Eggshell Days by Rebecca Gregson

left her slightly cold, but she blamed Toby for that. The past hadn’t been kind to men like him, and the Church certainly hadn’t, so even as a child Emmy had picked up on the fact that the place represented something stifling and repressed.
    She was right about the therapeutic aspect of the walk there, though. By the time they got to its arched door, all three children were laughing again. She and Asha had collected fallen camellia and azalea blooms on the way, big blousy pink ones, wistful cream ones and yellow trumpets, floppy with frost.
    They floated them in the rain butt and put the ones with stalks in a jam jar on the altar, and then, after a few minutes, they shut the small wooden door again and Emmy knew the flowers would be dead the next time anybody saw them.
    Somewhere in the back of her mind, she accepted that the chapel deserved more, but she and Toby weren’t the only perpetrators of injustice. Bodinnick’s sale details in the top drawer of the walnut bureau in the library didn’t make much of it, either. The fading document described a formal early-Regency house of robust nature, built in 1820, with the addition of a servants’ wing in 1870.
    The chapel was almost an afterthought, included in the garden paragraph and referred to as a “former private chapel currently being usefully employed as a tool and potting shed.” Beyond it, there was, in the description’s carefully vague wording, a “much older” building, insulated from the servants’ wing by a wall, with access from the outside only. This “older building” was where they all went next.
    It was the early equivalent of the modern-day shed, and when Toby took ownership of Bodinnick in 1960 it was full of the detritus of farm and family life—hen coops and lunchboxes, broken chairs and tractor tires, sacks of seed and tins of furniture wax—and was known as the “store.” He’d done nothing to alter its role but had added to it with his own rather more quirky mark—faux marble columns for a New Year’s Eve Roman orgy, speakers the size of junior-school children, a twelve-foot pennant of Prince Philip in nothing but the crown jewels for the Silver Jubilee, and a sit-up-and-beg bright pink bicycle complete with tinsel-twined basket, a veteran of his gay marches in London.
    As she watched the starburst effect on the children, Emmy’s memory threw up a very vague recall of Toby’s one-time intention to turn the store into an art gallery. He’d been forever coming up with ideas for the place. Maybe this very minute he was sitting on a fluffy white cloud, stroking his goatee beard and thinking, “Go, girl!”
    She hoped she could do him justice. He deserved success, even if his death—or rather his bequest—had been the shock of her life. It was ironic, really. Part of the reason for the move from London was rejection of the material world they all felt they’d been sucked into, and yet if Toby hadn’t made her the recipient of such gain, none of them would be here at all.
    The need to possess had never been her thing. Even having Maya ten years ago and finding herself wholly responsible for another person hadn’t changed that, so when she’d first heard that she was the sole beneficiary of the will, she’d felt like the pretender to a very grand throne.
    She had been dreading the funeral, but in any event, it had turned out to be so much like a party that she’d had to keep reminding herself afterward that Toby hadn’t been there in person. And not one finger had been pointed about the will. It really did seem that she was the only one who hadn’t seen it coming.
    â€œNo one knew Toby better than I,” his poor old boyfriend Julian had said after the burial, holding her gloved hands in his cold, scaly grasp. “And he believed that no one knew you better than he.”
    â€œI think that may be