Dolly and the Singing Bird (10 page)

It was a gamble he took. It is a gamble they all take. I have a name, a standing; I cannot be forced. If I choose to sleep with them, they have been lucky, this throw. If I do not, and nine times out of ten, ninety-nine out of a hundred I do not, then they must act the good loser, and hope for my interest next time. For the jewels I keep, always.

Anyway, that night I had enough on my mind without Stanley Hennessy. I smiled; I heard my voice automatically saying the right, the routine things; and I brought him back to the saloon because he had drunk a good deal, and I did not want to use blonde Blue Grass makeup tonight. With the bracelet clasped on my wrist, I allowed him to kiss my hand, and then my arm. Then I retired for a cooling period to a room with a lock; and when I returned we talked about his sugar and cotton estates, and his family shipping line to Latin America, and his other interests abroad. He was like all tycoons, utterly hypnotised by himself. I did not mind. These days, if I subjected myself to boredom, I first made sure of my fee.

All the same, I was glad when Rupert’s hail came from the quayside. It was amusing to see Hennessy’s temper flare: he had spent an hour creating for me an image, and here was Rupert, all careless young gentry, to spoil it. “I really doubt,” I heard Stanley saying on deck, “if the lady is interested in beer-parlour juvenilia.”

Rupert’s voice, still mild, said, “It’s not quite as ripe as that, sir, although I won’t claim that everyone is stone cold sober like yourself. We thought she’d like to hear some mouth music and a bit of piping, maybe. Won’t you come yourself, sir?”

“Where? To
Blue Kitten
?
Blue Kitten
, I recalled, had the pipes.

“No—we’re all on
Cara Mia
, Tom Moody’s boat. Madame Rossi?”

I was up on deck, in the lamplit darkness, by the time he called me, but Stanley Hennessy, his back to me, did not give way. Instead he said drily, “I imagine your young beat friends would interest her even less. Mouth music! More likely readings of Genet and reefers.”

Rupert was angry too. “No doubt. Do come sir,” he said, “then if anyone falls in the oggin, you’ll know what to do.”

For a big man, Stanley Hennessy was very light on his feet. One brandy less, and he would have lifted Rupert clean over the side. As it was, he caught him a glancing blow on the jaw which Rupert, swaying, almost entirely deflected. For a moment, he looked like replying; then turning quickly, he stepped down to the quay, breathing hard. He had seen me.

“I’m sorry, Madame Rossi,” said Rupert. “Mr. Hennessy, I apologise. But you’ll admit you’re pretty damned ready to run down me and my friends. You can’t expect everyone to lie down and take it. Will you ask Madame Rossi if she wants to come?”

“Stanley.” I put my hand, with the diamond bracelet on it, on Hennessy’s arm. “We’re all tired, but I mustn’t offend Johnson: he
is
my host. Forgive the boy. To be young is to be silly, we know.”

“The boy can go to hell,” said Hennessy forcibly. “
After
I’ve seen the colour of his five thousand pounds.” And, white with temper, he led me on to the quay, whence, in silence, Rupert and I walked to Moody’s big motor yacht.

Really, men are impossible.

On
Cara Mia
, which was an expensive mess, there was everybody, except perhaps Cecil Ogden. The dotty subdebs had become, if possible, a little more undressed, and the resident males had become a little tight. But Johnson was there, his feet up, and there also were the Q.C. from
Blue Kitten
and
Mina
’s professor with guitar, and a C.A.’s family, and the two Buchanans from
Binkie
, in clean shirts, exchanging blood-curdling reminiscences of something named, impossibly, the Cooing Sound. I recalled one of Johnson’s remarks during dinner. “You haven’t lived,” he had said, “until you’ve had a ten-tonner read you his log book.”

The tape had changed to what Rupert, jeering, referred to as quiet, showbiz pop. And indeed, it was not overloud, except when the pipes and the guitar were playing together.

That was the party I sang at. I remember in the middle saying impatiently to Johnson, “Shall I sing?”

He didn’t even lift his damned glasses from the duet of
Westering Home
, but merely remarked, “Depends what you charge.”

So, of course, I sang. There is a rather good ballad, which takes a lot of experience and breath control, but has an impact quite its own, particularly at drunken parties. I launched into it in the first perceptible pause in the riot, and you could have heard a mouse sneeze by the second bar.

