Eggshell Days (30 page)

“Let me go and get it,” Jonathan said, putting his hand out for the kettle. She looked closer to the full term than he had realized.

“No, I need the exercise. Anyway, you're not allowed in the ladies.”

“Let him get it from the blokes, then.”

“Dean, there's roughing it and then there's roughing it.”

“It's all the bloody same. Still gone through at least seven different livers by the time you drink it. And you're too bloody posh, you are.” He smiled at her and she put her face up for his kiss.

Over a second cup of tea, since Jonathan was in no hurry, they talked about the baby.

“We think it's due in a fortnight. I was a bit slow on the uptake,” Mog said. “I didn't realize I was pregnant for quite a long time.”

“Which is the understatement of the fuckin' year,” Dean said, picking tobacco from the end of a new roll-up.

“We'll have to get some petrol for the motorbike. We've timed it. It takes eight minutes to get to the bus stop, one comes on the hour every hour and it takes forty minutes to get to the hospital, so if we leave the minute I get my first contraction, we should be okay.”

“We don't want to leave too early,” Dean said. “If we get there too early, they'll be swarming round us like flies, telling us what to do, how to do it, probably even what to call the poor little sod. We don't want all that crap.”

“The way we see it, childbirth has been going on for all time, so, you know, we want our baby to come into the world without all those bright lights and people in green masks staring at her and pumping her full of drugs or whatever.”

“Him,” Dean corrected.

“Her,” Mog replied.

It was an innocent argument, delivered in a way that made Jonathan realize they thought they were the first to have it.

“What are your plans if something goes wrong?” he asked, feeling obliged to put it up for discussion.

“Like what?”

“Like a bus not coming?”

“We'll go on the motorbike.”

“Or the motorbike not starting.” He looked at it and tried to imagine it carrying a woman in labor.

“It will,” Dean said. “It always does.”

“Or Mog going into labor in the middle of the night?”

“I've got the number of a twenty-four-hour taxi firm.”

“Have you got a phone?”

“There's one in the village.”

“There's not much to go wrong, is there?” Mog added. “We'll be fine.”

They looked so full of confidence that Jonathan didn't want to frighten them with the list of possibilities.

*   *   *

Niall was also trying to draw up a list of possibilities—any possibilities, all possibilities—since the most likely possibility was too impossible to even contemplate. There was almost half a pint of Guinness still in his glass on the bar which he'd gingerly been taking sips from since he'd heard what Roy Mundy had to say.

It was the first round at the Cott he'd been included in that hadn't been in return for one he'd bought earlier—a milestone in local acceptance—but the stout wasn't going down like it should. Something else was going down instead.

“Don't miss a trick, I don't,” the spherical Roy Mundy kept chuckling.

Niall wanted the plumber to shut up, but Roy was in full flight. The more he teased, the higher he tugged up his trouser leg. Perched on a high bar stool like a portly gnome, he was now exposing a good six inches of mottled shin. Under normal circumstances, Niall would have had a laugh about it.

“But you don't have to tell us, does 'e, Dave?”

“No,” said the landlord, “'cos if 'e don't, someone else always will.”

“That's right, my boy,” Roy cackled. “So, save for the odd bleddy cloak-and-dagger meeting in a rest area, how's it going up the road?”

“It's what you could call work in progress,” Niall said, trying to ignore the cracks about the rest area. Roy and Dave were adamant they had seen him and Emmy in a clandestine rendezvous somewhere called Boxtree. “We've not quite found our feet yet.”

“They'll be on the end of your legs,” Roy said. His V-neck navy sweater, which reminded Niall of his old school uniform, was at least a size too small for his magnificent beer belly. “That's where I generally find mine.”

Niall wondered if he ever got to see them. Perhaps if he did, he wouldn't wear those dodgy black lace-up shoes and nylon gray socks. He had another go at steering the conversation back to something less unsettling. Aga parts would do.

“I drove halfway round the bloody world looking for this place, and it turned out to be a lock-up in some dying factory with vegetation growing out of the middle of the road, with a note on the door saying ‘Gone Surfing.' Is that normal?”

