Split Code (5 page)

They had known what he did. And now they knew what I did also.

That much, Johnson had found out. He also knew about the alternatives which Mike’s Department had offered me. To hide, or to help them by carrying on as if nothing untoward had been noticed, either about Mike’s accident or his papers.

It had been tempting to hide. But I wanted to help flush out Michael’s murderers; and perhaps I had. For, one week after his death, a Mrs Warr Beckenstaff had applied to the Margaret Beaseford Nursery Nurses’ Training College for a nanny with my qualifications. My qualifications down to the smallest detail. And at a time when no one outside my own friends and the Department knew that I was out of a job.

I turned down the offer when it reached me. I carried out orders and turned down every offer the first time. This one wasn’t renewed. But at the same time, Mrs Warr Beckenstaff refused every other nanny they sent her. Refused even after the grandchild was born for whom the nanny was wanted. The grandchild being Benedict, the son of her only child Rosamund Booker-Readman.

‘Then,’ said Johnson, ‘Rosamund and the baby went back to New York. The Department thought they were on to something, but didn’t want to appear too keen. They knew Simon comes to Winnipeg every year for the Gallery. So they sent you to cruise all over Canada. If Simon came north, it was half of a coincidence. If he came north with the baby, it was more than half a coincidence. If he went all out to engage you for the baby, it was too much of a coincidence to ignore. Which brings the story to date. My bloody coffee’s cold.’

He drank some, and his peculiar glasses turned white. ‘And now you’re wondering how I come into it.’

‘I know. You’re my protection,’ I said sarcastically. ‘Does my father always blab this much?’

‘Always,’ said Johnson blandly. ‘No. As a matter of fact, no one asked me to come. I’m just interfering. I had a bone, rather, to pick with Mike’s murderers.’

I supposed I should have to report it to somebody. I said, ‘So you agree with the Department? You think the Booker-Readmans have some ulterior motive in booking me? But you know, I could have sworn that neither of them knew I was a nanny beforehand. The mother especially.’

‘You were acting: why shouldn’t she be?’ Johnson said. ‘Or perhaps Simon was the prime mover. He was pretty keen to show you in action with Benedict. I don’t blame him. I thought that sexy knit was going to do in your chances.’

‘I’m glad you noticed. I thought your glasses were broken,’ I said.

‘Sight,’ said Johnson, ‘was the least of it. No one, at any rate, can suspect you of a burning wish to attach yourself to the Booker-Readmans. The Department has organized that. You’ve turned down Grandmother Warr Beckenstaff. Far from advertising your occupation, you’ve gone to some pains to conceal it. Whoever hooked the coach to that train achieved two things. They exposed you as a nanny, and threw Benedict into your arms so that when the job was offered, you took it. And that is something you hadn’t promised the Department you’d do. Am I right?’

He was right. I had thought my mind was made up. If Simon Booker-Readman had engineered that car crash, I didn’t want to look after his baby. If I was offered the job, it would be significant enough for the Department. They could take it from there.

So I had told the Department. But that, as Johnson said, was before Benedict had been thrown into my arms. Thrown into my arms and firmly kept there, it came to me, by the subsequent actions of Johnson himself; thus aiding and abetting whoever had hooked up the coach in the first place. I said, ‘You wanted me in this job? Why?’

His voice didn’t change. He didn’t put down his coffee. Damn him, he didn’t even blink. He said, ‘Mike’s murderers want you in the job. And I want Mike’s murderers even more than the Department do.’

‘So?’

‘So you have a new job in New York. So have I.’

‘Doing what?’ I said suspiciously.

‘Painting Benedict and his mother. I forgot to tell you. Grandma Warr Beckenstaff asked me in England. That is, we bumped into each other and she -’

‘- Made you an offer you couldn’t refuse? The way,’ I said cautiously, ‘you and I are going to bump into one another?’

This time he did put down his coffee-cup, shaken. ‘Good lord, no,’ Johnson said. ‘You play your game. I play mine. Different boards. I shall be surprised, really, if we meet again.’

Johnson came,
my mother once wrote.
I thought for once we were becoming quite close, and then he sort of melted away in my hands.

Like Sea Monkeys.

The status symbol supreme in New York is a Silver Cross pram with a Beaseford Nanny in uniform pushing it. Beside that, a Rolls Royce is rubbish.