Whatever Michael may say, absolute rest does my voice nothing but good. It came, high and pure and child-like, and I can tell you, sustained head notes are hell. Victoria was crying.

“
Perhaps the moon is shining for you in the far country…

But the skies there are not island skies…

Do… you not remember the salt smell of the sea
?

And the little rain
?”

I gripped the last note in my diaphragm like a nut in a nutcracker and diminished it, and it was magnificent. I can usually tell to a second how long a silence will hold before the applause breaks out, but that was a record. Then I sang the Waltz Song from
Romeo and Juliet
. It couldn’t miss. And it didn’t. Who needs Michael Twiss?

When we finally went home to
Dolly
the sky was pale in the east and Rupert’s arms were tightening round the matelassé as he lifted me on board in a way that made Johnson’s bifocals twinkle like butter dishes. I said, “What a silly encounter that was, Rupert, between you and Hennessy. What on earth did it mean?”

Rupert put me down in the cockpit. Johnson, following, said with interest, “Yes. Tell her. Me too, Rupert. What did it mean?”

In the flood of light from my cabin, Rupert visibly blushed. “It was my fault. I took a swipe at him. But he has bloody bad manners at the best of times. And to imply that everyone under twenty is a layabout or a junkie or a ponce just because his Frederick got hooked on Amphetamine and jumped into the sea is a bit this side of too much.”

“His son?”

Johnson had switched on the saloon lights, and forward I saw Lenny busy with cocoa in big jugs. “Yes. His wife died of cancer some years ago, while Hennessy was playing about with some starlet. Then the son drowned himself off
Symphonetta
, and Hennessy wasn’t a good enough seaman to save him. Hence the killing drive for perfection ever since. He’ll blame anyone except the boy. Rupert went to school with him, you see. Hennessy can never forgive him for knowing the story.”

I took my cocoa from Lenny. It was steaming hot. And in my bed, I knew, would be an electric blanket, with my nightdress on it, folded and warm. Already, the dawn air was stirring my hair. On my arm, Hennessy’s diamonds sparkled and danced. I said, “All the same, Rupert, it was unfair, surely, to throw the thing in his teeth.”

“All right, I apologised,” said Rupert, eyeing Johnson as if he and not I had made the remark. “But don’t run away with the idea that Mr. Stanley Hennessy is a figure of tragedy. It’s a safe bet that a few hundred daddies lose their Fredericks for every cargo the Latin Shipping Line carries.”

There was a little silence. Then, “That’s only a rather uninformed guess, Rupert,” said Johnson gently. “Let Tina make up her own mind.”

I said nothing, but I was not very surprised. I had heard of gun-running, of course. And at least some of Mr. Stanley Hennessy’s superb equipment for
Symphonetta
, I had already noticed, was made in regions of Europe and Asia where British yacht-owners rarely drop in.

I thanked Johnson, then, for this pleasant evening, and I closed the door of my cabin, warned of our early start tomorrow, when of course the race proper would begin. As I brushed my hair, relaxed in my lovely swansdown, I saw the pale sea in the distance rising from the night’s gloom, stained opal and pink in the dawning. It was beautiful.

It was coming to me that it was not impossible to survive without Michael. Now he had moulded me, the mould could not be broken. I knew I could not sing, without him, the great rôles which would keep me among the first names of music. I have the voice and the application, but not the instinct or the heart.

With a great many aunts, it is safest not to develop a heart.

But I could enjoy, as I had done tonight, the applause of the herd. It would give me my living, and all I wanted in moral support. My film work would go on. And I need not, at last, work so endlessly hard.

Michael did not mean, I knew, what he said about leaving me. He would be on board still tomorrow. He had made a fortune out of me, after all. But I— I owed nothing to Michael. Not now.

I went to sleep thinking, Thursday morning. In three days I should be in Portree, and the
Willa Mavis
would give me news of Kenneth. Would he come? Would he come as I asked, to Portree? And if he were stuck, if he couldn’t freely sail from South Rona, who then whispered to me in Lochgair, the night I was struck by the boom? Or did I imagine it all?

I fell asleep, and dreamed all night of Wagner.

It was a short night. At six, a cock crew, it seemed under my elbow, and I heard beyond my door and the cockpit the saloon door slide open as both Johnson and Rupert emerged to pad about on the deek. A smell of coffee seeped through, indistinctly, from the galley. From the fo’c’sle, there was no sound. Michael, I took it, was sulking. Who cared?

