I had to work a month’s notice in the United Commonwealth Hospital, and no one bothered me during that time, although I had two calls from James Ulric asking me if I was all right, and Mr Tiko rang once to say that he had been called back to New York but wished me to know that he would be happy to accede to whatever plans I wished to make for the future. I thanked him, and said that I would write to him presently. I found I was glad, if surprised, that Johnson hadn’t killed him as well. He wrote back that perhaps he would meet me at the MacRannoch Gathering.
Perhaps.
I worked very hard at my job. Perhaps a holiday was what I had needed. Or perhaps it was energy released by the act of resignation. It had pleased my father, even when I informed him that in future I proposed to draw on our joint account. He had never wanted me to work. He had only wanted me to become married. And so I might have, if I had never met Johnson.
I didn’t ask him about the outcome on Great Harbour Cay, and there was nothing of moment in the Nassau Guardian, only the heading Edgecombe Rites Monday and a large, respectful obituary on Sir Bartholomew, fatally wounded while grappling with an Army deserter in his Great Harbour Cay garden. There was a brief recapitulation of Lady Edgecombe’s recent tragic demise. I read them both sketchily and stopped thinking about it again.
I took a week-end trip to New York and bought some clothes and went to a theatre and had a large Bossa Nova in the interval, which was a mistake, as it made me think of Miami all over again. Next day I wore my dark glasses in hospital, but no one commented adversely.
I had never found the hospital atmosphere so clear and so pleasant as it had been this last month. Perhaps because they knew I was leaving. Perhaps because of my wig? My C.M.O. took me out to lunch and unfolded two risqué jokes and a long account of how he had always wanted to be a veterinary surgeon while I had two Yellowberries without noticeable effect. I was getting used to them. I was getting used to everything except being utilized and being ignored.
My father rang up for the third time and said the Begum wanted to know if she could get married, and I said, Ask Johnson. He said Johnson had gone away, and what was it to do with him anyway? It was too complicated to explain, so I rang off.
It was two days later, operating day, when I got home to be met by Daffodil at the door, and the smell of pipe smoke curling round from the hallway. A gentleman had called in to see me. A Mr—
‘I know,’ I said. ‘Good evening, Mr Johnson.’
He was standing in my father’s sitting-room in a crumpled shirt and tie, evidently put on in my honour, and a serious look round the bifocals, saying nothing at all. I uttered a few common-place bromides while Daffodil closed the door and walked with reluctance away from the keyhole. Johnson said, ‘I apologize for coming along uninvited, but I knew you wouldn’t see me if I telephoned. The Begum tells me I have made an impression midway between Mussolini and a Chubb T.D.R. safe. I am here to adjust my image. You weren’t expected to suffer all that without a word of decent explanation.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘I got the dose without the anti-depression pill. It was my own fault for leaving so quickly.’ I didn’t ask him to sit down.
‘You were seen,’ said Johnson gravely, ‘drinking Yellowberries. But if you don’t want to listen, I’m not going to pressure you. The other reason I came was to carry out a commission.’ He glanced at the wall. ‘I’ve been asked to leave you a painting.’
I walked two steps in and looked where he nodded. A square artist’s canvas, unframed, had been propped between the floor and the wall. Out of it, cheerful and enigmatic, gazed the dark face of Krishtof Bey, his hands clasped below at his knees.
‘With the sitter’s compliments,’ Johnson said. ‘I was also to convey to you Wallace Brady’s competitive love, and James Ulric wants to know if you’ve married that little buff Wop yet.’
‘Nip,’ I said automatically. I stared from Johnson’s bifocals to Krishtof Bey’s large eyes with their shameless false lashes. There was no doubt at all. He was a fiendishly good painter. I said, ‘You are a bloody Mussolini.’
‘It’s a lie,’ he said calmly.
‘I ought to turn you out. I don’t want any more dirt on my hands. I don’t want to hear -’
‘You do;’ said Johnson. ‘You want to know why Wallace Brady isn’t in prison and you want to know if Krishtof Bey is married or not.’
‘He isn’t,’ I said. ‘I looked him up in Who’s Who.’
There was an attentive movement of the bifocals. ‘You don’t mean the Begum’s folio edition?’ Johnson said. ‘You should try an up-to-date one. You’ve missed half his love-life. I don’t suppose it said a word about my six children.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘But it mentioned Judith Cicely Ballantyne.’
The bifocals remained completely impassive. ‘The daughter,’ he said, ‘of perhaps the most famous Russian spy the world has ever known, Igor Vasily Balinski. She married me on Kremlin orders to extirpate all my secrets, and when the truth came out later, we shot each other. They gave her a Soviet State funeral. Her aim had always been poor.’
We stared at one another, on the heels of this farrago. Whatever other precepts I had hurled out of the window, I could still respect privacy. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Sit down. What will you drink?’
He remained standing. He said thoughtfully, ‘Why should you suppose that had any truth in it?’
Ever since I had met him here in this house, the night he had taken me sailing on Dolly, he had been deceiving me. He must have been. Hardly anything he told me during all those subsequent days had been truthful. Why then should I believe that his wife was dead, and that he had loved her? He wanted me to listen, and sympathetically. He had made sure that I would.
I thought about it, standing there with the cap of the Haig bottle unscrewed in my hand. It wasn’t hard, once I did think about it. ‘I believe you,’ I said, ‘because I watched you shoot those two men on the golf-course.’
