"We're waiting," Kat said.

"Don't hold your breath," said Emmy, thinking that if she didn't say it someone else would.

Niall sucked in air noisily.

"You can talk," Sita said to him. "Is your computer even plugged in yet?"

"It can be. I sorted your hard drive this morning," Jonathan said.

"I thought that was my job," Kat said.

"What's that about my hard drive?" Niall asked, looking up from his cigarette paper. He was wearing the same baggy drawstring trousers and tweedy roll-neck sweater he'd had on all week.

"It's not floppy," Emmy said looking up, "apparently."

"This is very true."

Sita listened to the increasingly irritating banter as she washed her paintbrush, comforting herself by thinking of the patterns of behavior that had been established. The children-who were upstairs playing a game they had played almost obsessively all week, involving a wardrobe and some old coats-were getting the hang of which loos they could and could not use and where to find their parents at dead of night. She and Jonathan had a system of laundry up and running, Emmy had a permanent home for her tampons, and Niall knew which way to turn at the end of the drive to get to the nearest pub. It was progress of sorts.

As Niall had so delicately put it, "The house was almost feckin' tailor-made." The layout of the second floor could not have been designed more appropriately to accommodate their three essential clusters of living if it had tried, so the feared task of divvying up had, in the end, been stress-free. There hadn't been one moment at which needs clashed, apart from the small hiccup over Emmy's sewing room, which was still very definitely the dressing room next to Niall's.

Sita and Jonathan and the children had taken over a suite of rooms at the top of the stairs. Jay and Asha shared a huge, light bedroom to the right, which took in the west front corner of the house and had three sash windows with deep sills which they had been warned in no uncertain terms never to attempt opening themselves. "If you fall out, you'll kill yourselves," Emmy told them. She was only repeating something Toby had once told her, except she didn't embellish it with the rocking-horse ghost story as he did. She knew all about Asha's threshold for fear after spending an hour eating popcorn with her in a cinema foyer while her own daughter sat all on her own in Screen Two, happily watching Harry Potter meet Voldemort for the first time.

The plan was one day to divide the room with a large curtain, because both Sita and Jonathan secretly hoped that Jay would soon start showing signs of puberty. Once upon a time, they had thought he was hormonally precocious, but then they realized he was just a moody little sod. His upper lip was still very bare, barer than nine-year-old Asha's, even. He was a bit of a shrimp.

Next to Jay and Asha's room, but enjoying the front aspect only, was a baby-sized dressing room with no access from the landing, leading to another big bedroom which had an old but serviceable en suite bathroom on the other side. This had been Toby's room, so it was furnished with a tapestry half-tester over the king-size bed and an antique leather sofa running between the two windows, not that you could see the finer details of either against the dark red walls.

With a lick of cream paint, Sita, Jonathan and Lila were the ideal successors, particularly as their three rooms were at a slightly lower level than the landing, fed by one door and a couple of steps, reinforcing the feeling of trespass for anyone who needed it.

Maya, now ten, knew instinctively where it was and was not all right to go. She always knocked before entering even an empty bathroom-a trick she'd learned a few years ago when she'd found her mother having her back scrubbed with a Body Shop loofah by a man she'd never seen before. It wasn't the man she'd found alarming, it was the way Emmy had lurched from being wild with indignation to begging for forgiveness in the space of about five minutes.

To the left, the wide, long landing, with its two threadbare but valuable Persian runners, ran for long enough to accommodate Jonathan and Sita's bedroom and bathroom, and then dropped down again into the rooms allotted to Emmy and Maya.

Theirs was an L-shaped collection of smaller chambers, with their bedrooms along the front of the house and a separate lavatory and bathroom a few steps across the corridor, looking east. It was the end of the house where Emmy had slept as a child, and most of the old furniture was still there-the kidney-shaped, marble-topped dressing table with the gathered chintz cloth and ornate white mirror, the not-quite-matching marble-topped bedside tables, the serpentine lamp bases with their slightly wonky raw-silk shades. For a man so unconventional outside the home, Toby had certainly succumbed to traditional tastes within.

Emmy was thankful that the original architect had been sensitive enough to put the larger bathroom window on the eastern wall, not the western, otherwise it would have looked across a narrow outside passageway right into Niall's bedroom, and, like it or not, Niall's bedroom was also Kat's.