By six thirty we were in the sea lock with
Binkie
, and Rupert was rolling about on deck roaring with laughter to such an extent that I dressed and emerged. I wore ski trousers, a man’s printed lawn shirt and suede boots. Everyone else wore large dirty woollens with yellow oilskins. Bob and Nancy Buchanan wore their small woollen caps and sat on
Binkie
’s coachroof, subsiding with
Dolly
in unison as the lock water ebbed, and relating, it seemed, the stop-press or aftermath of the Club’s night out at Crinan. There was no sign of life on
Cara Mia
, but the basin was full of exhaust fumes, as the competitors moved about, ready to emerge.

The puffer
Willia Mavis
had gone out long ago, on the same course as our own, bound for the south end of Mull, but not before losing a coil of old rope and a loo lid to Ogden. Victoria, with the seat round her neck, strolled along the lock gate high above us just before we sailed through, and confirmed this, grinning. Her feet were still bare, and she looked as if she could do with a long sleep and a bath.

“Cecil Ogden should be in a bat-house,” said Rupert irritably after she had gone; but Johnson, perched up at the tiller with his bifocals repeating the first sun said, “For God’s sake don’t go all Bunny Mother now over Victoria. She collects bums. If you want her, you’ll have to go round the twist first.”

We were jilling about in a brisk wind, manoeuvering for the starting line, and Lenny, Johnson and Rupert appeared and disappeared among ropes and sails and tackle while they talked. “She’ll get no thanks for it,” I said. I know the Victorias. It begins with their ponies, at seven years old; and then they look for a man pony, because a grown-up man they could not manage or match.

The sail to Iona at least was fast: this much nearer to Kenneth, although Johnson and Lenny and Rupert were too occupied to be entertaining, and Michael was sulking still, with occasional bursts of chat directed at Johnson, usually about some fat cow of a soprano he once knew in Florence who ended up doing budgie-seed jingles. No one could be more childish than Michael when he didn’t get his own way. I hoped he was going to be sick.

On either side, the sunlit islands slipped past, wooded, pink with heather or rusty with bracken; some with small white houses, some with sheep. Soon we turned our backs on the mainland on our right and flew west, our main and mizzen sail full, for the south end of the island of Mull. Somewhere ahead of us, over the blue glittering water, was Hennessy’s
Symphonetta
who must not be allowed, Lenny said, to obtain too much of a lead in case the weather changed and we had a bad beat to Barra. Rupert said nothing.

Around us were the other boats of our class— sixteen now, Lenny said. Two had dropped out at Ardrishaig and two more at Crinan, due to affairs of business, family, and poor winter upkeep. Now we were widely separated.

“Funny thing,” said Lenny to nobody in particular as we went spinning past
Binkie
, “their Sniffa went off at Crinan, and they slammed the saloon door in me face.”

“Who did? Bob and Nancy Buchanan?” said Rupert. “You were sloshed, Lenny. They entertain every layabout that has been in port.”

“Not this time,” said Johnson amiably. “They had the cabin door locked all through the canal. Was it a gas leak?”

“Naw,” said Lenny. “Drip from the waterpump into the engine compartment. Fancy that, now. Getting nearly as particular as
Seawolf
, aren’t they, as to their company?”

Why waste time talking about workmen? Johnson’s hand over mine adjusted the tiller, while I saw Lenny below spilling cream and whisky into the coffee. The sky was a pale, shining blue, laddered with shimmering floss where the high cloud was streamed by the wind. On the horizon, as we opened the Sound of Iona, the mid-blue of the sea met the sky in a filming of mist. If only the damned tub were a helicopter.

At teatime, we anchored off Iona island itself, with its cathedral, foursquare as a fishing boat, perched above a thumbnail of sacred white sand in a blue and purple and emerald sea. Rupert fled ashore to check in, and even Michael strolled on deck to study the form. Hennessy and his
Symphonetta
lay there already. But our other rivals were behind us, with one rare exception. Ogden’s
Seawolf
, sailed, Johnson said, like a one-legged tricycle, had somehow got into the anchorage first.