He said, ‘I only shot one.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘You took Edgecombe’s life. It only happened to be Trotter who fired the bullet that killed him.’
Johnson moved. He removed the cap from my fingers and taking up the bottle of whisky, he set out two glasses and poured. ‘If you will allow me,’ he said. The lower lenses perched, two bald Chads, on the edge of his glass as he lifted it, unsmiling, to toast me. He said, ‘To the Scottish teaching hospitals and all they produce.’
I let him drink, and sit down, and put his whisky on the table beside him before I asked the question I had forbidden myself until now even to think about. ‘All the time,’ I said, ‘from the beginning, that day in the airport - who was trying to kill Sir Bartholomew Edgecombe?’
I thought I was ready for anything. I thought no answer he could give would surprise me. Instead he said, ‘You’ve had a month of worry, haven’t you, Beltanno? That was what I had been hoping to save you. You see, no one was trying to kill Bartholomew Edgecombe. You were only intended to believe someone was.’
‘Playacting?’ I said helpfully. I wondered if he expected me to believe him this time as well. I said, ‘The arsenic at the airport? The further dose on the plane? Pentecost’s attempt at the Bamboo Conch Club? The attempts to warn me off there and in New York and at Coral Harbour? The attack on me at Miami and the disappearance of your luggage and mine before my notes vanished on Crab Island? Denise’s death? The attempt to blow up Edgecombe on Dolly? The grenade someone threw at his car here that night?
‘No one was trying to kill Bart Edgecombe, were they?’ I said with some forgivable sarcasm. ‘Except that someone did kill him, and you did nothing at all to prevent him.’
‘We had an industrious week or two, didn’t we?’ said Johnson, his eyebrows raised, his glasses filled with mild contemplation. ‘You and the Mighty Leveller, raking together a scratch and dent sale. Of course I did nothing to stop Bart Edgecombe’s murder that evening. I’d just spent twenty-four hours organizing the whole bloody opera. I couldn’t kill Edgecombe myself: the Royal Academy wouldn’t be happy. Trotter had to do it.’
‘He hated both you and Edgecombe,’ I said slowly. ‘Trotter’s plan misfired at the Bamboo Conch Club, but he made sure you wouldn’t catch that waiter, or that if you did, the waiter wouldn’t live to confess. He could have caused all the disasters on Dolly, expecting to make some excuse to disembark before Haven struck her. He saved our lives, but only because he had to save his own. And on the golf-course that night, you fell to his bullet.’
‘You’ve killed him,’ Edgecombe had shouted at Trotter. ‘You bloody traitor, you’ve killed Johnson instead.’
‘I dare say you thought so,’ said Johnson mildly. ‘It looked like it from every angle but mine. Trotter aimed into the bushes where we both were, but he was actually shooting at Edgecombe. And Edgecombe, who was expecting it, was tough and quick and above all, a splendid opportunist. He ducked when he saw Trotter lift his revolver and, turning, took his own sights. When Trotter fired, Edgecombe fired as well. Of course he thought I was dead. He had just shot me himself, as I looked at him, full in the chest.’
God bless the drip-dry titanium underwear. I said, ‘He might have chosen your head.’
Johnson said, ‘I tried not to give him the chance. But it was a risk that had to be taken.’
I knew my voice had gone flat. I said, ‘You expected Sir Bartholomew some time to turn on you? Your own colleague and agent?’
He smiled a little, nursing his whisky, but his glasses were bleak as the North Sea in the deepening dusk. He said, ‘Edgecombe and I were on opposite sides from the moment I landed in Nassau. He was a double agent, Beltanno: a man being paid by and cheating both sides. We suspected it, but his other employers had found out for certain. They offered him his life on one condition only. That in return, he delivered them mine.’
‘He was to kill you?’ I said. I could not conceive of it. The big, grey-haired pleasant man lying sick in my own private ward.
‘He was to kill me. And because he was anxious that on no account shou|d our people ever suspect him, he made an elaborate plan. The attacks were to appear directed at him. The outside world was to believe them accidental; we should gradually come to perceive that it was a personal grudge. And to make sure that we knew, he picked you, Beltanno.’
‘Picked me?’ I said.
‘He had seen you at the hospital, remember? And been impressed by your efficiency. A forthright and independent young woman, who would have her own views about a sudden attack of food poisoning, and would be likely to act on them. He was in New York. Beltanno, because you were going to be in New York; and Trotter was there as his assistant.’
‘And Wallace Brady?’ I asked. I wouldn’t have gone so far if he hadn’t mentioned him already.
‘Wallace Brady.” said Johnson with evident enjoyment, ‘is an innocent bystander who likes building bridges and doesn’t think young women are to be trusted with guns in their handbags. He and Krishtof did sterling work in the last lap driving both Trotter and Edgecombe towards the car and into our hands.’
For a moment, it had appeared to make sense. I said snappishly. ‘But Trotter shot Edgecombe.”
‘I should think so.’ said Johnson. ‘After all, Edgecombe had just arranged his own accident and got safely off Dolly without returning as promised to take Trotter off too. I must confess that even if Edgecombe had wanted to come back on board, I had asked Brady not to allow him. A dependable young man. I thought him. All that stuff with the reverse gears.’
I said. ‘Then you knew already that Edgecombe and Trotter were working together?’
