The Secret of Happy Ever After (5 page)

‘Don’t move to Monte Carlo,’ said Anna glumly. ‘I’d miss you.’

‘You could come with me. You and your Von Trapp brood of little McQueens, all in matching T-shirts from Petit Bateau. Bring your guitar.’

Under the table, Pongo let out a heavy sigh and a suspicious fart.

‘And on that note,’ said Anna,‘I should be leaving. We need to take Evelyn back to the home, and I think I’ve drunk
just
enough to get out of driving her.’ She pushed her chair back and ran her hands through her curly blond hair, pulling it up into a ponytail.

The landline rang and Anna automatically looked over to the telephone table, but Michelle ignored it, and poured herself another glass of wine.

‘Aren’t you going to get that?’

‘Nope. You’re here, so it can only be one of two people. My mother, calling to give me a guilt trip, or Harvey. I don’t want to talk to either of them.’

‘What? Haven’t you spoken to your mother today?’

‘Of course I have! What do you take me for? I called them this morning, before they all trooped off to church.’ Michelle’s forehead puckered faintly, between the eyes. ‘I thanked them for the sheepskin slippers and car de-icing kit, and my mother moaned about the unsuitable presents I’d sent my brothers’ kids, then dropped a few heavy hints about some lonely old unmarried aunt they’d had to do duty calls to yesterday. And then more or less told me I should get back with Harvey, or that’d be me.’

‘But why him? You’ve been separated for over three years. It’s not like he’s the only man left in the world. You could have anyone.’

‘Mum loves Harvey. And he’s Dad’s highest-performing salesman since I left. I think secretly they’d rather keep him than me.’ Michelle looked away, and Anna thought she might be hiding a less flippant reaction. ‘And . . . well, it’s complicated. He was there for Christmas. I keep telling Mum she should just adopt him and get it over with.’

Anna tried to say something, but Michelle stopped her with a look. ‘Anyway, I told them I was doing voluntary work in an old people’s home. That Reading Aloud thing you do.’

Anna’s jaw dropped; Michelle mirrored her exactly, and she looked so funny, her brown eyes cartoonishly wide in her heart-shaped face, that genuine laughter burst out of Anna for the first time that day. The idea of Michelle in the drab, cabbage-scented surroundings of Butterfields Residential Home – and reading a book, at that – was too outrageous.

‘For that I’m going to make you come to the next session. Oh!’ she said, her memory jogged. ‘I meant to say – when we were collecting Evelyn this morning, who do you think we saw parked in the morning room?’

‘Princess Anne? Terry Wogan?’

‘Cyril Quentin. You know, from the bookshop. That’d explain why it’s been closed for the last week.’ Anna pulled on her duffle coat and started to wrap her scarf back round her neck.

‘It’s very hard to tell whether that bookshop is open or closed at the best of times.’ Michelle pursed her lips.

‘Oh, don’t.’ Anna’s face creased with guilt. ‘I tried to get half the books for the girls from his shop, but . . .’

‘You got them off the internet instead. That’s life. Bookshops are hard work these days. Especially when your window display still has Royal Wedding memorabilia in it – from Fergie’s big day.’

Anna knew Michelle was right, but it still made her sad. ‘It wasn’t always like that. I used to love dropping in there for a browse, when Agnes Quentin was alive. She must have done most of the buying. Last time I was in I had to plough through piles of military history to find anything, and there was a weird smell of—’

Anna’s phone buzzed, stopping her mid-sentence. ‘Phil,’ she sighed. ‘His mother’s woken up and the girls are fighting over the Wii. He wants Pongo back so he can take him out for a walk.’

At the sound of his name, Pongo emerged from under the table in his green babygro. ‘Christmas really has come for you, my old mate,’ observed Michelle. ‘Twice as many walkies as normal.’

‘Come on. Back to the fray,’ said Anna.

‘Keep the dog bag,’ said Michelle, fondling his ears affectionately. ‘Call it part of his Christmas present. Leave it on until you’re outside, though.’

‘Thanks.’ Impulsively, Anna hugged Michelle, feeling her small but sturdy frame crushed against her own lankier one. ‘Are you sure you don’t want to come back with us? Christmas supper? I hate leaving you here on your own.’

