Dolly and the Bird of Paradise - Dorothy Dunnett - Johnson Johnson 01 by Unknown Read Free Book Online

he’d been bleak with her on the phone, now he was freezing.
    There were three phone calls. Two were from friends of the Owner. One was for me. Mrs Sheridan required the services of Miss Rita Geddes, that afternoon at her hotel.
    Miss Rita Geddes said she’d be there, thank you.
    The Emerson woman stayed for ten minutes, and then came into the hall to ask if she could make coffee for Mr Johnson. Her expression, before she changed it, could be called grim.
    I had switched a pot on for myself, and found some jazz on a portable radio, which I hoped no one wanted back in the sitting-room. While I got cups, she went to fetch milk from the cupboard.
    She said, ‘He gets a lot of letters, doesn’t he? Are they still coming?’ She had to shout a bit, so I turned the jazz down.
    The second post had just come. I went out and scooped the mail up and showed it her. She put down the milk, and sorting through it, took out all the stuff that was handwritten.
    ‘Do you suppose,’ she said, ‘that all the private ones, the ones like that, could get themselves lost for a day or two?’
    ‘He’d notice,’ I said.
    ‘Give him a few at a time, then,’ she said. ‘But not all of them. In a week or two, it’ll be different.’
    I said, ‘It’s up to Mrs Margate, not me. I’ll give him his lunch, though.’
    The devoted correspondence took on a new meaning. I was safe as houses if the Owner was the bedridden organiser of a Gay Club.
    The coffee was perking, and I poured it. She said, ‘You’ve been very good. You work for Mr Braithwaite, don’t you?’
    ‘I’m a freelance,’ I said. ‘I’m with Natalie Sheridan this afternoon. So Mr Johnson will have to manage, I’m afraid, if his housekeeper doesn’t come back before evening.’
    ‘Of course, I understand that,’ said Lady Emerson. ‘I phoned the agency this morning to get a capable woman along. Someone with nursing training, who could take telephone messages and exercise Bessie.’
    She hesitated, and then went to her handbag and lifted it. ‘It occurs to me that, cut off from his bank, Mr Johnson maybe hasn’t been able to thank you properly?’
    She opened her bag.
    ‘Oh, not at all,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t dream of it. He can always write me a cheque anyhow, can’t he? The coffee’s getting stone cold.’
    I put the two cups on the tray with the spoons and sugar and milk, and she picked it up and went off to the sitting-room. I switched to the news and enjoyed a cup on my own, with some biscuits I’d discovered. I’d already found a place for the unwanted letters.
    There didn’t seem much sense to me in answering letters and not answering phone calls. But you never know what the boss class is playing at. Anyway, it wasn’t my funeral.
    The Emerson woman left fairly soon, and then someone called Ballantyne phoned, and I remembered just in time to tell him so that he could take the call himself, after I had plugged in the phone under his bed.
    When I heard him ring off, I went in to unplug it, carrying the Oscar Peterson programme I was listening to while I was cooking. I didn’t realise he was speaking until he asked me the same thing twice over.
    It was something about the other calls. When I told him my pencil had broken he was distinctly not amused. He seemed, however, too fed up to go on about it. Or thought it wiser not to.
    I hoped the capable woman didn’t mind queer invalids who fussed about telephone calls.
    The doctor came just as the steamed fish was ready.
    Like all the Owner’s well-brought-up friends, he greeted me as if he’d known me for ever, and asked after the housekeeper and Bessie, who came out and drooled over his trousers.
    He seemed surprised to find Mr Johnson not in his bedroom, but opened the sitting-room door and went in with a broad doctor’s smile. I heard the Owner calling him Henry. You couldn’t tell, of course, whether anyone was on first-name terms with Johnson or not.
    He was in a long time, and I ate the fish,