The Egg-Shaped Thing Read online

  So we clanged down the stairs and I took the right turn as directed and found myself at the top of the regular staircase. Davvitt closed another sliding door behind us (this one wasn’t quite so thick) and gestured me into going down one more flight.

  The sitting-room he showed me into was respectable middle class, even down to the climbing plant which was trained up a criss-cross trestle against the wall. The furnishings were what you might expect of someone who had paid a brief visit to the Ideal Home Exhibition without using much judgement.

  As I took in these surroundings I began to have serious doubts about the bewildering events up top. There’s no controlling the imagination — mine, anyway — once it has been thrust, by some primitive instinct alerted by shock, on to the bobsleigh-run of gathering terror. For here, in the squalidly innocuous environment of the prim commuter, the exotic cinema of the night seemed remote. Had it just been my mood, then, playing outlandish tricks with my perception?

  Davvitt said nothing, just let me go on feeling a fool, until he’d fixed me up with some instant coffee which he hadn’t mixed properly, so that congealed lumps of the powder still floated wretchedly on the surface.

  With meticulous attention to detail Davvitt poured a tomato-juice for himself, adding Worcester sauce and pepper in precise quantities and then tasting it like a ketchup connoisseur. Only after this performance did he address me, forcing himself to ask: “Are you badly hurt?”

  “No. I’m all right.”

  “How did you fall?”

  “I’ve no idea.”

  “Well surely, you must remember what you were doing up there?”

  Davvitt was a small, arrogant man with a blank face and a narrow nose like a beak. He looked as if he might wear spectacles, but in fact he didn’t. The omission threw emphasis on the flat, impassive eyes that only sometimes flamed-out with an obscure brand of passion, but more often looked as if they were closed.

  This was illusionary; much of the time he was looking down at his small hands, as if their puniness were a constant source of distress.

  “I asked you what you were doing up there,” he repeated.

  “It was simply that there were some cats fighting and making a God-awful noise. I went up to chase them off.”

  “Do you normally go trespassing in the middle of the night, just because of a few cats?”

  “No.”

  “Then why this time? Because it was my roof, as opposed to anyone else’s?”

  “But why should I want to pick your roof?”

  “That’s exactly what’s worrying me.” He sipped thoughtfully at his tomato-juice. “I’m doing top-secret work up there. Did you know that?”

  “I’ve guessed you were on to something in the way of research for some time. I didn’t know it had any official classification. I thought it was some private thing of your own.”

  He ignored this challenge. “And you’re seriously expecting me to believe that the nature of my project had nothing to do with your presence up there?”

  “I know nothing of the nature of your project. I’m simply stating what happened.”

  “Yes. But you’re in rather a difficult position, surely? You’ve been going about telling people I set out to ruin your company

  “Who in particular?”

  “Your friend Tesh Philbar, for instance.”

  “He said so to you?”

  “No. But then he wouldn’t. As a director of K.L.K. he too could be in a difficult position if he let fly. But he’s obviously been got at.”

  “‘Got at’! What do you think he is, Davvitt? A juryman? Tesh is a personal friend of mine to whom I can say what I like.”

  “Slander included?”

  I managed patiently: “Do you really want to make an issue of my presence on your roof? — bring charges? — all that sort of thing?”

  His voice assumed a goading quality, a lilting malevolence not at all appropriate to a conversation between one man and another. “Of course, I know it was all my fault you happened to be trespassing on my roof. Stupid of me — clearly it was I should have apologized!’

  I was more embarrassed than anything else by this tone, found myself being very careful not to laugh at him. “All this prodding between the lines…What’s it for? Are you planning on forcing me to lose my temper so you can set me two hundred lines for insolence?”

  “I think your own persecution complex would explain it. Wouldn’t it?”

  “All right: let’s argue it from that standpoint.”

  “Must we? From any standpoint?” He looked at his watch ostentatiously. (I was sure he glanced at his hand at the same time.) “I have a conference to make.”