She also liked the fact that, since she and Maya were at the end of the house, there was no reason to venture down the last flight of landing steps except to come and see her. This was less for privacy than for reassurance. She'd always liked to know her visitors came from desire, not by default.

Another happy coincidence was that Niall and Kat's largest window faced north, which might cut out the sun for them but at least also cut out the chance of being accidentally caught in the act, and, as Niall had insensitively pointed out, they were the most likely candidates for impromptu sex, so it was perfect.

"I object to that assumption," Jonathan had said over dinner and then wished in the ensuing amused silence that he hadn't.

As compensation for Niall and Kat's rooms being the darkest, they had the biggest bathroom, which Emmy was already doing her best not to look in every time she walked down the landing. If she averted her eyes slightly, she saw her sewing room. She had just ordered three more rolls of fabric and a new machine, so it would look the part, if nothing else.

Downstairs, though, the layout was less easy. The sitting room was north-facing, a fact which wasn't helped by the old blue carpet and its distance from the kitchen. The dining room table was so long and wide that they would have to dismantle it to get it out, so there was little they could do in there but eat, and the kitchen was better for that. Then there was a music room, a library, and a very small one-windowed room which Toby had used as a study and which the children had already claimed as a den.

"Why don't you use that one as your sewing room?" Kat had suggested.

"It's a bit too small," was Emmy's excuse, but that depended on what it was too small for. Sitting and staring into space was an activity you could do in a shoebox.

The big, sunny kitchen was already established as the heart of the house. Big and sunny was good, but it was universally agreed that the melamine units, the lino and the strip lights were very, very bad. They decided early on to make it their first project.

"If only because, if everything goes belly-up, a new kitchen will make it easier to sell," Jonathan had said.

"Go wash your mouth out," Emmy had told him, trying to stop her head filling with beech worksurfaces and aluminium storm lamps. Bodinnick's kitchen was not born to be beautiful. It was born to feed hordes of hungry, busy people. It was also where, according to Sita's timetable, the assembled throng should have been gathering for their first house meeting.

"We should have at least one, before Kat goes tomorrow," Sita insisted, putting her brush to dry on a piece of newspaper on the Aga lid.

She looked around. Niall was rolling a second cigarette, his latest money-saving wheeze, even though he hadn't yet smoked the first. Kat was painting her toenails again. Emmy was drawing on the inside of her orange peel with a pen. The exposed patch of bedroom floorboards where a chunk of ceiling plaster had collapsed and brought supper to an untimely close on their first night still sat over the table, waiting to be fixed.

"Right. I'll be upstairs if anyone wants me," she said a little brusquely. Unfortunately, her point was lost in the sudden clamor of fighting siblings.

"I want to go home," Asha wept, rushing in. "I want to go home. Please Mummy, can we go home?"

"This is home," Jay shouted, snapping at her heels. "You'd better get used to it."

"No it isn't. It's not my home, my home is in London."

"Hey hey hey, you two!"

Everyone saw Asha's painful little think bubble. It showed her old bedroom, with the unicorn stencils and white cupboards and night light. It showed her pink walls and her glittery curtains, her fitted carpet and her miniature desk and chair.

She had spent her whole life in a house where you could find anyone within a couple of minutes, where the paintwork didn't peel, the floors didn't creak, the fire didn't smoke. Even if you were on your own, you were never more than twenty feet from someone else. At Bodinnick, she sometimes thought she was lost forever. Outside her bedroom window, there was nothing. Nothing to worry about like overhead cables which might sway and break in the wind and electrocute someone in their bed like there were at some of her friends' houses in London, nothing like really tall trees right outside that burglars might climb up and break in like there were at Niall's old flat. All there was at Bodinnick was a lovely big garden. And she was terrified.

"My home's back in London," she kept crying.

"Not anymore, it's not," Jay taunted.

"Emmy, this isn't Narnia, is it? Is it? Maya says it is. She says there's an evil queen in that wardrobe and Jay told me to go through the coats, and..."

"But you've read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, haven't you?" Emmy said, not as gently as she meant to. She wasn't in the mood to have Maya blamed for Asha's neuroses, but at the same time she couldn't bear to think that the move might be making any of them unhappy.

