Eggshell Days Read Free Page A

what we’re doing,” Niall said, peering through the candlelight at the boxes of belongings all over the floor. “Essentials for simple living” was what they had all agreed to bring. It didn’t look like it. “One is that we’re all as mad as bollocks, and the other is that everyone else is.”
    â€œAt least we don’t have any secrets,” Sita said quickly to reassure herself, forgetting Emmy’s huge one, which was forgivable since Emmy had almost forgotten it herself. “At least we know, more or less, what we’re in for.”
    One of them had already hung a clip frame on the flaking kitchen wall to prove it. Twenty years’ worth of changing photographic technology showing them freckled, plaited, big haired, tanned, pale, bearded, bare, tear-stained, pregnant, fit, anorexic and not. It was a reminder that their bold and hasty decision was not such a risk, a reminder that everyone had seen everyone else cry at least once. Except Kat, and for most of them she didn’t count.
    â€œDownsizing,” the weekend property pages annoyingly insisted on calling the move from city to country, but that hardly seemed the word for it. All three of their London addresses would have fit easily into the rambling manor with room to spare. Admittedly, the four-story Fulham terrace that Jonathan and Sita had packed up and let at top speed took up considerably more space than Emmy or Niall’s rented broom cupboards, but no one was inclined to toy with architectural puzzles. The premise was that everyone here was equal. Animal Farm it was not.
    Cold Comfort Farm was more like it. Two days ago, Emmy had phoned to ask the farmer’s wife to light the Aga and put the heating on in readiness for their arrival, and Eileen Partridge had replied, “What heating would that be, my bird?”
    Anyway, freezing or not, spring was definitely back on course after its wintery blip, and Emmy was sure Bodinnick was relieved to be full again. In fact, earlier, it was as if the house had winked at her. She was standing by the sundial just as it was getting dark, looking up at the grand façade and realizing she had waited all her life for this moment, and someone had opened and closed an internal shutter on an upstairs bedroom window. Brilliant, she’d thought, almost winking back. The house has got us and we’ve got each other. How can we possibly fail?
    Even the near-Gothic moment of flicking on the hideous kitchen strip light and fusing the entire ground floor seemed part of the big romantic conspiracy. Candlelight made it feel as if the adventure had finally begun.
    It was as if the place was welcoming her back, delighted that she had brought properly passionate people with her this time, not just a few spiritless siblings—although even with five adults, three children and a baby, it wasn’t what you could call bursting at the seams. Once everyone got used to the space, though, it would shrink. Familiarity shrinks everything, she’d promised Sita and Jonathan’s middle daughter, Asha, who hated bigness, hated the high ceilings, the deep windowsills, the huge, heavy doors, hated the whole idea.
    It was now dusk and the excited clamor of arrival had died down to a collective sigh of relief. At last they were dining in at home instead of dining out. Dining in together, for the first probationary night in their shared kitchen in the middle of nowhere, with a leg of Cornish lamb bought from the kitty and the children pottering around the vast upstairs, metaphorically peeing on imaginary boundaries to mark their new territory.
    If they were feeling lucky, it was fair enough. Britain’s worst rail crash for sixty years, with a death toll of a hundred, and they should have been in it. “Carriage C,” Emmy could remember Jonathan shouting when they’d first heard the news, still stranded at the station the morning after Sara’s wedding.