He had known. I closed the screens and switched on the lamps as he gave me, encapsuled in that cool voice, the true events of that series of days which had ended my medical life.
To begin with, Edgecombe’s reports were already troubling his masters. Slight omissions, slight inaccuracies had led to Johnson’s presence in this part of the world, planned for two months to appear to coincide with an exhibition in Miami: a fortuitous visit which would allow him to call on Edgecombe in passing and judge for himself what was happening.
When news of Edgecombe’s illness had reached him, brought by me, he had at once felt uneasy. It was no place of Edgecombe’s to appoint an intermediary, however innocent. With the news he had to tell, he himself should have contacted Dolly immediately.
But of course, said Johnson, Edgecombe had chosen me with a purpose. I had to authenticate the attack. I was there to prove that he really had been poisoned, and once one realized that, one also realized that my life throughout would be sacrosanct.
The telephoned threat to me he had also found curious, and the odd repetition of words at the night-club and at Coral Harbour. Where I might have reported my findings direct to the hospital or the police, the threats had led me at least to talk to Sir Bartholomew, and had given him a chance to take me into his confidence. They had also given further proof, which I could later vouch for, that Sir Bartholomew’s life was indeed under attack.
But these had only been vague suspicions until the fire at the Bamboo Conch Club. Then the coincidences, said Johnson, became oddly marked. The club had been Lady Edgecombe’s choice, on her husband’s recommendation. A suitcase of clothes had been stolen, resulting in Johnson’s wearing an outfit of Edgecombe’s. Whether the ensuing fire resulted in death or in injury, the claim could be made that the attack had been intended for Edgecombe.
‘But how odd, I thought,’ said Johnson pensively, ‘that the attack had been prepared, and by a resident waiter. What would have happened if Lady Edgecombe had chosen to go to Charley Charley’s? It seemed to me that whoever made that choice of club also knew what was likely to happen there. And after the waiter died, I was also prepared to believe that Sergeant Trotter knew more than he should. At that point,’ went on Johnson’s quiet voice, ‘it seemed quite likely that the assault was intended for me, and that the culprit might be Lady Edgecombe. For example, any man whose family lived on Great Harbour Cay would surely know Sir Bartholomew Edgecombe’s family by sight.’
I said coldly, ‘Do I gather that when I was sent to stay at their home on the island, you held Sir Bartholomew Edgecombe and his wife in equal suspicion?’
Johnson was reassuring. ‘But of course you were perfectly safe. You were always perfectly safe: you were the evidence that Edgecombe had been poisoned: you were to be the evidence that he had been grievously assaulted. Nothing was going to happen to you. But I had begun to realize that if I wanted to pursue my suspicions, I ought to stay apart from both of the Edgecombes until the facts, whatever they were, had become plainer. So I remained on Crab Island while Denise drowned her sorrows in drink, and her husband reached the conclusion that drunk, she could no longer be trusted. That was my cardinal error.”
I remembered. Big Daddy. The only time I had seen Johnson drink more than he could easily carry. I said, ‘Sir Bartholomew killed his own wife?’
If he remembered at all, there was no trace of sentiment in his manner. ‘I don’t suppose she knew everything,’ Johnson said. ‘But a little too much. Enough to become nervous about all these mysterious accidents: enough to send her to the bottle for comfort. And when she was drunk, she talked. So she became the victim of another of those accidents aimed at Sir Bartholomew.
‘The brooch she lost was his anniversary present. Do you remember how he drew attention to it, and got her to put it into her pocket? Brady remembered it clearly. Later, with his arm round her waist, it would have been very easy for him to slip it out and place it just where he wanted. She didn’t struggle when she was pushed over the edge. She made no attempt to run away, nor were her footmarks the deep staggering kind you would expect from someone held against her will, an ether pad over her mouth. She knew who it was. She let him walk her to the edge of the excavation, maybe under the pretext that he had seen her brooch there. He may have embraced her and drugged her while she was in his arms. At any rate, analysis has shown that she was never inside the tarpaulin. It was flung down afterwards, on top of the body.’
He paused, and added, ‘The little scene after with Edgecombe, which so drastically lowered my ratings, was one I should apologize for. It was extremely necessary to reassure Edgecombe that I had no doubts at all about himself. You helped a lot.’
I remembered standing there shaking with anger, my hand on Bart Edgecombe’s shoulder. Bart, who had just killed his wife, and Johnson, who suspected it. I had helped everyone, it appeared, but myself.
Johnson was watching. I drew a long, even breath, and dismissed my emotions. Edgecombe, for his own ends, had warned me about Johnson. Edgecombe had told me that he was married, but not that he was a widower. Edgecombe and Johnson, I had to remember, had been trained in the same school . . ‘So you didn’t suspect Mr Tiko.’ I said. ‘Or Wallace Brady?’
‘I suspected everyone,’ Johnson said, in the same even, conversational voice. ‘But Lady Edgecombe was a rather large woman and Mr Tiko is a very small man. Brady was another matter. By the time we got to Crab Island my money was on Trotter for henchman, but I tried the small experiment of the arsenic test papers to see what we would flush. And talking of flushing -’
I took the reel of tape he handed me in dignified silence. I tried not to imagine the full score for the Polovtsian Dances thundering through the chaste cabins of Dolly. I said frigidly, ‘At any rate, I’m glad it enabled you to see your way clear to beginning your portrait.’
