Read Online Dolly And The Cookie Bird - Dorothy Dunnett - Johnson Johnson 03 by Unknown - Free Book Online

Janey hadn’t seen it yet, anyway.
    By the time I got back, Austin and Janey were drinking big sherries, and I made out I’d been to the loo. I had a big sherry as well and asked craftily if Austin lived in the basement, but he said, “No, only Gregorio,” but if I liked to go down I should meet the company craftsman, Jorge. Dead loss. Then Janey said, “Christ, look at the time. Austin darling, if you’re going to show us your balloons, you’ll have to do it on wheels.” And we got back into the hall and climbed the white marble stairs to the gallery.
    The shop on the ground floor had been dark. The shiny landing at the top of the stairs had a door on each side, and when Austin flung open the one on the right, the flood of ripe yellow light was quite blinding. In the first place the room was big, with long windows looking onto the street. And at the far end, standing open, were shuttered doors leading out to the garden: the gorgeous garden we’d spotted below, full of little pineapple-shaped palms, and pink and white roses, and a magnolia tree. And, oh Maurice Woodruff: arum lilies.
    This time we got in a rut, Janey and I. We both rushed toward the French windows, emitting girlish expressions of joy, and this damned thing first whacked me hard on the head, and then bounced back to do the same thing for Janey. Janey sat down, and I ducked, and we both glared at Austin, who swooped on us, cawing. I thought he was going to cry. The thing that hit us was still swinging. I got to my feet and examined it.
    The label said, “Cumulus Cloud with Tartan Carrying Case,” and the label was a hundred percent on the ball. It hung from a string on the ceiling, an irregular, inflated pillow of tartan with handles, maybe eight feet, in all, round its zip. At a distance, I suppose its outline could be regarded as cloudlike, but the tartan was a definite caprice. It stopped swinging, and Janey and I gazed at it without comment.
    “People,” said Austin, “say the artist today has no sense of humor. On the contrary, while most of his work is sober and sometimes even tragic, he has his moments of gaiety. One may smile, while enjoying the freshness and spontaneity of the idea. I do hope it didn’t give you a bruise?”
    “No,” I said. Janey was speechless. Austin looked at her compellingly. “There are more.”
    There were, hung along the whole gallery. They weren’t all clouds. One had cotton Easter chicks in all sizes inside it, and one a pailful of blue water and a lot of toy plastic ships. There was another thirty feet long. “I like them,” said Janey. Austin floated before us in a sort of high-voltage, intellectual euphoria. “I knew you would,” he said. “Aren’t they just darling? Now come and see these.”
    The fish for the Russians had to bake for thirty-five minutes. I’d rolled and stuffed it with shrimps, with just a flavor of onion and mushroom, and a little minced celery. There was an American salad to go with it, and a sort of orange cream with curaçao to follow. They were also getting stuffed artichokes and a croquemonsieur as starters. No one was going to go way from the Casa Veñets starving. It was the first meal I’d done for the Lloyds, and I wanted it to be just right. It had been after twelve when we got to the gallery. But in spite of that, I stared at Austin’s big, regular, well-shaven face, and his shirt with the button-down collar and a very faint shiny stripe, and the grey nugget cufflinks, and I got the link between Austin, the wolf in the Cadillac, and the traveling exhibition of Art in the Round.
    It wasn’t the tapestries of goats’ hair and feathers. It wasn’t the towering lanes of green plastic bosses, the labyrinths of quilted-cloth hangings based, said the card, on recurring genitalian contours, or the rows of nailed wooden disks on which lines of verse, or at any rate original expressions, sober, tragic, or gay, had been stenciled. I walked between “Masculine Presence,”