The Burden. Агата Кристи

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? I’ve 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?’

      ‘No,’ said Laura. ‘I don’t think I am.’

      ‘Beastly things, babies,’ agreed Mr Baldock sympathetically. ‘No teeth and no hair, and yell their heads off. Their mothers like them, of course, have to—or the poor little brutes would never get looked after, or grow up. But you won’t find it so bad when it’s three or four,’ he added encouragingly. ‘Almost as good as a kitten or a puppy by then.’

      ‘Charles died,’ said Laura. ‘Do you think it’s likely that my new baby brother may die too?’

      He shot her a keen glance, then said firmly:

      ‘Shouldn’t think so for a moment,’ and added: ‘Lightning never strikes twice.’

      ‘Cook says that,’ said Laura. ‘It means the same thing doesn’t happen twice?’

      ‘Quite right.’

      ‘Charles—’ began Laura, and stopped.

      Again Mr Baldock’s glance swept over her quickly.

      ‘No reason it should be a baby brother,’ he said. ‘Just as likely to be a baby sister.’

      ‘Mummy seems to think it will be a brother.’

      ‘Shouldn’t go by that if I were you. She wouldn’t be the first woman to think wrong.’

      Laura’s face brightened suddenly.

      ‘There was Jehoshaphat,’ she said. ‘Dulcibella’s last kitten. He’s turned out to be a girl after all. Cook calls him Josephine now,’ she added.

      ‘There you are,’ said Mr Baldock encouragingly. ‘I’m not a betting man, but I’d put my money on its being a girl myself.’

      ‘Would you?’ said Laura fervently.

      She smiled at him, a grateful and unexpectedly lovely smile that gave Mr Baldock quite a shock.

      ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I’ll go now.’ She added politely: ‘I hope I haven’t interrupted your work?’

      ‘It’s quite all right,’ said Mr Baldock. ‘I’m always glad to see you if it’s about something important. I know you wouldn’t barge in here just to chatter.’

      ‘Of course I wouldn’t,’ said Laura earnestly.

      She withdrew, closing the door carefully behind her.

      The conversation had cheered her considerably. Mr Baldock, she knew, was a very clever man.

      ‘He’s much more likely to be right than Mummy,’ she thought to herself.

      A baby sister? Yes, she could face the thought of a sister. A sister would only be another Laura—an inferior Laura. A Laura lacking teeth and hair, and any kind of sense.

      As she emerged from the kindly haze of the anaesthetic, Angela’s cornflower-blue eyes asked the eager question that her lips were almost afraid to form.

      ‘Is it—all right—is it—?’

      The nurse spoke glibly and briskly after the manner of nurses.

      ‘You’ve got a lovely daughter, Mrs Franklin.’

      ‘A daughter—a daughter …’ The blue eyes closed again.

      Disappointment surged through her. She had been so sure—so sure … Only a second Laura …

      The old tearing pain of her loss reawakened. Charles, her handsome laughing Charles. Her boy, her son …

      Downstairs, Cook was saying briskly:

      ‘Well, Miss Laura. You’ve got a little sister, what do you think of that?’