Johnson glanced at the almond-eyed face on the canvas. ‘I must admit, I deferred it until I was certain I shouldn’t have to end it in Pentonville. Brady was in my view also clean from that moment. He couldn’t have invented that performance. Not really.’
He sat, obviously thinking humorous thoughts about my all-American suitor. I said pointedly, ‘And did you find the papers you’d lost?”
‘In Trotter’s room,’ Johnson said. ‘An interesting outcome, because they were still intact. Which meant either that Trotter was blackmailing a murderer, or that he had pinched them for Bartholomew Edgecombe in case I destroyed them. In which case they would have been discovered safe and sound on some appropriate occasion in the future. Edgecombe, remember, wanted to prove he’d been poisoned. Then he came back from the funeral, and the arsenic papers disappeared from Trotter’s room.’
‘Into Edgecombe’s?’ I asked.
‘Edgecombe was far too clever for that. No, they vanished. Perhaps he posted them to somewhere in Nassau. We haven’t found them yet, but we will. At the time, it was another petered-out trail. Except that their disappearance on the very day Edgecombe returned seemed coincidental. And since Denise was dead, suspicion was now in fact fairly firmly pinned on Sir Bartholomew himself. Given that, as you can see, the Haven episode made his guilt and Trotter’s complicity very likely indeed. The key point there was that he engineered his own accident to enable him to leave Dolly plausibly. As I told you. I got Brady to mess about with the speedboat, and to suggest that they didn’t come back for you or for Trotter.’
‘I wondered,’ I said, ‘how you reached the simple decision to allow Violet of New York off the hook, and not me?’
Daffodil, stirred by the prospect of high jinks in the bedrooms, had produced a reasonable supper for two. I recall at this moment attempting to fix Johnson’s bifocals with one or both of my eyes, across my daiquiri and chicken with whisky. He merely went on talking, his short-range Ds bent on dissection.
‘Violet of New York,’ said Johnson, ‘is a very tough cookie who kept Edgecombe out of mischief, on my orders, for the rest of the day until we arrived. On the other hand, if Bart Edgecombe had your signed arsenic tests, he had no longer quite the need to worry over your health. I thought you would be safer on Dolly.’
I laid down my knife and fork. ‘But you knew that something was going to happen to Dolly.’
‘I know,’ said Johnson. ‘But I also thought that, whatever it was, Trotter would halt it.’
‘So the Haven,’ I said, ‘was a dreadful surprise.’
‘I shouldn’t like to exaggerate,’ said Johnson thoughtfully. ‘Trotter halted it.’
‘And went back to shore vowing vengeance on Edgecombe for leaving him. Did Edgecombe in fact intend Trotter to die?’ I asked. ‘Or was it simply your happy suggestion through Brady?’ I realized now why Johnson had had to dive into the sea: why it was so necessary to police what Trotter was doing on Haven.
‘I don’t know,’ Johnson said after a moment. ‘I think he meant to get rid of Trotter as in fact he got rid of Pentecost’s friends in the outcome, by running them into a trap. He talked freely of Trotter’s claims as a suspect. I don’t think Edgecombe would have risked a lifetime of blackmail from Trotter: when, with a little care, Trotter might act as his scapegoat. I suppose he got Trotter to help in the first place because of something he knew of Trotter’s past Army career. They were uneasy bedfellows. At any rate, the moment when Edgecombe learned that we weren’t all dead, and saw Trotter glaring at him across his own bedclothes, must have been one of the worst in his life.
‘Because this time, the whole thing had happened in public. No one could pretend a boat loaded with explosives and following a radio signal came there by accident. If we’d all died, it wouldn’t have mattered. The story would have involved a runaway boat and an accidental collision. No one need have suspected a thing. But here was a boatload of witnesses, including such a weak vessel as Harry, who was bound to demand that the police be told.
‘Trotter made a show of agreeing, and I helped set a deadline of twenty-four hours. To Edgecombe, it would appear that this was all the leeway I thought we could reasonably secure ourselves before the whole thing had to be made public. He would expect me in that time to redouble my efforts to trap his would-be assassin. So far as he was concerned, he would know that he had only twenty-four hours in which to engineer my death once and for all. And now. of course, there was no point in an elaborate faking of accidents. It was an affair of murder. The Haven had shown that up clearly. Hence the golf game.’
I stopped trying to eat. ‘What do you mean, hence the golf game? Mr Tiko finished the jigsaw, that was all. You can’t pretend you foresaw . . .’ I broke off. ‘Or do you have the brazen gall to tell me -’
‘The Begum,’ said Johnson apologetically, ‘told me to give her ten minutes.’
I stared at him. ‘The golf game. She engineered it at your suggestion?’
He nodded.
‘It took fifteen minutes,’ I said viciously. ‘And I nearly said no.’
‘Well,’ said Johnson, ‘I’m glad you didn’t. We shipped Edgecombe under sympathetic guard to Great Harbour Cay, where he was out of Trotter’s vengeance-bent reach and I incidentally was safe, out of his; but not before I had planned the Great Trap and put the details before him. He was most enthusiastic and agreed to co-operate by turning up at the right hole at the right time. We left him plenty of time to get hold of Pentecost’s friends or anyone else who took his fancy and arrange to have his empty car shot at or blown up or whatever he pleased.
