Split Code: Dolly and the Nanny Bird

by Dorothy Dunnett

  Here, also. I was standing holding the vodka and wondering, in a mild haze of wellbeing, where Hugo Panadek was when the door opened a second time and a brown, bald, ear-ringed figure strolled through and paused, clicking its tongue.

  ‘Well, darling,’ said Hugo Panadek. He walked forward, removed the vodka, kissed me warmly, replaced the vodka and stretched himself full length on Bunty’s bed. After a moment he extended a hand and, removing Bunty’s Ho Hang from the dressing table, sprayed his naked chest liberally and lay back again, breathing deeply. His eyes shut, ‘Really, darling,’ he said, ‘I am not intending to abduct your poor Warr Beckenstaff infant. Was it not I, Hugo, who shot all your bears for you?’

  ‘So what?’ I said, sitting down on the windowsill. He had short Central European legs in flared velvet trousers and a striped silk Charvet shirt, open to the waist, and an assortment of chains and medallions. The bald head, of course, was ridiculous, but the skin, though sallow, was smooth, and he had a torso the same size and shape as a rodeo barrel. I added, ‘That doesn’t prove anything, does it? You might be deeply in debt and suffering a total toy-invention block which threatens to throw you into the hands of your creditors. I haven’t noticed you invent anything recently.’

  ‘Heartless!’ said Hugo Panadek comfortably. ‘But I have, darling. Ask Comer.’ He lifted one finger, with his eyes closed, and pressed a white button on the bed head. There was a cautious creak, a groan, a buzz, and the mattress beneath him began to vibrate. His medals ringingly started to clatter on one another. ‘They’re called massage-boys,’ I said. ‘They have them all over France. Try again.’

  ‘Darling,’ said Hugo Panadek. ‘I had no need to invent the massage-boy. Of that I assure you. I am merely throwing off the weight of your disapproval. I am also postponing the time when I have to go downstairs to lunch and witness the appetite-destroying spectacle of Comer swimming thirty-two lengths of the pool before every mealtime. You know there is a swimming pool in the sitting-room?’

  ‘I wondered where it was,’ I said.

  ‘One part water to three thousand parts disinfectant. The only known mix that kills both the germs and the anti-bodies,’ Hugo said. ‘Then there is the Health Room, with the Rowing Machine, the Electronic Bucking Horse, the Electric Camel and the Traxatou Massage Couch with Vacumatic Suction. You must admire Comer. He persists.’

  ‘What at? His weight?’ I said. It was fascinating.

  ‘That, too. A major counter-offensive in the general battle against varicose veins, thrombosis, diabetes, dental caries, arteriosclerosis, peptic ulcers and appendicitis,’ Hugo said. ‘Obesity enters somewhere but that is more Beverley’s field. She would so dislike you to know that she is thirty-five years of age. Myself,’ said Hugo, ‘I prefer European women. Every civilized person should spend at least one third of the year in Europe. Even in England. I have had some commissions of great interest in England.’

  I made the sort of reply he was asking for, but I was really thinking of Beverley. That made her two years older than Comer, when I had put her down as an easy twenty-five. Not that I’d had the chance to make a study in depth on the two occasions I’d met her: once when falling flat over Sukey, and today sitting with Comer on the lounge seats of the sea-plane, well away from the regurgitating kids and their staff in the rear. A mink jacket, what else, over a russet suede pants suit and striped yellow shirt: bouncing blonde hair like satin and a Barbarella profile with eight different shades of under-cream, and the nostrils oiled. And that, I can tell you, is a trick that only one nose in ten thousand can use and end up looking like Dewi Sukarno and not Bella the Cook. ‘She doesn’t have to worry,’ I said.

  ‘Ah,’ said Hugo. ‘But she is a perfectionist. Do you imagine she would have had her two children if Comer had not finally insisted?’

  Something caught his eyes and infuriatingly, he broke off. Rolling on to one elbow, he examined the row of aerosol cans on Bunty’s dressing-table. ‘You know, you could kill a woman, making her dress in the dark. Foot refresher spray, makeup spray, toilet water spray, fly spray, hair spray, deodorant spray, all insulting the ozone layer and for what?’

  ‘Putting money into inventors’ pockets, when they wear any,’ I said. A thought struck me. ‘She’s had a nose job?’

