Free Rum Affair by Dorothy Dunnett Page B

excitedly; the man from Evergreen in immaculate uniform appeared in the cockpit and began testing the engine; Lenny, rather wet, vaulted into the cabin and announced Seawolf’s pram in good order and tied to its parent again; and last of all Rupert, a godly figure quite nude but for a pair of bathing trunks, appeared glistening negligently on the stairs and announced calmly that the rope was freed from the screw. As he said so, under the surgical fingertips of Evergreen’s skipper, the engine stirred, chattered and then boomed into life.
    There was a deafening cheer. The paid hand from Evergreen, his face severe, slowly entered the crowded saloon and confronted Cecil Ogden. “I think that’ll be all right now sir, although your clutch, if you’ll pardon my saying so, is in a verra poor kind of condition. Would there be somewhere I could wash my hands, sir?”
    Pressing back, we gave him passage through to the galley. There was no tap. He put an oily, efficient thumb over the open vent of the old trawler pump, and after a moment the water gushed into the sink, which he hadn’t yet plugged.
    Alas, he had not yet noticed – why should he? – that the sink and the waste pipe 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