The Christmas Egg

by Mary Kelly

  “Probably not to mine. It’s a deadly sin to kill a policeman, and even they know the wages of sin.”

  “But that unfortunate child?”

  “I doubt . . .” Brett stopped. That summed up his whole thought on Stephanie. “As for you,” he went on, “you should know your chances. What have you done to deserve this?”

  “Done? But I’ve done nothing, nothing!”

  “Then why did you cut the price of my cameo?”

  The question flew out of his mouth like a bird, and was succeeded by silence.

  “Look here, dear old fellow,” Majendie eventually whispered in a very nervous voice. “Difficult, I know, in the circumstances—medical attention—but take my advice—lie back, relax, you know, try to keep calm . . .”

  “Come off it!” Brett, furious, felt the brazen tongue of Beddoes leap into action in his own mouth. “Stop pouring out that padded cell syrup. I’m absolutely ice-cold sane. Did you or did you not tell that pomaded monkey to soften me up with a slice off whatever I wanted?”

  “Good God, sir!” Majendie was evidently stung out of his concern. “If by that offensive term you mean Mr. Emmanuel, certainly not.”

  “In your position, why not speak the truth?”

  “Do you have the effrontery to mistrust my word to my face?”

  “I trust no one,” said Brett.

  “Indeed, I imagine suspicion and cynicism, if not congenital, are soon ingrained in a policeman—a sort of occupational disease.”

  Conversation languished. Brett wondered how many people whose good will and friendliness he accepted without question really regarded him with discomfort and distaste.

  After a minute he became aware that Majendie was mumbling indistinctly in his corner.

  “Forgot myself, I’m afraid—allowances—head—ill—unsettled . . .”

  “Don’t bother,” said Brett, “it’s true.”

  There was a pause.

  “And you must realize,” Majendie went on with more assurance, “that not every item of stock is known to me. Describe this cameo.”

  Because it seemed so pointless, there was no reason not to comply. Brett told him.

  “Sixteen, seventeen, pounds or guineas,” said Majendie. “Possibly a little more or less. Not more than twenty.”

  Brett was silent. Emmanuel had let Majendie know how much he had cut, that was all. It was true that Majendie sounded uncommonly convincing. But his plausibility had never been in doubt.

  “Why not take an independent valuation?” he suggested.

  That was easily said. They had first to get out of their present plight.

  “But what put such an idea into your head?” Majendie persisted.

  What indeed! Or rather, who. Brett said nothing. Nothing was safe. What layer on layer of deceit and probing and sifting wouldn’t unfold? Majendie, he noticed, had shown no curiosity as to what had brought him on the scene in the first place.

  He only just managed to keep back a groan. He didn’t know what to think, and his head ached. He was beginning to feel the strain of being tied. Since Wacey had left the car he had been struggling to free himself, but had succeeded only in pulling the bonds tighter or in making his wrists swell. Above all, he longed to be with someone he could trust. He looked at the third passenger. He sat as before, mute and still.—Shove up, nutcase, can’t you? Nutcase. A person not to be reckoned with, not to be heeded, before whom anyone might talk freely, a sitting target for a bully. The simpleton in Boris Godunov. That was the likeness he had almost reached earlier, when Majendie had interrupted. The simpleton had no choice but to endure suffering and mockery. Yet the simpleton was not a fool. His sly dreamy sallies made Tsar Boris blanch. He had no illusions of a new life under a new leader; he went on singing of the grief and toil that was life in Russia.

  Russia. Exactly, thought Brett, feeling quite calm in spite of his sudden enlightenment. He stared into the corner. Dimly he could see the third passenger’s stragglings mustache.

  “Ivan Ilarionovich!” he said softly. “Ivan Karukhin! Do you hear me?”

  “Karukhin?” whispered Majendie. “Karukhin?”

  “Do you understand?” Brett went on. “But I was forgetting—of course you do. You’ve lived in England all the life you can remember, forty years nearly, in Bright’s Row. You’re British, on paper. Ivan!”

  He paused. No one spoke.

