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

career as God’s gift to catering, and he heard me out like a lamb.
    “You must get pretty sick of it,” said Clem. “Don’t you? It’s a hell of a life, holed up in other folks’ kitchens, thumbing anchovies onto Ritz biscuits. You lose weight, and you don’t want to eat, and in a year or two’s time you’ll have slipped disks and fallen arches and a cat and a real William and Mary card table with bun feet, and that’s your bloody lot. You want to marry some nice chap and cook for him and your kids.”
    “I know I do,” I said. Patiently. He just hadn’t been listening. I said, “Tell me any other job where I can take the waste caviar home and spoon it into the budgie. At sixteen guineas a whack?”
    “I didn’t know you had a budgie,” said Clem.
    “It jumped into the fish bowl and died.” I swallowed the last of the pop and got up. “Come on,” I said to Helmuth. His eyes were half shut.
    “Bye, Cassells,” said Clem. He heaved himself up and surveyed me, his face puckered in thought. “You’ve got guts, coming here after what happened. Can you really stick it? Do you like it? Are the Lloyd people decent?”
    “Oh, they’re all right,” I said. I swallowed. The great sentimental idiot. “I like it. They’re sweet, down in the town here.”
    “Um,” said Clem. He studied me a bit longer, then grinned, and stopped to fish in his net bag. Then he straightened and looped me a double cherry over each ear. “Olé,” he said. “O.K., Cassells. Be good.”
    “Look where it’s got you,” I said. All right, he was a bore. But a nice one. I left, trailing Helmuth. To work.
     
    Anne-Marie had got breakfast, but no one was down. I had mine and did my stint in the kitchen: by half-past eleven everything was laid out and covered with foil, and I went for a swim. Janey was in the pool, without anything on. I suppose Helmuth was used to it. Afterward we lay in the sun for a short fry before driving to Gallery 7. She has a beautiful body.
    We had a lot to catch up on. Janey had had a mink coat at fourteen and a Daimler sports car for her seventeenth birthday: name-dropping and place-dropping didn’t occur to her. But she knew all the jet-set gossip all right. We had just got through her love life, which was like the haberdashery at Harrod’s and of about the same lasting significance, when Janey said out of the blue, “Will you mind going to
Dolly
? To the yacht marina, I mean? That bloody boat-winch is there.”
    “I don’t mind all that much,” I said. “I mean. If you knew Daddy.”
    “You’re a born prig, She-she,” said Janey. “That’s your whole trouble. He knew how to live. Daddy never had a decent party in his life till old Forsey swarmed in and the whole of Cine Citta and the Almanachs de Gotha poured in after.”
    “You got value for money,” I agreed. I added quickly, “It was sporting of your father to ask me. I can imagine what a shake-up it must have been, without taking me on as well.”
    “Well, don’t start groveling,” said Janey. “He was probably just afraid of the talk. It was a rather wild party.”
    “Derek didn’t tell me how it happened,” I said. It was one way to make her talk.
    “God knows how it happened,” said Janey. She turned over, her red hair bouncing over her face. “Daddy had to go to the mainland, and Gil and I threw this party. Lobby was there, and Coco Fairley, and Guppy—I told you. They’d come round from St. Tropez, and the Hadleys had flown over from Formentor, and a whole bunch who were sharing a villa at that place in Minorca. You know how it happens. Parlor games in the house and more parlor games in the pool. You couldn’t see the water for Ping-Pong balls and bottles next day. So they tell me. Then Coco started handing out sugar.”
    1 am a prig, I suppose, since Janey says so. Certainly, LSD on sugar was one of the trips I hadn’t yet tried. “Did Daddy take it?” I said.
    “In general? I shouldn’t think so,” said