— Oh, Louie, she wails. — You’ve given me an egg.
Louie realises what she has done: she blushes darkly. The egg is an (expensive) replica of the kind that Victorian dairywomen put under hens to encourage them to lay: made in off-white porcelain with a grey crazing all over its surface. She had only wanted it because it was heavy and cold and smooth and she was bothered and footsore in the crowded shop.
— Don’t you like it?
— Another egg! Phil laughs. — You really don’t know you’re doing it, do you? Merrick won’t believe that you don’t know; but I’m sure.
— I’ve never given you an egg before, have I?
Phil goes off into the front room and brings back a plate on which there is a whole collection of eggs: blown and painted ones, wooden ones, stone ones, one in burnished metal. The collection must have been out on display among all the other interesting things, on all the many evenings Louie has spent here.
— I gave you all those? When? Surely not. Some of them I’ve never seen before.
— All of them. Over the past — oh, five or six years?
— God: have you thought that I meant something by it? Some awful kind of hint?
— You tell me.
— No, honestly, Phil, if I really try to think, it’s probably just that there’s something contained and satisfying and. you know. elliptical. about the shape, which makes me think of you. Of how you are. That’s all I can imagine.
— Only I’d rather, says Phil, — that we agreed that at this point my egg collection’s complete. It’s finished. There aren’t ever going to be any chickens.
They only began writing about a year ago: but it has taken hold of them both with a ferocity and a destructive importance. Neither is satisfied with anything they’ve done, yet. There are five of them in the writing group: under its surface appearance of supportive and sane encouragement a kind of anarchy of need and self-doubt and competition runs loose. Phil and Louie agree privately that none of the other three are very good. Even more privately, they doubt one another. That evening Phil reads out a story about a love affair between an older woman and a boy: the paper shakes in her hands. Louie feels embarrassed for her: the story is unconvincing and mawkish. Because of the egg disaster, however, she feels absolutely unable to say anything critical about it; in fact she praises it exaggeratedly, singling out the one or two moments which could be read as if they were ironic.
— About these eggs, says Louie when the others have gone. — I feel so awful. But do you know what occurred to me? You’re always giving me jugs.
— Jugs?
— Really. The Habitat one for my last birthday, that old blue and white spotted one, a big one with a leaf pattern you brought back from Portugal. Perhaps you mean something about me pouring myself out. Perhaps you mean that I’m wasting myself; giving myself away.
Phil sits with her feet tucked under her in a corner of the deep blue sofa. She doesn’t seem very interested in the jugs. She tells Louie that what she wrote in the story, the older woman and the boy, really happened to her.
— You’re joking, says Louie, slopping scalding tea. — You had a whole love affair, and never told me a word about it? When, for God’s sake? Is this before Merrick?
Phil says that she finished it six months ago, that Merrick doesn’t know. She says she finished it because it was really so unforgivable, he was the son of a friend of hers from work, someone Louie didn’t know. He was eighteen.
— Not much older than Ella, says Louie.
— No.
— I don’t know how you could.
— No.
But Phil sits with her face shining in some way — contained, oblique — which closes Louie out. She tells Louie that the boy was so special, so gifted, so lovely to look at. She tells her how they spent nights together at the seaside in Suffolk because his parents had a holiday place there, and how the room they slept in was full of his boyhood photographs and birdwatching lists and Airfix models. He was so completely serious about her. He was so concentrated. He had had no idea that things could be like that. (Louie supposes that ‘things’ means sex.) He had got a place to read English at Cambridge. (That was how it had all started: Phil’s friend had asked her to give her son extra tuition for his English A level.)
— He met someone we both knew at a party the other day, Phil says. — He asked after me, and before they could say that I was fine, he filled up with tears. It was all right. The person just thought he had a crush.
— It’s terrible, says Louie.
— I had to finish it because I didn’t want to be with him and be fifty. Or anywhere near fifty.
Louie sits up late, alone, on the sofa that is now pulled out and made into a bed for her. She’s beginning to remember all the writing Phil brought to the workshop while she must have been carrying on this ridiculous affair. How could she have failed to guess? How could she have thought those poems were about Merrick? The writing wasn’t particularly good. Love makes you stupid, she thinks, that kind of love.
You couldn’t be sorry that it wasn’t going to happen to you, ever again.
She feels as if a door is closing painfully on her, squeezing her shut: she holds the cool porcelain laying-egg against her hot cheeks and her wrists. Was she burning with envy: would she, in truth, give anything to have what Phil had had, just one last time? She reviews the things she wouldn’t give, not in her right mind: children, kindness, peace, writing. But then that kind of love has nothing to do with your right mind.
No, not ‘never again’.
Surely not.
Not ‘never’, not yet, not quite.
A CARD TRICK
IT WAS 1974: not a good year, clothes-wise, if you were an eighteen-year-old girl, tall and overweight, with thick curling hair and glasses. Gina liked best to wear a duffel coat, underneath which she imagined that she hid herself. But this was summer, she was on holiday, and she had had reluctantly to leave the duffel coat at home. She mostly wore a Laura Ashley dress in blue sprigged cotton. It was meant to look as if it had been faded by haymaking in meadows of wild flowers; but its buttons gaped across her bust, it was tight around her hips, and she knew its effect on her was not rustic but hulking and penitentiary. Sometimes while she walked along bitter tears stung her eyes, at the idea of the sheer affront of her ugliness. At other times she was more hopeful.
Today at least the sun was not shining. When it shone — and it had shone every day since she arrived — it made things worse; it seemed such an insult to nature and beauty not to want to peel off one’s clothes and run around on the beach, not to be happy. But today the sky was a soft grey which kept dissolving into warm rain, and everybody was more or less muffled under waterproofs. Because it was raining, Mamie had driven inland with her from the house on the coast, to visit Wing Lodge. Mamie was her mother’s friend, and Gina was staying with her and her family for a fortnight; although to call her a friend did not quite explain the whole thing, as Mamie was also a client, for whom her mother made clothes.
Mamie told it as a great joke that she was an Honourable because her father had had some sort of title; Princess Margaret had once come to tea with her family. She was small and very pretty, with sloping shoulders and ash-blonde hair and a face that was always screwing up with laughter; her tan was the kind you can only get in the South of France (they had a house there too). Her clothes seemed effortless — today, for example, a Liberty print blouse under a cream linen pinafore — but Gina had seen some of these things in the making and knew how much effort actually went into them, the serious scrutiny of pinned-up hemlines in front of the mirror, the bringing things back ruefully, apologetically, after a week or two, with a nagging suspicion that a sleeve was set in too high, or an inspiration that the seams would look wonderful with two rows of over-stitching. She was being very kind — very encouraging — to Gina. She had not made any mention of the Laura Ashley dress, nor the hairslide that had seemed an appealing idea when Gina brushed her hair that morning but was now bobbing against her cheek, having slipped to a wrong and ridiculous place.