Eggshell Days (2 page)

“No, but look.”

The newcomer put a confident hand out to take a cigarette from between Niall's lips and immediately brought it to her own. Two thin wedges of tarte au citron sat untouched on big white plates in front of them, the dusting of icing sugar undisturbed, like midday snow outside a honeymoon chalet.

“What does that tell you?” Emmy seethed.

“That she's not the kind of Kathleen you thought she'd be?”

“I've lost him,” Emmy said again as Niall took another cigarette from the packet and lit it off the one Kat had in her mouth. She could see their hair touching. “I'm going for a walk. I'll check on the children.”

“No you won't. They're fine. Jonathan has just been and the crèche staff sent him straight back down again. They said they'd come and get us if there was a problem.”

“There
is
a problem.”

“Only in your head. Now, listen, you're going to sit here, and talk to me, and smile and look as if you're having the best time in the world. Laugh, Emmy. Look at me and laugh.”

Emmy picked up her glass and held it to her friend's.

“He'll be back,” Sita said. “You know he will.”

“Will he?”

“Yes.”

“God Almighty, what would I do without you?”

They clinked conspiratorially and drank to their friendship, but through the glass Emmy saw a pair of pink lips and the burning tips of two Camel cigarettes which for once had absolutely nothing to do with her.

*   *   *

Mist rolled off the water. Two swans moved by, caught in the lakeside spotlight. There was a distant babble from the tent, where the music had slowed down to a smooch. Kat sat on the edge of a picnic table, her legs round Niall's hips, her dress hitched up like a miniskirt, his jacket round her shoulders. His shirt hung out over his trousers. He had one hand on her waist, and with the other he was smoking over her head.

“Do you think anyone saw us?” she asked, playing with the triangle of chest hair that was an inch away from her face.

“No, not unless they were looking.”

“So how are we going to go back in as if nothing has happened?”

“We're not. We're just going to disappear into thin air.”

“Are we? What about your friends?”

“Oh, don't worry about them. They're the last people you need worry about.”

“All of them? Even the one who was watching you like a goddamn hawk?”

“Yeah, even her. Especially her.”

“That's good. I don't do friends you have to worry about.” She took his cigarette again and forgot to give it back. “Where's this thin air, then? Where are you staying?”

“I think we're in one of the boarding houses.”

“What, in a fucking bunk bed? That's a little too thin for me. I've got a king-size all to myself.”

“Not anymore, you haven't,” he said, taking the cigarette from her mouth and flicking it into the darkness. “I'll catch up with them tomorrow. We're all supposed to be traveling back on the same train.”

*   *   *

“Where the bloody hell is he?” Emmy snapped over her croissant in the school canteen. It might have been devoid of boys in uniform and free from the smell of gravy, it might even have had flowers on the tables, but it was still a school canteen.

She had asked the dinner lady, who had been thinly disguised as a waitress for the entire wedding weekend, to bring Niall a full English breakfast, even though nobody had seen him since ten o'clock the evening before. It was now congealing on the plate. “Well, he'll just have to make his own way to the station.”

“Ignore her,” Maya told Jay and Asha. “She's got a hangover.”

“So have I,” said Jay.

“No you haven't,” his younger sister said. “Thirteen-year-olds can't get hangovers. You're just showing off.”

“Piss off, weirdo,” he hissed.

“Jay!” Jonathan shouted. “If I hear you use language like that again, I'll…”

“You'll what?” Jay smirked.

“Right. Get up.”

“Leave it, Jon,” Sita said wearily. “Just go and get the bags, would you? We'll see you in the hall.”

By the time the two taxis arrived, fifteen minutes later than they should have done, Emmy was boiling with anger. “What are we supposed to do? Go without him?”

“He's a big boy,” Jonathan told her, herding his children by the backs of their heads toward the two huge doors. “He can look after himself.”

Sita walked out of the bursar's office, where she had settled the bill. She had put everyone's, including Emmy's, on her MasterCard. Because she could second-guess its reception, she tried to say lightly what she had to say: “The secretary has just told me Niall called ten minutes ago and left us a message. He says he'll see us at the station, if not on the train.”

