Split Code: Dolly and the Nanny Bird

by Dorothy Dunnett

  ‘Your bedroom?’ said Simon, looking curiously around. I dumped Ben’s cot on one of the beds and sat beside him. Rosamund sank on the other side. The boy was sleeping, his new lashes stuck out like bristles.

  ‘It’s the master bedroom,’ Johnson said. ‘Bathroom off. Fittings as you see. Place for wet canvases here. I can get to the cockpit in one second if need be, and there’s a plastic cockpit cover I use when I’m painting. All the dials you see through the door are the usual things - radar, echo sounder and whatnot. And radio telephone, so you can speak from the Glycera. You’ll have a drink I hope with me here, and then as soon as you feel happy about the baby, we can push off round the quay to your mother. You said Mrs Warr Beckenstaff wanted to see Joanna?’

  That was an understatement. The command had come, by transatlantic telephone, the night before we left New York. She wanted to see me, and her grandson. I had said she could see me with pleasure, but not her grandson at the end of a long day of air travel. There had been a three-cornered argument which by remote control I had won. Benedict’s health came first, it was agreed. Eventually.

  Now Rosamund said, ‘We’ve been asked to take Joanna aboard for half an hour. May we leave the baby here with you until she comes back?’ The saloon was clear. Johnson moved from the cockpit down into it and waited while we all filed after, taking Ben with us. From a bar just behind him there came a pleasant chinking sound as Lenny laid out the drinks. ‘You can leave him with Lenny and Donovan,’ Johnson said. ‘He’ll be quite safe. They’re moving Dolly out from the jetty as soon as we’ve gone, and then no one can get aboard without warning. We carry a pram and a launch; we’ll send the launch to fetch Joanna whenever she’s ready.’

  Behind us, Lenny coughed and Johnson turned. His face behind the glasses was as bland as if he really didn’t know exactly what Lenny was about to remark. Johnson said, ‘A problem?’

  Lenny’s accent was Cockney, and his ears stuck out. He had exchanged his blue jacket for a white steward’s coat, spotlessly laundered. He said, ‘I’m sorry, sir. The Avenger’s out of action. Temporarily. They’re fixing her in the repair shop.’

  Neither of my employers displayed any interest. Donovan, coming through the door forward said, ‘You can’t leave shore then, can you, sir?’

  The sir was a new phenomenon, due perhaps to the owner of such an evident piece of floating capital. Johnson said, ‘We’ve got the dinghy. For that matter, Lenny can bring the yacht over to take Joanna off. After that, we meant to move round to Dubrovnik harbour anyway.’

  ‘Why?’ said Rosamund. She had a glass in her hand, and looked as though she needed it, what with jet lag and Ingmar in the offing.

  ‘The view is better,’ Johnson said peacefully. ‘Also, it’s less accessible. Dubrovnik’s a walled city closed to traffic, unless you happen to want to get married. The only escape is through the gates or up the funicular: all easy to close if there’s trouble. Come and see where the baby will sleep. Joanna, you’d better tell Lenny what to do if he wakens.’

  They had to wait for me in the end, because you can’t just walk off a boat with a baby there. But I took care of the essentials quickly, and in the right order, leaving a feed in the fridge and the bathing and changing and feeding essentials still in their polythene wraps where they were handy and yet couldn’t spill if Dolly sailed. They say that you can count a baby’s luggage as roughly the same as two adults’, and it’s all too true.

  Benedict’s carrycot stood on the forward stateroom carpet, with each handle lashed to the bulkhead. He was still sleeping when I came back after washing quickly. I took off my apron and combed my hair and buttoned my coat and went out, leaving him. As I had guessed from the laughter, they were on their second refills and hadn’t missed me. I followed everyone on to the jetty and Johnson took the wheel of the car. Looking back, I could see that Donovan was already standing by to cast off the shore line and that a thin cloud of smoke was rising aft from Dolly’s exhaust.

  Children don’t waken on boats. I’ve seen a five-year-old sleep like the dead with an anchor chain roaring a foot away. Between the noise of the car and the harbour I couldn’t even hear the sound of Dolly’s engine, never mind the screams of Benedict, if any. It was Donovan who must have spotted my corrugated face at the back window and straightened to give me a thumbs-up. It didn’t mean that Ben wasn’t roaring; only that he wanted to cheer me. And he did. I was going to meet Mrs Warr Beckenstaff on the Glycera, but I was a lot less worried about it than Rosamund.

