Eggshell Days (6 page)

As compensation for Niall and Kat's rooms being the darkest, they had the biggest bathroom, which Emmy was already doing her best not to look in every time she walked down the landing. If she averted her eyes slightly, she saw her sewing room. She had just ordered three more rolls of fabric and a new machine, so it would look the part, if nothing else.

Downstairs, though, the layout was less easy. The sitting room was north-facing, a fact which wasn't helped by the old blue carpet and its distance from the kitchen. The dining room table was so long and wide that they would have to dismantle it to get it out, so there was little they could do in there but eat, and the kitchen was better for that. Then there was a music room, a library, and a very small one-windowed room which Toby had used as a study and which the children had already claimed as a den.

“Why don't you use that one as your sewing room?” Kat had suggested.

“It's a bit too small,” was Emmy's excuse, but that depended on what it was too small for. Sitting and staring into space was an activity you could do in a shoebox.

The big, sunny kitchen was already established as the heart of the house. Big and sunny was good, but it was universally agreed that the melamine units, the lino and the strip lights were very, very bad. They decided early on to make it their first project.

“If only because, if everything goes belly-up, a new kitchen will make it easier to sell,” Jonathan had said.

“Go wash your mouth out,” Emmy had told him, trying to stop her head filling with beech worksurfaces and aluminium storm lamps. Bodinnick's kitchen was not born to be beautiful. It was born to feed hordes of hungry, busy people. It was also where, according to Sita's timetable, the assembled throng should have been gathering for their first house meeting.

“We should have at least one, before Kat goes tomorrow,” Sita insisted, putting her brush to dry on a piece of newspaper on the Aga lid.

She looked around. Niall was rolling a second cigarette, his latest money-saving wheeze, even though he hadn't yet smoked the first. Kat was painting her toenails again. Emmy was drawing on the inside of her orange peel with a pen. The exposed patch of bedroom floorboards where a chunk of ceiling plaster had collapsed and brought supper to an untimely close on their first night still sat over the table, waiting to be fixed.

“Right. I'll be upstairs if anyone wants me,” she said a little brusquely. Unfortunately, her point was lost in the sudden clamor of fighting siblings.

“I want to go home,” Asha wept, rushing in. “I want to go home. Please Mummy, can we go home?”

“This
is
home,” Jay shouted, snapping at her heels. “You'd better get used to it.”

“No it isn't. It's not
my
home,
my
home is in London.”

“Hey hey hey, you two!”

Everyone saw Asha's painful little think bubble. It showed her old bedroom, with the unicorn stencils and white cupboards and night light. It showed her pink walls and her glittery curtains, her fitted carpet and her miniature desk and chair.

She had spent her whole life in a house where you could find anyone within a couple of minutes, where the paintwork didn't peel, the floors didn't creak, the fire didn't smoke. Even if you were on your own, you were never more than twenty feet from someone else. At Bodinnick, she sometimes thought she was lost forever. Outside her bedroom window, there was nothing. Nothing to worry about like overhead cables which might sway and break in the wind and electrocute someone in their bed like there were at some of her friends' houses in London, nothing like really tall trees right outside that burglars might climb up and break in like there were at Niall's old flat. All there was at Bodinnick was a lovely big garden. And she was terrified.

“My home's back in London,” she kept crying.

“Not anymore, it's not,” Jay taunted.

“Emmy, this isn't Narnia, is it? Is it? Maya says it is. She says there's an evil queen in that wardrobe and Jay told me to go through the coats, and…”

“But you've read
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
, haven't you?” Emmy said, not as gently as she meant to. She wasn't in the mood to have Maya blamed for Asha's neuroses, but at the same time she couldn't bear to think that the move might be making any of them unhappy.

“I don't like it. Daddy stopped it. It scared me.”

“They're just playing it out.”

“I don't want them to.”

“Why not?” Emmy's parenting skills didn't stretch to reassurance. There had never been the need.

“I just don't.”

