C. Medleycott is a nurse by profession, and is used to this. ‘I’m terribly sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m still with the Mallards: just on holiday. But congratulations anyway. What have you got?’
‘A bastard,’ said Rosamund wearily. ‘Who won’t take his bloody bottle, and won’t sleep, and won’t let anyone else either. He’s upstairs. I don’t suppose you’d like to look at him?’
We could hear him as it was, every time the talk died. He sounded like a piccolo with asthma.
Charlie, I must say, has her moments. She said, ‘Of course I should. What are you giving him?’ and a few minutes later could be seen climbing the stairs, tracked by two bankers, I noticed.
Rosamund didn’t go with her. The family nanny had died, the maternity nurse had departed and both the girls the agency sent her had left after the first week of four-hourly feeds, which are bad enough during the day, and ruin the night, of course, for all purposes including sleeping.
‘I don’t know how they do it,’ said Rosamund, referring to the absent Charlotte as she fitted a menthol cigarette into a long silver holder. ‘It would drive me quite mad in a month. Poor Lady Carrington: someone’s got her Eskimos pissed.’
Everyone turned. From a corner solid with felt and cross stitching came at regular intervals arpeggios of Eskimo laughter, delivered from barrel chests whose lungs could scare an elephant seal into a stammer. Someone said, ‘They’re not all that bombed, ma’am. I guess they’re with that crazy dude who opened the exhibition.’
Any man who can make an Eskimo laugh is a man worth saving up for a gloomy sales year. I said, ‘The Bureau of Ethnology must be rolling with the times at last. Let’s go and meet him.’
‘Actually, it’s not the Bureau of Ethnology,’ said Simon Booker-Readman. ‘They got someone better by accident. Would you like to meet him, Joanna? I may call you Joanna?’ He took my arm.
It wasn’t officially what I was there for. If there was any part of the bang which didn’t need livening up, it was the segment in the far corner. But I was curious, and I walked over with Sultry Simon, and waited behind all the parkas while my escort cleared a path to the dude who opened the exhibition. And then I stood very still, no doubt changing colour.
As a spectacle in itself, it would hardly have taken the drive-ins by storm. All I or anyone saw was a shortsighted man in a knitted tie and a nondescript sports jacket and trousers. If you looked a little more closely, you saw he had a lot of black hair and odd cufflinks. His glasses, if you looked more closely still, were bifocals.
I didn’t need to look closely. I didn’t even listen as Sultry Simon confided: ‘Name of Johnson, Joanna. The portrait painter.
The
portrait painter, as a matter of fact. You’ve probably heard of him.’
I’d not only heard of him, I’d met him. When I was seventeen. In my father’s company.
He was a friend of my father. He might even know who my last employer was. He was going to wreck the whole flaming enterprise.
My father’s friend Johnson set down his drink, glasses glinting, and addressed me plaintively. ‘I’ve been trying and trying to get my uncle in Brighton to knit me one of those, but the face never turns out quite right. You won’t remember me. I was a friend of your father until he found out about your mother and me.’
I remembered the sass, too; but this time I was old enough to answer back.
‘I know,’ I said. ‘I’ve just checked the proofs of her memoirs. How are you?’
‘Dazzled,’ he said amiably. His eyebrows, black as his hair, were the only guide to his expression, really, behind all the glass. He directed a flash of the bifocals at Simon. ‘We used to meet when she was a schoolgirl. I know her parents. Are you doing anything after?’
‘Are you bringing Johnson?’
my mother used to ask my father.
‘Oh, good.’
And even after I was at college she would write:
‘Johnson came over yesterday. He’s painting the duchess.’
‘Doing anything after?’ Booker-Readman was repeating, resignation in his voice. ‘Hardly, old boy. We’ve got this bloody brat with us. Rosamund is about to blow her mind.’
‘Bring it!’ Johnson said largely. ‘It doesn’t drink; it doesn’t start fights, it doesn’t run after crumpet. Most civilized gent, in the province. Go and get Rosamund and the basket and make your farewells. Joanna is coming too.’
I stopped myself on the verge of a ‘How can I?’ bit. Something about the tilt of the glasses told me he knew all about Charlotte and the six Huskies and our invitation to stay at Government House till tomorrow. ‘You’ve arranged it,’ I said.
