Johnson-Johnson 06 – Dolly and the Nanny Bird (3 page)

‘Well,’ said Natural Unplucked Nutria, ‘have you
seen
what you’re drinking?’

We hadn’t. Held in the hand, our glasses contained what appeared to be an attractive straw-coloured whisky.

Held up to the light, it still looked like whisky. Except that, coursing briskly around it was a large pack of frilly grey foreign bodies filled with intent, and for all I know, winking. I said, ‘Sea Monkeys.’

I was the centre of attention. Everyone said ‘What?’

I said. ‘They’re Sea Monkeys.’ I was furious.

One of the Professors left the room quickly.

I said to Johnson, ‘That sugar.’

‘In your anorak pocket,’ he said. ‘I got it. I tipped it into the water. You remember. Then we couldn’t make the toddy because we’d no boiling water.’

I dipped my hand into my anorak pocket and came up, in silence, with an untouched pack of airline sugar. Johnson dipped his hand into his mac and came up with a torn pack of something else that he laid on the table between us.

Instant Life
it said, in yellow and red.
Ready-to-hatch Sea Monkeys, with a Supply of Special Growth Food. See them HATCH ALIVE. When fully-grown, they can be bred for even MORE adorable pets
.

‘Murderer,’ I said to Johnson coldly.

The other Professor left the room. Vladimir said, ‘What is this? Monkeys?’

‘Brine shrimps,’ I said. ‘There’s no need to fuss. Fish eat them with no ill effects whatever.’

Until you put them in water, brine shrimp eggs look like dust. It would be perfectly possible, if your glasses were broken, to mistake them for sugar. Unless you were Johnson.

Simon Booker-Readman said, ‘What in God’s name were you carrying these about for?’ He looked, blessedly, more entertained than revolted.

Johnson picked up my anorak. ‘You’d be surprised. You don’t mind, do you, Joanna?’ And without waiting, he turfed out my things on to the table. The sugar, which I’d saved from the airport. A picture postcard of a plane and two cocktail stirrers. A miniature pepper and salt. A pack of fruit gums, a box with a Mexican bean in it, a Matchbox tractor and three very poor cracker mottoes.

‘I’ve got nephews,’ I said. Simon Booker-Readman was looking at me in a very odd way.

‘You have no nephews,’ said Johnson precisely. ‘I, personally, am going to blow your cover.’

‘Shut up,’ I said. I knew, from the amused looks on their faces, that I had turned tie-dyed magenta with annoyance.

‘Don’t tease her,’ said Simon, but his voice had a questioning ring.

‘I wouldn’t dare,’ said Johnson mildly. ‘I only thought you would like to know that our gorgeous Joanna is a fully-qualified gold-medalled graduate of the world’s finest college of Nursery Nurses. How do you imagine Benedict got the perfect handling he did, despite everything? The girl is a Margaret Beaseford trained Nanny.’

I scarcely felt Raccoon and Scimmia settled one on each side of me. Nurses of any kind only mean one thing to Huskies. Simon Booker-Readman said, ‘You’re a
Nanny
?’

I’ve heard that tone of disbelief before as well. I had hardly finished nodding before he had streaked out of the room and was unfastening the galley door. Rosamund’s questions and Benedict’s screams died before the sheer violence of Benedict’s father’s voice, explaining.

Silence fell. Then the Booker-Readmans came back, all three, and gazed down upon me and my furry companions. Rosamund said, ‘We will pay you any fee you care to name, to come back and look after Benedict.’

I agreed, after persuasion. It was, after all, why I had been sent to Canada. To pay for my original Italian knits I am not only a Maggie Bee nurse. I have another profession.

I thought no one knew about that. I was wrong.

We got back to Government House at five in the morning and were met by the Governor and his wife, who hauled me off for hot coffee and a family post mortem in their private sitting-room. I was sitting in the Aide’s camelhair dressing gown inhaling steam with both eyes semi-closed when the door opened and Johnson came in, wearing striped winceyette pyjamas and a kimono.

His hair was on end, and if he had bags under his eyes, the glasses hid them. He said, ‘I’ve been a hell of a nuisance: I’m sorry, beautiful,’ and kissed his hostess, who got up and left, followed smartly by her husband, the rat. Johnson said ‘Two minutes’ to me and, pouring himself a mug of coffee, sat down.

‘I’ll time you,’ I said. My eyelashes had been filed off with emery board and my nose in the steam was expanding like a Japanese paper flower in warm water. Even for a family friend, I wasn’t going to volunteer anything more.

‘All right. Listen,’ said Johnson. ‘I helped arrange that because I know a bit about you. Your father is one of my friends. So was Mike Widdess, your last employer, whose kid’s toys you have in your pocket. I know that Mike lost his life in a car crash and that’s why you’re out of a job now. I know how he really died. And I know what you and he were doing together.’

With some of his friends, my father is too friendly.

I said ‘Prove it.’

The glasses flashed; perhaps with approval, perhaps with irritation. ‘All right,’ said Johnson mildly. ‘Mike Widdess was a lawyer who did some confidential work on the side for the government. He found you had some spare time and were bright, so he got you from time to time to help him. Then came the car crash.’

The car crash which ended it all. I was coping with his kid to let Mrs Widdess sort things out after the funeral when I got the news that the crash had not been accidental, but connected with Mike Widdess’s job. And further that the people who had rigged the accident, whoever they were, had also been discreetly through all Mike’s classified papers.,

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 organised 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 shoulderblades. 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 recognised 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 Schurz 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?’

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 Schurz 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 Graver’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?’