The Egg-Shaped Thing

by Christopher Hodder-Williams

  But I tried…

  The other side of the seesaw, Davvitt’s tomato-juice glowed, crimson-bright, in the limes focused impressively down upon the distinguished. He was in hot discourse with a humbly little professor, and waved his diminutive hands about as he spoke.

  I watched him and completed the cycle of my thoughts.

  So Miles sees Nicola a few times and rushes her up to Doncaster, for this. And who should be here but Davvitt. And why not? They’re both scientists.

  And who should be here but me. And why not? I got an invitation that was sent off far too long ago to have been contrived.

  And what should happen but Nicola and I bump into each other. And why not? She’s irresistible and I am lonely.

  Yes…you can say ‘and why not?’ to just about everything. Only there is too much to this everything…

  The speeches were unspeakable. Evidently the Doncasterites are so used to being patronized, so conditioned by condescension, they fail altogether to hurl tomatoes at avuncular speakers uttering bottom-grade Digest-isms that would outrage the laggards in one of those secondary modern schools where the emphasis is placed on carpentry, cooking and comics.

  It’s over. We rise. We convey the impression of feeling a small percentage of the self-importance aimed at. The boom-boom voices of the great men being great and the little women sick from the admiration demanded of them. The women are bursting with boredom; they wait for the afterwards, when they can resume the nagging.

  I make a beeline for where I think Nicola will have to pass on the way to the ladies’ room. I have some inner conviction she will try and avoid me, and suddenly I am all prepared for a snub.

  Only she’s so adorable I do not wear the snub-worthy expression. I surprise myself in the way I seem to come alive in her presence. All my defensive patter, saved up for the moment, improved and retouched and rehearsed during the speeches, goes right by the board.

  I simply say: “For God’s sake don’t disappear again. I’ve gone all taut inside.”

  “I guessed you would.”

  “How do I delay you?”

  “How long were you planning on?”

  “Indefinitely.”

  “Oh…But I must go loo-wards first.” She tosses, gaily over her shoulder, the magic words: “Miles isn’t going back to London, anyway!” and goes through the pink door with the skirted-silhouette embossed on it. I take the arbitrary symbol with the slacks; and feeling that such smoked salmon as that should be disposed of without demur, clamp myself in a blue cubicle with a ten-inch gap at the bottom of the door. They take no chances — it seems — even in the more expensive Doncaster hotels.

  While gazing at the blue-blankness ahead (they don’t write on the walls in deference to the ten-inch gap) I pick up snippets of conversation spoken from the more lordly urinal. It being considered bad form among the devout middle class to make full use of the opportunities afforded by the W.C. immediately after a meal, my presence isn’t taken into account.

  For Davvitt and Miles pee chummily side by side; and what they say (I’ll translate from the physics jargon where necessary) sounds on a par with the rubbish being disposed of in my secret world of blue. It simply makes no sense at all.

  Davvitt: “It’s a side effect we never thought of. But when you think of it, it makes perfect sense.”

  Miles: “I must say I don’t see how anything can influence statistics.”

  “That’s because you think of ‘statistics’ as a kind of fact. It’s an invented word, an invented science.”

  “If that’s so, it means that Gallup Polls would go out of business.”

  “No. Different. They deal in trend. But if you toss a coin a thousand times, there’s no reason why it should not come up heads a thousand times…I know it doesn’t, but no Statistician, however highly paid, could stop it happening if it chose to happen.”

  Someone runs a tap.

  Davvitt continues: “So! Play around with Relativity, interact with the essence of things…and you put a lot of experts out of a job.” The click of the foot-pedal hand-drier. The whine of a hot-air pump. Some of the conversation gets lost.

  “Of course, what goes on inside the thing has to affect what goes on outside. That’s the point we missed.”

  Miles says something, but it’s inaudible.

  Then Davvitt: “Well, yes! Only no one thought of that when they imposed those restrictions…” Then something I didn’t catch.

  They walked to the door, still talking. I just heard: “…for instance, the half-life of Uranium-235…”

  My stifled guffaw echoed against all those nice shiny blue tiles…And no doubt if ten thousand gorillas typed for ten million years they’d write the complete works of Shakespeare.

  I pulled the plug. It made a terrific whooshing noise.

  …Except that what they were saying was that one gorilla might, through some slight miscarriage of the rules, write Hamlet, Macbeth and Henry the Fourth Part One, plus all the other things I haven’t read either, in a matter of days.

  Funny. That rose hadn’t seemed very strong to me.

  *

  While I was standing — triumphant — outside the unmentionable blue door, and trying to work out just what three screaming cats might have to do with the basic rules of statistics, Nicola came up conspiratorially and said: “Meet me later.”

  “Where?”

  “In the foyer.”

  “The last train,” I said, with attention to practicalities, “leaves at eleven-thirty.”

  “I’ve got a car.”

  Chapter Four

  In the criss-crossed shadows of the semi-darkened foyer I waited for her, uncertain of my motive or aim.

