The Chinese Egg (2 page)

“I might. I've got maths as well. And history. It's going to take me hours.”

She turned her school bag out on to the cleared table. There was a cascade of books, exercise books, three biros, an elderly rubber, two set squares and a pencil, a ruler, a packet of Polos and a piece of wood.

“Can I borrow your rubber? I've gone wrong already,” Chris said reaching for it. Her fingers met the piece of wood first, and she said, “What on earth's that? It doesn't look like anything.”

“I dunno. Saw it in the gutter. Somehow it looked nice. As if it meant something.”

“Funny shape,” Chris said, holding it up, a stalk of wood with a wedge-shaped excrescence each end.

“Piece of something else, if you ask me,” their mother said.

“The ends are sort of polished,” Chris said.

“What can you do with it? If it's just a piece of something it isn't any good, is it?”

“S'pose not. I just sort of liked it. It looked somehow. . .”

“What, for Pete's sake?”

“I don't know. As if someone had meant it to be that shape. That's all.”

“You're crazy,” Chris said affectionately.

“It feels nice. Chuck it over. It might bring me luck,” Vicky said, frowning at her maths. But she didn't have luck with her maths. Every single problem she tackled came out hopelessly wrong.

“Why Vicky?” Mr. Stanford said to his wife later that evening, when the girls had gone up to bed, and she was sitting at the sewing-machine, feeding the blue and rosy material through its predatory foot.

“They've both got to have new summer frocks.”

“Why Vicky first? Why not Chris for a change?”

“To tell you the truth I bought this material for Chris. Just her colour, it is.”

“Why make it for Vicky, then?”

“I know it's stupid, but every now and then it comes over me that Chris is ours, and she knows it. Chris is safe. As safe as a child can be. And Vicky isn't. I want to make it up to her.”

“That doesn't mean you have to be doing things for Vicky that you don't do for Chris.”

“I don't in the ordinary way. I don't think about them like that. It's different too, Chris being so pretty. You know, I feel God's been unfair making Chris the pretty one and Vicky plain. Well, not plain exactly, but she's not like Chris.”

“That she's not,” Mr. Stanford said.

“She's a nice girl. You love her too,” his wife said.

“Of course I do. Only I don't forget she's not mine. Nor yours.”

“That's what I mean. However much we look to her as if she was our own, she can't ever be the same. There's always the thinking, ‘Perhaps that's her mother coming out,' or, ‘Who was her father, when all's said and done?' That's why I feel different about her.”

“That's why you give her Chris's summer frock?”

“Maybe. I don't know. I just feel I owe her something, that's all.”

“You owe her? I'd say she owed you. There was no call for you to bring her home the way you did.”

“Let's not have that again. You agreed at the time, you know you did.”

“Right. But I never. . . .”

“And she and Chris make a fine pair, don't they, now?”

“They're all right,” Mr. Stanford said without enthusiasm.

“And Chris would have been lonely.”

“I won't have you upsetting yourself about that.”

“I'm not upsetting myself. And Vicky's a good girl.”

“She's all right.”

“Clever, too.”

“She'll never be a patch on Chris for looks,” said Chris's father proudly.

“We couldn't have done without the two of them.”

“So you say.”

“I couldn't, anyway. Sometimes. . .” but she didn't finish the
sentence. She'd been going to say that she couldn't imagine her life without both her own and her adopted daughter, but looking at her husband's face she decided not to say it aloud. She loved them both. That was enough.

When Stephen had got home and tried to fit the bits of the egg together he realised the truth of what Mr. McGovern had said. It was not an easy puzzle. He'd spent longer over it than he should, considering the amount of weekend homework he had in the sixth form, and by dinner he hadn't got anywhere near discovering the lie of the pieces. He ate angrily through one of his mother's experimental dishes, returning the standard “all right” when she asked anxiously whether it was what he liked. He felt furious. He was furious with himself for dropping the egg, furious with himself again for not seeing at once how it should fit together, and furious with his parents for being there, for asking him questions he didn't want to have to answer, for his mother's anxiety and her ineptness with food—why couldn't she just cook roast chicken or beef or warm up frozen food like other people's mothers? Why did she have to try out fancy sauces and elaborate French ways of messing up perfectly good food which might have been all right if she'd been better at it, but which always, in her hands, went wrong? His father, fortunately for Stephen, was tired, so he didn't have to answer the endless inquiries into what he'd been doing, what he'd been thinking and why? why? why? all the time. Stephen supposed this went with his profession and it seemed to have become an inescapable part of his private life as well.

