and my scarf on the floor and dragged a chair across to the meter and stood on it. On top of the fuse box were wire, screwdriver, scissors and a Woolworth’s torch in full working order. Unlike Flo, I believe in doing things properly. I switched the torch on and looked for the lever to throw the light circuit off. It was thrown up already, and the handle snapped off.

Now that, Flo wouldn’t do. And George is a motor car salesman and would do his necking for kicks in Selfridge’s window if the bylaws would let him. My legs felt like candles all of a sudden, but I didn’t need to think what to do. I jumped down, and galloping through to the bedroom, torch in hand, I picked up the phone and dialled 999.

Someone in the flat sniggered. My hot dog came straight back up into my throat and I swung the torch round, still hanging on to the phone, which was perfectly dead. I had time to see Flo with her new culottes all creased, laid out cold on the floor, then something banged my wrist, hard, and the torch fell and went out.

To hell with that. I’m five foot seven stripped, and I was head prefect
and
principal bat at St T’s. I’ve sat with two medical students in the back of an old Hillman Minx at three in the morning and come away without losing a button. I ducked in the pitch blackness and ran for the door; and as the man, (whoever he was), crashed against me, I kicked him hard in the shins, drove my elbow into his middle and, hauling open the bedroom door, rushed through and slammed it, yelling. I got the key turned just as he laid hands on the handle inside. The old idiot upstairs bumped on the ceiling, and I made for the main door to the stairs.

I forgot, blow it, the chair under the meter. As I went flying, I could hear the door panels cracking behind me and horrible thuds as someone shouldered and kicked them.

The bloody thing was warped anyway. It gave with a crash as I picked myself up and something came at me like a steam engine. I seized the chair and stuck it out in his way.

The thud this time brought down the pictures, and for a moment, I thought he was winded. I was going to lay him out with the frying pan and tie him up with the nylon line from the bathroom, with Flo’s tights still pegged all along it. But he got up in such a whirl of shoes and fists and pieces of chair that I was a bit daunted, to tell you the truth, and before I could do a thing more, he had jerked open the front door and vanished.

By the time I got there, the stairs were empty, and I was shaking anyway like a speedometer needle and my hot dog was giving me trouble. I groped my way into the bathroom and got rid of it, and then got back into the hall, dragged another chair forward and climbed on it. The light switch was still broken and off, but the power circuit hadn’t been touched. I got down, and feeling my way past the sagging door, found the bedside lamp and plugged it into the 13-amp socket. Light.

Flo stirred. She looked like her mother, who is all right but doesn’t know how to make up. Then she sat up suddenly, and this time she looked really awful.

‘My God,’ she said. ‘Have I fainted?’

I sat down beside her and held her poor old cold hands.

‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘We’ve been burgled. You were only knocked out, or drugged.’

I’ve never seen such an improvement in anybody.

‘Oh, thank heavens,’ said Flo faintly. ‘I thought I was preggers.’

I promise you. Talk about inefficient.

We found George much later, after I’d told all my story and we’d got Flo’s culottes fixed and looked at the mess in the room. Every drawer in the place had been hauled out, and even the bedding unscrambled, or at least Flo said it wasn’t like that when she last saw it. She’d lost the charm bracelet she got from her last boyfriend but one, and was livid. According to her, the doorbell had rung, and George had left her to answer it. She heard him speaking, and then a silence, and she had just started to the door to find out why he hadn’t come back when the lights all went out. The next thing was an ether pad over her face.

‘Well, look on the bright side. You hadn’t had the pizza,’ I said.

George we discovered humped on the floor in the sitting room, and it was rather plain from the start that the Lotus Elan touch was a bit wanting. He looked a disaster and obviously felt it, and it was clear from the way Flo was shuffling about that she knew that as far as George’s associations were concerned, her wagon was fixed.

All we ever got out of him, even after we switched from instant coffee to Flo’s half-bottle of Japanese whisky, was that he had been knocked down by a middle-aged man with a stocking over his face. He was also stinking of ether.

