Eggshell Days Read online

  She picked up some stapled sheets and fanned them in the air. Everyone knew what they were. On the long and boring journey down, Maya had given them a title sheet. Rules, she had written in neon gel pen.

  “Right, to shut you up about the bloody train crash, I’m going to read these out.”

  “Could you add a ban on toe separators?” Niall asked.

  “And put in swear boxes,” Kat said.

  “Of course. We can have monthly subscriptions to Cosmofeckinpolitan if we want. This is a work in progress, remember?”

  “No, thanks. It takes me all month to get through What feckin Car,” Niall said.

  Everyone had to admit it, he was good at making them laugh.

  “Are you sitting comfortably?”

  “Not yet.” Niall lifted a buttock from his chair.

  Well, he made them laugh sometimes.

  “Are you sure you want to come down at weekends, Kat?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “’Course she does,” he said, winking across her.

  Emmy cleared her throat as Kat pushed her chair back, moved across and settled her tiny frame back on Niall’s.

  “Toes dry, are they, darling?”

  She nodded and pulled his arms round her waist again. He put his hand up her shirt and left it there.

  “So,” Emmy said quickly, “are we all up to speed with the legalities?” She was overconcentrating on the first sheet. She didn’t want to see Niall’s hand up Kat’s shirt.

  “What legalities?” Kat pounced.

  “Well, just the private mortgage, really.”

  “What private mortgage?”

  “Oh. Didn’t you tell her, Niall?”

  “No, he didn’t,” Kat answered.

  “Well, to be fair, we only finalized it yesterday. I thought Sita was going to tell everybody, or maybe, well, I think I assumed Niall would.”

  “No. No one told me anything.”

  “Oh.”

  They all sat there in their first awkward silence, everyone waiting for someone else to break it.

  “Emmy?” Sita said at last.

  “Oh, well, I mean, is there any need for Kat to take it on board anyway? She’s not implicated in any way.”

  “No, but I think it’s important we all know everything,” Niall said, “so that there’s no sense of, you know, someone feeling they have a bigger right to be here and all that.”

  “Okay, that’s fine.” Emmy shrugged. “Well, Jonathan and Sita are putting in forty thousand from their savings.”

  “Not from our savings, that is our savings. We’re cleaned out.”

  “Jeez,” said Kat. “What for?”

  “To carry out urgent repairs to the roof, the plumbing and, er, the wiring,” Sita said, waving at the darkness around them.

  “In return, they have that sum secured by a private mortgage on the property, to be repaid to them if and when it is sold,” Emmy added. Her voice was soft with appreciation, and yet it hadn’t occurred to her that, in fact, she was the generous one. Giving came naturally, which was a good thing, since taking also could.

  “Which it won’t be,” said Niall.

  Emmy winked at him. “Niall’s ten thousand—Sorry, you do know about that, do you, Kat?”

  “Yes.”

  “Excellent,” said Emmy, meaning the opposite. “So Niall’s ten thousand will also go into the repairs, but on a private loan arrangement with me, to be paid back after any sale, once Jonathan and Sita have retrieved their money. Are you sure you don’t want anything in writing, Niall?”

  “It is in writing.”

  “Well, in something other than felt-tip.”

  “No. I trust you.”

  “Fool,” she joked, knowing that he was right to, “and on the day-to-day front, we’ve already arranged equal access to a joint bank account opened in Sita’s and my names, with Jonathan and Niall as signatories. Our contributions to it will be reviewed after a fortnight to see if we got the sums right. A petty cash float of a hundred and fifty is already here”—she patted a locked tin—“and we’ll keep it on the top shelf of the Welsh dresser. It’ll be topped up weekly and used for agreed communal spending.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, we said routine household expenses, didn’t we? Petrol, groceries, that sort of thing.”

  “We won’t manage to feed nine of us on a hundred and fifty quid a week.”

  “We might. Well, we’ll try, anyway, and if we can’t, we’ll up it. But we’ve got the bank account too, remember. If we get stuck, we’ll just dip into that.”

