The Chinese Egg

by Catherine Storr

  “And it was in the paper I had this evening.”

  “But how d’you know it’s the same? It could have happened anywhere,” Chris said.

  “No. It’s the same. I know it is,” Vicky said.

  “You said it was only your imagination. . . .”

  “That’s what I wanted to think.”

  “I think she’s right, Chris. The thing is, I saw it too,” Stephen said.

  “When?”

  “Last week. When you and she were in the café.”

  “So it was you outside the window?” Chris said, momentarily distracted.

  “You saw it?” Vicky asked.

  “Sort of. And then you came out and wandered down the High Street.”

  “I was looking to see if there were any prams with no one looking after them.”

  “So I didn’t like it. I went away.”

  “But you really did see it. A baby being stolen?” Vicky asked.

  “I saw a girl looking into an empty pram and saying, ‘It was only a minute.’ Terribly upset,” Stephen said.

  “Where?” Chris asked.

  “I don’t know. Nowhere I knew. Outside a supermarket. But that’s no help, there are hundreds.”

  “What I don’t understand is how you and Vicky see the same things. You both saw the accident,” Chris said.

  “I saw a car come up behind a blue van and I thought it was going to hit the old lady. Then it wasn’t there, there wasn’t anyone on the crossing.”

  “And then it happened. Just like you’d both seen it. Right?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “And now it’s happened again. Well, you say it has. How d’you know it’s the one you saw? How do you know?”

  Stephen said slowly, “I don’t know about Vicky, but both times I’ve seen what happened like in a picture. With. . .”

  Vicky cut in. “Like in a frame? Funny-shaped pieces round it, dark?”

  “Yes. Dark. Like—like battlements.”

  “That’s right. Like the top of a castle. And the picture’s very bright in the middle.”

  They looked at each other with the relief of shared experience. But the relief didn’t last. Stephen said, “I don’t understand. Why do we see something that hasn’t happened yet? I can’t see how we can.”

  “Mum says people think they can. In crystal balls and that. Or the stars,” Chris said.

  “The stars! They’re always wrong,” Vicky said.

  “Did you see it too?” Stephen asked Chris.

  “Me? No. Thank goodness. I’d be scared out of my wits,” Chris said.

  “It’s horrible,” Vicky said.

  “I wish I understood,” Stephen said.

  “Should we tell the police? Or something?”

  “Who’d believe us?”

  “Suppose it happens again? Suppose you and Vicky see something else? How will you prevent it happening?” Chris asked.

  “I don’t know. It’s all so vague. If we don’t know where it’s happening or when, what can we do?”

  “Perhaps you could see some more about the baby. Why couldn’t you and Vicky see where it is? Then we could tell someone. Rescue it. Why don’t you do that?” Chris said enthusiastically. She was disappointed that neither Stephen nor Vicky seemed eager to agree.

  “I wish we understood how it works. What’s so maddening is that we’re wasting it. We know, but we don’t do anything,” Stephen said.

  “Let’s try everything we can think of to get you and Vicky. seeing a picture again.”

  Stephen said, “Wait a minute. I’ve got an idea.”

  The girls waited.

  “It was something you said. An idea sort of began to come into my head and then went away again.”

  “I said let’s try everything.”

  “Not that bit. I know! You said—don’t you see? Vicky and I have always seen the things at the same time.”

  “That’s right! And when you’ve been together.”

  “Not that time in the caff, when I saw it in the paper. Stephen wasn’t there then,” Vicky said.

  “No more he was.”

  “But I was quite close. I was just outside the café,” Stephen said.

  “And we were all of us there the first time, the time with the blue van.”

  “Perhaps it’s only here it works,” Chris said.

  “Seems a funny place,” Vicky objected.

  “Funny? Why funny?”

  “Not mysterious enough. You know. Daytime, and lots of people about.”

  “It’s worth trying, though, isn’t it? Isn’t it?” Chris said to Stephen.

  “I suppose so. Though I agree with Vicky. I don’t think it’s only that.”

  “What d’you mean? That there’s something else we don’t know about?”