I had the pizza pie myself, after we telephoned the police at my suggestion from the flat up above. We got to bed finally at three, after the police had fingerprinted the rooms and asked a whole lot of questions. All we’d lost were Flo’s bracelet and my American earrings from Mummy, which had been too nice to throw away. I was always getting presents from Mummy which were too nice to throw away. My three good family pieces were all right because I was wearing them. I always wear them, sometimes under my clothes and sometimes on top. It reminds me, if I needed reminding, that I am the daughter of the fifth Baron Forsey of Pinner . . . of the late fifth Baron Forsey of Pinner. Hell.

George slept the rest of the night on the sofa, and I cried with my head under my pillow until Flo gave me six aspirins and the rest of the Japanese whisky, and I had a wonderful night.

My brother, Derek, flew over for Daddy’s funeral. I didn’t want to go: I had a hundred and fifty brandy snaps to make for a wedding in Hampshire, and brandy snaps by Flo are simply well-rolled tarmacadam. However, the lawyer-trustee, whom I rather go for, came back from his shoot and took me to a nice plushy lunch at the Cafe Royal in order to jaw me, and then Derek rang up to say he was back from Ibiza and would I take a taxi round to the Dorchester, which he would pay for.

Daddy never stayed at the Dorchester; he couldn’t afford it but of course he’d been there hundreds of times at private parties and functions, and I knew how to swan in and where. I had a goodish cloth coat, which I’d shortened rather a lot, and a super black hat of Flo’s like a highwayman, and long black boots.

Derek’s room had a high bed with kicked Queen Anne legs, and there was a battery of taps like Bofors guns in the loo. Derek’s pad was usually the Hilton, with non-stop taped music and an iced-water tap and big lamps for snogging in strategic places all over the room. Not that Derek would bother with girls. He is just split-level minded and goes for efficiency.

We are not much alike. I’m fair, like the Forseys, but Derek is brown like Mummy was before she had it turned pink. He’s not much taller than I am, which he hates, but he bathes a lot oftener. Derek is a great soap-and-shoe-polish man. He even went through a health-regime fad: sauna baths and nut rissoles, the lot, but he grew out of it and isn’t a bad cook at that. At least when he takes you out, you can be sure of a good meal and a decent bottle of wine, although he won’t touch spirits or smoke. He isn’t bad really, he’s just anti Daddy, and I don’t suppose you can blame him.

Anyway, he hadn’t much to say about Daddy now. It was suicide all right, they’d found the razor dropped from his hand. He was still sitting on the horse, no doubt neck-high with Vat 69. Out of respect for the dead, Derek did manage to keep the disgust out of his voice, but he said the funeral was to be quiet and quick down at Pinner after the Spanish police had done their stuff, and what the hell did brandy snaps have to do with it? In the end, I got thirty quid out of him for a draggy black outfit I’d spotted in Fenwick’s, and agreed to turn up. If I stuck at it all night, I worked out, I could do my baking and Flo’s bit as well.

From then until the funeral was a bit of a dead loss, because Derek said parties were out and wouldn’t even consider a discotheque, so we had a number of sedate evenings with Purcell and Strindberg, interspersed with a lot of silences if I stopped talking, which you have to do sometimes. I gathered Derek was enjoying his job, had a nice company house with housekeeper laid on, and was concerned more than anything with how poor Daddy’s death would affect his professional image. He’s with Schuytstraat, the people who’d just mislaid their big new experimental aural sensator.

But he wouldn’t talk about that. He asked me twice if I knew why Daddy had done it and what he had said in his letter; but of course Daddy never wrote letters, and I hadn’t heard from him for months.

He also asked me, as the trustees had, what I was going to do; and I said carry on cooking. I don’t mind it; and I don’t see how on earth I’m going to find someone decent to marry unless I do. Derek didn’t get the point. I think he thought cooks stay in the kitchen, and his pride was offended. At least he did ask me, without enthusiasm, if I’d like to come and keep house for him, but I said no. My God, Holland.

