The Pre-War House and Other Stories

The Egg

William stands at the window, looking out through the snow-speckled glass. There was no summer to speak of, and now, already, it is winter. The first frost arrived overnight, and now the snow. In the small garden, and over the wall in the sprawling park, on the heath and the paths and the frozen lake, it is starting to settle.

Water drips from his damp hair, the greyed remains of it, trickling down the neck of his dressing gown. He looks down at his bare feet, at the blue veins in his winter-pale and water-softened skin, at his bloated ankles, their waxy appearance. They do not look like his; they look like somebody else’s.

In the bathroom, his wet footprints are already evaporating from the tiled floor.

The boy was in the park, standing in the wet grass, when William went into the garden to fill the bird table. He watched the boy bending and picking up a stone, holding it in both hands and inspecting it, and then dropping it back into the long grass.

William, standing on his lawn with his hands full of leftovers, said, ‘Have you lost something?’

The boy looked up at him, came closer and stood near the gate, resting his hands on the low wall, on the damp stones. His canvas shoes were soaked and his trousers were wet around the ankles as if the water were climbing his legs. Under the gate, by the boy’s feet, there was a puddle full of dead leaves.

Downstairs, William makes breakfast, cutting the rind from the bacon and cracking an egg into a bowl, finding a blood spot in the yolk. His bare feet chill on the kitchen’s cold stone floor. The snow is falling densely now, settling on the windowsill, pressing up against the windowpane. There is no traffic on the road behind the cottage, and nobody in the park. It is almost silent; any sound is muffled. William whisks his egg.

On the table, there is a shard of rock. He looks at it while he drinks his coffee.

He takes the rinds and crusts out to the bird table, gazing out at the trees, at their cold, bare limbs, and up at the empty sky, looking for the birds.

There are pigeons on the roof. He hears them in the night, the scrabbling and scratching of their claws on the slate. There are geese and swans in the park. There is bird mess spattered and encrusted on the sandstone; there is dark green slime on the grass.

Not much has changed about the sandstone cottage since he was a boy. The garden is just the same, the grass a little long, the shrubs a little overgrown. On the front door there is a lion’s head knocker. When William was little he liked to touch it, tracing the cold curves of the lion’s face. In the hallway, by the door, are his mother’s shoes with mud still on the heel, as if she has just stepped out of them, as if they would still be warm inside. In the living room, her vinyl is stacked by the record player, a favourite on the turntable. Her clothes, hanging in the wardrobe in the master bedroom, smell of mothballs.

The boy moved his hands from the cold coping stones into the deep pockets of his duffel coat. The coat was the colour of holly berries and made William think of winter.

‘How old are you?’ asked the boy.

William, turning to drop the bacon rind and the toast crusts onto the bird table, said, ‘Shouldn’t you be in school?’

‘It’s the holidays,’ said the boy.

William spread the birds’ breakfast more evenly over the table.

‘I’m going to find a fossil,’ said the boy.

‘You’ll be lucky,’ said William.

‘I bet I can,’ said the boy. He took his hands back out of his pockets, lifted the flap of the satchel he wore across his chest and reached inside. He took out a shard of rock and showed it to William. ‘I found this,’ he said.

William moved towards the boy to look at the rock, the suggestion of a body in the stone. ‘You collect fossils?’ he said.

‘I’ve only got that one,’ said the boy, returning it carefully to his otherwise empty satchel.

William turned and began his careful walk back up the wet path towards his front door.

‘You’re older than my granddad,’ said the boy, ‘and he’s dead.’

William, slowly stopping, turning back, said to the boy, ‘I’ve got a collection.’

He had wanted to be a natural historian. He had imagined working in a museum, sitting in a back room, labelling acquisitions. He had not got on at school though. He was bullied, and often his mother had said he did not have to go. ‘We’ll say you’re sick,’ she had said, settling him at the kitchen table to draw his birds.

He had missed a lot of school. He never even applied for a museum job, has never even been to the Natural History Museum, but he has his annotated sketches of birds pinned to his bedroom walls, and he has the skeleton of a bird in a jar beside his bed, and he has his collection.

As a boy, William climbed trees, climbed up to the roof of the house, looked in tree stumps and under bushes and in the reeds around the lake, finding nests and taking eggs, just one from each nest, just one of any type: a sparrow’s brown and blotchy egg, a blackbird’s pale turquoise and brown-speckled egg, a pigeon’s white egg.

In William’s hands, a warm egg turned cold. Beneath the thin, crackable shell, an immature bird, with embryonic eyes closed, grew still, trapped in its watery environment, suspended like an insect in amber.

