Eggshell Days

by Rebecca Gregson

  “You know your stuff, don’t you?” Tamsin had smiled, and Sita had caught him doing that excruciating gesture of false modesty, a quick downward brush of the hand.

  He’d taken some of her lines to the supper table with him. “It has to breathe,” he told everyone. Every time he said it, he breathed too. “Modern cement is impervious to damp but if there’s a tiny crack and moisture gets drawn in it gets trapped, it’s got nowhere to go, it can’t evaporate. That’s what the smell is.”

  “That’s possibly enough about working with traditional building materials, thanks,” Sita had said, thinking she could smell something else as well.

  “But lime works in harmony with the seasonal changes. It’s softer, more flexible.”

  “Just like Tamsin,” Niall had commented, and three of the four of them had laughed like drains.

  It was getting cold now and he and Jay would have to go in soon. His hands and knees were aching, and if he wanted a bath before midnight he would have to start running it now. The water pressure needed sorting, which was another job Sita wanted him to do. He was exhausted by the mere thought of it. The muscles in his calves ached from squatting for so long, chipping away at the rock-hard mortar, grueling work for a man who had spent the last twenty years sitting on a padded swivel chair talking into a telephone.

  He wondered what, if anything, would happen should he stay out here all night. It was the kind of behavior that people like Niall got away with all the time. People like Niall could sleep in their clothes, go missing for days, drink wine for breakfast, and not a word would be said. So why couldn’t he? Stuff went on without him the whole time. Nothing ever stopped because of his absence. And yet at the same time he was required to be ever-present. What impact would his death have on the world? Other than meaning a little extra work for Sita, obviously?

  Was it his fault for accepting, even if he didn’t entirely understand, the boundaries of his restrained personality? If Niall was a human version of Bodinnick, wild, sprawling, spacious, others saw Jonathan as the equivalent of a modest home in suburbia.

  Tamsin would never list him. In architectural terms, he was the kind of man who recognized the social importance of correct cornicing but would never have the guts to rip it out if the mood took him.

  But that’s where his acceptance of who he was stopped. If he didn’t want to be that kind of man, why was he? What had shaped him? What had led him down the path to commonplace? If the answer was himself, why did he sometimes fantasize about being someone else?

  What could he pass on to Jay about all that? Don’t follow paths just because they’re available. Hack through the undergrowth and discover something new. Be brave, take chances. He knew that, to the outside world, it looked as if he himself was doing just that. You don’t give up your job, let your house and move your family to the southwest tip of Britain to lead a more simple life if you aren’t at least a little adventurous. But of course, you do, because he just had, and he was the most boring man in the universe. Captain Sensible and Mr. Anorak.

  * * *

  The path through the scrub from the chapel was even more defined now, and he realized he’d been making the same journey four times a day for a fortnight. Back and forth he went, once again the commuter—just like the one in the poem who spends his life riding to and from his wife, shaving and taking trains. In fact, just like the one he used to be in London. Was routine his addiction?

  Sita’s anger over his interest in the chapel managed to swap focus at random. How could he justify spending so much time on it when there was clearly more than enough to do in the house? What did he mean, he was taking Lila there with him? Lime is dangerous: it can blind.

  “I’ve taken advice and I know what I’m doing,” he’d said, “but if you really don’t like it, why don’t you take her to work with you?” Which was when she’d called him a bastard and left the house without saying goodbye. She’d never ever called him a bastard before.

  The whole point of uprooting their lives from city to country was to increase their feeling of togetherness, not to wreck what little they had. At this rate, they’d be lucky to see the three months out still married. That would be the ultimate irony. To renovate a house at the expense of their own personal bricks and mortar. To see a house rise out of the ashes and a family sink without trace.

  But he didn’t say any of those things to Jay. Instead he said, “We should go in. Mum will be wondering where we are.”

