The Chinese Egg

by Catherine Storr

  Suddenly, just as it had happened before, the scene quivered, was shot with an intense and painful light, trembled into fragments and re-formed itself. He was looking not at two girls at a coffee table the other side of plate glass, but at a totally different picture. A shop front, people gathering round, and at the centre of the crowd a perambulator. It was empty, the shawls thrown aside as if the baby had been lifted out in a hurry. At the same time he heard sobbing, a voice saying, “It wasn’t more than a minute,” and he saw a desperate, shocked face, a chalky face like a clown’s, a cascade of long brown hair. The next instant the picture had gone, switched off like a light, and he was standing staring at the café’s big open window. But it wasn’t all just as it had been before. The two girls weren’t just sitting there reading, they were leaving their table in a hurry, arguing as they left, one—the plain one—making for the door, the other, Chris, the pretty one, taking out her purse and going towards the cash desk. Stephen ducked out of the way and saw the plain girl go weaving down the High Street as if she was searching for something. She didn’t see him. He had a horrible sort of premonition that he knew what she was looking for. When he saw her hesitate by a group of three prams, in the charge of a little girl who couldn’t have been more than ten, he said, almost out loud, “Oh no,” and set off for home. It was more than he could take, this was.

  He found his mother in the kitchen, dithering between four cookery books and several newspaper cuttings. He felt the need for the reassurance of the bread and butter side of living and said, “What’s it for, Mummy? Lunch or dinner?”

  It was painful to see how pleased she was by his unusual interest. “Dinner, darling. Daddy’s got one of those people from Vienna coming, and I want to make it specially nice.”

  “What, for instance?”

  “I can’t make up my mind whether to give them veal escalope—that’s veal with egg and breadcrumbs, you know—with green peas, or chicken marengo. I’ve never done veal escalope, of course, but it doesn’t look too difficult.”

  “Why try it out when we’ve got someone coming to dinner? You ought to practise on us first,” Stephen said.

  “It’s Viennese, you see, that’s why I thought it would be nice.”

  Stephen felt the well-known surge of irritation.

  “But Mummy, if the bloke who’s coming lives in Vienna, what on earth’s the point of giving him exactly what he gets at home? It’d be far more interesting for him to have something different.” He didn’t add that it would also be a mistake to provide a poor version of a national dish.

  “Yes of course, you’re right, darling. How silly of me not to have thought of that.”

  “If I were you I’d do something you know you can bring off.”

  “What?” his mother asked hopefully.

  “I don’t know. There must be something.”

  She turned the leaves of a cookery book, then picked up one of the newspaper cuttings.

  “This looks terribly easy. A sort of casserole with wine.”

  “Let’s have a look.” Stephen glanced through the recipe. “You have to leave the meat doing something or other in the wine and everything for three days.”

  “Oh dear. I didn’t see.” She bent over her books again.

  “Why not roast beef and Yorkshire pudding?”

  “You don’t think that’s a bit—well, too simple? Daddy says he’s something very important in the society over there. The psychological society, I mean.”

  “That doesn’t mean you can’t give him roast beef for dinner. Not as long as it’s properly cooked.”

  “I wish I could make up my mind,” Mrs. Rawlinson said hopelessly.

  “Well, don’t be too elaborate. I’m sure you think that the longer something takes to cook, the better it is.”

  “But darling, it is! I mean it ought to be. I mean, if it comes out right it ought to be better the more trouble you’ve taken,” Mrs. Rawlinson said.

  Stephen left it. He had had enough of the subject. His mother continued to look through all the possible delicious recipes, wondering which would be most appropriate for a distinguished Viennese psycho-analyst guest. He had reached the door and was almost out of it, when his mother said, “Stephen! There was something I wanted to ask you.”

  He said, on an exasperated sigh, “Oh all right” and came back.

  “Not if you’re in a hurry.”

  “I’m not in a hurry.”

  “You sounded as if you wanted to go.”

  “It wasn’t that.”

  “But there was something?”