‘Then Spry went along and combed the ground near the fourteenth green until he found the getaway car. He did more. When Trotter arrived at the clubhouse, he told him about it. According to Spry’s story, it was merely a good open car which he had found oddly abandoned. But the chances were that Trotter would know about it, and would realize that it was there for a purpose . . A useless purpose, as it would have turned out. Edgecombe hadn’t told his men that they would be surrounded by police and observers: that this time, in staging an attack on himself, they were to be the victims as well as I.
‘At any rate, we got the proof that we wanted. Three of my own private witnesses saw Trotter fire into the bushes between Edgecombe and myself, and saw Edgecombe rise under cover of this fire and, as he thought, successfully kill me. I did a superb Fairbanks fall, and I don’t need to tell you the rest. The police hiding there by the getaway car saw nothing but Trotter’s last stand, in which he succeeded at last in shooting down Edgecombe, the man who knew too much of his past. They saw Trotter kill Edgecombe and try to escape. They saw me shoot at the car and kill Trotter. Poor, insane Trotter. The case is now closed.’
There was a long silence. He was filling his pipe, leaning back on one of my father’s Chippendale dining-chairs. I realized we had been sitting there a long time, and rising, led the way back to the sitting- room.
Gracious living. The hi-fi radio caught my eye and, kneeling, I switched it on and moved one or two unthinking knobs, while Johnson settled back, prodding tobacco. The soulful inanities of the song called ‘Yellow Bird’ floated round the air conditioning:
Yellow Bird, up high in banana tree Yellow Bird, you sit all alone like me - You can fly away
In the sky away
You are luckier than me.
I switched it off sharply. I said, still kneeling, ‘I didn’t ask you. You said until Edgecombe had my notes, I was sacrosanct. So why was I hit on the head?’
Johnson, head down, puffed devotedly at his pipe. He took it out of his mouth, looked at it, and inserted it between his teeth finally, as if forced to a distasteful concession. A haze of smoke wandered after ‘Yellow Bird’, unaccompanied by sound. I said, with growing suspicion, ‘What have I said to cause that kind of gap?’
‘You have posed,’ said Johnson, ‘a problem in ethics.’
‘Oh,’ I said. I allowed myself, slowly and lucidly, to think of Miami, and the dog-track, and that unpleasant race through the car-park. I said, ‘Krishtof Bey doctored my tomato juice. On the Begum’s instructions?’
‘Right,’ Johnson said.
‘The Begum?’ I said, frowning in uneasy thought. The Begum, who had been distinctly troubled by the extent of my injury, the next day at the hospital. Troubled and guilty. Why had they taken my dress, I had asked myself often enough, and yet hadn’t assaulted me while I lay there in the car-park unconscious? How had they known that a call for a doctor would bring out a woman? Why had they stopped to do something so senseless as crop my hair into bristles?
So that the Begum, began an incredible thought, falling into my labouring senses - so that the Begum could bring me a wig and a dress, and so that Johnson . .
‘Pally Loo-loo?’ I found myself saying, accusation ringing in every ludicrous syllable.
‘A very fine bitch,’ said Johnson guardedly. His pipe emitted a column of protective black smoke.
‘Who never won a race in its life,’ I said. I could feel my face as stiff as washed unwashable leather. ‘Whose money was it? The Begum’s?’
Johnson said, ‘I thought you’d got over this hang-up about money? You can’t deny we gave your social habits a skin-pop.’
‘I don’t deny it,’ I said. ‘The lesson was made all too blindingly clear. Without the wig and the wardrobe I was Dracula. Who was going to look at me twice?’
‘No one,’ Johnson said. ‘Because the first time round, you sank your teeth in his jugular. We all know James Ulric didn’t read Spock. And since James Ulric did all the harm, you may as well let James Ulric’s bank account fix it. There are three men hanging about wanting to know if you’ll marry them.’
Mr Tiko, Wallace Brady and Krishtof . . ‘Three men?’ I said, frankly astonished.
‘Two men,’ Johnson corrected himself on the instant. ‘Krishtof Bey is anxious to live in sin with you, but will marry you if you’re going to be fussy.’
The mild figure puffed at its pipestem, and I gave him the same alarmed attention you would give to a circular saw. ‘The Begum phoned,’ I said casually, ‘asking if she ought to get married. I referred her to you.’
‘She phoned me as well,’ Johnson said. ‘I said yes. Beltanno, I told her, will be permanently attached one way or the other by the end of the MacRannoch Gathering. Six p.m. on the 30th at Great Harbour Cay, tickets five guineas a whack. Only genuine MacRannochs need apply.’
‘My God,’ I said, and I said it with reverence. ‘What’s he doing?’
‘Continuous flights,’ said Johnson, ‘from Nassau to Great Harbour Cay, where at 7.30 p.m. the Combined Tattoo and Highland Event will be held by floodlight in a new stadium built at the airport, followed by a State March with pipers to the new MacRannoch residence on Crab Island, where the Grand Banquet will be held. There have been two thousand acceptances.’
‘Tattoo?’ I said flinchingly.
‘Supervised by Brigadier Walter McCanna, Sergeant Trotter’s superior,’ Johnson said. ‘The Army felt they had been put on their mettle. Nothing has been lost. Except, I believe, the trained sheepdogs rounding up the flamingoes, excised because of the rabies laws.’ He grinned. ‘You really ought to attend. It’ll be an occasion unmatched in history. Especially when the two thousand walk over the bridge from Great Harbour Cay to Crab Island.’
