Emmy’s uncle and godfather, Toby Hart, might not have been the kind of family man the broker had in mind, but he nurtured a particular set of reasons for buying Bodinnick. His childhood home in Kent was a house so eerily similar that, as an old man in Cornwall, he often found himself looking for the missing back dairy or wondering how a third window could have been added to the drawing room without him noticing.
But Ledbury belonged to his elder brother, Emmy’s father, Lieutenant-Colonel Anthony Hart, whose sole purpose on earth seemed to be to provide perfect heirs, which he did with military precision every two years until he had sired his own beautiful regiment. Emmy had been the last and the only female recruit.
Toby’s seed was never going to be able to compete, for it was clearly made of different stuff, and when Bodinnick came on the market there was no question that it was meant to be his. Cornwall was six safe counties away and the solution suited everyone well. So well, in fact, that by 2000, no one could remember anyone called Trevivian living at Bodinnick. Bodinnick was where Mr. Hart lived.
All this meant that Emmy and Maya Hart’s route to acceptance in the village was already mapped out, but the others would have to prove themselves in other ways. They quickly realized that not asking for sushi at the post office would be a start and that even soy sauce might be pushing it—a risk recognized in the early appearance of a running household joke.
“Excuse me, do you sell shiitake mushrooms?”
“No.”
“Fresh udon noodles?”
“No.”
“Liquid dashi?”
“No!”
“Chicken Tonight?”
“What flavor, my bird?”
The crack was aimed mainly at Kat, who, a week later, was still having difficulty accepting that Japanese vegetarian cookery had yet to penetrate Cornwall, let alone Cott.
“But Bodinnick was once important enough to warrant its own stone signpost,” she argued.
“What’s that got to do with the price of bread?” Niall asked.
“That would be the white sliced variety, would it?”
Kat could afford to be sniffy about food. Her cooking skills, learned during her days as an Aspen chalet girl, were undeniable. Much to Emmy’s deep annoyance, on the second day, when they had all been too tired to go to the supermarket, she had made a passable meal from a few rusting tins left in Toby’s store cupboard. Spanish squid à la Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup. Nobody had died. In fact, Jonathan hadn’t even needed a Rennie, although if there was such a thing as jealousy pills Emmy should have popped a few.
“This isn’t London,” everyone kept telling Kat when she railed against the lack of choice.
“London? This isn’t even bloody Slough.”
“Never mind,” Niall said. “You’ve served a week already. Your initial sentence is nearly over.”
“A week?” said Emmy, looking up from the newspaper behind which she’d been counting the number of hours if not the minutes before Kat went back. “Is that all? I’ve lost track of time.”
“I knew this would happen,” Sita said, coming in with Lila tied in a sling on her hip. Her collarless shirt, which was covered with splashes of previous London-based decorating efforts, had been ironed. She had a paint scraper in one hand and a dirty nappy in the other.
“What have you been doing to that poor baby?” Niall asked.
“What?”
“Paint scraper? Nappy? Oh, never mind.”
Sita didn’t laugh. She was in a bad mood. “When are we going to take out these units?” she asked, slapping the much-maligned wood-effect melamine worktops. “The sooner the better, quite frankly. And we should take up all the lino, too. I bet there’s slate underneath. The stuff in the hall is already coming up at the bottom of the stairs and one of us is going to break a leg on it in a minute.”
“Shouldn’t we wait for the electrician to finish?”
“Finish? It would be nice to see him start.”
“Antsy, are we?” Emmy said, tugging the hem of her friend’s shirt as she went by.
“Well, it’s not supposed to be a holiday, is it? We’re supposed to be getting this place in some kind of order, remember?”
“What do you think those blokes are doing up on the roof, then? Staging a prison protest?”
“They’re being paid.” With our money, Sita didn’t say. “But we can’t pay for everything. We’re going to have to do some things ourselves. Look around you. The place is falling to pieces.”
“Hey, that’s my line.”
“Well, I’m using it now, because you seemed to have stopped.”
“Oooooo,” Emmy teased. “You and your bloody work ethic.”
“Asian parents.” Sita shrugged with her back to everyone. She untied the sling, pulled a few old cushions off the armchair in the corner and plonked Lila in an old dog basket on the floor. “What d’you expect?”
Sita often claimed she couldn’t remember school holidays, but that was because, in effect, she’d never really had them. Her father made her and her sister stay in their bedroom studying, while he ran the shop downstairs. “Education can transform your social position,” he used to tell them. “You can go up in your status,” he’d say. They would imitate him wobbling his head during their lunch breaks and take it in turns to look out for each other so they could listen to music on their Walkmans, or read their secretly bought magazines about boys and makeup. Somehow, she hadn’t yet got round to telling him that his son-in-law had become a house husband.
Jonathan came through the door. His hair was covered in flakes of old white gloss paint from scraping the skirting board in their moldy bathroom, and he had on a pair of trainers that he only wore for DIY.
“How come I’m the only one up a ladder around here?”
“At least my dad taught me how to get things done,” Sita said defensively, “which is why we can now afford for you to lead a life of leisure.”
“Leisure? Married to you? Living here? You’ve got to be joking.”
“And which also goes a long way to explain why Sita, as the daughter of a shopkeeper, is now a GP, and Emmy, the daughter of a colonel, is a waitress,” Kat said. Her protestations that she really didn’t have a problem with Niall and Emmy’s past sometimes appeared a little flimsy.
