She must have been seventy-five anyway, which when you look around is no great age, I suppose in a woman, and you would expect her to have everything tucked that would tuck; and she had. But she also had the poise and the drive and the dress sense of a woman who had married a small émigré pharmaceutist and turned him into a world cosmetics industry, with centres in London and New York and Paris.
The bewildered Warr Beckenstaff had a breakdown and died shortly after the tenth balance sheet; and thereafter nothing could stop her. And now she stood there in her pink silk jersey dress and examined me, the wealthy lady who had chosen the schools and colleges and finishing establishments which had made Rosamund what she was, and looked like making an equal mess of my Benedict.
Tall as her daughter, Ingmar Warr Beckenstaff was spider-thin, the brittle shafts of her wrists and shoulders emphasized by the weight of metal she wore, embedded with gemstones. Her eyes were Rosamund’s: large and sunken and heavy-lidded; and if her chin was too definite, her cheek-bones were good and her mouth still had planes that could be tinted. The hair, a smooth bouffant silver grey, stopped just short of her ears and swept asymmetrically over in a wing which just cleared her left eye. Glimpsed briefly, from the other side of a street she would have had Donovan after her.
I must have smiled at the thought because she said, ‘You disappoint me. Why not answer? I thought you had character,’ and sat down.
‘I’m sorry. I was trying to remember,’ I said. ‘Was that all you wanted to know?’
‘How very prudish,’ she said. She had a gold and black onyx cigarette holder to match her necklet and was choosing a pink and silver scroll to screw into it. She looked up. ‘Sit down, girl. I am unlikely either to be shocked or to sack you for immorality. I am told that you have been a devoted and courageous nurse to my grandson, and I hope you feel that your services are being adequately recognized. I wish you to continue your excellent care of him. I also wish, in exchange, some information. My son-in-law sleeps around, and I don’t like it.’
I sat down, keeping my back straight, my ankles crossed and my hands with my gloves in my lap. ‘Not with me, Mrs Warr Beckenstaff,’ I said politely.
‘I think that’s probably true,’ she said annoyingly. ‘Go on. With whom, then?’
I said, ‘I have a full-time job with Benedict. There really isn’t much opportunity to study what else is going on in the household. In any case, it isn’t my business.’
‘So it’s the Eisenkopp woman. I was afraid so,’ said Mrs Warr Beckenstaff. I wondered how I had given that away, and concluded she was the only piece of crumpet who lived so near that I was bound to have noticed. Or else she knew already, and it was merely a move in the game. The power game which, of course, she was playing with me.
I said, ‘I can’t make any comment. I’m sorry. Would you trust my discretion on anything else if I did?’
I hadn’t leaped forward to light her fag and to do her justice, she didn’t appear to expect it. She put the lighter down and gazed at me through pink scented smoke. ‘It depends what else you know. For example, have you no questions about Benedict?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I haven’t.’ Shot-gun weddings are not my affair. Or the reverse, as in this particular case.
‘You haven’t wondered.’ said Mrs Warr Beckenstaff, her clear voice quite unaltered, ‘how, with a father of Simon’s colouring, the child appears to be growing so dark? Or about other aspects of his appearance? Of course you have. And I expect you, not being uneducated or defective, to be able to give me a sensible opinion when I ask for it. Who does that grandson of mine remind you of?’
Because it was Ben, I hadn’t said anything even to Johnson. But now, of course, there was really no help for it.
‘Hugo Panadek,’ I said. ‘The Eisenkopps’ Design Director.’
Neither the pink swags nor the head of the Warr Beckenstaff Corporation fell to the ground. ‘Exactly,’ said Benedict’s grandmother impatiently. ‘The Booker-Readman fellow, of course, must be completely infertile although my daughter, as is obvious, is besotted with him. I cannot imagine she could have resorted to a bald-headed Serbian otherwise.’
‘I’ll have to run to Grandma for help,’ Simon had said tauntingly to his angry wife. He wasn’t afraid of this lady: why should he be? Rosamund had only to be nasty to Simon and he would spill the whole story: how he wasn’t the father of Benedict, and how the heir to the Warr Beckenstaff fortune was the son of a bald-headed foreigner.
