Eggshell Days

by Rebecca Gregson

  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.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Beer? Spirit? Drink with me?” he’d slurred, waving a bottle at her. “Pretty girl.” He had rubbed against her breast.

  She could still remember the lack of effect her then seven-and-a-half-stone frame had against his hot, sweating bulk, but at least the struggle had caused enough commotion to wake the sleeper at her feet. And when that sleeper had stood up, the relief of seeing someone a good foot taller than her aggressor was immense. It might even have been love at first sight.

  “You havin’ a problem there?” His hair was sticking up in clumps for want of a good wash, but his brand of personal hygiene, or the lack of it, was immediately familiar. Student-based. Non-threatening. Welcome.

  “Beer, lady? You want beer? Drink with me?”

  “No, I don’t think she does, mate,” the sleeper had said, “and she’s with me, okay?”

  So her first date with Niall had been a trip to a railway loo at midnight, and he’d held the door for her while she tried her best not to make a sound or pee all over the floor. Then they’d returned to her carriage, sat together with their legs on their bags, smoking and talking and strumming until Turin, where they’d kissed on the platform and arranged to meet in Milan.

  And that was it. It wasn’t the pregnancy that broke the beautiful spell of the next two years, it was the abortion. She was twenty-one in the summer after her finals and Niall was twenty-four.

  “I’m going mad,” she’d told him two months after it was done. “I think our love was encapsulated in the baby and now we’ve chosen to get rid of that we’ve also got rid of ourselves.”

  “We’re still here.”

  “No, we’re not. We’re in the medical wastebin with our baby. You’re not, and I’m not, but we are.”

  There wasn’t anywhere else they could go with that, so they’d walked away from their shared bedroom in a shared house and left everything, absolutely everything, behind.

  Weird that it had taken another train to bring them home again, to another shared house, with other shared bedrooms. Except that he shared his bedroom with someone else now. Only at weekends, though. And they never referred to it. Ever. But it was okay. It really was okay.

  She smiled at him again.

  “What’s on the other side of this?” he asked, tapping the solid stone. He knew those smiles and they usually meant trouble.

  “The kitchen.”

  “Perfect. We’ll knock through. I’ll get my brother to draw up the plans for free, and Murphy can come and build it.”

  “Build what?”

  “How about a sitting room people actually want to sit in.”

  “Don’t you like the one we’ve got?” Emmy felt icy panic claw at her chest.

  “I don’t know. It’s too cold to stay in there long enough to assess.”

  “Is it a disappointment here? Did you think it would be better than this? I wish it was the middle of summer—it’s so beautiful here when it’s hot and sunny. Give it a few weeks and—”

  “God, Emmy, relax. It’s just feckin’ cold in the sitting room, that’s all.”

  “Do you think I should get some heating put in? I know it’s already nearly May but even if we don’t stay until the winter, it might, you know, well, at least then we could—”

  “Stop. Right now. Everything is fine, everyone’s happy, we’re all pinching ourselves at being lucky enough to … you know.” He put his hand to her hair and pulled a strand away from her face. “It’s just colder inside than out, that’s all.”

  Emmy changed the subject. “Did you say Murphy? You’ve got to be joking.”

  “Paddy Murphy’s the man, builder par excellence.”

  “Except we’ll have to use local tradesmen, or you won’t get served at the pub.”

  “Good thinking.”

  “What are you doing in here, anyway? I thought Kat wanted you to hump furniture.”

  “I’ll hump later. How’re the kids?”

  “See for yourself.” Emmy gestured.

  “Don’t do smug.”

  “I’m not. But look, Asha’s fine. She’s completely forgotten about it. They make too much of it. She’d be fine if they just ignored it.”

  “That’s great. Just don’t forget that everyone has a different way, that’s all.”

  There were a few words implicit in his comment. What he meant was “everyone has a different way from us.” Emmy bristled with pleasure.

  “It’s all about diversion, isn’t it? It’s such an easy trick.”

  “Divert me, then.”

  Emmy didn’t bother to take him up on it—she’d heard it all before. Sexual innuendo from Niall had very little to do with whether he was attracted to you.

  The girls had freed the bicycle and were rubbing the cobwebs away, feeling its tires, emptying rubbish from its basket.

  “Look at that. They say that one man’s junk is—”

  “Another man’s treasure?”

