The Secret of Happy Ever After (32 page)

‘Actually, you know what, Becca? Chloe’s right,’ said Anna quickly, seeing a way to get Becca on her own. ‘I’d let her take them for you.’

Becca released them as if they were red-hot, and immediately Chloe switched off the shriek of outrage before it began.

‘You’re going to have to be smarter than that if you’re going to be a hotshot Cambridge lawyer.’ Chloe made a smug ‘score one to me’ gesture in the air and flounced out.

Some seconds later, Becca and Anna heard the opening bars of ‘I Kissed a Girl’ being bellowed through the karaoke machine in Chloe’s room. Only she was singing, ‘I Stole Some Jeans (and I Liked It)’.

‘. . . the jeans of
MY SAD SISTER
 . . .’

‘Becca,’ said Anna, kicking the door shut, ‘is there anything going on with you and Owen? You can tell me.’

Becca inspected her ragged revision nails. ‘No,’ she said. ‘We’re just hanging out.’

‘Really?’

Anna didn’t want to push too hard, but nor did she want to embarrass Becca if the crush was a bit one-sided. She knew that feeling too.

‘. . . I stole some jeans
AND THEY FIT ME
 . . .’

Becca stared into space, unable to hide the smile that had nothing to do with Chloe’s singing, then she looked back at Anna, her eyes sparkling with the need to share it with someone. ‘We’ve had a picnic in the park. He’s taken me out for lunch. We talk a lot about everything. He’s such an interesting guy – he’s spent time in India, and Ireland, and he wants to work in New York . . .’

‘He’s a bit older than you,’ said Anna.

‘There’s a bigger gap between you and Dad,’ said Becca, with a speed that suggested she’d pre-prepared that particular argument.

‘There’s a difference between twenty-four and eighteen, and thirty-three and twenty-four.’ As Anna said it, she knew – and Becca knew – that they were arguing about maths; she’d been much more naive than Becca, even at twenty-four with a degree
and
a job.

‘But I’ve got more in common with Owen than with the lads at school,’ said Becca. ‘They’re so fixated on stupid stuff. Owen’s done things. He’s got his own ideas, not just a load of band T-shirts. I could lie there and just talk to him for hours and hours.’

Lie there.
The dreamy way she said it made one question flash into Anna’s mind, and she couldn’t not ask. Men like Owen didn’t lie around for hours just talking. Not for long.

‘Becca, are you . . . ?’ This wasn’t in the parenting books either. But Owen had a flat of his own and no revision timetable, unlike Josh the oboe boy. Phil wouldn’t ask. She had to struggle on. ‘Are you sleeping together?’

Becca turned red. ‘
Anna!
No.’

‘Right,’ said Anna. That sounded more like a ‘not yet’ than a ‘no’. Becca’s body language was more forthcoming. Now she had the information she’d wanted, Anna wasn’t sure it made her feel any happier.

‘Are you going to tell Dad?’ Becca asked, and the blissful look left her face. ‘It’s just . . . You remember what he was like with Josh. That horrendous dinner. I don’t want Owen to get the “What are your intentions?” speech. Not yet. Not until he isn’t going to go off me because my family are a bunch of loons.’

‘No,’ said Anna. ‘No one wants that.’ She struggled internally, trying to balance the trust Becca had just put in her with her own responsibility to Phil. The trouble was, it was so tempting to promise that, yes, she’d keep their secret. It felt like the first proper stepmother thing she’d done.

‘Please don’t tell him yet,’ Becca begged, seeing her waver.

‘OK.’ She was going to have to talk to Michelle, though. Like that conversation was going to be any less awkward. ‘How about
you
tell him, once you’re sure Owen won’t mind coming to dinner? You can ask him over. Maybe Michelle can come too, make it seem less of an interview?’ If Owen was nice, and he liked talking as much as Becca said he did, that wouldn’t be too long, she argued to herself.

Becca seemed happy. ‘Fair enough.’

‘But soon, Becca,’ Anna warned her. ‘It’d be awful if he found out from someone else.’

There was another blast of singing from across the landing, as if someone had opened a bedroom door to make a loud point.

