Free Dolly and the Singing Bird by Dorothy Dunnett Page A

were not united. Water, falling straight through the hole, filled his immaculate shoes.
    There was a sorrowful silence. Then Johnson, his voice beautifully modulated, recalled that we were on our way to a cocktail party, and led the way out.

----
SIX
    « ^ »
    On
Evergreen
, the first person I saw was my manager, Michael Twiss. There he stood among the flood-lit geraniums with his blow-waved hair, doeskin jacket and Italian belt with the silver and ceramic clasp, looking blanched about his small, well-shaped mouth, which was smiling politely. He had been encountered ashore at the Lochgair Hotel by our host and hostess, May and Billy Bird, who had invited him aboard while he waited to join
Dolly
. Damn, damn,, and a triple-force damn.
    Why? Why join
Dolly
now, at the start of her voyage, instead of at the end, at Tobermory? To Johnson, who welcomed his change of plan, Michael said merely that he had decided to take up the original invitation. To me, as he uttered smiling politeness, his eyes were eloquent with
tepidita
. For the second time tonight, someone was in a passion of rage with me, poor Tina Rossi. And this time, again, I knew very well why.
    But of course Michael was at his most charming. Beside him, in any case, in open-necked shirts and clean trousers, were the Buchanans of
Binkie
. I was still wondering what they had managed to talk about when I found myself among the scatter cushions in the deck saloon, my feet in the bulwark-to-bulwark carpeting and my wrist bones creaking under a tumbler six inches thick, full of single malt Talisker.
    “Eee, lass,” May Bird, dispensing drinks from a commode like a Hammond organ, was screaming to me. “You’re a right dishy girl for a singer. And don’t tell me it don’t always ’elp. My ’Arold now ’ad a nice little tenor, but never the looks for it; and ’is Dad and me, we kept ’im off the stage. I won’t say the Navy pays well; but it’s safer.” She dimpled, like a very old window-pane. “Takes after me. The only way I could ever make the Winter Garden Torquay, legitimate, was to marry old Billy-boy here.”
    May Bird was small and fat, with bouffant hair, very yellow, and a short sleeveless dress in pink cloqué. The diamonds in her ears were real. Billy Bird, her husband, showed his age more: pink and round and white-haired, with stagey lines all around the mouth. They owned, Nancy whispered, a large public house and dance hall in Liverpool.
    I did not care, just at that moment, what they owned, apart from a radio telephone Johnson could use before I was pounced on by Michael. I sat drinking and smiling until I saw Johnson and Billy Bird get up together and disappear into the passage which led to the wheelhouse: a faint crackling ensued, and was cut off as a door shut.
    After an interval it opened again: there was more crackling, a faint burst of uproarious laughter, an unidentifiable booming, and then the voice of our host, embarking on something I could swear was a limerick. Johnson came back. “Mrs. Billy, you’ve been letting him get into bad company. That’s a new one since last year.”
    Pouring vodka as from a hot water bottle, Mrs. Billy laughed like a crow and said, without lowering her voice, “An’ what the ’eck was Cecil Ogden doing this night? And a good drop in ’im, an’ all.”
    She didn’t wait for an answer. “That Victoria wants her head seen to.”
    Victoria, in vivid discussion with Rupert over The Lovin’ Spoonful, which is an American disc group, put out her tongue and returned to her giggle. “All the dead-beats, that’s what she picks up. All the washed-up old trash. I tell ’er. They don’t appreciate it; and she’ll get a pay-off she doesn’t expect, one of these days.”
    “Where
is
Ogden?” asked Bob Buchanan. Without their woolly hats, he and his wife looked like brown pickled otters. They chose to drink gin.
    “Sulking,” said Lenny under his breath. He was right, too. With Victoria beguiled from his