In my mind’s eye, clear as a photograph, sprang a picture of the cold green straits between Castle Rannoch. Scotland and the mainland, running deep over the sea-rounded boulders of James Ulric’s five spavined bridges, buried with his virility.
‘Oh Christ!’ I said, varying it. ‘It’s got to be stopped.’
‘You won’t stop it’,’ said Johnson with ghoulish cheerfulness. ‘But I’ve organized a sort of Dunkirk of small boats round the piers, and we’ll save them all if their kilts keep them afloat long enough. They deserve a resident doctor.’
I thought of it. I forgot the thirteenth hole and Denise’s body, lying in its gully under the tarpaulin. I forgot the burning wreck of the car with Trotter’s body lying inside, Johnson’s bullet in his head. I forgot about Edgecombe and the insane singlemindedness which had involved us all in his own sordid game. Instead I considered, fascinated, the spectacle of James Ulric MacRannoch and his affianced if elderly bride, greeting two thousand filibegged MacRannochs and arraying before them a Bahamian steel band jumping through flaming hoops.
I thought of Brady. I thought of Krishtof Bey. I thought of a dress I had seen in the window of Bonwit Teller’s at Christmas time, set in salt snow and swansdown, with silver lights running down the shop shades. There had been a matching long silver wig.
‘I’ll think about it,’ I said. ‘Are you going?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m not a MacRannoch.’
‘Sailing off,’ I said, ‘into the sunset?’ I said it collectedly. I had had a good deal of practice.
‘Sailing off,’ he said, ‘to paint a stout Italian princess who runs a shoe business in Naples. Don’t think I don’t regret it. As jobs go, this one would have sickened a soap-boiler. If anyone made the thing bearable, it was B. Douglas MacRannoch. The one person who, through thick and thin, continued to say what she meant.’
‘I shall miss you.’ I said. ‘I think you’ve been a good teacher.’
‘I should like to be missed,’ said Johnson. He kissed my hand on the doorstep and then my cheek, but not in the manner of Dolly. The lesson was over.
I closed the door slowly, and went and looked at his picture.
The MacRannoch Gathering, Tattoo and Highland Event on Great Harbour Cay is of course a matter of history.
I flew there into the sunset with a cloak over my trouser suit of silver lame and white ostrich feathers, and my long silver wig sparkled in the plane windows. The Begum and James Ulric waited to greet us on a dais covered with MacRannoch tartan and a row of grey potted thistles slumping ear to ear in the still, tropical heat.
The Begum, her hair dyed black and her eye make-up thicker than ever, was wearing a stiff brocade sari with the MacRannoch sash over it. My father in full Highland dress looks like a small wishing-well in need of a tidy. His mouth dropped open when he saw me, hitting the amethyst in his jabot with a crack. Then he said, ‘Beltanno! Well, this is just what we were hoping for. B. Douglas, meet your new stepmother.’
The Begum’s smile was broad, and gave nothing away except a general sort of satisfaction. ‘You haven’t been hasty?’ I asked.
The Begum’s smile became broader. ‘Not while you look like that, darling,’ she said. ‘And look who’s behind you.’
It was Wallace Brady, in a white tuxedo and rosebud, with a smile like a rutting stud oyster. I smiled back. ‘Hullo,’ I said. ‘Where’s Mr Tiko?’ There is no point in fostering too great a sense of security.
‘He’s coming,’ the Begum said quickly. James Ulric was having his pipecleaner hand kneaded by a stonehenge of New Zealand MacRannochs. ‘There are still quite a few planes to come in. I’ll send him along to you. Wallace, will you take her into the stadium?’
We walked off arm in arm, and he was telling me how wonderful I was, and how much he had missed me. which was pleasant. They had laid a tartan-lined walk on the runway, which was almost impassable for crowds of people studded with cairngorms and daggers and milling round discussing their feet. ‘What have you been doing?’ said Wallace Brady. I told him.
The stadium had been contrived from a section of runway flanked by two broad raked stands hung with tartan. At the far end, the runway disappeared into the maw of a marquee from which, clearly, the performers were to emerge. Flags fluttered above it. I said, ‘Will they have a Fat Woman?’ and Wallace Brady said, ‘No, but I hear the clowns are really something.’
I began to warm to him once again. I let him lead me to the row of armchairs behind the first garlanded ledge. The MacRannoch’s pew, I deduced. I said, ‘But you’re not a MacRannoch?’
‘I’ve got special dispensation,’ said Wallace Brady, and followed me along the front row of the stand. A figure in full Highland evening dress rose from the furthest seat, bowed, and said, ‘And so have I,’ in a strong Turkish accent.
I stared at Krishtof Bey. He had his false eyelashes on.
Wallace Brady laughed. ‘Where did you get it?’
The original of Johnson’s portrait looked down at his garments with pride. ‘La Sylphide, Act 1. The Lincoln Centre forwarded them. Observe the frills at the wrist. The cross-binding of cords on the calves. The crested buttons. The buckles. The sporran.’
Wallace Brady gazed at the sporran, which was exceedingly hairy. ‘For Chrissakes, what’s that?’
‘The head of a former conductor of the Budapest Opera and Ballet,’ Krishtof Bey said. ‘In the last scene of Scheherezade I excised it. He kept regrettable tempi.’
