The Nanny (13 page)

“Cops,” he heard. “Apartment 8A. The Fane kid.”

He rolled out of bed and hobbled to the window on his aching feet, but now the voices stopped. Dr. Meducca lifted a slat of the blind and saw that it was Reardon's broad uniformed back turning the corner to get back to the front door where he was supposed to be on duty. “Nuts,” he said aloud, and hobbled back to bed, pulling the blanket up, punching the pillow, turning on his sleeping side.
Cops. Fane. Apartment 8A
. He had, after all, just made sure at the hospital that if Mrs. Fane should take it into her pretty little head that she ought to get back home to her precious devil's-spawn, she couldn't, so if anything happened.… Dr. Meducca groaned, and sitting up, rubbed his hair and gave up. He put on his robe and slippers, his arches hurting so much he could almost see the lightning bolts of pain shooting out like in the bunion ads, and moved quietly so as not to wake
his
devil's-spawn.

Dr. Meducca took his keys from the top of his chifforobe, holding them tight so they wouldn't rattle while he walked out of the apartment. He tapped on the glass door to get Reardon's attention and was told that about an hour before, the Fane kid had jumped out of his bathtub mother-naked and apparently run away from home.

“Why? Why?”

“Sure, why do kids do anything, Doctor? He's a kid and that's the height of it, but you wouldn't think it possible for him to slip away, now would you? But the nursemaid's gone from flat to flat, roof to basement, but not hide nor hair of him did she find. She's even had to call the police, Doctor.”

Hearing his own voice, Dr. Meducca asked Reardon whether the nursemaid had tried
his
apartment.

“First thing, sir, but it was locked up tight.”

“But my daughter was home, wasn't she? Wasn't she?” Reardon's Irish eyes had flickered oddly at the mention of Roberta. Oh, God, had she tried something already with him? He said sourly, “My daughter was supposed to be home.”

“Miss Meducca was in your office, Doctor. I had just come on duty and I saw the nursemaid speaking to Miss Meducca in the doorway to your office about the boy, but not hide nor hair—”

Dr. Meducca cut Reardon short to go back and ask Roberta, but then changed his mind and, selecting the key to the office, hurried across the lobby.

He closed the office door behind him and then called the boy's name, first softly, but then, as he moved deeper into the office, through the consultation room into the passage where the treatment cubicles and the dressing rooms were, louder; and then, a white office coat trailing, the boy came toward him. “Where were you?” he asked, and even as he spoke he heard the hum of the Fleuroscope and didn't wait for the child to answer but brushed past him into the Fleuroscopy room. As he crossed it to turn the machine off, keeping out of the field of the rays, he saw the chair drawn up and the screen pulled down so that the tube was at chair level and then pushed aside so that the rays were unimpeded. He turned back and saw the boy, looking smaller than he was in the trailing office coat.

Dr. Meducca pointed to the chair in front of the Fleuroscope. “Were you there? Did you sit there?”

“She told me to. I was cold. She said it would warm me up.”

Oh, my God, my God, he thought, because the boy was so small in the white coat.

Joey believed that the doctor was angry with him. “It wasn't my fault. She didn't tell me how to turn it off.”

“Joey! How long did you stay there? Joey, how long did you sit there?” Waiting, he set his teeth. Ten minutes is enough to kill him, he thought. He's dead if he sat there for ten minutes. “I want the truth, Joey!” he said, but even as he asked the question wondered what for because there was nothing anybody could do if the boy had sat there exposed to the tube for even seven minutes.

Joey said in a low voice. “I didn't like the noise. She said it'd warm me, but I didn't like the noise so I went away.”

“Right away? Joey? Joey?”

“She said good radiation was healthy—I didn't like the noise—” He said desperately, “I don't care if I catch a cold, honest!”

Before he knew it, in his enormous relief, he had swept the boy up in his arms and, the white coat trailing, hugged him. He pressed him to his chest and rested his chin against the soft dark hair and carried Joey back through the consultation room. It was when the boy saw that they were coming to the front door of the office and asked him where he was taking him, and when he said upstairs, of course, that Joey began to struggle in his arms like a panther.

