“A month,” Jonathan told Tamsin the next day, suddenly realizing he was staring at the almost invisible downy hair that ran in a line from her earlobe down her jaw line. The May Day beast had had its effect on them all.
He knew he was a very changed man from the one who had left London, if only because he was becoming so easily distracted. In the city, he had been programmed to focus on specific things, yet in Cornwall his viewfinder was all over the place. There was suddenly a lot to see, although, to be fair, he wasn’t the only one looking. And none of them had their zoom lenses pointing at the same thing.
With Sita it was children, work, house. With him it was children, chapel, Tamsin. Or was it Tamsin, chapel, children? He couldn’t remember the last time either of them had put each other in the frame.
What was he doing in Tamsin’s lilac VW Beetle anyway? He didn’t know whether he felt like her driving instructor, her date or her father. Somewhere not so deep down, he blamed Emmy and Niall, but only because that made him feel less guilty than blaming Sita. He certainly didn’t blame himself. Everyone else did that for him.
The medieval building they were heading for this stunningly clear morning was only an excuse. Open to the public every fourth weekend, Point Manor had a chapel of the same proportions as Bodinnick’s, with the addition of two wall paintings which were apparently in a remarkable condition. It would be interesting to see them, but he could easily have gone on his own.
“Would you like me to take you?” Tamsin had asked him over the phone on Friday.
“I’d love you to,” he’d said.
“Great, bring your children,” she’d replied. But they’d both known he wouldn’t.
“So you’ve got another two to go?” she asked, still five miles away and crunching the gears at every change.
“Two what?” He’d forgotten what they’d been talking about.
“Months.”
“Oh, yes, well, that’s the plan.”
“Is it unsettling, not knowing?”
“Not knowing what?”
“Come on, keep up. Whether this is it or not.”
Not when you’ve spent the last forty years not knowing, he thought, slamming his right foot automatically onto the floor as they found themselves staring up the back of an old bus. It had Surfers Against Sewage sprayed in big black letters across its boot and a thick curtain across the back window. It was the same bus they had all followed up the lane to Bodinnick on the last leg of their first journey.
“Well, who knows what they really want?” he said.
“I do. I want a job that I love that pays me loads of money which I can then spend traveling.”
“What, like these guys?”
She pulled out on a blind bend. “God no. I’ve got no desire to be a gypsy.”
“No?” If he hadn’t been so preoccupied with her driving skills, he would have felt disappointed at that admission. “Anyway, I thought you liked the job you’ve got.”
“I do. It just doesn’t pay enough.”
The engine was straining. Change down, for God’s sake, he wanted to shout.
“Cornwall’s full of mad people like this,” she said, gesticulating rudely at the bus. “Britain is like a Christmas stocking. All the nuts end up at the toe.”
“Thank you.”
“Oh, not you. You’re—” Don’t say sensible, he willed—“Sensible,” she said.
“Oh, you as well. Everyone thinks that.”
“Are they right?”
“Not necessarily.”
“Is it for me to find out?”
Her challenge made him lose his nerve and he changed tack. “Well, your job must pay you quite well to buy a brand-new car like this,” he said, his foot flat down on an imaginary accelerator.
“Someone bought it for me, actually.”
“Oh. Lucky you.”
“It was a guilt thing,” she said dismissively.
He knew she expected him to ask who the someone was, and what they had done to feel guilty about, but her slight arrogance had deflated him.
“Money’s not everything,” he said instead.
She finally found third gear. “You’re going to tell me it can’t buy you love next, aren’t you?”
It was the first time their conversation had turned away from the professional, but he couldn’t help wishing it wasn’t happening while they were abreast of a thirty-year-old coach on a hairpin bend. He glanced up at the driver and was surprised to see it was a girl with what looked like a big stripy sock on her head.
“I don’t know. I’ve never had enough of it to put it to the test,” he said.
Tamsin looked as though she didn’t believe him, and why should she? After all, he was a liar. As far as Sita knew, he was going on his own to a quarry to pick up some lime putty.
“They shouldn’t be allowed to drive round in that heap. It’s not roadworthy,” she said angrily, beginning to scrabble in her glove compartment for a tape.
“What do you want? Let me get it. You just get on with overtaking.”