  “All right,” said Brett, “it doesn’t matter. You needn’t say anything if you don’t want to. I can tell you. I know it. I know about the parents you never knew, the dissipated father, the delicate docile blonde mother who gave you all three qualities—and perhaps an affectionate nature. That, would have been doomed from the start. You had no one to love, only one to fear. Yes, I know about the grandmother. Grown people feared her when she was sane, so how much, more a child must have when she was mad.”

  “Mad, would you say?” said Majendie.

  “Oh, not helplessly, pitiably, certainly not pitiably. Not in that state of mental conflict that’s never resolved. Just mistaken in external circumstances, deluded. As if the Leningrad firing squad wanted her for a triumph.”

  “Persecution mania . . .”

  “How real was that fear? It was there in degree, of course. She went to the length of mewing herself up in Bright’s. Mad, if you like, but also, I think, lazy. Start to work in middle life? Never!”

  “But she needn’t have worked,” said Majendie. “She could have sold . . .”

  “The only remnant of her consequence? The one tangible assurance that she was truly a princess? No, no. Any dolt, any tradesman, can have money. Only Princess Karukhina could have had that particular diamond rivière, that antique heirloom Louis something snuffbox, and so on.”

  “She sold some,” Majendie observed.

  “ ‘Formerly the property,’ I believe, ‘of Princess Irina.’ And perhaps some pieces she’d never cared for.” Brett paused. “Oh, she kept you, Ivan, just till you could keep her. You were an investment; that’s why she bothered to make you safe by naturalization. Besides, she was always careful of servants. And you served. I know how you passed your childhood, struggling with cheap shopping, buying and eating God knows what—I’ve seen your adult breakfast—dressed by neighbors’ pity, sickly, asthmatic, a plant in a cellar. Healthy children recoil from feeble ones. Besides, didn’t you live with an old witch? They probably saw her at the window, though she never came out—all the more terrifying. I know about school. Years of dimness near the bottom of the class. Lacking in confidence, that’s what would have gone on your reports. And where would you have gotten confidence? From work? Independence? What a hope! She stopped selling the odd brooch and sucked up your miserable pittance instead, your reward for fifty weeks a year in a stuffy office and the smoke of a mainline station.”

  “But, my dear fellow,” Majendie objected, “it’s up to each one, after a certain age, to look out for himself, assert his rights . . .”

  “What had there been in your upbringing, Ivan, to make you think you might have rights? Did you think so, at that stage? Such mental agility as you ever possessed developed late, and no wonder. Your mind and your youth were stunted by habit and fear. Besides, you found an opiate. Who taught you to drown your sorrows? And how did you manage it? Perhaps you kept her in the dark about wage increases. In time, I suppose, you drank more and spent more, and braved whatever she said because your loneliness was getting unbearable and because your life offered no other pleasure; nothing, in fact, but squalor and boredom from which drink gave the easiest escape. In the end, not even that could blind you to the enormous rift between other people’s lives and yours. But by then, even if you’d wanted to clear out of Bright’s Row, you couldn’t afford to. Your wages went up and up, especially after the war. You knew you’d never command better money, but you couldn’t keep what you had, and you’d no capital. I think you tried to get some—that Greyhound Express in your wardrobe, was that a sign of your attempts? But you were unlucky.
So your life was slipping away, eaten by routine—office by day, pub by night. Then one afternoon, not so long ago, you came home sick.”

  There was no response from Ivan. Brett glanced through the window, but could make out nothing. If they were heading for Richborough, he had to be quick; it wouldn’t be long, even allowing for their speed being reduced by snow, before they were there.

  “I think that must have been the first time,” he went on, “that you were sent off duty, as opposed to taking sick leave for a whole day. If you’d been in the habit of arriving unexpectedly, she would always have locked the door, and in those days she didn’t. So you walked in. And the trunk was open.

  “You’d never seen inside it. As a child, perhaps, you’d asked and been fobbed off—what did she say, family papers? You’d grown up with the fact that she rarely left the room; so I suppose it never occurred to you that there might be a reason for it, other than her peculiarity. How could you guess that anyone living in penury could be in possession of a treasure they were unwilling to let out of their sight? But on that afternoon you saw. What was she doing? Disposing the contents around the room? Curtains drawn? Wearing the jewels perhaps—parure of diamonds, Brazilian, and emeralds, Siberian, displayed on a crumb-spattered shawl. Re-creating an era.”

