The Egg-Shaped Thing

by Christopher Hodder-Williams

  The swing-doors were a couple of yards away and this was no time for explanations.

  I gambled on the probability that people who drink Pernod and can stand the smell are not normally prize-fighters. “Forgive me!” I said — and gave him a (restrained) Guy Endleby to the jaw.

  And I got through, just as the uproar reached its climax behind me.

  I was out and away and in the jeep before they managed to sort themselves out.

  I’d got away. But where to now?

  Swans!

  How do you deliver swans? You don’t tie a message to their legs and just let them fly. You deliver them. In a van!

  I swung the jeep around in a tyre-squealing U-turn and headed back west along King’s Road toward the Hove section. A half mile past the West Pier, where first I had looked, was the turning which led to the building occupied by The Physics & Biology Experimental Centre. I didn’t think Gray would have had time to brief them about me but I would soon know.

  I pulled up with a squeal and wondered how much tread might be left on those tyres by now. I ran up the steps and pushed the bell.

  The place was in darkness. At first I thought it was deserted. After two more frantic jabs at the bell-push a light came on over the door. A woman opened it. She said: “They’re all up at the hotel. Stafford-Albion.” She started to close it again.

  Quickly, I told her: “I’ve just come from there.”

  “Oh, have they got the results?”

  “Er, just getting them out, I believe.”

  “What do you want then?”

  “Dr Julian Gray’s address.”

  “I don’t know it. Why don’t you ask him? He’ll be at the hotel with the others.”

  “He’s not.”

  “I couldn’t give it to you, anyway. He lives in London somewhere.”

  “But has a place down here.”

  “That’s more than I know, so you’re ahead of me on that.”

  “Was it you I spoke to this morning?”

  “I didn’t see anyone this morning.”

  “I mean on the phone.” This woman was driving me mad. “I asked about the swans.”

  “Oh, that. What of it?”

  “You see, I’m from the television people and we got permission to borrow Dr Gray’s swans for a feature we’re doing on Zoology. Peter Scott, you see.”

  “You’ve been sent to collect them.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you don’t know where to go.”

  “That’s right.”

  After a long pause she asked: “But why didn’t they tell you?”

  I said immediately: “They told me to contact Dr Gray at the hotel. He was going to take me on from there.”

  “And he’d gone when you arrived?”

  “That,” I said, exhausted, “is the trouble.”

  After another long wait she said: “Well, it’s very funny. No one here knew that Dr Gray had a place down in Brighton. I don’t know why he has to keep things so dark. Fancy you working for Peter Scott!”

  “The problem,” I said, “is that Peter Scott hates to be kept waiting. You might not think it, from the way he talks about ah those animals, but he has rather a quick temper.”

  “You never know, do you,” she said.

  “The point is I’M IN A HURRY.”

  “I gathered that. We must talk to Mr Paul Steiner.”

  “Why should we do that?”

  “Because he sold the swans to Dr Gray. But I’m willing to bet he doesn’t know about Dr Gray’s Hernando’s Hideaway.”

  We duly phoned Mr Paul Steiner, and he didn’t. “A van called, and that’s all I know,” he said. “I assumed they were taking the swans to London.”

  I asked him if he could remember the name of the delivery company.

  He said, how the blazes was he supposed to remember a thing like that?

  “Well, was it a local company?” I knew bloody well it must have been.

  “It was pink,” he said, with the emphasis of a man holding a gin in his hand. “A pink van. With green markings. Very bad taste,” he commented. “Green on pink — revolting. Blue on pink would have been better. But pink on pink,” he added with inebriated wit, “wouldn’t be any use because you couldn’t read it.”

  I agreed with his admirable logic and hung up.

  “You didn’t tell him about Peter Scott,” said the woman.

  “Peter Scott doesn’t like having his name bandied about all the time,” I told her, and left.