  “It’s just that you always wait to begin talking to me till I’m practically out of the door, and then you call me back.”

  “Do I? Oh, I am so sorry. I didn’t know I did that. I’ll try to watch it. Yes, I see it must be very irritating.”

  “Well anyhow. What did you want to say?”

  “It really doesn’t matter, darling. Any time will do.”

  “Now you’ve got me here again you may as well get on with it.” Stephen knew he was being unnecessarily tough, but there were times when his mother’s indecision and fear of doing the wrong thing exasperated him almost as much as it did his father.

  “It was something Daddy wanted you to know. I mean, Roderick.”

  “I know who you mean. Well?”

  “He thinks perhaps you’re getting a bit old to go on calling us Mummy and Daddy. He says he thinks perhaps you’d feel better about it if you used our names instead.”

  “You mean call him Roderick?” Stephen asked, astonished.

  “He thought Roddy,” his mother said apologizing to the outrage in his voice.

  “Why? What’s wrong with Dad? I don’t call him Daddy anyway, it’s you that does that.”

  “Well, I think he thinks you’re getting a bit too old.”

  “You mean he doesn’t want someone my age calling him Dad, so that everyone knows how old he is.”

  “Daddy—Roderick—thought you might like it better.”

  “Well, I don’t. You can tell him that. And anyway, why can’t he tell me himself? Why did you have to do it?”

  “Perhaps he thought it would be easier for you to tell me what you think about it,” Stephen’s mother said deprecatingly.

  “I think it’s a lousy idea. I think it stinks. And you can tell him so,” Stephen was saying emphatically when the door opened and his father walked in.

  “You sound fairly roused, Stephen. What’s up?” he asked. Then, without waiting for an answer, said to his wife, “Can we have something to eat quickly, dear? I’ve got to be out at Roehampton by two o’clock. Not one of your elaborate cookery class dishes. A simple omelette will do for me perfectly well.”

  Mrs. Rawlinson disappeared into the kitchen in a flurry of haste and alarm. Stephen, left with his father, and already angry, said, “Mummy says you want me to call you Roddy.”

  “Oh, she’s spoken to you about it, has she? Good, good, good.”

  “I don’t think so. I think it’s a silly idea.”

  “You don’t want to?” For a moment Dr. Rawlinson was taken aback, but he recovered quickly enough to say, in the best analytical tradition, “You prefer to go on saying ‘Dad’? I see that as clinging to a rather infantile form of relationship. After all, Stephen, you are—what is it—sixteen? At your age I certainly didn’t any longer regard my father as omnipotent, as the supreme authority.”

  “I don’t see that going on calling you Dad means that I think you can boss me around,” Stephen said.

  “Dad. Daddy. You must admit, the word belongs to the vocabulary of a very young child,” Dr. Rawlinson said.

  “I suppose so. Only it’s what everyone says.”

  “Just because it has become common usage doesn’t detract from the profound significance of the perpetuation of an infantile form of address.”

  “Look! I don’t mind if you want me to call you something else. Only just don’t think it means anything to me. Because it doesn’t,” Ste
phen said desperately.

  “This is a very normal defence,” his father said.

  “What do I have to defend myself against, for Christ’s sake?”

  “Your normal aggression. Don’t worry, Stephen. What you are feeling about me now, is the perfectly normal aggressive, competitive instincts that every healthy young male has against his father.”

  Stephen glared. Then speaking very slowly, as if to a half-wit, he said, “Look! Daddy! What you haven’t got into your head is that we’re not cases. We’re not examples in any of your beastly books about how people behave. We’re us. That’s all. We’re just us. Mummy makes mistakes with her cooking because she’s so dead frightened of what you’re going to say when she dishes it up, she can’t even read a recipe properly. And I’m not being special and aggressive or infantile or any of that lot when I say I don’t want to call you Roddy. I’m just being me. I don’t want to call you Roddy because I don’t feel like it. That’s all. I’ve always called you Daddy or Dad, and I’m going on doing it. I’m not going to change all that now just to please you. If you’d asked me because it was what you wanted, I might have said, Yes. I don’t know. But I don’t like the way you made Mummy ask me, and I don’t like the way you pretend it’s because you think I want to. I don’t.”

