Split Code: Dolly and the Nanny Bird

by Dorothy Dunnett

  Fast questions don’t work with children. The kid’s mouth remained open but silent. Bunty didn’t wait. She was quicker than I was. Abandoning a thunderstruck Grover she took to her heels through the gate and past the play-courts and down the paths where old men in overcoats were sitting playing chess on stone benches.

  The attendant was no more than a flying shadow among the bare trees: he must have seen us coming. But in his wake were two irate cardplayers sounding off in a mess of broken cigars and bent court cards, while beyond, an oil drum lay on its side, screaming hollowly.

  Inside among the cigarette packs and toffee papers and popcorn lay Benedict, still padded like a hand grenade in his matinee jacket, hat, coat and two shawls and tearlessly emoting throughout three square inches of naked face. I pulled him out, cheek to cheek and held him until he began rabbiting away at my ear, while Bunty, platform soles chugging, made across the park after the attendant.

  After five minutes she came back red-faced with a stitch and a crumpled park jacket, found on the grass. The man had disappeared. ‘Isn’t that something else?’ said the older of the two cardplayers. standing with his table-cloth clasped to his waistcoat. ‘The judge give you custody, they’ve got no right to do that.’ He picked up a jack of hearts in full beaver and chucked the gasping Benedict under the chin with it. ‘You stick to your Momma there, girlie. You gonna call the fuzz?’

  I looked at Bunty. ‘Are we going to call the fuzz?’

  But we didn’t have to telephone anybody, as Charlie arrived with the police just as we got back to the six yelling children, and from then on, it was nothing but questions. They finished with the other girls first. I said to Bunty, ‘If expressions of gratitude come into the picture, Sultry Simon ought to give you one for running after the bastard.’

  ‘Shucks,’ said Bunty agreeably. ‘I only wanted to ask him to take Grover and Sukey next time. That’s our duplex, on top of the newest block there. Come and have a drink when you’re off next. Tomorrow?’

  We fixed it. Then she and Charlie went off while I led the fuzz out of the park and past the notice board through which the Carl Schurz addresses its visitors.

  It said:

  ENJOY

  Run Hop Skip Jump Litter Skate Leap Laugh Giggle Wiggle Jog Romp Swing Slide Frolic Climb Bicycle Stretch Read Relax Imbibe Play Sleep.

  I forbore to go back and mark in KIDNAP. Who reads notice boards?

  FOUR

  I didn’t need to wonder whether to phone Johnson on the day of the snatch: Rosamund did it for me. In one sitting, he seemed to have made quite an impression. She got on the phone as soon as the police had left us and so did I, on the upstairs extension.

  Johnson’s voice was sympathetic but not burning with eagerness. His advice was to phone Simon and hire a bodyguard.

  My employer’s tones, on the other hand, were resonant with self-pity. ‘Your little Joanna, you know, was hired to look after this child twenty-four hours a day. Do you suppose she’s too young, or wrapped up in boyfriends or what? The Mallards’ girl is a nymphomaniac.’

  I was interested because it was practically true. Charlotte really has the best contacts at home and abroad of any person I know. I waited to be told more about myself, but instead Rosamund went on to ask if Johnson wouldn’t move in to finish painting her. She’d feel better, she said, with a man in the house.

  Johnson said he couldn’t, and wasn’t Simon due home tomorrow and really he advised very strongly hiring a short-term bodyguard. Some people snatched babies on impulse. It might never happen again.

  Rosamund rang off and so did I. I was almost as annoyed with him as Rosamund was.

  Benedict cried off and on through the night and by midday had worked himself into a heat rash and got both his sleeping times and his eating times so muddled up that it wasn’t worth taking him out. I cooled him off and dabbed on some lotion and surveyed him with a purely clinical satisfaction.

  A new, dark stubble was joining the two patches of long silky hair over his ears and his chin was advancing. He didn’t squint any longer. The previous week, he had smiled for the first time, but I hadn’t mentioned it. Tradition requires that the first smile is always for the mother.

  Later, preparing to take my afternoon off, I felt that somehow she wasn’t going to get it today. I laid out the feeds, the written instructions, the fresh clothes, the nappies, the spare sheets and everything else that in four hours might become of urgent necessity and, leaving Rosamund and her offspring glaring at one another, departed next door to the block of luxury flats that contained Bunty Cole and the Eisenkopp duplex.