“Oh, right!” Emmy exploded, her voice ricocheting off the wooden panels and polished floor. “Well, how kind of him to let us know. God, how bloody selfish can you get?”

*   *   *

“Mum, this isn't going to be one of your eggshell days is it?” Maya asked in the cab. Jay was in the back with her and she was taking advantage of his presence, using him as an unwitting shield.

“Sorry,” Emmy winced from the front. “Am I being that bad?”

“No, you're okay,” Jay said. “It's better than pretending. Mum and Dad put these stupid fixed smiles on their faces when they're in bad moods in front of people. Haven't you ever noticed?”

“I don't think Mum counts,” said Maya.

The taxis were in a twenty-mile-an-hour convoy behind a milk tanker. Behind them was a metallic blue Golf. In the cab in front of theirs, Sita turned round and tapped her watch through the back window.

“We're going to miss the train,” Emmy told the driver.

“It's this blessed tanker. He must be able to see us. He should pull over.” He sounded his horn.

“I hope we do miss it,” Jay told Maya when he could see Emmy was in conversation.

“Why?”

“Then we won't have to go to school.”

“We'll just have to get the next one. There'll be one every hour. Some people commute from here, you know.”

Jay sighed. “They must be mad. All grown-ups are mad.”

“Is Monday a bad day, then?”

“Every day's a bad day.”

“Is it?”

“Yeah, it is. I hate school.”

“Do you?”

“Yeah, really. Sometimes I don't bother going.”

“What do you do instead?”

“Go home.”

“What do you tell your mum and dad?”

“Nothing. They're not there, are they? I just pretend I've been at school. If they can pretend everything's fine when it's not, I can too.”

“What's not fine?” Maya asked. It had never occurred to her that things in Jay's family might not be fine.

“Do you want a list?”

“Anyway, I thought your mum was at home all the time now Lila has been born.”

“Well, yeah.”

“So how do you skip school?” She didn't believe he did, in the same way that Asha didn't believe he had a hangover.

“Well, that's one of the things that aren't fine, isn't it?”

“All right, you two?” Emmy asked, looking round.

“Fine,” said Jay, putting on what he thought was a stupid fixed smile.

“Hey, Niall's behind us!” Maya shouted, waving frantically. “What's he doing in that posh car? Who's that girl?”

“Maya, will you just turn round and sit properly,” her mother barked.

Maya recognized only too well the edge in Emmy's voice, and when that edge was present the only sensible option was to do exactly what she was told.

1

C
ORNWALL, TWO MONTHS LATER

They were having the train-crash conversation again.

“Right, okay, I think we should stop this,” Emmy said. “Now that we're here.” She gripped the solid edge of the table, just to be sure they really were. Toby's table. His kitchen. Her kitchen.
Their
kitchen.

“That's rich, coming from you,” Niall said. “You're the one who usually starts it.”

“That was back then.” She smiled. It was the contagious smile, the one that gave that glimpse of Maya. “Before my fairy godfather waved his magic wand.” It must have been magic, because it didn't even matter to her anymore that Kat was on Niall's lap. Being at Bodinnick made up for all sorts of things. “We missed the train,” she carried on. “It crashed. We could all be dead. We live here now. End of story.”

“Don't you mean beginning?” Sita corrected. “This should be where it starts to get interesting.”

“We hope,” said Jonathan.

A blown fuse meant it was dark in the huge room, but it was a clear evening and there was a full moon, so they could at least see each other.

“Well, there are two ways of looking at what we're doing,” Niall said, peering through the candlelight at the boxes of belongings all over the floor. “Essentials for simple living” was what they had all agreed to bring. It didn't look like it. “One is that we're all as mad as bollocks, and the other is that everyone else is.”

“At least we don't have any secrets,” Sita said quickly to reassure herself, forgetting Emmy's huge one, which was forgivable since Emmy had almost forgotten it herself. “At least we know, more or less, what we're in for.”

