The Secret of Happy Ever After (39 page)

‘Or . . . anything else?’

Becca shut the fridge door and came over to the table with her glass of milk. Her plaits were hanging either side of her face and she had deep circles under her blue eyes. Her alabaster bare feet sticking out from her baggy ‘revision trousers’ reminded Anna of a goose girl in some European fairytale book – apart from the green nail varnish.

‘Anna,’ she said, sitting down at the table. ‘Tell me something honestly?’

‘If I can.’ Anna put the book down and braced herself.

‘Me and Owen.’ Becca looked uncomfortable, then blurted it out: ‘Is it a problem for you and Michelle? Us dating?’

‘What?’ Anna hadn’t been expecting that one. ‘Er, no, course not, it’s . . . Well . . .’

Becca kept looking at her with the piercing expression Anna suspected would see her do well in a courtroom situation. She couldn’t deny it; things hadn’t been quite so warm as usual between her and Michelle, but it wasn’t just Owen. Anna wasn’t sure Michelle quite understood how much the pregnancy disappointment had crushed her, so she’d hugged it to herself. It wasn’t normal for her not to share something that had upset her so much.

Not that she could tell Becca that.

‘Well,’ she amended, ‘it’s not a
problem
. It’s just that he’s a bit older than you are, obviously, and Michelle knows what he’s got up to in the past, and we’re both concerned that—’

‘Because I don’t want it to affect your friendship,’ Becca interrupted. ‘It’s between me and Owen. I’ve noticed you getting all tense when he’s in the shop with me. And it’s ages since Michelle came round here for dinner.’

‘That’s because we’re so busy.’

‘When was the last time you two walked Pongo together? You used to do that all the time.’ Becca was serious. ‘What someone’s like when they’re your little brother, or your stepdaughter – it’s not what they’re like
as people
, when they’re together. So if you’re worried about me, and Michelle’s worried about him – don’t be.’ She frowned, as if she wasn’t sure she’d made herself understood. ‘It’s not like you think.’

‘I’m allowed to worry about you,’ said Anna. ‘If Michelle’s offended by me worrying, that’s her issue – I’d be worried about you if you were dating . . .’ She cast her mind about for someone current but innocuous, and realised she didn’t know anyone. ‘Justin Bieber?’

‘Aw.’ Becca reached over and squeezed Anna’s hand. Anna wasn’t sure if she was ‘awing’ the sentiment or the hopelessly wrong choice of celebrity. ‘But there’s no need. I know Owen’s a bit older than me, but we’re on the same wavelength. I feel like I’ve known him forever.’

‘So when are you going to invite him over for dinner, so we can all meet him?’ Anna asked. And so I can brush the fact that I’ve already told your dad under the carpet, she added to herself, feeling guilty.

‘Soon. He’s taking me to the prom.’

‘The prom,’ repeated Anna. ‘Are we all in America now?’

Becca looked up. The bags under her eyes were still there, but the eyes themselves were sparkling with an excitement that made Anna’s own heart ache with nostalgia. She could remember feeling that disorientating first rush of love, as bright and light as if no one else had ever felt it, as if you were looking down into the ultimate pool of emotional revelation. She also remembered how stupid it made you.

‘He’s amazing, Anna. He’s . . . like I wrote down my ideal man and suddenly, there he is.’

Anna watched Becca drink her milk and told herself that it would be fine. Telling Phil had been the responsible thing to do. And she hadn’t betrayed the confidence; all she’d done was pass on the fact that it was happening. She hadn’t told him about Becca’s expression, or the sweet things she said about Owen, or the way the bookshop website was really one big love letter to each other. She’d kept that to herself, and in return for that confidence she was keeping an eye on things. She was the useful buffer between child and parent that allowed Becca to grow into adulthood.

Under the table, Pongo shifted, laying his head on Anna’s foot.

It
was
ages since she and Michelle had walked him together, she thought. I should really rectify that. Just as soon as I can find some space in my diary.