  The M/S Glycera, chartered by the Warr Beckenstaff Corporation in the person of Rosamund’s mother to mark the fiftieth anniversary of her cosmetics business, was a German ship: German-owned and German-crewed.

  Not perhaps the most favoured visitor in a Yugoslav harbour, within spitting distance of Hitler’s underground prison and torture chamber on the other side of Dubrovnik. But congenial perhaps to those American guests who, unlike the Eisenkopps, had not forgotten their ethnic roots. And by any standard, a 6,000-ton mobile hotel whose food, appointments and general luxe could hardly be equalled, never mind bettered.

  Pink and silver were Ingmar’s trade colours and the Glycera wore them with all the chic which an expensive PR firm with an unlimited budget could demand from its favourite decorators. Wherever you looked, bunting, ribbons and awnings reminded you whose guest you were, and the scent of carnations and roses strove with the normal dock smell of tar, offal, diesel and bilge water.

  The captain was waiting at the top of the companionway for Mrs Warr Beckenstaff’s daughter and kissed her hand, clicking his heels at Simon and Johnson. The nursemaid he ignored, which gave me time to look at the quilted satin and the massed foliage and the pink and silver garlands and the Louis Quinze grille behind which the Ingmar staff, in place of the purser, were hiding. I also enjoyed watching the stewards fancying Simon as he strolled past in his brown velvet gear, platinum hair carefully brushed and classical profile endorsed by the high flowered collar of his twenty-guinea voile shirt. Simon, whom Rosamund had wanted to marry so much that she had forced her mother’s hand by allowing herself to become pregnant first. ‘What should I do if you stopped loving me?’ he had repeated, laughing, to Rosamund in the flaming row I’d overheard all those weeks ago. ‘Then I’d have to run to Grandma for help, wouldn’t I?’

  And Rosamund had shut up.

  I was able to study the scene, since the head steward led the Booker-Readmans and Johnson right off to see their hostess, and I was left sitting upright in a deep-buttoned armchair in the Empfangs-Halle, watching their cases being wheeled off to their staterooms.

  There was no other luggage about: the last of the guests must have come from the airport and were probably even now sleeping off their jet lag in their cabins. By my reckoning we had been fed eight times in the last twenty-four hours and no one would miss lunch, one would imagine. From the deck above, a murmur of music and laughter and the distant tinkle of plates told that the European guests, already well settled in, were making the most of the cuisine. Groups of people from the cabin area drifted upstairs from time to time to join them, or crossed the carpet to inquire about cashing cheques or making telephone calls.

  None of them looked at me, although like the stewards, I amused myself pricing their clothes and identifying them. The Eisenkopps hadn’t been far out in their guesswork. Men and women, they were a credit to Ingmar, and I had a shot at guessing which of them had begged to come and which she had paid to do so. It wasn’t an uninformed guess either. Private nurses and children’s nannies know more about the personal lives of the idle rich than any gossip writer ever born. It’s why half of them never hanker to marry, any more than the crowds at Brands Hatch want to change seats with the drivers.

  Outside, I could hear a lot of muted activity: voices calling in German and machinery clanking and feet paddling about, but inside it remained warm and scented and calm. Someone came and sprayed water all over the flowers, and someone else walked about letting fly with a te
n-litre bottle of Ingmar’s new scent, in a pink and silver aerosol. I shut my eyes and a man in a white jacket said, ‘Fraűlein Emerson? Will you be so kind as to follow me, please?’

  He took me up two flights of carpeted stairs to the Kleine Halle of the boat deck. To the biggest suite, of course, on the Glycera; since Mrs Warr Beckenstaff was the charterer. The only person for many months ever to employ my second name and reasonably, also, since she was paying for me. Since she had attempted to hire me right from the beginning, before anyone knew I was free, the week after Mike Widdess had died.

  Then the steward took me down a long corridor, past the lire extinguishers and the drinking water containers, and stopped at a double door swagged in pink velvet. The voice which answered his knock was high, commanding and totally English.