Victoria herself, whom Rupert brought back from the checkpoint to celebrate, was filled alternately with jubilation and with gloom. By flogging both themselves and
Seawolf
to death, Cecil had got to Iona in excellent time but a state of disrepair so extreme that their departure this side of Christmas seemed (said Victoria) highly unlikely. Even now Cecil was on board
Seawolf
(said Rupert) mending the rudder with string. And since
Seawolf
was temporarily out of commission, Ogden had sent Victoria (said Rupert) to go to Staffa in
Dolly
for her share of the champers.
Seawolf
, when mended, would follow. It looked to me, just then, as if Victoria had had just about all she could take of
Seawolf
and Ogden.

I had heard—who hadn’t?—about Duke Buzzy’s champers. The Duke, who sailed Buckingham Palace with stabilisers, was in the habit of awarding an annual prize to any Club yachts venturing to make the extra short passage to Staffa. The prize took the forms of two crates of champagne left, as a rule, in the recesses of Staffa’s large cave.

Two years out of three, had said Rupert, nobody got the champagne, either because Duke Buzzy wasn’t sailing that way that year; or he was sailing but couldn’t put a launch in to deposit it; or because the Duke got the champagne in, but none of the Club yachts managed to get it out. Outside the island of Staffa, said Rupert, there was virtually no anchorage. If you were agile and lucky, you could drop a hook there for a short time in calm weather. If not, not. And absolutely bloody not.

Today was calm. And Duke Buzzy’s
Vallida
, said the checkpoint, had not only sent the crates into the cave, but Hennessy had already been there for his pick. The remainder, Johnson with
Dolly
was now going to lift. “What about the race?” I demanded of Rupert.

He looked surprised. “This isn’t part of the race. We’ve checked in,” he said.

I said, with what patience I could manage, “I know. But shouldn’t we give the champagne a miss, and take advantage of the whole thing to check out? We’d have a head start over everyone but Hennessy, and we’d soon catch him up.”

“It isn’t done,” said Rupert. And added, “Don’t you want to see Fingal’s cave?”

O heresy! The quick answer was no. I stood as we chugged over to Staffa, and Johnson pointed out the low green hills of Mull on our right, and the long mouse-like ridge of Coll to our left. Ahead, dimly indigo on a mist-bed, floated still others: a flat cockscomb of rock called, it could not be, Eigg; a stub to the left of it named, they said, Muck; and beyond, a toothy fragment of the Red Cuilins of Skye.

To the left of these, wild and high and quite prodigally hilly, like a sketch by a child, was the island of Rum where Kenneth’s laboratory was, and where Kenneth himself ought to be. I stood staring by the bare pole of the mainmast while Johnson dropped anchor beside a whorl of stacked peats made of pumice-stone, and I plodded down the companionway as soon as the dinghy was lowered. I wasn’t going to be left alone on board
Dolly
with Michael.

Then I saw Michael was in the dinghy already. Pride would not allow me to return. I got in, Lenny started the outboard, and we went snarling off.

I recalled that Michael had already played the Mendelssohn overture five times on Johnson’s tape since we came alongside Mull. I was going to Staffa because I couldn’t avoid it. Michael was going to see if Felix had flunked on his homework.

Also we were both going because we noticed suddenly that we had an audience after all. The steamer
King George V
with, Rupert said, six hundred concert-going tourists had heaved into sight and dropped anchor, prior to disgorging all six hundred into Fingal’s cave. We should, said Rupert, manage to reach the cave and come back before the first boats arrived. The path used by the tourists, he also kindly made plain, ceased before penetrating the inmost bay of the cave. They wouldn’t even see Duke Buzzy’s champers.

We landed, and Johnson, declaiming (“…The pillared vestibule, Expanding yet precise, the roof embowed…”), helped ashore first me, then the barefoot Victoria. Lenny, prompted by Johnson, got back into the dinghy and departed to lend first aid to the unfortunate Cecil, drifting behind us on
Seawolf
. The rest of us set off, all five, along the volcanic footpath which leads from the minuscule harbour, past the PRIVATE PROPERTY notice, and into the mouth of the phenomenon known as Fingal’s cave.

I forgot, as fast as I heard it, all that Johnson then told us of Staffa. What is columnar basalt? I didn’t know, nor did Michael. I knew that the cliff surrounding the jetty was made of thick charcoal columns, some half fallen, some upright, some faggoted sideways to show their neatly packed ends, like a stack of shorn logs. Bleached to honey, they sank below the green water, and from the boat I had seen them continue, a cropped host of columns below the green sea; a razed forest, a broken city of temples, the upraised sliced face of each stalk glimmering jade and veridian and turquoise like a handful of coins.

