Dolly And The Cookie Bird - Dorothy Dunnett - Johnson Johnson 03 by Unknown Read Free Book Online Page A

small barrels: crème de menthe, jerez. A red plastic pail was hung from each tap. The walls were shelved high with bottles: wine, gin, whiskey, martini, vodka. Beside the door, a jumble of cards were pinned to a notice board. Half of them were in English: a cinema club advertising a showing of
Gentleman Jim;
a list of desirable flatlets to let; someone with a Gerrard stereo record player for sale.
    It was then I noticed a half-open door at the back which seemed to lead to some kind of patio. I could see a vine trellis against the clear sky, the edge of a bright peacock table, and a number of feet. It appeared, from the voices, to be a popular spot to repair to when shopping was done. I said to Helmuth, “Come on. Let’s have a glass of something before we go back.”
    He’d been sweet, like a quiet old janitor we once had for a term. He hung back, but I took his arm and marched him up to the back of the shop. Through the door one could now see a white well, a fish tank, and lots of pots in yellow and blue, with cacti and flowers and creepers growing up the white walls out of them. There were more tables and chairs and benches, and more feet, two of which were wearing white canvas sneakers.
    Lots of people, of course, wear white canvas sneakers, although not perhaps such stained ones as these. I stopped dead, gripping Helmuth like a boa constrictor, and then started moving slowly again. It had been pitch dark under the cork trees. If it was the man I had spotted last night, he had probably seen as little of me as I had of him. And even if he had seen me, it wasn’t to say that he had been there with any evil designs against me personally. As Johnson said, it was possibly just an assignment. And finally, even if he was unfriendly, he couldn’t be unfriendly to any harmful degree in a wine shop in the open air at nine in the morning. I went on in.
    The man in the canvas shoes got up and said, “Strewth.”
    It was Flo’s cousin, Clem Sainsbury.
    I think I said the right things. I know I went scarlet, and then probably green. I forgot about the corkwood. After an absolute four-year famine of men, I now had four in a day. Even Janey couldn’t take all of them. Clem came over and kissed me, to the silent fascination of everyone hi the wine shop, and I introduced Helmuth, and we sat down.
    As I think I mentioned before, Clem is big and rugged and blonde, and instead of wearing a sheepskin, he had on stained cook’s trousers and a T-shirt and a tatty old pullover with mistakes in the cable stitch, which I bet was Flo’s knitting. He had a string bag of shopping beside him. We ordered: I had fizzy stone ginger. Then he said, “And how’s Flo and the cooking? Hard luck about the other thing, Cassells.” He always called me Cassells.
    “I know,” I said. He was just the same. Clean-cut, with a rather blunt knife.
    Clem said, “Were you coming to see us? We haven’t swabbed the decks yet.”
    I didn’t get it. Then, coupled with his excessive lack of surprise, I got it all right. “You’re with Johnson on
Dolly
?” I said.
    “He didn’t tell you,” said Clem, without resentment. “Bloody pirate. I’ve signed on for six months. It’s all right.”
    “Just you and Johnson?”
    “There’s a working skipper, called Spry. Two can sail her, but if the painter is painting, then time is holy. Not that he bugs himself working, so far as I’ve noticed.”
    “Do you like him?” I said.
    “Never met him,” said Clem. “We converse with the bifocals. If you like glass, it’s O.K.”
    “That’s what I thought,” I said. “Mr. Lloyd wants him to paint Janey.”
    “Wo-ow!” said Clem. When I was with Clem, I thought in four-letter words all right. You knew Clem was hog and you were sow, and even if you became chief engineer in the Russian merchant navy, you’d stay sow to him. With other boys I tried to be feminine, but Clem had the opposite effect.
    I sat there drinking stone ginger and laying off about my