  “I just think there must be. If that’s all, why doesn’t it happen to other people too? Why Vicky and me?”

  “I dunno. P’raps it’s like dog whistles,” Vicky said.

  “What about dog whistles?”

  “You know. You can buy whistles that only dogs can hear, humans can’t. The note’s too high or something. Perhaps we’re hearing something other people can’t. Seeing, I mean. It just could be something like that.”

  “Vicky! You’re brilliant! Isn’t she, Steve?”

  Although he wished he’d thought of it himself, Stephen looked at Vicky with a new respect. He had to admit it was a good idea, and it immediately made him feel better about the whole thing. He hated the thought that they’d got mixed up in something spooky; and as for magic, the whole idea was ridiculously babyish. But Vicky had suggested something with a perfectly good scientific background. He could even imagine his father saying, “Yes, not beyond the bounds of possibility.” Only then his father would go on and start analysing dogs. Or whistles. In spite of himself Stephen half smiled.

  “What is it?”

  “Nothing. Only, Vicky,” it was the first time he’d called her by her name, “why do you think it might happen in one special place?”

  “No idea.”

  “Anyway, let’s try it out. Let’s come back here tomorrow and see if you do see anything,” Chris urged.

  “All right. When?”

  “Not too early. It’s bad enough having to get up at quarter-past eight every day for school.”

  “Ten too early for you?”

  “Make it eleven.”

  “I’ll order the coffees if I get here first.”

  “Fine.”

  Stephen said directly to Vicky, “You’ll come, won’t you?” He knew Chris would, Vicky was more unpredictable.

  “Of course she’s coming,” Chris said.

  “Yes, I’ll come,” Vicky said.

  Eight

  But the next day in the café, nothing happened that couldn’t be explained in the most ordinary ways. Stephen, Vicky and Chris drank coffee and shared an enormous number of packets of biscuits. To the amazement of the sloppy girl behind the counter, they tried the experiment of being all together inside, two in and one outside, two out and one in, all three outside. No one saw anything that wasn’t there, and there all the time. There were no accidents on the dangerous crossing, and every pram that passed them was capably filled by baby. Chris was simply disappointed, Vicky’s and Stephen’s disappointment was tinged by relief. If they couldn’t see anything then they also needn’t do anything.

  “We’ll have to be getting back. It’s nearly dinner-time,” Chris said.

  “Dinner? It’s not lunch-time yet,” Stephen said.

  “Goodness! What time do you have lunch then?”

  “About one o’clock. Sometimes later. It depends whether my father’s there or not.”

  “Of course! I forgot. Posh people call dinner lunch, don’t they?” Chris said, unembarrassed.

  “I’m not posh,” Stephen said, red with shame.

  “Yes, you are. Compared to us, anyway. You needn’t worry about it, we don’t mind, do we, Vicky? It’s only Dad who goes on and o
n about how awful it is to be one of the upper classes. I wonder sometimes what he’d do if he won a lot of money on the pools or something, so that he was rich for a change.”

  “I know. He’d give it all to his blinking Party,” Vicky said.

  “That’s right, so he would. To give everyone guns so they could kill off the aristocrats when the revolution begins.”

  “Is he a Communist?” Stephen asked.

  “Not like that. Just very keen on workers’ rights and Unions and that sort of thing. He’ll certainly think you’re up to no good when he knows you have lunch instead of dinner,” Chris said, teasing.

  “Anyway, Chris is right, we’d better go,” Vicky said.

  “Wait a minute. I’ve just thought of something. When you were in here before, you saw about the baby in a newspaper, didn’t you?” Stephen asked.

  “Yes. Evening Standard, it was. Same as you saw last night.”

  “I’ll get one of today’s. It might be something to do with the paper,” Stephen said, and was off before they could answer. He was back in a minute with the midday Standard in his hand.

  “Vicky. You look at the middle bit and I’ll look at the outside.”

  Chris craned over Vicky’s shoulder to read. Vicky turned the pages slowly and unwillingly and breathed a deep sigh as she finished. “Nothing there. What about you?”

