The pool was empty. Too late now for a new batch of school lessons, too early for private ones. She’d beaten Niall and she’d thought about getting in but decided to sit on one of the hinged blue seats and wait.
The water was almost glass-still and she wanted to break its surface with a dive. Except you weren’t allowed to dive. When she was a grown-up, she was going to take a leaf out of her mother’s book and do exactly as she wanted. Emmy never did anything she didn’t want to do. She didn’t even get up if she didn’t want to.
“Hi, darlin’,” Niall said. He thought she looked a little lost sitting there. “Have you been waiting long?”
“Ages,” she said, jumping to her feet and making a run for the pool. Niall ran too.
Dads, thought the lifeguard, blasting on his whistle from his high chair. Why don’t they care what they look like?
* * *
When the phone rang that night and Emmy jumped to her feet, Maya did, too, pushing her chair back and sending it scraping across the slate floor.
“Leave it!” her mother shouted. She could have done with a lifeguard’s whistle, too.
The sound of the phone surprised Emmy, even though she had been waiting for it to go all day. It was eleven days since Cathal had posted the letter.
“Hello?” Maya shouted happily into the Bakelite receiver. On non-eggshell days, she and her mum would race to be the first to answer and she was claiming a victory on this one. “Hold on.” She ran to the bottom of the stairs and Emmy waited.
“Niall? Niall, phone. Phone, Niall.”
Emmy’s next sip of blackcurrant tea tasted of morning sickness, metal and aspartame. She got up from the table like a robot and programmed herself to retrieve her daughter. Maya was walking back to the phone, her thick socks sliding on the shiny floor. Her hand went to pick up the handset again.
“Maya,” Emmy shouted, freezing the frame in her head, “go back and finish your supper.”
But her daughter had already started talking happily into the mouthpiece. “He’s just coming. I think he’s in the shower. We went swimming and his hair has gone all funny.”
Emmy waited again. The voice on the other end was going to carry the conversation on. Of course he was. She could have written the script. And why shouldn’t he? Cathal was an opportunist—he responded to combinations of circumstance. She of all people should know that. She swayed a little and felt warm blood whooshing round her brain.
“Yes,” Maya said. Then a pause. “Nearly eleven.”
Emmy’s legs buckled. “Give it to me,” she demanded, so loudly that Cathal would certainly hear.
“What?” Maya asked. “Why?”
“Because I said so.” Emmy had her hand out. “Go and sit down.”
Maya made a face and then remembered. Eggshell day. She pushed her feet across the floor in a skating movement once more and made another face at Asha. Asha made one back.
“Can I help?” Emmy said into the receiver, her voice shaking. Every last ounce of energy she possessed had fallen away.
“Is that Emmy?” It was the soft Dublin lilt of Mrs. O’Connor. “I was just having a word with your daughter. Where does the time go? How are you, my love? Is my son behaving himself?”
“Oh, Mary, I thought…”
“Are you all right, dear?”
“Yes, yes, I think—oh, he’s just here. Thank you Mary, it’s good to…”
“Have I called at a bad time?”
“No, no. Here he is.”
She handed the phone to Niall, wet from another shower. Oh, someone help me, she pleaded silently. Sons, daughters, fathers, grandmothers, uncles, mothers-in-law. It was all too complicated.
His chat sounded normal, as if there was no family drama on the horizon, and that settled her. But the next thing she knew he was back in the kitchen, apparently talking to her in Swahili. “He says he wants to hear it from you, Emmy. God knows why. I’ve told him you’re not the keeper of the key.”
“Who does?” Everyone was looking at her. “What?” She hadn’t heard a word anyone had said for at least the last five minutes. Mouths had been opening and closing around her and people had been coming in and out of the kitchen talking excitedly, but she hadn’t engaged with any of it.
“Cathal.”
“Sorry?”
“Cathal. Who did you think I meant?”
The blood drained from her face. She wondered if she was dreaming.
“He says he won’t come unless you say he can.”
“What?”
“Emmy?”
There was a barely visible shake of her head.
“But it’s your mum on the phone, not your brother,” she said. She could feel a stupid grin form on her lips. Was this all some kind of joke?
“Emmy? Are you okay?” Sita asked.
“Yes. I just don’t understand what Niall means about Cathal. What does he want?”
“He wants to come and stay. He’s doing a job on a house in Ireland of the same proportions and he wants to come and see Bodinnick.”
“Like hell!”
“What?”
“I said, ‘Like hell!’ No.”
“Emmy?”
