Split Code

by Dorothy Dunnett

  About the time I thought we were on our way by foot back to my aunt in Toronto there appeared a great deal of steam, and a long, dark shape sprouting cables and periodic bunches of icicles, which looked uncommonly like an ordinary, empty, CNR railway carriage.

  Ahead, Johnson abruptly rose dimly into the air; first, it became clear, with the aid of a footstool and next up a pair of club steps to a doorway. There he turned and surveyed us. ‘And a great welcome, folks, on behalf of E2-46 and his friends to the Vice-Presidential Car of the Lazy Three. See you later.’

  It wasn’t that he was going away: just that the heat inside the car steamed up his glasses like lavatory windows so that we had to undress him: a trace of a struggle with eleven folk and a basket all removing their slushmold galoshes and coats at one and the same time. Then Rosamund disappeared to park the basket in an adjacent bedroom conducted by E1-48, while Johnson sat us all down, and a white-jacketed steward came for the drink orders. In an isolated railway carriage in a railway siding on a winter’s night in Winnipeg. With Eskimos. And Simon Booker-Readman. And, of course, Johnson.

  One of the Ethnology men, who were both Professors, explained that the Eskimos were living on board for a day or two, before being hauled to the next station, so to speak, on the cultural circuit for short-changed minorities. They were all on great terms with the steward, who had their numbers off pat, and also their drink orders. Without their raccoon hoods and new cross-stitched parkas they were still twice as wide as anyone else. The Professors, who were thin and bearded, sat lodged between them like piano keys, but the Booker-Readmans chose the opposite sofa with Johnson.

  I claimed the Ukrainian and he turned out to have lots of chat, which was a bonus. His name was Vladimir, and he painted ikons and ran a launderette in Vancouver. We got deep into the launderette, over which I could hear a learned discussion about Angmagssalik sculptures passing to and fro between Booker-Readman and the Professors, interspersed with a six-sided ding-dong about the Hamilton Tiger-Cats’ chance in the Grey Cup between Johnson, Rosamund and the Numerate Four who were drinking like pails, and showing a tendency to kick their feet into the air.

  They had a table-lamp over twice before the steward came through to announce that dinner was served. Then E1-27, tripping up on the way to the dining-room, hit the end of the buffet table with his chin and ran straight up the spare ribs and salmon in aspic, ending unabashed with his head in a flower bowl. E2-46, volunteering to wipe him off, discovered E1-27 was ticklish and they both descended sagging and chortling to the floor, where they rolled about for a bit. My Ukrainian, with his friendly smile, walked over and lay on them. They all three went to sleep, abruptly.

  ‘Mr Johnson?’ ventured the steward.

  Johnson, who had stepped back to survey the passage, re-entered the dining-room and addressed the affronted Booker-Readmans. ‘The other two Nanooks, I’m afraid, are out cold as well. Should we put them to bed?’

  I could hear the cream of the Bureau of Canadian Ethnology putting the other two, puffing, to bed. I got down on my knees and took hold, with resignation, of Vladimir. By the time I got him into a bunk, Johnson and Booker-Readman had tidied the other two numbers away and the steward had redistributed the aspic. We all sat down to dinner, Simon, Johnson, Rosamund, the two Professors and I. The candlelight pulsed on the stuffed peaches and cherries, on the dishes of roast beef and cob corn; on the fingermarks on Simon’s mohair suiting and the lard-stiffened folds of my silky-knit, which felt like a fire curtain. One of the Professors was going to have a black eye.

  Not that the Eskimos had resisted. In fact, they had wanted to go to bed more than anybody, but not necessarily alone. For it is a well-known fact that very cold air will sober you, if you have been drinking heavily, whereas the first drink indoors afterwards will send you straight up and over the moon.

  At least, Johnson said it was well known. He described his last client, who had been a Chinese dipsomaniac, and the one before that who had been a horse; and the one before that, who ought to have been a horse but in fact acted in koala westerns in Sydney.

  It began to feel like a party.

  At half past ten, over coffee, Rosamund Booker-Readman said, ‘Oh hell. What’s the time, Simon?’

  ‘Eleven,’ I said. It was none of my business, but I did go that far.

  The Booker-Readmans looked at one another. He said, ‘Why disturb him? He’s sleeping.’

