The Chinese Egg

by Catherine Storr

  “There! Would your mother mind if I looked for some milk in her fridge? I don’t really like mine without,” Chris said, putting the mugs of coffee on the table. Looking at her more closely, Stephen saw that she hadn’t got that extra flush of liveliness that added so much to her prettiness and which had so much struck him at their first meeting. It wasn’t that she’d been remote or difficult today, she’d been warmly concerned for the lost baby, but she’d been somehow subdued. He felt he’d been ridiculously blind. He’d been jealous of Paul the first time he’d seen him with Chris. Why hadn’t it occurred to him that Paul might feel the same about him? And what would he have done if it had? Paul had presumably just kept out of her way, and she minded. At which thought Stephen’s jealousy renewed itself. He hadn’t been thinking so much about her lately, but now for a moment he hated Paul for having the power to dim Chris’s sparkle—and to light it up again. For that same moment he felt the unaccountable urge to snatch, the need to establish sole rights, which constitutes so large a part of sudden and overwhelming attraction to another person. He looked at Chris, still quite astonishingly much prettier than any girl he’d ever met, and resented the idea that she might prefer someone else, that he wouldn’t have a chance if he really set about trying to win her. At the same time, an uneasy cool thought slid into the back of his mind that she wasn’t his sort of person. He dismissed it angrily. He didn’t want reason here, he wanted simply to feel.

  He was so far away, pursuing his reactions to Chris, that when Vicky said, “Did you find it?” he’d forgotten what it was he’d gone to look for. Then he remembered. The egg. For answer he emptied the contents of the plastic bag on to the table. The separate pieces fell out, a jumble of crooked billets of wood, but so carefully carved, so lovingly shaped to fit into and hold each other, they had a sort of beauty, a look of purpose, even apart. Like Adam and Eve as God made them, each had its own symmetry, and yet was not complete in itself.

  Vicky put her solitary piece on the table too.

  “Why don’t you put the whole thing together?” Chris asked. But Stephen hesitated, and Vicky stretched out a hand as if to draw her piece back again.

  “Go on! Why don’t you?” Chris urged.

  Stephen said, “I don’t know if. . .” just as Vicky said, “Suppose when it’s put together it doesn’t work?”

  “You mean you mightn’t get any more flashes?”

  “That’s right.”

  “But. . .! You’d think it’d work better when it’s like it was meant to be.”

  “I don’t think so,” Vicky said.

  “Why not? How d’you know?”

  “I didn’t say know. I only think.”

  “What? Why shouldn’t it work when it’s all put together?”

  Vicky said, “Something to do with it being all in one piece. Then it doesn’t need anything else, it’s got everything it wants. . . I know it sounds crazy. . .” she stopped, embarrassed.

  “I don’t see. . .” Chris began.

  “I know what Vicky means. If it’s complete, it sort of isn’t anything to do with us. If it’s all in separate bits, then it does need us, or someone, to put it together.”

  “But that’s what I want you to do!” Chris exclaimed.

  “But if we do, we’ve lost it. Or we’ve lost whatever we have as long as it’s separate. Anyway I think Vicky is right. I think we shouldn’t try to put it together until after we’ve found the baby. Then if we don’t get any more flashes it won’t matter.”

  “There might be something else you want to find out then,” Chris said, and Stephen thought of wanting to know about girls, of discovering what they wanted; but was it Chris, he was thinking about? Or was it Vicky? Vicky thought about her father. She didn’t really believe that the wooden egg would help her to find out where he was or what he was like. But if there was the smallest chance, she wasn’t going to spoil it.

  The front door opened and shut. Stephen had time to think, “Oh god, that’s Mum,” before Mrs. Rawlinson came in at the kitchen door. Vicky’s hand had gone out for her piece of the egg, and Stephen had bundled the other bits back into their plastic bag and had transferred the whole thing to his pocket, before his mother had reached the table and put her shopping basket down. Not, however, before she’d started apologizing for disturbing them, as though, Stephen thought gloomily, she hadn’t the right to be in her own kitchen. “One thing I’ll never do when I’m married, is get my wife sp frightened that she doesn’t know what she’s doing,” he thought, and noticed with amazement that this hypothetical wife didn’t look like Chris, hadn’t the self-confidence of a girl who has always felt safe and loved and courted, but was a more complex character, who needed encouragement and the security of being wanted.