And Hugo . . . It was Hugo who had referred to both Benedict’s parents, his lip curling, as punks. Hugo who had shown no surprise over the peculiar affair of the ikons and who had arranged Johnson’s accident at Cape Cod, one might well reason, in order to expose Simon’s liaison with Beverley. Hugo, one might suggest, in whose Wonderland Rudi Klapper, the shooting stall attendant who had given the Booker-Readmans their first kidnapping fright had been employed; but who could hardly be interested in kidnapping his own son; especially as he, as well as Simon, had the power to blackmail the Warr Beckenstaff Corporation with the truth about its heir. I said however, to be sure, ‘If it’s Mr Panadek, will he make an approach, do you think, about Benedict?’
The large, lidded eyes continued to gaze at me through the smoke. ‘For money?’ said the easy breath coming through the pearly capped teeth and silver-pink mouth. ‘If there were any person in this world who can induce me to pay what I don’t intend to pay, I shouldn’t be talking to you of all these matters now. Mr Panadek is much too wise a gentleman to attempt blackmail. He has no interest, I am sure, in the child. While it would be a pity, there would be no permanent damage caused by Benedict’s parentage being known. My will ensures that if Benedict dies, my daughter inherits no more than the barest minimum. If on the other hand, Benedict has the ability, I shall be quite content to see him take over the business when he is of an age. I have made provision for that also. In the meantime, my main concern is to preserve the child from his parents. If need be, I shall do it by placing him totally in your hands. That is why you were chosen.’
It seemed as good a chance as any. I said, ‘I was told that you asked for me even before I was free of my last job. Might I ask who recommended me?’
‘You may, but I am afraid I cannot indulge you,’ Ingmar said. ‘There were a dozen of you. and my secretary made the inquiries which led to the final selection. We had the opinion, I believe, of another nanny and several employers. Indeed, in your case, the Princess at Cape Cod was one.’
I’d never been employed by the Princess. But Hugo knew her. He had had lunch there. I said, ‘I think Benedict is bright. He’s worth cultivating.’
‘In spite of the fact,’ said his grandmother, ‘that if he’s kidnapped he could cost me a fortune?’
I said, ‘He’s as safe as he can be. The yacht is very secure, and Mr Johnson has taken every precaution.’
‘I believe he has,’ Ingmar said. She swung her feet slowly round, and removing her cigarette holder, took out and stubbed the cigarette. Then, one red nailed hand on her knee, she said, ‘Do you always sit like that? Yes. Your training, I suppose. Well, I must tell you I was taken with your Mr Johnson when I first met him, and I have been impressed with him at each meeting since. Rosamund tells me the painting is quite astonishing. He is not, therefore, behind these attempts on Benedict and you are not, I now see, in collusion with him. I am glad to be reassured.’
My mouth dropped open. I stared at her and then, despite myself, felt my face relax in a grin. ‘You thought. . . Of course, you might very well imagine such a thing.’ ‘The projection of possibilities,’ Ingmar Warr Beckenstaff said, ‘is the structure upon which large businesses are founded and flourish. You had better return to your charge. I have arranged that from last month onwards, your salary will be increased by a third. I have also left instructions that all your existing cosmetics should be thrown away and replaced by those of the firm by whom you are employed. No excuse is acceptable: there is an anti-allergy range. What is it?’
She was talking to someone behind me. I turned my head and saw the blotched face of Ingmar’s P.R. man. He said, ‘Madame . . .’ and the telephone rang.
‘Answer it,’ said Ingmar Warr Beckenstaff, to me.
I answered it, squeezing between the pink sofas and around the silver baskets of roses and peonies. It was on a desk by the large boat-deck windows and as I picked it up and said, ‘Hullo? Mrs Warr Beckenstaff’s cabin’, my gaze rested on the voile curtains and the deck and the harbour beyond them. And on the water.
Which was odd.
A voice said, ‘This is the Captain. May I speak with Mrs Warr Beckenstaff, if you please?’
I put my hand over the telephone and said, ‘It’s the captain. Mrs Warr Beckenstaff, we’re sailing.’
‘So I see,’ Ingmar said. ‘Give me the telephone.’ The door closed behind the public relations man and she spoke into the phone briefly, in German. She put the receiver down and I replaced the phone on the desk. ‘You don’t understand German,’ she said. Beyond the pink swagged door, the ship’s tannoy could just be heard, making a booming announcement. I thought of all the sleepers it would wake up, and of all the people, like the Eisenkopps, who were spending the afternoon at an hotel, and would return to the quay to find the Glycera absent.
