Eggshell Days (22 page)

“A bit thick, I think.”

“Best not to tell Mummy about the little accident.”

“Why? Will she tell you off?”

Lila squealed and threw one of her paintbrushes on the floor. Jay came in, too.

“Leave the skateboard there, Jay. We need the air to circulate.”

“I thought you didn't want it to dry out too quickly.”

“Oh, good thinking.”

Jay smiled proudly and Jonathan held his hand out like a surgeon in theater.

“Sieve.”

Jay handed him a sieve.

“Bucket.”

Jay handed him a bucket.

He began to work the lime and the water through.

“What can I do?” Asha asked.

“Grab me the goggles while Lila's not looking.”

Asha handed him the goggles.

“This is good teamwork, kids,” he said. “Thank you.”

He'd purloined the flimsy white plastic goggles with foam-backed edges from Jay's chemistry set. They were too small for him and made him look like a cartoon ant.

When he put them on, Asha burst out laughing, but as soon as his five-month-old daughter saw him her bottom lip curled down, her face began to crumple, her eyes filled with tears.

“Oh no, come on,” Jonathan said, lifting the goggles. “We've been through all this before. It's me, look.”

Lila's crying stopped like clockwork.

“That's better,” and he moved back to the bucket. “Now, we've got to work fairly quickly here. Dilute the mixture until it is the consistency of milk,” he read from the photocopied instructions. “Does that look like milk?”

He put the goggles back on. Lila started crying again.

“Oh, God. Lila, look! On, off, on, off.” He put the whisk down, picked her up and made the fatal mistake of giving her what she wanted. Lila held the goggles by the elastic, bouncing them up and down and waving them in the air. Her bottom lip uncurled itself, her face uncrumpled and her tears evaporated.

“Goggles,” Asha told her. “Say goggles.”

Lila whacked her father in the face with them and Asha laughed again.

“Now give them back to Daddy.”

Lila held tight, flailing them around his head as his old schoolteacher used to do with the blackboard rubber to unruly pupils. Not him, obviously. He was always the quiet one at the front.

“Goggles to Daddy,” Jonathan said, trying to pry open her tight little fist.

The lip curled back down. The tears welled up.

“Okay, goggles to Lila,” he said, admitting defeat. Women of all ages had him wrapped right round their little fingers. “You sit there and look after them,” he told her, clipping her back into her seat, “and Daddy will be very very careful when he stirs.”

He was planning, when Sita had a go at him, to get Asha to tell her the Lila story but he still knew he was in trouble. Jay had read a leaflet out loud at breakfast about the heat generated by a dustbin full of slaking lime being sufficient to set scaffold boards on fire, and Sita had made Jonathan promise he would be careful. “It's nothing to do with slaking lime,” he told her. “This is lime putty. It's perfectly safe.” Thank God he'd only burned his own eyes.

“Okay, kids, I'm ready when you are. You need to work fast. The thing is, if the wall is dry it'll suck out all the water from the limewash, and that's no good. It's your job to keep the surface damp, and it's my job to paint the wash on after you. Are you ready? Spray as fast as you can. Try not to miss any bits.”

“We're ready.”

“Go.”

It was perfect synergy, and he wished Sita could see them.

*   *   *

So did Sita. Walking out of the house that morning had felt wrong and she hadn't been able to put her mind to work at all. Saturday night's party was supposed to have been a celebration, but it had ended feeling more like a wake. The usual spark in Emmy had died mid-evening, and her own embryonic rekindled interest in sex had died with it. Sunday had been a write-off. Monday, so far, was no better.

Patients had come and gone with their minor time-wasting ailments and carefully worded excuses for having a look at the new fill-in doctor, and she had played along, pretending not to know what they were up to, writing unnecessary prescriptions, making bland diagnoses, trying her best to win confidences and bury prejudice. But it had all left her unusually cold. She was tiring of a new surgery every other week. It was making her feel as if she didn't belong anywhere, not at Bodinnick, not at work, not even at Jonathan's side if she was honest.

