Split Code by Dorothy Dunnett Read Free Book Online Page A

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