  The first policeman I saw in the street knew the answer off the cuff. “Yes…Delby’s. What was it? — carrying animals or something?”

  “Yes. Swans.”

  “That’ll be Delby’s. Their garage is just the other end of town. You can’t miss it. They’ve got an all-night petrol station. On the left…Top of Marine Parade. So you don’t need to go cross-country.”

  I didn’t get it. “How do you mean? — not cross-country?”

  “That jeep. You want to wash it, chum. What have you been doing? Trying to use it as a hovercraft?”

  I stared at him transfixed.

  “Don’t look at me like that! Pm not going to clean it for you!”

  “What?” Hovercraft! What else?

  The one I had seen looked as if it was doing some fifty knots even around the offshore water. Couldn’t have been flat out. Say it could make…what?…seventy miles per hour? Four clear hours or so at that speed is close on three hundred miles. I couldn’t hope to achieve such a distance by any other means.

  At Delby’s I ran into trouble.

  “Yes, we delivered them. But we had the strictest instructions not to say where. So I won’t.”

  “Peter Scott,” I said, “is going to be extremely angry.”

  “But not with me.”

  “Are you the chap who delivered it?”

  “No. I’m the manager. I’m also the owner. I also do what my customers ask me to do. Provided it’s legal.”

  I shrugged. “Okay. You’re the boss. And you say no.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Could I use your toilet?”

  “Go ahead. Don’t think of buying any petrol. I have two sorts of visitors. One lot pay for fuel and have regular habits. The other lot drop in for the use of my usual offices. Never the twain shall meet. It’s through there. Past the office.”

  “Thank you.”

  Yes. Past the office. Past the manager’s neatly and methodically kept office.

  Full of nice big fat filing cabinets. And no doubt equally fat record sheets. Business is brisk, in Brighton, for efficient men. And this garage was efficient.

  I had to time it. The manager was on the pumps himself. Soon there would be a queue of cars. Let’s hope the law of chance works a bit my way, this time. Mr Delby needs lots of customers right now.

  From the lavatory I could watch the forecourt. It didn’t look good. Business seemed slack. One car on its own. Nothing. Another car on its own. Long gap. Hell.

  I understood a lot about Mr Delby. There was a whole row of his green and pink vans behind the glass of the showroom. Anyone with the effrontery to choose such a colour scheme was bound to make money. So where were his customers?

  Suddenly they all came in a drove. Mr Delby showed the lightning touch. He was busy. Thank you, Mr Delby.

  The cash register was in a paybox out by the pumps. And cash registers were very close to Mr Delby’s heart. I didn’t think it would be too hard to rifle his office.

  What a commendable filing system Mr Delby had! Neat little labels everywhere.

  ‘Deliveries and Collections — Other Goods’

  That, presumably, would cover animals.

  So it would be either under G for Gray or S for Steiner.

  I’d better have both.

  Mr Delby was still enthusiastically playing with the till when I drove off.

  *

  Telscombe Cliffs is one of those seaside residential areas that people rushed to just before the Second Wo
rld War. Yet in their rush, they never finished it.

  The bungalow business poured itself out of a concrete mixer and was plastered in a criss-cross pattern of gravel roads that stop some thirty yards short of the cliff edge. The area between the box-houses and the cliff is simply uncut open grass which extends right up to the rough wire-netting, containing many gaps, which offers lean protection for those who might like a second thought before taking the lovers’ leap. These cliffs mean business; and the sheer drop down to the granite and the breakers below is over a hundred feet. Few splashes of colour intrude upon the downtown beige that predominates in the village, whether you’re looking at the house-fronts, the gravel of the road or the chalk patches that have worn through the grass.