Her mind kept going back to when Asha, as a toddler, went through a phase of refusing to join in anything. It didn't matter if it was a playgroup picnic, or pass the parcel, or face painting, or paddling in the sea, the child would stand on the edges, watching with wet eyes and a quivering lip, presumably wishing she hadn't kicked up such a fuss in the first place because that made it even harder to find a way back in.

Was that what she had been doing since she'd arrived in Cornwall? She'd made such a big thing of her desire for work, how could she now say otherwise?

Everyone was being sensitive enough to recognize the imbalance of her life and doing their best to accommodate it, but it wasn't easy piling on the makeup and blow-drying her hair after a night of so little sleep, while the rest of the house mooched around in baggy trousers.

Last night was a perfect example. She had heard Emmy bashing around in the early hours because she, too, had been awake, but she had been up since six and she knew damn well Emmy wouldn't surface until she felt like it. Then no doubt this evening, when she was so tired that she'd have to make her inevitable move for sleep at ten thirty, someone would call her a party-pooper. It happened so often it was almost a routine.

If anyone ought to be staying at home, it was her. Lila was still tiny. Anyway, work was supposed to be the part-time theme in this downshift, not family. But even though the others made the right noises, none of them knew what it felt like to come in after a hard day's slog and not know where to place yourself. By the time she got a look in, so much had happened at Bodinnick during the day that nobody knew where to start to fill her in.

Maybe today would be easier. She was on her way home again, even though it was only three thirty. The surgery had been very understanding, and it wasn't a total lie. She
was
feeling ill, it was just nothing to do with dodgy prawns.

As she drove up the drive eating a pasty out of a bag, she could see that Emmy's Golf was missing and she felt suddenly cross on behalf of Jonathan, who would be lumbered with all four children again. Her instincts told her she would find them over at the chapel and, without bothering to swap her good shoes for old, she took off across the wet grass. Shrieks of laughter reached her ears before she went through the arched gate, and the closer she got to the sound of fun the farther away she felt.

When she got to the gate and realized that Jonathan had only their own three, all to himself, she felt a sharp pang of jealousy. She looked at Asha's unknowing face, Jay's slightly cumbersome lope and Lila's owl gaze and they seemed more consummately beautiful than ever—and yet, at the same time, the sight made her want to turn on her smart leather heels and run.

They hadn't noticed her. They weren't looking for her. As far as they were concerned, she was at work, and until she materialized in the evening she didn't exist for them. Never had she seen that truth more clearly.

Jonathan appeared from inside the chapel, pumping a garden sprayer and shouting something silly. He ran after a radiant Asha, and his hefty booted foot clipped the upright handle of Lila's car seat, missing the baby's head by an inch.

Sita's impulse to run out of the shadows was stopped in its tracks by Jay, getting his little sister out of the seat, picking her up, showing her the water hanging from the nozzle on the end of the sprayer, getting her little index finger and dabbing it on the drip. When Lila reached out for Jonathan, resentment blistered all over Sita's inner skin.

“What on earth is the matter?” she said, bursting onto the scene. She'd meant to say hello first, but somehow that hadn't happened.

“Nothing,” Jonathan said. “Just having some fun.”

“Daddy! Daddy, get me,” Asha squealed, forgetting that her mother wasn't supposed to be here.

Jonathan lurched at her with a pretend growl. Lila squealed with delight.

“What are you doing back?” he asked with his back half turned to her. He was only half interested, too.

“Um, I've taken the rest of the day off.” Then she meant to say that she missed them all, and could they give her five minutes to go and change and she could join in too, but those words didn't come, either. Instead, her rancor homed in on his red-rimmed eyes.

“What happened to you?”

“Just a little localized difficulty with the goggles, wasn't there, Asha?”

“Don't be cross with him, be cross with Lila. Get me, Daddy, get me!”

But the anger that came spitting out of Sita's mouth left no one in any doubt about who was cross with whom and suddenly, when she had said everything she thought she never would, she found herself playing her trump card.

