Eggshell Days (9 page)

Jonathan and Sita ran, the wall of heat chasing them as they stumbled over the humps and bumps of the grass.

Emmy was floored by it. She ducked, and in her shock lay flat on the ground, screaming, “You bloody pyromaniac! Did you mean to do that?”

“Well, how else are we going to get rid of it?” he shouted back over the furious crackling, laughing nervously. Thick black smoke belched over them and, for a second, he disappeared behind it.

“Just tell me you wouldn't have done that if any of the children had been here,” Sita said crossly when he reappeared.

“Course I wouldn't. What do you think I am?”

“A bloody liability,” she told him. “I'm going back to check on Lila. Don't do anything else stupid, for God's sake.”

“Come on! I'm not as dangerous as I look, I promise you.”

The fire blazed, spluttered and spat behind them as it consumed the ancient synthetic wool and rubber of Toby's dreadful carpet. As the heat subsided and the flames sank to a safer height and color, Emmy decided that, actually, she quite liked it. At least, she quite liked the energy it was throwing out.

Niall was pacing round it, excited. He had his sweater off and had tied it round his waist, and most of his shirt buttons, including the cuffs, were undone. “Well, now it's going, we should get the rest of the stuff. Do you think we could burn the useless old sofa from the music room?”

“And all that old wood from the kitchen?”

“God, the heat.”

“Bring it on.”

Jonathan looked at them from a distance. He had spent an hour stacking the wood in question in a neat pile by the back door. He was going to chop it into manageable lengths and store it for winter firewood, but it was pointless to make a bid for it now. When Niall and Emmy teamed up, opposition was more or less useless. He was beginning to understand that fact better than he ever had in London.

Niall climbed back onto his quad and revved the engine. Emmy was there like a shot, climbing up behind him, legs akimbo on the back of the ripped black seat. Her knees clamped themselves to his thighs almost instinctively as he pushed his foot down on the accelerator and bounced off over the field grass.

“Keep an eye on it, Jon,” he shouted as they sailed off into the sunset. “Give it a poke if it needs it.”

Jonathan watched them go. He wasn't sure if his face was burning from the fire or from some horrible recoil that had started to combust from inside.

The conversation with Sita at first light had made them both touchy. He'd woken feeling aroused, and this time had decided not to dismiss it as just another run-of-the-mill morning erection, so he had asked her to come and join him on the sofa. “No,” she'd said, “I'm too cold.”

“I know how to warm you up,” he'd said from his antique exile on the sofa under the window. The women in his life had set up a feminist camp in the marital bed and showed little sign of allowing him back in. Asha was refusing point blank to sleep in the room she had been given, even when Jay was there. It was too big, she said, and if Lila was allowed in with Mummy, why wasn't she?

“No, thanks,” Sita had said. So he told her she made him feel unwanted, unnecessary, surplus to requirements. He wanted to know how she'd feel if he disappeared off the surface of the earth.

“At six o'clock in the morning? Look Jon,” she said, “I've had five hours' sleep, broken by a night feed. I'd be deeply pissed off if you disappeared off the surface of the earth, not least because I wouldn't wish single parenthood on anyone. What do you want me to say?”

She had barely said goodbye when he left on the school run, and then when he came back, it had been all lino and carpets and beer, and he hadn't got a look in edgeways. Not communicating wasn't like them. Or perhaps it was. Perhaps he just had more time to realize it now he wasn't constantly rushing to catch a train.

Or maybe the rejection wouldn't have lingered so long if Emmy and Niall hadn't been behaving the way they were. Breakfast without Kat had been almost too much. Why had they eaten scones, anyway? What was wrong with cereal and toast?

“Cream with your split, sir?” Emmy had said. She'd been wearing a long shirt with nothing underneath. Okay, it was a nightshirt, but Jonathan got the message even if Niall didn't.

“With my what?”

“Your split.”

“It's a scone,” Sita said.

“No it's not. It's a split. There's a difference.”

“Not to the naked eye, there's not.”

