The Secret of Happy Ever After (21 page)

‘You can’t just expect Anna to drop everything to suit you,’ Phil said, seizing a fresh strand of argument. ‘She’s got to be in the bookshop at the weekend.’

‘What’s more important?’ Chloe demanded, finally running out of niceness. ‘Her job or her
stepdaughter
? Don’t I mean anything to
either
of you? Do you want me to live in this dump all my life, and
die
here? In some boring job?’

‘You’ll have to
get
a job first,’ Becca pointed out. ‘I don’t think anyone’s hiring Christina Aguilera impersonators at the moment.’

‘Shut up, Becca,’ roared Chloe. ‘Dad, tell her to shut up.’

Lily said nothing, but watched the argument with bug eyes, turning her head like a tennis spectator as the barbs whizzed from side to side.

‘I bet Mum would take us.’ Chloe tossed her hair and dared anyone to contradict her. ‘She said, didn’t she, Lily, that she’d take me to
American Idol
? Anna
should
take us. It’s her duty. It’s what a
real mother
would do for her—’

‘Chloe!’ snapped Phil, but not before everyone round the table had winced in unison.

‘Well, it’s true,’ she said defiantly.

Anna tried to hide the unexpected burning sensation in her throat.

‘We can talk about it,’ she said, as calmly as she could. ‘Why don’t you give me Tyra’s mum’s number and I’ll see what the plans are.’

‘Anna! That’s, like . . .’ The sunny glow returned to Chloe’s face.

‘It’s not a no from me,’ said Anna swiftly. ‘But it’s not a yes, either.’

‘It’s a “We’ll talk to Tyra’s mum”,’ said Becca, translating without looking up from her book. ‘You should tell Louis Walsh he can use that one.’

Chloe flicked her fringe and shoved her chair back. ‘I’m going to the cellar to practise,’ she said. ‘Don’t disturb me, OK?’

‘We won’t,’ said Phil. He sounded conciliatory now, the doting dad again. ‘Text us if you need anything.’

Anna watched his expression as his eyes followed Chloe out of the room, and she wished, just for once, that he’d tell her to stop being such a brat. But he never did.

Phil had no trouble laying down the law with Lily and Becca, but when it came to Chloe, he seemed scared of saying no, and scared of saying yes. Anna wondered if it because she was so like Sarah. Because she was, right down to the pointed chin. Maybe it was because she’d been the most devastated by her parents’ divorce? Or maybe just because she was a teenager? Whatever Phil said, Chloe would want the opposite; Anna’s covert child-rearing reference books said fifteen was that sort of age.

Anna could only remember being fifteen by cross-referencing with
Now
albums and books. Fifteen for her was Douglas Adams, all the Brontës in a dramatic gulp, Pulp and Blur. Not arguing with her dad, flying to the States every three months to see her mum, and auditioning for talent shows. How was she supposed to give Chloe what she needed if she didn’t know what it was? Phil knew her better. Why couldn’t he do it?

Phil caught her looking at him and grimaced.

‘That’s what those cute little babies turn into,’ he said. His tone was light, but his eyes were telling a different story.

She knew what he was thinking: ‘Fancy handling that all over again, when I’m fifty-six?’

‘Not necessarily,’ said Becca, still engrossed in her book. ‘Hello?’

‘No,’ said Anna. ‘Not necessarily.’

Becca went off to do her homework, taking an apple with her, and Lily retreated to the corner of the sitting room where Pongo snuck onto the sofa next to her while she played her Nintendo DS on his back.

Anna cleared the plates from the table while Phil poured what was left of the custard into the remains of the apple crumble, and sat there picking at the serving dish with a forlorn expression.

‘Can you get a move on?’ she asked. ‘I want the table to do some planning for the shop.’

He looked at her. ‘You could have backed me up,’ he muttered, rolling his eyes towards the cellar.

‘I could have backed
you
up?’ Anna carried on stacking the dishwasher. ‘How? What was I supposed to say?’