“You could be Lucy.”

“I don't want to be Lucy. I want to be me. I want to go home.”

“Well, you know what?” Emmy said. “This is better than Narnia—this is Bodinnick.”

Which wasn't entirely the right thing to say. Asha needed fitted carpets and double glazed windows, not magic and mystery. In Emmy's defense, she knew very little about children like that. The prosecution might say she had no desire to, either.

Suddenly, from the floor there was a dull thud, a split second's silence and then a blood-curdling scream. Lila had fallen from her nest of cushions and was hanging backward out of the brown plastic dog basket, her head resting on the hard, cold lino.

“For God's sake, who put her down there?” Sita shouted.

“You did,” Emmy said.

“Well, it's about bloody time she learned how to sit up!”

“Wellies on, kids,” Emmy said quickly, realizing the household could take no more. “You ain't seen nothin' yet.”

It was true. The house, just as Emmy had promised, was shrinking, but the grounds and outbuildings were still an unknown universe, with secrets lurking behind every hut and hydrangea.

3

Emmy frogmarched the children to the chapel first, because she thought the walk would do them good.

In truth, the perfect little medieval building nestling in the corner of a field on the other side of the lane that led from the manor to the farmhouse had always left her slightly cold, but she blamed Toby for that. The past hadn't been kind to men like him, and the Church certainly hadn't, so even as a child Emmy had picked up on the fact that the place represented something stifling and repressed.

She was right about the therapeutic aspect of the walk there, though. By the time they got to its arched door, all three children were laughing again. She and Asha had collected fallen camellia and azalea blooms on the way, big blousy pink ones, wistful cream ones and yellow trumpets, floppy with frost.

They floated them in the rain butt and put the ones with stalks in a jam jar on the altar, and then, after a few minutes, they shut the small wooden door again and Emmy knew the flowers would be dead the next time anybody saw them.

Somewhere in the back of her mind, she accepted that the chapel deserved more, but she and Toby weren't the only perpetrators of injustice. Bodinnick's sale details in the top drawer of the walnut bureau in the library didn't make much of it, either. The fading document described a formal early-Regency house of robust nature, built in 1820, with the addition of a servants' wing in 1870.

The chapel was almost an afterthought, included in the garden paragraph and referred to as a “former private chapel currently being usefully employed as a tool and potting shed.” Beyond it, there was, in the description's carefully vague wording, a “much older” building, insulated from the servants' wing by a wall, with access from the outside only. This “older building” was where they all went next.

It was the early equivalent of the modern-day shed, and when Toby took ownership of Bodinnick in 1960 it was full of the detritus of farm and family life—hen coops and lunchboxes, broken chairs and tractor tires, sacks of seed and tins of furniture wax—and was known as the “store.” He'd done nothing to alter its role but had added to it with his own rather more quirky mark—faux marble columns for a New Year's Eve Roman orgy, speakers the size of junior-school children, a twelve-foot pennant of Prince Philip in nothing but the crown jewels for the Silver Jubilee, and a sit-up-and-beg bright pink bicycle complete with tinsel-twined basket, a veteran of his gay marches in London.

As she watched the starburst effect on the children, Emmy's memory threw up a very vague recall of Toby's one-time intention to turn the store into an art gallery. He'd been forever coming up with ideas for the place. Maybe this very minute he was sitting on a fluffy white cloud, stroking his goatee beard and thinking, “Go, girl!”

She hoped she could do him justice. He deserved success, even if his death—or rather his bequest—had been the shock of her life. It was ironic, really. Part of the reason for the move from London was rejection of the material world they all felt they'd been sucked into, and yet if Toby hadn't made her the recipient of such gain, none of them would be here at all.

The need to possess had never been her thing. Even having Maya ten years ago and finding herself wholly responsible for another person hadn't changed that, so when she'd first heard that she was the sole beneficiary of the will, she'd felt like the pretender to a very grand throne.

