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That had been their first crisis. There had been others: his muted, slow-burning reaction to his mother’s death, when he’d shut her out so completely that she’d almost walked away; the string of burglaries in the last parish; the incident which never was with her colleague in the English department. And there was the business of children, of course, but they’d stopped talking about that eventually, once it had become more or less academic.
And then there was the American woman he’d offered the spare room to that time, six years ago now and she couldn’t help thinking it was too long ago for her to be still thinking about it like this. It wasn’t as if they’d ever seen her again.
That Saturday, when the woman had been in their house for more than a week and was showing no sign of being about to leave, Catherine had been woken by the sound of Michael making his breakfast. She usually tried to have a lie-in on Saturdays, and was usually w
oken like this, by the clatter of knives and plates and mugs, reflecting each time that for such a big house sounds did seem to carry awfully well, that the two of them seemed to rattle around in there. She heard the toaster popping up, and Michael putting it down again, and she turned over to go back to sleep.
In the kitchen, Michael was taking the butter and the honey down from the cupboard and waiting for the kettle to boil. The American woman appeared in the doorway – this was Michael’s account of it, later – and said she hoped she wasn’t interrupting but could she ask him something? Michael said yes, certainly, and she came into the room and sat down. Her situation was more complicated than she’d expected, she told him. It seemed she would have to go back to New York to get copies of her medical records, a referral from her doctor, her insurance documents. Which was a problem because she didn’t have the money to go home and come back again. Michael asked if there wasn’t someone she could get to send the documents. The woman looked at him, and ignored his interruption, telling him again that she didn’t have that kind of money, not to go home and come back again. She didn’t even have the money to get down to Heathrow, ha ha – this said as if it was all a big joke, according to Michael, or rather as if she wanted him to think that she was bravely trying to make it all into a big joke – and so she knew it was a lot to ask after all the kindness they’d already shown her but did Michael think there was any chance he could help out at all? Financially?
Michael told her he was sorry but he didn’t think he could do that. Which seemed to surprise her, he said. Seemed to nudge her off-balance. Something in her expression changed, was the way he described it. But all she said was that she was sorry to have troubled him. And then, as they were both moving into the hallway, asking if she could ask him something else. A nod or a shrug from Michael, and she said that she’d noticed something was wrong, that she wondered if there were maybe some problems between him and his wife. And the answer heard by Catherine, as she stood in their bedroom doorway at the top of the stairs, was that he didn’t think that was an appropriate question actually, ha ha; whereas the answer in the account he gave her later was a far less equivocal no.
He’d left for a meeting at the church then, and the American woman had gone back to her room, and she must have already started packing because by the time Catherine had been to the bathroom and washed her hair the woman had disappeared: the room empty, the sheets stripped, the front door key left on the bare mattress with a note.
She stood in the empty room for a few moments, feeling the blessed silence settle around her, and then she went downstairs to set the table for lunch. She scrubbed and pierced two jacket potatoes and put them in the oven. She washed and drained and mixed a salad, and made a dressing. She looked in the kitchen drawer where they kept their bank cards and passports and housekeeping money, and made sure everything was there. She checked that Michael’s new laptop computer was still in the study. She ran the vacuum cleaner around the spare room, emptied the wastepaper basket of yoghurt pots, straightened the rug. She took the crumpled sheets downstairs and put them in the washing machine, and when she went back upstairs she checked through her jewellery box.
It wasn’t that she’d thought the woman would turn out to be a thief. Not really. She just wanted some rational explanation for the way she’d felt about her, the suspicion and unease which she couldn’t bring herself to admit might have been unfounded.
It felt like a long time before Michael got home. He started telling her about the meeting almost before he’d opened the door, tugging off his shoes in the hallway and rattling on about misplaced funding priorities and a dean who cared more about church buildings than putting the gospel into practice. She waited for him to finish talking before telling him that the woman was gone, by which time they were sitting at the table with a dressed salad and two steaming baked potatoes between them. She showed him the note the woman had left, unfolding it from her cardigan pocket and smoothing it out on the table. THANK YOU, it said, SEE YOU AGAIN SOON. He smiled, and nodded, and draped a napkin across his lap.
‘What do you think she means?’ Catherine asked. ‘See you again soon?’
‘Oh, I’m sure it’s nothing. Just a figure of speech.’
‘Really?’
‘Really.’ He straightened the napkin on his lap, and fiddled with his knife and fork. ‘Crisis over,’ he said. He poured out two glasses of water. ‘Did she take anything?’