  One of the Professors said, ‘They’re all sleeping. You don’t have to go, surely?’ Rosamund, as I hope I have indicated, was as well as select, quite excessively dishy.

  Simon said, ‘We can stay for a bit. It feels like being let out of clink.’

  ‘That’s my line,’ said his wife. ‘You haven’t been stuck with him for four days. Have you a wife, Mr Johnson?’

  ‘No,’ Johnson said. ‘Although I rather like the sound of E4-257, who does twenty-foot stone-cuts of birdmen. We could set up a Druidic dovecote at Rankin with her models in twenty-foot pigeonholes.’

  The Professors were unmarried also and had to spend their weekends with their mothers, fixing the plumbing and having their underwear mended. One of them asked. ‘How old is the offspring?’

  Rosamund Booker-Readman was impatient. ‘Goodness knows, I’ve lost count. My mother’s moron of a doctor got the date wrong and it turned up fifteen days ahead of schedule. I missed the Hartleymann wedding.’

  I remembered the Hartleymann wedding. There were twenty- two bridal attendants and no publishable group photograph. I said, ‘Then he’s thirty days old at the most.’

  Nobody complimented me on my arithmetic. They all went on smoking and drinking. One of the Professors was reminded of a funny story. I got up in the middle while they were beginning to laugh, and let myself out into the passage, and asked where the basket was. The steward took me into a single-bunk room reeking of baby. The light was off and the basket was dumped on the floor. I hooked a towel over the bulb, switched on and had a good look.

  The Booker-Readman offspring was about twenty-five days old and a sturdy eight-pounder. His nightie was soaking and so were his smart cyclamen sheets. There was a patch of curdled milk under one ear.

  He was asleep but hungry, his mouth making sucking movements and his face beginning to screw. He wouldn’t be asleep for very much longer. A hunt round and under the mattress brought to a light a box of tissues and nothing else. I went back to the party and said, ‘Johnson, I’m awfully sorry to abandon the Numbers, but I’ve got to get back.’

  Simon Booker-Readman got up. ‘Oh, why? Are you feeling all right?’ he said. He had a boudoir voice too. His equipment was really unfairly prodigious. I smiled at him and said I was quite healthy, thank you. I was still smiling when I fell into his arms, and he fell into Johnson’s and Johnson fell over the Professors, who struck Rosamund variously with their elbows and burst her beads.

  Rumbling, grinding and squeaking, the wheels of the coach began trundling beneath us. The pullman trembled. The rumbling increased and quickened. A row of lights flashed by the windows.

  We were moving.

  That is, for an hour and a half, this had been a lone detached coach in a siding.

  Now we were a part of a train leaving Winnipeg.

  ‘Someone,’ said Johnson severely, ‘has stood on my glasses.’

  Rosamund Booker-Readman stopped screaming, picked herself up and began asking loud questions like everyone else. One of the Professors fumbled with curtains. ‘No, no,’ Johnson said with mild irritation. ‘The telephone. If someone will guide me to the sitting-room, I shall telephone the driver.’

  I thought it was a joke until we got back to the sitting-room, but there it was on the wall. A barometer, a thermometer, a speed dial and a telephone. We were going at fifty miles an hour. Johnson lifted the receiver and said into it, ‘Driver?’

  We all stood about.

  ‘Driver?’ said Johnson again. He joggled the rest, perhaps in order to alert the telephone exchange. Then he turned
round, the classic expression on his unfocused face. ‘The line’s dead,’ he said.

  My responding hoot clashed with another response we might have anticipated: an outburst of short-winded wailing. Rosamund Booker-Readman cursed and took a step, in a harassed way, towards the passage. The large figure of E1-46, appearing there, took her comfortably in its arms and said, ‘You are sleepy too? I am One for Sex.’ He had on a pair of Angora wool long-johns.

  Johnson, walking like Mister Magoo, said, ‘Oh, steward, you might take the bourbon before it rolls over,’ and handed the bottle to E1-46, who dropped Rosamund and retired with the booze to his bedroom. One of the Professors, from the direction of the galley, said, ‘The steward’s knocked himself out. Help, someone.’

  My Italian knit was beyond hope anyhow; so I helped. The staff rooms lay at the end of the carriage. We hoisted the stricken steward on to his bunk and I bathed and plastered the cut on his head and began to get him under the blankets. Through the door, I could hear the wailing going on, with certain vibrations to indicate that the wailer had been lifted and joggled.