“Right, that's it. I want that house meeting. This has all gone far enough.”

*   *   *

“Blame it on me,” Niall said as he opened the swing door to the communal changing rooms at the swimming pool and let Maya walk under his arm. He was pleased she still fitted. “You know what she's like sometimes.”

Maya nodded, but she was getting a little sick of her mother's eggshell days. She knew they could sometimes spill into eggshell weekends, but this one seemed to be mustering enough strength to go on for weeks. Today, Emmy had even made Maya miss school. “Why?” Maya had asked. “Because you're looking pale. I think you're overtired,” Emmy said. Keeping her out of school was a classic. It was so annoying.

In the back of her mind when they were packing their things to move, Maya had hoped that these days of Emmy's would belong to the past. She had thought for one silly moment that they were leaving all that miserable stuff behind, only taking the good bits with them. It wasn't very nice, finding out you were wrong.

“But if anyone else was in a bad mood for this long for no reason, Mum would be furious,” she told Niall reasonably. “She's got double standards, hasn't she?”

“Thing is, Maya, what's sauce for the goose is not necessarily sauce for the gander with grown-ups.”

He wanted to sweep her up and run away with her, and bring her back when it was all over, except that he felt it was all his fault. Removing himself from it now would make things worse.

“I'll see you in the pool,” she said. “I'm going to teach you a surface dive.”

“What's that?”

“It's what otters do. You just swim along, and then make a shape like this with your hands, and then you go underwater. It's really cool. People think you've disappeared. Mum really panicked the first time I did it because I stayed under there for such a long time. I can touch the bottom of the deep end when I do it.”

“Otters don't have hands.”

“No, but you have.”

He put them either side of her peachy cheeks. “See you in there.”

She scooted off across the wet tiled floor. What she wanted now was for someone to wave a wand and make it all all right again, whatever “it” was. When she said “someone” she meant Niall, because in her experience Niall was the only one who ever had the wand. That was why she'd asked him to take her swimming on her own. “I'd just like to have some time with the two of us,” she'd told him. “God, you women, you're all the same,” he'd joked, but he'd gone through hoops to make it happen, borrowing Emmy's car, making all sorts of promises to Kat about how he would make it up to her.

But now, Maya thought as she chose her cubicle, perhaps he doesn't have the wand anymore. Or perhaps he only waved it over Kat.

Niall was thinking something not entirely removed from that himself. He should have been more careful where he did and didn't wave his wand, or certainly where he did and didn't scatter his promises. He should have learned by now that when Emmy said everything was fine, what she meant was everything was fine at that precise moment. It didn't mean everything would be fine five minutes on. And he shouldn't have promised her she had him, because she hadn't.

The changing rooms were packed with noisy, wet school-children shouting and throwing socks at each other over the locked doors, but he walked obliviously through them. He'd been reckless. As Cathal would say, he'd let his dick rule his head and his sexual greed was now hurting the one person he hoped he would never, ever hurt. What he found even more painful was that Maya was only a short distance away from realizing it.

He could see that she didn't yet have enough understanding to put two and two together as he had. She hadn't yet done the Emmy plus Niall divided by Kat doesn't equal happiness sum, but he knew she would, soon. When she did, she'd realize it was his fault, and she would love him that little bit less. He didn't know if he could bear that.

What he also didn't know was that he hadn't added up correctly, either. He had the wrong equation. He wasn't even in it.

Emmy's mood since Kat's arrival had been atrocious. She could barely bring herself to talk to anyone except Maya, who she could hardly let out of her sight. It had been hard work even negotiating the trip to the pool. Why were they going on their own? she wanted to know. Were they meeting anyone? What time were they going to be back?

He kicked himself again for messing things up. It wasn't simply that he and Emmy shouldn't have made love, it was that they should have put themselves more securely back in their box afterward. But he had believed her when she'd said she was okay with it, that she would be fine if and when Kat came back, that it was just who they were, and she would deal with it in the same way she always dealt with it, by putting it in the box and keeping it safe until they next felt like taking it out.