“Ouch,” said Niall. No one else could quite believe she had said it.
“Former waitress,” Emmy reminded her. She broke open an orange and piled the scraps of peel on top of each other. That was the thing with Emmy, she never bore a grudge. She was aware enough to know that her own behavior was so often left wanting that her best bet was to forgive almost everyone almost everything. “And future owner of the most successful children’s fancy-dress mail-order company the world has ever seen.”
“We’re waiting,” Kat said.
“Don’t hold your breath,” said Emmy, thinking that if she didn’t say it someone else would.
Niall sucked in air noisily.
“You can talk,” Sita said to him. “Is your computer even plugged in yet?”
“It can be. I sorted your hard drive this morning,” Jonathan said.
“I thought that was my job,” Kat said.
“What’s that about my hard drive?” Niall asked, looking up from his cigarette paper. He was wearing the same baggy drawstring trousers and tweedy roll-neck sweater he’d had on all week.
“It’s not floppy,” Emmy said looking up, “apparently.”
“This is very true.”
Sita listened to the increasingly irritating banter as she washed her paintbrush, comforting herself by thinking of the patterns of behavior that had been established. The children—who were upstairs playing a game they had played almost obsessively all week, involving a wardrobe and some old coats—were getting the hang of which loos they could and could not use and where to find their parents at dead of night. She and Jonathan had a system of laundry up and running, Emmy had a permanent home for her tampons, and Niall knew
which way to turn at the end of the drive to get to the nearest pub. It was progress of sorts.
As Niall had so delicately put it, “The house was almost feckin’ tailor-made.” The layout of the second floor could not have been designed more appropriately to accommodate their three essential clusters of living if it had tried, so the feared task of divvying up had, in the end, been stress-free. There hadn’t been one moment at which needs clashed, apart from the small hiccup over Emmy’s sewing room, which was still very definitely the dressing room next to Niall’s.
Sita and Jonathan and the children had taken over a suite of rooms at the top of the stairs. Jay and Asha shared a huge, light bedroom to the right, which took in the west front corner of the house and had three sash windows with deep sills which they had been warned in no uncertain terms never to attempt opening themselves. “If you fall out, you’ll kill yourselves,” Emmy told them. She was only repeating something Toby had once told her, except she didn’t embellish it with the rocking-horse ghost story as he did. She knew all about Asha’s threshold for fear after spending an hour eating popcorn with her in a cinema foyer while her own daughter sat all on her own in Screen Two, happily watching Harry Potter meet Voldemort for the first time.
The plan was one day to divide the room with a large curtain, because both Sita and Jonathan secretly hoped that Jay would soon start showing signs of puberty. Once upon a time, they had thought he was hormonally precocious, but then they realized he was just a moody little sod. His upper lip was still very bare, barer than nine-year-old Asha’s, even. He was a bit of a shrimp.
Next to Jay and Asha’s room, but enjoying the front aspect only, was a baby-sized dressing room with no access from the landing, leading to another big bedroom which had an old but serviceable en suite bathroom on the other side. This had been Toby’s room, so it was furnished with a tapestry half-tester over the king-size bed and an antique leather sofa running between the two windows, not that you could see the finer details of either against the dark red walls.
With a lick of cream paint, Sita, Jonathan and Lila were the ideal successors, particularly as their three rooms were at a slightly lower level than the landing, fed by one door and a couple of steps, reinforcing the feeling of trespass for anyone who needed it.
Maya, now ten, knew instinctively where it was and was not all right to go. She always knocked before entering even an empty bathroom—a trick she’d learned a few years ago when she’d found her mother having her back scrubbed with a Body Shop loofah by a man she’d never seen before. It wasn’t the man she’d found alarming, it was the way Emmy had lurched from being wild with indignation to begging for forgiveness in the space of about five minutes.
To the left, the wide, long landing, with its two threadbare but valuable Persian runners, ran for long enough to accommodate Jonathan and Sita’s bedroom and bathroom, and then dropped down again into the rooms allotted to Emmy and Maya.
Theirs was an L-shaped collection of smaller chambers, with their bedrooms along the front of the house and a separate lavatory and bathroom a few steps across the corridor, looking east. It was the end of the house where Emmy had slept as a child, and most of the old furniture was still there—the kidney-shaped, marble-topped dressing table with the gathered chintz cloth and ornate white mirror, the not-quite-matching marble-topped bedside tables, the serpentine lamp bases with their slightly wonky raw-silk shades. For a man so unconventional outside the home, Toby had certainly succumbed to traditional tastes within.
Emmy was thankful that the original architect had been sensitive enough to put the larger bathroom window on the eastern wall, not the western, otherwise it would have looked across a narrow outside passageway right into Niall’s bedroom, and, like it or not, Niall’s bedroom was also Kat’s.
She also liked the fact that, since she and Maya were at the end of the house, there was no reason to venture down the last flight of landing steps except to come and see her. This was less for privacy than for reassurance. She’d always liked to know her visitors came from desire, not by default.
Another happy coincidence was that Niall and Kat’s largest window faced north, which might cut out the sun for them but at least also cut out the chance of being accidentally caught in the act, and, as Niall had insensitively pointed out, they were the most likely candidates for impromptu sex, so it was perfect.
“I object to that assumption,” Jonathan had said over dinner and then wished in the ensuing amused silence that he hadn’t.
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.
Eggshell Days Page 4