  “No,” said Jonathan firmly. “That’s there for electricity and heating, phone and Aga fuel.” He held a photocopied version which had appeared from seemingly nowhere but had in fact been pinned—by him—to an old cork board earlier that day.

  “It’s soundin’ a bit feckin’ fierce to me,” said Niall.

  “That’s only because you have a problem with taking anything seriously. Do you want more? There’s reams of it.”

  “Yeah, go on, hit us with the lot.”

  “Okay. Sita’s going to use my car for work, Sita and Jonathan’s is going to become the communal car. Niall’s motorbike is totally bloody useless, of course, and we’re going to use buses whenever possible.”

  “Oh, we are, are we?”

  “I know what this reminds me of!” Niall exclaimed. “Your birth plan, Em. Maya was going to be born underwater to the sound of whale music and you weren’t going to have any pain relief, remember?”

  “So how was the epidural?” Sita laughed.

  “Bloody marvelous.”

  “What’s that got to do with buses?” Kat asked, confused.

  “You’d know if you’d seen the back end of her in labor like I did,” Niall said.

  “I beg your pardon,” Emmy shouted.

  “Buses,” said Jonathan. He could see things getting out of hand. “Where do we get buses?”

  Everyone thought of the only one they had seen so far: the one they’d got stuck behind for the final mile of their journey, an ancient hand-painted jalopy with curtains at the window and a motorbike hanging off the back.

  “Mrs. Partridge told me today that the nearest stop is at the bottom end of Cott,” said Sita.

  “We should grow our own vegetables,” Emmy said. “Fresh peas and new potatoes. From garden to table in an hour. Unbeatable.”

  “And in the meantime, we have to rely on local seasonal produce.”

  “That’s swede and daffodil pie for the next three months, then,” said Niall.

  “Who said anything about pastry?” Sita asked him.

  “What about Cornish pasties?”

  “I think they count as local seasonal produce.”

  “As in year-round seasonal?” Niall asked with one raised eyebrow.

  “Exactly. Oh, this is a good one, I don’t remember this,” said Emmy, looking at the biro scrawl on her sheet. “Discounted wine courtesy of PopCork Online.”

  Kat spluttered. PopCork Online was Niall’s dot com business, one of the early ones that had miraculously survived. Miraculous not so much because of the famously precarious nature of such companies, but because of Niall’s somewhat unorthodox approach to stock control.

  “Did you really say that, Niall?”

  “Yeah, why not?”

  “Is that okay?” Jonathan asked, looking at the four empty bottles on the table. It seemed a bit generous.

  “Sure. I’ve always got bin-ends hanging around, so unless you’re all going to start drinking as heavily as me…”

  “That’s not likely.”

  “Not possible.”

  “Then it’s fine.”

  “You’ll never be rich,” said Kat, looking cross.

  “Don’t want to be,” said Niall.

  “That’s good,” said Emmy, thinking his girlfriend really did know nothing about him. “Do you want to hear more or have you had enough?”

  “We want to hear it all.”


  “Okay.” But she read the next bit quickly to herself. “Washing machine operational during off-peak times only. Nonessential phoning done during cheap-rate hours. E-mailing and letter writing for longer communications preferred. Hair and beauty treatments kept in house. Haircuts from personal budgets, appointments to be scheduled in conjunction with other necessary trips to town. Newspapers to be read on screen during free internet access time. Books to be borrowed from library. Gifts handmade or ‘promises,’ wine from Niall. All exercise, apart from swimming, must be free. All new clothes an individual expense.” She could remember them writing it in all seriousness in the sitting room at Sita and Jonathan’s one earnest Sunday afternoon. “Basically, we’re not supposed to be spending any money,” she said grimly.

  “God, London is sounding better and better,” Kat smirked.

  “Anything else?”

