Eggshell Days (24 page)

The secretary finished at the photocopier and he got up to use it. As she brushed past him with a bristle of anger, he lifted the lid, placed the letter face down, and pressed the Copy button. A bright blue light lasered through his thoughts. Maybe he should just turn up in Cornwall, as Niall had suggested in all innocence. His brother had no bloody idea, did he? No bloody idea at all.

The machine churned on and he realized he had forgotten to alter the number of copies required. Five letters identical to the one he had shown Peter lay in the tray and a mad whim overtook him.

“Er, Bridget, could you make sure these get today's post?”

“Sure, but it's Belinda,” she snapped back. “Look, if you've got something to say, I'd rather you just got on and said it.”

“Sorry?”

Then she noticed that all five envelopes were addressed to the same woman and that her new boss was looking sick. Maybe it wasn't anything to do with her after all.

“Oh nothing,” she said. “I'll just go for the post.”

*   *   *

The house meeting, when it came, was a grimmer affair than Sita had intended. Its only saving grace was that it wasn't held in the kitchen, where there were all those candlelit memories and freshly painted hopes to think about. She chose the unknown territory of the dining room instead, and the rest of them sat there like strangers in a waiting room, fidgeting and picking their nails until she plucked up the courage to start.

“Okay, um…”

The north-facing room was a soulless place at the best of times, with its empty silver candlesticks lined up on the sideboards, its closed shutters and the almost pointlessly high lighting overhead. The paintings of hunting scenes and dead men didn't help, and nor did a glass corner cabinet which housed crockery untouched for a decade.

“Right, er…”

If she was honest, her initial anger or jealousy had quite quickly faded to mere dissatisfaction, but she had voiced her intention by then, and, as her father had drummed into her, you should always finish what you start.

She wasn't used to admitting defeat and, anyway, Jonathan had made it even more difficult by using that particular gene against her. It was as if he had been able to read her hesitation, and was punishing her by refusing to allow it breathing space.

Her demands had been met with predictable reactions, although none of the surprise or resentment had come from Emmy, who had retreated so far into her own little unreachable world that Sita thought you could have set Bodinnick on fire and Emmy would not flinch.

“Shall we…?”

The five of them sat round the long table with the door shut. The girls were upstairs, asleep, but Jay loitered outside, alternately furious and curious.

“Well, we haven't come in here for a five-course gourmet meal with cabaret, have we?” Niall said, allowing a rare edge of savagery in his voice.

For once, there was no alcohol in their glasses, just filtered water as there would have been in any respectable boardroom. Everyone shuffled the papers in front of them, useless, meaningless words about private mortgages and visions for the future. Maya's gel-pen title pages looked up at them all like a Christmas card from someone who had just died.

Emmy hadn't brushed her hair all day. She sat, red-eyed and expressionless, between Jonathan and Niall, her nails bitten to the quick, her thin sweater hanging limply off her hunched shoulders. Kat was opposite, all clean tousles and clear skin, carefully self-styled to accentuate the difference. Sita sat next to her, another deliberate move. It looked to the others like a random choice of seating, but it was a careful ploy to dispel any idea of Them and Us, although the mere thought at that stage of any Us at all was laughable.

“Shall I start?” she asked.

The others nodded. Her neck tensed, as it had done in the surgery that day with the woman who had lost the desire for her husband.

“Okay. Well, I don't want to be in here anymore than any of you do, but it's got to be said. Basically, we've lost our way, haven't we?”

Her words were met with calculated silence.

“Oh, come off it. Surely it's not just me, is it?”

She stopped. Emmy was staring at the table top. Jonathan was looking straight at her, coldly. Niall leaned back in his chair, toying with a cigarette he had no desire, for once, to smoke.

Kat, on the other hand, looked rather pleased. If Sita had been able to see just how pleased, she might have said there and then, “Oh, this is stupid. Let's just try and make a bigger effort, shall we?” but she couldn't, so she carried on.