  ‘Beverley?’ said Hugo lazily. He lay down again. ‘Beverley, darling, has had everything lifted. Chins, chest, eyelids, haunches, everything. She hasn’t tried Bucharest to date, but you can be sure that as soon as the Warr Beckenstaff gala is over, she will be in the pits for an overhaul at the Radoslav. Bunty tells me she booked in a month ago.’

  Everyone who has worked in a rich woman’s household has heard of the Radoslav clinic in Dubrovnik. Cosmetic surgery in Yugoslavia has been in the news since the first nose-bob doctor thought of advertising a combined ten-day holiday offer and was knocked down in the rush of misshapen tourists. ‘Don’t tell me,’ I said. ‘It’s Missy’s Radoslav Clinic?’

  ‘Is every science to be laid at my door? I had nothing to do with it,’ said Hugo Panadek. ‘Merely, the first time Beverley answered an advertisement and went by herself. Perhaps to escape from her father-in-law, who deserved a stroke but had not yet had it. A lady friend of mine introduced us. That is how I got to know Comer. I owe my fortune to the Yugoslav National Health Service. Now you tell me something. Why is the daughter of Professor Sir Bernard Emerson performing menial services for punks like Simon and Rosamund?’

  I knew now why the Eisenkopps called me Nurse Joanna. Indeed, it was surprising that, unlike Hugo, they hadn’t tried pumping me earlier. I said, ‘Charlotte’s father is actually better off than mine. But, you know, we’re big expensive girls with big, expensive tastes. We have to earn a living.’

  ‘But in this fashion?’ said Hugo. ‘With jumping beans in your pockets and the mouth full of nappy pins? You swim. You shoot. The Tiffany Bridges’ Register is not, I suspect, your immediate goal. Did no other career commend itself? You are meticulous: precise as in an engineer, a scientist. Did you never wish to pursue such a calling?’

  Shrewd Mr Panadek. I grinned and said, ‘Are you making a cross-cultural sociological study or offering me a job? I don’t need to change my work. I’m a social engineer as it is. And I do try hard. I promise you, not to neglect my potential.’

  ‘According to Mr Donovan,’ Hugo said, ‘not hard enough. What is the appeal of other people’s children?’

  ‘Very little,’ I said. ‘But it grows on you. Some people can’t even stand their own children. Hence the market. You might say that punks give their kids a punk childhood which leads to the next generation of punks.’

  ‘And every Margaret Beaseford nurse is dedicated to breaking this chain?’

  He had impudent eyebrows. ‘Wouldn’t do much good if we were,’ I said. ‘You can’t fight heredity. Keep ‘em healthy, teach ‘em manners, and give the kids and their parents a break from one another. Bearing in mind that a bad parent is better than a bad nurse any day. Do you suppose that’s a summons for lunch?’

  Hugo swung his neat feet to the floor. ‘It is. And I am lunching over the Bay with the Princess. I expect, since she is our local celebrity, to find our Brownbelly colleague Mr Johnson staying with her. Comer tells me he is coming to visit here next, and moreover has been invited on Wednesday week to the Warr Beckenstaff gala. What it is to be simple, and shortsighted, and popular.’

  He slid off after I made a sufficiently flippant rejoinder. Conversation with Hugo Panadek had some aspects in common with hang gliding. Afterwards, I allowed myself to dwell on Johnson’s shortcomings. His interest in Mike Widdess, it seemed to me, was as erratic as his interest in Benedict. And now he was going to Venice.

  It wasn’t that I had come to depend on him. But it was hard to look around, and find neither the board nor the player.

  He came to stay two days later, and was immediately sucked into the vortex of the Eisenkopp routine, which began with a swim, a ride or some tennis or squash before breakfast and
proceeded with several rounds of competitive sport culminating in Comer’s thirty-two lengths of the pool. Some of his guests got in and swam with him. The rest sat about drinking martinis. The pool was cleaned by a pool bug called Percy, who ran about at the end of a cable and ate all the dead leaves and popcorn. Sometimes it tried to eat Comer.

  After lunch, everyone slept, and there would be a sail, a race or a fishing expedition before the evening drinking began, either at home or in one of the neighbouring mansions.

  After dinner, there were games. Both Comer and Beverley were taking backgammon lessons.