“You choose.”
He didn’t recognize any of the names of any of the bands she had written on the cassette boxes, so he picked one at random and put it in, pretending he hadn’t looked.
“Well done, good choice. Thanks,” she said.
And because both the bus and a ten-mile stretch of road were now behind them, he smiled. She had both needed and thanked him in the space of a minute and he was grateful for that—even if he was very clearly in the passenger seat again.
* * *
“Let’s have some music,” Emmy said to Sita, rolling her sleeves up and taking a deep breath of the clove-scented steam rising from the ham. She needed to fill the time, having already spun out her trip to the butcher’s to a full hour, not that the person she really wanted to notice had noticed. Niall had been too busy sleeping off the effects of making love to two women in twenty-four hours to notice anything.
Kat really had come back from London last night just as she had threatened, and for the first time in nearly three weeks Emmy hadn’t seen Niall all day. She knew what he was doing up there. He was kicking over the last few traces of his infidelity, undoing the spell. The problem was that she was still well and truly under it. She could still smell him in her bed, a mix of shower gel and smoke and mystic beast.
“Turn it up as loud as you like,” she said to Sita, who was more than happy to oblige. She’d heard the movements upstairs too. “We can’t have him emerging from his love nest into complete silence, can we?”
Sita shuffled around inside a cardboard box of organic vegetables which had just been delivered. “You okay?”
“Fine. Why?”
“Just that I thought it might be hard for you, with Kat coming back.”
Emmy put her finger on the recipe. “Hold on. Add the sugar, lower the heat and simmer briskly. Sorry, what did you say?”
“Can’t remember.”
There was another noise from upstairs, an indistinct banging. It couldn’t be the children. They were outside. Emmy turned the music up even more.
“What have we got this week?” she asked, peering into the box and speaking in a voice that sounded to her a few octaves too high. “Please not more kale.”
“Carrots, potatoes, a rutabaga, a huge bunch of parsley.”
“Hmm. Do you think we could get away with rutabaga and carrot with the ham?”
“No, the children are sick of it. We should try and do something festive. The food has got to be in the party mood, even if you’re not.”
“Oh, but I am.”
“Yeah, and I’m a banana.”
“See if you can find anything in there that uses swede and spuds, then,” Emmy said, spinning the book across the table. The sound of Kat laughing seeped through the floorboards.
“What time did she get back? Were you still up?” Sita asked.
“No idea,” Emmy said, remembering that the digital display on the clock radio next to her bed had said 12:12. She had heard everything. The motorbike, the front door, the low voices, the stairs. She even thought she had heard the clothes falling to the floor. “Right, this has now got to simmer briskly for an hour and fifty minutes.”
Emmy peeled off her long-sleeved T-shirt to work in her vest. Sita noticed that someone had written “Goodnight” in ballpoint on the top of her shoulder. It wasn’t Maya’s hand. “That’s not a brisk simmer, that’s a gentle boil.”
“What’s the difference?”
“The same as the difference between you being in a party mood and me being a banana.”
Jay saved them from the pointless discussion by walking in and asking if he and Scott could have a beer.
“No,” Sita said.
“Why not? We’re supposed to be celebrating, aren’t we?”
“Not all day. You can have one tonight.”
He made a face at his small friend, who looked relieved. “But Scott won’t be here tonight.”
“He can be if he likes.”
“Cool. Can he stay the night?”
“I should think so. There’s no school tomorrow. And if it’s okay with his parents.”
“It will be,” Scott said a little sadly.
“Can I have this?” Jay asked, picking up a cast-iron saucepan lid.
“No,” said Emmy. “I need it.”
“This, then?” He picked up a knife block.
“No! What for?”
Jay tapped the side of his nose.
“Where are the girls?” Sita asked.
“Practicing their play. What about these? If we promise not to drink them?” He lifted a four-pack of beer by the plastic rings.
“No, Jay,” said Sita. “Do you think I’m stupid? What do you want them for, anyway?”
He smiled secretly, Scott shrugged, and they both slipped into the room-sized larder, where they found a giant tin of coffee, a crate of shrink-wrapped baked beans and an economy-size box of washing powder, provisions bought weeks ago by Sita with the idealistic notion that bulk buying would make them all better people. In fact, all they had done so far was block the path to the fridge, stub a few toes and lurk like muttered reminders of their spectacular incompetence at sticking to the rules.