On the other side of town, Michelle was unloading boxes from the back of her car and sweating gently while Tavish watched, his tail sweeping the step, his head cocked to one side.

They weren’t books for the shop, but she wondered if they could be, once she’d sorted through them. She certainly wasn’t going to read them again herself: they were the contents of her old room at home, plus a couple of boxes that been delivered straight from school to their attic after her shameful expulsion, and now from the attic into her spare room, unopened in thirteen years.

Michelle sorted the contents of the first three into bags for the shop, for the charity shop next door, for recycling and for the tip, then stopped when she came to the boxes that were still wrapped in tape with her school crest on.

She took a deep breath, then cut the tape and pulled open the flaps. As she looked inside, her past came rushing up in a wave.

On top were her sixth-form schoolbooks, instantly familiar by their colours and texture, if not their contents.
The Color Purple
, her pale blue Shakespeares, the stone-grey
Story of Art
, wedged into this box in the order they’d been on her study bookshelf. She didn’t remember packing but whoever it was had just grabbed and dumped, grabbed and dumped, until all traces of Michelle Nightingale, Upper Sixth Arts, had been removed from the room and taped up in the box.

She’d never unpacked because she’d never needed to revise. ‘
We regret that it will be impossible for Michelle to return to sit her A-level examinations. Arrangements may be made for her to sit the examinations elsewhere
.’ Except arrangements hadn’t been made. Michelle had been well away by then, first staying with her aunt in New Zealand, then back home in Surrey – anywhere but in a gym hall, recalling three key dramatic themes of
Othello
.

She pulled the flap back further and saw the pencil cases stuffed in the gaps, the postcards yanked off her study wall with the Blu-Tack still globbed on the back, the revision calendar to her exams with only three days crossed off. The CDs shoved in the spaces; Blur, Pulp, Nick Drake, music she’d never listened to again but which she could hear now in her head, like a jukebox suddenly springing into life.

1999 in a box. Her eighteenth year, frozen and waiting for her to unpack, the breaths and whispers of those months ready to be released from the pages of the books. Even now – was it her imagination? – she could smell the throat-burning scent of Lynx that had permeated every corner of the dormitories.

Michelle slammed the flap down, pushing it back into the sealed position with fumbling fingers.

She would take the other bags to the dump and to the shops, but these boxes were going straight into the attic. There were some things she didn’t want to unpack.

22

Michelle wasn’t used to running up against opposition from her Business Relationship Manager at the bank, so it took her a while to realise that Martin Leonard, who’d always insisted she was his favourite client, was telling her, albeit in a very roundabout way, that she couldn’t extend her overdraft facility, and that they were very unlikely to approve a mortgage for ‘a possible further property’.

Longhampton was enjoying a June heatwave, but the beads of perspiration on Martin’s brow had nothing to do with the efficacy of the bank’s air-con, and everything to do with Michelle’s direct gaze, and the presentation she’d prepared. He kept shuffling and reshuffling her pages but he wasn’t saying yes.

When it finally did sink in, somewhere around the nine-minute mark, a dull weight settled in the pit of her stomach. Money wasn’t going to be the answer to the unpleasant choices she was now facing.

The bookshop was no longer breaking even now the novelty value had worn off and the summer had begun. They’d shifted some holiday paperbacks but not as many as she’d hoped; as Anna explained in her generous way, most of their budget-conscious customers stockpiled their holiday reading at the supermarket, ‘and you can hardly blame them’. Anna’s solution was to push ‘classic deckchair reads’, not new titles, but that wasn’t making much money. Michelle had lain awake for several sticky nights, thinking about what Rory had said about Anna and reflected brand value, and had tried to come up with a different solution that would keep everyone happy. Her last, maybe maddest, idea had been to take Rory up on his offer to find another premises and rent that as well, but Martin Leonard was very firm about the bank’s new ‘cautious financial overview’.

