Eggshell Days (14 page)

When he'd gone to the chapel that morning, he'd been feeling lethargic, aware as he budged the door open that he had given up his early expectation of finding anything redeeming within its walls. And then at that very low moment, Tamsin Edwards had floated into his view.

“Hello,” she said, her vague Cornish burr bouncing off the salty walls. “I was just admiring your work.”

As he watched her running her bitten pink fingernail along his neatly executed grooves, he'd realized it wasn't just the walls that were being given the opportunity to breathe again. Feck, as Niall would say. He should leave well alone. Young bright women never went down well when Sita was postnatal. Her father had brought her up to believe that if you stand still someone will overtake you, which was one of those truths that were so horribly true, it wasn't even worth thinking about.

“Tamsin's the adviser I've been talking to,” he'd said a bit sheepishly when Sita found them talking rapidly over coffee in the chapel, and Sita had looked back at him as if he'd just told the most blatantly transparent lie in the history of their marriage. Maybe he had.

“Hello, Mrs. Taylor,” Tamsin replied cheerily. “Fabulous chapel you've got here.” Well, how was she to know Sita preferred Ms. or Dr. Dhanda?

Sita's distrust was Jonathan's fault. If he'd been more confident about displaying his interest in the chapel, if he'd been open about his trips to the library and phone calls to the council and subscriptions to specialist magazines, his familiarity with Tamsin wouldn't have seemed so odd. But it was odd, particularly to him. He could remember every single thing she had told him.

“Lime mortar has to breathe,” she'd said. “This stuff suffocates it, keeps all the damp in. Can't you smell it?”

Her creamy complexion had flushed with the mildest red again. Pink maybe. The lightest pink flush. “I can't work out why it isn't listed. The house is, but the chapel isn't—though the remains of fifteenth-, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century buildings in Cornwall are so numerous that they sometimes get overlooked on purpose.”

“But this isn't a remain, it's a complete structure.”

“True, but you sound as if you want it listed.”

“Don't you think it should be? Early-sixteenth-century domestic chapels with slate roofs, coped verges and granite ashlars can't be all that common.”

“You know your stuff, don't you?” Tamsin had smiled, and Sita had caught him doing that excruciating gesture of false modesty, a quick downward brush of the hand.

He'd taken some of her lines to the supper table with him. “It has to breathe,” he told everyone. Every time he said it, he breathed too. “Modern cement is impervious to damp but if there's a tiny crack and moisture gets drawn in it gets trapped, it's got nowhere to go, it can't evaporate. That's what the smell is.”

“That's possibly enough about working with traditional building materials, thanks,” Sita had said, thinking she could smell something else as well.

“But lime works in harmony with the seasonal changes. It's softer, more flexible.”

“Just like Tamsin,” Niall had commented, and three of the four of them had laughed like drains.

It was getting cold now and he and Jay would have to go in soon. His hands and knees were aching, and if he wanted a bath before midnight he would have to start running it now. The water pressure needed sorting, which was another job Sita wanted him to do. He was exhausted by the mere thought of it. The muscles in his calves ached from squatting for so long, chipping away at the rock-hard mortar, grueling work for a man who had spent the last twenty years sitting on a padded swivel chair talking into a telephone.

He wondered what, if anything, would happen should he stay out here all night. It was the kind of behavior that people like Niall got away with all the time. People like Niall could sleep in their clothes, go missing for days, drink wine for breakfast, and not a word would be said. So why couldn't he? Stuff went on without him the whole time. Nothing ever stopped because of his absence. And yet at the same time he was required to be ever-present. What impact would his death have on the world? Other than meaning a little extra work for Sita, obviously?

Was it his fault for accepting, even if he didn't entirely understand, the boundaries of his restrained personality? If Niall was a human version of Bodinnick, wild, sprawling, spacious, others saw Jonathan as the equivalent of a modest home in suburbia.

Tamsin would never list
him
. In architectural terms, he was the kind of man who recognized the social importance of correct cornicing but would never have the guts to rip it out if the mood took him.

But that's where his acceptance of who he was stopped. If he didn't want to be that kind of man, why was he? What had shaped him? What had led him down the path to commonplace? If the answer was himself, why did he sometimes fantasize about being someone else?

What could he pass on to Jay about all that? Don't follow paths just because they're available. Hack through the undergrowth and discover something new. Be brave, take chances. He knew that, to the outside world, it looked as if he himself was doing just that. You don't give up your job, let your house and move your family to the southwest tip of Britain to lead a more simple life if you aren't at least a little adventurous. But of course, you do, because he just had, and he was the most boring man in the universe. Captain Sensible and Mr. Anorak.

*   *   *

The path through the scrub from the chapel was even more defined now, and he realized he'd been making the same journey four times a day for a fortnight. Back and forth he went, once again the commuter—just like the one in the poem who spends his life riding to and from his wife, shaving and taking trains. In fact, just like the one he used to be in London. Was routine his addiction?

Sita's anger over his interest in the chapel managed to swap focus at random. How could he justify spending so much time on it when there was clearly more than enough to do in the house? What did he mean, he was taking Lila there with him? Lime is dangerous: it can blind.

“I've taken advice and I know what I'm doing,” he'd said, “but if you really don't like it, why don't you take her to work with you?” Which was when she'd called him a bastard and left the house without saying goodbye. She'd never ever called him a bastard before.

The whole point of uprooting their lives from city to country was to increase their feeling of togetherness, not to wreck what little they had. At this rate, they'd be lucky to see the three months out still married. That would be the ultimate irony. To renovate a house at the expense of their own personal bricks and mortar. To see a house rise out of the ashes and a family sink without trace.

But he didn't say any of those things to Jay. Instead he said, “We should go in. Mum will be wondering where we are.”

