Split Code by Dorothy Dunnett Read Free Book Online

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