  But Mrs. Rawlinson’s hesitation didn’t last. Reassured by Chris, finding herself in the position of having to forgive the raids on her coffee and milk jugs, she relaxed, she talked, more easily than Stephen often heard her. Once she even laughed at something one of the girls said; not the nervous, anxious-to-please laugh with which she so often greeted Dr. Rawlinson’s barbed wit, but a real, open, belly laugh. She looked animated, younger. Stephen saw, for almost the first time, that she must have been pretty herself, as a girl. He wondered now whether she’d have been happier and felt more at ease if he’d been a girl. The thought intrigued him, and when Vicky and Chris had left, he asked his mother, “When I was born, did you want a son? Or would you have preferred a daughter?”

  She was anxious at once not to say the wrong thing. “No, of course not. Why ever should you think that?”

  “I just thought you got on rather well with those two and I wondered if you minded not having any girls.”

  “I’d really have liked to have both. I always meant to have a big family. Well, four, anyway.”

  “Why didn’t you?” It struck Stephen as extraordinary that in all his seventeen years he’d never asked this question before.

  “Daddy—Roderick—thought one was as much as I could manage.”

  “I bet you’d have been better than you expected if you had had a lot of children,” Stephen said.

  “Do you really think so?” his mother asked. She sounded surprisingly pleased.

  “You wouldn’t have been able to spend so much time wondering whether you were doing it right or not. You’d have had to get on with whatever it was.”

  His mother said, “I suppose so. It would have been rather. . . fun.”

  “Never mind! You’ve got me,” Stephen said.

  “Only I don’t think I’m much good to you. As a mother, I mean.”

  “If you mean you don’t interfere with what I want to do all the time like Aunt Jean—I can’t think how Luke stands it. Being asked every minute how he’s feeling and what’s he’s thinking about.”

  “I think some people tell each other too much,” his mother said.

  “I’ve never heard you say anything like that before, Mum.”

  “Oh dear! I didn’t mean to say anything against. . . I mean, I know a lot of people really need to talk about their troubles. . . especially to a person who’s trained. . . . I only meant. . . .”

  “I know what you meant. You don’t always have to say everything to be understood,” Stephen said, and left, taking the fragmented egg with him. Mrs. Rawlinson sat for an unaccustomed two minutes’ rest at the kitchen table, feeling an equally unusual warmth from Stephen’s reassurance and from the obvious liking and appreciation shown by those two nice girls. And yet they hadn’t actually put their feelings into words any more than Stephen had. She hadn’t had to be told, she had known. She wondered if perhaps she could believe more in knowing and not so much in being told how by experts and whether everything she did wouldn’t turn out better? Even her cooking, possibly? Fired by this thought, she decided to scrap the cheese soufflé she’d meant to make for lunch and instead to make toasted cheese on slices of fried bread, the way she and her sister used to do when they were children. With a fried egg o
n top, it had seemed the most delicious thing they’d ever eaten. With plenty of salt and mustard and just a drop of Worcester sauce. She remembered those cooking experiments so vividly she could have done it blindfold. After all, if Roddy didn’t like it, he could always have more of the coq au vin which was to follow. She just hoped the sauce would thicken properly this time.

  “Chrissie!” Vicky said as they’d nearly reached home.

  “What?”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I didn’t say there was anything wrong.”

  “I know there is, though. There was on Sunday, wasn’t there?”

  “Sort of.”

  “What is it? It’s to do with Paul, isn’t it?”

  “It’s silly. It’s nothing, really.”

  “Did he say anything you didn’t like?”

  “No. He hasn’t said anything. Anything at all.”

  “But you know he likes you.”

  “I thought he did. And that made me like him more. You know how it is.”

  “He does like you. I know he does. What’s happened, then?”

