Dolly And The Cookie Bird - Dorothy Dunnett - Johnson Johnson 03 by Unknown Page B

kissed Anne-Marie, and hitched himself onto the edge of the table. He had on a voile shirt and pale hipster pants, and he still looked like Gary Grant. “Your nose is red, She-she,” he said.
    I said, “I’ve been drinking.”
    He caught the balls and began to throw them up one-handed, his eyebrows lifted right up. His eyes were blue, not green like Janey’s. I wondered if he wore contact lenses too. He said, “I gather Janey has made a botch of her public relations. Has the worthy engineer gone back to his engines?”
    “I don’t know,” I said. I didn’t care, either. I’d given up thinking about Derek. And about Daddy, for that matter.
    “Um,” said Gilmore. He remained. “Well, now we know you drink. You also cook. You swim. What other talents can you produce?”
    I held my coffee cup with both hands and studied it. “I dance. I play tennis and cricket. I skate. I water-ski. I ride. I can type. I think I can wear clothes. And I know how to sew and to nurse and to look after babies.”
    “Come and look after me,” said Gilmore Lloyd, getting off the table. “I want to go riding.”
    “I have,” I said, “your lunch to get ready.”
    “Anne-Marie got the breakfast and she can perfectly well cook lunch for Janey and Father as well,” said Gilmore pleasantly. Anne-Marie, catching my eye, smiled and nodded. “We shan’t be in.”
     
    It was the kind of day Celeste sometimes hints at, but never for Capricorn. By the time I’d changed, Gil had brought round the Cooper S, dark green and we took off for the stables, where we switched to the horses. Gil had brought saddlebags with him. I knew there’d be cold chicken and a bottle of martinis in one, and a large towel in the other… and that they had all been packed long before I got back from Derek. Men like Gil Lloyd don’t take a girl out to watch rugby or to teach her to drive. That was all right. We spoke the same language.
    The morning was super: blue and clear with a gorgeous fresh heat. And we made our own breeze, cantering over the scrub and between the rows of little green trees, with the fig trees, like ghosts, staked out like maypoles all round their elbows. We passed a bent olive tree with a prop under its knuckle, like “The Thinker,” and I asked Gil if all this wasn’t someone’s land. He said it was. It was his father’s. The sun shone harder, and all the cicadas sang, and so did Gilmore and I.
    We stopped at a place called San José for a beer and a fizzy stone ginger, and then made our way across unwalled country down to a beach. It was a wild ride, up and down crumbly, overgrown gulches, with a motor road winding in and out in hairpin bends beside us, through a mass of little hot hills, dotted with conifers and bushes and flowers, and all scented by pine trees and thyme.
    A flock of little birds barred with bright lemon, like butterflies, got up and fluttered away. A goat, chained and muzzled, looked up as the horses moved past. We rustled at times hock deep in a thicket of flowers: tall, feathery, pink spikes even Gil didn’t know and miles of enormous white daisies, their centers all stained deep yellow. There were bushes and bushes of starry things like Christmas roses in lilac and white, and short purple flowers, some with spikes, some with trumpets, and things like vetches, and miniature iris, and oceans of bright yellow stuff that looked like charlock. There were patches of tall sisal cactus and thickets of prickly pear like a crowd of cheering green bats. Gil told me what everything was and the names went straight out of my head because he looked so super, with his French needle-cord jeans, his suntan, and the way he moved with his horse.
    We picked our way down to the beach, just about midday. It was simply out of this world: a cut of fine shelving sand underneath a towering cliff of stacked orange sandstone. The cliff had a fuzz of greeny-gray stuff here and there seeded into it and a litter of dead branches and trunks