Out of the side of Bale’s mouth: “Get on them, please, Nanny.”
“At once, sir,” Nedra agreed, and Bale, even out of just the corner of his eye and even with only half an ear cocked and only a fraction of his already divided attentions, could tell at once the enormity of his mistake. She was solicitous and intimidated, her months with Prince Andrew no plus at all, a season of watered, undermined authority. (He should have demanded references from Her Majesty.) Eddy saw her for what she was, more nursemaid than nanny, a tucker-inner, a pusher of perambulators and strollers, protective enough but incapable of anything but loyalty, by nature a fan, for Labor, he guessed, when Labor was in, a Tory under the Tories, on all Authority’s impressive tit, effaced, invisible as a poor relation or maiden aunty. Wouldn’t the children be happier in the airport’s lovely, comfortable seats? she wondered. Would they like to look at some of our nation’s lovely newspapers travelers were forever leaving behind? Perhaps a few of the bigger children could read some of the smaller children the news?
“Was that a crack?” Charles Mudd-Gaddis snarled.
“Of course not, Charles,” Nedra Carp said. “I’m sorry if you took it that way.”
“I may only be eight years old and three feet tall,” he sneered, “and weigh only thirty-nine pounds, but I’m not ‘some of the smaller children.’”
“Of course not.”
“I’ve got progeria,” he said bitterly.
“Yes.”
“It’s a condition,” he grumbled.
“I know.”
“It ages me prematurely,” he complained.
“Tch-tch.”
“It shrivels me up like a little old man,” he groused sullenly.
“Of course it does,” she said, and looked around desperately, studying Heathrow’s lovely lever-operated ashtrays should she be taken ill.
“It wrinkles my skin and hardens my arteries and causes my hair to fall out,” he whined.
“That’s only natural,” she said vaguely.
“No one knows the cause,” he said acrimoniously. He pointed to the doctor. “That one, for example. He doesn’t know the cause. He doesn’t know the cure either,” he grumped.
“I’m sure they’re working on it,” Nedra Carp offered brightly.
“Too rare,” Mudd-Gaddis shot back crossly.
Her attention had wandered. She was looking at the airport’s comfortable seats and wishing she were seated in one now, curled up with one of the nation’s newspapers travelers were forever leaving behind. “Sorry?” she said, turning back to him.
“I said too rare. What’s wrong with your ears, woman?” he asked irritably. “One in eight million births. No one’s going to commit the research money to wipe out progeria when only one in eight million gets it,” he growled.
Nedra Carp nodded.
“It constipates me and makes me cranky,” he told her crankily.
“That’s awful.”
“I have to take prune juice,” he said resentfully.
“I’ll see there’s some always on hand.”
“But I’ve got all my faculties,” he protested indignantly.
“Certainly,” Nedra Carp said.
“Which I daresay is more than many can say,” he added accusingly. “I can recall things that happened to me when I was two years old as if it were yesterday. I’m very alert for my age.”
“What about yesterday?”
“I don’t remember yesterday.”
“I see.”
He studied her carefully.
“Yes?” Nedra coaxed.
“Are you my uncle Phil?” he asked.
“I’m Nanny,” Nanny said.
“That’s right,” Mudd-Gaddis said, and shuffled off, Nedra Carp looking after the little withered fellow in a sort of awe. Death was the authority here. Death was boss.
Bale, who’d overheard Benny Maxine offer to make book with the children about who’d get back alive, wanted a piece of the action. The kid quoted long odds for naming the deceased in a sort of daily double, suggested complicated bets — trifectas, quinellas. When they looked at him peculiarly he objected that there was nothing illegal about it, it was just like the pools. Eddy thought of going up to the boy. He’d have put Nedra Carp’s name down beside his own.
Meanwhile, Ginny had come back into the lounge with a man who looked familiar, who rather resembled, except for his clothes, Tony, their old newsagent and tobacconist. A sport in a sort of savvy, modified trench coat television journalists sometimes wore in the field, he seemed absolutely at home in a world class airport like Heathrow and looked, in his cunning, elegant zippers, loops and epaulets, one hand rakishly tipped into what might have been a map pocket, every inch the double agent. He could almost have been holding a gun, was awash in gaiety and a kind of hysterical flush — joy? — and seemed as if he might be taken off any second now by a sort of apoplectic rapture.
“You remember Tony,” Ginny said.
“How are you, Eddy?” Tony said, and withdrew the gun- toting hand from the depths of his trench coat. Bale wondered why all the men who broke up homes in Britain were named Tony. “Fine bunch of bairn,” the anchorman added affably, indicating the terminally ill children. “You know, they don’t seem all that sick?” he said.
“They don’t?” Bale said.
“Well,” Tony said, qualifying, “maybe the little preggers kid doesn’t look quite strong enough to carry to term.”
“The preggers kid.”
Ginny’s friend indicated wasted little Lydia Conscience, eleven, whose ovarian tumor had indeed punched up her belly to something like the appearance of a seventh- or eighth-month pregnancy.
“She has dysgerminoma,” Eddy Bale said with great feigned dignity. “That’s a tumor she’s carrying to term.”
“Hmm,” the foreign correspondent said thoughtfully. “You know what gets me about all this?”
“What’s that?”
He lowered his voice. “When they’re that sick they go all emaciated, and it makes their eyes something enormous,” he said. “That’s because eyes don’t grow. It’s a fact. Eyes is full size at birth. Then, when the face comes down, it’s pathetic. ‘Windows of the soul,’ eyes are. Big eyes touch a chord in Christians. Oxfam understands this. That’s why you see all them great full- moon eyes in the adverts, Eddy.” Bale widened his own eyes and looked at his wife. She hung on the fellow’s arm, attached there like one more of the trench coat’s accessories. Tony, intercepting Bale’s glance, shrugged shyly. “It’s odd and all, me calling you Eddy like this.”