“Okay, I'll be even more frank. I get up tired and I come home tired, and the way it has increasingly seemed to me, I might as well be doing that in London, where I can at least earn decent money for it.”

There was another silence. Someone scraped a chair.

“So, before it stops being a dream and becomes a nightmare, I think we should wake up. That's all.”

There was the tiniest hint of insecurity in her voice which only Jonathan heard, and an instinctive loyalty kicked in. When he spoke, his voice was nervous and guarded.

“I promise you I'm saying this to Sita for the first time, okay? We haven't discussed any of this privately at all. But I think she is right. We do need to sort something. Quite what, I don't know, but now is our opportunity to discuss that. Maybe we should look at the point at which we started going wrong.”

Niall raised his eyebrows and turned down the corners of his mouth.

“Or is it just that we're all having a few personal problems and, because we're now living in each other's pockets, those problems have become communal ones?” he asked.

Kat scowled at him. Emmy still refused to look up.

“But that is the nature of the beast,” Sita said. “Unless we're a team, it doesn't work.”

The word “team” stood out as much as “us.” It made Jonathan speak again.

“Okay, let's work with that. Who feels as if this is a shared experience? Emmy?”

“I have no idea,” she said. “I'm not the right person to ask.”

“That is precisely the sort of unhelpful comment I mean,” Sita snapped back. “If you of all people can come out with something like that, we might as well all pack up and go.”

“Fine,” Emmy said. “Why don't we? Don't mind me.”

“Do you really mean that?” Jonathan asked.

Emmy shrugged. Niall lit his cigarette and sucked his teeth.

“What about you, Niall? Do you feel the shared experience?”

“Well, I don't think it's vanished without trace, has it? I mean, I know some of us have been—what shall I say—distracted lately, but if this sort of behavior was going on in London it would be dealt with in a few late-night phone calls between the girls, wouldn't it? We're in Cornwall, not feckin' Utopia, for God's sake.”

“Some of you might have said it was one and the same thing a few weeks ago, sweetie,” Kat said, pleased that she had waited for her debut.

She didn't realize it, but her comment did more to muster togetherness than anything that had gone before. Unfortunately, it wasn't enough.

“Okay, look, this is so painful I want to get it over with,” Sita said. “I'm going to come out with it. I think the most sensible thing we can do—without any finality—is to get someone in to value the house, give us an idea of its marketability, and then we'll know what we're looking at.”

“No,” Emmy said. “That's even more pathetic than anything I have said so far.”

“I don't think so,” Sita replied.

“Yes it is. Either it's final or it's not.” Emmy spun her papers across the table and leaned back in her chair defiantly, but her vigor died almost instantly and she followed up by flinging her head into her hands and keeping it there.

“Emmy, calm down,” Niall told her. “Face it. It's not such a bad idea, if it lends some focus.” But he could tell, even as he said it, that she couldn't see the wood for the trees.

“Vote,” said Jonathan. “Come on. Let's get it out the way. I don't want to be in here much longer.”

“No problem. Value it,” Kat purred. Her voice added diddly squat. She paid her way at weekends but nothing more. She was really just Niall's guest.

“Me too,” said Sita, which clinched it.

There was the merest nod of acceptance from the two men before the door was flung open, bashing the side of the cabinet and making the candlesticks wobble. Even Emmy took her hands away from her face. It was Jay, with an armful of stuff. His face was as brooding as the thunder clouds that had started to gather off the south coast.

“Here,” he said, his unbroken voice offering the barest hint of maturity. “Have these.”

He flung his booty onto the table. His prized Game Boy spun in a perfect trajectory toward his father, coming to a stop just before it fell off the edge. The new school backpack stayed where it was, a heavy lump of completed homework and friends' phone numbers. The banner from the party, which he had so carefully sewn with his best blanket stitch, unfolded and hung over the side. He had torn the photographs off in anger and they fell from their bundle onto the floor.

“Jay!” Sita said sharply. “What are you doing in here? I told you to stay out.”