I said, ‘No. I don’t understand German. Why are we sailing?’
‘To sever our connection with the land,’ said Ingmar Warr Beckenstaff, seating herself at her desk, and drawing pen and paper towards her. ‘You had better go, and send in my secretary.
Fortunately, press and photographers are on board and, of course, all the European guests who joined us at Venice.’
She was writing. ‘Mrs Warr Beckenstaff,’ I said, ‘I have to get back to the baby. Why are we sailing?’
She half looked up. ‘Ah, the baby,’ she said. ‘He has been vaccinated, I should hope?’
Beneath my chaste lilac uniform, like a crab from its shell, the bottom fell out of my stomach. ‘Oh heavens,’ I said. ‘It isn’t smallpox?’
‘Ah, passion at last,’ she said, writing firmly. ‘Yes: an outbreak of smallpox was announced by Belgrade late this morning. Confined, they believe, to the Dubrovnik region, but we shall move out of the seaway for safety. No one comes aboard except in emergency, and unless he or she has been vaccinated. No one leaving the ship for the danger area will be permitted to come aboard a second time. The news reached the airport, I am told, just after our plane arrived and many if not all of the passengers are waiting there to take the next scheduled flight home. You didn’t hear an announcement?’
‘We left by car, before the others did. Mrs Warr Beckenstaff...'
She put down her pen with a crack. ‘I am aware of your problem. It is minor. We shall make a temporary stop off Ploče to allow a launch to return you to the Dolly. I see no difficulty, provided the Dolly remains at sea, and all those on board have been vaccinated. You will be safer than before, it seems to me. The militia have cordoned the area.’
I couldn’t get on deck then quickly enough. Johnson was hanging over the port side, his hair mixed up with his spectacles, watching the noisy approach of a launch full of luggage and people. Among them were the black and blonde heads and cashmere sports casuals of Comer and Beverley Eisenkopp.
Unlike the faces round about us, Johnson’s was stamped with neither excitement nor horror. He listened with attention to all I told him of my visit to Ingmar and at the end said only, ‘She’s right. I could do without the Glycera wandering about, but in a way, the cordon makes our job easier. It’s almost bound to force the other side into a change of plan, and that always leaves room for errors. The other thing is the health hazard. Are you worried?’
Below, the launch had reached the foot of the companionway, and the captain and the chief officer had appeared there. No one had come aboard.
I said, ‘Ben is protected, and I’m all right. What about you and Lenny?’
‘I’m a permanent walking chemical factory,’ Johnson said. ‘And I know Donovan is all right, and his invisible comrades. It’s a mild outbreak. I gather the vaccinated can walk about anywhere so long as they have the right papers. And that’s what the said other side are going to find awkward. I only hope, after this, the poor sods aren’t moved to abandon the kidnap.’
‘Surely not,’ I said. Pained.
The shouting below had risen in volume. Craning over, we could see the wind lifting Comer’s creamed hair, and hear the despairing twang of Beverley’s accent. I said, ‘Comer’s against vaccination as a matter of principle.’
‘Ain’t that a bitch?’ said Johnson sympathetically. ‘Then he’s going to miss out on the Warr Beckenstaff gala. What do you think they’ve done with Bunty and the two Eisenkinder?’
‘Sent them on to Herceg-Novi,’ I said. I tried very hard to keep the laughter out of my voice. ‘Bunty’s vaccinated, you see. And when we were in Cape Cod, she got Dr Gibbings to do the kids without telling Comer.’
It was as well she did. The car, clearly, had been allowed to proceed to the seaside, and the Eisenkopps had had to return to plague-ridden Dubrovnik, to see the Glycera majestically sailing out of the harbour. No wonder they were clean out of alphas. I said, ‘I ought to get back to Benedict. I could take that launch. But I don’t want the Eisenkopps on Dolly.’
‘I don’t imagine you’ll get them on Dolly,’ said Johnson placidly. ‘I’ll come with you, if you like, to dissuade them. But if I know Comer, he’ll take the first plane back to health, hygiene and sanity, and force Beverley and the kids to go along with him.’
