Mixed feelings, I guess, is the best way to characterize it. But powerfully mixed! One part of me was melting in his gaze—especially when he started talking about baby lamb chops—but another part of me wanted to stab him through the eyeball with the swizzle stick from my drink.
In fact, I was on the point of agreeing to go for dinner with him when you’ll never guess who arrived.
“Dr. Eggstain!” I exclaimed. (I did. I exclaimed it!)
“Did you just say what I think you said?” murmured Nicky.
Shorn of his tramp’s beard, Eggstain had lost his inscrutable doctorly wisdom, and now stood exposed and heartbreakingly vulnerable. For some reason I was ridiculously pleased to see him.
“So glad I found you here,” he said. “I hope I’m not interrupting?”
Nicky’s face! He looked like he’d bitten into a rotten Brazil nut.
I performed some basic introductions, describing Eggstain as “my mother’s memory specialist” and Nicky—oh, the satisfaction—as “someone I knew a long time ago.”
The two men shook hands with one another warily, Nicky’s ice blue eyes searching Eggstain’s soulful brown jobbies for clues.
“Fellow I met in Laos,” said Nicky. “He had memory issues. It was most unusual. He suffered from amnesia and déjà vu at the same time.”
Eggstain smiled. “He couldn’t remember what happened next. Am I right?”
“I should have guessed you’d know that one.”
I noticed that Eggstain was holding a sports bag. He met my gaze and something passed between us.
“She kicked me out.”
“Shut. Up! Just because you shaved the beard?”
He nodded sadly. “It was kind of inevitable anyway. There was a screaming row. I said, well, if that’s the way you feel about it, I’ll leave. And she said, Yes. Leave. In fact, leave now. So I went. I didn’t really have much of an idea of where to go, so I waited for something to pop into my head.”
“That’s his technique,” I explained to Nicky (who didn’t look all that interested, to be honest). “And what did pop in?” I asked.
Eggstain looked at me like I should have been able to guess. There was quite a long gap before the penny dropped.
“Me?”
“Your mother told me where I’d find you.”
“My mother!? How would my mother know?”
“I phoned her and she told me. Rather, someone she was with told her. And then she told me.”
Well, now I was properly confused.
“Who was she with?”
“She didn’t say. It didn’t occur to me to ask.”
“What did they sound like?”
“It was difficult to tell, Daisy. I was standing on a busy main road.”
“Of course. But this person who was with my mother. They knew I was in this exact bar?”
“Curiouser and curiouser,” said Nicky.
I gave him a look. What? You’re still here, are you?
“Your mother said she didn’t know where you were. And then the voice said this was where I’d find you.”
“What sort of voice? Not Mrs. blooming Abernethy! How the fuck would she know?”
The doctor shrugged.
“I mean, was it a man? A woman?”
“It was hard to tell with the traffic,” said Eggstain. “It could have been either. But he or she gave the address. Even the postcode.”
“That is properly weird.”
A pause fell on the conversation.
“And now?” said Nicky; helpfully or unhelpfully, it was impossible to tell.
And because I didn’t know the answer, I simply waited for the first thing to pop into my mind.
It didn’t take long to arrive.
“Crash on my sofa, if you like.”
At the flat, Eggstain was massively apologetic for what he called the “intrusion.”
“It’s terrifically kind of you. I promise I’ll leave first thing in the morning,” he said.
“It’s absolutely fine, honestly. But what will you do?”
“Arrange to get my stuff from the flat. Sort out somewhere to live.”
“It’s irretrievable between you two?”
“Oh, I hope so.”
“Why do you say it like that?”
“It’s over. If it isn’t the absolute end, it’s the beginning of the end.”
“It might just be the end of the beginning.”
“No, we’ve done that bit. This has been coming for a long time. I’m really sorry, Daisy, for bringing my dirty linen into your life.”
I couldn’t help glancing at his shirt when he said that; a blob of Hoisin sauce had come to rest between two buttons, possibly forever. Kong’s Kitchen had excelled itself and we were sitting at either end of the sofa surrounded by takeaway detritus. My feet were up on the coffee table and I encouraged Eggstain to follow suit if he could find a space for his own between the aluminum containers.
He shrugged off the tragic trainers to reveal a big toe poking through his sock.
“I was afraid that would happen,” he said.
When we’d first arrived after waving goodbye to a sick-looking Nicky—he did a pathetic let’s talk thing with his little and index fingers as we left!—Eggstain prowled about, inspecting my various artworks, knick-knacks and “library.” He admired the framed poster of the London Tube map where all the stations are replaced by the names of famous people, giving rise to a Footballers’ Line, a Comedians’ Line, a Philosophers’ Line, etc.—an uncharacteristically edgy present from Normotic Andrew. And he was pleasingly satirical about the “Souvenir from the Isle of Wight,” a plaster figure of two copulating pigs labeled “Makin’ Bacon” that I bought with my pocket money on a family holiday.
“Have you read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich?” he asked. We were standing side by side before my bookshelf.
“It belonged to my father. I don’t think he’d read it either.”
“A thousand pages,” he said, flipping through them, landing on a postcard of the Rialto Bridge in Venice.
“He wrote that to me when I was six. After he ran off to Italy with the Whetstone Trollop. That’s what my mother always calls her.”
Eggstain replaced the fat paperback.
“I don’t know why I don’t take it to Oxfam. I’m never going to get through all that.”
“Because it represents your father. Another