  As I watched the guests sauntering out in groups for their buses and their taxis and their cars I took a ruthless, unforgiving look at myself, and wondered just how much my ‘intuition’ — the only mechanism by which I could justify my actions at the moment — was being sponsored by a desperate personal need…

  The guests are thinning out. Has Nicola changed her mind? Christ!

  Tesh, in one of his alarmingly penetrating moments, had said not long before: “No one, James, can decide what you are except you. If you float on instinct alone, how can you calculate the exact buoyancy for the computed load? You don’t do your sums, and I think it’s just that you’re too damn lazy.”

  “Are you waiting for somebody, sir?"

  “Yes."

  “I think all the guests have left, now. Would you like me to look for your

  “No thanks. I’ll wait another five minutes.”

  “As you like, sir. But I’m afraid I’ll have to close in here, after that…”

  If she didn’t show up, it would be because she, too, had sensed I was playing blind man’s buff. She would have talked with someone in there, reassessed the situation, decided that I was over-dramatizing it for my own purposes…

  Yet I had approached her with such confidence! What was this weird afterthought, that always seemed to negate the initial act — ?

  “Sorry, James!”

  I turned and saw her. And she saw nothing short of amazement on my face, simply for the fact that she had done what she said she would do. She said nothing, but I knew she had caught, and understood, the look.

  A few minutes later we were in the car. I said I would drive, and she accepted this as the natural thing. It was a big car, for a woman: a Vauxhall with automatic transmission. I am not a driver infatuated with racing gear shifts and petulant exhaust noises and I liked this car at the touch.

  We had the radio playing and for a long time she was quite content to curl up, looking small and slender in a simple black sleeveless dress, on the far side of the front seat. I glanced across at her at times, surprised and somehow flattered that she neither questioned my driving nor my reasons for being there.

  Pert, serious face, tipped so as to clear the facia for the view forward, she sat in a natural curve, lips a little parted; and I smiled slightly becau
se the driver’s seat would surely have been too low for her. Driving, she would have presented just this small, gracefully-fashioned face peering interestedly over the top of a large steering wheel. But I decided she was a competent, calm driver for all that.

  “Whose car?” I asked. “Your father’s?”

  “Yes. Isn’t it disgraceful? The poor man hardly ever sees it, when I’m around.”

  “But then he adores you, I know it.” She said nothing, just looked thoughtful. After another half-mile I said: “Why do I know your mother is dead?”

  “Instinct.” She darted me a look. “The thing you never trust.”

  “There’s not very much wrong with yours,” I said, shaken.

  “It works with some people, and it doesn’t work with others.”

  “How did Miles make out tonight?”

  The thought broke her relaxed mood. She lit a cigarette for herself and one for me and handed mine across. “What did you think of him?”

  I said: “I only saw him for five seconds.”

  She set her expression impassively. “What did you think of him? — in those five seconds? By your instinct?”

  “He wants to take your father’s place,” I replied, not looking at her, “but he can’t quite bring himself to dispose of the sunglasses and be real.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  After a few more bars on the radio I went on: “Was he married, at any time?”

  “No.” The glow from her cigarette tinted the chrome on the instruments. “What made you ask?”

  “To see how much you really knew about him.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s the one thing about you which simply doesn’t add up. You’re a father’s girl; and I never met one yet who was a drifter. Therefore you have a purpose. I think there’s more to that meeting at Fortnum’s than meets the eye.”

  She glanced across. “Your eye? Or mine?”

  “I mean you wouldn’t have taken him on trust. There’s something wrong with him and you know it.”

  “I hope you’re not saying that because he presented a huge Easter egg to a pretty little girl?”

  “No. I’m saying it because of a five-second exposure in the Clarendon…” Gripping the wheel hard, I added: “Only one thing would have made you go to that cocktail party…” and with an anxious glance at her: “He told you his name; you mentioned him to your father, your father knows him…and that was your insurance policy.”

  She sounded very tense and replied: “You’re a very surprising man. And you’ve got me very worried about your scientific ability.”

  I found I had slowed the car right down. I was so tense I didn’t trust myself to go at speed. “Then obviously, I must be completely wrong.”

  “Oh no! You’re completely right. That’s why I doubt your scientific prowess.” Her mouth was hard, and the redistribution of her facial muscles drew her cheeks in tight to the bone. “Scientists,” she said, “know nothing about people.”

  “Which is a cliché,” I said. “You know…the freezing-cold scientist with the wire-rimmed glasses and holding up a test tube. There are freezing-cold brassière salesmen and also there are freezing-cold boilerhouse engineers. Conversely, there are warm-hearted computer programmers who make love in the middle of breakfast and listen to Mozart.”

  She looked at me. “Why are you so determined to snub me?”

  “Am I doing that?” I eased my foot off the gas a little, and glanced back. I said: “I know why.”

  “You’ve got to tell yourself there’s no need.”

  “I must be like a knife scraping on a plate.”

  “No. Because you know how to stop doing it.”

  “When there’s this much at stake,” I said, “I know how to stop doing anything.”

  She said: “I know you do.”

  “What you meant a minute ago was your father’s a scientist.”

  “Yes.”

  “Does he bust up your love life often?”