  Bunty and I had our meals in our room with the children. While the others were out, Bunty showed me the rest of the house. Beverley’s suite was done in shell-pink taffeta and had a mirrored ceiling and frilled zip-linked beds: Separate in a Jiff for a Sniff or a Tiff. Automatic switches opened the curtains and put on the lights and the TV and radio and controlled the record player. Bunty pressed a button and a rich voice started intoning behind the heaped pillows. ‘Relax. You are going to lose weight. You will not be able to overeat. Sometimes you will not be able to finish a meal . . .’

  I listened fascinated for a bit, and then Bunty switched it off and led the way out, scooping up a boxful of Bissinger’s Nut Balls from under the bed before, she said, the dogs got it. There were two dogs and they each got three Panteric and four vitamin E tablets a day and their own beef-flavoured Doggy Dent toothpaste. Grover liked the taste too, and ate it until Bunty found it all squashed up in the pocket of his Fairy Tooth Pillow and threw it away.

  I made him some dough and he wrung out a dirty grey flower and a fish, and the Mafia let us put them in the oven. We had them quickly for tea, the plague in every mouthful, before Comer could see us. Then I boiled coloured eggs and we rolled them down the chute, what else, which at least took Grover’s mind (and Bunty’s) off the chocolate kind which arrived by every post from the expense accounts of Comer’s business colleagues.

  Not that there was any shortage of means by which the Wabash community could get shot of their Special Little Princes and Princesses as and when it seemed desirable. There were films for children and play groups and puppets and Punch and Judy and musicals. You could have your Little People taught to swim, play tennis, speak French, ride, play an instrument, dance, fish and play simple card games. Left to Bunty, Grover would have spent in a play group all the waking moments he wasn’t already spending in his high chair, his cot or his playpen.

  I begged him off after a day and whipped him out when I’d finished with Ben to the shore or the swings or the chute. We had a bucket with starfish in it, and a wheelbarrow for pebbles. I taught him eight more nursery songs and started a big Easter mural of cotton wool rabbits and crepe paper trees.

  Johnson arrived to stay while I was working on it and escaped a whole afternoon’s riding by devoting himself to equipping the bunnies with large-eyed, smiling and flattering likenesses of all Grover’s immediate circle, including Sukey and Benedict. Grover watched, building bricks in an absent-minded way, quite entranced, and unaware that with exceptional sleight of hand, Johnson was sketching him at the same time.

  The sketch was quite brilliant, as well. After Grover had returned to his sand-pit I said, ‘The guest for whom every door is open. Did you draw the Princess as well?’ He looked no trendier, but a little less like a lush from a quilting bee. He was also unmoved by sarcasm. ‘That’s how I do it,’ he said. ‘Swiss quality at Hong Kong prices. Have you seen Comer’s computerized bar? It served three Virgin Marys into my pocket, and a pack of Sun Giant Almonds the Adult Nut zing into the automatic shoe cleaner. It was like Bad Day at Black Rock.’ He stuck some black cotton wool on his upper lip, looked at himself in the nursery mirror and then peeled it off’’. . . . But I will say they’ve got the War on Want licked. No further bloodcurdling incidents?’

  ‘Not so far,’ I said. ‘But Bunty wants danger money.’ She was in the next room, not quite within earshot, trying to persuade half a pound of tuppenny rice out of Grover.

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Johnson abstractedly. ‘The house is wired, and the garden is full of Alsatians. You’ll be better off here than you would in New York, with Donovan changing you into a bottle garden. It was the nearest thing to the rats and the pumpkins that I ever saw outside Cinderella.’

  ‘But in ten days’ time, you’re going to Venice?’ I made it pointed. I daren’t embark on anything less than ambiguous. ‘A free suite at the Gritti and you’re painting the manager?’

  His glasses flashed. ‘You forget,’ said Johnson. ‘I’ve worked my passage already, commissioned by Benedict’s grandmother Ingmar. My costume’s all fixed: too exciting. Then after the bash, I may drift on to Malta.’

  ‘To paint Mabel?’ I said. I was not amused. I didn’t know, either, that it was a fancy dress party.

  ‘To pick up Dolly. She’s wintered at Sliema,’ said Johnson.

  His yacht. I had forgotten. The one he brought over the Atlantic, sometimes; and painted on, and lived aboard, and used from time to time as a means of exit. I said, ‘And what about Benedict’s portrait? He’s going to look a bit odd in collar and tie and a christening robe.’