  * * *

  Sita was wondering about him, actually. She was wondering what on earth had happened to the man she had married, and whether he was wondering the same thing about her. She was also wondering if Emmy had told her the whole truth about her and Niall, why she was feeling such deep-green shades of jealousy, and what the hell they were all doing here. But the worst of her sleepless wonders was why she no longer bothered to share any of them with Jonathan.

  They used to be such a team, confronting challenges together, trusting each other’s judgment, knowing without being told that each had the other’s happiness higher up the list than their own. That was their sex, really. They had never been wildly active, not in the way she knew some of her friends were. They’d never done it in a public place. They’d never used a sex toy or props. She had never even played out a fantasy in her head, let alone admitted one to him. They did it—or rather used to do it—in bed at night, usually with the lights off. It was good when it happened, but they got their kicks in other ways. And there was the “used to” phrase again.

  She thought about the holidays they had taken before Jay was born—mountain climbing in the Italian Alps and river canoeing in southwest France. While most other young couples would have gone straight to bed with a bottle of massage oil, they went to a bar with a bottle of beer and spent hours exploring their individual weaknesses, their confidences, what scared them, what excited them. They took it in turns to lead. One minute, he needed her advice, and the next she sought his. Those conversations were their version of foreplay. Very often, after a joint achievement, they would be on a high for weeks. It used to be like taking their marriage vows all over again, remembering that they were a team, that they worked better as a unit than they did as individuals.

  She could remember coming home from one such holiday and Emmy asking her why she had ever bothered to leave the Girl Guides. Jonathan had whispered, “She’s just jealous,” in her ear. It must have been at the peak of her and Emmy’s estrangement, a strange few years in which they had focused on their differences. Sita married and pregnant, Emmy single and very much not. But Maya had changed all that.

  What goes around comes around, she thought. Maybe Jonathan and I will come around again soon. How though? And when? The children had brought with them a nasty little element of competition. Who was the most tired? Who worked the hardest? Who was the most put-upon? Now, not only did they not have sex, but they didn’t have holidays, either.

  Her two daughters moved their flawless coffee-colored limbs either side of her, and she tried to condense her maternal bulk into the dip in the middle of the old horsehair mattress. She was facing Lila, her left breast still released from its feeding bra, and she pulled the stretch-marked flesh back to study the baby’s dark eyelashes and pursed lips. The horror at finding herself pregnant again had finally disappeared. Lila was surely the perfect gift.

  She and Jonathan should be riding the crest of a wave, lying in a bed of smugness congratulating themselves on the products of their union, but instead, they seemed lost in a thickening fog of resentment. Why were they so cross with each other all the time?

  She’d naively hoped the Cornish sun might be strong enough to burn through the fog, that the Cornish air might be clean enough to cure Jonathan’s obsession with his breathing, that the Cornish wind might blow away their recent selves and bring back their old ones on a summer breeze. But so far, metaphorically anyway, it had mainly rained.

  Would it help if she admitted that her main motivation for coming he
re was him? And that, if she wasn’t going to benefit from his new self, they might as well pack up and go back? The difficulty was, she wasn’t entirely sure they could go back, despite all the insurance policies they’d taken out.

  He had been so much a shadow of his former self in the last year or so that she’d feared for their future. It was as if he’d left himself somewhere, under an office desk or in a computer program, and what she and the children had been getting was his shell.

  She knew that the way she handled it only made it worse. It was the old chestnut about the talent of application again, the work ethic, the “If a job is worth doing, it’s worth doing well” thing. Jonathan had been worse than useless in the last year, so she had taken on his responsibilities, too. Terribly efficient, businesslike, practical, competent. But cold? Undemonstrative? Bossy, even?

  Frustratingly, she could feel her thoughts only licking at the truth. She had rendered him surplus to requirements. She hadn’t meant to, but she had written him out of his own job description. She had become the mother and the father, the homemaker and the breadwinner. She was earning the money to feed them now and all she was managing to taste was his emptiness.