‘. . . I stole her jeans
AND THEY’RE STRETCHY
, hope her
BOYFRIEND
don’t mind it . . . A baggy
ARSE
, a baggy
KNEE
 . . .’

Becca narrowed her eyes. ‘Promise me you’ll cut the plug off that thing while we’re away?’

‘Bring me some Whitestrips from Duane Reade,’ said Anna, ‘and it can be arranged.’

They shook on it.

Later that night, when Anna was going through her diary at the kitchen table, blocking out the next few weeks with work and Reading Aloud sessions, she noticed something she’d been too busy to notice before.

Her period should have started two days ago.

She flicked backwards through the squares of dance classes, bookshop shifts and supermarket deliveries, and frowned. No, she’d definitely had her last period on the fifth – she’d taken so many painkillers for her terrible cramps that she’d read the same page of
Right Ho, Jeeves
three times over at Butterfields before one of the old dears had pointed it out to her.

‘This is rubbish,’ Chloe announced from the sofa. The girls and Phil were watching
Britain’s Got Talent
, and marking everyone harshly out of ten. ‘I cannot
believe
these morons got through the auditions and we didn’t.’

‘You should have trained Pongo to dance with you,’ said Lily, who was allowed to stay up to join in the criticism. Pongo was on the sofa next to her, draping himself equally over her and Chloe, his head resting lovingly in Lily’s lap. ‘Then you’d have won.’

‘They’d have put Pongo through and not the Apricotz,’ said Becca. ‘That’s if they could have told the singing apart.’

‘Anna? Don’t you think they’re crap?’ demanded Chloe, over her shoulder.

‘At least you can hear what they’re singing. And don’t say “crap”,’ admonished Phil. ‘Say something more intelligent.’

‘Don’t you think they’re
bollocks
? What? That’s Chaucer. Anna, tell him how bad they are. He’s too old to realise, poor old man.’

Anna carried on staring at her diary. Was this real? Had she got it wrong? No, it added up. Her heart hammered in her chest. Was she actually pregnant? Without noticing? Was that even possible?

‘Er, they’re not very good,’ she said, without thinking. ‘Definitely not as good as the Apricotz.’

Pregnant. For once words seemed inadequate, too detached from what was happening right now inside her. Anna had never been pregnant before. She had no idea what it was supposed to feel like, beyond the swooning, rampant vomiting, or luminous blooming of fictional mothers-to-be, which she presumed was a bit exaggerated.

Although, now she thought about it, she did feel faintly . . . nauseous. Nauseous, and excited.

‘Vote them off !’ roared Chloe from the sofa. ‘It’s a NNNGGGHHH from me!’

‘And it’s a NNNGGGHHH from me too!’ said Lily.

‘Anna, why don’t you come and watch this with us?’ Phil looked round from his La-Z-Boy chair, one of the pair he’d bought when it was just the two of them. ‘I need some intellectual commentary to counterbalance this honking.’

‘Um, yeah, in a minute.’

Anna checked the dates again, and again, and when the pages started swimming in front of her eyes she made herself walk over to the sofa. It felt like walking on clouds, or on the moon, her knees light and insubstantial in her legs.

I’m pregnant, she kept thinking. Over and over. I’m pregnant.

She managed to get through bath and bedtime, and a chapter of Lily’s new story, and then chivvying Chloe upstairs, before she finally got Phil on his own.

‘Phil, there’s something we need to talk about,’ she said, watching his back as he loaded the dishwasher.

‘If it’s letting Chloe audition for
Britain’s Got Talent
, the answer’s still no. Not even if she trains Pongo to do the paso doble with her.’

‘No, it’s . . .’ Anna swallowed, watching him ram the pasta pan in the wrong section of the rack. What was the right way to do this? In her imagination over the years she’d gone for all sorts of cutesy tactics: the bootee in the cake box, the positive pregnancy test under his pillow. When it came to it now, she just wanted to blurt it out. ‘It’s not Chloe. It’s me.’

Phil seemed to sense her jitteriness, and put down the tea towel. ‘What? Is it something the girls have done?’

‘No! No, they’re fine. It’s . . .’

Phil looked up, then saw the strain mingling with excitement on her face. ‘Anna?’