‘It’s obvious, isn’t it?’ The cogs had obviously been whirring. ‘I don’t want my daughter prancing around half dressed in front of television cameras, letting them make her look ridiculous.’

Anna leaned on the table in front of him. She ignored the ‘my daughter’ bit. ‘Come on, Phil, do you know how many weirdos audition for that programme?’ she hissed. ‘Thousands. She’d have to be very,
very
bad to get on to the part where they make them look ridiculous.’

His face twisted up and he dropped his voice. ‘Do we know how bad she is?’

‘Don’t you mean how
good
she is?’ Anna said. ‘Have you listened to her recently? She sings for the whole of the school run. She
narrates
it. In song. And sometimes it even rhymes.’

Phil looked pained. ‘Anna. I’m not into singing, you know that. I got the builders to soundproof that cellar for a reason. I love Chloe more than anything in the world, but even I realise she’s no Mariah Carey. Apart from the mad demands. How bad are we talking?’

‘She’s . . . pretty good,’ said Anna, trying to be fair. ‘And she won’t be on her own,’ she added. ‘There’s the other three, whoever they are at the time.’

Phil clattered his spoon in the empty dish. ‘It’s not really the point, though, is it?’ he said, looking thwarted. ‘She acts as though she’s twenty, but at the end of the day she’s still my baby. If I go, I’ll only wind up being on telly myself for lamping the judges when they don’t let her win then and there. To be honest, I’d rather be the mean dad who wouldn’t let her audition than have her upset. I couldn’t bear it.’

Anna put her arms round him and kissed his head. ‘You big softy. It’s not in any way a reluctance to spend all weekend in a queue with thousands of other Chloes?’

‘Don’t.’ He closed his eyes and made a worryingly convincing ‘soul-singer wobbly hand’ gesture that made Anna wonder whether he’d been telling the truth about never watching talent shows.

She sank down onto the chair next to him. ‘I don’t want to see Chloe upset either, but it’s literally all she talks about. If you don’t let her go, she’ll only demand to fly out for
American Idol
. Don’t let it turn into “Mum loves me more than Dad” again, with a side order of “Dad thinks I’m a crap singer but Mum believes in me and my Journey”.’

‘It’s typical of Sarah.’ Phil rolled his eyes. ‘Chloe’s got her exams coming up. Sarah should be telling her to concentrate on those.’

‘Then tell her she can go if her mocks are good. Or if she comes with me to read to her granny, or helps at the shop or something.’

‘You are so sensible.’

‘It’s all relative.’

‘Yeah, well, I bet Sarah’s put her up to this. She was just like Chloe at that age, doing all the school musicals. She was Sandy in
Grease
. Spent all day walking round the school in her PVC trousers “to get into the part”. All we boys thought about was how she got them on and off.’ He paused and looked stricken. ‘I hope Chloe’s not wearing anything like that.’

Anna put the final plate in the dishwasher and said nothing.

It was hard to imagine Sarah in PVC trousers, or being fifteen, for that matter. Anna had only met her a handful of times, but she’d always been perfectly groomed, the ideal HR woman. That was the strange thing – Anna never felt jealous of Sarah and Phil’s marriage. What gave her twinges were his references to their shared parenting, before the divorce. The births, the first steps, the tooth fairy. Stuff she’d never get to share, even though from now on, the girls would be in her life.

‘I hope she can sing better than her mother,’ said Phil, breaking into her thoughts. ‘Sarah never hit one single note the entire concert, but no one noticed. She wore the PVC trousers for weeks. They got the part before she did.’

There wasn’t much Anna could say to that, and she was struggling to come up with a response that wasn’t nosy or jealous-sounding when Lily called through from the sitting room.

‘Anna!’

‘Yes?’

‘Pongo wants his story now, please.’

‘Tell him to get ready for bed first,’ she called back. ‘Then we’ll have a chapter. Two if he makes sure you do your teeth properly.’

Phil looked at her, his mouth open. ‘Pongo wants a story?’ he repeated. ‘You’re kidding me. How did you manage to get Lily onto bedtime stories?’

