Split Code (7 page)

To the Eisenkopps, whom I had not yet encountered, I was evidently Nurse Joanna, although they were certainly American, if not dating right back to the
Mayflower.
Which, since they called Bunty Bunty, told you quite a lot about the Eisenkopps.

‘That horrible little punk,’ said Bunty placidly, referring presumably to the absent Grover. ‘Came into my bedroom five times last night, including when I was trying out this green face pack.’ She finished juicing up Sukey and dumped her back on the Wilton, without apparently noticing the marks of the trade on her striped coffee nylon.

Sukey squawked and Grover came in pedalling his bike and drove it straight at her face without slackening.

I stopped it with my foot. Bunty said, ‘Grover, be careful!’ and went on telling me about the green face pack. Then she got up and went out to find one to show me, and Grover, settling violently in the saddle, backed and came once more, hard, for Sukey.

This time I stopped him with more than my foot. I lifted him off his tricycle and said, ‘Grover. If you do that again, I shall smack you.’

Rule fifteen in the Maggie Bee book holds firmly to the belief that there is no need for spanking or smacking in the rearing of children, and indeed begs employers not to ask any Margaret Beaseford Nurse to lift a hand in anger.

The first thing a Maggie Bee nurse does in any British household is to ask the mother if she minds if the offspring gets paddled from time to time, and if the mother has any sense she agrees to it. They have got, after all, to get into training for public school.

When, therefore, Grover responded to my threat in the time-honoured way by mounting the trike and forcing it straight into and nearly over his sweet sister’s pulsing cranium, I locked the handlebars, scoured him out of the saddle, laid him over my knee and delivered a finely-judged smack on the trousers.

I might have got in another, but a broad hand gripped my arm from behind and squeezing it like a toothpaste tube, removed me from my chair so fast that the chair fell right over and my tights laddered. Grover, sliding yelling off the punishment rostrum, was caught by another, solicitous hand and then enfolded, still yelling, against the stomach of what could only be his male parent. The male parent, addressing me, said. ‘Hit my kid again, and I’ll sock you one.’

Comer Eisenkopp, who ran a business which paid for the top two floors of a luxury penthouse and supported an ageing father, a wife, two children, an Italian couple and Bunty at three hundred dollars a week plus the privilege of undoing her uniform buttons, was short, stocky and healthily clean-shaven, with thickly waving dark hair and glorious teeth, which he was baring. He also had on a starched collar and tie, and a leather-trimmed alpaca cardigan.

He said, ‘Can the child hustle you back? You’ve got it made real good, haven’t you, whoever you are? Pick on a kid? Pick on a poor helpless baby? What’d you do to my poor little Sukey there? Slug her jaw if she don’t eat her waffles?’

His gaze shifted. ‘Did you bring that gin? Where’s my girl? Did you bring that gin?’ His voice, already powerful, swelled to appalling proportions. ‘Bunty! Bunty? Do you know there’s a drunk foreigner in here beating my children?’

At this point, I hand it to Bunty. She could have lain doggo. She could have pretended to be out of hearing or even, at a pinch, out of the house. As it was, she appeared, if belatedly, in her doorway, with the leaf-green mud pack all over her face.

Grover, adoring every sadistic second, peeped out from his father’s cardigan selveage and went off into a paroxysm of fresh amazement and horror. Sukey, drawing breath from time to time, continued an
obbligato
that would have done Bishop proud. A soft voice raised in mellow alarm impinged from the direction of the doorway calling, ‘My babies! My babies! What are you doing to my babies?’ and Mother Eisenkopp, a dead ringer for any of the Mrs Roger Vadims, floated in, capsized over the tricycle and collapsed shrieking on top of her daughter, kicking her son in the fist as she did so.

The gin went flying. Mr Eisenkopp, shouting ‘Beverley!’, leaped forward and gripped his blonde and dazzling wife. Bunty, clawing mud off her face, flew in and winkled out Sukey.

I lifted the gin, bestowed a couple of stiff cleansing doubles on the glistening patch already present on Sukey’s resting place, and then picked up Grover, who was standing with his eyes shut, emitting short breathy hoots with his cut paw dripping blood on the carpet.

Before he knew where he was, I had his hand under the cold tap in the bathroom, and the hoots were giving way to straight-up crying.

‘Grover is a brave boy,’ I said. ‘Look. Joanna has a big white handkerchief. Now, Grover show Joanna where Bunty’s bandages are.’

Bandages or band-aids: they always do the trick.