  “An unexceptionable pastime, my dear boy,” Majendie murmured.

  “Thereafter she locked the door,” Brett went on, “not, as Mrs. Minelli thought, to keep out the Red peril but to make sure no one else interrupted her as she counted her treasures. She didn’t bother to hide them from you; there was no point. You saw them again, many times, came to know them by heart, in tiny detail, as a child knows a fairy story. In time, unawares, you grew to love them—at least one of them. But, you didn’t discover that till too late. In the meantime your first thought was that the contents of the trunk would provide you with the capital you’d despaired of. I suppose you concluded that she was madder than you’d realized, too mad to appreciate the value of the trunk. You explained its value—what a moment that must have been—and suggested that she sell.

  “Of course she wouldn’t. But how it must have shaken her to discover that you weren’t so stupid, that through those years of apparent submission you’d been daring to nourish ambition! Perhaps she also discovered how she hated you, though she may have known herself well enough to have recognized that already. You must have been surprised, though. Callousness you’d met as a child, contempt, when you were drunk. Scorn, derision, you knew. But not to be hated.”

  “And what, would you say, was the cause of that hatred?” asked Majendie. “One sees, of course, a certain . . .”

  “Ivan, you were the son of her son,” Brett cut in quickly, “that obstinate fellow who dared to cross her. You were the son of the daughter whose docility she despised even though she expected it. You embodied them. You embodied her past failure, mistakes, and follies. She couldn’t put them out of her mind because she couldn’t put you out of her sight. She had cunning enough to know that she depended on you, reason enough to know what had made you as you are—heredity, aggravated by her upbringing. She’d made a rod for her own back, but like most people in that position, she couldn’t admit that it was true. Most people find a way out. She did. Your existence was a reproach; she turned it into an offense. To save herself from hating herself, she hated you.”

  Lights shone outside the windows. They were passing through a village. Nightingale saw a pub, a chapel, a filling station, a weather-boarded wall with posters on it.

  “Wingham or I’m much mistaken,” whispered Majendie, “on the Canterbury-Sandwich road, you know. Heading for the coast, do you think?”

  Brett turned back to Ivan. “Easy to understand your feelings,” he went on. “She’d injured and insulted and finally begun to torment you. After her first refusal to sell, didn’t she take a malicious pleasure in setting out the treasures in your presence? As if she said, ‘Look your fill, babble it to the world. Who’s going to heed the boasting of a sot?’ And didn’t you find that’s how it was? Prince, bleeding poet. That was your reception. And didn’t she say you were not to be her heir, would never touch a bead of it? Perhaps she told you she’d already made her will. She hadn’t, but how could you know? All you knew was that alive she deprived you; dead she deprived you. And you were in despair, divided between drinking yourself into oblivion and trying to think of a way out.

  “You had one brilliant idea—to have her certified. You consulted a doctor, perhaps even a solicitor, only to find that it wouldn’t work. What about stealing the trunk? It could have been done, in spite of her almost continuous presence. But you knew you’d have a very short start before she discovered the loss; you knew she’d notify the police; that you’d be the first suspect. Even if you managed to hide, how could you hope to get rid of the pieces? Of course, you thought of killing her. The trouble was the same—inevitable discovery. You could think of nothing that didn’t end in that. So more arguments, more drink, more despair, until one night in the Oak Tree you met Stan Wacey. The one that jumped just now. How did he come to be in that pub? By chance? Most unlikely. You didn’t take the initiative, Ivan, I’m sure you didn’t. You’d been marked; and Wacey spoke first, working you around to the subject of your inheritance—easily done, with the aid of several pints—thence, to the trunk. A risk, but Wacey lives by risks. Of course, he was careful, cagey. When he was sure you were ripe, he pointed out that it would be better to make sure of part than to lose the whole. He suggested you sell not the trunk but the information of its existence, and share the money from its professional dispersal. You fell. I expect he pretended he wasn’t interested for himself and screwed a few pounds out of you as the price of passing the information on to the right place. Anyway, he must have arranged a second meeting, probably not at the Oak Tree. Vanbrugh Street? Never mind. You went. He introduced a nameless friend, an interested party. You passed on each beloved detail of the treasures. You explained the difficulties—her close watch, the bolted door open only to you or Mrs. Minelli. They were quite confident of finding a way around all that. You were to be in the clear. Everything would happen while you were at work. They fixed a date, a long time ahead, to give them time to organize. After the event you were to receive the first installment of your money—what, fifty?—but I expect they told you it was useless to stipulate for a definite final sum as they couldn’t say how much they’d make. And in the circumstances you had to be content.”