  Joggling a wet, hungry baby is a fat lot of use. I tucked up the steward and went back along the corridor. The Eskimo had not reappeared. The four Caucasian brains of the expedition were in the sitting-room, pouring whisky and discussing the situation. Mother Booker-Readman was in the single-bunk room with the unshaded light blazing down on her son’s rolling head. She was holding him like a rabbit under the arms, which were about the only dry places left, and he was bawling so hard his head was scarlet under the fuzz. She said, ‘He’s dirty.’

  It didn’t need mentioning. Also, everything he had was coming down, the longer she joggled him. It must have been a strain for her, too: she was gripping him as if about to hook him serially on to a curtain rail. I said, ‘According to Johnson, it may be several hours before we stop at a station. Or, if we’re with an express train, the whole of the night.’ I followed her gaze to the pulsing fontanelle on top of her son and heir’s head. ‘When did he have his last bottle?’

  ‘Oh Christ,’ Rosamund said. She laid the baby back on its sopping sheet, whereupon it turned a darker red and set up a screech like a corn-crake. Green bubbles welled from its nostrils. Its mother said, ‘I’ll sue them for this. We were to fly back to New York in the morning. And you’re right. What about Benedict? He got his last feed at six.’

  Benedict. Oh, well. I said, ‘What’s he on?’ and wasn’t surprised when she simply said, ‘Milk’. The agency girl had left a formula and a bottle or two behind her, but these, of course, were back at the Forty Garry Hotel, together with the Harrington squares and the nappies. I said, ‘Well, there’s milk and hot water. Why don’t you clean him up while I heat something?’

  She stared at me. There were bags under her handsome eyes where Benedict’s demands had kept her up for a night or two. She said, ‘Are you joking? I’m going to bloody spew as it is. Get the steward or someone.’

  I treated it as a reasonable suggestion and said, ‘The steward’s out cold. I’ll do it, if you don’t mind the legwork. We’ll need a bowl of warm water and soap, and a bunch of clean towels, if you can find them. And a polythene bag, maybe the roasting size. Also a plastic sheet would be nice, or a tablecloth.’

  She found two, which saved the bed and what was left of my creative knitwear. Then while she was off boiling a kettle I picked up the poor bloody mite, stripped it, and ramming its nappies, its clothes and its sheets into the roasting bag, laid it on my knee and proceeded to soap and rinse it with a new dish cloth. After that, it got a folded table napkin between its raw legs and a towel rolled like a tube round its bottom.

  By the time Rosamund came back, it was back in its cot with another towel and a plastic tablecloth under it, and a couple of blankets furled round its torso. It was still yelling blue murder and the smell hadn’t dispersed so’s you’d notice, so I suggested she went through to Simon and had a stiff drink while I got the milk going. I waited until she’d gone, and then took the carrycot through with me to the galley. I couldn’t spare the poor sod a hand, but I could talk to it.

  The galley had an enormous steel stove covered with gas jets. There were hot cupboards in steel up to the ceiling, and implements of every kind hanging all over the walls. There was also a refrigerator, with milk. I found a strainer, a cup, a spoon, a measuring jug and a couple of pans and scalded them all, prior to boiling up a pint of milk in one pan and a jugful of drinking water in the other. Then I added seven ounces of H20 to the milk, strained five ounces of the mix into a cup and sat it in cold water while I got some cotton-wool from the bathroom cabinet and twirled it round Benedict’s breathing apparatus, in recognition of the fact that he was shortly going to require his mouth for alternative purposes. Then I heaved him up, stuck a doubled table napkin under his negligible chin and dipped one finger into the milk.

  It was all right. I changed the bowl of cold water for a bowl of hot, scooped up a spoonful of milk, and held it in front of him.

  He stopped yelling. ‘Come on, Ben,’ I said. ‘You’ve got to start on spoons some time. This is your big moment, brother.’

  I tipped in the first one, to let him get the taste, but the next five or six he sucked off the spoon himself. It was the bluntest I could find, since I didn’t want him to start life with a small, well-cut smile. After about three ounces he began to grizzle at the feel of the spoon and suck when it wasn’t there. At four ounces he went on strike, and just cried.