‘No. I looked, but I don’t think anything’s missing.’
‘Did she say anything when she left, besides the note?’
‘No, nothing.’
They shut their eyes and said a prayer of thanks and cut open their potatoes, the steam rushing out into the room and filling the space between them for a moment while they each waited for the other to reach for the butter and the salt.
‘Well,’ he said. He was almost smiling. He felt vindicated, she supposed. ‘I imagine that’s that then.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I imagine you do.’
The Chicken And The Egg
Stickford
It’s not really something he likes talking about, to be fair. It is, in actual fact, quite a difficult thing to discuss. But it’s becoming more of an issue. It’s having knock-on effects. What it is, he has this fear of breaking open eggs. It’s a type of phobia. There doesn’t seem to be a Latin name for it. He’s checked. But essentially he has this fear that he’ll one day break open an egg and find a little baby chicken foetus curled up inside. Dead. Occasionally he imagines it being just about alive – limply flopping is the phrase which comes to mind – but he’s pretty sure that’s just him being irrational.
He is in actual fact quite sure the whole thing’s irrational but he can’t get the idea out of his head. He knows something about poultry-farming methods; he’s been looking into it, and he knows that the chances of a fertilised and developed egg making its way into the retail chain are just about impossible. For starters if it was an egg from a battery-cage site then it stands to reason it wouldn’t be fertilised. Due to the cages, that would be. And even on the organic or free-range sites they do have these incredibly strict inspection regimes. It would be a failure of what he’s been reliably informed are very robust systems. Millions and millions of eggs are produced every single day.
It would only take one.
It started when he overheard a man in a café describing it actually happening to him. The man was the owner of the café. He was talking to a woman at the counter who was ordering breakfast. He told her that some years previously, when he was working in the kitchen, he’d broken an egg and found a baby chicken inside. He described it in quite some detail, was the thing: how perfectly formed the foetus had been, with feathers and everything, how there was mostly blood and membrane where the yolk should have been. He told the woman it had quite shaken him up and he’d been unable to cook with eggs from then on. The woman changed her mind about what she was ordering. It’s a conversation he can remember very clearly. There were certain shapes the man made with his hands while he was describing it all.
But when he knew it had got really bad was this one time when he was staying with his wife at a B&B. It was out in the country somewhere and the landlady kept chickens in the garden. His wife had liked that. She’d thought it was very authentic. Only he’d noticed that there was a rooster in with the hens, and then at breakfast he’d found these dark-red specks in the yolks of their fried eggs. Tiny specks, to be fair, about the size of a pencil mark made with a very sharp pencil. But he’d understood what they were. And the trouble was, he hadn’t wanted to say anything to his wife, and he hadn’t wanted to offend the landlady, and so he’d gone ahead and eaten the bloody things. And then what was awful was that they were absolutely delicious: they were literally the freshest eggs he’d ever eaten and they really were very good. Creamy and soft. Light. But at the same time he hadn’t been able to stop thinking about the tiny dark-red specks. It was as if his imagination was a microscope, was the way he thought of it. And after that the whole trouble with eggs got serious, was what happened, was how he recalls it happening.
It’s the anticipation which gets him. Even just thinking about it. Even nowhere near a cooking situation or an eating situation, just thinking about it at some other moment. The anticipation is what really does the damage. If he does happen to find himself in an unavoidable egg-breaking scenario, the tension is almost literally palpable. His stomach clenches, and his face more or less prepares to express disgust. He’ll stand there with the egg held out at arm’s length, like what it might do is explode. He’ll close his eyes, and brace himself, and crack it into the bowl or the pan, and then once his eyes are shut what he has to do is brace himself all over again to open his eyes and look.
If it could just happen, is what he’s started to think. If he could get it over and done with. Then he wouldn’t be all worked up with the anticipation. The reality of it might not even be all that bad, considering. Considering all the things he’s imagined.
Sometimes he’s imagined it happening with a hard-boiled egg. Picking off the shell, getting the salt and pepper ready, and then cutting through the firm white of the egg and making the discovery. On a picnic. On a train. At a business meeting. Or even worse, having served the hard-boiled eggs to a guest. In a salad, such as perhaps a salad of cos lettuce and rocket, with a dusting of paprika across the eggs, some quarters of very ripe tomato, parmesan shavings, an olive-oil dressing. The eggs still just warm enough to release the fragrance of the olive oil. The guest being the first to cut into the egg.