  Bunty Cole’s employers had thirty-two rooms in that block, and a roofgarden.

  To get there, I had to pass a doorman, a speaking tube and a closed circuit television, all of which filled me with envy. Then I got out of the lift at the Eisenkopp residence and was rendered practically speechless.

  Bunty shared with the family’s grandfather the whole upper floor of the duplex. Bunty had a bedroom, a bathroom, a sitting-room with colour TV and a night nursery off with Sukey in it. Beyond was a day nursery, a smart room for Grover, a laundry and a miniature kitchen. The furniture was as in Abitare, and you got tired lifting your feet through the carpet.

  Bunty showed me round. In the laundry was the automatic washing machine, the tumble-drier, the ironing board and the warming-cupboard full of clean diapers. In the kitchen was the cooker, the infra-red grill, the dish-washing machine, the sink with the waste-disposal unit, the electric mixer, mincer and bottle warmer, the deep freeze, and the fridge.

  On the shelves were cans and cans of babyfood, instant potato, maple syrup, cereals, eggs, bread and chewable vitamins inanimal shapes. In the deep freeze was a stack of frozen fruit juice, waffles, pancakes, fish fingers, and whole frozen meals packed on TV trays. In the refrigerator were ice cubes, butter, beer, soda- water, 7-Up, Coca-Cola and a few lonely bottles of milk.

  I said when I could speak, ‘Well, at least they’ve left you room for the milk. My lot keep the fridge full of beer packs.’

  ‘That’s what Charlotte said,’ said Bunty placidly. ‘I used to share kitchens once, but you do get in a mess.’

  In other words, all the hard work was done by the Italian couple and the help in the family kitchen below. The hand-trimmed voile and lace ruffles on Sukey’s cot were fresh as tomorrow.

  I said, ‘Before you ask, I have one room with Benedict next to it, and there is a Brazilian daily.’ I had been given a gin and orange. I suppose all the world makes gin and orange with child’s high-vitamin juice, but not everyone also heaps it with cut peaches and nectarines from a crate in the corner. I said, ‘What in God’s name does Comer Eisenkopp do? Deliver doggie bags to Fort Knox?’

  ‘He runs a business,’ said Bunty vaguely. Sukey, not yet unpacked from her walk, bumped the plastic butterflies bracing the hood of her pram and they revolved. Her eyes rolled together like marbles.

  I said, following Charlotte’s advice, ‘Honestly, you’ll make her squint if you string things so close to her face . . . Who was the super man who kissed you as we came upstairs then?’

  ‘With the moustache?’ said Bunty, as if the crowd had been overwhelming. ‘Hugo Panadek, love: Father Eisenkopp’s Design Director. He lives here half the time. That’s who I keep the vodka for.’

  If that left it an open question on the matter of the other eleven bottles of spirits, I didn’t pursue it. Grover, without a dummy but still wearing his lumberjack’s hat, came in from the day nursery and said, ‘Hugo was a good boy and Bunty kissed him.’ He produced, absent-mindedly, a number of hacking coughs.

  I had a London bus in my pocket. I said, ‘Grover. Look what I’ve got.’ He came over. Sukey, bored with butterflies, let out a series of squeals. With a sigh, Bunty put down her gin and orange and, rising, disentangled the baby from her bedding and deposited her on the floor where she lay, her hat over her eyes. She had on an embroidered matinee jacket and a long fine wool nightdress with lac
e, faintly tinged with orange in the nappy area.

  Bunty said, ‘It’s a lottery, ain’t it? If you look after bleedin’ infants you’re too fagged for a love life; and if you get them able to talk then they fink on you. Grover, don’t do that.’

  Grover had flung the London bus at Sukey, but missed. Sukey, breathing heavily through her hat, paid no attention. I said, ‘That’s a bad cough, Grover. Come and open your mouth for me,’ and when he came, peered into his throat and took off his hat at the same time. His glands were slightly swollen but his throat, though red, wasn’t spotty.

  ‘It’s only a little cough,’ Bunty said, in a tone which meant, ‘three hours at the paediatrician: not bloody likely.’ ‘Grover, go and get your new trike.’ She poured out more gin, and put some of the extra orange into a cup, with a splash from the waterjug. This she stirred and then, lifting the nerveless Sukey, dragged her face out of her hat and fed her a spoonful. Grover trotted across, picked up the bus, and threw it at Sukey again. It missed her, but nearly knocked over Bunty’s gin.

