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picked them up because they were white. What else is missing?”
    “Nothing.”
    “Well, let’s borrow a torch and go look for it,” said Johnson. In the son-et-lumière, his face looked just like uncut moquette. It was all right by me, except that Janey insisted on coming. I had a little knitted coat in the bedroom. I let down my hair, which had dried, from its wraparound, squirted Calèche all over, and sprinted off down. He was on the mature side, but he wasn’t married, and I didn’t see why Janey should have it all her own way. I couldn’t pay for a portrait, but maybe Austin Mandleberg could.
    It was jolly dark in the ditch, even with a couple of torches, and the old Seat’s headlights simply lay over the top. Janey found a dead brown rat, with its four pink feet all pointing upward, which put me off looking for a bit, so I got the storm lantern and went off under the cork trees, in case the letter had bounced or got blown out or something. It was a bit odd, because the lantern made all the tree shadows slide backward and forward, and if you looked back to the road, I swear you could see bats. I kept looking down, for the letter, and then I thought I had found it, but it was only an old blue empty packet of Ducados, largos con filtros. Beyond it, just at the edge of the light, was the battered old wreck of a car. And behind the car, and just visible under the chassis, was a pair of masculine feet, wearing white canvas shoes.
    I got the quarter-mile cup at St. Tizzy’s. I had dropped the lantern and lit out of that wood before you could draw breath for a sneeze, and I fell into the ditch just as Johnson was shouting, “I’ve got it! Miss Cassells! We’ve dug up your letter!”
    “There’s a man in there,” I said, still rolling.
    “You surprise me,” said Johnson. “They must call this lovers’ corkwood. Was it any two people we know?”
    “It was a man,” I said and sat up. “Alone. Standing. Not speaking. Right inside the wood.”
    “Austin,” said Janey. “You ass.”
    “No,” I said. “They weren’t American shoes.”
    “Well, for heaven’s sake, She-she,” said Janey. “Run back.”
    No one was taking me seriously, and so long as we weren’t staying in that wood any longer, why should I care. As Johnson said, at least the feet weren’t bare. He handed me Daddy’s letter as we all got into the Seat. It was a bit crumpled, but quite intact. “My dear She-she,” he’d written.
    When we got back, I telephoned Austin. He wasn’t in, but a voice in a thick Spanish accent promised to tell him that my bag had been found. Gil was still absent, sulking, and Johnson, though polite, clearly wanted to get back to the harbor, where he was staying on board his yacht
Dolly
. He invited me, after a broad hint or two, to visit him for a drink the next afternoon, and then asked Janey as well, which was mean, because that meant I had transport. I suppose he had to… No… That’s just being draggy. Janey really is gorgeous.
    I slept like the dead.
     
    The market in Ibiza opens between seven and half-past in the morning. I was up by six-thirty and leaving the house half an hour later with Helmuth in a hefty old Land Rover with a tire on its bonnet and room for a small horse at the back. I had a lunch party of nine to cook for; or I’d volunteered, anyway. I was rather pleased that Janey’s father accepted the offer without the least bit of fuss. He was quite the nicest of all the rich men Daddy had ever stayed with: big and athletic and clean with a great, jolly laugh. For instance, for goodness’ sake, he’d no need to offer to entertain a minor Russian trade mission, on a brief break from treaty talks in Madrid, even though he’d met the attaché before. He said he owed a favor to the official delegate for Ibiza and Formentera, who was away till tomorrow. I suspected that the reason actually was that the Reds knew they’d get a jolly good tuck-in at the Casa Veñets compared with