But he didn’t. By the time Johnson and I boarded the launch it was empty of all but the rejected Eisenkopps and a number of tight-lipped representatives of the Warr Beckenstaff Corporation. The Booker-Readmans, if appealed to, had clearly not come to the rescue. Neither had Ingmar herself although Dr Gibbings, looking hurt, turned on his heel as we arrived and walked away from the head of the gangway. Comer said, his voice hoarse with declaiming, ‘I’m glad to see two folks with sense. You’re gonna fly the kid out of the God-damned country.’
The launch’s engine started up and Johnson sat down, and so did I. Beverley said, ‘Are they hell going to fly the kid out of the country; Benedict’s vaccinated; right?’ to me.
I nodded. ‘I’m staying with him on Dolly. It’s only a mild outbreak, Mr Eisenkopp, and the health authorities haven’t advised tourists to leave. I’m sure the children will be fine in Herceg-Novi.’
‘A bunch of gollies,’ Comer Eisenkopp said. ‘Some crap bunch of gollies on a coach tour to Meccaland, wouldn’t you know it? And back they come with the plague. A hell of a mother my kids have got. She’s left them down there with a girl that’s pumped their guts fulla cow shit. A klutz. I’da bust her. I’da slung her out on her ass but their Mom here - oh, no. Herceg-Novi’s not infected. Hell, Dubrovnik wasn’t infected yesterday. Today like as not the bugs are right there in your belly, shoulder to shoulder and doin’ a circle jerk. Ya know what she wants to do?’
The rope came inboard and we began to move away from the Glycera. Togetherness had melted from the Eisenkopp prospectus. Comer jerked a thumb at his wife. ‘She wants to get herself shot full of cow shit and go to the party.’
I’d guessed that much. I also wondered how much she had paid in advance for her holiday course of plastic surgery. This time Johnson said, ‘I think it’s been pretty well proved that vaccination saves lives, Mr Eisenkopp. But if you don’t fancy it, why not leave your wife with us? We’ll see she gets her scrape, and I’ll take her back to the Glycera. Then later on, she and the children can have a good holiday. Why, you might even feel like coming back in a few days and joining them.’ He was a rat. I could feel Beverley stiffen at the prospect of bewitching her husband, all black eyes and skin-pink elastoplast. Comer said, ‘I’ve got a business to run. I can’t do my head in like some guys in the play scene. Bev? You heard what he said.’
‘I want to get vaccinated,’ Beverley said. Her gorgeous face was blotchy with crying and temper, and strands of hair flew from her bandana. Her small, pretty hands were clenched so hard her rings were grinding together.
Comer said, ‘I reckon you mean to get your money’s worth outta that costoom. And the beauty box. You know there’s a white leather gift box in every cabin, fitted out with Ingmar’s products in silver-topped crystal bottles, all lined with pink plush? The men get somethin’ too. Sprayed with hormones, I guess. You’ll look real good, honey, in spots.’
We had arrived at the jetty. ‘You’re no gentleman, Comer Eisenkopp,’ said his wife in a low-pitched, vehement voice. ‘Mr Johnson, I thank you for your offer. Good-bye, Comer.’
She jumped ashore. For a moment, Comer Eisenkopp looked nonplussed. Then without a word, he strode on to the pier and made for a taxi, without waiting for his cases. The seamen began to lift them out and they stood in two matched sets beside us: his and hers, in leather-bound tapestry. A taxi containing Comer ambled across, absorbed one pile and vanished on the road to the airport. There were no farewells.
Johnson turned from the sea where Dolly, distantly swinging, disclosed the presence of Lenny with binoculars in the cockpit and Donovan lying stripped to the waist on the coachroof. They both waved, lazily. No cries floated over the water.
Her owner grinned down at his new companion. ‘Honey,’ said Johnson, who was no gentleman either, ‘you would look real good in anything. Come on and let’s find a cow-doctor.’
Johnson parked behind the north walls. From the highway above, Dubrovnik looks like a toy city packed in a matchbox, with a bite out of one end for the harbour. Of the two longer sides, one is built on the sea-rocks and the other crosses the peninsula neck under the shadow of wooded Mount Srdj. The city gates, once with their moats and their drawbridges, lie at either end of the matchbox; and the Placa, the broad main street which runs from the one gate to the other, is sunk like the floor of a boat, so that all the long streets on either side slope or step sharply down to it. The walls are seventy-two feet high and eighteen feet thick in some places. Dubrovnik, old name Ragusa, was a rich city state for four hundred years, trading like Venice with the Orient. It had a lot to protect.