“What are you going to do after dinner, darling?” his mother asked as she stacked plates for Mrs. Noble to wash up in the morning, and Stephen said, “Work, I suppose,” wondering what his father would say if he'd answered that he was going to try to
mend a broken egg. He could just imagine how his father's expression would change to the alert, watchful look which meant that he thought for once he was going to see into Stephen's mind. He'd say, “That sounds like quite a tricky business. How are you going to set about it?” or, “Now why should you want to do that?” or if he was feeling philosophical, “Interesting concept the egg, as the perfect indivisible whole. . .” or something like that, with a string of the names of all the different tribes in the South Seas or somewhere who worshipped the egg as a god or as a fertility symbol or the token of re-birth or anything else sufficiently far-fetched. Stephen by now knew quite a lot of the jargon, though he couldn't be sure he always got it right. One thing was certain, though, whatever else his father said about it, he wouldn't just see it as an egg. That would be too ordinary and simple. It would have to mean something else. Stephen thought that both his parents really made life much more complicated than it need be, since his father would see the egg not as an egg but as a symbol, and his mother wouldn't just boil it or fry it, but would look up how to turn it into something unrecognisable in one of ‘her foreign cookery books. By the time either of them had finished with it, in fact, no one would ever know it had started life as nothing more than an egg. “Its own mother wouldn't know it,” Stephen said aloud in the privacy of his room, and laughed and felt better.

Probably, just because he felt better, when he looked at the wooden shapes where he'd left them angrily an hour or so earlier, he saw them not as incomprehensible, hostile, separate things, but as having meaning, parts of a whole. He forgot his history essay and the intensive reading he should have been doing around the Metaphysical poets, and sat down at his desk, fingering the smooth pieces of wood. He found that without thinking he'd interlocked three of them together, obviously right. There was the beginning of the outside curve, ovoid, polished. The inner surfaces were plain, that was the only help in seeing how the egg was to be put together. Pleased with his progress, he made the mistake of concentrating too hard, trying to work the puzzle out like an algebraic formula, or a problem in geometry, as if it were a proposition in logic. It was better, he found, if he didn't think
directly about it, but let his fingers play with the pieces, his eyes wander over them; then suddenly it jumped at him, how this angle was made to fit into that, how what had seemed an impossible shape to fit in anywhere turned out to be the king-pin that held, others together. Before, when the pattern had completely eluded him, he'd been working at it too hard; now he played, allowing his mind to wander, thinking of his friends, school, places he'd been to, girls he'd looked at and longed for, music he'd heard. And while he dreamed and remembered the egg grew in his fingers. Like any jigsaw—only this was a three-dimensional one—it got simpler as the pieces to be fitted in became fewer. Even so it wasn't easy. He stuck at it, with a growing feeling of triumph, for over two hours. It was eleven when he'd got all but the last three pieces into place. It wasn't until that moment that he realised that although only three pieces remained on the red leather inside the flap of his desk, this wasn't the total number needed to complete the egg. He fitted them in, with a sort of desperate hope that he'd got it wrong, but there was no doubt. The smooth surface of the egg still showed one or two rectangular gaps where another polished segment should slot in. And though the egg held together, it was doubtfully, hesitantly, without the firm confidence Stephen had sensed in it when he'd first held it in his hand. There was at least one bit still missing; he must have overlooked it in the street. He'd go and look for it first thing next morning. It was a Saturday, fortunately. He was determined to find it. He went to bed angry again, stayed awake longer than usual, raging against the luck that had made him trip just at that psychological moment, and overslept the next morning. He didn't get out to begin his search until after ten.