*   *   *

Sita was wondering about him, actually. She was wondering what on earth had happened to the man she had married, and whether he was wondering the same thing about her. She was also wondering if Emmy had told her the whole truth about her and Niall, why she was feeling such deep-green shades of jealousy, and what the hell they were all doing here. But the worst of her sleepless wonders was why she no longer bothered to share any of them with Jonathan.

They used to be such a team, confronting challenges together, trusting each other's judgment, knowing without being told that each had the other's happiness higher up the list than their own. That was their sex, really. They had never been wildly active, not in the way she knew some of her friends were. They'd never done it in a public place. They'd never used a sex toy or props. She had never even played out a fantasy in her head, let alone admitted one to him. They did it—or rather used to do it—in bed at night, usually with the lights off. It was good when it happened, but they got their kicks in other ways. And there was the “used to” phrase again.

She thought about the holidays they had taken before Jay was born—mountain climbing in the Italian Alps and river canoeing in southwest France. While most other young couples would have gone straight to bed with a bottle of massage oil, they went to a bar with a bottle of beer and spent hours exploring their individual weaknesses, their confidences, what scared them, what excited them. They took it in turns to lead. One minute, he needed her advice, and the next she sought his. Those conversations were their version of foreplay. Very often, after a joint achievement, they would be on a high for weeks. It used to be like taking their marriage vows all over again, remembering that they were a team, that they worked better as a unit than they did as individuals.

She could remember coming home from one such holiday and Emmy asking her why she had ever bothered to leave the Girl Guides. Jonathan had whispered, “She's just jealous,” in her ear. It must have been at the peak of her and Emmy's estrangement, a strange few years in which they had focused on their differences. Sita married and pregnant, Emmy single and very much not. But Maya had changed all that.

What goes around comes around, she thought. Maybe Jonathan and I will come around again soon. How though? And when? The children had brought with them a nasty little element of competition. Who was the most tired? Who worked the hardest? Who was the most put-upon? Now, not only did they not have sex, but they didn't have holidays, either.

Her two daughters moved their flawless coffee-colored limbs either side of her, and she tried to condense her maternal bulk into the dip in the middle of the old horsehair mattress. She was facing Lila, her left breast still released from its feeding bra, and she pulled the stretch-marked flesh back to study the baby's dark eyelashes and pursed lips. The horror at finding herself pregnant again had finally disappeared. Lila was surely the perfect gift.

She and Jonathan should be riding the crest of a wave, lying in a bed of smugness congratulating themselves on the products of their union, but instead, they seemed lost in a thickening fog of resentment. Why were they so cross with each other all the time?

She'd naively hoped the Cornish sun might be strong enough to burn through the fog, that the Cornish air might be clean enough to cure Jonathan's obsession with his breathing, that the Cornish wind might blow away their recent selves and bring back their old ones on a summer breeze. But so far, metaphorically anyway, it had mainly rained.

Would it help if she admitted that her main motivation for coming here was him? And that, if she wasn't going to benefit from his new self, they might as well pack up and go back? The difficulty was, she wasn't entirely sure they could go back, despite all the insurance policies they'd taken out.

He had been so much a shadow of his former self in the last year or so that she'd feared for their future. It was as if he'd left himself somewhere, under an office desk or in a computer program, and what she and the children had been getting was his shell.

She knew that the way she handled it only made it worse. It was the old chestnut about the talent of application again, the work ethic, the “If a job is worth doing, it's worth doing well” thing. Jonathan had been worse than useless in the last year, so she had taken on his responsibilities, too. Terribly efficient, businesslike, practical, competent. But cold? Undemonstrative? Bossy, even?

Frustratingly, she could feel her thoughts only licking at the truth. She had rendered him surplus to requirements. She hadn't meant to, but she had written him out of his own job description. She had become the mother and the father, the homemaker and the breadwinner. She was earning the money to feed them now and all she was managing to taste was his emptiness.

She'd tasted it at lunchtime, when she could have come home from the surgery for an hour. The distance between the practice and Bodinnick was negligible, and her desire to see Lila, to feed her the puréed swede and carrot she'd prepared this morning and put her down for her afternoon nap, had been tempting. But not tempting enough. She'd spoken to Jonathan on his mobile to see if everything was okay without her and there had been that flat echo to his voice. He was in the bloody chapel again.

So he had seen or felt something over there that she hadn't—well, that was just too bad. She hadn't got time to explore her inner self. She was too busy shoving her nipple into Lila's mouth, while sorting out nightmares and angina, to get in touch with her spiritual side.

It had been her choice to keep her career going, but for the first time she was wondering if that was what she really wanted. It wasn't the money she was doing it for—they had enough with Jonathan's redundancy to keep them going for at least a year—but the prospect of them both being permanently unemployed was not one she would allow the family to face. At the same time, was she prepared to face becoming resentful in her role as the sole earner? How did grudges start? Was a temporary replacement's wage worth the risk? And since she was still working, how far could she fulfil her
Manifesto
wish to adopt a simpler lifestyle with more free time to concentrate on the things that matter? What
did
matter? Though usually so resolute, she had no idea.

The one thing she did know was that she was relieved to be back in a working environment. It made her feel less guilty than she had thought it would. She recognized herself in the surgery. Being a doctor was what she did. But she was also a mother and a wife. Was that where the guilt lay?

She heard his voice outside the door. “Thanks for keeping me company, Jay,” he was saying. “I enjoyed that.” He sounded thankful and lonely. Then she heard the wobble of a hot-water bottle being thrown, a quiet laugh, and his footsteps move off again. The realization that he wasn't going to come in and kiss her goodnight made her want to cry. But she didn't do crying—there wasn't time—so she sighed just once and closed her eyes. She had to sleep. She had to work in the morning even if no one else did.