It still had a lot to protect, and the enemy this time wasn’t corsairs. Twenty-three thousand other people besides Beverley Eisenkopp wanted to be vaccinated, quickly, and it was clear long before Johnson slid into the Put Iza Grada car park that if Beverley was ever to grace the Ingmar anniversary celebration that evening, she was going to have to have the personal favour of St Blaise, short of discovering a reliable but corrupt member of the Yugoslav nationalized health service.
Clear to me, that is. Beverley had already remembered what I had forgotten and Johnson wasn’t supposed to know about. As Johnson got out of the car she said, ‘Now look at that view. Why don’t you go up on the walls, J.J., and have yourself a nice walk while Nurse Joanna and I go and get this little business looked after? There’s a real nice statue down there, you can’t miss it; we could meet up with you there in half an hour?’
Johnson said. ‘Half an hour? Are you sure?’ There were queues everywhere.
‘I’m sure,’ said Beverley. The pinched look had gone out of her face and she tossed her Wig ‘n Lift off her shoulders for Johnson’s benefit. ‘Anyways, Nurse Joanna can come and tell you if I’m held up.’
I telegraphed to Johnson, I’ve got to get back to the baby, and he replied with a flash of his glasses: Don’t miss the chance to find out where she is going. In spite of all that, I said aloud, ‘Can Lenny manage?’
‘Of course he can,’ said Johnson calmly. ‘First sign of senility, when you think you’re indispensable. Run along, both of you.’
And so we ran. Through the modern gateway, down the steps and the landings of the nearest plunging street and right along the Ulica Prijeka to a tall, crumbling seventeenth-century building with a wide, handsome door and brass plate. The Radoslav Clinic, naturally. Where Beverley was to have her plastic pick-up in three days from now, and the medics all knew her.
She said, ringing the bell, ‘I daresay Bunty has told you about this place. I guess there isn’t much about my private life you don’t know between you by this time. Maybe it seems weird to you, but you’d be surprised just how many big English names you’ll see getting their image fixed up. And all those Japanese eyelids. You wanna come in?’
Nothing, really, would have kept me out.
Inside there was a black and white floor and a fountain, and a doorway leading into a patio with a pool and palm trees and wistaria, and a number of lemon trees in small tubs. There was also a queue, stretching three times round the hall and then out of sight up a staircase, of women in black skirts and headscarves, and men in thin dark suits and black berets, their collarless shirts displaying necklines of pristine white underwear. They were undoubtedly not there to have their chins lifted.
A nurse in white canvas boots and a blue overall came out of an office and there was a sharp exchange, in the middle of which Beverley wheeled round and pushing past the patient crocodile, began to make her way up the stairs. The nurse looked after her without attempting to follow, sighed and then, picking up a half- smoked cigarette, turned her large dark eyes on me. One of her sleeves had been taped up to uncover a new vaccination. ‘Don’t tell me,’ I said. ‘You’ve cancelled the cosmetic surgery programme?’
Her English was perfectly adequate. ‘Is it not reasonable?’ she said. ‘The risk of infection. And all, all our doctors will be needed for many days for all these poor people. We will open again. Your friend will come back.’
‘The lady is my employer,’ I said, also with a sigh but smiling as well. ‘I am a nurse also. I look after the lady’s two children.’
Well, I did, on occasion. And it brought me a seat in the office and a bowl of thick Turkish coffee. While my hostess said ‘Molim?’ continuously through her cigarette into the telephone and Beverley jumped the queue, or failed to, for her vaccination.
Half an hour later I had seen over the clinic, inspected, with suppressed hysteria, the signed thank-you photographs in the doctors’ private sitting-room and located Beverley Eisenkopp, roughly two hundred and fifteenth in the double line of those waiting to be vaccinated, and weeping with rage. Equality, it seemed, meant equality; and if they lost that Eisenkopp overhaul business for the rest of their lives, they still weren’t willing to oblige her.
I was on my way out to tell Johnson when this white-coated young doctor stopped me. Tall and brown, as most of the citizens were, with humorous brown eyes strongly under-lidded, and a slender nose with flattened high cheekbones. He said, without removing his cigarette, ‘The nurse tells me you are Mrs Eisenkopp’s nanny, so perhaps you are Bunty?’
