The Chinese Egg

by Catherine Storr

  “I’m sure that’s what you told me,” Mrs. Plum said, surprised.

  “I never. I never did,” Maureen said.

  “What was it then, dear? Funny! I could have sworn you said Brady. . .”

  “Wilmington,” Maureen said. The moment she’d said it, she knew she’d made an even worse mistake. Mrs. Plum was looking at her properly now, she’d stopped fussing with the tea and the cups, and she was staring. But then all she said was, “That’s funny,” and didn’t go on about it, so Maureen hoped she hadn’t really taken that much notice. When she thought of what Skinner would say if he knew about it, Maureen felt sick. But even that thought couldn’t keep her eyelids from dropping or her mind from going all swimmy. When the cups of tea were ready and Mrs. Plum came over to sit in the other chair, she saw that Maureen’s head had slipped sideways and, like the baby, she was fast asleep. Mrs. Plum didn’t mind. Having a bit of a sleep in front of the telly was, she thought, the proper thing to do on a Sunday afternoon.

  Upstairs things were not so peaceful. Skinner had found Jakey and brought him straight up to the bedroom. He didn’t want Maureen in on this conversation.

  “How’s it going?” Jakey asked, lounging on the unmade bed.

  “Bloody kid yells all the time.”

  “Can’t Fatty keep her quiet?”

  “Only sometimes.”

  “Told you she wasn’t any good. Hasn’t as much brain as a louse. I suppose you picked her for her looks,” Jakey said grinning.

  “Shut up, will you?”

  “Told you you should’ve got a girl who’d had one herself,” Jakey said.

  “Like your Sharon?” Skinner said with false sweetness.

  “You lay off Sharon,” Jakey said.

  “More to the point if you did,” Skinner said.

  “What about the old lady?”

  “What old lady?”

  “That one that was in the hall when we came in.”

  “She’s the landlady.”

  “She all right? Swallowed the story?”

  “Why shouldn’t she? There’s lots of couples moving around with kids. Nothing funny about that.”

  “Only as long as Fatty doesn’t go and say something she shouldn’t.”

  “She won’t,” Skinner said grimly.

  “How can you be sure?”

  “She’s frightened, that’s why. She wouldn’t dare.”

  “You better keep her away from people she can talk to,” Jakey told Skinner.

  “Yes? That would look like normal, wouldn’t it? What am I supposed to do, take my wife and kid to work with me every day so she doesn’t get the chance to say anything?”

  “I could get Sharon to come round and take her out for the day.”

  “That’s crazy. You know what he said. One girl to take the kid, a different one to look after it. I’d like to see you, after Smithy heard, if you let Sharon come round here.”

  “She says no one saw her take it.”

  “Where is Sharon?”

  “Keeping out of the way just for the moment.”

  “What about the money?”

  “He phoned yesterday.”

  “So what?”

  “He told them two hundred thou, and left them to think it over.”

  “When’ll he phone again?”

  “A day or two. You’ll stay here?”

  “As long as it seems all right.”

  “You mean as long as your loony bird doesn’t open her mouth.”

  “She won’t,” Skinner said again.

  “Well, keep in touch.”

  “How? He said. . . .”

  “Callbox if you must. If everything’s O.K. just stay put and act normal. He’ll tell you when you have to do anything.” Jakey got up from the bed.

  “You coming round tomorrow?” Skinner said.

  “Might do. He doesn’t want more’n one of us to come to the same place. So if anyone comes it’ll have to be me. He says keep off the Club for a bit.”

  “How’re the others doing?”

  “Ted’s having a fit of the sulks. Don’t ask me why.”

  “Bus?”

  “After a new bird. To hear him talk she must be something quite special. Don’t you wish you was him?” Jakey said, grinning. He opened the door. “Don’t worry about seeing me out. I can find my way,” he said. He ran down the stairs and slammed the front door behind him. Mrs. Plum felt the house quiver with the impact and woke, clucking her tongue in disapproval. Poor tired Maureen never heard a thing.

  Eighteen

  Stephen and Vicky and Chris were engaged, that Sunday, in heated argument. It was the same old story, Chris urging action, Stephen and Vicky agreeing that something ought to be done, but unwilling to commit themselves to doing it.

  “You’ll have to tell the police. Suppose they arrest that girl!” Chris said.

  “You tell me why they should believe us any more than Mr. Wilmington did,” Stephen said.

  “Because. . . you could say you’d seen the girl with the baby. You could tell them what you heard her say.”

  “And then they say, ‘Well where is she then?’ What do we say next?”

  “He’s right, Chris,” Vicky said.

  “You could give them a description.”

  “We’ve got no evidence. We can’t prove anything.”

  “Oh!” Chris said, exasperated.

  “If only we had some sort of lead. I wouldn’t mind trying if we could say where we’d seen those two with the baby. What I hate is going along with a daft story and nothing to back it up.”

  “But we will have to do something,” Vicky said for the tenth time.

  “I know we will. Trouble is, what?”