‘You get a bandage?’ he said. He had dark hair like his father’s, and maybe even his mother’s; cracked lips and red patches on both bulbous cheeks.

‘A very big bandage,’ I said. ‘Grover show the bandages to Joanna.’

They were in the bathroom cabinet, along with a half-hearted bottle of Junior Aspirin, some plasters, some lint, some cotton wool, an obelisk of assorted make-up and Bunty’s pills, all up-to-date to the minute, which tallied with Charlotte’s analysis and was good news for the Mexican yam industry.

The Eisenkopps might have been hell on hygiene, but they had missed out on the First Aid Department. Or maybe that had been cornered by the Mafia. I cut out some lint, chatting, and made a beautiful bandage, with donkey’s ears on it. Grover, his face smothered in half-dried tears said, ‘Now Joanna give Sukey a bandage.’

The fate of Sukey had been somewhat occupying my mind, not to mention the fact that if Mother Eisenkopp had broken both legs, all three of Bunty’s boyfriends were in for a hard time. With three adults already on the scene I felt the only positive contribution I could make was to keep Grover out of it. He produced a dry cough, and followed it with another. ‘Grover wants Bunty,’ he said suddenly.

I should have been more worried if he hadn’t. I said, ‘Bunty is helping Mummy just now, then she’ll come and see Grover’s big bandage. Shall I tell you a secret?’

‘I tell you?’ he said. He continued with a phased series of croaks.

‘I’ll show you something that’s nice for your cough. Where’s the kitchen?’

He was less than eager, but he condescended to show me, and he watched while I made butter balls rolled in sugar. In the middle he said,
‘That’s
a topeat.’

Whatever he was describing, I was being done a favour. I looked about. Bunty’s English habits at once proclaimed themselves ‘So it is,’ I said. ‘Some people call it a teapot.’

‘You
call it a topeat,’ said Grover. ‘Again?’

I gave him another butter ball. ‘Grover can be a teapot,’ I said. ‘Look.’ I set one hand on his hip, and pulled the other out at an angle. ‘You’re a teapot.’

‘You’re a topeat,’ said Grover, and giggled. He was a quick learner, too. After a few minutes he had me by the hand and we were progressing out of the suite, bearing the plateful of butter balls with us. At the end of a passage he knocked on a door and called ‘Grandpa!’

It was getting like a Frank Capra film except that the man in the bed wasn’t gentle and white-haired and quizzical, but as short, black-haired and positive as his powerful son. Beside the bed was a wheelchair of the automatic kind with a mike that you talk to.

‘About time, too,’ said Grandfather Eisenkopp. ‘Is Comer throwing a party out there I’m not invited to?’

‘Grover’s hurt his hand,’ I said. ‘Someone fell over his trike. We’ve brought you some butter balls.’

‘I’m a topeat,’ said Grover happily.

‘I could have told you,’ said Grover’s grandfather readily enough. He picked up a butter ball, squeezed it and then put it into his mouth, wiping his hand on the sheet. Grover struck his newfound attitude and declaimed:

‘I’m a little teapot, short and stout

Here’s my handle, here’s my spout

When the kettle boils, hear me shout

Pick me up and pour me out.’

‘So you are,’ said Grandfather. He leaned forward, picked Grover up and pouring him out, proceeded to tickle him under the arms as he lay, shrieking with joy on the bed. Over Grover’s back he said, ‘If something needs doing, I’ll keep him now.’

Grandfather Eisenkopp was nobody’s fool. I nodded and backed to the door, ‘What’s your name?’ he added, still tickling.

I said, ‘Joanna Emerson. I work for the Booker-Readmans next door. You’ll make him sick after the butter.’

‘Go to hell,’ said Grandfather Eisenkopp amiably. I shut the door and went back, with reluctance, to the sitting-room.

Beverley Eisenkopp was lying back on Bunty’s sofa while Bunty, still green as the Frog Prince in coffee-striped nylon, massaged her sprained ankle and Comer Eisenkopp held both her hands as if they were money.

I looked round for Sukey, on the carpet, in the pram, inside an armchair: even, if the worst had come to the worst, in the waste paper basket. Then, leaving the tableau to look after itself, I tracked her down to the curtained confection in the night nursery where she lay fast asleep with her hat off and her fingers sticking through the same fancy shawl Charlotte and I had already deplored.

