The Secret of Happy Ever After (46 page)

Rory looked relieved. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Now you just have to prove to me that you’re not the uptight control freak I think you are by sitting down and reading the papers with me without picking up the scatter cushions when I move them off the sofa.’

Michelle smiled tightly. ‘One step at a time.’

When he was gone, she flicked through the supplements, but she couldn’t settle. Her mind kept wandering back to Jilly Cooper and the packed boxes upstairs. Her original copy of
Riders
was probably still in there – she could skip ahead with it this afternoon, quicker than waiting to listen to it on her next run. But even though part of her wanted to unpack them and see what was in there, a bigger part wished they’d just disappear without her having to touch them again.

Michelle put the magazine down with a slap that made Tavish jolt awake next to her on the sofa. This was crazy. They were only books. Books and pencils and junk. This was why she never allowed clutter in her home. It bred dust and regrets and mess.

Before she could think any more, Michelle forced herself off the sofa and up the stairs to her spare room.

The boxes were stacked against her wardrobe, the flaps bent where she’d hurriedly rammed them shut. Michelle opened the first one and started unpacking the books inside.

‘Surprise, surprise,’ she said aloud, as a dog-eared copy of
Riders
came out, sandwiched between
The Color Purple
and
Othello
.

It was the smell that came back to her most powerfully, along with the order in which the books had been stacked – the exact left-to-right order of her bookshelf. Her books smelled of the Anaïs Anaïs that her study-mate Katherine had applied liberally every time she had a cigarette out of the bathroom window, and coffee.

These could go into the shop, she thought. Anna could sell them as vintage editions.

Michelle lifted out three books at once, and in the middle was a fabric-bound notebook, with leather ties wrapped around it. As she touched it, another memory leaped up in her chest; this was a book she’d forgotten about entirely until now, but it was so familiar she felt jerked backwards into a different time, as if she’d never left it.

She stared at it. How could that be there? Hadn’t she got rid of it? More to the point, who’d packed it? Had her dad swept all this stuff into boxes when he came for her? Had he read it? The thought made her feel nauseous.

Michelle put the surrounding dictionaries down and held the notebook in shaking hands, remembering the feel of the paisley-patterned Indian covering. A present from a school friend who’d gone travelling in the summer. Handmade pages, perfect for miserable outpourings of teenage angst.

Of all the books in the box, this was the one she’d written herself. My diary, she thought. Still hidden between the books on her shelf, sandwiched spine in so no one would spot it.

Her stomach began to sink as she opened the pages and saw her rounded teenage handwriting, the purple ink, and although she didn’t want to read, she couldn’t stop herself.

25

Michelle’s diaries began when she started the Black Monk School in the lower sixth, and initially detailed – quite obsessively – the daily routines, how often she could call her parents, Owen’s homesickness in the prep school attached to her secondary school, then Owen’s complete conquest of his entire year, and so on.

Until then, she’d gone to the local school in Kingston, but an upswing in her father’s business, combined with her mother’s determination to carve out some more ‘me time’, had meant she and Owen had moved up in the world. Owen, a natural athlete, had settled in quickly; for Michelle it had been harder, since the school only took girls in the sixth form, and those that were there seemed much more worldly than her, more skilled in playing off the constant jostles of male attention.

Romance entered the picture early on. Her crush on Ed Pryce started from the first day she had to do a lunchtime queue supervision with him. Her handwriting scrawled in awe as each detail of their conversation was forensically recorded, and it came back to her at once – the hot-chips smell of the dining hall and the musty reek of 200 teenage boys queueing outside. Ed put two fourth years in detention for being cheeky to her, and her heart was gone.

I don’t remember being this soppy, she thought, her eye skimming her lovelorn notes on every detail of his ‘thoughtful expression’ while trying to translate French texts, and his ‘gorgeous long lashes’. She couldn’t really remember Ed’s face that well, just the feeling she got when she looked at him sideways. But the metallic pang of longing leapt from the page, of afternoons spent chewing a pencil and staring out of her study window, hoping to see the flash of blond hair over the hedge that meant he was coming to visit someone in her boarding house.

Even in Michelle’s elaborately ‘theoretical’ lists of her ideal man, written because Katherine had read in
Company
magazine that if you visualised your ideal man, he’d appear in your life, she was clearly describing Ed.

‘My ideal man would be tall,’ she wrote, ‘probably a rugby player or cricketer, with blond hair and green eyes, with his own car (not Vauxhall).’

She sank back onto her heels, as her lower sixth year unfolded in a series of tests, and petty arguments with the other girls, and agonies about her weight, and the triumphs and failures of the rugby team, in which Ed Pryce was a key player. Reliving it all wasn’t quite as traumatic as she’d expected when she first saw the notebook, and she found herself smiling at some of her cattier comments.

I was so dull, thought Michelle, amused at the way she measured her thighs daily to see if the cabbage soup diet was taking effect. And quite a cow.

She was brought up short against one entry, towards the end of her first year. ‘
Mum’s away again for half term, so Owen
and I are staying with Ben in London. I don’t know if Dad’s going with her. He didn’t know anything about it when I phoned.’

Michelle remembered staying with Ben, and trailing round the Planetarium with Owen, but she didn’t remember it being because her mum wasn’t around. Funny how she had blanked that bit out; it was such an obvious palming-off. I should ask Ben about that, she thought. If he even remembers.

Come on, come on, she thought, skimming through endless reports of classroom bitchery in search of juicier observations about Ed Pryce. Hadn’t she managed a single snog? But then, as she turned into her upper sixth form, the words started getting more familiar, and she slowed down, feeling a sudden dread in the pit of her stomach when she reached the spring term.