I laughed. I suddenly felt very cheerful. I shook hands with the tall, kilted figure of Brigadier McCanna, the Tattoo Director, and watched him leave without pangs to prepare for his programme: he looked nothing like Trotter.
The seats filled up. A message came that Mr Tiko was at Nassau airport and hoped to be with us shortly. The sun went down and the floodlights came on in a faintly dismaying eau-de-nil colour, coinciding with the distant sound of inflating bagpipes. Preceded by the Pipe Major in a cloud of red-hot fluttering tartan, my father and stepmother marched hand in hand down the runway to a storm of clapping and took their places in the principal armchairs beside us. The minister of St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, Nassau, uprising unexpectedly beside them, announced a prayer and a psalm into the public-address system, catching most of the MacRannoch men undoubtedly on the hop: their women kicked them on to their feet.
During the eighth verse the Begum leaned over to whisper that Mr Tiko seemed to be having some sort of trouble in Nassau. My father grunted and shaded his error of pitch from a third to a full semitone. Krishtof Bey flinched. I tried to visualize James Ulric’s head as a sporran.
The psalm ended; we all sat down; the marquee at the end grew a spotlight and the Massed Pipes and Drums of the 1st Battalion the Royal Scots, the 2nd Battalion of the Scots Guards and the Federation of Malaya Police marched out in a rhythmic, befurred body. The great MacRannoch Tattoo and Highland Event had got under way.
There are some memories the mind works to preserve, and others which demand to be jettisoned at the earliest convenient moment. I cannot now remember precisely when I noticed that something was wrong: it was certainly after the putting of the sixteen-pound ball and the flinging of the fifty-six-pound weight, and probably after the combined display of massed limbo dancers and firefighting demonstration by units of the Nassau Brigade. (Music: ‘I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire’).
Certainly the matter came to a head during the jeep assembly exercise by two teams of Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers (Music: ‘Pack up Your Troubles’). Hurrying wheels bisected the runway, with electrical and mechanical engineers running doggedly after them and falling on their medals with great regularity. It looked like a drunk clockmaker’s workshop.
The moment the first jeep stood, splayed and creaking in a welter of washers, they announced the winners and shoved in the British Legion Boys’ Band blowing ‘Semper Fidelis’ while the Mechanical Engineers and their jeeps were shovelled up off the field. A uniformed lieutenant, politely excusing himself along my row of the stand, turned out to be bearing a message from the Tattoo Director. The Brigadier wanted a doctor.
In my silver lame and feathers, silently I followed him out.
In the marquee, the trouble was glassily obvious. Amid a dishevelment of jeeps sat or lay the giggling members of the two mechanical teams. ‘Rum?’ I said. ‘They’re all that high on rum?’
Brigadier McCanna spoke heavily. ‘One tot. I can’t understand it.
It’s regulation, back at the Castle. One tot to put heart into them. And see them!’
I saw them. I touched one on the shoulder and he yelped. I rolled his sleeve up and he smiled and lay down on the ground. A thin white bandage, one of Currie’s best jobs, encircled his upper left arm. The United Commonwealth Hospital had run short of frigates this month.
I said, ‘Don’t you know what happens if you give a blood donor alcohol?’ and Brigadier McCanna, staring at me, said ‘My God!’ with the greatest simplicity. He added, ‘What can I do?’
‘Sort out the sober ones,’ I said. (Music: ‘Reel for My Hume’). ‘And trust to the ingenuity of your MacRannoch friends.’
Nothing short of stereotaxic surgery will ever obliterate the events of the rest of that night. The Brigadier, six feet high in cock’s feathers, holding up five Italian Bersaglieri on his shoulders in the Musical and Physical Training Display. The high jump Wallace Brady competed for in singlet and kilt, and the sixteensome reel Krishtof Bey danced as my partner before racing off to take four different parts in Fighting Men through the Ages.
The MacRannochs greeted it all with a violent and warming enthusiasm. The applause, the cheers, the encores increased until the programme wallowed on to its end, and in the marquee Wallace, Krishtof and the Brigadier met, full of exhausted hilarity, for the Final March Past of Massed Bands and Salute. Pipes tuned, drums thudding and thundering, they would walk past the saluting MacRannoch, and behind would fall in the Chief and the two thousand clansmen, to cross to Crab Island and dinner.
Across the bridge, I heard the Brigadier preparing his pipers; I heard Krishtof and Wallace shouting with laughter but I wasn’t laughing. Five bridges had fallen under the Chief of the MacRannochs. No MacRannoch had succeeded in building a bridge between the shore and his castle since the thirteenth, and he had had the help of the fairies. I said to Wallace. ‘I don’t want them to go over the bridge.’
He broke off at once and came over. He said, ‘Look: I know what happened in Scotland. Believe me it won’t happen here.’
‘No,’ I said after a pause. ‘But you don’t know my family. It’s a legend.’
A man in full piper’s uniform fell at my feet: someone took him by the armpits and dragged him away. Wallace Brady said, ‘I’m going to cross that bridge, and so is your father. We’ll break the legend between us. We’ll make a new one, Beltanno.’
Brigadier McCanna said, ‘Dr MacRannoch?’
‘Lay him down somewhere cool and let him sleep it off,’ I said, without turning.
‘Dr MacRannoch,’ he said again, and I turned at the alarm in his voice. ‘That was the only damned man among them who could play the solo “The MacRannoch for Ever”.’
