Johnson-Johnson 06 – Dolly and the Nanny Bird

SPHERE BOOKS LIMITED

30/32 Gray’s Inn Road, London WC1X 8JL

First published in Great Britain by Michael Joseph Ltd., 1976

Copyright © Dorothy Dunnett 1976

First Sphere Books edition 1978

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Set in Intertype Pilgrim

Printed in Great Britain by Hunt Barnard Printing Ltd, Aylesbury, Bucks.

KIDNAP…

Very quietly, Charlotte said, ‘Joanna?’ The last time I heard her whisper like that, the incubator lights had cut out in a prem. ward. This time, she was staring at Benedict’s baby carriage. It was still there, braked at the end of the wooden park bench where we were sitting, shining. But the hood was eased back and the cover half off, instead of mitred and tucked as I’d left it. Nor, like a wren’s egg in its nest, was Ben’s bullet head bedded under it. I got to the pram before Charlotte’s next breath and tore up the blankets. The pram was empty but for one knitted bootee. Benedict Booker-Readman had vanished…

Also by Dorothy Dunnett in Sphere Books:

the game of kings

queens’ play

disorderly knights

pawn in frankincense

the ringed castle

checkmate

Dear Elizabeth, dear Edna, dear Sue:

This book is for you, and for all those other friends of the young who left,

carrying with you the love of two generations.

It is also, of course, for your children.

Everyone knows three boring facts about Eskimos. I’ll tell you another. Whenever I think about Eskimos, I think about bifocal spectacles.

Ever since last winter, that is; when I was supposed to be between jobs and spent a week glacier-skiing in Canada. My college friend Charlotte Medleycott came along with me. Charlie had a job in New York and maintained boy friends, like Barclaycards, in every country with a cheap postal system. When we set off to this party in Winnipeg, no fewer than six of them asked to fly with us.

One of them, I have cause to remember, was an ice hockey genius called Donovan, acquired from an organisation entitled Data-Mate. He was large, long-haired and bracing, as if scoured and hosed-down with ice slush.

We borrowed a plane and Donovan flew it to Winnipeg. It turned out that he’d just passed the test for his pilot’s licence at the fifth time of asking. In my opinion, he should have asked a bit more before someone answered. We landed at the airport in tingling silence and he made straight for the loo bearing three brimming bags
pour la nausée
, and they weren’t all his, I can tell you.

Winnipeg stands in the flat, frozen prairie bang in the centre of Canada, and even the city highways were deep in hard snow. The neon signs said Ten, which means degrees Fahrenheit, and the cab radio was also keen to spread the good news. ‘Bundle up folks,’ it kept saying. ‘We’ve a low coming of fifteen to twenty below.’

We suspected. I could see Charlotte’s pinched face over her Fun Fur and the escorts were all done up in Raccoon and Tibetan Yak and Scimmia and Alaskan Timberwolf and Natural Unplucked Nutria. We arrived at Government House and the Aide simply stood there crying, ‘My God, the Wombles.’

I could tell he was pleased. Once a year the State of Manitoba holds an art show of Canadian Primitives, and celebrates the opening with a bang at the Governor General’s. Tonight was the bang, and Charlotte and I and the six Huskies were there to make sure it wasn’t a whimper.

It worked, too. Charlotte, in lumps of Willie Woo and a dress slit to her armpits, brought joy to the Senior Citizens in between pointing me out all the richest, most unmarried Americans. The handsomest man in the room, it proved, wasn’t American at all, but English like us. ‘Simon Booker-Readman,’ said Charlotte, consulted. ‘Simply gorgeous, I do agree with you. But Married to Money, name of Rosamund. She’s currently in England, producing.’

‘Oh?’ I said.

‘But I guarantee, totally organised,’ Charlie said. ‘My dear, even the midwife will have a title. The Booker-Readman home is in New York. He runs an art gallery. Sultry Simon, they call him… You
are
a bitch, spending that kind of money on Italian knits. How do you do it?’

She didn’t really expect to be answered. Which was just as well, under the circumstances.

After that, I worked quite hard for a bit among the City Council and the Legislature and then hunted out some of the exhibitors, who talked about quilting and Raku ceramics and splatter work. Ethnologists adore Winnipeg, which is a social porridge of Red Indians, Ukrainians, Eskimos, Japanese and what have you, which makes for a change at least in the chit-chat. I kept seeing the flaxen hair and godlike profile of Simon Booker-Readman, but I gave myself a full hour before making tracks for him. I fell hard once before for a married man, and I still remembered the pangs.

