Rum Affair Read Online Free PDF

of manly condolences over my headache. He’ll never find out I went with Johnson instead.”
    “And what sort of tub is it, anyway; and who the hell’s heard of Johnson? You’ll ruin your voice. I got you that trip in the Aegean last year; what’s the point of souring all that with a tinpot canoe tour of the peasantry?”
    “She’s thirty-four tons.”
    “Look, the Christina’s one thousand eight hundred.”
    “She’s a gaff-rigged auxiliary ketch which can be handled by three at a pinch. Johnson owns her.”
    “He does?” I knew that would help. “What does he do, anyway? Apart from making potty remarks?”
    “He makes me laugh,” I said lightly.
     
    It had been a rather good, if decorous, evening. The Club had produced mainstream jazz and a respectable meal, and Johnson had come up with a chaperone: a big golden Guards Officer named Rupert Glasscock, who was also the mate of Johnson’s gaff ketch, the Dolly. We danced a Hully Gully. And then, since nobody recognised me, Johnson performed a frenzied Watusi. It was like before and after with Flit. I smiled incautiously now, and Michael snapped back. “Well, you can call the whole bloody thing off. The tub’s probably not even leakproof.”
    “She can go anywhere. She’s racing.”
    He thought he’d got it now. “ Bluebottle there?”
    “No, it’s more a Britannia thing. It’s a sort of Club cruise in company, open to all classes of boat, with a handicap. They start off at Gourock on Tuesday and get back to Tobermory, Mull, a week or so later, checking in their sailing times at various islands en route.” God knew if I’d got that off right, but it sounded good. “Look, they’re not all proles, Michael. You’ve got to be pretty well-heeled to own a yacht between ten and fifty odd tons. You haven’t heard yet what Johnson does for a living.”
    Michael was unappeased. “Let me guess. He’s a soloist with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra.”
    I had kept the straight left till the last. “He’s the Johnson. The Academician. He’s the portrait man, Michael. And he’s going to paint me sailing on Dolly.”
    And that did it, of course.
     
    The clash between Johnson and Hennessy took place next day, and was the last event in the sporting calendar before I left Edinburgh. It was inevitable, even though my defection to jazz remained, miraculously, unexposed. In fact, it came about by sheer chance, when Stanley Hennessy took me out for lunch and found Johnson and his friend Captain Glasscock at a neighbouring table.
    To begin with, it rated no more than an exchange of cool nods, and we got down to the menu. But all too soon, the subject of yachts floated into the arena: Hennessy’s sunburn waxed with enthusiasm and his stiff yellow hair curled and crackled with vim as he described the joys of the sea.
    There was no point in concealing my plans. Over the pâté I confessed I was sailing on Dolly, and over the trout my sunburnt friend pulled all the switches he knew to persuade me to sail off on the Hennessy yawl Symphonetta instead. Symphonetta had just made a killing at Cowes. Symphonetta, it appeared, was in the Clyde and willing to abandon the nasty old race and leave for any part of the world at my whim.
    It was tempting; but Hennessy was not, he would be the first to concede, a court painter of world renown. With real regret, I refused.
    Then, as I sat, in blonde tweed from Bergdorf Goodman and the champagne diamond I earned from La Gioconda, peaceably eating my lamb noisettes, I was irritated to find Hennessy rising, with the briefest apology, and departing to lean over the unoffending table of Skipper Johnson and his mate Mr World. He greeted them chattily and said, in the voice that built oil tankers: “I hear you’re in for the Royal Highland cruise. I’ve been telling Madame Rossi she’ll find Dolly quite a nice little boat.”
    “Thank you. You’re just cruising around this year, Stanley?” said Johnson. The Archbishop of