“Depends how many feet you've got,” Roy said.

“Feet of surf,” Dave explained with a pained expression.

As Roy hooted at his own joke, Niall heard Cathal's voice in his head again, muffled words coming from inside the sewing room that he couldn't piece together. “This isn't about Niall, Emmy. This is the one thing in your life that isn't about Niall.”

By the time he came to again, Roy Mundy had changed the subject. “Well, then, I knew old Mr. Hart quite well. He was a case, w'un 'e? He was an old bugger, 'e was. I 'spect you've heard that, 'ave you?”

“Funnily enough…”

“I don't care, I don't. People can do what they like, can't they?” Roy sipped his beer. “What is it, some sort of hippy commune you've got up there?”

“Nudist hippy commune,” Niall said. “I'm only wearing clothes now because I'm here. Usually we all walk around naked. Especially the women.” His banter sounded hopelessly flimsy. He could hear Emmy in her sewing room with Cathal. “Right for who?” she was shouting.

“Nudist, is it? 'Ell! What's it you say is wrong with your Aga? Maybe I could fit it in this afternoon, hey, Dave?” He took a long sip, draining the last three inches of ale. “That's what they all think in the village, mind.”

“Better not spoil their fun by telling them the truth then.”

“Old bleddy Mrs. Partridge up there thinks you'm all on the wacky baccy.”

“Jaysus, what a joke.”

“We all think it is. We're all having a great laugh.”

“Good. It's nice to know you're giving something back to the community.”

Roy cackled some more and the two of them realized they liked each other. Niall wished he was in the mood to show it.

“Emmy is Mr. Hart's niece,” he said, the Guinness still sitting unhappily in his stomach on top of the rest area conversation. “He left her the house in his will, and—”

“We know that,” Roy interrupted impatiently. “And we know you've had Culworthy's up to have a look, and the colored maid who's taken over from Dr. Rawe at the surgery went home apparently sick the other day and then recovered enough to buy a pasty from Cott Stores and start eating it before she even got in the bleddy car. I tell you, we don't miss a trick, we don't.”

“So you keep telling me. Anyway, Sita needs to eat, she's still breastfeeding.”

“Spare me the details, boy. No, as I said, I don't mind. I like everyone, me.” He tapped the bar with his empty glass.

“I'll get that,” Niall said, nodding at the landlord.

“You're a funny lot, though, in' you? You've got all this space up there, and you have to drive a couple of miles up the road in separate cars just so you can talk in a bit of privacy.”

“It wasn't me.”

“Yes, 'twas.”

Roy put a five-pound note on a pump, and Niall took it off again, pointing to himself as Dave Kemp filled the empty glass with a pint of Wreckers.

“You're a worse gossip than Eileen Partridge, you are,” the landlord said.

“Get on! I seen 'im and his flash bleddy car in the rest area with Mr. Hart's niece, I know I did. Wos' think I am? Stupid?”

“That would be one word.” Dave laughed.

“I'll tell you one more time,” Niall said, trying to sound as if he was enjoying the wind-up. “It wasn't me. Prove otherwise and I'll buy you a beer every day for the rest of your life.”

“That'll be till a week on Tuesday, looking at 'im,” Dave said.

“Your twin, was it?” Roy asked.

“My brother, I expect.”

“Your brother? I love to see a grown man squirm, I do.”

“Was the hood up?” Niall asked.

“T'wadn't the hood that was up, boy.”

“What was the other car? A blue Golf?”

“Course it bleddy was. You were there. All right, Jim?”

Jim Best, the electrician, came over to the bar. Same crowd every lunchtime.

“All right, Roy?”

“I'm just telling Mr. O'Connor here, the Boxtree rest area idn't as private as 'e thinks 'tis.”

“It's your car there, is it? Partridge'll 'ave your guts for garters, boy. 'Ee can't get his car through the gate.”

“I'll go and shift it,” Niall said.

“I thought you said t'wadn't yours?”

“It isn't, it's Emmy's.” He was relieved to have an excuse to leave after admitting that. He forced the last of his stout down. “Haven't you two got work to do? Like fixing my Aga, for a start?”

