An Ibiza Surprise: Dolly and the Cookie Bird; Murder in the Round Read online

  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.’

  TWO

  ‘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.

  ‘What does he know about Gilmore Lloyd?’ I inquired.

  ‘Spoiled, rich and beautiful. What we all know already. Now. Sarah . . .’ said Flo.

  ‘Oh, I know,’ I said. Flo will make out that I’m overeager. But if you don’t put yourself across, who’ll do it for you? And you might not get a second chance.

  At the beginning of Easter
week, I flew to Ibiza alone.

  I don’t mind flying. Except when I’m out with a new boy, I have a very strong stomach, and the Trident from London was full of middle-aged businessmen. I opened a magazine and looked up my horoscope.

  I’d been in Spain once before, with Mummy during the school holidays. It must have been just before she got fed up with having an alcoholic society husband with no money, for she used occasionally to take out Derek or me to toughen our cultural muscles: the rest of the time we were foisted on aunts, or other parents, or even on decent old helps in the house. Daddy, I believe, wouldn’t have minded seeing much more of us, but once he’d got us, he simply didn’t know what to do. You can’t drag an eleven-year-old schoolboy to impromptu late-night parties full of wags and wits and bunches of brainy sophisticates, and expect him to mix. Or if you do, and he is totally silent, or even worse, sick, then you simply don’t take him again. Derek never understood that. And later on, when he was grown up, he had missed out on the training: he hadn’t the address or the nous to keep in with Daddy’s lot.

  I might have done. I suppose I could have had a pretty marvellous time, but by then it wasn’t my scene. The sort of people who wanted a tame titled jester and didn’t mind if he drank, weren’t my sort, and I didn’t enjoy watching my father sing for his supper. He was neat and witty and relaxed and so easy-going it just wasn’t true. I don’t think I ever heard him say an unkind thing in his life: even about Mummy, even about the fat stockbrokers whose villas he stayed in. He sold them his company because they had money, and he needed money to live on. He didn’t seem to despise them.

  But I wouldn’t do it. I wouldn’t go to the Lloyds’ and expect to live on their handouts. They meant to be kind, but I’d made that quite clear before I left London. If I went to Ibiza, I would earn my board and my ticket, by cooking. And after a lot of pricey phone arguments, Mr Lloyd had agreed.

  I turned over the magazine. The little plastic food trays had come and had gone, and I had the feeling that someone was watching me. I think that’s always exciting.

  Anyhow, I was wearing my hair up, and this beret, and this little baker-boy suit with long patterned stockings, and sitting in a first-class seat beside a window that wasn’t full of dribbling wing, for which Janey’s father was entirely to be thanked, when this man came and sat down, thump, beside me and somehow I knew at once who had been looking.

  He smelt American. He was big and broad-shouldered, with that super kind of Swedish suede jacket in Sahara-sand colour and a long white polished tie and hair growing downward, like Jacques Tati. He had a big gold watch showing the seconds, the hour, the day, the date, the month, the moon phase, and the telephone number of his stockbroker; and a gold signet ring on his right hand. Nothing on his left.

  ‘I’m terribly sorry, ma’am,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid you’ve got half my seat belt.’

  He was from Minnesota, unmarried, and his father had been a senator with big real estate interests. He had three Cadillacs and an antiques and art-dealing business, with branches all over the place. He even had a shop in Ibiza, called Gallery 7. I asked him what he sold.

  He said: ‘Well, Sarah, maybe you think this is just a sleepy little island full of sleepy little peasants selling straw shopping bags and cheap castanets to the hundred-dollar package-deal holiday trade. But I can tell you, I don’t sell ballpoint pens made up to look like banderillas. Have you heard of St Paul de Vence? Biot? Rocque-brune?’

  ‘They’re all artists’ colonies, aren’t they?’ I said. ‘On the Riviera.’

  There wasn’t any fizzy stone ginger, so he had bought me a large sherry. I bought myself a pack of duty-free cigarettes to give to Janey’s father. I had six pounds left in my bag. It wasn’t much.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Austin. He was called Austin. I was praying he was also called Rockefeller or even Woolworth, but we hadn’t got beyond Christian names.

  ‘And that’s what’s happening right here in Ibiza. The weather’s good, the living’s cheap, and any guy with talent who’s not too fussy can find a hole somewhere to work and a ready-made market in summer. Sure, they’re shoving up concrete hotels on the beaches and selling urbanisation parcels like peanuts, but the place is still full of snazzy villas in nice discreet corners owned by big names who want to get away from it all. Singers, businessmen, politicians, actors. You name ‘em. In a year or two they’ll move on, but Ibiza isn’t Majorca just yet. That’s my market.’

  I said: ‘You mean you buy paintings and stuff from the colony and sell it all in your shop?’ I wished, for the first time, I had really listened to Mummy laying off on the topic of new advanced art. It gave Daddy hysterics.

