Free Ibiza Surprise by Dorothy Dunnett

of course, but on every return home she seems to have taken control. She has a good brain. And of course she’s had Anne-Marie and Helmuth, and any other help that she wanted.
     
    After lunch I served coffee and cognac, and Mr Lloyd asked me to stay and have it with Janey. He and the six visitors left almost immediately to talk in his smoking room.
    Gilmore hadn’t come in.
    ‘He’s at Coco’s,’ said Janey. She had had two cognacs and hadn’t even turned pink. ‘They’ve got a living-in tennis professional, and Giller is either going to make Wimbledon or spring a coil in his chesterfield.’
    ‘Isn’t he keen on the business?’ I said. A playboy-sportsman is all right. A middle-aged playboy-sportsman is slightly pathetic, especially to a middle-aged, playboy-sportsman’s wife.
    ‘You’re joking,’ said Janey dispassionately. ‘He took a law degree because Daddy wouldn’t give him an allowance without it, and he went to Harvard because he was dead keen on baseball and rich American girls’ legs. He’s got the allowance and had the American girls, so why work?’
    I cleared up, and lifted an English newspaper three days old off the hall table on my way up to the siesta. It promised Scorpio a good day and Virgo a slight disappointment. Clem Sainsbury was the same as me, Capricorn. Capricorn, said the paper, should treat foreign interests and matters of law with extreme caution, for they are not in control, and there may be conflict, perhaps disaster.
    And, I thought, you can say that again.
     
    I don’t think Janey actually wanted to be painted. I mean, she’d cheerfully spend days being photographed, but sitting still being turned inside out by another person was something different again. Janey liked to be in charge, on her own terms.
    Anyway, after the siesta when it came time to leave for Johnson’s boat Dolly, I found that Janey had got herself completely tied up in showing the three red squares round the island, and I had to set off alone. I didn’t mind. Maybe Johnson would paint me instead. And Janey had lent me the Maserati.
    The road from Santa Eulalia to Ibiza is a good one, as I’ve said, seldom built up for long and mostly running in long, level stretches, above or below the farm country. At places the speed is controlled, but a good, easy sixty to seventy is generally all right. On empty roads, you could pick your own speed. Between six and seven in the evening, as now, it’s fairly constantly busy. Workmen in Spain stop at seven.
    I set off then, taking it easy, and finding a path among the old battered Seats, the Peugeots, the daisy-painted Renaults and Simcas, and the bashed Ebro lorries with two sides gone from their steamy old bonnets.
    I enjoyed it. I took time to look for the orange and lemon trees and the house that was building, with the old woman hobbling in and out with her wicker dish of wood shavings. A man was ploughing, his feet on the share, his fists gripping the big horse’s tail. The fig trees were budding at last pale grey with their branches outspread like the skirts of an Infanta, a green candle-leaf at each tip. The low sun hit fields edged by warped, whitened branches and turned the soil broken orange and the dry stone walls orange too. As the road rose a little, the hills and foothills showed, patched and streaked with green, tan, and pale sandy colour, spotted with dark scrub and patched with low trees. Small white houses with tiled roofs faced the sun, shining, and the white cylinder of a well, or the tall pylons with their spidery windmills. Olives, with their brown twisted barks, and orange trees on their thin, spindly sticks. Poppies. Fir trees like thick furzy cushions of dense yellow-green, and yellow haystacks like mushrooms. A flower like a telegraph pole, with yellow blossoms on each short, outflung arm caught the sun, over and over, at the side of the road. I was happy.
     
    I don’t know when I first noticed the white Alfa Romeo Giolia Spider behind