  “We went out. Sunday afternoon. Only to the common. And everything seemed all right. Only when we came back, he didn’t say anything about seeing me again.”

  “He is working for his ‘A’s’.”

  “Not all of every day. Anyway, if it’d been that, he’d have said.”

  “D’you think perhaps he thinks you’re going out with Stephen?” Vicky dared to suggest.

  “But I’m not! I don’t. . . I like Steve. But I wouldn’t go out with him. . . .”

  “He’s all right!” Vicky said, more fiercely than she meant to.

  “He’s really nice. Only I just don’t fancy him.”

  “But Paul might think you do. We have been seeing a lot of him this last week.”

  “Do you think he really might think that?”

  “He could.”

  “Seen it in one of your flashes?” Chris asked, not meaning it. But Vicky was pleased she was able to tease again, and she didn’t say, no.

  Twenty Six

  Thursday

  Maureen had never been so thankful as she was when Skinner told her they were going to move on out of Fred’s mother’s house where they’d been staying since they left Edmonton. Fred didn’t like her, never had, but then he didn’t like girls at all. He called her Fatty, like Skinner did, and passed remarks about her figure and the slow way she did everything. He made Skinner worse to her than before, having the two of them on at her all the time was awful. She couldn’t help crying sometimes, and that got them madder than ever. She’d thought, when she heard the house belonged to Fred’s mother, that perhaps she, the mother, would be nice to her and talk to her like Mrs. Plum had, perhaps even help her to look after Linda. But Mrs. Stowe wasn’t a bit like that. She was rather smartly dressed, though you could see she was quite old, with platinum blonde hair and a nasty short way of talking. She wasn’t pleased to have Maureen and Skinner and the baby staying with her and she didn’t trouble to hide it from them. She’d shown them the room they were to have, half down in the basement, it was, and given Skinner a key and told them they’d have to look after themselves, she had enough to do upstairs.

  It was Fred who’d shown them where the toilet was and the kitchen, though he’d said they weren’t to use it more than they could help, so they lived mostly on what Skinner brought in; warm beer and fish and chips and a loaf of bread and a pot of jam. Maureen wasn’t fussy about her food, but she didn’t think much of having just that and nothing else for two whole days nearly three. After the first day, she felt she’d give her soul for a cup of tea, so she went upstairs into the kitchen and found what she needed and made herself one. Fred came into the kitchen while she was at it. He never said much, just looked, and then he said, “Did my mother invite you in here drinking her tea?” and when Maureen, frightened, said, No, but she hadn’t seen any harm, Fred said, “If you want to leave here inside your greasy skin, you’ll keep out of this kitchen until you’re asked in.” After that Maureen never went near the kitchen again. She made up Linda’s feeds in the toilet and warmed them up as well as she could in front of the gas fire in the bedroom. One bottle she put too near the flame and it broke and the milky feed made a nasty mess all over the rug. Maureen mopped it up with toilet paper and never said a word. She made do with just one bottle, she didn’t dare tell Skinner. The big black beetles which ran about on the floor when ever you hadn’t got the light on were much interested in the remains of the feed on the rug, and congregated there hopefully, waiting for more.

  The only thing that was a bit better than it had been at Mrs. Plum’s was Linda. Now that Maureen knew about getting up her wind and giving her feeds more or less at the same times of day, she did sleep more and she didn’t cry half as much. Which was lucky, because Skinner had told her that Fred’s mother wouldn’t stand for a howling kid, she’d got to keep it quiet or they’d both cop it. She made a mistake, though, the first day they were there; after she’d rinsed out Linda’s macintosh panties that she had on over the throw-away nappies, she hung them on the washing-line outside the back door. You’d have thought she’d committed a crime to hear how they went on at her, all three of them, Skinner and Fred and Mrs. Stowe. “Didn’t he tell you not to go out of the house?” Fred said, looking at her with those cold eyes, and Maureen said Yes, but she’d thought he meant not out of the front of the house, she didn’t know she wasn’t to go into the garden.

  “Anyone might have seen her,” Mrs. Stowe said.

  “Your neighbours nosey?” Skinner asked.