  “No flashes like the others. But there’s a lot about the baby.”

  There certainly was. Almost the whole of the front page was given up to an account of the snatching. It was the nurse’s half day off—“There, I told you they were posh,” Chris said—and Mrs. Wilmington had taken the baby out in its pram to do a little shopping in the supermarket in Kensington High Street. She’d spent about ten minutes in the shop and thought she could see the pram all the time—“What, when she was getting fish fingers out of the deep freeze? Tell me another,” Chris said—but when she came out, the pram was empty. Other shoppers hadn’t noticed anything unusual. There was a picture of the Wilmingtons’ wedding, all grinning faces and ridiculous hats, another of the baby when aged two months, a picture of the house where the Wilmingtons lived in Kensington, and a fourth, photograph of Mrs. Wilmington, her face screwed up with crying, her hair all over the place, quite different from the pretty girl in white satin and roses who smiled out of the wedding picture, leaning on her bridegroom’s arm.

  “She’s really nice,” Chris said.

  “Not when she’s crying.”

  “No one is when they cry. Let’s see the house. Golly, it’s enormous. Wonder how many servants they have to keep all that clean.”

  “He looks all right too,” Vicky said.

  “Mm. Terribly good looking. Only I don’t like those little moustaches.”

  There was a pause.

  “What are we going to do then?” Vicky said.

  They looked at each other.

  “Absolutely nothing,” Stephen said, half angrily.

  “It seems so feeble, somehow,” Vicky said.

  “You don’t think the police. . .? It says here, the police are asking anyone who might have seen anything suspicious to come forward,” Chris said.

  “They’d never believe us. Anyway, what have we got to tell them? Nothing they don’t know already.”

  “If you got another flash, it might help.”

  “And it might not.”

  “Come on. We’d better get back,” Vicky said. They left the café. In the street outside, Stephen said to Vicky, “If anything happens, you’ll let me know, won’t you?”

  “Yes. Wait a tick. I don’t know where you live.”

  “Fourteen, Partlett Crescent. And the telephone number’s 132-2735. Shall I write that down?”

  “No, I’ll remember it till I get home. Only if I get a flash and you don’t, it’ll mean we don’t need to be anywhere near each other. Partlett Crescent’s quite a way from us.”

  “I suppose it would prove something though.”

  “Come on. Dinner’ll be cold. Hope you enjoy your lunch” Chris called out to Stephen as they separated.

  Nine

  The Wilmington house was full of policemen. They suddenly appeared in unexpected places, so that Paolo, one of the Spanish couple who did the cooking and the housekeeping and most of the cleaning, found men in blue uniforms on the stairs, in the hall, coming out of bedrooms, even in his own, sacred, pantry. His wife, Maria, who was quite as suspicious of the police as they could possibly be of her, retreated to their bedroom in tears, and announced that she was not coming down again until everybody had gone. Nora Hunter, the beautifully trained young nurse whose business it was to look after Caroline Ann for five and a half days a week, was red-eyed and very much less trim and confident than she usually appeared.