“Well, tough,” he shouted. “I'm sick of being told what to do. Sick of you. I don't want to go, I want to stay. But you don't care about that, do you?” There were tears in his soft brown eyes.

Jonathan was on his feet.

“No!” Jay shouted. “I don't want your bloody stupid parents' pep talk shit. I don't want another walk round the garden telling me what I am and what I'm not allowed to do. I'm sick of you. You didn't ask us if we wanted to come here and now you're—”

“Yes, we did,” his mother said.

“No, you didn't. And now, you're not asking us if we want to go, either. Well, it stinks. You're all selfish, and—” Tears were rolling down his face.

Sita was standing now, too. The others sat, motionless.

“Bed, Jay. It's late.”

“Fuck late!” he screamed. “Fuck all of you. I hate you. I hate you!”

And he turned and ran out, slamming the heavy door as angrily as his puny arms would let him.

14

Jonathan didn't realize how far things had gone until he found himself saying yes to another beer in Tamsin's flat at three o'clock in the afternoon. Even through the haze of lunchtime drinking, there could be no favorable explanation for them going back there after the wine bar. There hadn't even been a truly favorable explanation for the wine bar itself.

“To say thank you for last weekend,” he'd said over the phone. “That's okay,” she'd said, “you don't need to thank me. I enjoyed it.” But they'd arranged to meet anyway. And Jonathan had lied to Sita for the second time. That for him was a habit.

Truth and lies swam around in his head like slightly pissed wasps. He swatted arbitrarily. Lie to Sita, swat. Toy with Tamsin, let it go.

He felt justified. He had tried hard to rekindle the brief foreplay he and Sita had enjoyed on the night of the party, but his wife had made it clear she was no longer interested, not since his ridiculous decision to go and get the post from the chapel in the pouring rain at eleven o'clock at night, not since the argument about the lime wash and his eyes, and certainly not since the traumatic house meeting, which had changed everything.

He didn't want to think about the almost freakish vacancy in Emmy's eyes throughout the whole gruesome deliberation. Actually, he didn't want to think about any of it. Even then, at that silent, awful table, the idea of Tamsin had popped into his head. He was almost getting used to it, the way she came to him at the most vulnerable times, like a silent shrug at their joint failure to make the most of the Bodinnick dream.

But if he had to pinpoint the exact moment he'd decided to take the Tamsin thing to the edge, he would say it was Sita telling him about Niall and Emmy's snatched moment of abandoned passion on May Day. She'd told him in their bathroom after the meeting, when he was standing in boxer shorts and socks rubbing cream into his chapped hands, and she was sorting the family wash into colors and whites. They had been pretending life was normal, that there was no significance in their decision to have the place valued, that it wasn't really all over but the shouting.

The way she'd said it made it sound as if it were entirely his fault that those days were so far behind them. And his first reaction hadn't been his usual acceptance of inadequacy, it had been anger: “Well, lucky old them.”

“Quite.”

“And what about Kat? Is it fair on her?”

But Sita had flicked one of Lila's sleep suits angrily into the air and said something along the lines of “You've got to take your chances when you can, haven't you?”

And so here he was now, taking his chance, already floundering. Not out of his depth, exactly, because being in Tamsin's flat was more like swimming to the shallow end of a pool and standing up to find that the water doesn't even cover your trunks. He was suffering from realizing he was overgrown, that he was too old for all this.

Nothing he could see in her twenty-something home had any reference to his life. In other friends' houses, there were familiar signposts, like a CD collection that echoed your own, or the same out-of-production Habitat mugs, or letters from school about hair lice or sports day.

Here, their fifteen-year age gap was visible even in the packets of food on her open shelving: flavored rice in sachets, tacos, a bottle of Malibu. A knee-length coat with a furry collar and cuffs lay over a perspex chair, and an ice-cream tub full of bottles of nail polish sat on the bare floorboards by a bright blue sofa with metal legs.

Because he didn't know where to look, he settled his eyes on a smooth oval boulder propping open a door leading into a room with cerise walls.