  He didn’t cry very long, because his eyes were closing already with tiredness because of the crying he’d done already, plus the food and the warmth and the dryness. I didn’t try any more, but stuck the cup back in its bowl and held an intelligent one-sided conversation with him, oscillating gently. He fell asleep, and I put him down in his carrycot. Simon Booker-Readman burst in and said, ‘What’s wrong?’ sharply.

  ‘I cut his throat,’ I said mildly. ‘I can’t stand the smell.’ I said it mildly because he was the only one who had noticed the silence, even though he took the cause of it totally in his stride, being under the impression that the child had been induced to sit up and have a cheese hamburger. The carrycot back in the bedroom, I returned to where Johnson was playing cribbage, through field-glasses, with one of the Professors. Rosamund was lying back beside a neat bourbon, and the other Professor was reading. ‘Meanwhile, back at the Orgy,’ Johnson said. ‘Have you done with the kettle? If I can find some sugar, I was going to make us all toddy.’

  ‘I couldn’t find any sugar,’ I said. After viewing that nappy, I hadn’t looked for it very hard. I added, ‘There’s a pack of airport sugar somewhere in my anorak, if you can find it. The kettle is disengaged. Why is it so quiet?’

  ‘Benedict has stopped bawling,’ Rosamund said. She didn’t open her eyes. Johnson leaned over and switched off the cassette player.

  Silence fell. ‘It is quiet,’ he said. The only real sound was that of Eskimos snoring. Rosamund’s second bourbon, momentarily full, stood in well-behaved immobility, which was more than the rest of us did. We swung, as one man, to the speed dial.

  It registered nil.

  Our cries as we ripped back the curtains wakened the Ethnics.

  Our further cries, as we flung open the Vice-Presidential door, would have untangled a Kajuraho carving.

  We had stopped. We had stopped on a plain, with no buildings in sight, in total darkness in the midst of a snow-storm. And the rest of the train, and the engine, had vanished.

  TWO

  Of Johnson, eyeless in Manitoba, I had no great expectations. You couldn’t say of the anthropologists that they were stoned out of their skulls; but neither were they in the way of dealing with what you might call emergencies. The steward was still out cold. The Booker-Readmans had, at public or finishing school, never even met a Boy Scout. But you would expect, alone in the howling wastelands of Canada, in a deserted railway carriage with the temperature at twenty-five at least under, that the men for the job would be Eskim
os.

  Not so. Even after we got them outside, they merely stamped about in the snow on the railway track. Tracking them from the light of the windows, the Professors reported that, far from hunting, fishing, or erecting an igloo, the quartet were snowballing each other.

  About that time, I got into my boots and my anorak and, prising out my private Ukrainian, set off to see what observation could do.

  I had a torch, because I always have a torch in my anorak pocket. We walked along the snow on the track, with the car’s row of brilliantly lit windows above us. Then the coach came to an end, and we were in the dark, looking down at the trampled snow where some person or persons had unhitched us.

  Some person or persons, it was apparent, who could only have come from the train that was pulling us. The footprints, half obscured already by snow, led along the track and ended in nowhere, where the bastard or bastards had got themselves back on the train. Vladimir, in whom the running of a launderette had induced a suspicious nature, said, ‘But why did the train stop in the first place? There is no station.’

  There was no station. There wasn’t even a tepee. We walked by mutual consent along the rails to where the head of the train must have been, and saw nothing. There hadn’t been a Red Indian ambush, a trappers’ demonstration; a moose asleep on the line. ‘He stopped,’ my Ukrainian said, ‘because he was before time? No. He did not stop long enough.’

  ‘He stopped,’ I said, ‘by my guess, because someone pulled the communication cord, and then made up some story while someone else broke the connection. Let’s get back.’

  ‘Christ my Saviour,’ said Vladimir in a very reverent manner. ‘The Vice-Presidential car has now gone.’

  It hadn’t, but the lights had gone out and it smelt, as we climbed in, of wet Eskimo and panic and whisky. There seemed to be a great many more than twelve of us, or eleven not counting the steward. Rosamund’s voice said. ‘Heavens, you’re cold,’ while she fended herself off my anorak. She had her own fur coat on. In the light of the torch, I saw they all had. Of course, with the connection gone, we had no heating.