‘Ah’ll lay a’ the tea in China that Ah can break every egg frae here tae John o’ Groats. An’ the hens that laid them.’ The last thrown in as a magnanimous afterthought.
‘Ye can have London tae an orange,’ Charlie’s father said adamantly, not to be outdone in generosity.
The rather intractable geographical dimensions of the wager were scaled down to the more finite terms of an even dollar, and four bright half-crowns were tiered ceremoniously on the mantelpiece.
‘Elizabeth,’ Charlie’s father said. ‘Would ye go through an’ bring us an egg, please, hen?’
‘Oh that’s no’ fair, Father,’ Elizabeth’s lips pursed righteously. ‘You ken fine it canny be done.’
‘Are you anither yin, Lizzie?’ Uncle Hughie looked like Samson among the Philistines. ‘You go through an’ fetch me an egg, an’ we’ll see if it canny be done. This man’s got you as bad as himself.’
‘Anyway,’ Elizabeth said, ‘we don’t hae eggs to throw away like that.’
‘Ah’ll buy ye a dozen eggs wi’ ma winnings, hen,’ Uncle Hughie promised.
‘Yer egg’ll go back the way it came, Elizabeth,’ Charlie’s father said. ‘Don’t fash yourself aboot that. I’ll have it for ma breakfast first thing the morra mornin’.’
‘I’ll get ye an egg,’ Charlie said.
‘All right. All right.’ Elizabeth could hold out no longer against a united front. ‘I’ll fetch it for them.’
Uncle Hughie took advantage of her absence to pivot on his chair and fart thunderously, as if it was some kind of inbuilt fanfare-system.
‘Well, if ye haven’t burst yer farting-clappers already, Hughie,’ Charlie’s father said jocularly, ‘ye’ll do it when ye try to break this egg.’
‘Better wi’ a toom hoose than a bad tenant.’ Uncle Hughie said cryptically, taking off his jacket prefatory to combat.
‘Homespun proletarian wisdom,’ Charlie said.
But his Uncle Hughie was absorbed in his preparations. He was rolling his already rolled-up sleeves even higher.
‘Ye’d better strip to the waist, Hughie,’ Charlie’s father said seriously. ‘It’ll make an awfu’ mess when that egg bursts.’
Uncle Hughie took him at his word. He peeled off shirt and vest as one, and stood naked to the waist, revealing a huge craggy torso with fine dark coal-scars running over the left shoulder, and tattooed forearms. On his left forearm what looked like some sort of dancing girl stood with her arms tirelessly upraised, a faded relic of the romantic past who had aged with Uncle Hughie. On his right forearm two pale pink hearts had grown anaemic with the years.
Elizabeth entered like a handmaiden, carrying the egg. A space was cleared in the middle of the floor, and Elizabeth sat down beside Charlie on the settee like a ringside seat. Everything was done with formal propriety, as if it was all according to the eggbreakers’ handbook. Uncle Hughie was set in the middle of the cleared space and Charlie’s father stood with his hand on his shoulder, giving him a brief run-through of the rules. Uncle Hughie was nodding quietly, not missing a trick. Charlie almost expected to see him shake hands with the egg, and started to give a tense sibilant commentary in Elizabeth’s ear.
‘I want a good clean fight,’ he was saying. ‘And break when I say “break”. You both know the rules. I won’t hesitate to disqualify either you or the egg. So come out fighting and may the best egg win.’
Uncle Hughie was ready. He laced the fingers of both hands carefully together and held them cupped upwards while Charlie’s father painstakingly placed the egg between his palms. Uncle Hughie’s hands closed impatiently on the egg, but Charlie’s father halted him and ran his fingers lightly round the edges of the egg to make sure that it was being held only by the tips.
‘Right, Hughie,’ he said. ‘Away ye go.’
Uncle Hughie started to press.
‘Feeling is running high at the Garden tonight,’ Charlie resumed in Elizabeth’s ear. ‘This is something of a needle match, Hughie versus The Egg. Human dignity hangs in the balance.’
Uncle Hughie was now visibly putting on the pressure. The dancing girl writhed sensuously. His right forearm had angina pectoris in duplicate. Huge veins rose and fell on his neck like organ-stops. His forehead, ploughed with effort, slowly took on a faint dew of sweat. His body, like an overheated boiler, became suffused with an unnatural red glow, as if combustion was imminent. And at the middle of this gigantic exertion, in the still centre of the hurricane, lay the egg, a tribute to the grit of Danish hens.
Uncle Hughie relaxed and took a breather. His palms glittered decoratively, sequined with sweat, and he wiped them on the seat of his trousers.
‘Ah wouldny have believed that,’ he said.
‘There y’are,’ Charlie’s father said, vindicated. ‘Ye’ll maybe no’ be so cocky the next time.’
He resumed his grip on the egg, with Charlie’s father sitting confidently watching. Charlie became aware that Elizabeth was struggling to hold in her laughter. She snittered once briefly, like a horse neighing, and cut it short. Glancing at her, Charlie saw her lips twisting nervously in an attempt to suppress the laughter which showed beneath her composure like a kitten under a coverlet. Then he felt laughter lit like a slow fuse in himself, rising steadily, coming nearer to ignition, until it flashed and exploded from his mouth, simultaneous with Elizabeth’s. Just at that moment the egg slipped in Uncle Hughie’s perspiring hands and burst. Egg-yolk exploded dramatically like shrapnel, and catherine-wheeled in all directions. It spattered sideboard and mirror. It clung like a canker to an artificial flower. A fragment of it fried merrily in the fire. It spotted Uncle Hughie like an exotic acne. The laughter of the other three overtook the last particle of it before it found a resting-place. They hosed Uncle Hughie mercilessly with laughter, while he stood in the centre of the floor, dripping egg. They laughed and coughed and gasped for breath and laughed again. Charlie fell off the settee on to the floor and lay there helplessly, epileptic with laughter.
‘For my next trick . . .’ Uncle Hughie said.
And they became a quartet of laughers in unison, modulating, improvising, giving new interpretations to the situation through their laughter, until Uncle Hughie went through to get washed and returned spruce and eggless. While he was putting his shirt on again, Charlie’s father tried to give him back his money but he insisted it had been fairly lost. In the end it was decided that the money should be given to charity, namely Charlie and Elizabeth. The incident had generated laughter that lasted throughout that night and beyond.
As he remembered it, Charlie’s smile was an ironic echo of that laughter. Lying alone in his room, he thought himself through that occasion and others like it as if it were a form of penance. Since his father’s death he found himself brooding over past incidents like that, fingering them over and over in his memory, like rosary beads, as if mysteriously they could somehow help him to understand what had happened to him, help to resolve the enigma his feelings had become even to himself. Something about all of these moments drew him, seemed to promise to help him come to terms with the amorphous feeling of utter deception that he felt. Somewhere in them was the reason for his inability to participate as he had done before in his own life. And the incident of the ludicrous egg-breaking contest was typical of them all.
He remembered how they had all felt after it. They were all conscious of having made something among them. A night had been baptized. That was The Night That Uncle Hughie Fought The Egg. It was salvaged from the anonymity of other nights. It would