I wasn’t going overboard for Simon Booker-Readman, whose wife was in England, producing.

He was speaking to Charlotte, and since he was Married to Money I couldn’t be accused of poaching. In fact, he turned his incredible jaw line and said, ‘You’re Joanna Emerson, a sort of niece of the Governor. Charlotte tells me she’s staying with you.’

‘Well, with my aunt in Toronto,’ I said. He was tall and slim, and his eyelashes were stupendous. ‘We missed the show, flying in late. Have you bought any Primitives?’

He opened his eyes. ‘Booker-Readman is better known than I bargained for. You know the gallery, do you? Actually, whisper it, I come mainly to chase up some ikons for a mad collector. But I did mark down one or two useful Primitives. And taped the opening speech. You made a mistake missing that.’

Several people had told me I had made a mistake, missing that. It had apparently gone down as the most hilarious opening speech in the history of the Winnipeg Art Gallery, which would have thrilled me if I’d known whether or not Bob Hope opened it last time. I had opened my mouth to say something when a voice behind me said, ‘Having fun, Simon darling? He’s sicked up his disgusting feed, so I’ve left him with Lady Carrington’s girl. I want a very strong whisky, and some sympathy.’

Rosamund Booker-Readman wasn’t in England producing. She was here, having produced, and the product, no doubt, was upstairs in a basket. She was, moreover, a very upper-class lady, being at least five feet ten, and thin, and negligent, with brown Nefertiti hair tucked behind her ringed ears and beads falling in tiers to her kneecaps. She looked straight at Charlie and said, ‘I’ve seen you before, haven’t I?’

‘Charlotte Medleycott,’ said Charlie Medleycott, smiling sweetly.

If she thought that was going to get her off the hook, she was mistaken. ‘I have. At the Embassy. You’re with the Mallards!’ said Mrs Booker-Readman, a little fretfully. ‘I don’t suppose by any God-like chance you’re free, are you?’

C. Medleycott is a nurse by profession, and is used to this. ‘I’m terribly sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m still with the Mallards: just on holiday. But congratulations anyway. What have you got?’

‘A bastard,’ said Rosamund wearily. ‘Who won’t take his bloody bottle, and won’t sleep, and won’t let anyone else either. He’s upstairs. I don’t suppose you’d like to look at him?’

We could hear him as it was, every time the talk died. He sounded like a piccolo with asthma.

Charlie, I must say, has her moments. She said, ‘Of course I should. What are you giving him? ’ and a few minutes later could be seen climbing the stairs, tracked by two bankers, I noticed.

Rosamund didn’t go with her. The family nanny had died, the maternity nurse had departed and both the girls the agency sent her had left after the first week of four-hourly feeds, which are bad enough during the day, and ruin the night, of course, for all purposes including sleeping.

‘I don’t know how they do it,’ said Rosamund, referring to the absent Charlotte as she fitted a menthol cigarette into a long silver holder. ‘It would drive me quite mad in a month. Poor Lady Carrington: someone’s got her Eskimos pissed.’

Everyone turned. From a corner solid with felt and cross stitching came at regular intervals arpeggios of Eskimo laughter, delivered from barrel chests whose lungs could scare an elephant seal into a stammer. Someone said, ‘They’re not all that bombed, ma’am. I guess they’re with that crazy dude who opened the exhibition.’

‘Any man who can make an Eskimo laugh is a man worth saving up for a gloomy sales year,’ I said. ‘The Bureau of Ethnology must be rolling with the times at last. Let’s go and meet him.’

‘Actually, it’s not the Bureau of Ethnology,’ said Simon Booker-Readman. ‘They got someone better by accident. Would you like to meet him, Joanna? I may call you Joanna?’ He took my arm.

It wasn’t officially what I was there for. If there was any part of the bang which didn’t need livening up, it was the segment in the far corner. But I was curious, and I walked over with Sultry Simon, and waited behind all the parkas while my escort cleared a path to the dude who opened the exhibition. And then I stood very still, no doubt changing colour.

As a spectacle in itself, it would hardly have taken the drive-ins by storm. All I or anyone saw was a shortsighted man in a knitted tie and a nondescript sports jacket and trousers. If you looked a little more closely, you saw he had a lot of black hair and odd cufflinks. His glasses, if you looked more closely still, were bifocals.

