Eggshell Days (18 page)

*   *   *

Outside her sewing room, Emmy slowed. There was the threshold to Niall's space—the space that would soon be shared with Kat again.

His bathroom door was wide open, a green towel was in a damp heap on the floor and puddles led to the bedroom. Beyond that, a radio burbled. Niall would be listening to it, wet and unclothed, preparing himself for the great return.

The thump of the May Day music was still beating inside her, making her want to burst in, throw herself on his bed, fling out her arms and give in. She wanted to dance with the 'oss just once, for old and new times' sake, but she knew she had to carry on putting one foot in front of the other until she reached her own room. It was almost too much effort.

Suddenly, she wanted something even more than the 'oss. She wanted closure on the last few weeks. She wanted to know where she stood, what would happen when Kat went back the next time, if their increased intimacy had changed things. All the issues that had been carried away with the beast this morning were back. The May Day music was fading to a feeble squeak.

Seeing his towel and his footprints, knowing that tomorrow there would be another towel and other prints, she just had to know. Even if the closure really was closure, she wanted it.

It took her ten brisk paces to get to her own space, where she picked up her mobile from the old walnut bureau.

ARE YOU DRY YET
? she typed with shaking fingers. Then she put it back at the same angle, pointing toward the window where she knew the signal would be strongest. Even texting felt like a loss. Their recent messages had been a seamless string of not very important questions. Are you asleep? Did you get the bread? Fancy a beer? Just enough to keep them in secret touch.

Waiting for the bleep of reply, she sat on the bed looking at her swatches. As she picked up a red satin square, it rang.

“Hi,” she answered, her voice as silky as the material she was fingering. She stood precariously at the edge of the dressing table against the wall. If she moved, he could so easily disappear.

“Yes I am,” he said. “And thank you for asking.”

“Are you dressed as well?”

“No.”

“So you're stark bollock naked?”

“I am.”

“Well, don't get cold.”

“I won't.”

She realized she was going to have to spell it out. “I, er, I thought we ought to have a talk.”

“Is talking on mobiles when you're in the same house allowed?”

“Probably not.” Emmy didn't care about rules anymore.

“So if we were being sensible, we would put our phones down and come and find each other.”

“Yes, we would, but we're not, are we, so we won't. Anyway, you'd have to put some clothes on for that.” Damn. She frowned at herself for taking the conversation in the opposite direction to the one she wanted it to go in.

“I'm too hot for clothes,” he said.

She began to feel the pound of desire again, which was no good for closure at all. “Hot baths are bad for you. You had better lie down.”

“Had I?”

“A rush of blood can be very dangerous.”

“So I've heard. What are you doing up here?”

“How do you know I'm up here?”

“I heard you go past.”

“Did you? I nearly came in to see you.”

“I know. I was hoping you would.” He sat down. “What are you doing?”

“Standing up.”

“Have you still got your boots on?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Have you still got your boots on?”

“Why do you want to know that?”

“I just do. I want to know everything about you. So, have you?”

“Well, yes, I have.”

“They're so sexy, those boots. What about your skirt?”

“You noticed.”

“You knew I'd notice.”

“Uh huh.”

“Take it off.”

Emmy laughed but she knew she would do what he'd asked.

“Go on, take it off,” he said again. His voice had changed gear. It was slower, deeper. “Take your skirt off but leave your boots on.”

“Why should I want to do that?”

“Because the visual image interests you,” he said.

“You or me?”

“Me.”

“What right have you got to tell me to take my clothes off?” she asked, unbuttoning her skirt and letting it fall to the ground. Then she moved her free hand to run her fingers over her stomach and across the top of her pants just to see if she felt desirable. She did. Her long legs looked good in her flat suede boots and she found herself mesmerized by the strong erotic image. “There.”

“Have you done it?” He sounded surprised.

“Yeah.”

“God, Emmy, have you really?”

“Yeah.”

“What else are you wearing?”

“A black vest and my jacket.”

“The denim one?”

“Yes.”

She thought she heard him groan.

“Take the vest off and put the jacket back on.”

“Why?” she asked again.

“Because you want to.”

“Make me,” she said.

“Make me make you.”

“Just say that again a little slower.”

“I can make you. I just have to ask you. Take your clothes off for me, Emmy.”

He heard her put the phone down on a surface. She took her jacket off, laid it on the bed, threw her vest on the floor and put the jacket back on. She stared at herself, liking it.

“Can you see yourself in the mirror?”

“Uh huh.”

Niall lay back on the bed, and they stopped speaking for a while, listening to each other's changing breathing patterns.

“Do you want me?” she whispered.

“I do, I really do.”

“Tell me.”

“I want you.”

“Tell me again.”

“Emmy, come here,” Niall said in an urgent, quiet voice. “Come to me. Please.”

“No. You come here.” And she moved away from the mirror, her hand hanging by her side, holding the phone, her legs slightly apart, waiting for his footsteps.

He walked in, dropped his towel and took the phone from her hand, switching it off. Then he took her face in his hands and their tongues flicked in each other's mouths. Emmy put her arms above her head and he moved to kiss her breasts.

“And I want you,” she said.

“You've got me.”

“No. You don't understand. I want you forever.”

“You've got me for as long as you want.” She could feel his heartbeating through her skin.

They both thought of the single thump of the drum, the crowd's roar, the swirling dance of the beast. She took his finger again and pulled it down the side of her face. Now wasn't the time to hold him to any life promises.

10

“A month,” Jonathan told Tamsin the next day, suddenly realizing he was staring at the almost invisible downy hair that ran in a line from her earlobe down her jaw line. The May Day beast had had its effect on them all.