“Say it again.”

“What, naked?”

“No, split.”

“And again.”

“Sp-lit.”

“You two, please,” Sita interrupted again.

“I can't help it. I've always fancied servile women.”

“Is that why you liked me as a waitress?”

They could have gone on for hours if Jay hadn't come in and started nagging for someone to take him to the bus stop.

“Walk,” Niall told him. “It's only down the lane.”

“Can I?” he'd asked his parents keenly.

“I don't see why not,” Sita replied, without even so much as a look at Jonathan.

“No you can't,” Jonathan had said. “It's your first day. That's ridiculous.”

“For God's sake, Jon, he needs to know we can trust him,” Sita said huffily, as if Jay's previous truancy had been Jonathan's fault.

Children were experts at interrupting, his in particular. He accepted that his sex life had always been a bit off and on, but it had never been quite this off for quite this long. Jay, stop start, Asha, stop start. And now of course there was Lila. They were talking nearly thirteen years of scrappy sex here. At forty, that set a pattern. Welcome to middle age, Sita said whenever he tried to talk to her about it.

Suddenly, he didn't want to be anywhere near the bonfire by the time Emmy and Niall got back and began stoking and fanning and all that crap, so he started to walk.

In the garden, the ground in the shaded areas where the rhododendrons arched to form a canopy was still mushy—a thick soup from last autumn's leaves and winter twigs. Already a path was beginning to form from all the recent exploration. He could see imprints of children's trainers and his own much larger boots. The track from Jay's BMX bike skidded off to the right just before the gate and the sight of it made him feel better. It used to be practically impossible to lever his son into any open-air activity, and now he wanted a wetsuit. At least Cornwall was benefiting one of them.

Jonathan didn't get other people very much, not even—if he was being absolutely honest—his wife or his closest friends. He loved them, but he knew they were sometimes different to him. Sometimes it seemed as if everyone was always different to him.

The pond was a classic example, he thought as he walked past it. Emmy had taken them to the optimistically named “water garden” just after the chapel, and they'd all torn their skin and clothes to pieces fighting through the bamboo and razor-sharp grasses to get to it.

A pond was just about visible to the naked eye but it was dank and dark, covered in a mass of succulent weed, like flat cacti, and the Gunnera grew like giant rhubarb round the edge. The musty, forgotten water stank. Tar-black midges hovered across its hidden surface. Someone had spotted an elderly Koi carp lurking beneath the gloop and they all whooped and screamed and clapped their hands as if they were falling upon hidden treasure. But for a medieval chapel, nothing. Not even a raised eyebrow.

When Emmy had first taken them to Bodinnick's chapel, his jaw had practically fallen on the floor. He couldn't believe she hadn't mentioned it before. It was one of the most perfect examples of a simple rural medieval building he had ever seen.

Her lack of interest made him wonder if his life might have been easier if his passion had been for motorbikes, or new music, or exotic travel. He was always telling his children to look above the shop fronts, to see what hid behind the hideous façades. “But they prefer the hideous façades, darling,” Sita would say.

He walked quickly past the pond, keen to get where he now knew he was going. After the rhododendrons, the planting fizzled out into random hollies and hydrangeas. One large pink camellia stood apart, neither random nor sited, as if it had fallen off a wheelbarrow years ago and no one had bothered to pick it up.

He lifted and twisted the rusted metal latch on the arched gateway in the brick wall and pushed the door open as far as it would go. A ridge of soft mud collected behind the rotting wood, and he had to turn sideways to slip quickly, almost furtively, through the gap.

As he came out of the shade and across the tarmac track that ran from the road behind the house and into the farmyard, he blew through his hands and coughed. He coughed again for the purposes of self-diagnosis, not sure if he was wheezing or not. The ball of fire from the burning carpet might have scorched his lungs, and he was sure he had inhaled some of the acrid smoke.

The five-bar gate was tied with a loose chain so he climbed it to save the trouble of resecuring it. There was no hint of chest pain as he did so, and he jumped off, quickening his pace, feeling stronger.