Manhattan is full of Maggie Bee nurses. You can tell us by our pudding-basin green hats and green coats and brown leather gloves over our varnishless, closely pared fingernails. By our lavender dresses with their bows and belts in uniquely dyed ribbon; by our stiff collars with studs and our crackling, box pleated aprons. By our handbags filled with clean tissues and crayons and monogrammed spoons wrapped in handkerchiefs. By the indefinable odour of disinfectant from finger to elbow, and of sour milk about our left shoulder-blades. By the fact, if you care to investigate, that under every stout skirt is a matching set of close-fitting knickers. You can’t make a lap with your knees together which has, as Charlie Medleycott says, been the downfall of many a Nanny.

Charlie’s green coat and hat were the first thing I saw, flying in from Toronto. The next thing was the relieved face of Rosamund Booker-Readman, my new employer, as she hoisted a basket towards me.

She said, ‘I thought I would know you again. Listen, I’m going to lose my flight unless I go now. That’s our address in Bermuda. There’s Benedict. Charlotte will show you where the house is, and your room and everything. The freezer’s full. Ask the help if you want to know anything. Have you money?’

‘No,’ I said. I took the basket. Charlotte’s face was bright red.

‘Oh.’ Rosamund took out her purse and slid out three five dollar bills, which was modest enough considering that she was paying me two hundred dollars a week. Or Grandmother was. I said, taking it, ‘And when will you be back?’

She turned back, looking impatient. She had a cloche hat over her large handsome eyes, and a thirties beaver collar which suited her. ‘Oh, in about a week, I should think. Simon’ll wire you.’

‘Have a good trip,’ I said, but she was off already. From red, Charlotte had gone pale with fellow-feeling under the pudding-basin. I said, ‘Scrub it. I’d rather have that than be fussed over. Look, is this your time off?’ to Charlie.

‘No. The Mallards,’ said Charlotte, ‘have lent me for the morning. What a rotten -’

I let her talk herself out on the cab ride. I hadn’t enjoyed my reception, but I recognized it. Not all mothers grasp the idea that babies are people. Or even that people are people, come to that.

My future home was a brownstone house in three storeys, plus a basement in which Sultry Simon stored the surplus objects from his Madison Avenue gallery. Every window was barred; there were three locks on the front door, and you had to walk round a mat in the hall, or it let off an alarm system. The house itself had had no attention in recent years from anyone except woodworm larvae but that was all right. For the first time for a quite a while I began to feel safe.

Because Benedict, removed from his basket, proved to have a temperature of 104, I was safe for three weeks, in as much as I never stepped over the threshold. One Dr Joshua Gibbings, at unthinkable cost, arrived daily and the Brazilian Help went back and forth to the drug store with Portuguese notes stored in her bosom. Rosamund phoned from Bermuda three times but didn’t come home for ten days.

Other people telephoned, such as Charlotte and her Data-Mate boyfriend Denny Donovan. I had a single innocuous conversation over the phone with Johnson. Johnson, installed at the Waldorf was painting tycoons, tycoons’ daughters and occasionally, he said, tycoons’ mistresses whose tycoons didn’t understand them. He wanted to know when he could paint Rosamund and Benedict, and when my first outing would be. ‘Go with someone else till you get used to the traffic,’ he said. ‘You know. They drive on the right.’

‘Separate boards,’ he had said. I didn’t know what to do about Johnson, so I’d done nothing. The Department had told me I’d be protected, but not by whom. I believed Johnson when he said he had nothing officially to do with it. He was a public figure. He had engineered that commission because he was Mike Widdess’s good friend, not mine. Rosamund came home, and I gave her his message.

I took my weekly telephone call, also innocuous, from my mother, and had Donovan in for a chaste cup of tea in the kitchen, without Charlie’s knowledge and with Rosamund’s affronted agreement. Then she decided to produce
coq au vin
instead of cold beef for supper and Donovan was turned off the breakfast bar by the spice wheel. I was sorry, since he was the only guest I could have who could infect nothing more than a hockey team.

Then Benedict recovered, and the decadent stuff really started. That is, I could have a private life three evenings a week, and during the day could join the pram-bashing league with the rest of the Nannies.

I met Charlotte Medleycott in the Carl Shurz Park just two days later.