Who would have thought it? I produced my most candid expression. ‘Well, she was nearly right. My employer is a friend of Mrs Eisenkopp and I know Bunty very well. But my name’s Joanna Emerson. Why? Do you know Bunty?’
I knew the answer just before he came out with it. ‘Ah, a great deal,’ he said. ‘But by name only, for I hear so much about her, and about you. It is you who have the aunt in Canada, is it not? For you see . . .
‘Don’t tell me,’ I said. ‘You’re Jesus Krysztof?’
Charlotte’s boyfriend. As it happened, he wasn’t. He was the other one.
‘Lazar Dogíc,’ he said. His lids bunched with glee, and also against the clouds of grey smoke from his filter-fag. ‘Our names are difficult. Charlotte has much fun with mine. How is she; is she well? She is not with you?’
I explained. I further explained about Mrs Eisenkopp. He knew all about her cancelled operation but not about her urgent desire to be vaccinated. In two minutes, equality had acquired a slight bend, and the American lady had been slipped from the queue by another nurse with laced boots with no toes and heels.
I followed. We were led to a neat room with clean parquet flooring where a trolley already stood by an armchair. While Lazar Dogi’c administered the vaccine, I waited outside and tried to guess from the dialogue where he had punctured her.
Wherever it was, it made Dr Dogíc’s day: his fresh cigarette had dimples all round it when he eventually emerged. Beverley herself was rather blotched, and a line had sneaked out from the Wig ‘n Lift and landed between her arched eyebrows. At the same time, you couldn’t say she was mournful, either over the smallpox or Comer. It turned out that it was Dr Dogíc’s birthday, and Beverley had asked him to join us and Johnson in a drink. We all sallied forth to find the square, the statue and Johnson.
I remember at that point feeling momentarily free. I trusted Lenny with Ben. I believed Johnson when he said that the baby and I ran no danger when we were separate. I ought, no doubt, to be making a valuable study of my companions but my companions were getting along perfectly well together and had been here before and were going to be here again, and I wasn’t.
Fate, or the Department, or Johnson had brought me to this medieval city state without traffic, and I wanted to rubberneck. To drift with others along its main street, paved with brilliant white marble like parquet. To lift my eyes to the handsome stone buildings with their red pantile roofs and rows of green swallow-tailed shutters. To linger in front of each arch of the knee shops, door and window and counter in one, which for three hundred years had formed each side of the street into a range of mysterious caverns.
Too quickly we reached the square at the end, surrounded by Renaissance and Gothic arched palaces and containing a freestanding pillar with the real nice statue of a longhaired knight with sword and shield in its niche.
Johnson wasn’t behind the shield or sitting on the steps on the other side of the column, unless he had been flattened by the five hundred odd people who were standing there instead, their backs to us. Beverley said, ‘What’s going on? Are they running a sweepstake?’ as she picked her way like the rest of us over a carpet of pigeons.
Charlotte’s boyfriend said, ‘No, they are watching the weddings. You see in front of you the Municipal Palace. There. Beside the belfry and the small fountain. And someone waves to you, perhaps your friend, from the Gradska Kafana? The City Café? On the terrace there?’
It was Johnson. But I wasn’t looking at Johnson. Below the white balustrades of the City Café, and smothered bonnets, radiators, windows and boots with mixed flowers and greenery, were parked five desecrating automobiles. As we stared, a discreet croak behind us scattered first the pigeons and then the crowds to admit a sixth car which also halted in front of the Palace.
A girl in a long coarse white dress and short veil got out, followed by three men in good suits with carnations in their buttonholes and another girl in a long purple dress. They disappeared inside the building and the driver backed his car into line with the others.
‘I told you,’ Johnson said when we joined him at his table. ‘It’s the only thing they allow cars inside the city for. They’ll be out in twenty minutes. Did you meet someone you knew?’ Dr Dogíc had lingered behind to speak to one of the drivers.
‘A boyfriend of Charlotte’s,’ I said. ‘He’s coming to join us. He gave Mrs Eisenkopp her vaccination and it’s his birthday, so we rather owe him something, if you don’t mind.’