  “Not more than most. But that Mrs. Bennett next door, she’s always at home. She might’ve seen the kid’s pants even if she didn’t see your. . . girl,” Mrs. Stowe said. Maureen had never heard a woman swear like she did.

  “What’ll you say if she asks?” Skinner said.

  “Say I’ve got a niece staying with me who’s not too bright.”

  “You can say that again,” Skinner said.

  “You certainly got a beauty when you found her. I don’t know why you had to pick on one that was half-witted as well as fat,” Fred said. And later, in the horrid bedroom downstairs, Skinner hit Maureen again several times, not as if he really cared or was even furious, but just as he might have swiped at one of the beetles that happened to be about. She cried and he hit her again. “You stay in here tomorrow. You don’t so much as put your fat pig’s snout out of the door.”

  “Have we got to stay here long?” Maureen asked.

  “You won’t stay anywhere long if you don’t learn,” Skinner said.

  “Who’ll get me the feeds for Linda? I haven’t hardly got enough to last tomorrow.”

  The next day Fred brought in another tin of the stuff she had to make up for the baby’s bottle and two packets of the throw-away nappies, and she stayed in the bedroom all day. Linda slept. There wasn’t even a radio to listen to. Maureen was frightened and bored. She slept all the afternoon and only woke up when the front door banged upstairs and there was the sound of angry voices. She could hear Skinner and Fred and that peculiar high voice, almost like a girl’s, which meant that Jakey was there too. Maureen shivered. She pulled the covers of the bed closer up round her chin as if that could keep her safe.

  Steps came quickly down the stairs and Fred opened the door, without knocking or anything.

  “Upstairs,” he said.

  “Who? Me?”

  “Who d’you think I mean? The blasted kid? Get on with it. We’re waiting.”

  Maureen dragged herself off the bed and up the stairs. Fred led the way into the front room which Maureen hadn’t ever seen, and she followed him. Seated on the three-piece suite were Skinner and Jakey and Bus. Without realizing it, Maureen gave Bus an imploring look. After all he had pinched her bottom more than once and she half hoped he might be more on her side than Skinner or Jakey seemed likely to be.

  “There she is, the bloody cow. You ask her,” Skinner said. />
  Fred sat down on one of the hard chairs by a table that had a big plant on it. No one suggested to Maureen that she should sit, so she continued to stand. Jakey began.

  “What’d you say to that woman you been lodging with?”

  “Nothing,” Maureen said.

  “That’s a lie, and you know it. You told her about the kid.”

  “I didn’t! I never!”

  “Why’d she go to the coppers, then?”

  “I don’t know—I never told her anything.”

  “Skinner heard you.”

  Maureen was no match for this sort of game. Her mouth drooping open with terror, she said, “He didn’t! Did he?”

  Jakey pursued his advantage. “You told her Wilmington.”

  “I said it was a street. She kept on asking. . . .”

  “What else?”

  Maureen looked at him too terrified to speak.

  “Hit her, Fred,” Jakey said. Fred said, “It’ll be a pleasure,” and hit her across the mouth.

  “There’s more where that came from. Go on. What else?” Maureen’s mouth shaped the words, “Nothing else.” They didn’t come out very clearly and Fred hit her again. She felt her lips swelling so that her mouth felt like cotton wool that had soaked up pain. She tasted blood too. It was lucky for her that saying anything after this hurt so much, because it saved her where her poor fuddled brain might not have. All she could think was how not to have to speak, and far away behind that was a sort of knowledge that she must never, never, never, if she wanted to stay in one piece, as Skinner said, and not get hurt too much, mention the name Brady Drive. She shook her head. That hurt too.

  “What else?”

  She tried to say, “Nothing,” but it didn’t come out right. She heard Fred ask, “What about another?” but she didn’t hear the answer because this time Fred hit her in the stomach and she fell, gasping. She hadn’t ever had such an awful pain. She heard the voices going on over her head but she couldn’t understand what they said. Presently the pain went away a bit and she listened. Jakey seemed to be doing most of the talking. She heard him say, “Fair description they’ve got of you and Fatty. That old cow must’ve talked all night.”