“I'll be there d'rec'ly,” Roy said.

“And I'll be there just after that,” Jim said, his face as straight as a poker.

As he shut the low white door that led from the public bar onto the road, he could hear the three of them coughing and laughing through their Superkings like a coven of witches.

He started his bike with a more aggressive kick than it needed, and pulled away from the pub, wondering where the hell Boxtree rest area was and why every hole in the hedge needed to have a name around here.

He took the first right, heading in the vague direction of Bodinnick but not down a lane he knew. Then he took a left, and at a junction of no fewer than five roads known locally, but not to him, as Star Cross, he took another right. It was like a labyrinth out to trick him. Every road had the same landmarks. Five-bar gates leading to timber companies, driveways to farms, private lanes to big houses.

Just when he thought he had completely lost his bearings, he saw it. Emmy's car, abandoned in the middle of a long, narrow rest area in front of some privately owned woodland. Tracks in the leafy mulch suggested the recent arrival and departure of another car. Well, he could be more specific than that if he chose to be. He could say the arrival and departure of a blue Italian front-wheel-drive with a throaty roar, which belonged to his brother Cathal.

He pulled in and took off his helmet with fumbling fingers. His mind searched for a more palatable scenario. Perhaps she had broken down, and phoned home for help. Perhaps Cathal had been the one to answer. Perhaps he had been hearing things when they were in the sewing room. Perhaps Maya hadn't really thought Emmy was refusing to come out because of Cathal. Perhaps he hadn't really seen them on the stairs, seen their faces.

He tried the door of her car and looked inside. Her bag was on the passenger floor and one of Maya's sweaters was on the back seat, the very thinly striped hand-knitted one he'd bought her at Greenwich Market that had stretched so much it now reached her knees. The hood was still warm.

He leaned against the front of the car, trying to work out why he felt so sick. Why
not
Cathal? He could see why she would find him attractive. But if they were together, how? And when? There were some pieces of the jigsaw that seemed to fit and others that didn't. He tried this way and that way to find the whole picture, picking up the same few bits again and again, turning them to the left, the right, upside down, forcing them. But he just couldn't see it clearly. Stuff was missing.

My God, he thought. What the fuck am I doing here? What am I doing acting like some crazed Peeping Tom? What will I say if they find me?

He heard traffic and panicked. As he turned his bike back toward the road, Cathal's car came over the brow of the hill. He saw Emmy in the passenger seat but her head was bowed. Cathal didn't look exactly full of the joys of spring, either. With white-hot panic boiling in his head, he opened up the throttle, bareheaded, his crash helmet still hanging on the fence. He didn't know how to get out of there fast enough.

17

Dean wasn't used to feeling frightened, having developed a high alarm threshold when he'd cut half his finger off with a Stanley knife at the age of eight and taken himself and the piece of digit to the hospital on the bus. His mother had been “missing” at the time, and when she went “missing” he and his brother used to fend for themselves until they ran out of food, then they'd go and get her from the pub. She always bought them double chips on the way back.

Life had continually thrown stuff at him, so he had grown up believing he could catch most things. But looking at Mog's blotchy face and wide, scared eyes, seeing the wet, slightly bloody sheets he had just taken off the bed, watching the way her back arched and her belly moved, he had an uncontainable fear that he was about to drop the one ball that really mattered.

He sat on a rickety painted stool next to the sofa on which Mog was immobilized and tried to keep his cool.

“Let me just take the motorbike up to the village and phone for an ambulance, yeah? I'll go like fuck. I'll be back before you even miss me.” He pulled the edge of his beard as he spoke. The skin was already red raw underneath.

“No,” Mog begged. “I don't want you to leave me. I don't want to be on my own. Please don't go.”

He held her left hand in both of his and squeezed. “You'll be all right. We're gonna 'ave a baby, be a little family, yeah?”

Mog's attempt at a smile failed. “It's happening again,” she whimpered, lifting her bottom off the cushions and pulling his hand underneath the small of her back. “Can you push it there? Harder than that.”