‘Sit down,’ she said, gesturing at the table. ‘I know, it’s an awful cliché, but I’d prefer it if we were sitting down.’

He pulled out a chair and slid onto it. The crease between his brows had deepened now. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Please don’t tell me you want to leave. I have literally no idea how anything works in this house. I’m sorry, whatever it is I’ve done.’

‘What? No!’ Anna nearly laughed at how wrong he was. She sat down and reached for his hands, and when he curled his fingers round hers, she said quietly, ‘Phil, my period’s late. It’s never late.’

‘How late?’

‘Two days.’

He said nothing for a few long seconds, then asked, ‘Have you done a test?’ A muscle in his neck twitched.

‘Not yet,’ said Anna. She smiled, she couldn’t help it. ‘I didn’t want to tempt fate.’

‘How? It’s not really up to fate, is it? I mean, you’re either pregnant or you’re not, it’s not like you can . . . Sorry.’ He wiped a hand across his face. ‘Sorry, that’s not the right thing to say.’

‘No,’ said Anna. ‘It’s not.’ She sat back in her chair and looked at him.

This wasn’t the reaction she’d expected. She hadn’t been banking on euphoria, given the things he’d said the other day about babies being stinky and exhausting. But excitement, definitely. Pretend disappointment that the shed was off the agenda for a while, possibly. Not this. Not . . .
annoyance
.

‘Are you sure?’ he said, starting again. ‘It’s just that two days is quite early. You’ve been pretty stressed lately, that can affect your period.’

‘I know I’m not as expert as you, but I can count,’ Anna began, but he held up his hands to stop her.

‘Sorry. It’s just that . . . well, I’ve been through a few false alarms, let’s say.’

‘Well, I haven’t,’ she said, hurt. ‘So bear with me if I’m feeling a bit excited. Phil, I might be having a baby. Doesn’t that make you feel . . . thrilled?’ She paused. He didn’t look very thrilled. ‘How
do
you feel?’

‘Well, half of me would be pretty impressed that everything was still working,’ Phil replied, with a half-laugh. ‘But then the other half of me would be a bit scared.’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘And I’d be on the phone to the surgery, wondering who we could sue about the Pill. Isn’t it meant to be ninety-nine per cent effective? What happened? Were you sick? Did you miss one?’

This was it. The point on the tracks where their marriage could go one way or another. Anna couldn’t understand how it had gone from fizzy excitement to panic in a matter of seconds.

‘It is pretty reliable, yes,’ she said. ‘If you’re taking it. But I’m not.’

‘What?’ He stared at her. ‘You’re joking, right?’

‘No. You
knew
I’d stopped. I stopped after our anniversary, like we agreed when we got married. Don’t pretend you’d forgotten that?’

Phil said nothing, and Anna’s heart hung in her chest. Everything felt like it was hanging – for this second, he was still her handsome, reliable husband, her dream man, her complicated-but-worth-it family. In the next moment, all that could be crushed. She knew it sounded melodramatic – she could hear the screechiness of her inner voice – but that was how tightly wound she was. So tightly she hadn’t even considered any other reactions.

‘I hadn’t forgotten,’ said Phil slowly, his voice low, ‘but I didn’t think you’d go ahead and do something as serious
for all of us
as stop using contraception without discussing it first.’

‘We discussed it in the car,’ said Anna. ‘On the way to the airport.’

‘That wasn’t a discussion, that was just a general chat about families! Did you actually say, oh by the way, just so you know, from now on every time we have sex, you might get an early Christmas present? No!’ Phil barked, then swallowed to control his temper. ‘Anna. Did you listen to anything I said about the girls being unsettled by Sarah buggering off and leaving them here? Or about how I’d quite like some time to ourselves? Some time off from parenting?’

‘I heard all that.’ Anna was struggling to keep the tears out of her own voice. ‘But did you hear me telling you how much I want a baby? Not just then, but for the last four years? I don’t see why this
is
such a bad time. Sarah’s coming back in a year, and the longer we leave it, the bigger the gap will be between Lily and another baby, and the older
we’ll
be.’

‘And the exams that the kids have got coming up?’

‘We don’t have to tell them yet. When are pregnancies supposed to be safe to announce? Three months? That’s
way
after their exams finish.’