“These’ll do,” Jay whispered to Scott. “Give me a hand to get them up later?”
“Are we allowed a beer?” Emmy asked Sita when the boys had gone again.
“No, we’re allowed champagne. We might as well make the most of being manless.”
“When have I been anything but?”
“Don’t give me that,” Sita replied. “Jay may think I’m stupid but you’re certainly not allowed to.”
* * *
“It’s quite a sorry tale, actually,” Tamsin was saying to Jonathan who was trying not to concentrate too hard on his breathing.
It was a shame his difficulties seemed to have chosen this moment to return with a vengeance. A couple of times since they had got out of the car, he had felt his heart lose its rhythm. So far Tamsin hadn’t noticed his panic-ridden gulping because he’d managed to cover it up with coughs.
“The building of the house was aborted in 1521 when Charles Pencarrow’s wife and infant son both died of a fever. He couldn’t bear being here anymore, because it represented everything he had lost. Basically, he went a bit mad.”
Jonathan didn’t want to think about wives or sons. “It’s a shame someone else didn’t come along and finish it,” he said, drawing air slowly though his nose.
“No one would go near it. Everyone believed it was cursed.”
“Cursed?”
“Yes. Two unexplained deaths, a madness. It didn’t take much.”
“Blimey. I hope it isn’t.”
“Why? What are you worried about then? Death or madness?”
He felt like saying just plain old adultery actually. “Death isn’t exactly in my life plan. But places do have their own vibes, don’t they?”
“No, I don’t think so. I think the vibes are just about the people who are living in it at the time.”
“Is that what you think?”
“Yes, that’s what I think.”
We’re flirting with each other, he realized. “Well, I’d live here,” he said.
“In your dreams.”
He didn’t want to think too hard about his dreams, either, so he opened the cream folded sheet of paper that he had picked up from inside the porch. “It says here that after the deaths Charles Pencarrow diverted all his wealth to the rebuilding of Saint Peter’s Church across the valley.”
“Oh, you should go to Saint Peter’s if you can. It has this fabulous sculptured granite façade.”
“You’ve been?” She nodded. She didn’t tell him it was on a school trip six years ago.
“We could go together?” he suggested tentatively.
“Sure.”
“That would be great. It’s so good, finally meeting someone who’s interested in the same things as I am.”
“Oh, it’s nothing.”
And the way she said it, he really should have realized that she meant it.
* * *
“What about clapshot?” Sita said.
“No, I’ve never had that. Is it treatable?” Emmy asked, fishing carrots and the green parts of the leek out of the ham pot.
Sita laughed. “It’s something you can make from rutabagas and potatoes. Look.” She pointed at a recipe in a book called Hearty Vegetable Dishes.
“Good grief! Who the hell would eat anything called clapshot?”
“Somebody who had a surfeit of rutabagas and potatoes?”
“Oh yeah!”
They were both a little drunk and Emmy had been tutoring Sita in the newly discovered techniques of phone sex.
“I think you should do it today,” said Emmy. “Strike while the iron’s hot.”
“Wouldn’t that burn?”
Their loud cackles were more or less unconscious now, but if they still traveled upstairs that was a bonus. If he heard them, Niall might wish he were downstairs instead.
“God knows we could do with a touch of originality,” said Sita.
“Oh, you don’t touch, and it’s not very original. This is the age of the mobile, remember.”
“It would be original for us.”
“From what you’ve just told me, any sex would be original for you.”
“This is true. Shall I phone him now?”
“He might have lime putty on his hands. Very caustic, I’ve heard. It can cause blindness. And don’t you think that would be biting off more than you can chew?”
“I’ve never been able to do that, either. What do you do with your teeth?”
“Take ’em out, leave ’em in a glass of water on the side.”
“It’ll come to that sooner than we think.”
“I know. My gums have already started bleeding when I clean my teeth.”
“Stop,” Sita said, making a disgusted face. “That’s too much information, even for a doctor. Anyway, that’s not caused by old age, that’s down to careless brushing. Let’s go back to phone sex a minute. Give me an opening line.”