  The conversation went round and round in circles. Chris became more and more impatient. Presently she got up from the table in the coffee bar where they’d been sitting half the morning, and said abruptly, “I know what I’d do if it was me, but it isn’t, and listening to you just makes me cross. I’m going.” She left.

  Vicky and Stephen stared at each other across the table.

  “Is she really upset?” he asked.

  “She won’t stay like it. Chris never stays cross for long.”

  “I’m sorry, though.”

  “She can’t see why we don’t rush off and do something at once. She would, you see. She wouldn’t stop to think about how people might think she was silly, she’d just know she was right and she’d go and do it. Sometimes I wish I was like that.”

  To her surprise, Stephen said, “I know. You mean you get the feeling that the more you think about a thing, the more difficult it is to do it.” He added, “You sort of see all the things that might happen and you can’t make up your mind to start.”

  “That’s it! I didn’t know anyone felt like that. Except me.”

  “Hamlet did.”

  “Hamlet?” She wondered if he was laughing at her.

  “Whether it be

  Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple.

  Of thinking too precisely on the event

  A thought which, quartered, hath but one part wisdom

  And ever three parts coward, I do not know

  Why yet I live to say, This thing’s to do;”

  Stephen said.

  “Is that Hamlet?”

  “He’s wondering why he still hasn’t killed his uncle.”

  “Mm. Say it again.”

  Stephen repeated it.

  “You must know it fantastically well.”

  “I had to last year. It was the set play for my exams.”

  “Did you learn it all off by heart?”

  “Of course not. Just bits. That wasn’t one of the bits we were told to learn, I just liked it because it said how I feel. About not doing things because of thinking about them too much.”

  Vicky considered this. Then she said, “Funny how he knew all that.”

  “Who? Hamlet?”

  “Not really, Shakespeare, I meant.” “Don’t say it!”
>
  “Don’t say what?”

  “I thought you were going to say what the psychologists always say. How wonderful that Shakespeare knew so much about human behaviour when he hadn’t had a chance to study modern psychology.”

  “Is that what your Dad says?”

  “It’s one of the things he says.”

  Vicky said, “It must be more difficult to write like that now. I mean because there’s such a lot of people knowing things and telling you. Sometimes you get told when you’d rather have found out for yourself.”

  “Perhaps I shouldn’t have told you that piece out of Hamlet, then you could have found it out for yourself?” Stephen said, teasing her gently.

  “Not that sort of thing. I mean, when someone says just what you’ve been feeling. It’s nice to know someone else feels the same.”

  “There’s you and me and Hamlet. That makes three of us.”

  “It’s much easier to be the other sort of person. Like Chris.”

  “Much. And what’s so unfair is that often they’re right. They go off and get the thing done, whatever it is, and just because they’re that sort of person who hasn’t any doubts, they bring it off.”

  “That’s right. Chrissie does. Mum does too. She doesn’t take ages trying to work out what’ll happen next.”

  “What about your father?”

  He was surprised by the way in which Vicky pounced on this. “What about him? What do you want to know?”

  “I only wondered if he was like you. Thinking too much instead of doing whatever it is.”

  “No he isn’t,” Vicky said shortly.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean. . . .”

  There was an uncomfortable pause.

  “I’m sorry,” Stephen said again.

  “It’s all right,” Vicky said.

  “I honestly didn’t mean. . . .”

  “I said, it’s all right.”

  There was a pause. Then Vicky said, “He isn’t my father really.”

  Stephen stared.

  “I’m adopted,” Vicky said, with a tremendous effort.

  “You mean. . . you’re not really Chris’s sister?”

  “Not by rights.” Vicky hated to have to say it.

  “But I thought. . . . You said you weren’t like your father. . . .”

  Vicky said, “How do I know who I’m like?”

  Stephen felt Vicky’s need to stick to the facts. He realized it wasn’t any good trying to get by with only good feeling and sympathy. He said, “Do you know anything about your real parents?”

  “My mum died. Two days after she’d had me.” She said it as if it had been a betrayal.

  “What happened to you then?”

  “Mum—this Mum, that belongs to me and Chris—she was in the bed next to my own Mum and she knew there wasn’t anyone else wanted me. And the doctors had told her she couldn’t have any more babies. She didn’t want to have just the one, so when she went back home from the hospital, she took me too.”

  Stephen looked at her, sitting aslant him at the table, hunched against the world. “Why do you mind so much?”

  “Wouldn’t you?”

  He thought. Difficult to imagine. He had a longing fancy of how wonderful it would be to be free. Not to feel he must do credit to his analytical father, all intelligence, or become like his frightened mother, browbeaten by that intelligence. But at least he knew what he had to cope with. This girl didn’t. He said, “I suppose it could be difficult.”

  “You don’t know who you really are.”

  “Why can’t you just be yourself? That’s what’s important. Not what your parents were like.”