He knew he was a very changed man from the one who had left London, if only because he was becoming so easily distracted. In the city, he had been programmed to focus on specific things, yet in Cornwall his viewfinder was all over the place. There was suddenly a lot to see, although, to be fair, he wasn't the only one looking. And none of them had their zoom lenses pointing at the same thing.

With Sita it was children, work, house. With him it was children, chapel, Tamsin. Or was it Tamsin, chapel, children? He couldn't remember the last time either of them had put each other in the frame.

What was he doing in Tamsin's lilac VW Beetle anyway? He didn't know whether he felt like her driving instructor, her date or her father. Somewhere not so deep down, he blamed Emmy and Niall, but only because that made him feel less guilty than blaming Sita. He certainly didn't blame himself. Everyone else did that for him.

The medieval building they were heading for this stunningly clear morning was only an excuse. Open to the public every fourth weekend, Point Manor had a chapel of the same proportions as Bodinnick's, with the addition of two wall paintings which were apparently in a remarkable condition. It would be interesting to see them, but he could easily have gone on his own.

“Would you like me to take you?” Tamsin had asked him over the phone on Friday.

“I'd love you to,” he'd said.

“Great, bring your children,” she'd replied. But they'd both known he wouldn't.

“So you've got another two to go?” she asked, still five miles away and crunching the gears at every change.

“Two what?” He'd forgotten what they'd been talking about.

“Months.”

“Oh, yes, well, that's the plan.”

“Is it unsettling, not knowing?”

“Not knowing what?”

“Come on, keep up. Whether this is it or not.”

Not when you've spent the last forty years not knowing, he thought, slamming his right foot automatically onto the floor as they found themselves staring up the back of an old bus. It had
Surfers Against Sewage
sprayed in big black letters across its boot and a thick curtain across the back window. It was the same bus they had all followed up the lane to Bodinnick on the last leg of their first journey.

“Well, who knows what they really want?” he said.

“I do. I want a job that I love that pays me loads of money which I can then spend traveling.”

“What, like these guys?”

She pulled out on a blind bend. “God no. I've got no desire to be a gypsy.”

“No?” If he hadn't been so preoccupied with her driving skills, he would have felt disappointed at that admission. “Anyway, I thought you liked the job you've got.”

“I do. It just doesn't pay enough.”

The engine was straining. Change down, for God's sake, he wanted to shout.

“Cornwall's full of mad people like this,” she said, gesticulating rudely at the bus. “Britain is like a Christmas stocking. All the nuts end up at the toe.”

“Thank you.”

“Oh, not you. You're—” Don't say sensible, he willed—“Sensible,” she said.

“Oh, you as well. Everyone thinks that.”

“Are they right?”

“Not necessarily.”

“Is it for me to find out?”

Her challenge made him lose his nerve and he changed tack. “Well, your job must pay you quite well to buy a brand-new car like this,” he said, his foot flat down on an imaginary accelerator.

“Someone bought it for me, actually.”

“Oh. Lucky you.”

“It was a guilt thing,” she said dismissively.

He knew she expected him to ask who the someone was, and what they had done to feel guilty about, but her slight arrogance had deflated him.

“Money's not everything,” he said instead.

She finally found third gear. “You're going to tell me it can't buy you love next, aren't you?”

It was the first time their conversation had turned away from the professional, but he couldn't help wishing it wasn't happening while they were abreast of a thirty-year-old coach on a hairpin bend. He glanced up at the driver and was surprised to see it was a girl with what looked like a big stripy sock on her head.

“I don't know. I've never had enough of it to put it to the test,” he said.

Tamsin looked as though she didn't believe him, and why should she? After all, he was a liar. As far as Sita knew, he was going on his own to a quarry to pick up some lime putty.

“They shouldn't be allowed to drive round in that heap. It's not roadworthy,” she said angrily, beginning to scrabble in her glove compartment for a tape.

“What do you want? Let me get it. You just get on with overtaking.”

“You choose.”

He didn't recognize any of the names of any of the bands she had written on the cassette boxes, so he picked one at random and put it in, pretending he hadn't looked.

“Well done, good choice. Thanks,” she said.

And because both the bus and a ten-mile stretch of road were now behind them, he smiled. She had both needed and thanked him in the space of a minute and he was grateful for that—even if he was very clearly in the passenger seat again.

*   *   *

“Let's have some music,” Emmy said to Sita, rolling her sleeves up and taking a deep breath of the clove-scented steam rising from the ham. She needed to fill the time, having already spun out her trip to the butcher's to a full hour, not that the person she really wanted to notice had noticed. Niall had been too busy sleeping off the effects of making love to two women in twenty-four hours to notice anything.

Kat really had come back from London last night just as she had threatened, and for the first time in nearly three weeks Emmy hadn't seen Niall all day. She knew what he was doing up there. He was kicking over the last few traces of his infidelity, undoing the spell. The problem was that she was still well and truly under it. She could still smell him in her bed, a mix of shower gel and smoke and mystic beast.

“Turn it up as loud as you like,” she said to Sita, who was more than happy to oblige. She'd heard the movements upstairs too. “We can't have him emerging from his love nest into complete silence, can we?”

Sita shuffled around inside a cardboard box of organic vegetables which had just been delivered. “You okay?”

“Fine. Why?”

“Just that I thought it might be hard for you, with Kat coming back.”

Emmy put her finger on the recipe. “Hold on. Add the sugar, lower the heat and simmer briskly. Sorry, what did you say?”

“Can't remember.”

There was another noise from upstairs, an indistinct banging. It couldn't be the children. They were outside. Emmy turned the music up even more.

“What have we got this week?” she asked, peering into the box and speaking in a voice that sounded to her a few octaves too high. “Please not more kale.”