Ibiza Surprise by Dorothy Dunnett

had a string bag of shopping beside him. We ordered: I had fizzy stone ginger.
    Then he said: ‘And how’s Flo and the cooking? Hard luck about the other thing, Cassells.’ He always called me Cassells.
    ‘I know,’ I said. He was just the same. Clean-cut, with a rather blunt knife.
    Clem said: ‘Were you coming to see us? We haven’t swabbed the decks yet.’
    I didn’t get it. Then, coupled with his excessive lack of surprise, I got it all right.
    ‘You’re with Johnson on Dolly?’ I said.
    ‘He didn’t tell you,’ said Clem, without resentment. ‘Bloody pirate. I’ve signed on for six months. It’s all right.’
    ‘Just you and Johnson?’
    ‘There’s a working skipper, called Spry. Two can sail her, but if the painter is painting, then time is holy. Not that he bugs himself working, so far as I’ve noticed.’
    ‘Do you like him?’ I said.
    ‘Never met him,’ said Clem. ‘We converse with the bifocals. If you like glass, it’s OK.’
    ‘That’s what I thought,’ I said. ‘Mr Lloyd wants him to paint Janey.’
    ‘Wo-owl,’ said Clem. When I was with Clem, I thought in four-letter words all right. You knew Clem was hog and you were sow, and even if you became chief engineer in the Russian merchant navy, you’d stay sow to him. With other boys I tried to be feminine, but Clem had the opposite effect.
    I sat there drinking stone ginger and laying off about my 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 on to 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. ‘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. ‘Ole.’ he said. ‘OK, 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. Afterwards 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,