  “Yes. To avoid chaos in the kitchen, children breakfast first, overseen by Jonathan, Sita or Emmy. Cooking on rota. Weekday suppers to include children, weekend suppers later, to exclude children who will be fed a proper meal at lunch-time. Niall and Kat to have their own timetable if required. Shopping to be done twice a week, with strict list, on rota basis. Laundry overnight, individual’s responsibility. Jonathan and Sita four nights, Emmy and Maya two, Niall one. General household cleaning to be run in conjunction with cooking rota. Family bathrooms and loos individual responsibility.”

  “Jawohl.”

  “What about my laundry?” Kat asked. “I don’t get much chance to do it in my flat. I’m never in.”

  “Your clothes are so bloody small, you can rinse them under a tap in a British Rail bog on your way down.”

  “So I can just do it whenever, can I?” she said, ignoring Niall.

  “Yes, Kat. No problem,” said Sita.

  “I don’t want to have to join a queue or anything. Not if I’m just here for one night.”

  “That’s fine. I’m sure we can work round you.”

  “Thank you, Sita.”

  “Go on, Emmy.”

  “Niall, you get exclusive use of the library for your office, and I get the en suite dressing room to your bedroom as my sewing room.”

  “Isn’t there another room you could use?” Kat asked suspiciously. “It doesn’t seem an entirely logical choice.”

  “You don’t need it for anything, do you?”

  “No, I was just thinking of privacy.”

  “Well, the only planned nakedness in there should belong to the dressmaker’s dummy.”

  “I was thinking of our privacy, actually.”

  “Ah, don’t worry about that,” Niall said. “She’s seen it all before, haven’t you, Em? And you’re not really going to be needing a sewing room anyway, are you?” He winked at her. “We all know about you and your great plans.”

  “You’re on dodgy ground, mate,” Emmy said.

  “Yeah, but so’s your business. How long has it been in the planning stage?”

  “We did put something in about privacy, didn’t we?” Sita asked speedily.

  “Yes, we said that if you want to be left alone, you shut your door.”

  “But an open one doesn’t necessarily mean ‘Come in,’” Kat underlined unnecessarily.

  Emmy didn’t know if it was just prejudice, but Kat did come across as a sour old cow sometimes. Young cow. Younger cow, anyway.

  “We’ll all have to get into the habit of knocking,” Sita said.

  “And that’s it,” said Emmy, folding the sheets. She’d had enough of rules now. She wanted the lovely familial warmth back.

  “Oh, what about the final reminder at the end?” Jonathan asked.

  “No, there’s no need to go into that,” she said hurriedly.

  “Why not?”

  “Well, it’s not quite in the spirit of things, is it? You and Sita didn’t have a prenuptial agreement, did you?”

  “We did, actually.”

  “Oh.”

  There was a gunfire of laughter from all of them.

  “To be fair,” Jonathan said, “it’s probably the only rule we need.”

  “Okay,” said Emmy reluctantly. “You read it, then.” She pushed it across to him.

  “Sure. Well, it just says that if at any stage any one of us wishes to move out, we can call a house meeting and the decision to put Bodinnick on the market will be discussed and put to the vote. If the vote is overwhelmingly to stay, that person or persons shall be bought out. And Emmy’s decision is final.”

  “How do you call a house meeting?” Kat asked.

  “Like this.” Niall cupped his hands round his mouth and shouted.

  Lila jumped in her sleep and Jonathan frowned.

  “You just have to ask. Make it clear you want us all to sit down and listen to you,” Sita said, feeling Emmy’s foot press against hers under the table. She pressed back.

  “As I was saying, it’s all a bit feckin’ serious,” Niall said, grabbing a second set of stapled sheets from the heap of stuff in the middle of the table. This time, Maya had used glitter glue to spell out The Bodinnick Manifesto.

  Jonathan had started this one by e-mail. That was when everyone knew they were on to something. If Jonathan, in the cold light of London, could carry the vision of a new life to work with him, so could the rest of them.

  Niall handed it to him. “Go on,” he said.

  “What, read it?”

  “No, eat the bloody thing.”

  “Do you want me to? Okay.” He cleared his throat. “The Bodinnick Manifesto.”