One of them had already hung a clip frame on the flaking kitchen wall to prove it. Twenty years' worth of changing photographic technology showing them freckled, plaited, big haired, tanned, pale, bearded, bare, tear-stained, pregnant, fit, anorexic and not. It was a reminder that their bold and hasty decision was not such a risk, a reminder that everyone had seen everyone else cry at least once. Except Kat, and for most of them she didn't count.

“Downsizing,” the weekend property pages annoyingly insisted on calling the move from city to country, but that hardly seemed the word for it. All three of their London addresses would have fit easily into the rambling manor with room to spare. Admittedly, the four-story Fulham terrace that Jonathan and Sita had packed up and let at top speed took up considerably more space than Emmy or Niall's rented broom cupboards, but no one was inclined to toy with architectural puzzles. The premise was that everyone here was equal.
Animal Farm
it was not.

Cold Comfort Farm
was more like it. Two days ago, Emmy had phoned to ask the farmer's wife to light the Aga and put the heating on in readiness for their arrival, and Eileen Partridge had replied, “What heating would that be, my bird?”

Anyway, freezing or not, spring was definitely back on course after its wintery blip, and Emmy was sure Bodinnick was relieved to be full again. In fact, earlier, it was as if the house had winked at her. She was standing by the sundial just as it was getting dark, looking up at the grand façade and realizing she had waited all her life for this moment, and someone had opened and closed an internal shutter on an upstairs bedroom window. Brilliant, she'd thought, almost winking back. The house has got us and we've got each other. How can we possibly fail?

Even the near-Gothic moment of flicking on the hideous kitchen strip light and fusing the entire ground floor seemed part of the big romantic conspiracy. Candlelight made it feel as if the adventure had finally begun.

It was as if the place was welcoming her back, delighted that she had brought properly passionate people with her this time, not just a few spiritless siblings—although even with five adults, three children and a baby, it wasn't what you could call bursting at the seams. Once everyone got used to the space, though, it would shrink. Familiarity shrinks everything, she'd promised Sita and Jonathan's middle daughter, Asha, who hated bigness, hated the high ceilings, the deep windowsills, the huge, heavy doors, hated the whole idea.

It was now dusk and the excited clamor of arrival had died down to a collective sigh of relief. At last they were dining in at home instead of dining out. Dining in together, for the first probationary night in their shared kitchen in the middle of nowhere, with a leg of Cornish lamb bought from the kitty and the children pottering around the vast upstairs, metaphorically peeing on imaginary boundaries to mark their new territory.

If they were feeling lucky, it was fair enough. Britain's worst rail crash for sixty years, with a death toll of a hundred, and they should have been in it. “Carriage C,” Emmy could remember Jonathan shouting when they'd first heard the news, still stranded at the station the morning after Sara's wedding. “Carriage C, Carriage C.” She could even remember the way his hand burrowed frantically in his inside jacket pocket for the tickets to prove his point. “All right, all right,” Sita had snapped. “We believe you.” But nobody believed it really, still didn't.

“My God, we should be dead,” they kept saying to each other in the days that followed. “Why aren't we dead?”

And the only answer they could come up with back in London, as they'd watched repeated television footage of the mangled lump of metal dangling from the crane's teeth, was that it hadn't been their time.

“If it had been our time, would we have died happy?”

It was that terrifying question which had started the whole ball rolling, from hermetically sealed sitting room to drafty manor kitchen in less than seventy days.

Admittedly, it helped that they had all had such a stress-laden two months, during which time the ball had careered relentlessly through their lives, apparently hell-bent on collecting every possible reason for them all to seek pastures new.

First, Niall's flat had been burgled as he lay under his duvet playing with Kat. His CD player, his tape deck, his computer and his TV all yanked from their sockets, his credit cards, mobile phone and the keys to his motorbike gone for the third time in as many years. He'd been initially furious, and then, when he found a spattering of what looked like blood across his bathroom sink, frightened.