In his bottom drawer, underneath his jumpers, there was a large shoebox, and it was full of birds’ eggs: a starling’s pale blue egg, a thrush’s bright blue and black-spotted egg, a robin’s white and red-spotted egg.

One day, he came in from the garden, into the kitchen, and found his mother sitting at the table with his shoebox out, the lid off, his stolen eggs in her hands: a yellowhammer’s white and purple-scribbled egg, a skylark’s greyish and brown-freckled egg, a reed bunting’s pale lilac and black-blotched egg.

‘What’s all this?’ she asked him.

William looked at the box, picked out an egg and began to tell her the name of the bird which had laid it, where he had found the nest, how many eggs had been in it.

‘These are not yours, William,’ she said, taking the egg from his hand, putting it back in the shoebox and taking the shoebox away.

He stood at the window, watching her standing outside, unable to put the eggs in the bin. In the end she pushed them gently under the bush beneath the kitchen window, as if, in the right habitat, they might still hatch.

Later, when he crept down from his bedroom to take the eggs back out from under the bush, his mother was watching. In the garden, on his knees, his head down while his hand groped, he turned and saw her coming towards him. He had not had time to get to his feet before her soft hand flew out and smacked the side of his head so hard he lost his balance, and before he had regained it another blow landed. It all happened so quietly, but he can still feel the smarting and flushing of his skin; he can still see the glare of her small, dark eyes.

When he looked again, she had moved the eggs and he had to start his collection from scratch, with a new hiding place.

William knelt down and retrieved the shoebox from under his bed. He lifted the lid and showed the boy the eggs nestling inside, amongst the balls of cotton wool: a kingfisher’s roundish white egg, a coot’s buff and brown-spotted egg, a tufted duck’s olive-coloured egg. Each one was labelled in a child’s handwriting on a small strip of paper pinned to a cotton wool ball.

The boy was impressed. He said, ‘There can’t be any you haven’t got.’

‘I haven’t got a swan’s egg,’ said William.

‘Why not?’ asked the boy.

William had always wanted one, but he was scared of swans. He was afraid of their big, heavy bodies, their powerful wings, their serpentine necks, the hard snap of their beaks, their hissing and biting. And he was especially afraid of nesting swans, which were ferociously protective of their eggs. He had seen their huge nests on the shore of the lake and on the island, but he had never got close to one. There was one on the island which had been there since the spring, abandoned with an unhatched egg inside it. He had watched it through his binoculars.

‘They’re not easy to come by,’ said William, looking down at the boy, at the small, dark head bent over the shoebox. ‘You’d be lucky to get one.’

He imagines the first chilly moment of clambering into the lake, the cold water perhaps only up to the knees at first, or up to the tops of the thighs or just above the waist. He imagines the struggle through the reeds, the effort, half-wading, half-swimming and then actually swimming through the icy water to the island. He imagines the swans, which have not left the lake, which have remained into the winter, witnessing the taking of the egg from the nest. He imagines the plunge back into the lake, the body already numb with cold and exhaustion, encumbered by waterlogged clothing and by the bag in which the egg has been stowed, and again the almost-swimming, the struggling in the reeds.

The shoebox is on William’s pillow with the lid off. He sits down beside it, holding a tiny rectangle of white paper and a pin. He touches the smooth, cool shells of the eggs: the pale green egg of a mallard; the creamy egg of a goose; a large, light-grey egg beneath which he positions his label, pushing the pin through the paper and through the cotton wool. The tip slides into the soft pad of his thumb, and the blood is slow coming to the surface. The handwriting is scratchier, shakier, than on the other labels. The still-wet ink says, Mute swan.

He replaces the lid on the shoebox and pushes it back under his bed.

He had imagined a wife, but it never happened. The master bedroom is vacant now, but his single room suits him fine; he has never used the double bed.

He rarely leaves the house. His shopping is delivered by a Tesco van and brought into his kitchen in a plastic crate which is then taken away again, empty.

But every morning, before his bath, before his breakfast, before feeding the birds, William walks around the lake. He goes early, when it is barely light, so that he will have it all to himself. It is three miles all the way around, and these days it takes him a while. Often he walks the whole way just looking at his shoes and he doesn’t even notice the changing seasons. Other times he sees things.

This morning he saw the frost.

He saw the puddle by the garden gate frozen over, the dead leaves trapped, the ice cracking under his heel as he walked out.

He saw the emptiness of the park beneath the blank dome of the sky, and the snow beginning to fall.

He saw the overwintering swans in amongst the reeds, and the empty nest on the island.

He saw something in the water, near the bank, holly berry red under the snow-mottled ice, and the frosted grass beside the lake crushed beneath his feet.