  “Honor among thieves, they say, I know,” said Majendie, “but it does seem to me that such a haphazard way of setting about a dangerous enterprise, such a lapse of time between promise and performance, would give rise to doubt . . .”

  “Doubt! Ivan, you must have been exhausted by constant changes of mood. Mostly you feared that they’d steal the trunk in their own time, leaving you helplessly cheated. And if nothing worse, you’d still lost the money you’d been induced to part with. But then you’d dream of the approaching liberation. The trunk gone, she’d have lost her sting. She could either stay in Bright’s and rot, while you went off to better yourself, or come with you—on your terms and with you holding the reins. What if she raved to the police? Who’d believe that anything had existed outside her addled brain? Your sudden affluence? Lucky bets, accumulated savings—it would have been troublesome to disprove. But in fact, Ivan, you were in a false position from the start. So were they. There was someone who had not seen but received part of what was in the trunk—Mrs. Minelli. Your grandmother gave her an ikon and a brooch, long before you’d seen the treasures. But of course you knew nothing of that. So, in good time, you went to the doctor for sleeping tablets.”

  “Hm! No cheaper and certainly less anonymous than a shillings worth of aspirins from a strange druggist,” commented Majendie.

  “You went to the doctor partly from habit, partly in the muddled and mistaken belief that an authentic prescription would establish the innocence of your purpose. Anxiety made you overact, draw attention to
your sleeplessness and yourself. On the twenty-first of December you went to Vanbrugh Street to hand them your key. I imagine Mrs. Minelli often had to let you in, so she wouldn’t necessarily conclude that the key was lost or ask questions. On the morning of the twenty-second you made breakfast earlier than usual, putting into your grandmother’s cocoa an extra large dollop of condensed milk and a crushed dose of sleeping tablets.”

  “An overdose, I suppose you mean?” said Majendie.

  “Well, yes, but not such a colossal one. A long heavy sleep was the object. You forgot, Ivan, that tough and indestructible as she must have seemed to you, she was an old ill-nourished woman. You saw her to sleep—that’s why you’d had to start early—and went off to work, where for once you forced yourself on your colleagues’ notice, even attached yourself to one of them at lunch. As at the doctor’s, self-consciousness . . .”

  “My dear fellow! Surely an understatement! One would be expecting at any moment a call from the police.”

  “Not more than a little. You knew what they were going to do—unfasten the string from around her neck, open the trunk, transfer its contents to their bags, lock it, put the key back on the string, and retie it. With luck, she wouldn’t discover for a day or two that the trunk was empty. And as there was no alarm during the day, you went in the evening to the Vanbrugh. What met you? Long faces and no money. Remember you’d told them in detail what to expect. Remember they were experts. One piece they’d specially looked forward to getting their hands on, a piece they wouldn’t have to break up, a piece for which an unscrupulous private collector would pay thousands—and it wasn’t in the trunk. They said you must have kept it for yourself or it had never existed. You swore good faith, utter ignorance, amazement, innocence. That didn’t help as regards money, but it must have convinced them you were speaking the truth. They suggested, I think, that she might for some lunatic reason have taken it out and hidden it around the room, or even in other parts of the house, and that you should go home, give her another dose of tablets, and look for it while she slept. You hesitated. They pointed out that if she discovered the robbery before you could find and get rid of the missing object, she’d be able to show it to the police, who’d be far more willing to believe in vanished glories when one of them remained. So you went back to Bright’s.