‘Perhaps I ought to go and bring him,’ Johnson said; and vanished, like the Cheshire Cat, while his voice was still displacing sound waves. I picked up the wine list. It was in the Roman alphabet, not the Cyrillic for a wonder, and I was reading under the Zestoka Picā or Strong Drinks and hovering between Gin Gilbey’s and J. Walker at 15 Dinari when Johnson and Lazar came back and orders for sljivovica went flying about like the pigeons.
Plum brandy at five in the afternoon needs to be treated with caution. I treated it with caution, which gave me a ringside view of Beverley lightly sloshed, going into her adored-little-girl act for Johnson and Lazar, both of whom had lost no time in chatting her up. Peals of silvery laughter greeted Johnson’s every graven-faced observation which were still effortlessly prolific no matter how high he was becoming. On the other hand there was Lazar’s charm, laid on with all the pure Balkan style which had placed him, obviously, on Charlotte’s mailing list.
In between observing the Municipal Palace disgorge married couples like parking tickets I watched the handsome brown doctor down four separate tumblers of sljivovica with no visible change in his smile or his macho, and wondered how long it would take Mr Eisenkopp’s Beverley to recall that all the animation she was wasting on the habitués of the City Café would be better employed exclusively on Johnson and the other beautiful or powerful people on board the Glycera. Or Dr Dogíc, who appeared to know the whole of female Dubrovnik, to cease smiling and waving and remember the birthday party he had spent some energy fruitlessly inviting us severally to.
I wondered what sort of head Johnson had for plum brandy. Sober, I watched the setting sun flame on the ribbed pantile roofs high over our heads and light the wings of the swifts as they swept up from the dark of the ancient Platea Comunis and squeaked and wheeled against the rose-coloured pines of Mount Srdj. Now the shutters were up and lights glimmered in all the arched windows and, a moment later, sprang along the main street as the people of Dubrovnik strolled out to take the evening air. A little wind started up and Beverley shivered and turned to pull on her green cashmere jacket, with help from each side. Then, smiling, she rose.
She had remembered. Beverley Eisenkopp had taken a great many pains to acquire that coveted invitation on board the Glycera, and she wasn’t going to be diverted now.
We all left the café together. Three more people among the strollers, two of them ravishingly pretty girls, waved to Dr Dogíc and he waved back, smiling. He was a popular boy. His polo-necked sweater, I noted, had been bought in Italy, and the thick gold ring on his little finger had a passable diamond in it. He said caressingly to Beverley, ‘You need help to find the way to your car? I come with you.’
I watched him take her arm. I was still watching when he winked at me.
I didn’t wink back, but I grinned. Conquering the impulse to look at Johnson almost killed me, both then and when we began to climb the steep street to the north wall and Lazar’s hand, leaving Beverley, brushed the stout inverted pleat in my faithful green Maggie Bee trenchcoat.
I was entertained. Charlotte’s boyfriends always had bags of initiative, and no mid-European cavalier was going to offend the wealthier and more important of two possible dates by making up to both at once. None of that, however, was going to stop Dr Dogíc from trying to have his cake and eat it. Also, one bitchily had to remember, the Radoslav Clinic knew to a day just how old Beverley was. I went on climbing steadily, and hoped, also bitchily, that Johnson had noticed.
It was getting dark. Overhead, the strip of sky between the tall leaning houses was inky blue, and the infrequent lanterns threw odd jagged shadows on the peeling walls and doorways and balconies. A gleaming brass plate announced advokat and another in English directed to Disco-Bar with Disc jokey. There was a smell of cats, and Dijamant filter cigarettes, and cooking. Behind us in the square the last of the wedding cars, honking and afforested with waving arms, swept along the Placa, displacing the sauntering citizens.
It was all implacably foreign, and made one think of things I had heard about Yugoslavia during the war. How in one small town, every professional man, every doctor and teacher had been taken and executed in reprisal for German officers killed by the Resistance. How after the war, nine old women had been discovered living alone in one mountain village, where every other soul had either lost his life fighting or had been taken and shot. As we climbed higher I could see the neon sign of the Labirint, the night club built on the site, they said, of a wartime Gestapo torture chamber.
I said to Lazar, ‘Don’t you see ghosts, when you go over there to dance?’
The street was wide enough - just - for three people. He tucked the hand that wasn’t holding Beverley under my arm. ‘Why should we? Do you see ghosts in Dublin Castle? We are a collection of different races in Yugoslavia, with different languages, different religions, different customs.’