Michelle slammed the diary shut, her face suddenly hot. A weird sense of déjà vu filled her head, like being at the top of a rollercoaster and already feeling the plunge though it hadn’t started, and she felt caught between a need to read on, and a need to throw the book so far away that she’d never have to look at it again.

She held the diary in her hand for a moment and then, without even thinking, shoved it between the mattress and the base of her spare bed, and began piling the books back into the box.

The shockwaves from Chloe’s exam disaster took a long time to disperse in the McQueen house. Chloe was distraught but defiant, and kept insisting that she ‘might as well’ leave school to become an international pop star now. Phil was furious with the teachers, with the exam board, with Sarah, with himself – everyone apart from Chloe and Anna. He didn’t dare be furious with Anna, since she was only just holding things together as it was, mainly by taking Pongo for extended walks while listening to audiobooks. Superwoman had gone by the wayside: she hadn’t done a deep clean on the house since May, and she didn’t care. If Phil cared, he was too scared to point it out. Chloe’s general mood was one of operatic fury in every direction, interspersed with some breathtaking displays of meanness that reminded Anna of Evelyn. The school wasn’t being as sympathetic as they’d all hoped about her grades, despite Anna and Phil’s desperate conversations with the staff, and even when they persuaded the school to let her continue into the sixth form, she accused them of ‘making the school treat me like a freak’.

It didn’t help that Becca’s Law reading list books were now sitting in a box by the stairs waiting to be opened. Becca herself was very quiet on the topic of Cambridge, as if she didn’t want to rub her sister’s nose in it, but Lily guilelessly triggered at least one spectacular row every day by asking if she could have Becca’s room ‘when she went to university’.

Phil’s response to the roiling tension in his family was to order the shed he’d dreamed of for so long. It arrived in the garden the same day that Chloe was brought back by Tyra’s mother, giggling hysterically and drunk on cider, and it took all Anna’s strength not to lock herself in it.

Evelyn’s birthday at the end of August was an annual trial for all the family, but particularly Anna, who had to find a present as well as arrange a lunch and guilt-trip the girls into being nice to their granny, who celebrated her birthday by being twice as rude to everyone, as if it was some kind of special treat.

‘Michelle, I need your help,’ she said, popping next door during a lunch break. ‘What do you get a seventy-nine-year-old woman who not only has everything but also hates everything?’

‘Budget?’ Michelle stopped flipping through a catalogue. She couldn’t resist a present challenge, just as Anna couldn’t resist recommending books.

Anna smacked Phil’s credit card down on the counter. ‘Whatever it takes. Plus fifty quid danger money for me, since I’ll have to bear the brunt of the sarcasm when she hates it.’

Michelle laughed. ‘When for?’

‘It’s her birthday on Sunday. We’re taking her out for a meal, and I’ve got to organise that, and the present. Obviously.’

‘And Phil can’t do it because . . . ?’

‘Because he’s more scared of her than I am. She blames him for Chloe’s grades, Becca’s height and Lily’s braces.’ Anna rolled her eyes. ‘And she is in no way genetically responsible for any of that, the cantankerous old bag.’

‘Woah! You’re not scared of anyone any more, are you?’

‘Nope. Clearly I’m a terrible stepmother, so what can she tell me that I don’t know already?’ said Anna recklessly. ‘I might as well just spend the weekend in bed with Lily reading
Anne of Green Gables
. At least two of us would be happy then. Three, if I let Pongo up.’

‘Anna, you know you’re not a terrible stepmother.’

She fiddled with the card. ‘It feels like it. I should have checked up on Chloe more. I should have tested her.’

‘How? She’s old enough to know when she’s not putting the hours in. Look, if you were such a bad stepmother then Becca would have failed everything too, wouldn’t she? And,’ Michelle added, more tersely, ‘kindly tell Phil to stop making out that the world ends if you fail some exams. It’s not true, and it’s pretty offensive to those of us who’ve managed to drag ourselves out of the gutter without a degree.’

Anna looked at her. ‘That’s a good point. I will mention it.’

‘Thank you,’ said Michelle. ‘Now, how about a silk Liberty scarf? You can always throttle her with it if she winds you up. A very stylish way to go.’

It took ages to get the girls ready on Sunday. Chloe had to be dragged out of bed, and Becca had already vanished to Owen’s and had to be called back. While Phil took Pongo round the block to wear him out, Anna checked the contents of the fridge to see if they needed to call in at the supermarket while they were out.

She peered into the depths and frowned. The big Sainsbury’s order had come on Friday as usual, but there didn’t seem to be as much in there as she remembered unpacking.

‘Chloe, have you eaten the mascarpone?’ she asked as Chloe wafted in, furious in her one appropriate dress.

‘No. Why’s it always
me
who gets accused of things?’ She looked outraged. ‘It’s so unfair!’

‘It’s not unfair, it’s a reasonable assumption based on fact,’ said Anna. She adopted Becca’s courtroom style, since it got such instant results with Chloe. ‘Where did the two tubs of Ben and Jerry’s go last weekend?’

‘That’s not fair either!’ roared Chloe. ‘The band were here! You didn’t give us enough supper!’

‘Well, on that basis, did you eat the mascarpone?’

‘Oh my God. It’s like a police state.’ Chloe boggled her eyes and said in a deliberately slow voice, ‘I don’t even know what mascarpone is.’

‘White cream cheese stuff. I was going to make a tiramisu for later, so it’s your loss.’ Anna peered more closely at her. Was that evidence of secret scoffing on her top lip? Or moustache bleach?