She had been dreading the funeral, but in any event, it had turned out to be so much like a party that she'd had to keep reminding herself afterward that Toby hadn't been there in person. And not one finger had been pointed about the will. It really did seem that she was the only one who hadn't seen it coming.

“No one knew Toby better than I,” his poor old boyfriend Julian had said after the burial, holding her gloved hands in his cold, scaly grasp. “And he believed that no one knew you better than he.”

“I think that may be true.”

“Then you have one duty to him, and one duty alone.”

“Which is?”

“To make the most of your joie de vivre. He used to say you inherited it from him.”

“That may be true, too.”

“So you must let Bodinnick make you as happy as it made him. Make your life exactly what you want it to be.”

“It would help if I knew.”

“He always thought you did know.”

“Ah,” Emmy had said feebly. “But what about you? Are you sure you don't want to stay on?”

“Thank you, my dear, but I couldn't bear to be there without him. My cottage in Totnes will serve me more than well until I go and join him.”

Once she knew that, she had been brave enough to ask the rest. She'd tried not to focus on the drip hanging from the end of his long, thin nose.

“Do you think I could share the house? With friends? A sort of cooperative, so that all of us and none of us own it? They're good friends,
best
friends, they're more important to me than my family. I'd trust them with my life.”

Julian had said, with a nod so definite that the nose drip fell and settled on his mustard cashmere scarf, that he thought that would make Toby very happy indeed. He said Toby knew all about friends being more important than family, present company excepted.

Amazing, since the wedding and the train crash were, at that stage, still a whole week away. Spooky, even.

Perhaps the manor had been nurturing her all her life for this. Her responses to the place had always been different from the rest of the family's. She was the only one who never got scared here as a child, the only one who came and stayed with Toby on her own, the only one who wanted to play in the attic, poke around the rooms, make dens in the garden. Her brothers used to pester for a day on the beach or a tent in the field, but Emmy always preferred to be within striking distance of its thick granite walls. Being inside its grounds was like having her own fortified town. She never wanted to be queen, just inhabitant. Besides, it had already had its queen.

“Be careful!” she shouted to the children as one of the fake marble columns wobbled. It was verging on the disrespectful, the way they were suddenly lost in the desire to possess. Half an hour ago, they had been tearful, taunting and homesick. Now they were behaving like a crack team of consummate carjackers. Well, they hadn't been near a shop other than the village one for ten days, which must be a record.

“Uh, I need a man!” Maya shouted, trying to drag the pink bicycle free from its prison of ropes and old chairs.

Don't we all, darling? Emmy felt like replying.

“Jaysus! It's Liberace's dressing room.”

Oh my God, she thought, leaping out of her skin as Niall appeared from nowhere. I can do thought-transference. Wish him, and he appears.

He had his arm round Prince Philip. “I'm beginning to see what your family were up against,” he said, moving the figure to one side.

“Careful. Toby's ghost lives on, you know. He'll come to haunt you with his feather boa and Judy Garland record collection.”

“I hope so. It'd be nice to see him again.”

“Wouldn't it.”

“It would. This is great,” he said, looking around. “God almighty, that's an amplifier and a half.”

“That was for his electric guitar.”

“Where's the guitar, then? Is that still around?”

“Don't even think about it.”

“Too late. The seed has been sown. It's years since I played.”

“And you were terrible even then.”

“Get on. I was great.”

They both thought of the first time he had sung to her.

“That train was a stroke of luck,” he said.

“And which train would that be?” she asked coyly.

“That would be both of them.”

“Is the right answer.”

That now beatified journey of her youth on the Paris-to-Rome sleeper had been Hitchcockian in its potential for menace. Nineteen years old, alone in Europe and picking her way in the dark over twisted heaps of travel-weary bodies and scuffed rucksacks, she had almost been able to hear the soundtrack. It had been no surprise at all when the Moroccan guy leaning against a carriage partition had swung his pitted oily face in her own and blocked her path with his reeking body.