‘Then I suppose you were lucky,’ said Johnson from behind, ‘that a man like President Tito was able to hold you all together for so long. When he goes, what will happen?’
Still holding my arm, Lazar turned his head smiling, over his shoulder. ‘Ask the politicians. They control us. I am only a doctor. Here is the gateway, and there is the car park. You see, Izlaz means exit.’
The sign, distressingly, said ИЭЛАЭ. Lazar said ‘You have no Serbo-Croat?’ And when we all shook our heads, ‘Ah, but you will manage very well. Most speak English. And now I must leave you. Good-bye, my dear Mrs Eisenkopp. Good-bye, Mr Johnson. Is it possible, Joanna, before you leave, that I might give you a message for Charlotte?’
The message, delivered in a smiling undertone as the others got into the car was, as one might have guessed, a pressing invitation to Lazar Dogíc’s birthday party. ‘The others will be on the Glycera, is it not? Then you are free.’
‘You don’t know how tempting it is,’ I said. ‘But I’m looking after a baby on Mr Johnson’s yacht and we shan’t even be tied up in the harbour. They’re afraid of kidnapping, and we have to spend the night at anchor somewhere. I’m so sorry.’
‘So Mr Johnson has said. But this is no problem. There are boats. There are two men on board, Mr Johnson says, who attend to the baby this afternoon. Why can you not leave the baby with them for this evening?’
He patted me on the shoulder. ‘It is settled. I shall come for you.’
‘It isn’t settled,’ I said. Behind us, Beverley had leant over and pressed Johnson’s car horn. ‘Look, I have to go. Have a wonderful party. I’ll tell Charlotte I met you.’
He continued to grin. ‘I shall come,’ he said. He was still waving as we drove off.
Lenny Milligan brought the Dolly under motor to the quayside to pick us all up and take us across to where the Glycera, dressed overall with strings of coloured lights, lay floodlit on the ocean like Selfridge’s.
Ben, neatly stowed in his carrycot, was pinkly asleep and had been so, Donovan said, for four hours. After all, it was what I’d been counting on, but none the less I was pleased. I left him a few minutes longer while I got out orange juice and beef soup and the next bottle ready to warm, and found out how Johnson’s galley cooker functioned. I spread polythene sheets and unpacked baby gear, while footsteps above, and voices, and the thud of dropped ropes gave way to the surge of the engine and the kind of motion that told we were now on our way to the Glycera.
Beverley’s face needed fixing. She made straight for the heads, and didn’t come near me again. Donovan put his head round the door and said, ‘My God, you should smell the plum brandy. Where’ve you lot all been?’ and then withdrew when I grinned but didn’t stop working. I had gone to lift Benedict when the engine stopped and we coasted, by the sounds, up to the Glycera.
They let Beverley on board this time: I heard her voice on the cruise boat’s companionway, followed by the bumps of her baggage ascending. The door opened and Johnson said, ‘All right, Joanna?’
Because my whole attention was on Ben, I said ‘Yes, he’s fine. You’re off now, are you?’ without thinking. It did strike me that he looked pretty sober for the amount of Zestoka Picā he had consumed. Benedict’s eyes were still shut but his lips began to push in and out. I slipped my hands a little further under him, ready to lever.
Johnson said, ‘I don’t know what the bloody hell your father was thinking of.’
That found its way through the jet lag. My hands still under the baby, I gave Johnson my abrupt attention. ‘I’m sorry. I’m stupid. Don’t worry. I do remember why we’re here. Is there anything more I can do?’
From outside, we could hear calling voices. Johnson said, ‘No. We’ve been over it all. Don’t trust the doctor.’
‘Lazar Dogíc? He was trying to lure me on shore,’ I said. ‘I thought you said that so long as Ben and I were separated . . . ?’
‘I know. But don’t trust him all the same. Good luck,’ Johnson said.
Even after he said it, he didn’t move for a moment, although Lenny’s voice had now joined the others calling his name. I said again, ‘Don’t worry. It’s my own father I’m doing it for.’
It sounded discourteous but he understood probably because he gave one of his less glassy smiles before he walked off and boarded the Glycera. It was Ben himself, squirming against my two hands, who dragged my mind back to the baby.
My nose was pricking again, But that was jet lag as well as other emotions. Including, if you must know, plain terror.