“You don’t need me to tell you what to say.”
“Oh but I do.”
“Well, it can be anything, can’t it? Just make sure you choose your words carefully—some words don’t work.”
“Like what? I need an example.”
“Okay. ‘Probing.’”
“Uuugh!”
“Or the ‘c’ word.”
“I wouldn’t say that anyway.”
“And men don’t like ‘prick.’”
“I don’t suppose they do!”
“So why do they like ‘dick?’”
“Do they?”
“Don’t they? I thought they did.”
“I don’t know, do I?”
Emmy filled their glasses with the last of the champagne. “Can you remember what—”
“Don’t! I know what you’re going to say and just don’t!”
“Fingerbob!”
“I said don’t! I’d forgotten him!”
They were dribbling helplessly, with tears streaming down their faces, and neither of them noticed when Niall walked in, barefoot. He checked the empty champagne bottle and decided not to mention how much it cost. It was worth every penny, anyway.
“Get on with sorting the clapshot, you old tart,” Emmy snorted to Sita, rolling the rutabaga at her.
It was too good a line for Niall to ignore. “I thought you weren’t on duty today, Sita.”
“Oh, God! How long have you been there?” shrieked Emmy, spinning round. Her face was flushed with alcohol.
“Ages. I heard the whole lot.” It was a fair bet. He knew what they were like.
“You liar.”
“I did. And you’re both filthy. You should be ashamed of yourselves.”
“We are. Deeply.”
“Well,” said Sita, scraping her chair across the slate floor and picking up her mobile from the dresser. “Will you excuse me? I’ve got a phone call to make.”
“You aren’t, are you?” Emmy asked her.
“I am.”
“Is nothing sacred?” said Niall, not really minding that he had clearly been discussed, and pointing to Emmy’s shoulder to try and tell her about the pen.
* * *
“You all need to leave room for my delicious pudding,” Kat reminded everyone. But fingers kept creeping back to the platter to have one more go at picking up the last few chunky flakes of rich pink meat, or to the chipped floral serving dish for some of the burned onions left from the clapshot.
She had spent the late afternoon spoiling Emmy and Sita’s fun with her presence, and creating a complicated chocolate orange soufflé with ingredients from a selection of cappuccino-colored paper bags tied with gold ribbons. The bags still sat by the organic vegetable cardboard box next to the kitchen sink, making a statement similar to the one being made under the table by her high snakeskin-effect mules and Emmy’s flat clogs.
“I’m not sure I could eat another thing,” Emmy said, the ballpoint message still on her shoulder blade but hidden by a lime-green velvet wrap with a fringe of purple beads she had made for the occasion.
“Oh, you must.”
Maya dipped her spoon in and licked it. “It’s actually really yum!”
“There’s loads of alcohol in it.”
“How much?” Jonathan asked nervously.
Kat shrugged helplessly. “Oh, loads. I didn’t think about the children.”
“I’ll have some,” Jay shouted from the far end. He and Scott had already seen off two cans of beer each and he liked the Dutch courage it gave him. What’s more, his banner had worked. He and Scott had hung it from the Welsh dresser, weighted down at the top by the contents of the larder. Everyone had cheered when he finally allowed them into the kitchen. He’d even let his mother kiss him.
“Arm-wrestle me, Dad.”
“No. You’ll beat me.”
“Arm-wrestle me, Niall.”
“No. I’ll break your finger bones.”
“A game of snooker, then?”
“We haven’t got enough balls.”
“Speak for yourself,” Jay shouted bravely, basking in Scott’s adoring admiration. “C’mon Scottie, let’s go.”
Sita and Jonathan smiled at each other side by side on the settle.
“Did you get my message at lunchtime?” she asked him under her breath.
“Yes. I didn’t get back because I was already on my way.”
“Pity.”
“Why? What did you need me for?”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
“Why not?”
“You just wouldn’t.”
“Try me.” He wasn’t sure but he thought he caught something in her eye he hadn’t seen for a very long time.
“Phone sex,” she whispered.
He looked around to see who was in on the joke. No one seemed to be. “Yeah, right. Don’t tell me, Lila had run out of nappies and you wanted me to stop off at the shop.”