  Mrs. Wilmington, in spite of the tranquillizers prescribed by her doctor, wandered around the house. Sometimes she was down in the library, sometimes in the hall. Sometimes she was up in Caroline Ann’s nursery. Sometimes she was in her bedroom. But wherever she was, she couldn’t keep still. If she sat down, it wasn’t for more than a moment, she would be up again. It was as if it was only by walking that she could bear to be awake and conscious of what was happening. And while she walked, she touched. Her hand went out to books in the library, to the carved ends of the oak bookshelves; from them to the lamp on the little table, then to the curtains over the window. Moving towards the door, she touched the telephone on the desk; hesitated, then moved on again. Opened the door, and moved down the hall towards the sitting-room, but didn’t go in, went, instead, upstairs. Her hand turned the handle of the nursery door, slid over the flowers on the nursery table, over the back of a rocking-chair. The hand went on to the smooth china knob of the room next door, the night nursery, where the baby and her nurse slept. Opened the door and touched the mantelpiece with two cottage china dogs, one each end, tongues lolling, looking sentimentally out of their china eyes at the small pink and white room. Stroked the dogs’ heads, then went up to Mrs. Wilmington’s eyes as if to discover whether there were tears there. She had remembered taking one of the two china dogs off the mantelpiece only yesterday and holding it in front of the baby’s eyes, making it jump up and down while she barked for it, “Woof! Woof!” Caroline Ann had chuckled. She had clutched at the china dog, and her mother had gently disengaged her fat baby fingers and put the dog back oh the mantelpiece. They had been laughing, she and Nora and Caroline Ann. Now the dog sat smirking on the mantelpiece, Nora was crying downstairs, she was here, in this empty room, and Caroline Ann? Where was she? Was she laughing now? Who was looking after her? Was she frightened? Lonely? Missing the people, the only people she knew and trusted? The hand gripped the side of the wooden cot to which Caroline Ann had just been promoted, and the steel supports of the dropside bit into the soft palm. Sally Wilmington held on. She wanted to be hurt. It was her fault that Caroline Ann was lost. It hadn’t happened to Nora, it had happened to her, to Sally Wilmington, Caroline Ann’s mother. If any pain she felt could bring Caroline Ann back, she would welcome that pain. And no pain could be worse than what she was already feeling. Presently the hand relaxed its grip and Sally Wilmington moved on. Out of the night nursery, down the stairs, back to the library, out into the hall, into the sitting-room, into the passage, the dining-room, back again to the hall. There is no rest for this sort of torment.

  Everyone in the house had been interviewed, but there was nothing in anyone’s statement to help. It had been such an ordinary day. Nora always had Thursday afternoon off, it was usual for Mrs. Wilmington to take the baby out. Mr. Wilmington was away on a business trip. No one had seen anything suspicious. Had any strangers been seen loitering outside the house in the past week or so? No. Had there been any unidentified telephone calls? None. Had Nora, on her walks out with the baby, ever been approached by strangers and asked questions about her employers? Never. Had she ever had the notion that she might have been followed on these walks? No. She and the two Spaniards had impeccable references, there
was no reason to suspect any of them; yet it was Nora who most interested Chief Superintendent Price. Not because she gave in any way the impression of guilt, but simply because as a young, reasonably attractive woman in a position of trust, she was, he considered, the most open to persuasion or threat. He meant to keep a very sharp eye on Miss Hunter.

  The most difficult job, he’d found, was with Mrs. Wilmington herself. When he’d first seen her, on the day of the snatch, she’d been in a state of shock. Today, the morning after, she was more under control. He could see from her shadow-ringed eyes that she hadn’t slept much, if at all. She was shaky, could hardly hold the coffee cup without spilling the contents, and her voice was tuned high like a fiddle string, ready to break, but she tried to sit still and to tell him what he wanted to know. She reminded him of a child who is under a strain almost too great to bear, but who is trying to be good. Yes, she said, anyone could have discovered from watching the house that Nora had a regular day off on Thursdays and that she took the baby out in the afternoon if it was fine. She often did a little shopping on the way back from the Gardens. Her husband was away a fair amount, often had to go on business trips abroad. Anyone could have known this. No, she hadn’t been able to speak to her husband yet. He was in the States, should have got back to the East Coast last night. She’d booked a call to the New York office, but hadn’t heard anything. “We’ve wired him the news, he’ll know by now what’s happened,” Price said, thinking that the poor girl wouldn’t be very intelligible on a transatlantic call.

  “Just one more thing, Mrs. Wilmington, and then I hope you’ll try to get a little rest. Your nurse, Nora Hunter. I know she’s got good references and all that sort of thing, but I want you to tell me, if you can, what you feel about her personally. One’s own personal impressions are sometimes more valuable than any number of references. Do you like her? Get on well with her?”

  “Yes, very well. She’s a very nice girl.”

  “Nothing you feel you don’t quite understand about her? Nothing that has ever made you say to yourself that perhaps she’s not exactly what she seems?”

  “No. Oh no. Nothing like that.”