‘If it was up to myself, Michelle, you know I’d invest the money in your venture yesterday,’ he’d said, with a new bead of sweat appearing on his forehead. ‘But the bank’s clamping down. Come back next year, see what’s happening then.’

Michelle had smiled tightly, agreed to put aside one of the limited-edition glass Pimm’s jugs for his wife, and marched down the high street so hard she lost the heel cap off one of her stilettos. When she reached the bookshop, the fizzing in her stomach hadn’t subsided and her brain was still blank, so to Anna’s surprise, she’d grabbed Tavish and her trainers and taken him for an impromptu walk. She didn’t want any of her staff to see her like this.

They only got as far as the park, where Michelle sat on a bench and stared into the middle distance. If she could get a decent night’s sleep it would help but she hadn’t had more than a couple of hours a night in weeks, tossing and turning until 4 a.m. She couldn’t take the same pleasure in her own cloud-white bedlinen mood board – or even her own bedroom – after what Rory had said about the pillows. Not only was it
wrong
and
irrelevant
, it was also outrageously
rude
coming from a man with a light sabre, and she wished she’d had the presence of mind to tell him that when he’d come out with it.

Rory was much easier to be outraged by in theory than he was in the flesh. In the flesh he seemed strangely reasonable.

Michelle stared across the park, which was dotted with slow-walking senior couples being towed along by their dogs, and mums steering buggies with toddlers and patient Labradors around the path towards the play area.

Beside her – not on the bench, that would be unhygienic – Tavish belched and didn’t look remotely embarrassed. Since he’d had his teeth out, he’d taken on a sprightly new lease of life, and ate the most disgusting things when her back was turned. God knew what he found to scoff at Rory’s bachelor sty.

I’m thirty-one, she thought, and for the first time, she felt a pang of loneliness. I’m thirty-one and I feel bloody fifty. When’s this ever going to get better?

Michelle knew what the answer was: when she summoned up the courage to cut herself free from Harvey. The papers had sat in their thick legal envelope on her kitchen table for a week now, but in that week, she’d suffered the worst nightmares she’d had in years, culminating in a terrible, vivid flashback to her twenty-sixth birthday party, where Harvey had flown into an incoherent rage about the ‘tarty’ outfit she’d bought from the only boutique he approved of, and locked her in the garage for seven hours, telling their friends waiting at the restaurant that she’d had a disastrous haircut and was too vain to show her face. Michelle only found that bit out later, when Harvey came home, wreathed in their sympathy for his stupid child-wife, and chopped off her long black hair himself – ‘So your story’s straight.’

Michelle didn’t know what he’d do when he got the forms. Although the flowers had stopped, Rachel from the rescue had called to ‘thank her’ for a friend of hers sponsoring a dog in her name.

‘He asked us which dog had been in there the longest, so I suggested Minty, that Staffy girl with one eye,’ she’d explained. ‘He said he wanted to sponsor whichever one no one seemed to want. Really thoughtful. Most people just want the cute puppies.’

It
wasn’t
thoughtful. Michelle knew it was Harvey’s way of telling her she was damaged goods, that no one else would give her a second look. But as usual, it was dressed up as a kind act that she could hardly take offence at, and it made her feel like a rat in a trap.

She stared out into the park, feeling more alone than ever.

Normally she’d have turned to Anna, who’d have been by her side wrestling Pongo away from a passing spaniel, and they’d have laughed about it. Anna would have told her she was single for a reason – so Mr Right would know she was available. Then they’d have dragged the dogs to the dog café for carrot cake.

Anna wasn’t there, though. She was with her family.

‘Time to go, Tavish,’ she said and stood up.

Back in the shop, there was a hum of conversation coming from the back room and two folded buggies by the door. Anna wasn’t at the counter, and when Michelle stepped inside, she saw Anna in the back room, deep in conversation with a few other women, two of whom had babies on their lap and a book in their hand. Two other toddlers were sitting on the floor, playing with the toys from the toy box. It was rather a charming scene, Michelle had to admit – not least because of the piles of soon-to-be-bought books the women were holding.