  One of the few things I knew about Davvitt absolutely for certain was that he was crazy about keeping people waiting and was notoriously late for everything. “Surprise them and be late,” I advised.

  He ignored my isolated attempt at sarcasm. “I’ll hear you out.” He shrugged.

  “If I had a persecution complex,” I said, “I would first of all trace a good many of the rumours that were rippling around at K.L.K. about what really happened to the designs developed by Sceptre Electronics. Having traced them, I would (in my dementia) find that there were strong links with you. Next, I would ask myself why you tried to arrange for K.L.K.’s Second-Eleven womanizer to tune up his S.U. carburettor on Helen.”

  He smiled. “If you’re talking about Guy Endleby I agree he’s no match for Tesh. But you shouldn’t leave your mistress lying about the place, Fulbright. It’s so bad for everybody’s nerves.”

  “You deny that, of course.”

  “Well, as you carefully explained, you’re only talking about your hallucinations. I hardly like to cut across the terrain of the psychiatrist I understand you consulted, but you seem to want to open your heart.”

  “Opening it even farther then, I would definitely have concluded that you, having broken my little outfit, wanted — no doubt for some excellent reason of your own — to keep an eye on me. You therefore got in with the boys who really were trying to help me out and made sure the flat I ended up in was just a few doors away from yours.”

  Davvitt’s smile held. “If I may say so, I would have thought it was you who seemed to be cashing in on that happy chance. Which brings us back to my roof.” Another hurried look at his watch. “To put it briefly: please stay off it.”

  “I promise to try.”

  “There’s a good fellow.”

  *

  Not every plan one ever makes comes off. After cleaning up I strolled toward Trasgate New Town itself — an area I had avoided like the plague for too long — and worked out how I might take a more objective look at that equipment on his roof. In fact, I never got around to getting a better view, though I was not to know that at the time.

  The old town of Trasgate is seventeen miles north of Hyde Park Corner. The garden suburb — a descriptive phrase that does little to endear the place to anybody — lies two miles farther up the line. The murky area between — the bit where I lived — extends as far as the edge of what has laughingly been called a park. This was never finished; and the mud-tracks of the bulldozers are still there. And near the bulldozer tracks is the pub, which is called The Stook of Corn.

  People who consider themselves slightly too suave for the real pubs nearer the old town — mostly sub-tycoons from K.L.K. Electronics — roll up at the Stook in their Zephyrs and Zodiacs and drink everything except beer beneath the brass cans that hang from pseudo-beams and all that pink-tube lighting. If the conversation flags a bit, there’s always the Musak.

  Dick Davvitt was Consultant to K.L.K. on Electron Physics and this fact was largely — but not wholly — the reason why I had avoided the Stook for so long. I had tried it once only — and had discarded my dignity like a soiled raincoat left in someone’s porchway. To be brief, I had become drunk and insulting. Now, I had no complicated motives for making up for it. I just thought Tesh might be there on his usual Wednesday visit from the L
ondon office.

  I couldn’t see his car outside, but decided to go in anyway. I took with me the perception of deep cynicism. I might even have had that awful, lop-sided smile that often goes with it. The place seemed faintly ridiculous…though not so ridiculous — I now suspect — as my conduct.

  Guy Endleby was there with some girl, and I asked him if Tesh would be coming in at lunchtime. Guy, to whom it occurred immediately that I might somehow be back in favour, was so courteous as to offer me a drink. Fortunately I already had one by then in my hand. I was spared the ludicrous image of a man thrown back on his pride.

  I watched the girl with interest, as she was refilled with gin, probably by courtesy of the kindly auditors of K.L.K. I knew Guy to be predictably skilled at manipulating his expenses. The company considered this quite normal and nobody complained. He was a useful executive entitled to his perks. But in this he was different from Tesh, whom I knew to be scrupulous.