‘I’ve got you leave of absence till midnight, sweetie,’ Johnson said. ‘The Eskimos are giving a party, and they won’t let me come unless I bring the two prettiest blondes in the room. Truly. Charlie will be perfectly happy to stay in Government House, so long as you leave her all the Huskies.’
I don’t think Simon caught it, or would have resented it if he had. And it was true, of course, about Charlie. A wide gentleman with long black hair and a moustache pulled my wet-look silky Italian knit. ‘One for Sex,’ he said. ‘You come to my party?’
Another gentleman with flat cheeks, a round crop and a smile tugged the other sleeve. ‘Two for Sex. You are coming?’ he said.
‘Three for Sex?’ I said. I had been set up by Johnson. I could feel it.
‘No,’ said Johnson happily. ‘Three-Four Six is back home in Moose Jaw. But One-Two Seven and One-Four Eight are all waiting right here round the blow-hole.’
There was a roar of unalloyed laughter. It was their standard leg-pull. Faced with five hundred folk-artists called Ahlooloo the only solution, I suppose, is to settle for painters by numbers.
They waited for me while I collected my skiing anorak and my boots, and made my excuses to my host and hostess and the others. Then I walked out of Government House with my four Eskimo hosts, two Anthropologists, one Ukrainian, three Booker-Readmans (one of them in a basket) and Johnson.
Plus, he advised, a computer.
We drove straight to the railway station, where we plugged the car engine heaters into a row of wall sockets, beside a policeman in pavement-length buffalo. Then we made our way through the station, out into the snow at the back, off the platform and down among the railway lines, which were also covered with snow. It was twenty-five degrees below zero Fahrenheit, and nine o’clock at night, and dark, and deserted. It was the kind of cold you feel first as a stiffening, crackling crust inside your nose, followed by a sparkling sensation all over your face, like stepping into a stiff gin and tonic.
The Eskimos were used to it. They walked along in single file cracking jokes about Indians which the Ukrainian also enjoyed: it was an undoubted tribute to something that in spite of all the well-intentioned hospitality they were all of them sober as housemothers. Johnson’s state I was unable to assess, except that I knew he wanted me to ask where we were going and I wouldn’t.
That is, with Johnson there, I knew I wasn’t going to swell the white slave traffic and I am against pandering to rich portrait painters wearing old macs and tatty waistcoats knitted by their uncles in Brighton.
About the time I thought we were on our way by foot back to my aunt in Toronto there appeared a great deal of steam, and a long, dark shape sprouting cables and periodic bunches of icicles, which looked uncommonly like an ordinary, empty, CNR railway carriage.
Ahead, Johnson abruptly rose dimly into the air; first, it became clear, with the aid of a footstool and next up a pair of club steps to a doorway. There he turned and surveyed us. ‘And a great welcome, folks, on behalf of E2-46 and his friends to the Vice-Presidential Car of the Lazy Three. See you later.’
It wasn’t that he was going away: just that the heat inside the car steamed up his glasses like lavatory windows so that we had to undress him: a trace of a struggle with eleven folk and a basket all removing their slushmold galoshes and coats at one and the same time. Then Rosamund disappeared to park the basket in an adjacent bedroom conducted by E1-48, while Johnson sat us all down, and a white-jacketed steward came for the drink orders. In an isolated railway carriage in a railway siding on a winter’s night in Winnipeg. With Eskimos. And Simon Booker-Readman. And, of course, Johnson.
One of the Ethnology men, who were both Professors, explained that the Eskimos were living on board for a day or two, before being hauled to the next station, so to speak, on the cultural circuit for short-changed minorities. They were all on great terms with the steward, who had their numbers off pat, and also their drink orders. Without their raccoon hoods and new cross-stitched parkas they were still twice as wide as anyone else. The Professors, who were thin and bearded, sat lodged between them like piano keys, but the Booker-Readmans chose the opposite sofa with Johnson.
I claimed the Ukrainian and he turned out to have lots of chat, which was a bonus. His name was Vladimir, and he painted ikons and ran a launderette in Vancouver. We got deep into the launderette, over which I could hear a learned discussion about Angmagssalik sculptures passing to and fro between Booker-Readman and the Professors, interspersed with a six-sided ding-dong about the Hamilton Tiger-Cats’ chance in the Grey Cup between Johnson, Rosamund and the Numerate Four who were drinking like pails, and showing a tendency to kick their feet into the air.
