Split Code (6 page)

Nannies know everything. ‘She’s had a sitting already,’ I said.

‘At the Waldorf.’ The lumberjack was maintaining possession of the pedal bike in the face of bodily assault by a black-eyed child in a fur coat and a crash helmet. The baby in the penny-farthing started to grizzle and Bunty rocked the contraption with one booted foot. I added, to get it clear, ‘He’s rich, single, thirty-eight and a friend of my father’s.’

‘They’re the worst,’ Bunty said cheerfully. ‘Some of them start early and never leave off. Even Grover got down to undoing my buttons on Saturday. Just like your father, I told him.’

‘Talking of Grover,’ Charlotte said. ‘You’ve forgotten to take out his dummy again. If Pa Eisenkopp sees you, he’ll flip his lid, dearie.’

Bunty leaped to her feet, swearing mildly, and tripped off, teetering, among the pedal bikes, where she pounced on the lumberjack and evacuated its plug with a plop. Grover let out a wail which sharpened audibly as he was lifted from the pedal bike labelled ‘Sanchez’ and replaced on that marked ‘Grover’. ‘The Eisenkopps,’ Charlotte said, ‘are hell on hygiene. Fortunately, Bunty couldn’t care less.’

A park attendant with a leaf badge on his left shoulder went by, wheeling a large oil can with brooms on it and a small boy riding outside talking, his fists on the rim. Someone fell out of a swing and was taken, yelling, to the Mister Softee van. A girl in pigtails went through on roller skates, narrowly missing Grover and Bunty.

In the pram, Grover’s sister had begun a further series of more insistent complaints, ending in a short squeal of the kind that means ‘nappie pin’. I was nearest, so I turned back the fur coverlet, the merino blankets and the Viyella sheet, revealing Sukey Eisenkopp, who had all her fingers stuck through different holes in her fine fancy shawl, and scratch marks all over her face from her fingernails. She also had both the terry and Harrington squares between her bare, mottled limbs, and looked like a two-legged terrapin.

I said, fixing her, ‘Do the Eisenkopps know they’re going to have a hen-toed daughter and a son with bent teeth from dummy-sucking?’

Charlotte put down the child whose nose she was wiping and came over to help. ‘I did tell Bunty to alter the nappies,’ she said. ‘The shawl’s a new disaster, and so are the scratches: she’ll have to get gloves. Will you tell her? Or shall I?’

With good reason, non-Maggie Bee nurses do not appreciate Maggie Bee nurses telling them their business. I was therefore surprised, and Charlotte saw it, and grinned. ‘Bunty doesn’t mind. Bunty’s trouble is that she has three serious boyfriends and can’t make up her mind which one to bypass her pills for, or whether to save it all up for her trips back to England. I tell you, she gets more Friendship Club letters than I do. But she’s all right. She likes kids, when she remembers.’

There was nothing reassuring about that statement. Charlotte’s address book is maintained with the help of roughly five hundred male correspondents in both hemispheres.

‘Even when she remembers,’ I said cautiously, ‘isn’t it rough on the kids?’

‘It won’t be, now she’s got you next door,’ said Charlotte with, as it turned out, push-button accuracy.

Then she 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 bench, 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 merinos. The pram was empty but for one knitted bootee. Benedict Booker-Readman had vanished.

Two of the Mallard children, frightened by the look on Charlotte’s face, started to cry. Charlotte said, ‘I didn’t see
anyone.’

I was looking round. ‘There’s a pram over there. Run. If he’s not in it, try East End Avenue. I’ll go out by the river.’ The Carl Shurz has a very small tots’ lot. Unless he’d been chucked in the loo, or another pram, he was out in the streets in a basket, a bag or a car, in which case the Booker-Readmans had lost him. There was also the network of paths between the rest of the park and East River.

He wasn’t in the lavatories. I affronted a number of kids of both genders and then hared for the riverside exit, shouting to Bunty, who had stopped there with Grover. She said, her hand over Grover’s mouth, ‘No one came out this way. Wait. Someone did. The attendant.’ She turned suddenly and made a grab at one of the kids staring at us. ‘You had a ride on the oil can. Where did he go? The man with the brushes?’

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?

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 lace, 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.