“No, really.”
“Really?” he asked. He was also whispering now.
“Yes, really.”
“Bloody good soufflé,” Niall said, scraping the last of it up.
“Not bad for a first attempt,” Kat purred, pulling his arm round her neck.
“I think I need to lie down,” said Emmy.
“Not before you tell us about your business,” Kat said. “I took a look in your sewing room today. You’ve got a load of material in there.”
“Oh, that reminds me, was there any post today?” Emmy asked quickly. “I’ve been waiting a whole week for some patterns I ordered.”
“The post here is verging on bloody carrier pigeon, isn’t it?” said Niall. “I saw the plumber, Roy Mundy, at the pub earlier and he said he sent his bill to us days ago. I’m sure we haven’t had it. I reckon that chirpy little postie nicks stuff and hides it in the bushes somewhere. He’s not right, is he? If he asks me to put a feckin’ letterbox in the back door one more time I’ll—”
“Language!” Asha shouted from the end of the table.
And then Jonathan remembered.
“Oh God, it’s my fault,” he said, the blood draining from his face. “I bet it’s all over at the chapel. I intercepted the post the other day when I had Lila with me. I shoved it in her bucket seat. I was so keen to get away from him that I just took it and … I’ll go and get it.”
“Don’t worry about it now, Jon. It can wait another day,” said Emmy. “Anyway, it’s pouring down out there.”
“No, no, I’ll go and get it now, while I remember. It’s no problem. It won’t take me two minutes.”
“Don’t be daft, Jonathan,” Sita said, but he was already doing up his boots. She put her hand to her ear to mime a phone but he missed it.
“You’re mad,” Emmy told him.
“Completely bloody barking,” said Niall.
“Probably,” he said, and on the walk over there, he realized there was no probably about it.
* * *
The rain was coming right at him, but if he kept his head down he couldn’t see where he was going, because the lights of the farmhouse were his only pointer. The driving wetness found its way inside the collar of his coat and through the stitching of his boots within seconds, and the warmth from the kitchen flew out the top of his thinning hair and left him chilled to the bone. He would probably be cold all night now.
Not that he cared. The chapel door gave him its familiar greeting as he pushed it open and flicked on the light. A single unshaded lightbulb hung from a central beam and he made two mental notes. One, to have a proper think about the ultimate necessity for electricity over here; two, to get a doorstop.
The mail was still on the floor by the radio. It was covered in a film of grit, and the top envelope had a coffee ring on it. Two dirty cups were next to it. A slender bone-china mug that was far too good to be out here had marks of lipstick round its rim. In slow motion, he brought it up to his mouth and pressed it against his lips. Then he rolled it against his cheek and held it there. It wasn’t the chapel he wanted to see again tonight, it was Tamsin.
When he got back to the house, a game of Chinese whispers was under way. What had started out as “Peas in a pod are good for the bod” had ended up as “Piss in a pot is good for Herbert,” and he walked into the kitchen to hear his nine-year-old daughter deliver the final sentence with all the finesse of a navvy. Sita had gone to bed.
“Tenpence for the swear box, Asha,” Niall shouted.
“Pot calling, I think,” Jonathan told him, letting two envelopes fall into Emmy’s lap. He put the mugs on the table but the lipstick mark was gone, wiped off on the inside of his pocket.
“Are you making a patchwork quilt or something?” Niall asked as Emmy undid the parcel and pulled out five different-colored squares of satin. He tilted a bottle toward her empty glass but missed—a splash of red wine hit the newly revealed slate floor with a wet slap. His attention had been caught by something else. The second letter she picked up had a familiar green stamp with a harp on it—the equivalent of a flashing neon arrow to an Irishman.
“Who’s writing to you from Ireland?”
“I’ve no idea,” Emmy said looking at the printed address, but her brain had finished sifting through the possibilities before the words came out of her mouth.
“Can I have the stamp?” Maya asked.
But her mother didn’t hear. She had already started to pull the contents out and it was too late to stop. There was nothing to do but read it.
Emmy, I would very much like to talk to you. My work, home and mobile numbers are below. Please call me if you can. Cathal.
Her world receded like the shrinking crisp packet Jay had just set alight with a candle in the ashtray.