The Secret of Happy Ever After (9 page)

While Anna was still laughing, he took the phone off the hook again and shoved it behind a sofa cushion.

‘You,’ he said, pushing the bottle and the glasses into her hands,‘are coming with me. To bed.’

And with a groan, Phil picked Anna up, staggered slightly, then heaved her over his shoulder and carried her upstairs.

4

Anna knew it was a mistake, agreeing to meet Michelle at Home Sweet Home instead of at her house. It was tempting enough browsing there at the best of times, but with a hand-printed ‘Special Customer Sale Preview’ postcard burning a hole in her bag, she and her post-Christmas pull-our-belts-in budget were doomed.

She pushed her purse firmly to the bottom of her handbag as she approached the shop; it probably wouldn’t stop her wanting to buy everything in sight, but it might delay her for a few vital, credit-card-saving seconds.

Home Sweet Home was generally agreed to be the reason that Longhampton High Street was starting to pick up, a strong green shoot of good times amidst the charity shops and pound stores. The first thing Michelle had done was to rip off the plastic fishmonger’s signage and paint the neglected exterior a soft honey-cream, picking out the carved stone roses along the shop window in gold and crimson paint. No one had noticed the stone roses for decades. Within a month, three shops on the same side had refurbished.

Anna put her hand on the door handle, steeled herself by visualising the epic phone bill she’d got that morning and went in. Immediately her eye lit on a delicious pile of glass baubles in a basket, and her resistance melted like a chocolate Santa.

The shop was already packed out with shoppers carrying baskets loaded with filigree tree decorations and gingerbread hearts. Phil joked that Michelle pumped some kind of shopping nerve gas into the shop, but the truth was that she just had the knack of stocking what women wanted – the most beautiful, useful, unusual, pretty things; some expensive, some cheap, all presented as if they were precious, and just what you needed to make your home as welcoming as the shop. It didn’t matter whether you were eight and obsessed with ribbons like Lily, or thirty-one and unable to resist an organic beeswax lip balm like Anna – there was something on every table that whispered, ‘Buy me’.

She picked up the glass ball, imagining a cluster of them in Becca’s room, hanging on gold ribbons around her window maybe, then put it down. They were on one income now, and the girls would be shopping it up in New York. But at half price they were such a bargain, and she’d seen Becca admiring them.

‘Oh, aren’t they gorgeous?’ said a breathy voice. ‘But, um, wouldn’t you be worried about Pongo eating one? Not being funny, but they do look like tomatoes. I couldn’t work out what was Christmassy about tomatoes till Michelle told me they were for the tree.’

Anna looked up to see Michelle’s junior assistant, Kelsey, hovering by the table, and put the bauble down. Kelsey was lovely, like everything else in the shop, but about as useful as the glass baubles when it came to actual selling. She was mostly confined to dealing with internet orders, since she’d never managed to make the till work on her own, and had kindly talked Anna out of a couple of rash purchases – not, thankfully, while Michelle was around. Kelsey was like a golden-eyebrowed supermodel, or an angel whose wings had fallen off, and she drove Michelle insane with her unfortunate habit of missing shoplifters because she was unpicking her complicated love life on the phone to her friends.

If Gillian, queen of the window display, hadn’t been so efficient, Kelsey would have been ruthlessly excised from Michelle’s empire long ago, but like the green fig candles burning in high alcoves, and the Ella Fitzgerald soundtrack, she added a certain aspirational ambience to the place.

‘Hi, Kelsey, is Michelle around?’ Anna asked. ‘She said she’d meet me here, at quarter to?’

‘She’s upstairs.’ Kelsey dropped her voice conspiratorially. ‘With a guy!’

‘A
guy
?’ Anna hadn’t meant it to sound so loud, but the way Kelsey was winking at her made it hard not to.

‘Yeah. A really good-looking guy. Bit young for her, if you ask me, but if you’ve got it, right?’ She stopped winking and pulled a face to indicate that she felt Michelle did still have it.

‘Are you sure he’s not a rep?’ asked Anna.

Kelsey snorted. ‘Not unless he’s selling sexy hair.’