  Niall coughed on his Camel. “It’s not a feckin’ by-election.”

  “The vision. Jonathan Taylor—”

  “Conservative,” said Niall in a stage whisper. Kat giggled.

  “To cut down the stress, to get out of the rat race, to find the confidence to be different, to find out if I can, to kiss goodbye to the Heathrow Express—Oh, come on, I didn’t put that.”

  “Ah, y’see? Typical bloody Tory, ye’ve changed your mind already.”

  “Sita Dhanda—”

  “Labor, three times, incredibly painful.”

  “Yes Niall, it was, thank you.”

  “To adopt a simpler lifestyle with more free time to concentrate on the things that matter. To show our children a nonmaterial world.”

  “I’m still going with that.”

  “Hear hear.”

  “Emmy Hart—”

  “Monster Raving Loony.”

  “Okay, Niall. Joke’s over.”

  “To say thank you for everything you all are to me. To provide Maya with a sense of family. To shout from the rooftops that I am living the life I want.”

  “Rooftops?” Niall said. “What are you? Mary feckin’ Poppins?”

  Kat giggled again.

  “Niall O’Connor—”

  “Wanker,” whispered Emmy, to loud cheers.

  “To never eat sushi again.”

  “That’s pathetic.”

  “Even you have got to come up with a higher dream than that.”

  “There is no higher dream.”

  “Kat Rice: To get away from aggression and pollution. To give my mind and body the attention I deserve. To spend more quality time with Niall.”

  “Quality time? With Niall?”

  “You’ve got the wrong bloke.”

  The shouting and laughter around the table became rowdy enough to draw the children down from upstairs.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Why are you banging on the table, Dad?”

  “Hold on, hold on,” Jonathan said. “I haven’t finished. I haven’t done you lot yet. “Maya Hart: To climb trees. To have a purple bedroom and a dog. To have an adventure.”

  “Purple, Mum, got that?”

  “Jay Taylor: To leave school.”

  “Prosaic as ever,” said Sita, managing to put her hand on her son’s head before he ducked and moved away.

  “Asha Taylor: To climb bushes. To have a pink bedroom and a rabbit, a guinea pig a
nd a chicken. To have a safe adventure.”

  “You copied Maya,” Jay said.

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Yes, you did.”

  “Hey, we didn’t invite you two in here to argue.”

  “You didn’t invite us at all.”

  “And you were arguing anyway.”

  “He started it.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Yes, you did.”

  “And finally,” shouted Jonathan over the noise. “Let’s not forget Lila. This sounds remarkably like her mother to me but it is apparently Lila’s intention to stop waking everyone up too early, to learn to sit up unsupported, to feed myself, walk, dress myself, cook, drive, clean.”

  “Did you write that, Mum?”

  “No, Lila did, you pillock,” Jay told his sister.

  “To the Manifesto,” said Jonathan, raising his glass.

  Everyone raised their glasses too.

  “Is anyone missing sushi yet?” Emmy asked.

  “Oh, it’s okay,” Kat said. “I brought some with me.”

  2

  It went without saying that asking for sushi was a long-term no-no at the Londis shop in the small south-coast village of Cott, but you wouldn’t necessarily be able to pick up directions to Bodinnick there, either.

  This was more to do with the store’s permanently changing part-time staff than with xenophobia, although flashes of the latter were hardly unknown. On the other hand, if you were lucky enough to stumble across a nonxenophobe who had a grandparent buried in Cott churchyard, they would ask you if you wanted the dower house, the farm or the big house itself.

  These separate dwellings had enjoyed their own approaches since the First World War, when all four seventh-generation Trevivian sons had been killed in the space of a year, and their diminutive widowed mother had barricaded herself in the dower house, letting the farm go to her gamekeeper for a song. Bodinnick itself was shuttered, locked and left to grow mold on its windowsills until the old woman died in 1955 and a distant cousin with an eye on an Oxfordshire vicarage, rather than a Cornish manor, felt it was high time such an engaging family home was properly enjoyed.