  ‘Don’t do that, Grover,’ said Bunty again automatically. ‘Fetch your new trike and show Nurse Joanna.’

  According to College rules, every nurse expects to be called Nurse, with the Christian or surname added, as preferred. College rules are not observed by top people’s parents, at whose parties I should be addressed as Nanny Booker-Readman; nor by trendy mothers or Americans, to whom I was Jo. In return I could call the Americans, but not the trendy mothers, by their Christian names also.

  To the Eisenkopps, whom I had not yet encountered, I was evidently Nurse Joanna, although they were certainly American, if not dating right back to the Mayflower. Which, since they called Bunty Bunty, told you quite a lot about the Eisenkopps.

  ‘That horrible little punk,’ said Bunty placidly, referring presumably to the absent Grover. ‘Came into my bedroom five times last night, including when I was trying out this green face pack.’ She finished juicing up Sukey and dumped her back on the Wilton, without apparently noticing the marks of the trade on her striped coffee nylon.

  Sukey squawked and Grover came in pedalling his bike and drove it straight at her face without slackening.

  I stopped it with my foot. Bunty said, ‘Grover, be careful!’ and went on telling me about the green face pack. Then she got up and went out to find one to show me, and Grover, settling violently in the saddle, backed and came once more, hard, for Sukey.

  This time I stopped him with more than my foot. I lifted him off his tricycle and said, ‘Grover. If you do that again, I shall smack you.’

  Rule fifteen in the Maggie Bee book holds firmly to the belief that there is no need for spanking or smacking in the rearing of children, and indeed begs employers not to ask any Margaret Beaseford Nurse to lift a hand in anger.

  The first thing a Maggie Bee nurse does in any British household is to ask the mother if she minds if the offspring gets paddled from time to time, and if the mother has any sense she agrees to it. They have got, after all, to get into training for public school.

  When, therefore, Grover responded to my threat in the time-honoured way by mounting the trike and forcing it straight into and nearly over his sweet sister’s pulsing cranium, I locked the handlebars, scoured him out of the saddle, laid him over my knee and delivered a finely-judged smack on the trousers.

  I might have got in another, but a broad hand gripped my arm from behind and squeezing it like a toothpaste tube, removed me from my chair so fast that the chair fell right over and my tights laddered. Grover, sliding yelling off the punishment rostrum, was caught by another, solicitous hand and then enfolded, still yelling, against the stomach of what could only be his male parent. The male parent, addressing me, said. ‘Hit my kid again, and I’ll sock you one.’

  Comer Eisenkopp, who ran a business which paid for the top two floors of a luxury penthouse and supported an ageing father, a wife, two children, an Italian couple and Bunty at three hundred dollars a week plus the privilege of undoing her uniform buttons, was short, stocky and healthily clean-shaven, with thickly waving dark hair and glorious teeth, which he was baring. He also had on a starched collar and tie, and a leather-trimmed alpaca cardigan.

  He said, ‘Can the child hustle you back? You’ve got it made real good, haven’t you, whoever you are? Pick on a kid? Pick on a poor helpless baby? What’d you do to my poor little Sukey there? Slug her jaw if she don’t eat her waffles?’

  His gaze shifted. ‘Did you bring that gin? Where’s my girl? Did you bring that gin?’ His voice, already powerful, swelled to appalling proportions. ‘Bunty! Bunty? Do you know there’s a drunk foreigner in here beating my children?’

  At this point, I hand it to Bunty. She could have lain doggo. She could have pretended to be out of hearing or even, at a pinch, out of the house. As it was, she appeared, if belatedly, in her doorway, with the leaf-green mud pack all over her face.

  Grover, adoring every sadistic second, peeped out from his father’s cardigan selveage and went off into a paroxysm of fresh amazement and horror. Sukey, drawing breath from time to time, continued an obbligato that would have done Bishop proud. A soft voice raised in mellow alarm impinged from the direction of the doorway calling, ‘My babies! My babies! What are you doing to my babies?’ and Mother Eisenkopp, a dead ringer for any of the Mrs Roger Vadims, floated in, capsized over the tricycle and collapsed shrieking on top of her daughter, kicking her son in the fist as she did so.

