Split Code Read Free

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