‘I’m fine. I’ve got a really expensive meal-for-one. Now let me go, you’re smearing my make-up.’ Michelle’s voice was muffled against her coat, and when Anna pulled away, she saw that though her eyeliner was just as pristine as before, her eyes were wet.

‘It’s going to be a good year,’ insisted Anna.

‘I know,’ said Michelle. ‘Stop trying so hard and let it happen.’

Anna thought that was rich, coming from Michelle, but she let it go.

2

Physically, Michelle wasn’t a typical runner – she was small, and her legs were slightly shorter than she’d have liked – but she had a determination that turned each circuit around the town into a race with herself.

Just because it was Boxing Day – maybe because it was Boxing Day – didn’t mean she’d abandoned her routine: her morning run, followed by a shower, a cafetiere of Kenyan coffee and two glasses of water, porridge, to-do lists and then a sneaky scan of the online gossip sites. Michelle liked to keep herself on a rail-like schedule, but today she wanted to be up, about and out in case her mother phoned back and tried to guilt-trip her into driving down to Surrey, to be guilt-tripped some more.

She jogged down the deserted towpath, past the silvery-grey waters of the canal where three brown ducks swished along in silence, and turned left onto the footpath that led into town. Her breath made puffs of white in the cold morning air, and she felt the blood pumping around her body, fresh and hot. A few dog-walkers were out, and she nodded at the ones she recognised – Juliet, Anna’s dog-sitter with the white terrier and the chocolate Labrador, and an old couple with a grizzly Dachshund, all of them wrapped up in waxed jackets.

Michelle’s route took her down the two upwardly mobile rows of white Georgian villas towards the Victorian terraces nearer town, her eye ticking off the list of poet streets, Tennyson Avenue, Wordsworth Road, Donne Gardens. They were her ideal customer areas, and she liked to monitor what was going on. She glanced into people’s front windows as she jogged past, and spotted a couple of her filigree silver stars and some of the outdoor tree lights that had sold out in one week. It gave her an extra burst of energy as she turned up the hill towards the main part of town.

At the top of Worcester Street, Michelle faced a choice: right, down and onto the high street, or left and round by the park. Normally, she wouldn’t jog down the high street, but it was quiet and a thought had been niggling at her since Milton Grove, where every front-room window revealed a packed bookshelf, and in some cases, floor-to-ceiling books. Michelle wasn’t a book person herself, unless you counted coffee-table art books, which she did love, especially arranged in height order on her footstool. But Anna’s interest in Quentin’s bookshop had made Michelle wonder if she might not be missing something that the poet streets might be interested in buying.

There were a few wandering souls escaping the morning after on the high street, but not many shops were open. Two women were gazing at the festive display in Home Sweet Home but they’d moved on before Michelle had gone past Boots. She slowed down outside the bookshop and peered in through the murky window, her heart still pounding in her chest as she stretched her burning hamstrings.

Inside the main room was gloomy, with stacks of books all over the place, and the mess alone made Michelle want to break in and tidy it up. It had been teetering on the edge of closure for weeks now; some days the open sign would never be turned round. Michelle had popped in a few times to say hello, but she hadn’t been in for ages, mainly because Cyril Quentin was the sort of book maniac who could spot a ‘nonreader’ a mile off, and he made her feel thick. The impression she’d had the last time she went in was of a sort of clubby stillness that didn’t, to Michelle’s mind, fulfil a shop’s only brief: to seduce and thrill the customer into parting with cash to take some of that thrill home with them.

A strange, forlorn feeling swept over her as she tried to make out where the front ended and the back room began. She wondered if the Quentins ever decorated. The shelves looked as if they’d been there since the shop was built, looming like ribs throughout the room. Michelle couldn’t see where any light was coming from, it was so dark.

But the shop had potential. Massive potential. If you sanded the floorboards, she thought, and painted everything a soft oatmeal colour with bright accents, and put in some clever lighting, and took down those shadowy shelves, this could be the perfect bedlinen emporium. Home Sweet Home II.