Walking up the slight incline through the meadow grass and over to the smaller kissing gate, he felt cross with himself for not telling anyone he had been to the reference library yesterday. One of the pages he had photocopied about historic buildings in Cornwall even included a short paragraph on Bodinnick. Why hadn't he told them? Was it a desire not to be called Captain Sensible again? Or was it selfishness?

The revving of Niall's quad broke the stillness, so he almost ran toward the boxy little building beyond the tangle of grass, weeds and self-seeded trees, employing the same rhythm of breathing he used to use on the treadmills at the company gym.

The small field was covered in sheep's droppings, but mysteriously there were no sheep and the stepping-stone path to the door was all but covered by the invading grass. It felt like a forgotten place, which suited his mood.

The first thing he did was run his smooth office hands down the small wooden entrance. A Tudor arched doorway with strap hinges, according to
Cornish Houses from 1400 to 1700
, which he'd found in Bodinnick's own library yesterday. At breakfast he'd read a chapter about the “robust and unruly” people who lived in these places, people who lived piratical and dangerous lives, surrounded by treacherous coastlines which increased their feeling of separation and “encouraged an attachment to God and their homes.”

He had no idea what it would be like to be robust and unruly, or to have an attachment to God and his home, but he wished he had.

The lichen on the granite side buttresses was both slimy and rough, but he had an idea it only grew in pure air, so he took a deep breath and tested his lung capacity again. This time he counted to five, not four.

He took his hand off the latch and walked around the outside, savoring its scale. It was small but confident and surprisingly lofty.

There was a tiny square chamfered window, then a narrow rectangular one, then two large centered windows on both the east and the west sides with carved decorations to their surrounds. The slate roof had been renewed within the last thirty years, he guessed, and the other clue to recent interest was what he suspected was a late-twentieth-century granite cross on the gable. He wondered if it was a replica of the original or whether Toby had simply got it wrong. He entertained himself with the thought that he might be in a strong position to take it down, to make decisions about this building. No one else was going to, that was for sure.

The door resisted a little, then, with a slight push, creaked and flung open, revealing a light gray arc scratched on the slate floor where the door had been opened and closed over the years. Not that many years: the slate was modern, too neatly cut for antiquity.

The door shut behind him, coming to rest on the ridge of slate that had caused it to resist on opening. He pulled it back, but as soon as he let go it shut again. Emmy was right about one thing: the smell. It was damp. In pursuit of a through draft, he found a stool to prop it open with, and when he'd done that he took a detailed look around.

The exposed wagon roof looked sound enough. The timber curved seamlessly, the distances between the beams were mathematically accurate, the edges of the wood were smooth.

He tried to bring to mind the medieval carpenter who'd made it and a mason perhaps, or an apprentice, but he couldn't summon anything more than a vague sense of rustic competence. His mind was well and truly locked in the twenty-first century. Visionary he was not. He needed the written word to form a mental image of anything, and to reassure himself he patted the back pocket of his jeans, from which poked a few stapled pages.

The step up to the sanctuary, or altar, looked original. He stood on it, then stepped off again and back a few paces to take in the larger picture. A small wooden table sat below a large three-paned cinque-foiled leaded window, flanked by granite pillars set into the stone. There was a jam jar in the middle of the table, its insides stained with brown rings and dying floral debris. The decay offended him so he took it off and put it in the corner on the floor.

When he looked up, he saw the “upper chamber, accommodation for a resident chaplain with projections on either side, on the south for a staircase, and on the north, for a recess and a fireplace,” he'd read about, and for a moment he tried to conjure up the chaplain, too, but as with the carpenter he failed.

Buildings he could see. He had enough knowledge to bring up in his mind the appropriate architecture for most periods, so if someone talked of a Georgian house or a Gothic window, he knew what they meant, but people remained as text. His imagination couldn't go that extra distance.

He needed the security of someone else's knowledge, and he pulled the pages from his back pocket and started to read.