"I don't like it. Daddy stopped it. It scared me."

"They're just playing it out."

"I don't want them to."

"Why not?" Emmy's parenting skills didn't stretch to reassurance. There had never been the need.

"I just don't."

"You could be Lucy."

"I don't want to be Lucy. I want to be me. I want to go home."

"Well, you know what?" Emmy said. "This is better than Narnia-this is Bodinnick."

Which wasn't entirely the right thing to say. Asha needed fitted carpets and double glazed windows, not magic and mystery. In Emmy's defense, she knew very little about children like that. The prosecution might say she had no desire to, either.

Suddenly, from the floor there was a dull thud, a split second's silence and then a blood-curdling scream. Lila had fallen from her nest of cushions and was hanging backward out of the brown plastic dog basket, her head resting on the hard, cold lino.

"For God's sake, who put her down there?" Sita shouted.

"You did," Emmy said.

"Well, it's about bloody time she learned how to sit up!"

"Wellies on, kids," Emmy said quickly, realizing the household could take no more. "You ain't seen nothin' yet."

It was true. The house, just as Emmy had promised, was shrinking, but the grounds and outbuildings were still an unknown universe, with secrets lurking behind every hut and hydrangea.

3.

Emmy frogmarched the children to the chapel first, because she thought the walk would do them good.

In truth, the perfect little medieval building nestling in the corner of a field on the other side of the lane that led from the manor to the farmhouse had always 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.

"No 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."

"I think that may be true."

"Then you have one duty to him, and one duty alone."

"Which is?"

"To make the most of your joie de vivre. He used to say you inherited it from him."

"That may be true, too."

"So you must let Bodinnick make you as happy as it made him. Make your life exactly what you want it to be."

"It would help if I knew."

"He always thought you did know."

"Ah," Emmy had said feebly. "But what about you? Are you sure you don't want to stay on?"

"Thank you, my dear, but I couldn't bear to be there without him. My cottage in Totnes will serve me more than well until I go and join him."

Once she knew that, she had been brave enough to ask the rest. She'd tried not to focus on the drip hanging from the end of his long, thin nose.

"Do you think I could share the house? With friends? A sort of cooperative, so that all of us and none of us own it? They're good friends, best friends, they're more important to me than my family. I'd trust them with my life."

Julian had said, with a nod so definite that the nose drip fell and settled on his mustard cashmere scarf, that he thought that would make Toby very happy indeed. He said Toby knew all about friends being more important than family, present company excepted.

Amazing, since the wedding and the train crash were, at that stage, still a whole week away. Spooky, even.

Perhaps the manor had been nurturing her all her life for this. Her responses to the place had always been different from the rest of the family's. She was the only one who never got scared here as a child, the only one who came and stayed with Toby on her own, the only one who wanted to play in the attic, poke around the rooms, make dens in the garden. Her brothers used to pester for a day on the beach or a tent in the field, but Emmy always preferred to be within striking distance of its thick granite walls. Being inside its grounds was like having her own fortified town. She never wanted to be queen, just inhabitant. Besides, it had already had its queen.

"Be careful!" she shouted to the children as one of the fake marble columns wobbled. It was verging on the disrespectful, the way they were suddenly lost in the desire to possess. Half an hour ago, they had been tearful, taunting and homesick. Now they were behaving like a crack team of consummate carjackers. Well, they hadn't been near a shop other than the village one for ten days, which must be a record.

"Uh, I need a man!" Maya shouted, trying to drag the pink bicycle free from its prison of ropes and old chairs.

Don't we all, darling? Emmy felt like replying.

"Jaysus! It's Liberace's dressing room."

Oh my God, she thought, leaping out of her skin as Niall appeared from nowhere. I can do thought-transference. Wish him, and he appears.

He had his arm round Prince Philip. "I'm beginning to see what your family were up against," he said, moving the figure to one side.

"Careful. Toby's ghost lives on, you know. He'll come to haunt you with his feather boa and Judy Garland record collection."

"I hope so. It'd be nice to see him again."

"Wouldn't it."

"It would. This is great," he said, looking around. "God almighty, that's an amplifier and a half."

"That was for his electric guitar."

"Where's the guitar, then? Is that still around?"