  Tesh, a retrograde from wartime Bomber Command in the RAF, abhorred the game of executive-manipulation that was merely business, preferring (as he called it) to be immature about women. To this end he flaunted his sailing ability and his flying experience. He was a sound pilot and women felt safe with him in that particular respect. What followed after the happy landings was strictly his affair; though psychopathic sexual wickedness — the biggest bore I know — wasn’t at the root of it…even if his imitators mistakenly thought it was. I remembered Guy Endleby had hero-worshipped Tesh in the most embarrassing way at one time on the grounds of his seduction rate. But Tesh wasn’t a phallic-narcissist, chalking up each success on a public bulletin board. Guy was. This being so, he rather missed the point.

  This was in the face of the girl, as I watched. She was restless, jumpy, drinking too much.

  I’d been idling away with my thoughts for ten minutes when Tesh came in. He saw me, registered neither surprise nor indifference, obtained a pint of ale and joined me where I was sitting — which was as far away from the source of the Musak as I had been able to contrive.

  He produced a great grin and said: “Are you after Guy’s woman?”

  “No. Are you?”

  “I try and make a point of never making contact with anything that has been touched by Guy Endleby.” He downed a third of the beer and watched her. “…Though at times like this such abstention is depressing…None of your tolerant smiles, James! And anyway, if you don’t want her, why did I catch you watching it all so intently?”

  “I was looking in a mirror.”

  “You and Helen? What bloody nonsense! I was around during enough of your throat-tearings to know the difference. You’re not being fair to her, never mind yourself…What are you doing here, anyway? Tell me that.”

  “Looking for you. I want you to invite Dick Davvitt out to dinner.”

  He looked at me sharply, then nodded, pushing out his lower lip in recognition of something. “I see…And why am I to undergo this excruciating experience?”

  “Because housebreaking is so much easier when there’s no opposition.”

  He raised his eyebrows and downed more beer. “You have changed. But I refuse to ruin one of my valuable evenings without knowing why I’m doing it.”

  I said carefully: “Beyond referring you to one of your own comments I’m not giving anything away.”

  “Oh? And which one was that?”

  “A certain interest displayed by Davvitt in the Mystique Department of Electron Physics.”

  “Which you are now busily over-interpreting?”

  “Possibly.”

  “But you reserve your defence?”

  “At the moment.”

  Tesh wrote something down and put the diary back in his pocket. Then he checked his watch and finished the beer rapidly. Before he left me he said: “Y’know, I think I might make an exception to my rule.”

  “I thought you might…if you’re referring to Guy’s woman.”

  “Well, Guy can’t be wrong about everything.”

  I declined an offer of a lift home and idly watched Tesh leave, then transferred my attention to Guy Endleby and the girl. I observed that the tension had reached flashpoint, that she said something terse to him and he said something equally terse back and promptly left. Whatever secret formula Tesh used it was obviously working by remote control.

  The chess game of sex progressed several moves in fairly quick succession. First, the girl just sat there. Then, she took another glance toward me. She ordered herself a drink and came over.

  “You’re James Fulbright.”

  “Yes.”

  “A friend of Tesh’s?”

  “As you saw. Join me.”

  She sat down. Long pause. I supplied a cigarette.

  “I’m Daphne Stagg,” she said, and added: “I know it’s a ghastly name.”

  “It’s just a contradiction,” I said, surprised at the apology, “but in your case the contradiction is null and void.”

  A quick, nervous, appreciative look. “Thanks.”

  Another long pause.

  Then I tried: “If you want to give me your telephone number I can ensure that Tesh will dial it.”

  “What’s to stop you dialling it?”

  “I’m bankrupt.”

  “You think that’s a good reason?”

  “Don’t you?”

  “God…and I thought I was bitter.”

  I gestured toward her glass. “Is it Guy Endleby that causes you to drink doubles at lunchtime?”

  “So observant?”

  “You’re worth observing.”

  “Thank you again…but we won’t blame Guy for the doubles.”

  There was another depressing pause, till I said: “You may have noticed a series of long silences emanating — so to speak — from me. So you’ll have to fill in.”