‘Michelle’s upstairs sorting out the website,’ called a voice from the room behind the main shop floor; a competent, older voice. ‘It’s gone down again, don’t ask me how or why. And she’s with her
brother
. She won’t be a moment.’

‘Her brother?’ mouthed Kelsey, shocked.

‘She’s got three brothers,’ said Anna, as Gillian appeared in her Christmas sale outfit: a red cardigan over her usual black shift dress, and an extra-rigid girdle flattening her Christmas excesses. There were no seasonal reindeer horns in here. ‘Which one is it?’

‘The hot one,’ said Gillian. ‘Pardon my French.’

Anna heard two sets of footsteps clattering down the stairs that led up to the flat, and before Kelsey had time to do more than fluff up her hair, Michelle and Owen were standing in front of a three-woman welcome committee.

‘What?’ said Michelle, seeing the blatant curiosity on their faces. ‘Oh, I get it. Owen, let me introduce you properly. This is Gillian, who runs the shop. This is Kelsey, who posts out the website orders, and this is Anna, who stops me from going mad. Ladies, this is my little brother, Owen. He’s our new website geek.’

‘I prefer IT consultant,’ said Owen, with a smile that reached his brown eyes, making them crinkle attractively.

Anna could see the family resemblance. Owen had the same dark chestnut hair as Michelle and the same sharp chin, but whereas her hair was cut into a geometric bob, his curled round his ears and over his collar. And his brown eyes flashed – she started to correct the Mills and Boon-ish word, then had to admit that actually, in this instance, it was fair enough – whereas Michelle’s eyes were more guarded, noticing everything but giving nothing away.

Owen towered over his sister, with thin leather bracelets circling his wrists and long legs in skinny jeans. He looks as if he should be in a band, thought Anna, envying his long lashes. One of those ones that Becca likes, with a name that means something she was too out-of-touch to know about.

‘Owen’s going to be setting up the new spring web pages, and he’s got a lot to be getting on with, so don’t let him distract you,’ Michelle went on, checking through her to-do list and crossing off a few things, while he beamed affably at them all. ‘Owen, don’t let Kelsey distract you either. She’s got a lot to be getting on with down here.’

Kelsey looked thwarted and closed her mouth. Owen winked at her, and even though the wink wasn’t directed her way, Anna felt a sort of passive flutter.

‘OK.’ Michelle clicked her pen. ‘You, upstairs. You,’ she pointed at Kelsey, ‘serve those ladies over there. You,’ she pointed at Anna, ‘let’s go and do some reading.’

‘Are you sure you can spare the time?’ Anna asked, as two more customers jangled the bell and made a beeline for the rack of handsewn cherry-print aprons.

‘So long as I’m back for the afternoon rush,’ said Michelle. She wound a scarf around her neck and pulled on her shear-ling jacket. It was buttery soft, and, like all her clothes, untouched by Dalmatian hair or accidental felt-tip pen marks. Anna envied the easy way Michelle made scarves hang right.

‘Where are you going?’ Kelsey asked.

‘Butterfields.’ Anna seized the chance to recruit some new volunteers. ‘I don’t suppose you’d like to volunteer a few hours a month, would you? All you have to do is read for about half an hour, and maybe discuss the book, share some stories about—’

‘No, sorry. I’m not really a book person,’ said Kelsey firmly. ‘I prefer to wait for the film.’

‘But reading’s such a lovely thing to do. Very relaxing. You end up enjoying it as much as the people you’re reading to,’ Anna persisted. ‘Don’t you remember being read to at school? Or by your mum? What an amazing feeling it is letting the story come to life in your head?’

‘No.’ Kelsey looked horrified at the thought of anything coming to life anywhere near her head.

‘Is it a council thing?’ asked Gillian. She was a keen monitor of council expenditure.

‘No, it’s a volunteer group we started in the library to reach people who’ve lost touch with words and stories. Maybe they can’t concentrate, or they can’t read, or see . . . all sorts of reasons. I do the old people’s home, my assistant Wendy ran sessions for the Learning Support Unit at the school, and there’s another one at the hospital.’

‘And you just . . . read?’ asked Gillian.