  The riding party was back. The dulcimer chimed. It was time for the plunge pool with the hydrojet massage. Johnson said, ‘You let me worry about that and everything else. Just put your mind to being polite to itinerant painters and doing everything that everyone tells you to. That way you won’t get the sack.’

  But I did.

  Easter Monday was the Eisenkopps’ ninth wedding anniversary, and the house was full of florists, electricians and caterers and six-foot vats full of crushed ice. Dr Gibbings arrived in the morning to check Benedict’s vaccination and to give one to Sukey and Grover. This represented a triumph of Maggie Bee diplomacy over an army of Eisenkopp prejudices. I didn’t know until later that - anything for a quiet life - Bunty had agreed to have her charges vaccinated, but hadn’t actually mentioned it to her employers.

  While Dr Gibbings was there, I got him to look at Grover’s throat also. He advised a waiting game over his tonsils and was prevailed upon, without difficulty, to remain for the party.

  The party was attended by two hundred guests and had as its main feature a surprise neon sign from Mrs Eisenkopp to Mr Eisenkopp which said, COMER I LOVE YOU. The Wabash Bay Musical Society rendered a selection of Great American Love Songs in harmony after the buffet.

  The only conversation which came within our range of hearing as we sat, Bunty and I, out of sight at the top of the stairs, was about the lethal properties of maraschino cherries. An argument broke out, as I remember, to do with fruit salad, in the purest of senses, during which Bunty broke into weeping.

  Next morning, Grover had a field day throwing building bricks, tiddly-winks and bits of paper from his mother’s bedroom into the pool, finishing up with the entire contents of his bottle of Giant Little Folks’ Bubble Bath. When Comer came in for his thirty-two lengths the water looked like the effluent stream of a soda pop factory with the pool bug lurching and wheezing about like a hand whisk.

  The scene that followed is only relevant insofar as it ended with Comer, swollen with rage, gouging Percy out on to the wall-to- wall carpet and prising open its glutted mouth-trap from which emerged a stream of small toys, cigarette butts, Adult Nuts, dirty tissues, crumpled paper and rejected maraschino cherries. It was what I might have expected to find in Bunty’s loo, for example, if the party had been held there.

  There were other parallels. One of the pieces of paper, uncurling itself in Johnson’s careless hand, proved to be a fragment of writing, much chewed and washed out by bubble bath, which said nevertheless quite distinctly, ‘Look out for me then, darling, on Tuesday.’

  ‘Why, he’s torn Gwenny’s letter,’ said Beverley quickly. ‘You bad, bad boy, Grover.’

  I saw Comer Eisenkopp’s hand rise quivering to waist height and then, disappointingly, drop again. He knelt. ‘Son. What you’ve done today has made yo
ur Momma and Dad very unhappy. Are you glad you made your Momma unhappy, Grover?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Grover.

  Bunty smoothed out her coffee striped nylon, and kneeling also, laid her hand on Grover’s forehead. ‘Oh, dear,’ she said. ‘We’ve got a little temperature, haven’t we? Mr Eisenkopp, you’ll have to let me take him away to lie down. It’s all come as a shock, poor little baby. Mrs Eisenkopp, you know you have a very sensitive son.’

  She looked reproachfully at Beverley who had already switched expressions and was saying, her hand on Comer’s naked shoulder, ‘He didn’t mean it, I know. Easter always upsets him, darling. Why don’t we just go and have a sauna instead?’

  They retired. Grover got the flat of Bunty’s hand three times, cried, was given half an Italian Easter egg and was sick in the sandpit. His parents, clean, pink and restored to calm, knelt on either side of his bed and promised to take him sailing on Dadda’s yacht in the morning.

  Or Comer did. Beverley never boarded the thing, it was common knowledge, since she got sick to her stomach, in the colourful phrase, if she walked on wet grass. And by arrangement, it was Bunty’s day off.

  I remember saying, in an attempt to stem the flood of reconciliation, ‘Mr Eisenkopp . . . He’ll have to have someone with him in case he falls in. And I’m looking after Ben and Sukey.’ Grover burst into tears. Beverley looked up. Her nose in profile was high-bred and slender as a humming-bird feeder, and if there were any tucks. I couldn’t see them. Her skin was flawless. She said, ‘He is so sensitive. Nurse Joanna, you go with Grover. No problem. I’ll stay at home and look after the babies.’