Ibiza Surprise Read Free Page B

and an office in Gib and in Malaga. They have acres of vineyards and a bullfarm and an interest in a shipping line and three olive oil factories and some business in Spanish Morocco. Janey was finished in Florence and has been round the world twice and has just spent Christmas in Nassau and came back for the skiing. They want me to stay with them.’
    ‘That’s OK,’ said Flo soothingly. ‘Business will stand it.’
    It was after the funeral, and the rush for our services had cooled off at the same time as George, so Flo and I were staying at her mother’s nice house in Hampshire. Flo’s Mama is a brick, which compels me to weed the garden and paper the maid’s room when I stay with her, so I don’t go there too often.
    ‘She’s got a brother called Gilmore,’ Flo added. ‘Clem knows him.’
    I looked, but she wasn’t hiding a smile. I had a crush on Gilmore Lloyd when we were at school. I only saw him once, but that was enough. He was head boy at Harrow.
    I said: ‘How on earth does Clem know him?’ Clem Sainsbury is Flo’s favourite cousin.
    Flo said: ‘Are you implying that my cousin doesn’t move in the right circles to know Giller Lloyd?’ and went off into gales of unladylike laughter.
    I said: ‘Flo, you’re awful,’ without really thinking. Clem was an absolute pet: on that the whole of St Tizzy’s agreed, but so Duke of Edinburgh it just wasn’t true. I never met anyone in my life who used up so much energy on totally useless pursuits. By nineteen, I should think he had climbed everything and swum everything and played everything there was in the book, and had never done more with a girl than drag her off to a rugby match and then give her a beer in a pub. We’d all had a try at Clem and got no further than a warm-up inside his sheepskin.
    Flo said: ‘You know he’s nutty on sailing? He spent his hols last year hanging about crewing at Gib, and he’s taken six months off this year to do the same thing.’ Clem had a modest degree in social anthropology and a lot of big silver cups.
    ‘What does he know about Gilmore Lloyd?’ I inquired.
    ‘Spoiled, rich and beautiful. What we all know already. Now. Sarah . . .’ said Flo.
    ‘Oh, I know,’ I said. Flo will make out that I’m overeager. But if you don’t put yourself across, who’ll do it for you? And you might not get a second chance.
     
    At the beginning of Easter week, I flew to Ibiza alone.
    I don’t mind flying. Except when I’m out with a new boy, I have a very strong stomach, and the Trident from London was full of middle-aged businessmen. I opened a magazine and looked up my horoscope.
    I’d been in Spain once before, with Mummy during the school holidays. It must have been just before she got fed up with having an alcoholic society husband with no money, for she used occasionally to take out Derek or me to toughen our cultural muscles: the rest of the time we were foisted on aunts, or other parents, or even on decent old helps in the house. Daddy, I believe, wouldn’t have minded seeing much more of us, but once he’d got us, he simply didn’t know what to do. You can’t drag an eleven-year-old schoolboy to impromptu late-night parties full of wags and wits and bunches of brainy sophisticates, and expect him to mix. Or if you do, and he is totally silent, or even worse, sick, then you simply don’t take him again. Derek never understood that. And later on, when he was grown up, he had missed out on the training: he hadn’t the address or the nous to keep in with Daddy’s lot.
    I might have done. I suppose I could have had a pretty marvellous time, but by then it wasn’t my scene. The sort of people who wanted a tame titled jester and didn’t mind if he drank, weren’t my sort, and I didn’t enjoy watching my father sing for his supper. He was neat and witty and relaxed and so easy-going it just wasn’t true. I don’t think I ever heard him say an unkind thing in his life: even about Mummy, even about the fat