The British Embassy being prolific, Charlie had three Mallard kids on the hoof and one bawling its head off in a push-chair. Despite that, she looked the same straight-nosed, leisure-class athlete who had cut a swathe through the boys in Toronto and Winnipeg, or at hunt balls, or at the Maggie Bee back in England, for that matter. She had her hair waved to her ears, and then tongued out sideways under her hat-brim. I thought about growing my hair again. ‘Well?’ she was repeating.

I knew what she was asking. I’d just had my first evening off between the six and ten o’clock feeds, and had spent it with a boy of Charlie’s providing.

There have been more successful evenings. I must have been the only female in New York to fall asleep three times into the Breast of Peach Blossom Duck when out on a first date at Trader Vic’s. I said, ‘He was sweet, Charlie; and I’m meeting him again, when I’m down to four feeds a day and only half dead.’

Charlie peered into the expensive piece of coachwork rolling in front of me, with the hood up and Benedict slumbering neatly inside it. ‘How is he?’

He was well over seven weeks, and eleven pounds five ounces in weight, and was taking an average seven ounces per bottle of newly thickened feed containing two drops of Adexolin, five grains of sodium citrate, and lactose. I said nothing and Charlotte said, ‘He’s filling out. Thank God you got rid of the petunia blankets.’

Some mothers spend the pre-natal months buying midnight-blue buster suits, chocolate nighties and trendy black pillowslips. I’m all for contrast, but most kids are less often peach-coloured than a blotched shade between green and yellow. I said, ‘The girl with the pink pram is calling you.’

We went over and Charlotte did her standard, and slanderous introduction. The girl with the pink pram was called Bunty Cole and I’d heard of her. Among other interesting things, she and her employers lived in the luxury flats next to my brownstone. I remember quite clearly paying attention to her face and her clothes so that if we crossed paths again, I should know her.

As Charlotte and I stood together, Bunty Cole came to our shoulders. She had a tip-tilted nose, brown spaghetti-hoop hair, and lashes glued on her eyelids like draught-excluders. Someone had kitted her out in striped coffee nylon with a smart buff gaberdine trenchcoat. With it, she wore twenty-guinea zipped platform fashion boots to match the high fashion pram that sat perched on its wheels like a penny-farthing. A good-going breeze would have blown any child out of its socket, if not overturned it: the Maggie Bee would have nothing to do with them.

The world is full, however, of nursery nurses with full-scale N.N.E.B. qualifications and Health Diplomas who have not been trained at the Maggie Bee. Bunty Cole, introduced, offered a small, taloned hand. ‘Just a peasant from Liverpool, love. I keep telling Charlie. You either love kids or you hate ‘em, but it’s a great way to flush out the fellas.’ She turned to Charlotte. ‘You know yet what Donovan does?’

‘Plays ice hockey,’ Charlotte said.

‘In his spare time. Sure,’ Bunty said. ‘That’s on his Data-Mate card. You want to know what he really does? He’s a plant doctor.’

Charlotte sat down. ‘A what?’

‘A plant doctor. He spends his time paying health calls on pot plants.’

I didn’t really believe it and neither did Charlotte, but it was worth discussing. We sat there under the bare wintry trees on primrose benches and went on to other items of gossip from nurseries on both sides of the Atlantic while Benedict slept and Charlie’s four pottered about between the swings and the chute and the climbing frame.

There were two other Maggie Bee’s, and about two dozen mixed au pairs and helps and Mums in jeans and head-scarves and jackets, and the odd Dad on his hunkers. And there were at least fifty kids, with pails and bikes and balls and bats and an epidemic of low pedal bikes with ‘Tristan’, ‘Claudia’, ‘Grover’, ‘Melissa’ and ‘Sanchez’ painted groggily all down the axle-shafts.

There were, as I have said, a lot of English nannies in New York, and English nannies go to English families if they can manage it. I watched, idly, the pedal bike labelled ‘Sanchez’ until it was appropriated by a three-year-old lumberjack in earflaps, a dummy and Wellingtons. Bunty said, ‘I got all the dirt on the Booker- Readmans when I was over in England at Christmas. The County said they’d either get a Maggie Bee nanny or smother it. You’d better watch the Warr Beckenstaff shares. I bet Grandmother is paying your salary. What’s Sultry Simon like when Rosamund isn’t there?’

‘Rosamund’s always there.’ I said.

‘I bet,’ said Bunty again. ‘But he’d make a lovely rich widower. And what about the portrait man, Johnson? He looks a mess in his pictures, but you don’t run a yacht and a Porsche on peanuts. When’s he coming to paint her?’