I didn’t propose to wake her yelling this time in order to unbend her fingers. A silent withdrawal was on my immediate programme, before any of the Eisenkopps started shouting again, or Grover was sick. As a last gesture of goodwill to the profession I bent down to the litter round the cot and picking up a soaked nappy and a noisome Harrington square, carted them into the bathroom where the nappy pail was, and the loo.

The gentle art of loo-pan nappy-sluicing requires a stomach of iron and fingers sufficiently strong to retain hold of said nappy in the left hand while keeping your right for the flushing apparatus. According to the book a couple of gallons of pressurized water will then cleanse the nappy and allow you to return it scoured and dripping to the nappy pail, ready for washing. At Maggie Bee’s you paid for every nappy you lost down the bend, and if the plumber had to call, then you paid for that, too.

I would have backed Bunty to lose the two kids down the S bend, never mind Harrington’s best. I held the square in the loo-pan and flushed, and the loo rose, brimmed and stayed brimming without showing a hint of retiring. The square relieved itself of its burden. I lifted it into the pail and finding a loo brush returned to the pan for some undesirable baling and excavating.

It wasn’t a Harrington square but a whole nappy, presumably Grover’s, which reluctantly swam from the recess. It brought with it an assortment of unappetizing debris, including a headache powder wrapper, some bits of wood and a couple of assorted sepia scrolls I identified, after a moment’s brief speculation, as portions of a burst rubber dummy.

Not to let Bunty down, I wrapped the dummy remains and concealed them. The bits of wood and the paper I set aside while I dabbled the nappy. More wood floated up.

There really wasn’t enough water left in the loo pan to rinse with and I wasn’t going to flush it a second time. I was bringing out Grover’s potty when I noticed that most of the splinters were coloured. I put down the potty, fished the rest of the wood from the loo and put all the bits side by side on the vinyl. They were only fragments, but you could guess, fitted together, they might have made the whole of a very small painting. A painting on wood. A painting of eyes, nose, feet, fingers and something which could have been also a halo.

I returned, deep in thought, to the potty and held it under the bath tap, my mind still on the picture. A very old picture. One I felt I had seen before. Perhaps because Simon Booker-Readman had some very like it stored in his overflow basement.

The fact was, it wasn’t a picture: it was an ikon. And Simon Booker-Readman, according to rumour, had just lost an ikon, an old one.

This one, for example?

Then, should I call Bunty?

I didn’t have to. As I held it under the tap, Grover’s potty burst into song. Bunty opened the door. I turned off the tap. The potty, jingling busily, completed its modest recital:

‘Half a pound of tuppenny rice,

Half a pound of treac. . . cle.

Mix
it up, and make it nice,

Pop! goes the wea . . . sel.’

‘Hullo,’ said Bunty. ‘You’ve found Grover’s musical potty. I say, you’ve got the nappy out of the loo.’

‘And the other things,’ I said. ‘What do you do, empty your coat pockets into the lavatory pan?’

‘Sometimes,’ said Bunty simply. ‘What’s all that, for God’s sakes?’

I spread out the fragments of unhygienic wood on some loo paper. ‘Someone’s bust up a picture. Grover?’

‘Maybe,’ said Bunty with cursory sympathy. ‘Bloody kid. Wrap it up and I’ll shove it down the disposal chute. Or his father’ll lecture him silly. Where is he, anyway?’

‘Grover’s with his grandfather,’ I said. I gave her the bundle of chippings. ‘How’s the scene with the parents?’

Bunty said vaguely, ‘Oh, I explained it all.’ She watched me wash my hands with a cake of Chanel No. 5 that matched the talc in the night nursery and must have tripled Bunty’s aura in the Park, whatever its virtues in cases of nappy-rash.

‘You explained the gin and orange?’ I said.

‘No problem,’ said Bunty. ‘I said you and Hugo had shared a light refreshment. Hugo’ll back us both up. You must meet him some time. He practically lives here.’

With difficulty, I remembered that Hugo Panadek was Eisenkopp’s Design Director, and a good boy whom Bunty had kissed, according to Grover. I said, ‘Look, with you and Beverley Eisenkopp in the house, what that man needs is a sedative, not new introductions. What does he design anyway, apart from subterfuges?’

‘Never heard of them,’ said Bunty, who had no pretensions. ‘He’s Father Eisenkopp’s toy designer. Didn’t I tell you Comer manufactured toys?’

‘No,’ I said. I hadn’t seen a toy in the place apart from the plastic butterflies. ‘You mean I’m going to be sued for criminal assault by the irate mogul of a toy empire?’