  ‘Send the girl in!’ said Grandmother Warr Beckenstaff; and in my pudding-basin hat, my uniform coat, my brown gloves and low, polished shoes I drew a breath and walked firmly forward.

  The clear, cold voice spoke again before I saw anyone at all in the room: behind the flowers, the cushions, the sofas, the ceiling and walls of pink and grey velvet.

  ‘Tell me, girl,’ said the voice. ‘This extraordinary man Johnson Johnson: are you and he sleeping together?’

  THIRTEEN

  She must have been seventy-five anyway, which when you look around is no great age, I suppose in a woman, and you would expect her to have everything tucked that would tuck; and she had. But she also had the poise and the drive and the dress sense of a woman who had married a small émigré pharmaceutist and turned him into a world cosmetics industry, with centres in London and New York and Paris.

  The bewildered Warr Beckenstaff had a breakdown and died shortly after the tenth balance sheet; and thereafter nothing could stop her. And now she stood there in her pink silk jersey dress and examined me, the wealthy lady who had chosen the schools and colleges and finishing establishments which had made Rosamund what she was, and looked like making an equal mess of my Benedict.

  Tall as her daughter, Ingmar Warr Beckenstaff was spider-thin, the brittle shafts of her wrists and shoulders emphasized by the weight of metal she wore, embedded with gemstones. Her eyes were Rosamund’s: large and sunken and heavy-lidded; and if her chin was too definite, her cheek-bones were good and her mouth still had planes that could be tinted. The hair, a smooth bouffant silver grey, stopped just short of her ears and swept asymmetrically over in a wing which just cleared her left eye. Glimpsed briefly, from the other side of a street she would have had Donovan after her.

  I must have smiled at the thought because she said, ‘You disappoint me. Why not answer? I thought you had character,’ and sat down.

  ‘I’m sorry. I was trying to remember,’ I said. ‘Was that all you wanted to know?’

  ‘How very prudish,’ she said. She had a gold and black onyx cigarette holder to match her necklet and was choosing a pink and silver scroll to screw into it. She looked up. ‘Sit down, girl. I am unlikely either to be shocked or to sack you for immorality. I am told that you have been a devoted and courageous nurse to my grandson, and I hope you feel that your services are being adequately recognized. I wish you to continue your excellent care of him. I also wish, in exchange, some information. My son-in-law sleeps around, and I don’t like it.’

  I sat down, keeping my back straight, my ankles crossed and my hands with my gloves in my lap. ‘Not with me, Mrs Warr Beckenstaff,’ I said politely.

  ‘I think that’s probably true,’ she said annoyingly. ‘Go on. With whom, then?’

  I said, ‘I have a full-time job with Benedict. There really isn’t much opportunity to study what else is going on in the household. In any case, it isn’t my business.’

  ‘So it’s the Eisenkopp woman. I was afraid so,’ said Mrs Warr Beckenstaff. I wondered how I had given that away, and concluded she was the only piece of crumpet who lived so near that I was bound to have noticed. Or else she knew already, and it was merely a move in the game. The power game which, of course, she was playing with me.

  I said, ‘I can’t make any comment. I’m sorry. Would you trust my discretion on anything else if I did?’

  I hadn’t leaped forward to light her fag and to do her justice, she didn’t appear to expect it. She put the lighter down and gazed at me through pink scented smoke. ‘It depends what else you know. For example, have you no questions about Benedict?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I haven’t.’ Shot-gun weddings are not my affair. Or the reverse, as in this particular case.

  ‘You haven’t wondered.’ said Mrs Warr Beckenstaff, her clear voice quite unaltered, ‘how, with a father of Simon’s colouring, the child appears to be growing so dark? Or about other aspects of his appearance? Of course you have. And I expect you, not being uneducated or defective, to be able to give me a sensible opinion when I ask for it. Who does that grandson of mine remind you of?’

  Because it was Ben, I hadn’t said anything even to Johnson. But now, of course, there was really no help for it.

  ‘Hugo Panadek,’ I said. ‘The Eisenkopps’ Design Director.’

  Neither the pink swags nor the head of the Warr Beckenstaff Corporation fell to the ground. ‘Exactly,’ said Benedict’s grandmother impatiently. ‘The Booker-Readman fellow, of course, must be completely infertile although my daughter, as is obvious, is besotted with him. I cannot imagine she could have resorted to a bald-headed Serbian otherwise.’