  She’d tasted it at lunchtime, when she could have come home from the surgery for an hour. The distance between the practice and Bodinnick was negligible, and her desire to see Lila, to feed her the puréed swede and carrot she’d prepared this morning and put her down for her afternoon nap, had been tempting. But not tempting enough. She’d spoken to Jonathan on his mobile to see if everything was okay without her and there had been that flat echo to his voice. He was in the bloody chapel again.

  So he had seen or felt something over there that she hadn’t—well, that was just too bad. She hadn’t got time to explore her inner self. She was too busy shoving her nipple into Lila’s mouth, while sorting out nightmares and angina, to get in touch with her spiritual side.

  It had been her choice to keep her career going, but for the first time she was wondering if that was what she really wanted. It wasn’t the money she was doing it for—they had enough with Jonathan’s redundancy to keep them going for at least a year—but the prospect of them both being permanently unemployed was not one she would allow the family to face. At the same time, was she prepared to face becoming resentful in her role as the sole earner? How did grudges start? Was a temporary replacement’s wage worth the risk? And since she was still working, how far could she fulfil her Manifesto wish to adopt a simpler lifestyle with more free time to concentrate on the things that matter? What did matter? Though usually so resolute, she had no idea.

  The one thing she did know was that she was relieved to be back in a working environment. It made her feel less guilty than she had thought it would. She recognized herself in the surgery. Being a doctor was what she did. But she was also a mother and a wife. Was that where the guilt lay?

  She heard his voice outside the door. “Thanks for keeping me company, Jay,” he was saying. “I enjoyed that.” He sounded thankful and lonely. Then she heard the wobble of a hot-water bottle being thrown, a quiet laugh, and his footsteps move off again. The realization that he wasn’t going to come in and kiss her goodnight made her want to cry. But she didn’t do crying—there wasn’t time—so she sighed just once and closed her eyes. She had to sleep. She had to work in the morning even if no one else did.

  * * *

  When Jonathan closed his eyes, on the leather sofa at midnight, he could still see the blurred glow of the chapel windows projected on his lids. He thought about cement, and suffocation, and rot setting in, and through-drafts, and how good it would be to feel that he could make a difference. He found himself thinking fleetingly about Tamsin Edwards again, too. Then he fell asleep, trying but failing to keep pace with the collective breathing of the female branch of his family, eight feet and a million miles away from him in bed.

  8

  Cathal sat in front of the picture window of his riverside flat at the desk his father had left him, and tried to stop his thoughts trampling over everything that was good about his world. There wasn’t much to trample on. His job, once fulfilling, now bored him. His ex-wife, Christine, who once used to phone him twice a day at work, could now barely be bothered to speak to him. His boys, once footballers, were now into baseball. (It was worse than that, even, but the fact that they were rapidly becoming another man’s sons was too painful to cite.) And on top of all that, the second most unthinkable thing was at stake, too. Niall.

  He used to be able to see the estate agent’s point about it being therapeutic after a hard day’s work to look out at all those perfectly restored barges twinkling on the Liffey, but now he wanted to push wide the window and shout at them all to bugger off and twinkle somewhere else.

  The view was rewritten history at its worst. The area used to be strictly out of bounds to him as a child; not that he took any notice. But with the wave of a developer’s wand, the slums were now a chi-chi enclave for city dwellers on fat salaries, a status symbol to go with the Armani suit and the Ferrari.

  “The docks are not a suitable place for a son of mine,” his mother had said when he’d told her where he was buying. And in one way, she was right. They didn’t suit him, not now.

  He’d bought the flat out of spite, to make Christine angry. She’d put their name down on the show home’s Interested list during the death throes of their marriage and tried to use it as an ultimatum: either we buy one or I go. “Who do you think I am?” he’d said in front of her sister. “Bono?”