  Vicky said impatiently, “That’s what everyone says. It’s all right for them. They know what sort of family they’ve come from and what their fathers did and all that. It’s all very well to say it doesn’t matter. It does when you haven’t got it, what other people have. That’s all.”

  Stephen saw what she meant. He found he wanted to say something that wouldn’t hurt, that might even help. He said, “I see that. When you do know who your parents are, you sometimes wish you didn’t. You feel you’d be freer to be whatever you really wanted instead of having it all mapped out for you beforehand.”

  “But you do know where you are. And you could be different from what people expect.”

  “It probably looks easy to you because that’s not your problem. For instance, I’ve got an uncle called Lou.”

  Vicky suddenly dissolved into giggles. “He can’t be! That’s what some people call the toilet!”

  “His proper name is Louis, you see.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “Yes, you have. All the French kings were called Louis. Well, a lot of them were.”

  “Oh! French! Go on anyway.”

  “The family wasn’t French. I don’t know why he was called that. What I was going to tell you was that I was always supposed to look exactly like him. When he’d been young, I mean. When I knew him he was bald and a bit fat. He was a great-uncle, you see. And he was really a horrible old man. He was the youngest of a lot of sisters, and they all adored him and sort of hung around saying wasn’t he marvellous, and then they used to do the same to me, only not saying I was marvellous, but how like Lou I was, and wasn’t it wonderful. And I didn’t want to be like Lou. He’d been quite successful in business or something and he’d made a lot of money, but he was the meanest man I’ve ever met. He never allowed his wife enough money for the housekeeping or her clothes, and when he had to give anyone a present for Christmas or birthdays, he used to look out for something he’d had for ages and pretend he’d got it specially for them. Once he gave my mother an old teapot that hadn’t got a spout or a handle and he told her it would look pretty in the garden with a climbing plant growing out of it. And when he died it turned out he’d got masses of money. He was just fantastically mean.”

  Vicky sat and looked at him. She didn’t speak.

  “So you see. When everyone said I was just like Lou, I felt sort of doomed to be like that. Not just mean, but bald and fat too.”

  “You aren’t yet,” Vicky said.

  “I’m not bald, but how do you know I’m not mean?”

  “Are you?”

  Stephen couldn’t answer this. He said, “I do see it could be hellish not knowing about your family, too.”

  “It’s not exactly family. It’s not knowing about my father,” Vicky said.

  “Didn’t he come to see your mother while she was in the hospital?”

  “Mum reckons he probably didn’t know anything about me being born.”

  Stephen wasn’t quick enough to conceal the surprise he felt, and Vicky said, “They probably weren’t married, Mum thinks.”

  “Do you mind that too?”

  Vicky said, “Not that much. I might have if my real Mum had had me without being married and had given me away. I’d have felt bad about it, then. I used to think only girls who didn’t like their babies let them go for adoption, but now. . . . There was this girl in our class last year, had a baby, and everyone told her she ought to have it adopted. . . .”

  She stopped.

  “What happened?” Stephen asked.

  “She did what they said. But she cried. She went on crying. I. . . . I didn’t know it was like that. I wouldn’t have wanted my own Mum. . . .”

  “But your mother. . . I mean. . . well, your and Chris’s Mum. She’s terribly nice, I thought.”

  “She’s fabulous,” Vicky said.

  “And you get on with Chris. Don’t you?”

  Vicky couldn’t imagine life without Chris. She nodded.

  “You don’t know how lucky you are having a sister. I wish to god I’d got brothers or sisters. Or someone.”

  Vicky, faintly interested, asked, “Why?”

  “If you’re an only, you’re sort of a target. Everything your parents think or feel has to be worked out on you.”

  “Why does that matter?”

  “My mother
worries, for instance. If I’m five minutes late home, she’s sure I’ve had an accident. When I was a kid and had the usual sort of illnesses, she always thought I was going to die. And now I’m older, she worries about my exams and about smoking and drugs and sex. All the usual things. If there were more of us, we’d only get a share. As it is, I get the lot.”

  “I don’t think Mum worries like that about anything. I don’t think she would even if she had only got the one,” Vicky said.

  “I still wish there’d been more of us,” Stephen said.

  Vicky was used, by now, to having boys tell her how lucky she was to have pretty Chris as a sister. She was waiting for Stephen to say, “Chris is really pretty, isn’t she?” Instead of which, Stephen said, “I suppose that’s why you’re so different from Chris.”

  “You mean why she’s pretty and I’m not?” Vicky said, sharply.

  “No, I didn’t. I meant, you’ve got different sorts of minds.” “We get the same sort of marks at school.”

  “I wasn’t thinking about that sort of mind. I meant what we were saying before. About thinking about things too much before you do them.”

  “That’s just being stupid,” Vicky said.

  “No, it isn’t. It means you see things Chris wouldn’t. No. I didn’t mean that—not like we see things in flashes. I meant—damn! I don’t know how to say it. You’re more considering. That’s more like it.”

  Vicky was pleased but not sure what he meant. “I don’t see how that helps.”