  There was an awkward pause, after which he added, feebly, “That’s all.”

  His father made a good recovery. “I suppose all that was an example of your lack of aggression against me?”

  “Why do you have to call it aggression? If you mean I’m bloody angry, all right, I am.”

  “You can admit your feelings of anger at the moment, but not the underlying hostility which always exists between an adolescent son and his father.”

  “Must you use that sort of language all the time? Why can’t you use ordinary words like anyone else?”

  “It’s so interesting that you tend to attack me as a form of defence against insight. Do you notice that whenever I ask you something, you turn it back into an accusation? It’s a very typical defence mechanism.”

  Stephen’s extremely impolite answer to this was fortunately cut short by his mother, who at that moment opened the door to say, “Would you like a cheese omelette, dear, or just with herbs? The cheese is a tiny bit mouldy, but I can cut that off and I don’t think it will taste.”

  “If you put it like that, it seems to me that the cheese is contra-indicated. A herb omelette will do for me very well.”

  “Is anything the matter?” Mrs. Rawlinson asked, hesitating at the door.

  “I’m going,” Stephen said hastily.

  “What happened?” his mother asked his father when he’d gone.

  “Just a perfectly normal adolescent exhibition of the Oedipus complex. Nothing to worry about,” Dr. Rawlinson said airily. But he ate his omelette—leathery and burned at the edges—in a silence which his wife perfectly understood.

  Seven

  It took Stephen a week to make up his mind to go round to Chris’s house to ask her to go to the pictures, and when he at last did it, he was disconcerted to find Vicky there too. It hadn’t occurred to him that they belonged to the same family. He’d never seen sisters less alike. It wasn’t as difficult as he’d thought, though, to invite only one of them to go out with him. Vicky, after looking at him in what he felt was a hostile silence for a short time, left the room, and it became easy to ask Chris if she’d come to the spy film at the Gaumont. He was pleased when she accepted at once. She didn’t pretend not to be able to decide or fuss about what she was going to wear, like some girls he’d met. Perhaps, he thought, she knew she’d be the prettiest girl anywhere they went, so she didn’t have to worry. He liked her more and more.

  Vicky had retreated upstairs to the bedroom she shared with Chris, partly because she knew quite well that it wasn’t her that Stephen had come to find, partly because she herself didn’t want to see him. She didn’t want to be reminded of the two incidents in which he and she seemed to be involved together. It was bad enough having queer turns without the embarrassment of sharing them with a stranger. She felt as if the boy brought her bad luck, as if it was his fault she’d seen things that weren’t there and that she didn’t want to know about. She was glad it was Chris he wanted to take out and not her. She stayed upstairs until Chris called out to her that she was going to the pictures, would she tell Mum that she wouldn’t be back till ten, or just after? Vicky heard the front door shut and saw Stephen and Chris go up the road together. Then she came down and had just begun getting supper ready when her Mum came back from visiting Carol, her eldest niece, in hospital where she’d had her first baby.

  “Where’s Chris?” Mrs. Stanford asked.

  “Gone to the pictures.”

  “Alistair take her?” Mrs. Stanford asked.

  “No.”

  “Who then?”

  “That boy who brought us back that Saturday when I didn’t feel so good.”

  “Oh, him! Seen him again since, has she?”

  “Not really. Not to speak to.”

  “He speaks nicely,” Mrs. Stanford said.

  “Mm.”

  “You don’t like him?” Vicky’s Mum said.

  “Not much.”

  “Something wrong with him?”

  “No. I expect he’s all right. I just don’t like him, that’s all. He’s. . . posh,” Vicky said.

  “Well off, you mean? Why’s that against him? You’re talking like Dad.”

  “I dunno. I don’t feel comfortable when he’s there. That’s all.”

  “You want any help with the supper?” Mrs. Stanford asked.

  “It’s all right, I can manage. You keep sitting down.”