  But now that she couldn’t care less how or where he lived, it had lost even that limited appeal. When he looked out on the river, he didn’t see the twinkling barges, he saw the generations of families who had been hounded out by the property pioneers. Where were they now? Where did they go when they needed their childhood back? He was so deep into the sentimentality of parenthood that it didn’t occur to him most of them were busy trying to forget they had had one.

  He didn’t usually notice Dublin’s incessant seagull chatter but today the birds sounded as if they were laughing at him so he got up and shut the window. Then he sat back down and picked up the photograph of Maya on the stairs at Bodinnick. He didn’t know what he expected to see that he hadn’t seen any of the countless other times he’d looked at it, but he looked all the same, waiting. Waiting for her face to become Emmy’s, or a stranger’s. But it didn’t. He could still only see his own face staring back. That, and Niall’s, blotchy with tears and disbelief, begging him to tell him it wasn’t true.

  Maybe it wasn’t. At times over the last few days, he’d thought he must be going mad, that finally the divorce and the cruel removal of his boys to America had got to him. He wondered if the effort of hanging on to fatherhood by the skin of his teeth had sent him crazy.

  “Get a grip,” he said out loud. But there was no point telling himself to get a grip because he couldn’t find anything to hold on to.

  Why all this now? Why, after ten years of arm’s-length contact, did he think he had the right to hold Maya’s hand? Because that’s what he’d been imagining himself doing, walking with her through the streets of his city, buying her something she pointed out to him in a shop, correcting her driving skills. He’d imagined his mum brushing her hair, and his boys asking him what she looked like, and his mum saying yes, she’d babysit, as long as he was back by ten.

  There was one scene that had returned with a vengeance. It might have been the first time he’d seen her, or maybe the second. Eight years ago, he had called Niall from a pub down the road from his firm’s Kensington offices and suggested a pint, and he had sat on a stool looking forward to a blokey drink and waiting to see his brother come though the swing doors. Which he had duly done—with a baby in tow.

  “Don’t tell Emmy,” Niall had said. “She’d kill me. We’re supposed to be at playgroup, aren’t we, Maya?”

  “I don’t like playgroup,” Maya had said. “I like pubs.”

  She’d been between two a
nd three, although there was something adult about her, too. She had been such compelling company that he had almost ignored Niall and played a game flipping beer mats across the table with her. Even then, there had been an element of competition between them for her affection. More than that. A genetic familiarity. A sense of already knowing her.

  “I don’t wear nappies when I go to sleep,” she’d announced standing on the chair and pulling up her checked skirt. “I jus’ wear this one cos is very dangerous for boys to go in girls’ loos an is very dangerous for girls to go in boys’ loos, too. You can fall in big loos, and I dun wan a fall in big loos, do you? I just pee in this today. Not amorrow, jus today. Don’t tell Mummy.”

  “I won’t,” he promised.

  Another memory had the same element of collusion. Emmy had gone away with a new boyfriend for a few days, somewhere reachable and romantic—Paris, perhaps, or Prague—and Niall had come to Dublin with Maya, having been left holding the baby yet again.

  One would expect Niall to be awkward around a child for so long, nervous at the prospect of being left in sole charge of a seven-year-old girl, hopeful of offloading the burden on his mother. But no. Niall had been in his element, taking Maya everywhere he could, showing her off, pretending to his mates she was his, letting her in on the joke. She’d called him Daddy the entire weekend.

  Daddy. Cathal could hear her saying it and this time it wasn’t so much of a joke. But if nothing had occurred to him then, why should it occur now? The lack of reason made it all the more sinister. Perhaps it was occurring because it was time for it to occur. Perhaps it was life catching up with them all.

  The truth careered round the loop of his mind like an electronic rabbit on a dogtrack, always a few seconds faster than his brain. Distractions were like stepping stones to help him reach the other side of the day, but the moment he walked back into his flat on the “luxury” development his firm of architects had so spectacularly lost the contract for, the rabbit was out of its trap, going just slowly enough at first to let him believe it was worth chasing one more time and then whoosh!