Here, our path was a honeycomb of truncated columns, sealed together here and there, by courtesy of Messrs. MacBrayne. Above to our right the dark ribbing towered, creased as elephant hide, up to stony tissues and the green sward on the top; while the sea swirled and lapped below on our left, and ran in and out of the petrified stack behind which
Dolly
lay.

Behind me, Michael walked carefully with Rupert, saying nothing. Ahead, Johnson was talking gently to Victoria about Cecil Ogden. It was possible, I supposed, that Victoria was sustaining her friend in his weaknesses purely for his own good and not her own. Possible, but extraordinary. What good would Cecil Ogden ever do anyone, after all?

The causeway ran like a ledge round the southeast cliff face of Staffa, and then turned sharp right. I cannoned into Johnson, who caught me, black eyebrows lifted. I turned, and there was the cavern.

If anyone cares, Fingal, I am told, is a mythical Celtic giant. His cave is nearly seventy feet high and forty feet wide at the entrance, with the sea running inland to its full length of over two hundred feet. If anyone cares.

To me, it was a black booming vault lined with columns, grey, rose, lilac and charcoal, of natural basalt. Uneven, crowded columns hung from the roof and stuck up through the opaque peacock water, thinning here to bright green, which lay surging and lapping below us, darkening as it moved away from the sunlight and into the depths of the cave.

On our right, the causeway we were following turned along the right wall of the cave and continued, guarded from the water by iron stanchions and wire roping, almost to the far end, where a barrier had been erected. Johnson leading, we started along it.

It was dark. We walked on the honeycomb, which fell away on our left, stalk upon broken stalk, into the deep sea-floor of the cave. To my hand, on the right, were the massive ribs of the fall, its surface pitted with loving inscriptions. Behind us, in the bright blue day at the cave mouth, the next wave had entered—a swell that darkened the vent and ran, silent and spume-spotted, into the unquiet sea of the cave, easing like oil over the drying stalks of its margin.

It rolled below us, thick, thundery green, and on to where the cave narrowed and ended. There was a growling, rising fast to a roar. A storm of glimmering foam flashed at the cave end, rearing high in the blackness, then retreated. And as it declined the cave gave forth a new sound: a great, tinny clatter of laughter, a pouring of primaeval scorn, a vast, roaring, continuing rattle of inhuman amusement.

My skin rose in goose pimples and Johnson turned back, still talking about Ogden, and stood with me at the wire fence which guarded the drop. “Queer, isn’t it,” he added. “It’s the stone beach at the end, getting sucked back by the tide. What d’you think, Mr. Twiss? Too many minims?”

Michael’s face was silkily white. Some things frightened Michael very easily. But I knew he would not give in. He was hypnotized by the sound.

Johnson glanced at him, and at Victoria, and at Rupert who, having gone ahead to the end of the path, had vaulted the barrier and was hunting, whistling, for the champagne. Johnson said, “I have had an idea. Ringside seats, with refreshments, before the masses arrive. No, not the champagne. Duck under there and sit down, and we’ll see what
Dolly
can do.”

What
Dolly
could do was to produce five polythene sachets from Johnson’s hip pocket, with a dry Martini with olive in each. Trying to drink a dry Martini from the snipped end of a sachet is a task calculated to preserve anyone from mysterious terrors. There was a good deal of giggling, and Victoria dropped her olive. Michael jumped down after it.

It was to annoy me, no doubt, but it was a sad mistake, for athletic Michael was not. There was a clatter, a cry, and as Johnson vaulted down after him, Michael disappeared into the water.

Only for a moment. The swell lifted him again as Johnson’s arm reached him, and single-handed Johnson slid him on to the rocks, where he lay, cocked at various levels, seawater running out of his mouth. Johnson gave him a few experimental press-downs, evacuated the rest of the water, and turning Michael over said briskly, “It’ll sell for tinning. Has he fainted, do you think?”

We were all standing above him by then, cautiously, with our Martinis fizzing inside us. I said, “He always faints. Should we leave him, perhaps, for
King George V
to retrieve?” I was in no mood for meeting six hundred people in this bloody cave. Waving from yacht or dinghy, yes. Within touching distance, emphatically no.