  “I shan’t say, No. It’s a long drag up to St. Monica’s and the bus only goes every half hour.”

  Vicky went on slicing onions and crying into them, while Mrs. Stanford sat in front of the telly, only half attending to the end of an old film. Vicky heard its closing, syrupy music and saw the screen, out of the corner of her eye, flicker to a different sort of picture. She wasn’t listening to the newscaster’s voice and only heard her Mum’s exclamation. “I don’t know how anyone can!”

  “Anyone can what, Mum?”

  “Take away a baby.”

  Vicky just had time to say, “No!” when she heard the front door open and Chris came in, followed by Stephen.

  “I thought you’d gone to the pictures,” Mrs. Stanford said.

  “So did I.” Chris, for once, was angry.

  “What’s up, then?”

  “Ask Stephen.”

  Stephen, horribly embarrassed, said, “I’m really sorry. I just had to come back.”

  “Feeling bad?” Mrs. Stanford asked, ready to sympathize if there was really something wrong.

  “Not like that. It was something I read in the paper.” He had an Evening Standard in his hand. He glanced at Vicky, but she wouldn’t meet his eyes.

  “Why were you reading the paper at the pictures?”

  “We were in the queue. It looked as if we were going to have to wait to get in, so I bought a paper.”

  “Something about someone you know?” Mrs. Stanford asked.

  “Not exactly. Only something I ought to do something about, so I asked Chris if she’d mind skipping the film. I had to get back, you see.” It was clear to Mrs. Stanford that Stephen was appealing to Chris as much as to herself. She waited for him to excuse himself and go, but he didn’t. Instead he said to Vicky, “Could I talk to you for a minute?” Mrs. Stanford couldn’t understand this at all. Nor could she understand why Vicky looked so much disturbed by the suggestion and glanced at Chris. But Chris did seem to know what was going on. She said to Vicky, “Was it. . .?” and when Vicky nodded, Chris said to Stephen, “You ought to have told me what it was about. I wouldn’t have minded if I’d known.”

  “What’s all this about?” Mrs. Stanford demanded.

  Stephen said carefully, “I’m sorry. It must sound crazy. It’s just that there’s
a story in the paper that might be something to do with something that happened to us.”

  “Let’s go round to the coffee bar,” Chris said.

  “You’ll come?” Stephen said directly to Vicky.

  “I was just getting supper ready.”

  “That’ll wait. You aren’t in a hurry, are you, Mum?” Chris said.

  “Anyway I can be getting on with it,” Mrs. Stanford said.

  “You said you were tired,” Vicky said.

  “I’ll do whatever it is when we get back. You’ve got to come, Vicky. It’s to do with you,” Chris said. Mrs. Stanford found the whole situation more and more puzzling. Vicky had as good as said she didn’t like this boy much, and yet here she was, clearly not wanting to, agreeing with Chris that she’d got to go. She washed her hands slowly under the cold tap of the sink and went to get her coat. Chris and Stephen stood around silent, waiting for her. When she reappeared they all three went out, Chris saying, “Don’t do anything about supper, Mum, we shan’t be more than half an hour. I’ll help Vicky with it when we get back,” Vicky saying nothing, and the boy saying, “Good-bye. I’m sorry to upset everything like this.” Polite. In spite of what Vicky had said, her Mum rather liked the look of the boy.

  Sitting in the coffee bar, Stephen, Vicky and Chris looked at each other. Then Chris said, “Well?”

  Stephen said to Vicky, “You saw about the baby?”

  Vicky, very pale, nodded.

  Chris said, “What about a baby?”

  Vicky said, “You know when I thought I saw in the paper about a baby being stolen? And we went looking down the High Street and there wasn’t anything?”

  “I’m not likely to forget. It was me told a woman her baby wasn’t safe, and boy, was she furious!” Chris said with feeling.

  “It’s happened. It’s happened, Chris,” Vicky said.

  “It hasn’t! It can’t have! Who said?” Chris demanded.

  “On the news on the telly. I saw it,” Vicky said.