‘Not sure,’ she admitted. ‘But Pongo seems to love them.’

And Lily did too. They’d now nearly finished
One Hundred and One Dalmatians
, and Anna had even found Lily reading to herself one morning.

‘Do you want to join us?’ she asked.

Phil’s mouth curved and she could tell he wanted to say yes. But he shook his head gently.

‘No, it’s all right,’ he said. ‘It’s your thing. And I don’t do voices as well as you do.’

Later on, upstairs, when she was reaching the end of the chapter and Lily’s heavy eyelids were drooping while Pongo snored beside her, Anna looked up and caught Phil watching her from the half-closed door.

He smiled and put a finger to his lips so she wouldn’t stop, and stood listening as Anna finished the part about the puppies rolling cleverly in soot to disguise their tell-tale spots. It always made her cry, so she was making a significant effort to keep it together.

Lily rewarded her performance with a loud snore.

Anna put the book down, turned Lily’s nightlight on and tugged Pongo’s collar to take him downstairs. She felt conscious of Phil’s eyes on her, and hugged the moment to herself, hoping this would go some way to rebalancing Chloe’s strop earlier.

See, she wanted to yell, and point at the tranquil scene. It could be like this!

Phil said nothing, but put his arms around her as she closed Lily’s bedroom door to the exact inch-gap she insisted on. He pulled her to his chest and kissed her forehead with a tenderness that Anna found almost too painful to bear.

11

On a personal level, Michelle hated Valentine’s Day – in her opinion it was for teenagers and people in the first twelve months of a relationship only – but from a sales point of view, it was one of her favourite days of the year.

She bought plenty of ad space in the local paper for both her shops, and the results were gratifying. Home Sweet Home ran out of everything pink and heart-shaped a whole week ahead of time, forcing her to bring out the new range of quilts she’d been storing in the upstairs flat. They sold out too, which only made her more excited about her bedlinen hunch.

But Anna had an even better Valentine’s Day in the bookshop. ‘Calorie-free’ book bouquets sold out, as did the ‘Read Your Own Romantic Hero’ kits for the single. She and Michelle came up with a window display of chocolate hearts, which customers could buy for their Valentine. Each one then ‘led’ to a special Valentine’s gift in the shop – meaning they were able to get rid of a lot of second-hand poetry, as well as a number of
Guess How Much I Love You?
and
Winnie the Pooh
type kids’ books, too.

All in all, it was a pretty good week for Michelle, marred only by a big padded card from ‘an admirer’ who didn’t bother to change his handwriting or obscure the Kingston postmark. She had to trail over to the sorting office to collect it because it wouldn’t go through the door, and then field a phone call from her mother enquiring as to whether she’d ‘got any cards this year?’

Michelle thought about lying and saying no, but knew that would only result in the card being re-sent. She didn’t dare say ‘I got lots’, either, in case that got back to Harvey too. Instead, she told her mother that yes, she’d got Harvey’s card and that Owen had opened it, along with the stack of cards he got himself.

That bit was true. Owen received about seven, most of them purchased in Home Sweet Home.

After a brief burst of romantic spring sunshine, the weather turned gloomy, and the shadows seemed to return to the nooks and crannies. One morning, Kelsey refused to cover Anna’s school-run hour in the afternoons, the hour when a new melancholy settled over the shop.

‘There’s something in there spooking me out,’ she said, coming into the bookshop reluctantly. ‘I’ve heard noises. In the back room.’

‘What sort of noises?’ Michelle stopped fixing silk flowers onto a pile of book bouquets and gave Kelsey her ‘Don’t mess with me’ stare. Kelsey was prone to funny feelings, which usually came on when she sensed hard work approaching.

‘I don’t know. Like someone’s in there. Watching me.’

‘Are you sure it’s not Rory moving around upstairs?’ asked Anna, tidying up the coffee cups from the children’s corner.

The gaggle of mummy friends had just left, but not before Anna had persuaded them to buy handfuls of Christine Pullein-Thompson books by arguing that it was cheaper than a real pony. ‘It could be his son.’