  “With what?”

  I shrugged. “Things about Guy Endleby?”

  “Would that interest you?”

  “I suppose that depends on how interesting Guy Endleby really is.”

  She drained her glass, then looked at me, wondering why I wanted to talk about him. But she just said: “It varies.”

  “Evidently. Still, there must be some constant factors that run all the way through. Tell me about them. I’ll even offer sympathy.”

  “No thanks. I wouldn’t dispute your claim to that. I think you want all the pity you can get.”

  “Oh, come on. Be greedy.”

  She said, as if addressing the world in general: “Two people, so consumed with self-hatred, they can’t even be bothered to hate each other…Do you know what I mean?”

  “Everybody knows what that means. My rival in the hate business was called Helen. She made up her mind she was so thoroughly evil that it authorized her to do anything she liked. As a system it works extremely well.”

  “Why are you trying to get me to talk about it?”

  “Perhaps it helps to compare notes.”

  “I think,” she said thoughtfully, “that you think I’m frightened of Guy, and you’re trying to find the reason. All right, you explain this: last night I got woken up by Guy. He was out of bed, looking out of the window. I looked at the clock. It was a few minutes past three. I asked him what was bothering him. He just turned and said: ‘I just wish that damn dog would stop barking.’” Something akin to terror came into her expression. “Outside there was absolute silence. There was certainly no dog. You could see a long way in the moonlight. Everything was still. Then the moon started to go behind a cloud. He…he sort of backed from the window…I honestly thought he’d gone mad. I said it must have been his imagination, that he’d been dreaming. He was furious and said ‘Don’t be damn silly, that yelping animal sounds as if it’s right outside the house!’ But I promise you there wasn’t a sound! Guy was wide awake, and he just couldn’t have been talking or walking in his sleep — anything like that.”

  “Are you sure he thought it was a dog?”

  “Yes. Quite sure.”

  “I see
. What happened after that?”

  She seemed to be collecting her wits, nerving herself to go on. “He was quieter. He didn’t go to bed again; just paced the floor, and kept going to the window. But a few minutes later he got very excited. He started muttering things I couldn’t make out. So I got up and turned the light on and poured us both a drink. He took the drink, without saying anything to me and rather acting as if I wasn’t there.” She stopped.

  “Then what?”

  “He let out a scream and shouted: ‘Come away from there, James!’”

  I was really startled this time. “Those were his exact words?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was there anything else?”

  “Yes. After a few seconds he got quite calm and said: ‘What’s the time?’ So I told him. He very carefully wrote it down and went back to bed again.”

  “Did he sleep?”

  “He went to sleep immediately.”

  “Did he refer to all this in the morning?”

  “Oh,” she said, “he never mentions it afterwards, when anything like this happens.”

  *

  When I got home I was astounded to find in the mail an invitation to the ‘Science and You’ dinner. The envelope had been redirected several times and had arrived only just in time — the formality was in fact due to take place that very evening.

  Feeling in need of advice over so preposterous a degree of recognition (I thought my name must have been left on some circulation list in error) I phoned Tesh and asked him if he thought I should go.

  “Look at the card,” he advised, “and see if you’re a ‘special guest’.”

  “I don’t have to. I’m sure I can’t be.”

  “The term is purely technical. It means you don’t have to pay.”

  “I still have to get to Doncaster.”

  “It’s an investment. Like someone emerging from a long jail sentence you should practise showing yourself.”

  “Thank you!” I was looking at the card. “And it’s all free.”

  “Let me know all about it,” said Tesh. “Doncaster! — Christ!”

  Chapter Three

  There is an old joke among those architects who fail to be enamoured of the neo-air-terminal school of design, which is that there is invariably a lock-nut somewhere in the building which holds the whole thing together; and that if you undo this nut you abruptly find yourself in a heap of matchwood and electric-light fittings which, if reassembled, could only be made into a building one-tenth the size of the original.