“Joey! Stop that! What's the matter with you?” He just about managed to keep hold of the kid. “Stop that! Tell me!”

“She tried to drown me,” Joey said. “I won't go back there!”

And then it was easy to hold him; that turned him cold as stone and hard as steel. Tried to drown him. She tried to drown him! Psychopaths would stop at nothing, he told himself,
nothing!

The elevator man saw him coming and took him right up.

Joey screamed, “I want my mom! I want my mom!”

After trying to kill his mom, Dr. Meducca reminded himself. Weren't they something? Weren't they really something? Now he cries for his mom like a normal kid of eight and my heart is supposed to melt! “That's enough of that,” he kept saying. “I don't want to hear any more about that!”

To work up his own anger, to wipe out the feel of the struggling child and the piteous sound of his sobs, he reminded himself of what Roberta had just tried to do. He told himself that maybe it was a pity the boy hadn't stayed where she put him. It would have been better for all concerned, he told himself, if she had finished him off now. It would have been two at one blow, he told himself. This one weeping and struggling would be put out of his misery and they would keep Roberta locked up for another couple of years anyhow. Two at one blow.

The elevator man rang the doorbell of 8A for him and there was the poor old woman looking like hell from worry. (He knew all about that!) She held out her hands and he handed the boy over. The other one, Mrs. Gore-Green, began to gab, but he didn't want to hear any more about it. (He knew all about it.) He had better think what to do about Roberta. “Just put him to bed,” he said, not listening to her. “Just put him to bed.”

“Obviously Nanny was mistaken about his having already taken his sleeping pill … should he be given his sleeping pill now?”

Joey screamed, “I won't! I won't!”

“Make
him,” he said. He saw the terror in the boy's face but told himself that they could fake that, too, they could do anything. He put nothing past them, so he stopped looking at Joey's face. “I'm your friend, Joey,” he said falsely, as false as Roberta. (She must have had a key made for the lock on the office door. Unless she could go through a closed door, she must have had a key made. Better check on narcotics again.) “I'm your pal, Joey.” Pal Joey, ha ha.

“Put me down!” Now he was struggling in the old woman's arms.

He'd injure the old woman struggling like that. “Put him down. He won't run away again. Put him down.”

Mrs. Gore-Green said, “But, Doctor …”

“Now you listen to me, Pal Joey. I'm doing this for your own good. You should know that. And now I want an end to all this nonsense … an end to all this nonsense,” he repeated, fake-smiling down at the boy, thinking,
What end could there be?
(He saw burning fagots and above them, tied by chains to a stake, his daughter. There was a mob crowding around, as close as they could get to the fire. They shook their fists at Roberta and screamed, “Witch! Witch!” That was how they dealt with their psychopaths in the old days, but not now.)

Something white was flung at him. His office coat. Joey flung his office coat at him to tell him he knew he was not his pal. But they had no friends. They couldn't have friends. “I want you to promise me to stay here and be a good boy. Okay? Okay?”

Now he could look into the naked boy's terror-filled eyes because he was thinking of Roberta versus the whole helpless world, because nowadays the world was helpless against them. The fury he now felt showed plainly in his face. “Is—it—okay?” he asked.

The boy looked up at him, then turned towards Mrs. What's-her-name, who looked back at him, her elegant nostrils pinching as if he were a bad smell. (And who, after all, could blame her?) The boy became absolutely still.

“I'll call off the, police,” he said to the nursemaid wearily. “We don't want the police here.” Because if the cops came and the kid made his accusation against the old woman to them—leave it to a psychopath to give everyone as bad a time as possible—they might take it seriously. “We certainly don't want to spend the night explaining to the police.”

“No, sir,” Nanny said. “Thank you, sir.”

“I'll tell the cops the boy is safe,” he said.

Nanny was a saint, Mrs. Gore-Green thought. A
saint!
Only a saint could feel no resentment. You would never think, listening to her, that she was addressing a child who had just accused her of trying to drown him. Why, darling Nanny wasn't even taking advantage of the doctor's express order to override the idiotic permissiveness of the lunatic doctor who ran that school for child lunatics! Listen to her!