  ‘Sure. Or Gregorio, my manager, does. We sell carvings and oils and ceramics and jewellery, and mix it all with antiques from the mainland. We have a workshop of our own for repairs and a bit of repro work, and we tour exhibitions as well. I’ve got one in the gallery right now of North American Art in the Round that’s travelling right across Europe. You know what I mean? Caro? Volten? Philip King?’

  ‘I’d love to see it,’ I said. The only Art in the Round I’d ever heard of was a strip show in Soho that George had told us about. ‘But I don’t know how long I’ll be here. I’m just visiting a girl I was at school with.’

  ‘Come tomorrow,’ said Austin. ‘Bring your friend. Where are you staying?’

  ‘Near a place called Santa Eulalia,’ I said. ‘At the Casa Venets with the Lloyds.’

  His big, scrubbed, handsome face glowed with delight.

  ‘You know Tony Lloyd? But of course, you’ll be the same age as Janey. Well, whadda you know?’ He thought of something I ought to know. ‘Maybe you haven’t been to the Casa Venets before. But when you get there, you’ll find half the antiques are from Mandleberg’s.’

  ‘That’s the name of your business?’ I said. He seemed awfully simple. But then, I used to think George was simple, and Flo used to get furious.

  ‘Austin Mandleberg, that’s me,’ he said. ‘Go right up to the city wall and climb through the old town to the Calle de San Guillermo, No. 7. That’s my gallery.’

  ‘My name’s Sarah Cassells,’ I said. ‘I’ll come tomorrow. I’d adore to see all your things. Are you going to stay long?’

  ‘Oh, a few weeks, maybe. I get around,’ said Austin Mandleberg. ‘I’ve another gallery in Seville. Ever been to Seville?’

  ‘Only once,’ I said.

  That had been the term I was Poppy Phillip’s best friend. The parents were always keen for me to come with them on holidays. If Mummy arranged it, she usually saw I had decent clothes but forgot to give me enough spending money. If it was Daddy, he didn’t do either. I loved the lush hotels and the big cars and the foreign boys fighting to get you out on the beach after midnight, but I hated the pauperdom.

  ‘You must come again,’ said Austin Mandleberg. ‘I’d sure like to show you Seville.’

  He didn’t seem to have heard of Lord Forsey, sitting on the horse-winch with his throat cut. I wondered what he’d think, when he got to Ibiza and heard the latest sensation. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the Pyrenees poke through the clouds. They were snowy, like one of Flo’s batches of tea cakes whose royal icing had run.

  ‘Where do you stay, when you come to look after business?’ I inquired.

  It was a pity, rather. There was a house over the shop. I wondered if Gregorio cooked.

  I couldn’t quite make out his annual income in dollars, but by the time we were circling over Ibiza, I knew quite a lot about Austin Mandleberg, and I’d told him about Daddy, too, in the end. He was very quiet and intense about it and held my hand for the last half hour, and I could feel my head swimming a bit, with the Dry Sack and the chatting up and the fact that we were flying on our ear for ten minutes awaiting permission to land. I like my horizons horizontal. I always have.

  The
n we came in very low over a little network of runways set in a waste of flat scrub. A man in a straw hat was bent over weeding or something in the middle, his mini-scooter propped on a stump. He didn’t look up as we shaped up to land. I was sorry. I always feel if the undercarriage doesn’t come down, at least they could jump up and point.

  The undercarriage must have come down, for we landed on it.

  I was first out of the aeroplane. It was warm, and there was this super smell I’d forgotten, made up of cigar smoke and palm trees and dry dust and strong scent and olive oil and something I thought must be orange blossom. I’d looked at Lord Luck before we left London, and he said it was a good day for sport, but I must control my impulses towards evening. Celeste, on the other hand, had said Mars was moving through Scorpio and should give me the energy and determination to carry out my plans. I couldn’t see Janey. I turned on the aircraft steps and said to Austin: ‘When is your birthday?’

  He said, ‘I beg your pardon?’ and then we got it worked out that he was Virgo. He didn’t seem worried about it, but I wished I’d looked it up before coming. Celeste hadn’t said anything about Virgo.

  I took a long time to cross to the airport buildings with Austin. If Janey was waiting, which I doubted, there was no point in depriving her of the view. Beyond the other planes and the red-and-white Campsa tankers rushing between them, the land stretched flat as a pancake to a lot of green woolly hills with Martini hoardings and windmills in front of them. If you turned back, you could see more hills on the other side of the airport, with a sheet of water before them, divided into sort of dikes. There was a long, low white thing, like a thin clip of paper.

  ‘Salt,’ said Austin. ‘Those are salt flats you see. They ship out thousands of tons from that anchorage. Let me carry your coat.’ And we walked up the slope beneath a flowery lattice and between paths edged with cacti and small palms and purple bougainvillea and red climbing geraniums, and into the airport.