They all looked at me in my silver wig and my silver suit with the white ostrich feathers, and they saw nothing at all. They saw a woman doctor who could play on the bagpipes.
I lifted the pipes. I tucked the bag under my arm and threw the drones over my shoulder and put the blow-pipe to my lips and settled my grip on the chanter. I nodded. Then the massed pipes struck up and we marched, Brady and Krishtof on either side, out of the marquee.
My father fell in before us as we passed the main stand. He had the Begum with him and they were both smiling politely because of the roar of applause that had gone up when we three emerged from the tent. James Ulric patted me on the back and muttered something about Mr Tiko.
I wasn’t playing, but the massed pipe band was. ‘What?’ I said. The pipes had switched to ‘The Bonawe Highlanders’.
‘He says the place on your right ought to be occupied by the heir,” shouted the Begum. The rest of the two thousand were shuffling into place behind us, but we couldn’t hear them and they certainly couldn’t hear us. ‘It’s a shame about Mr Tiko.’
I shouted back, ‘What happened to him?’
Wallace Brady cupped his hands round his mouth and aimed it at my father. ‘They wouldn’t let him in,’ he yelled, ‘because he wasn’t a MacRannoch.’
‘Mr Tiko,’ I shouted. ‘We’re talking about Mr Tiko.’
‘I know,’ yelled Wallace. ‘He wasn’t a MacRannoch.’
I said, ‘But he said -’
‘No, he didn’t,’ yelled Wallace. ‘He just said his name was hard to pronounce. And that he was a doctor as well. It was you who said he was called T. K. MacRannoch.’
What with rage and astonishment and confusion, I had almost nothing to shout with. I croaked, ‘But his name was on the Paradise Island golf register.’
‘No, it wasn’t,’ said Krishtof Bey, flicking a strand of silver off his impeccable Lincoln Centre filibeg and plush doublet. ‘I played a round of golf just behind Mr Tiko. It wasn’t his name you saw in the book, it was mine.’
The pipers switched to ‘The Garb of Old Gaul’ and got half-way through it quite uninterrupted. I could hear my father’s F.E.V. revving up. The Begum was smiling, strolling along. I said, ‘What?’
Krishtof Bey said mildly, ‘I am T. Krishtof MacRannoch. It is a bizarre name for a ballet-dancer. I do not use it.’
My father said, in a fixed voice, ‘The name of my heir after Beltanno is T. K. MacRannoch. A Japanese.’
‘A Turk,’ said the Begum dreamily. ‘James, I ought to have told you. But after Wallace mentioned what Krishtof’s real name was. I went over the papers again. The genealogical people didn’t mean to mislead you, darling. It was a typing error. T. K. MacRannoch. Turk. Krishtof Bey is the heir to the chieftainship.’
‘And?’ I said thinly. It was another damnable plot. It was a plot between the Begum and Brady. I remembered she had even got James Ulric to agree to my marrying Krishtof. ‘What about me? What about Mr Tiko?’
‘Mr Tiko is polite,’ said the Begum. ‘He will marry you if you insist, but I believe he would be rather relieved not to have James Ulric for a father-in-law.’
‘And Krishtof?’ I said.
Krishtof was admiring the swing of his kilt. ‘I? I never interfere.’ he remarked. ‘I am interested in love, not in chieftains or marriage.”
‘I’ve noticed as much,’ said James Ulric. His face had brightened. ‘But I’ll not deny you’re a treat at the sixteensome. You’ll mind, Beltanno, that “The MacRannoch for Ever” is due at the bridge?’
His words fell in to a wheezing withdrawal of bedlam. The pipes had ceased. The files were opening and halting, displaying before me the dazzle of concrete under a flock of bright, floodlit banners, with the standard of the MacRannochs flying over it all. Ahead, in the darkness, on either side of the white arch before me, I could hear the low chuckle of water, and smell the salt, soft air of the sea.
Here was the new bridge. And here was I, at the head of two thousand, to pipe the 45th Chief to his castle.
The MacRannoch for Ever is not a difficult solo, but there is a knack to it.
I had the knack. I settled the bag and put the blow-pipe into my mouth and sent up a prayer and drew in all the sea air I could muster between there and the Florida coast. The drones started up, and then the first note, clear and steady; and I launched into my father’s own tune as I set foot on his bridge.
I played steadily as I walked over, and behind me I could sense the trample and thud as the MacRannochs flocked after the piping: whether as rats or as children it is not for me, a MacRannoch, to say. I filled my own ears with my music so that no lesser rumble could reach me: no crumbling chasm of concrete: no cracking and sliding of piers.
Beneath my feet the new bridge was solid. Solid to the midway reach of the strait, with the lights twinkling in front and behind. Solid as the far end came nearer, and the lights of the castle shone sharp-cut and welcoming there.
I walked on, and James Ulric walked firmly behind me; and when we both stepped on to dry land, he moved forward and laying his hands on my shoulders, he embraced me for the first time since childhood.
‘The curse is broken,’ he said.
He underestimated his reticuloendothelial system; but success is an excellent doctor. I kissed him back fondly. And through the fronds of his tall Chieftain’s bonnet, I saw not MacRannoch Castle before me, but a palm tree with a banana bird in it, and beneath it, B. Douglas MacRannoch: mistress to the man on my one hand, or wife to the man on my other; or both.
Thank you. Johnson. Thank you for everything.