Chris and Vicky went out shopping every Saturday morning. This Saturday was no different from any other to start with. They did the boring stuff—that meant the household shopping—first, then went to look for the more interesting things. Chris wanted shoes. Vicky wanted a slide to keep her straggling hair off her face; astonishingly she found immediately exactly what she wanted, made of pale fine cane woven into a sort of flat knot. “Marvellous, you're so dark. Keep it on, Vicky, it's great,”
Chris said. Looking in the mirror Vicky saw that it was true. The slide, the way Chris had looped her hair off her face, made a new, different Vicky. Not pretty, not ravishingly pretty like Chris, but a girl with a style of her own. She almost smiled at her reflection, then her eyes took in the sloppy pullover she'd been wearing for the last year, faded jeans stretched a little too tight, and beside her, Chris, in almost equally old clothes, but somehow looking finished and put together just right, and sure of herself in the way that perhaps only a girl who has been pretty, without effort, from babyhood, can be. Vicky scowled at her own reflection, then cheered up and bought the slide. It was miraculously cheap. She came put of the boutique saying, “Lucky! We've both been lucky, your shoes and now this.”

Chris said, “Your silly bit of wood you found. Think it really works?” Vicky put her hand in her pocket. She'd forgotten it, but it was there. She started to say, “That wasn't the sort of luck I meant,” when the thing happened.

They were on the pavement outside the delicatessen, just by the pedestrian crossing, the one that Mum always said was dangerous; the road was too wide, a driver coming up on the outside couldn't see who'd stepped off the pavement. Vicky wasn't really looking at it, but it flashed suddenly in front of her eyes. The funny thing was that what she saw was in a sort of frame, like a small bright picture surrounded by odd, dark, angled shapes like the top of a tower, like battlements. In the bright picture, she saw the crossing and an old lady starting to walk across in front of a blue van that had stopped for her. In that instant she heard two sounds. A voice, a boy's voice, cried out, “Look out!” and brakes screamed. She thought she saw a car coming up much too fast on the further side of the van, she wasn't sure if the old lady fell. She clutched Chris's arm and shut her eyes, she didn't want to see the accident.

“What's the matter?” Chris said.

Vicky opened her eyes. She saw the boy who had called out, his mouth still open, staring, shocked.

“What's the matter? You're hurting,” Chris said.

“The old lady,” Vicky said.

“What old lady?”

“On the crossing.”

“There isn't anyone on the crossing. What's the matter? You're seeing things,” Chris said.

“But I saw her. And a blue van. She was going to be hit.”

“You're crazy. There isn't anything like that. Look!” Chris said.

Vicky looked. Chris was right. Traffic was flowing smoothly up the High Street, buses, vans and cars. Three small children with their mother stood on the curb waiting correctly until some kind-hearted driver should stop. No old lady, no blue van. No accident.

“I saw her,” Vicky said again.

“You've gone all white. You're shaking. We'd better go back,” Chris said.

“Wait a minute,” Vicky said. The boy was still there. He was standing quite still, looking at the pedestrian crossing, as if he couldn't believe his eyes.

He had called out. He must have seen it too.

Vicky felt peculiar. She was cold, but she was sweating. Sound roared in her ears, she couldn't see properly. She took three steps away from Chris towards the boy, meaning to ask him something, she didn't know what, but when she'd reached him all she said was, “Chris!” desperately before blackness fell on her like a shower of soft dark feathers.

“Help me,” Chris said to the boy, who stood there staring at nothing as far as she could see and looking, she thought, a bit daft. “Into the caff,” Chris said, pointing to it with her head, and they half carried, half dragged Vicky to a table just inside the door. “Get her head down on her knees. She'll come round in a second,” Chris said, competently holding Vicky on the chair with one hand and with the other forcing her head down. “It's only a faint. She used to do it in school prayers all the time, but she hasn't for ages now.”