Free Dolly and the Bird of Paradise - Dorothy Dunnett - Johnson Johnson 01 by Unknown Page B

tapes.
    On a chest of drawers, in the middle, was the yellow cat I’d sent him. I came out smiling.
    His workroom was next to Natalie’s dressing-room, and there again, the arrangements were efficient and American and streamlined.
    The cupboards which lined the walls were full of packets and tubes and bottles arranged in date order and separated into their various uses: for cinema and T.V. work; for Mrs Sheridan and her friends. The make-up mirror was huge, with a special chair with a foot-rest in front of it.
    There was a sink with a mixer-tap and another fitted for shampooing, and a standard hair-dryer and an infra-red stand for fuzzed hair. There was an incinerator chute. There was everything.
    I had seen something like it once or twice before in a private house, but I’d never before been in charge of one. I understood, a bit, how he’d come to leave the struggle outside to serve Mrs Sheridan.
    I left the room, and went downstairs to the other room, the morning-room and study where he sat, and where he did his secretarial bit.
    Unlike the rest of the house, the study was not pink and grey but done up in pine panelling, with rows of books and a couple of filing cabinets. One of the two desks, heavy on onyx and leather, looked like Mrs Sheridan’s.
    The other stood to one side and had a tape-recorder on it, as well as a couple of telephones. Kim-Jim’s desk. And now mine.
    But this was also a sitting-room. In front of a real fireplace were two nice leather chairs and a good rug. And a T.V. with a video machine under it. And a cabinet full of cassettes.
    Here Natalie Sheridan would sit with Kim-Jim sometimes, I guessed, if they were alone. Or here Kim-Jim would relax, watching films while Natalie entertained her private business friends, or her boyfriends.
    Kim-Jim loved telly films. It was one of the things we had in common. I had brought a lot of tapes with me, most of them pirated or got for me on the side by my Byres Road pals.
    Dodo hadn’t found them, although she might have noticed that my pack of Modesse was a bit weighty. Dodo, whom I’d seen already when I carried the tea tray into the kitchen, was stony-faced according to custom, eyeing my drawstring pants of Old English Patchwork with the same look that she cast on my New Madeira black eye.
    Dolores and Aurelio, bustling, were friendly. Aurelio would be glad, he said, to take me into town. What Mrs Sheridan’s plans were they didn’t exactly know, except that two men and an Honourable were coming to dinner.
    After a bit they remembered the Honourable’s name, which was Margaret Oliver.
    A female Honourable. A female Honourable I had reason to know, because she was one of Ferdy’s real bits of crumpet. A bitch called Maggie.
    I was cross. I thought he was here to write a book on Sexual Strategy in Flowers, goddammit. What he’d already told me about pansies ought to have been enough to keep him going till Christmas.
    After that, I came out of the service door and fell over him.
    I fell across him because he was lying immediately outside the door on the furry wall-to-wall rug of Mrs Sheridan’s sitting-room, requesting me to be his Sexy Flower Assistant and load his camera for him.
    He had also freed Mrs Sheridan’s parrot, or perhaps it was Kim-Jim’s parrot, who was sitting on one of his shoulders, brooding over half a pound of unravelled cashmere and a bagel of bird-shit.
    ‘She doesn’t need you till later,’ Ferdy said.
    ‘
Screw the bitch
,’ said the parrot.
    I stepped over Ferdy’s beautiful flannels.
    ‘I’ll pay you,’ Ferdy said. ‘Twenty a flower.’
    ‘
Bugger the bastard
,’ the parrot said.
    I walked to the door. ‘Not me,’ I said.
    ‘Who else is there?’ bawled Ferdy. He got up on one elbow, and the parrot fell off.
    ‘
Bugger the bitch
,’ roared the parrot, fluttering off him.
    ‘The Honourable Maggie. Your parrot knows her,’ I said; and walked out.
    The Bird of Paradise, I had noticed, still stuck out of his