They had a table-lamp over twice before the steward came through to announce that dinner was served. Then E1-27, tripping up on the way to the dining-room, hit the end of the buffet table with his chin and ran straight up the spare ribs and salmon in aspic, ending unabashed with his head in a flower bowl. E2-46, volunteering to wipe him off, discovered E1-27 was ticklish and they both descended sagging and chortling to the floor, where they rolled about for a bit. My Ukrainian, with his friendly smile, walked over and lay on them. They all three went to sleep, abruptly.
‘Mr Johnson?’ ventured the steward.
Johnson, who had stepped back to survey the passage, re-entered the dining-room and addressed the affronted Booker-Readmans. ‘The other two Nanooks, I’m afraid, are out cold as well. Should we put them to bed?’
I could hear the cream of the Bureau of Canadian Ethnology putting the other two, puffing, to bed. I got down on my knees and took hold, with resignation, of Vladimir. By the time I got him into a bunk, Johnson and Booker-Readman had tidied the other two numbers away and the steward had redistributed the aspic. We all sat down to dinner, Simon, Johnson, Rosamund, the two Professors and I. The candlelight pulsed on the stuffed peaches and cherries, on the dishes of roast beef and cob corn; on the fingermarks on Simon’s mohair suiting and the lard-stiffened folds of my silky-knit, which felt like a fire curtain. One of the Professors was going to have a black eye.
Not that the Eskimos had resisted. In fact, they had wanted to go to bed more than anybody, but not necessarily alone. For it is a well-known fact that very cold air will sober you, if you have been drinking heavily, whereas the first drink indoors afterwards will send you straight up and over the moon.
At least, Johnson said it was well known. He described his last client, who had been a Chinese dipsomaniac, and the one before that who had been a horse; and the one before that, who ought to have been a horse but in fact acted in koala westerns in Sydney.
It began to feel like a party.
At half past ten, over coffee, Rosamund Booker-Readman said, ‘Oh hell. What’s the time, Simon?’
‘Eleven,’ I said. It was none of my business, but I did go that far.
The Booker-Readmans looked at one another. He said, ‘Why disturb him? He’s sleeping.’
One of the Professors said, ‘They’re all sleeping. You don’t have to go, surely?’ Rosamund, as I hope I have indicated, was as well as select, quite excessively dishy.
Simon said, ‘We can stay for a bit. It feels like being let out of clink.’
‘That’s
my
line,’ said his wife. ‘You haven’t been stuck with him for four days. Have you a wife, Mr Johnson?’
‘No,’ Johnson said. ‘Although I rather like the sound of E4-257, who does twenty-foot stone-cuts of birdmen. We could set up a Druidic dovecote at Rankin with her models in twenty-foot pigeonholes.’
The Professors were unmarried also and had to spend their weekends with their mothers, fixing the plumbing and having their underwear mended. One of them asked. ‘How old is the offspring?’
Rosamund Booker-Readman was impatient. ‘Goodness knows, I’ve lost count. My mother’s moron of a doctor got the date wrong and it turned up fifteen days ahead of schedule. I missed the Hartleymann wedding.’
I remembered the Hartleymann wedding. There were twenty- two bridal attendants and no publishable group photograph. I said, ‘Then he’s thirty days old at the most.’
Nobody complimented me on my arithmetic. They all went on smoking and drinking. One of the Professors was reminded of a funny story. I got up in the middle while they were beginning to laugh, and let myself out into the passage, and asked where the basket was. The steward took me into a single-bunk room reeking of baby. The light was off and the basket was dumped on the floor. I hooked a towel over the bulb, switched on and had a good look.
The Booker-Readman offspring was about twenty-five days old and a sturdy eight-pounder. His nightie was soaking and so were his smart cyclamen sheets. There was a patch of curdled milk under one ear.
He was asleep but hungry, his mouth making sucking movements and his face beginning to screw. He wouldn’t be asleep for very much longer. A hunt round and under the mattress brought to a light a box of tissues and nothing else. I went back to the party and said, ‘Johnson, I’m awfully sorry to abandon the Numbers, but I’ve got to get back.’
Simon Booker-Readman got up. ‘Oh, why? Are you feeling all right?’ he said. He had a boudoir voice too. His equipment was really unfairly prodigious. I smiled at him and said I was quite healthy, thank you. I was still smiling when I fell into his arms, and he fell into Johnson’s and Johnson fell over the Professors, who struck Rosamund variously with their elbows and burst her beads.