  On my arrival I felt sure that Delby must have made some error in his records system: for here was the middle-class fortress of all time. Some of the bungalows still betrayed their interiors through undrawn curtains…showed by their trend-perfect decor an undeviating conformity. At once the lack of development of the surroundings was explained; the tourists must be kept away…let them by all means zero on to the happy-lighting five miles along the coast. The emotional buttress of anti-glamour at Telscombe Cliffs would serve as the simplest deterrent…

  I drove off the main road along the unadopted lane toward the cliffs and parked by the wire. Balding grass beneath the wheels and a clear view both ways along the front. Below and beyond the wire, a sheer drop of a hundred feet or more. From there, the sound of a quiescent tide.

  I began to realize that the setting was right after all. Davvitt had denied any technocratic functionalism in his nature and wound up with trained ivy up the walls, Ideal Home furniture and heavily palate-knifed okay-paintings of the sort that adorn the walls of those who happen to be courting the Council of Industrial Design. You buy them by the assorted dozen and change them yearly; familiarizing yourself with the in-words as you go along.

  But where do you put a tiling like a copper egg that must weigh several tons? Where do you house its control equipment? — its instrumentation? — its lifting gear?

  I crunched gravel toward number forty-one Seaside Walk. Light behind orange curtains. Newly-painted front door.

  And a Vauxhall Cresta with tartan seat-covers parked right outside it.

  All right. Brazen it out. You have arrived, you have been right, you are needed.

  Doorbell.

  Ping…Pong!

  Nothing. Just the sound of the sea behind you.

  Ping-Pong…Ping-pong!

  Still nothing. Is the door locked? Yes…of course it’s locked, you bloody fool.

  But no sound from inside.

  And no difficulty with the front left-hand window, either.

  …Well what did you expect? Was the egg-shaped thing supposed to be in front of the duraluminium fireplace, warming itself by the television?

  Nicola’s handbag on the unit-type couch. It seems like an object from another age.

  There are no swans sitting on the bright blue carpet, either.

  Well, what are you waiting for? A brigade of dinosaurs? Let’s explore around.

  All is quiet…only the mechanism of the electric clock on the mantelpiece, in need of oil, faintly rumbles as it pushes the centre second-hand round the dial.

  Seven minutes past nine.

  Everything in the house neat, in perfect order. How Nicola must hate it! She represents life, freedom from the tyranny of plastic sterility. Yet in this kitchen you could perform a surgical operation without fumigating it first…

  Spotless electric food-mixer on the polystyrene shelf — every accessory shining new, but no meringue on a tempting dish as a result. Large open freezing chest packed with brilliantly packaged icebergs to thwart a hungry late-arrival out of an extemporized snack. Even the cheese in the immaculate (and silent!) refrigerator was too cold to eat.

  Push-button controls on the wall looked after every electromagnetic-automechanical function that did everything on earth to do with eating except give you an appetite.

  Except if you pressed the end button there came a rumbling sound from somewhere that had nothing to do with the kitchen at all, but seemed to come from the hall outside.

  This I found interesting. Even more so when I opened the chasm full out. I was in the garage; and a huge ramp ran sharply down and away from the main doors leading to the lane.

  I think of money too often to be a dedicated scientist…Because I realized at that moment that Sceptre Electronics, by its failure, must have paid the huge bill for all this. For an explanation of the financial anomaly, look to the balance sheet of K.L.K…

  All such mundane thoughts were cleansed from my mind, though, as I reached the bottom of that ramp and went through the farthest doors.

  When I saw what I saw my mind leapt back to something my psychiatrist had said to me in his most persuasive voice.

  “There’s only one kind of madness,” he had said, “that we know we can’t cure — the madness of Waste.”

  And here, then, was a measure of the insanity of Brundash. The lavishness of it…the succulantly rich delirium brandished by his followers, his believers — of those in whom he had in a sense been sectionally reincarnated — was expressed herein.

  I was standing at the top of an exquisitely-designed staircase which was — like the trapesium-curved roof — made entirely of copper. Looking down into the immense cavity below, I saw a huge pool. Clear water, blue and deep and clean, formed the base of a formidably beautiful concept in architecture.