“He’s on the phone. Go and have a word,” said Sita calmly. She was beginning to wonder if Emmy was clinically depressed again. There was an imbalance about her she hadn’t seen for a long time.
“I mean … but it’s his mum. I spoke to her myself.” Emmy spoke more slowly now.
“Yes, but Cathal’s there, too. Are you sure you’re okay?”
“He’s offered to help replace the sitting room windows,” Niall said, “and have a look at the store. Go on, Emmy, it’s our bill.”
“No, it isn’t.” She found herself shouting again. “Mary rang here. Maya answered it. I’m not going mad. Stop making me feel as if I am.”
Niall couldn’t be bothered to tell her that Cathal had walked into his mother’s house mid-call and that when his mother had handed him the phone it had gone mysteriously dead, or that when Niall had rung back Cathal had sounded more depressed than he had ever heard him sound before. It wasn’t worth it. She was clearly in no mood to listen.
“I’ll tell him yes, then, shall I?”
“Tell him what you like. As you said, I’m not the keeper of the bloody key.” And she slammed out into the windy garden in her shirtsleeves.
“My fault,” Niall winked at Maya. “For sure.” And yet he wasn’t so sure.
13
Cathal opened his suit jacket and took a sheet of paper from the inside pocket. His hands trembled a little and, what with that and his bloodshot eyes, an observer might think he was an alcoholic in serious need of a mid-morning drink. In fact it was dog tiredness. In the last few weeks, his body had forgotten how to relax and instead it was in a permanent state of vigilance. Emmy might get back to him at any time. Even with his limited knowledge of her, he knew she was just as likely to call at three in the morning as she was in the middle of the working day.
The paper was a copy of the letter he had sent her more than a week ago, the one that he had agonized over for so long, the one that had taken every ounce of steel to put into the postbox. It was also a letter that was having apparently no effect whatsoever.
“Peter, could I borrow you for a minute?”
One of his partners walked over to his desk. He was worried about the way Cathal had been looking lately. “Yes?”
“What do you think this means?”
Peter took the letter and read it in thirty seconds. “What are you asking me for? You wrote the thing, didn’t you?”
“Yes, yes, but what would you think if you got it?”
“Well, that all depends on what’s gone before.”
“But if you had been sent it, would you get back to me as a matter of some urgency?”
“That all depends, too,” his colleague told him carefully. “Hey, listen, are you okay?”
“Yes.” Cathal folded the letter again. “I’m fine. J
ust trying to second-guess a woman. Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it. But you know what, don’t you?”
“What?”
“It is a complete waste of time trying to second-guess any woman, but particularly one who affects you the way this one obviously does.”
“No, no, she’s not, er, of course, yeah, right.”
As Peter turned away, Cathal read the letter one more time, just to be sure there really was no way anyone in their right mind could misread the gentle insistence. It was a question of whether or not Emmy was in her right mind, and from what he knew of her that was anyone’s guess.
He had been sitting in his office all morning, his mobile phone right next to him. It hadn’t rung, or bleeped, or lost its signal, but he kept picking it up and looking for the little envelope that would tell him he had a message. Then he would dial his home number, wait for his answer-machine message to kick in and press the hash key and his PIN number for access. Even before the computer-generated female voice began to speak, he knew what it was going to say: “You have no new messages.” It was becoming the sort of obsessive repetitive behavior he saw more usually in the office juniors and he knew it was time to stop, to do something.
A new secretary was standing in profile at the photocopier. Cathal had taken her on last month, on the strength of her breasts, mainly. Today she was wearing a tight gray skirt and an even tighter pink sweater, but where he might once have found the stretch of wool across such ample flesh a major distraction, now it was barely a momentary observation. As a girlfriend had told him at the weekend, when he’d declined a previously popular offer of hers, the light in his boxer shorts had gone out.
He’d taken the girl at the photocopier out to lunch twice in her first week and she was waiting for him to ask again. So was everybody else. Peter, back at his desk and on the phone, was wondering why Cathal wasn’t absentmindedly sizing up her legs as he usually did. She was showing enough of them.
Their firm of architects had lost office junior after office junior because of Cathal and his easy appreciation of women. Not because they didn’t enjoy his attentions, but because for some inexplicable reason they took him up on them, and then when it was all over they got upset and resigned. It always surprised Cathal when they left. He always thought he’d done everything possible to make them feel at home.
He stared out of the window at the optician’s across the street. We can help you see the world more clearly, the poster on the door claimed. There was only one person who could do that. And no, it wasn’t God, he felt like shouting at the priest crossing the road.
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.”
Eggshell Days Page 18