Split Code by Dorothy Dunnett Page B

Come and open your mouth for me,’ and when he came, peered into his throat and took off his hat at the same time. His glands were slightly swollen but his throat, though red, wasn’t spotty.
    ‘It’s only a little cough,’ Bunty said, in a tone which meant, ‘three hours at the paediatrician: not bloody likely.’ ‘Grover, go and get your new trike.’ She poured out more gin, and put some of the extra orange into a cup, with a splash from the waterjug. This she stirred and then, lifting the nerveless Sukey, dragged her face out of her hat and fed her a spoonful. Grover trotted across, picked up the bus, and threw it at Sukey again. It missed her, but nearly knocked over Bunty’s gin.
    ‘Don’t do that, Grover,’ said Bunty again automatically. ‘Fetch your new trike and show Nurse Joanna.’
    According to College rules, every nurse expects to be called Nurse, with the Christian or surname added, as preferred. College rules are not observed by top people’s parents, at whose parties I should be addressed as Nanny Booker-Readman; nor by trendy mothers or Americans, to whom I was Jo. In return I could call the Americans, but not the trendy mothers, by their Christian names also.
    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