  ‘I’ll have to run to Grandma for help,’ Simon had said tauntingly to his angry wife. He wasn’t afraid of this lady: why should he be? Rosamund had only to be nasty to Simon and he would spill the whole story: how he wasn’t the father of Benedict, and how the heir to the Warr Beckenstaff fortune was the son of a bald-headed foreigner.

  And Hugo . . . It was Hugo who had referred to both Benedict’s parents, his lip curling, as punks. Hugo who had shown no surprise over the peculiar affair of the ikons and who had arranged Johnson’s accident at Cape Cod, one might well reason, in order to expose Simon’s liaison with Beverley. Hugo, one might suggest, in whose Wonderland Rudi Klapper, the shooting stall attendant who had given the Booker-Readmans their first kidnapping fright had been employed; but who could hardly be interested in kidnapping his own son; especially as he, as well as Simon, had the power to blackmail the Warr Beckenstaff Corporation with the truth about its heir. I said however, to be sure, ‘If it’s Mr Panadek, will he make an approach, do you think, about Benedict?’

  The large, lidded eyes continued to gaze at me through the smoke. ‘For money?’ said the easy breath coming through the pearly capped teeth and silver-pink mouth. ‘If there were any person in this world who can induce me to pay what I don’t intend to pay, I shouldn’t be talking to you of all these matters now. Mr Panadek is much too wise a gentleman to attempt blackmail. He has no interest, I am sure, in the child. While it would be a pity, there would be no permanent damage caused by Benedict’s parentage being known. My will ensures that if Benedict dies, my daughter inherits no more than the barest minimum. If on the other hand, Benedict has the ability, I shall be quite content to see him take over the business when he is of an age. I have made provision for that also. In the meantime, my main concern is to preserve the child from his parents. If need be, I shall do it by placing him totally in your hands. That is why you were chosen.’

  It seemed as good a chance as any. I said, ‘I was told that you asked for me even before I was free of my last job. Might I ask who recommended me?’

  ‘You may, but I am afraid I cannot indulge you,’ Ingmar said. ‘There were a dozen of you. and my secretary made the inquiries which led to the final selection. We had the opinion, I believe, of another nanny and several employers. Indeed, in your case, the Princess at Cape Cod was one.’

  I’d never been employed by the Princess. But Hugo knew her. He had had lunch there. I said, ‘I think Benedict is bright. He’s worth cultivating.’

  ‘In spite of the fact,’ said his grandmother, ‘that if he
’s kidnapped he could cost me a fortune?’

  I said, ‘He’s as safe as he can be. The yacht is very secure, and Mr Johnson has taken every precaution.’

  ‘I believe he has,’ Ingmar said. She swung her feet slowly round, and removing her cigarette holder, took out and stubbed the cigarette. Then, one red nailed hand on her knee, she said, ‘Do you always sit like that? Yes. Your training, I suppose. Well, I must tell you I was taken with your Mr Johnson when I first met him, and I have been impressed with him at each meeting since. Rosamund tells me the painting is quite astonishing. He is not, therefore, behind these attempts on Benedict and you are not, I now see, in collusion with him. I am glad to be reassured.’

  My mouth dropped open. I stared at her and then, despite myself, felt my face relax in a grin. ‘You thought. . . Of course, you might very well imagine such a thing.’ ‘The projection of possibilities,’ Ingmar Warr Beckenstaff said, ‘is the structure upon which large businesses are founded and flourish. You had better return to your charge. I have arranged that from last month onwards, your salary will be increased by a third. I have also left instructions that all your existing cosmetics should be thrown away and replaced by those of the firm by whom you are employed. No excuse is acceptable: there is an anti-allergy range. What is it?’

  She was talking to someone behind me. I turned my head and saw the blotched face of Ingmar’s P.R. man. He said, ‘Madame . . .’ and the telephone rang.

  ‘Answer it,’ said Ingmar Warr Beckenstaff, to me.

  I answered it, squeezing between the pink sofas and around the silver baskets of roses and peonies. It was on a desk by the large boat-deck windows and as I picked it up and said, ‘Hullo? Mrs Warr Beckenstaff’s cabin’, my gaze rested on the voile curtains and the deck and the harbour beyond them. And on the water.