  The gin went flying. Mr Eisenkopp, shouting ‘Beverley!’, leaped forward and gripped his blonde and dazzling wife. Bunty, clawing mud off her face, flew in and winkled out Sukey.

  I lifted the gin, bestowed a couple of stiff cleansing doubles on the glistening patch already present on Sukey’s resting place, and then picked up Grover, who was standing with his eyes shut, emitting short breathy hoots with his cut paw dripping blood on the carpet.

  Before he knew where he was, I had his hand under the cold tap in the bathroom, and the hoots were giving way to straight-up crying.

  ‘Grover is a brave boy,’ I said. ‘Look. Joanna has a big white handkerchief. Now, Grover show Joanna where Bunty’s bandages are.’

  Bandages or band-aids: they always do the trick.

  ‘You get a bandage?’ he said. He had dark hair like his father’s, and maybe even his mother’s; cracked lips and red patches on both bulbous cheeks.

  ‘A very big bandage,’ I said. ‘Grover show the bandages to Joanna.’

  They were in the bathroom cabinet, along with a half-hearted bottle of Junior Aspirin, some plasters, some lint, some cotton wool, an obelisk of assorted make-up and Bunty’s pills, all up-to-date to the minute, which tallied with Charlotte’s analysis and was good news for the Mexican yam industry.

  The Eisenkopps might have been hell on hygiene, but they had missed out on the First Aid Department. Or maybe that had been cornered by the Mafia. I cut out some lint, chatting, and made a beautiful bandage, with donkey’s ears on it. Grover, his face smothered in half-dried tears said, ‘Now Joanna give Sukey a bandage.’

  The fate of Sukey had been somewhat occupying my mind, not to mention the fact that if Mother Eisenkopp had broken both legs, all three of Bunty’s boyfriends were in for a hard time. With three adults already on the scene I felt the only positive contribution I could make was to keep Grover out of it. He produced a dry cough, and followed it with another. ‘Grover wants Bunty,’ he said suddenly.

  I should have been more worried if he hadn’t. I said, ‘Bunty is helping Mummy just now, then she’ll come and see Grover’s big bandage. Shall I tell you a secret?’

  ‘I tell you?’ he said. He continued with a phased series of croaks.

  ‘I’ll show you something that’s nice for your cough. Where’s the kitchen?’

  He was less than eager, but he condescended to show me, and he watched while I made butter balls rolled in sugar. In the middle he said, ‘That’s a topeat.’

  Whatever he was describing, I was being do
ne a favour. I looked about. Bunty’s English habits at once proclaimed themselves ‘So it is,’ I said. ‘Some people call it a teapot.’

  ‘You call it a topeat,’ said Grover. ‘Again?’

  I gave him another butter ball. ‘Grover can be a teapot,’ I said. ‘Look.’ I set one hand on his hip, and pulled the other out at an angle. ‘You’re a teapot.’

  ‘You’re a topeat,’ said Grover, and giggled. He was a quick learner, too. After a few minutes he had me by the hand and we were progressing out of the suite, bearing the plateful of butter balls with us. At the end of a passage he knocked on a door and called ‘Grandpa!’

  It was getting like a Frank Capra film except that the man in the bed wasn’t gentle and white-haired and quizzical, but as short, black-haired and positive as his powerful son. Beside the bed was a wheelchair of the automatic kind with a mike that you talk to.

  ‘About time, too,’ said Grandfather Eisenkopp. ‘Is Comer throwing a party out there I’m not invited to?’

  ‘Grover’s hurt his hand,’ I said. ‘Someone fell over his trike. We’ve brought you some butter balls.’

  ‘I’m a topeat,’ said Grover happily.

  ‘I could have told you,’ said Grover’s grandfather readily enough. He picked up a butter ball, squeezed it and then put it into his mouth, wiping his hand on the sheet. Grover struck his newfound attitude and declaimed:

  ‘I’m a little teapot, short and stout

  Here’s my handle, here’s my spout

  When the kettle boils, hear me shout

  Pick me up and pour me out.’

  ‘So you are,’ said Grandfather. He leaned forward, picked Grover up and pouring him out, proceeded to tickle him under the arms as he lay, shrieking with joy on the bed. Over Grover’s back he said, ‘If something needs doing, I’ll keep him now.’