I didn’t need to look closely. I didn’t even listen as Sultry Simon confided: ‘Name of Johnson, Joanna. The portrait painter.
The
portrait painter, as a matter of fact. You’ve probably heard of him.’

I’d not only heard of him, I’d met him. When I was seventeen. In my father’s company.

He was a friend of my father. He might even know who my last employer was. He was going to wreck the whole flaming enterprise.

My father’s friend Johnson set down his drink, glasses glinting, and addressed me plaintively. ‘I’ve been trying and trying to get my uncle in Brighton to knit me one of those, but the face never turns out quite right. You won’t remember me. I was a friend of your father until he found out about your mother and me.’

I remembered the sass, too; but this time I was old enough to answer back.

‘I know,’ I said. ‘I’ve just checked the proofs of her memoirs. How are you?’

‘Dazzled,’ he said amiably. His eyebrows, black as his hair, were the only guide to his expression, really, behind all the glass. He directed a flash of the bifocals at Simon. ‘We used to meet when she was a schoolgirl. I know her parents. Are you doing anything after?’

‘
Are you bringing Johnson
?’ my mother used to ask my father. ‘
Oh, good
.’ And even after I was at college she would write: ‘
Johnson came over yesterday. He’s painting the duchess
.’

‘Doing anything after?’ Booker-Readman was repeating, resignation in his voice. ‘Hardly, old boy. We’ve got this bloody brat with us. Rosamund is about to blow her mind.’

‘Bring it! ’ Johnson said largely. ‘It doesn’t drink; it doesn’t start fights, it doesn’t run after crumpet. Most civilised gent. in the province. Go and get Rosamund and the basket and make your farewells. Joanna is coming too.’

I stopped myself on the verge of a ‘How can I?’ bit. Something about the tilt of the glasses told me he knew all about Charlotte and the six Huskies and our invitation to stay at Government House till tomorrow. ‘You’ve arranged it,’ I said.

‘I’ve got you leave of absence till midnight, sweetie,’ Johnson said: ‘The Eskimos are giving a party, and they won’t let me come unless I bring the two prettiest blondes in the room. Truly. Charlie will be perfectly happy to stay in Government House, so long as you leave her all the Huskies.’

I don’t think Simon caught it, or would have resented it if he had. And it was true, of course, about Charlie. A wide gentleman with long black hair and a moustache pulled my wet-look silky Italian knit. ‘One for Sex,’ he said. ‘You come to my party?’

Another gentleman with flat cheeks, a round crop and a smile tugged the other sleeve. ‘Two for Sex. You are coming?’ he said.

‘Three for Sex?’ I said. I had been set up by Johnson. I could feel it.

‘No,’ said Johnson happily. ‘Three-Four Six is back home in Moose Jaw. But One-Two Seven and One-Four Eight are all waiting right here round the blow-hole.’

There was a roar of unalloyed laughter. It was their standard leg-pull. Faced with five hundred folk-artists called Ahlooloo the only solution, I suppose, is to settle for painters by numbers.

They waited for me while I collected my skiing anorak and my boots, and made my excuses to my host and hostess and the others. Then I walked out of Government House with my four Eskimo hosts, two Anthropologists, one Ukrainian, three Booker-Readmans (one of them in a basket) and Johnson.

Plus, he advised, a computer.

We drove straight to the railway station, where we plugged the car engine heaters into a row of wall sockets, beside a policeman in pavement-length buffalo. Then we made our way through the station, out into the snow at the back, off the platform and down among the railway lines, which were also covered with snow. It was twenty-five degrees below zero Fahrenheit, and nine o’clock at night, and dark, and deserted. It was the kind of cold you feel first as a stiffening, crackling crust inside your nose, followed by a sparkling sensation all over your face, like stepping into a stiff gin and tonic.

The Eskimos were used to it. They walked along in single file cracking jokes about Indians which the Ukrainian also enjoyed: it was an undoubted tribute to something that in spite of all the well-intentioned hospitality they were all of them sober as housemothers. Johnson’s state I was unable to assess, except that I knew he wanted me to ask where we were going and I wouldn’t.

That is, with Johnson there, I knew I wasn’t going to swell the white slave traffic and I am against pandering to rich portrait painters wearing old macs and tatty waistcoats knitted by their uncles in Brighton.

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 foot stool 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.