Agatha Christie: The Burden

"Oh, thank you, sir. My little niece-"

"Your niece, or the cat, or anyone."

He went into the library and shut the door.

"Well!" said Mrs. Rouse again. "Of all the crusty old bachelors! But there, I understand his ways! It's not everyone that would."

Laura went home with a pleasing feeling of importance.

She popped her head through the kitchen window where Ethel, the house-parlourmaid, was struggling with the intricacies of a crochet pattern.

"Ethel," said Laura. "I've got a Friend."

"Yes, dearie," said Ethel, murmuring to herself under her breath. "Five chain, twice into the next stitch, eight chain-"

"I have got a Friend." Laura stressed the information.

Ethel was still murmuring:

"Five double crochet, and then three times into the next-but that makes it come out wrong at the end - now where have I slipped up?"

"I've got a Friend," shouted Laura, maddened by the lack of comprehension displayed by her confidante.

Ethel looked up, startled.

"Well, rub it, dearie, rub it," she said vaguely.

Laura turned away in disgust.

Angela Franklin had dreaded returning home but, when the time came, she found it not half so bad as she had feared.

As they drove up to the door, she said to her husband:

"There's Laura waiting for us on the steps. She looks quite excited."

And, jumping out as the car drew up, she folded her arms affectionately round her daughter and cried:

"Laura darling. It's lovely to see you. Have you missed us a lot?"

Laura said conscientiously:

"Not very much. I've been very busy. But I've made you a raffia mat."

Swiftly there swept over Angela's mind a sudden remembrance of Charles-of the way he would tear across the grass, flinging himself upon her, hugging her. "Mummy, Mummy, Mummy!"

How horribly it hurt-remembering.

She pushed aside memories, smiled at Laura and said:

"A raffia mat? How nice, darling."

Arthur Franklin tweaked his daughter's hair.

"I believe you've grown, Puss."

They all went into the house.

What it was Laura had expected, she did not know. Here were Mummy and Daddy home, and pleased to see her, making a fuss of her, asking her questions. It wasn't they who were wrong, it was herself. She wasn't - she wasn't-what wasn't she?

She herself hadn't said the things or looked or even felt as she had thought she would.

It wasn't the way she had planned it. She hadn't-really-taken Charles's place. There was something missing with her, Laura. But it would be different tomorrow, she told herself, or if not tomorrow, then the next day, or the day after. The heart of the house, Laura said to herself, suddenly recalling a phrase that had taken her fancy from an old-fashioned children's book she had come across in the attic.

That was what she was now, surely, the heart of the house.

Unfortunate that she should feel herself, with a deep inner misgiving, to be just Laura as usual.

Just Laura…

"Baldy seems to have taken quite a fancy to Laura," said Angela. "Fancy, he asked her to tea with him while we were away."

Arthur said he'd like very much to know what they had talked about.

"I think," said Angela after a moment or two, "that we ought to tell Laura. I mean, if we don't, she'll hear something-the servants or someone. After all, she's too old for gooseberry bushes and all that kind of thing."

She was lying in a long basket chair under the cedar tree. She turned her head now towards her husband in his deck chair.

The lines of suffering still showed in her face. The life she was carrying had not yet succeeded in blurring the sense of loss.

"It's going to be a boy," said Arthur Franklin. "I know it's going to be a boy."

Angela smiled, and shook her head.

"No use building on it," she said.

"I tell you, Angela, I know."

He was positive-quite positive.

A boy like Charles, another Charles, laughing, blue-eyed, mischievous, affectionate.

Angela thought: 'It may be another boy-but it won't be Charles.' "I expect we shall be just as pleased with a girl, however," said Arthur, not very convincingly.

"Arthur, you know you want a son!"

"Yes," he sighed, "I'd like a son."

A man wanted a son-needed a son. Daughters - it wasn't the same thing.

Obscurely moved by some consciousness of guilt, he said:

"Laura's really a dear little thing."

Angela agreed sincerely.

"I know. So good and quiet and helpful. We shall miss her when she goes to school."

She added: "That's partly why I hope it won't be a girl. Laura might be a teeny bit jealous of a baby sister-not that she'd have any need to be."

"Of course not."

"But children are sometimes-it's quite natural; that's why I think we ought to tell her, prepare her."

And so it was that Angela Franklin said to her daughter:

"How would you like a little baby brother?"

"Or sister?" she added rather belatedly.

Laura stared at her. The words did not seem to make sense. She was puzzled. She did not understand.

Angela said gently: "You see, darling, I'm going to have a baby… next September. It will be nice, won't it?"

She was a little disturbed when Laura, murmuring something incoherent, backed away, her face crimsoning with an emotion that her mother did not understand.

Angela Franklin felt worried.

"I wonder," she said to her husband. "Perhaps we've been wrong? Eve never actually told her anything - about-about things, I mean. Perhaps she hadn't any idea…"

Arthur Franklin said that considering that the production of kittens that went on in the house was something astronomical, it was hardly likely that Laura was completely unacquainted with the facts of life.

"Yes, but perhaps she thinks people are different. It may have been a shock to her."

It had been a shock to Laura, though not in any biological sense. It was simply that the idea that her mother would have another child had never occurred to Laura. She had seen the whole pattern as simple and straightforward. Charles was dead, and she was her parents' only child. She was, as she had phrased it to herself, 'all they had in the world.'

And now-now-there was to be another Charles.

She never doubted, any more than Arthur and Angela secretly doubted, that the baby would be a boy.

Desolation struck through to her.

For a long time Laura sat huddled upon the edge of a cucumber-frame, while she wrestled with disaster.

Then she made up her mind. She got up, walked down the drive and along the road to Mr. Baldock's house.

Mr. Baldock, grinding his teeth and snorting with venom, was penning a really vitriolic review for a learned journal of a fellow historian's life work.

He turned a ferocious face to the door, as Mrs. Rouse, giving a perfunctory knock and pushing it open, announced:

"Here's little Miss Laura for you."

"Oh," said Mr. Baldock, checked on the verge of a tremendous flood of invective. "So it's you."

He was disconcerted. A fine thing it would be if the child was going to trot along here at any odd moment. He hadn't bargained for that. Drat all children! Give them an inch and they took an ell. He didn't like children, anyway. He never had.

His disconcerted gaze met Laura's. There was no apology in Laura's look. It was grave, deeply troubled, but quite confident in a divine right to be where she was. She made no polite remarks of an introductory nature.

"I thought I'd come and tell you," she said, "that I'm going to have a baby brother."

"Oh," said Mr. Baldock, taken aback.

"We-ell…" he said, playing for time. Laura's face was white and expressionless. "That's news, isn't it?" He paused. "Are you pleased?"