Mummy didn’t come to the funeral, and I think Derek was relieved: he was always a little afraid of her. The papers had dug out her theatrical history and added a bit about her being laid low with a virus in her beautiful Billy-Baldwin-designed Fifth Avenue home. I rather respected her for it. Whatever she was, she wasn’t a hypocrite. Anyway, the Fenwick outfit was pretty stunning, and I was photographed for two different newspapers, and there were four Daimlers and a Rolls-Royce, private ones, in the funeral procession. The owner of the Rolls-Royce had an alpaca overcoat and eyed me a good bit during the service. He was about Daddy’s age but much more the spring-grip dumb-bells and chinning-bar type: broadly built with dark hair and the kind of suntan you can’t get with a sunlamp, but can with a villa in Trinidad. Afterwards, he came across and took both my hands, and said:
‘Sarah!’

He didn’t honestly look as if he needed a cook, but the suntan was more than something. I said:

‘Are you a friend of Daddy’s? It was so kind of you to come.’

‘My dear girl!’ he said. He was still holding my hands. ‘But surely you were at school with my Jane? At St Theresa’s?’

I removed my hands. Some snotty schoolgirl called Jane. This was always happening. Daddy was only the Hon. Eric Cassells while I was at school, so no one connects me with Forsey. I ran my mind without enthusiasm over the ranks of St T’s. Then something made me look at him again.

‘Janey Lloyd!’ I exclaimed. ‘You’re not Janey Lloyd’s father? I can’t believe it! How is she?’

He smiled and put his hands in his pockets. ‘She hasn’t changed a bit, and neither have you. You were the two most elegant girls in the school. But Sarah . . .’

I had remembered at the same time.

‘But what are you doing here?’

The power-beam faded, and his expression got back to the funeral.

‘You see, I had no idea, Sarah, that you were Lord Forsey’s daughter, or of course we’d have written. When I saw you standing there . . . you haven’t changed. You see, your father was staying with me,’ said Mr Lloyd sadly, ‘when he ended his life.’

‘They’ve got a hotel,’ I said, ‘in Seville and a flat at Jerez and an office in Gib and in Malaga. They have acres of vineyards and a bullfarm and an interest in a shipping line and three olive oil factories and some business in Spanish Morocco. Janey was finished in Florence and has been round the world twice and has just spent Christmas in Nassau and came back for the skiing. They want me to stay with them.’

‘That’s OK,’ said Flo soothingly. ‘Business will stand it.’

It was after the funeral, and the rush for our services had cooled off at the same time as George, so Flo and I were staying at her mother’s nice house in Hampshire. Flo’s Mama is a brick, which compels me to weed the garden and paper the maid’s room when I stay with her, so I don’t go there too often.

‘She’s got a brother called Gilmore,’ Flo added. ‘Clem knows him.’

I looked, but she wasn’t hiding a smile. I had a crush on Gilmore Lloyd when we were at school. I only saw him once, but that was enough. He was head boy at Harrow.

I said: ‘How on earth does Clem know him?’ Clem Sainsbury is Flo’s favourite cousin.

Flo said: ‘Are you implying that my cousin doesn’t move in the right circles to know Giller Lloyd?’ and went off into gales of unladylike laughter.

I said: ‘Flo, you’re awful,’ without really thinking. Clem was an absolute pet: on
that
the whole of St Tizzy’s agreed, but so Duke of Edinburgh it just wasn’t true. I never met anyone in my life who used up so much energy on totally useless pursuits. By nineteen, I should think he had climbed everything and swum everything and played everything there was in the book, and had never done more with a girl than drag her off to a rugby match and then give her a beer in a pub. We’d all had a try at Clem and got no further than a warm-up inside his sheepskin.

Flo said: ‘You know he’s nutty on sailing? He spent his hols last year hanging about crewing at Gib, and he’s taken six months off this year to do the same thing.’ Clem had a modest degree in social anthropology and a lot of big silver cups.