“Master Joey, you will go to bed now, won't you? Well, suppose you just think it over while I get your room ready for you.”

“It
is
ready,” he said. “My mommy got it ready. You leave it alone. Don't you touch nothing!”

“I won't, Master Joey. I tell you, Miss Penelope shall come with Nanny and see whether she touches anything, how is that? Miss Pen, will you just walk slowly to Master Joey's room and be—” she chuckled softly—“be a witness that I didn't touch anything?”

A witness!
I'd like to witness him, Mrs. Gore-Green thought. “Very well, Nanny, if you say so.”

“Go ahead, Master Joey, show Miss Pen the way.”

The naked child just stood there. “Come on, lead on, Macduff,” she said, the quotation coming because his face was so tragic. Would she never get any sleep tonight, she wondered, and her mind went on quoting, “Methought I heard a voice cry, ‘Sleep no more! Macbeth does murder sleep!'”

Murder and sleep, their combination, that murder was sleep, that to sleep was to be murdered, rang in her mind. She said to Joey, “Come on, come on, you're not walking to the gallows!” She had to remind herself that it wasn't murder he was really afraid of, but only “Bedfordshire”; that he wasn't a tragic figure, only one of those children who, like her, had childish night fears. He did not move, so she made an impatient sound. She hadn't Nanny's saintly patience and never pretended to have, and she started across the dining gallery to the kitchen. Now he was trailing after her, but less because he was obeying than because he refused to stay with darling Nanny.

In the kitchen, on the table, Mrs. Gore-Green saw on a cracked blue plate, done up so neatly in a paper napkin, the snack which the old darling had prepared for the child. “There's your cinnamon toast, Joey. Do have your toast. You have no idea how far an empty tummy can lead one!”

He was ravenous, she saw. He tried not to take up the plate, but his hungry hand reached out for it. Mrs. Gore-Green turned back to smile her small triumph at Nanny, who nodded in gratitude. (Saint, she was!)

On the far wall of the kitchen was the door to the servant's room. Mrs. Gore-Green pushed the door open and Joey, awakened at last in defense of his—what? privacy?—pushed past her, holding the blue plate, even before she could put the light switch on. With the light on, she saw that the room wasn't as tiny as she thought it would be, but that was because it contained nothing but a narrow bed and a rather good chest of drawers. On the bed, which was made up ready for the night, was a large cuddly toy leopard, an elephant and—she stared—a thick coil of rope. Now what, she asked herself, is the word for what cowboys used a rope as? A larabie? A lariat, a lariat. She said, “Is that your
lariat
, Joey?”

The boy was setting the blue plate down and turned, starting to say something, but then he gave a gasp and backed away with his arms outstretched to ward something off. Mrs. Gore-Green turned and it was Nanny, of course. Now what crime had the poor darling committed? She was holding out one of those low sturdy bathroom steps children were given to help them reach what they called the “facilities” here. The old dear had trotted off to bring him this step to help him if he wanted to get down during the night, she thought, and this … this utter
what
… was her reward!

“Take it away,” he said. “Take it away.”

She would have boxed his ears for him, but Nanny simply ignored him and moved steadily into the room. “I'll just set it down here, Master Joey. You can put it in the bathroom yourself, how's that?”

He clenched his jaw in a way which should have been comical. “Get outa here, you! Get outa this room!”

Nanny put the step down. “Very well, Master Joey. There now,” she said comfortably, retreating to the doorway. “I'm out now, aren't I? Miss Pen, I haven't touched a thing in here, have I? You are witness to that.”

Mrs. Gore-Green tried to get into the spirit of it. “No, Nanny, you haven't touched a blessed thing. Not his clothes, not his toys, not his pills, not his lariat.”

“It's not a lariat,” he said, then repeated hopelessly, through clenched teeth, “Get outa here. Get out.”

There was no spirit in it, though. He was done in. He didn't even emerge when, a few minutes later, the doorbell rang and it was Althea.

“Why, darling!” Mrs. Gore-Green said, but she wasn't permitted to remain under the illusion that Althea had come to make certain that her mother was all right.

“Hi, Mummy,” Althea said airily. “I've come to see Nanny.”