Bedlinen was going to be the next big thing; Michelle knew it from her own obsessive browsing on the internet for featherbeds and baby-soft blankets. Her regulars complained that their gym membership and nights out had been crunched, but they still wanted to cosy up inside, especially in chilly Longhampton with its drizzly springs that never seemed to burst into flower until the last possible moment, and the damp, leafy autumns that started the day after Wimbledon finished.

Michelle gazed into the bookshop with her X-ray decoration vision, replacing the piles of paperbacks with brass-framed double beds made up with crisp white cotton and duck-down duvets, set on scrubbed floorboards with crimson-and-cream rag rugs dotted between. The shelves filled up with neatly folded blankets, Irish lambswool in sherbet stripes, lavender bags in the shape of hearts, and her signature purple ribbon tying up cleverly colour-coded bed sets.

Her heart beat faster, but not from the exercise. All she’d done was write down ‘New Shop’ and here it was – the shop right next door, Anna tipping her off before anyone else heard. It was meant to be. Someone up there had decided to throw her a chance, for once.

Michelle pulled out her phone, made a note to herself about tracking down the solicitors – she had a vague memory that Flint and Cook handled the older traders’ businesses – then turned her music back on and jogged home, her mind full of paint charts, uplighters and soft mohair throws.

She was so busy planning her next move that she didn’t even notice the man sitting on her step until he got up, and nearly made her swerve into the canal.

‘Hello, Michelle,’ said Owen, and flashed her the cheeky grin that worked on every woman with breath in her body – except her.

‘OK, girls. Have you got everything?’ asked Phil for the twentieth time.

Anna thought it was a pretty redundant question because, going by the huge bags piled up by the front door, there wasn’t much the girls
hadn’t
packed. She didn’t say anything, though.

‘Presents for your mum?’ she asked instead, as neutrally as she could. Sarah, she knew, was getting a fabulous basket of gifts she’d helped Chloe and Lily to wrap. They’d spent hours on it.

‘Yes,’ said Becca.

‘Presents for Jeff?’

Jeff was Sarah’s boyfriend, although given he was nearly fifty and a senior director at the management company she worked for, ‘boyfriend’ did seem to be pushing it. When Anna felt that she got the rough end of the girls’ attitudes, she had to remind herself that she wasn’t poor Jeff, the thoroughly pleasant American Sarah had met when he came over to restructure the UK operation, who’d committed the ultimate sin of being neither Phil, nor the George Clooney-a-like they felt their mother should have remarried, Phil no longer being available.

Chloe tossed her hair over her shoulder. She had beautiful hair, long and blond and naturally streaky like a tortoiseshell cat, and she used it as punctuation when she couldn’t make her voice sarcastic enough. ‘I still don’t see why we have to give Jeff anything.’

‘Yes,’ said Becca firmly, speaking over her. ‘English condiments. Mum says he misses English mustard.’

Chloe tossed her hair the other way and muttered, ‘We should have got him breath mints.’

‘Give it a rest, Chloe,’ said Becca, checking her own bag.

Becca, at nearly eighteen, was only two years older than Chloe, but sometimes Anna thought she seemed to have accelerated straight out of her teens and into her thirties. She had long blond hair too, but wore it plaited and out of the way; for the last few months, it had been wrapped Heidi-style across the top of her head.

‘Breath mints? Why?’ As Phil looked up from his bag-balancing act, Anna caught the ghost of satisfaction that crossed Chloe’s face, and she knew who the comment had been intended for.

‘Oh my
God
, Dad, you know cheese and onion crisps? Well, Jeff’s like the cheese and onion breath monster and he’s—’ Chloe’s huge eyes looked ready to pop out of her face, so inexpressible was her revulsion.

‘Jeff’s all right,’ Becca interrupted. ‘And Mum clearly thinks he’s all right and she’s the one who has to smell his breath every morning. Can we hurry up, please? I don’t want to be late.’

‘Have you got . . . something to read on the plane?’ Anna suggested tentatively. She hadn’t wanted to shove the books into their bags, but the thought of an eight-hour flight without a good read was like torture to her. She’d put some flight-length books in her Christmas selection for that very reason.