  I took a few steps down, allowed the perfect proportions of the place to reorientate from the changed perspective of my position.

  A succession of concrete domes, bowl-down, hung on cables from the uppermost part of the sloped roof, and beneath these were copper designs in action-sculpture which disgraced most that I had ever seen.

  A few steps farther then…

  One of the dome shapes had partly obliterated my view of the pond. Now I saw what had been missing on its surface; the living art which completed its perfection.

  A pair of crystal-white swans.

  I gasped at the completion of the spectacle as, when I reached the first half-landing before the next sweeping set of steps, the copper egg came into view. For it was the centrepiece for the whole asymmetry, the logical and ideal and only solution to the aesthetic equation demonstrated in these perfectionist dimensions.

  It glistened in its deathly immobility, reflecting each light, each cross-member, each subtle pattern…as if every thought and every computation that had gone into the inspired contours around it had been conceived to satisfy the accuracy needed to assure the egg of its magnificence.

  And my adulation was turning to disgust.

  It was impossible, rationally, to see why. Not a single ugly line, not one synthetic curve existed to soil the multi-integration of the whole.

  And yet, by the time I had reached the level of the pond, I felt revulsed.

  “James! Do not move!”

  Nicola’s voice, raised in strident alarm for my safety, ringing endless around the intermingling acoustics of the place, mixing with the faint fountain-spring of running water pouring from a great dome near the head of the pool.

  I stood still.

  Nicola came slowly into view from the other side of it.

  And, across the surface of the pond, we gazed at each other.

  Her voice: “It’s a radiation decay pond!”

  It didn’t seem possible!

  A decay pond is a filthy great tank in which you stick contaminated fuel rods after removal from nuclear reactors. They are hot with gamma rays.

  From where I stood I could now see clearly the tell-tale tubes. Inserted in the bed of the pond, they stood upright under the water and came within a few feet of the surface.

  Water is a shield against radiation; I didn’t understand why Nicola’s voice called out in such terror for me.

  But then I saw.

  The level of the pond was drop
ping rapidly.

  Within a few minutes those deadly rods would be fully exposed, murdering the swans and anyone near at hand by ionization.

  But, for now, it was safe to approach. I walked to the water’s edge, watching Nicola.

  She did what I did. We beheld each other over the blue pool. Slowly, the swans circled, hardly rippling the surface.

  Nicola took one or two paces nearer the edge…heels clicking on concrete, then repeating from the roof.

  She wasn’t remote or in a trance or anything like that; it was rather she conveyed the impression that she knew all was lost, that it only mattered now for me to stay in safety. She couldn’t see that my own safety was bound up in hers, and that I couldn’t be interested in my own survival alone.

  I spoke cautiously, tenderly, aware that she was in the mood to do anything. “Nicola. There is a chance.”

  She shook her head, quite slowly — and almost smiling. “There is no chance. Not for me. Or them.” She seemed to look at the egg. I glanced over my shoulder for a second, as if the answer must lie there. Nicola said: “You belong in the world. Not here.”

  She took one more step toward the pool. I did likewise. I didn’t like the hypnotic effect the swans now seemed to have on her. I thought that by sharing it with her I might halve their influence.

  I said: “Where are they?” — Even pitched low, the sound of my voice seemed to go on for ever around me, targeting on to one shining surface after another in successive waves, then dying gradually and at last, somewhere in the upper distance.

  She said: “You’re too late.”

  “Are they dead?”

  Her expression…Identical with Jane’s. She might almost have been Jane, at that moment. “You would not think them dead. But that’s what people will say.”

  I moved.

  Her voice raised again: “Don’t come near me!”

  “Why?”

  “It’s not safe.” She looked beyond me, and up. At the egg. I followed her eyes, then looked back at her. The level in the pond had dropped a good inch and a half further. More softly she said: “I’m telling you to forget all this. To leave me.”