Anna nodded. It was hard to explain how rewarding the reading scheme was without sounding holier-than-thou, but it made her feel she’d given something useful, which would last for hours after she’d left. ‘Sometimes they read themselves, sometimes we stop and discuss a passage, or they talk about some memory it’s brought back. I have to admit, I sometimes get a bit teary with the older folk. It’s like they’re waking up and you suddenly see their eyes look young again. All because of an idea someone had, then wrote down to share, and now that same idea is planted in memories all over the world, and it’s as if it can turn back time. Isn’t that amazing?’

Kelsey looked unconvinced but Anna thought she saw a glistening in Gillian’s eyes. Next time she’s coming too, Anna decided.

Michelle tapped her watch. ‘We’re cutting into their Jean Plaidy hour. Let’s go!’

And with one backwards glance at a silk handbag covered in tiny chiffon butterflies, Anna let herself be swept out of the warm embrace of Home Sweet Home and onto the chilly high street.

Anna had reluctantly got rid of her sports car to pay for the bigger people carrier, but she had kept the same energetic driving style. Michelle was relieved when she finally indicated down the tree-lined drive to an Edwardian mansion with a sweeping turning circle and neat box hedges marking out the lawn. No croquet hoops, just a discreet sign saying, ‘Butterfields Residential Home’ and a wheelchair-adapted minibus outside.

‘I didn’t even know this was here,’ said Michelle, admiring the ivy-covered frontage and long windows. ‘It must have been quite a place in its day.’

‘It used to belong to the town’s one and only captain of industry,’ said Anna, as she parked next to the only other car there. ‘Some of the older residents can remember the family. Don’t get them started on the Parrys. I’ve had to avoid any Catherine Cookson novels with servants in them, because some of the current residents’ forebears were disgruntled parlourmaids.’

Michelle stood back from Anna as she marched across the gravel in her flat boots and announced their arrival via the security buzzer. She looked at them in the plate-glass of the entrance porch. They made a funny-looking couple, like a pair of comedians: sharp-edged Michelle in her jeans and leather boots, and graceful Anna in her long skirt, her blond hair stuffed under a knitted hat and her book bag slung over her shoulder.

Their reflections hovered on the glass, somewhere between the crisp winter air outside and the dingy institutional walls inside. Like ghosts, she thought. Michelle didn’t want to say so to Anna, but old people’s homes gave her the creeps. If she hadn’t been set on charming Mr Quentin into changing his mind about the bookshop, there was no way she’d have got herself across the threshold.

As Anna pulled open the door and directed her into the once-imposing entrance hall, the majestic first impression of the exterior dissolved in a whiff of boiled vegetables and cleaning fluid. Michelle cast her eyes around urgently for any shreds of elegance that remained. There wasn’t much to go on.

Everything’s so grey, she thought – grey and thick. Where are the colours, the soothing smells, even some nice wallpaper?

Oblivious to her friend’s reaction, Anna pushed open a heavy fire door and smiled at a helper in a nylon housecoat who was pushing a vacant-eyed man in a wheelchair down the corridor.

‘That’s Albert,’ she said, under her breath. ‘Only time I ever heard him speak was after we’d read some chapters of
Atonement
. At the end, without any warning, he said, “I met my Noreen in an air-raid shelter in Solihull, and I thought she was her sister. Had to marry her after that.” The nurses nearly fell over.’

‘And after that you couldn’t stop him chattering away?’

‘Well, no.’ Anna stopped at another fire door and pulled it open to let Michelle through first. ‘But it gave the carers something to think about when his family next came to visit.’

They’d reached the main day room, a grand, high-ceilinged reception room with chintzy winged chairs arranged in a circle, containing hunched-up old men and women, some of whom turned to see who’d come in. The others just carried on staring into space, their hands clawed around the arms of their chairs.

A chill went through Michelle at the solitude in the room, despite all the people in it. She loved living alone – couldn’t bear the thought of sharing her beautiful house with anyone – but this, as her mother kept reminding her, was where it could all end up. Slow, featureless days in a room with other unloved people, forced into cells of single old folk, without even a horde of cats to eat you.