  “Don’t,” she warned, “try to understand too much too quickly.”

  “Why? Because it’s misleading? — or because it’s not very tactful?” I pulled into the grass verge; not — she knew — to physically make her acquaintance, but rather because the conversation had become so compelling.

  She understood this; and we sat silent, just smoking in the darkness.

  “Yes,” said Nicola as the engine clicked one degree cooler, “he busts me up often.”

  “And you take it?”

  “So far.”

  “Why?”

  “He needs me. He’s a frightened, lonely man.”

  “And you live at home, while he trades on that.”

  “There are degrees of being a frightened, lonely man.” She started toying with the chain that dangled from the ignition key, then said suddenly: “Can you imagine me on a dirty weekend? — I mean, a real dirty weekend?”

  “Millionaire in a five-star hotel?”

  “Yes. Just that.” She modified it with: “Not a fully-fledged millionaire…they never are.”

  “To be honest,” I said, “I can’t imagine any such thing. That probably doesn’t help very much. Are you trying to tell me?”

  “Not a confessional,” she said. “I don’t do anything for no reason.”

  “What was your reason?”

  “Spite.”

  “I see. Daddy busts up something nice, so you hit back with something nasty. I hope you were very, very sick.”

  “I would have been. Only I chose the wrong hotel. My father…he had a secret life too.”

  “That doesn’t sound as if it fits.”

  “Different kind.”

  “How many kinds are there?”

  She jangled the key more forcibly. “There’s a place near Brighton

  “Don’t tell me you chose Brighton?”

  She flared: “What right have you to mock me?”

  “Because if your father managed to stop it, you were a lot luckier than you deserved. You were being incredibly stupid and I’m entitled to ridicule sheer lunacy in an intelligent person. I don’t need any qualifications at all for that.”

  “Perhaps I’d better not go on. You want the lady on top of the Christmas tree. I was under the mistaken impression that you were an adult.”

  “There are degrees of that, too. I refuse to take the blame for your extremes of idiocy, only to be told I’m as childish as you were.”

  She said: “That does actually sound more adult.”

  “Why?”

  “Millionaires have money.”

  “Oh, I’d thought of that. Only since I don’t think you’d be so unkind as to put me in a position of judging you, I presumed it didn’t apply.”

  “Is that the only reason?”

  “It’s absolutely the only reason. Whatever you may think my emotional age happens to be, I don’t pursue innocence. It’s apt to lead down some excessively blind alleys. And at least I never thought you had that kind of father fixation — if you see what I mean.”

  “So?”

  “Go on about Brighton.”

  Nicola said: “When you asked — somewhat caustically — how many sorts of secret lives there were, I don’t know what exactly you were getting at. Various sorts of sex? Various sorts of escape?” She flicked the key again. “I thought that, at first. It was coincidence when my father walked into the bar of that hotel and saw…” She almost mentioned a name, but stopped herself. “And saw me with this man. And it did turn it into the awful, cruel face it really was…I mean, I honestly didn’t mean to hurt anybody.”

  “I do hope he didn’t blame your millionaire.”

  “He blamed himself.”

  “Oh yes, how ingenious!”

  “Why?”

  “Oh, just something more you could feel sorry for him about.”

  But also…how interesting. Nicola’s father, a scientist. Miles, a scientist. Davvitt, a scientist. All playing on each other’s nerves, in various ways. And
Nicola herself, turning up at that awful convention over a ghastly dinner at Doncaster. Even that event seemed contrived. Who rigged it? Her father? For a moment I felt like asking Nicola if she knew of anything that ‘hadn’t happened yet’ — till I realized how this would sound. So instead I asked: “What did you mean when you told me not to try and understand too much too quickly?”

  “Just that we haven’t the right to trust each other that much so soon.” She looked at me gravely in the glow from the instruments. “Don’t think I’m making rules, James. There is something holding both of us back — you just as much as me.”

  I said with a frankness that surprised me: “Yes…I wouldn’t normally sit in a car and just talk.”

  “I know that. We both feel something weird and we’re both frightened.”

  I said, looking away: “As long as you don’t think it’s just me that’s weird. I couldn’t stand that.”

  “I know…you couldn’t stand being mistrusted. As a man, I mean. I don’t think we have that kind of reservation about each other.”

  “Thanks.”

  After a while she said: “My father was on the Manhattan Project. You know what that was?”

  “Of course. The construction of the first atom bomb.”

  “It made him…odd.”

  “It made a lot of people odd, Nicola. But how do you know he wasn’t odd before?”

  “I can tell from what I remember of my mother. And if she’d known what they were really doing out at Oak Ridge and Los Alamos I think she would have stopped him.”

  “Were you born out there?”

  “Yes…and my mother must have been carrying me just about the time when daddy was carrying his secret — alone.”

  “I see.”

  She looked at me at close quarters. “What do you see?”

  “The pat answer is guilt.”

  “Yes. And I think he tried to escape from it.”

  “Into what?”

  “Don’t press me.”

  I said: “It sounds to me as if you run away when really you should make an issue of it.”

  She shook her head. “He has too much power.”