  Maya heard his voice and looked up. Niall blew her a kiss.

  “You haven’t been too hard on her, have you?” he asked accusingly.

  Only he could suggest such a thing. Emmy knew that he knew she was sometimes too hard on Maya, that she leaned too hard, punished too hard, loved too hard.

  “No.”

  “Go easy. It’s new for us all.”

  “I know, but tell me it’s not just me who thinks it’s odd that Asha’s got all the trappings of security she could wish for, and she can’t say boo to a goose, and then there’s Maya, who’s been dragged up without a father, with a mother who lurches from one emotional crisis to the next…”

  Niall put his hand in his old cord coat pocket to find his cigarettes, and shook his head. “That’s not right, though, Em, is it?”

  “It is.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, for a start, we both know you think Maya’s better off without a father.”

  “I do. I’m not ashamed of that.”

  “Nor should you be, but don’t do all that ‘dragged up without one’ thing. Not to me, anyway.” He was sailing close to the wind. “Because I know you think you have the more rounded child as a result—that given the choice you would actively advocate single parenthood.”

  “I do. I think it does you good to have the corners knocked off you at an early age.”

  “You don’t have to be the child of a single parent for that to happen.”

  “I know, but you get less attention, and that has its benefits.”

  “Do you?”

  “Maya does.”

  Niall didn’t think so, but he didn’t say so. “You’d hate to share her, wouldn’t you?”

  “You try it. It’s bloody hard work.”

  “That’s not in dispute, but c’mon, Maya is hardly deprived of stability, and what are your emotional crises? A couple of useless boyfriends? She’s one of the lucky ones, and you know it.”

  He watched the girl climb over an old tractor seat and jump down the other side. He might be the only one who could get away with talking to Emmy like that but he also knew when to change tack. “But you’re obviously doing something right.”

  Emmy nodded, accepting the compliment. She thought she was one of the lucky ones too. Single parenthood was what she would choose. It meant the accolade belonged entirely to her. Maya was her achievement. Her only achievement, maybe, but still all hers.

  Niall shrugged. “I can’t help it.”

  “Can’t help what?”

  “Being so proud of her.”

  You have no idea what hearing something like that does to me, Emmy thought. “Don’t help it, then. You know how much you mean to her.”

  “I do now. She’s
already given me my pass to enter her room whenever I like.” He produced a credit-card-sized piece of board with his name and a password on it. “No one else is going to have one, apparently. Not even you.”

  One of Maya’s early paintings flashed up in Emmy’s mind. My Family, it was called. Niall was in it, along with the goldfish and the hamster, and it had been on the fridge door for years. Emmy liked him playing Dad, but only because he knew things. For a start, he knew he was playing, and secondly he also knew the point at which she would do the Lioness thing and swipe him with her paw.

  “Not that I’m going to be allowed to use it much,” he said, putting the pass back in his pocket. “Not at weekends, anyway.”

  “What? Kat? She’s not still got a thing about her, has she?”

  “Don’t be too hard on her, Em. She’s just trying to find her feet. She’s really keen to make this work, not just between her and me, but here.”

  “Or is she just putting up with us lot as a means of getting you?”

  “What do you mean, getting me?”

  “Keeping you, then.”

  “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Good. Don’t.”

  “I won’t. I don’t help, though. I told her the reason I wasn’t up for a kid just now was because I felt I already had one.”

  “She wants a baby?” Emmy’s heart thumped a little.

  “Not really. Only when she’s pissed.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Is it?”

  “Well, you tell me.”

  “You’re a bad girl sometimes, Emmy,” Niall said, shaking his head at her. “Most of the time you’re irresistibly lovely, but every now and again you’re rotten to the core.”

  “Sorry. Anyway, you told her you already had one?”

  “I told her I felt I did. It’s true, you know it is. Maya feels like mine, even if she isn’t.”

  “She certainly behaves as if she’s yours sometimes.”

  “Swears like a trooper, smokes herself half to death.”

  “All that.”

  There was a long pause, which Emmy wanted to go on for even longer. It happened sometimes, their past coming to illuminate their present, and when it did her world was a better place. She had tried to be clear about it to Sita once, but she’d ended up being about as clear as pastis and water. What everyone except Kat did seem able to understand was that, even though Niall wasn’t Maya’s father, she engendered in him something so like paternal love that he might as well have been. Even Jay and Asha had got as far as that.