The Secret of Happy Ever After

by Lucy Dillon

  Anna first appeared at the second-to-top step, in the Christmas photo four years ago. She’d had the special privilege of holding Pongo in his red Christmas hat. It had been a milestone, hanging that one, but now she felt inadequate, as if she’d been caught out at university with no previous qualifications, which was, by a grim coincidence, also one of her recurrent nightmares.

  As Lily’s crying slowed to a hiccup, Anna trawled her mind for the right thing to say, and found nothing. It had been drummed into her that you weren’t supposed to lie to children, promise them things you couldn’t deliver, especially when you didn’t even know the situation yourself, but she couldn’t bear to see Lily so distressed.

  She wondered how long it would take Phil and Sarah to realise Lily had slipped out of the kitchen.

  Lily drew a couple of long shuddery breaths and looked up at Anna, waiting for her to say something, her big eyes wet with tears.

  In a rushing instant, desperate to reassure her and take away the pain, Anna heard herself say what was in her heart, not what her head was preparing. ‘Whatever happens, it’s going to be OK. We all love you, Lily. It’s going to be fine.’

  ‘What if Mum stays in America? Does she want a family over there instead of here? Are we going to be left here forever now?’

  Anna curled a loop of hair around Lily’s ear, trying not to feel hurt by the implication that the girls were waiting out their time in her home like dogs in quarantine. ‘I don’t know what her plans are, but I know she won’t do anything without checking it all out with you and Becca and Chloe first.’

  ‘What if the new baby doesn’t like us?’

  ‘Lily?’ The kitchen door swung open and Anna saw Sarah standing in the doorframe, backlit by hard lighting. All the spotlights had been turned on at once, instead of the carefully blended ambient combinations she and Michelle had designed. Phil never knew how to put them on properly.

  Sarah was dressed in expensive jersey separates that revealed the faintest hint of a baby bump, and she looked tired, her cheekbones sharper than normal in her pointy face. Her hair didn’t have its usual bounce, and her face was flushed and tight with frustration; before she saw Anna on the stairs she lifted one hand to her face and squeezed her eyes tight.

  Anna heard Phil say, ‘Sarah, I’ll go to—’ but Sarah snapped, ‘No, let me,’ over her shoulder and, in turning, saw Anna, cuddling up with her little girl, and her face went blank.

  Anna knew it must look bad – her comforting Lily, probably saying all sorts, unsupervised by Sarah – but for once she didn’t care about what things looked like. She was stinging on Lily’s behalf. What sort of mother was too busy shouting the odds to miss the fact that her little girl had run away in tears?

  Sarah didn’t react with the defensiveness Anna would have done in her place. Instead she let her tiredness show out of Phil’s sight, and offered Anna a weary smile.

  ‘Hi, Anna,’ she said, more relaxed in Anna’s home than Anna was herself. ‘I didn’t hear you come in.’

  ‘It sounds quite noisy in there,’ said Anna, as evenly as she could. ‘Is everything OK?’

  ‘Everything’s fine.’ Sarah’s expression softened as she held out her arms to Lily. ‘Come here, darling, we need to have a proper talk,’ she said. ‘On our own. Just you and me.’

  Lily didn’t move. She didn’t cling to Anna harder, but she didn’t get up either.

  Anna looked down at her small head. Lily’s sharp nose was pointed at the banisters as she stared fiercely at the stairs. She knew she should get out of the way, but something made her reluctant to leave Lily, knowing that her carefully ordered world of cuddly toys was about to be turned upside down again.

  ‘Come on, Lilybella,’ said Sarah easily, the practised parent. ‘What about Mrs Piggle? Why don’t we go and tell Piggy-Jo my big news? See what she says?’

  That was enough. Lily wriggled out of Anna’s arms and ran down the hall to Sarah, wrapping herself round her like a starfish. ‘I love you Mummy I love you Mummy I love you Mummy,’ she gabbled, and Sarah bent over to kiss Lily’s head, barely able to hide her own tears.

  ‘You’ll always be my baby, Lily,’ she kept saying, over and over as they fused into one mother-and-daughter shape of messy, instinctive, unconditional love.

  Anna felt like an intruder. She slipped off the step and stumbled down the hall, feeling battered by too many different emotions. That was everything she longed for: to be needed so powerfully by one person, someone for whom she was the entire world, for whom she would move the entire world, stone by stone. She grabbed Pongo’s collar and led him into the kitchen, where Chloe, Becca and Phil were each staring mutely in different directions.

  Chloe’s mascara was smeared down her cheeks, but Becca’s eyes were distant, as if she was computing the effects, processing it all with her proto-lawyer’s mind. Phil looked up when she came in, his face braced for another round, but seeing it was her, his eyes relaxed into a haunted sort of relief.

  He expects me to sort things out, thought Anna suddenly. He’s glad I’m here, because he expects me to deal with this. It hasn’t even occurred to him how this might make me feel, where it leaves me, and us – and our own baby.

  She held her breath for a second, suspending her own silent howl of pain in her head, like a conjuror’s smoke-ring in a soap bubble.

  Then she swallowed it, deliberately, and made herself turn to the shattered, crestfallen faces round the table.

  ‘Shall I put the kettle on?’ she said.

  Much later that night, Anna lay with her head on Phil’s chest, listening to him breathe. He was pretending to be on the edge of sleep, but she knew he wasn’t, because he wasn’t starting to snore.

  ‘How long’s she staying?’ she whispered.

  Sarah was asleep in Becca’s double bed, vacated for the night by Becca, who was sharing Chloe’s double bed with the fairy lights wrapped round the frame. Pongo was in with Lily and her 300 soft toys, against all official house rules. Lily had insisted on Sarah reading her the bedtime story, with Phil in attendance. No Anna required.

  ‘She’s got to fly back tomorrow. Something’s come up at work.’

  ‘Shame,’ Anna whispered back. ‘She could have made a weekend of it. Taken Chloe to some auditions. Tested Becca on her French. Done some laundry.’

  Phil rolled over on his side and looked at her. Anna tucked herself into his warm body so she didn’t have to meet his eye, because she still wasn’t sure what her face was doing when she wasn’t concentrating on making it look understanding and calm.

  She knew that was what she was supposed to be projecting. Inside she was anything but. After a brief, painful chat with Sarah about folic acid and maternity leave, she’d excused herself for an early bath and worked through shock, fury, frustration and misery as fast as she could in the twenty minutes she had the locked bathroom for. And then she’d come back downstairs and cooked supper for everyone because it got her out of the sitting room while Chloe and Becca expertly shut down Sarah’s attempts to start a friendly conversation about their revision timetables. Lily might have forgiven their mother, but they hadn’t. Yet.

  They’d got through supper without another falling-out only because Anna had asked every single question she could think of about American life, offices, drugstore cosmetics . . . anything to keep the conversation going. Anything was better than the furious silence coming from the girls. After pushing Anna’s crumble round their plates for a bit, they both left ‘to revise’.

  ‘I totally fail to see how adults can call teenagers selfish when they behave like selfish kids,’ Chloe had pronounced, before storming off to her room in a huff.

  Becca had followed without speaking, her arms full of books.

  Once or twice Anna had lifted up the phone to see if they were moaning away to their mates, but since they both had mobiles and laptops, they had no reason to open up their displeasure to inspection – unlike all the times when Chloe had ‘accidentally’ let her
overhear conversations with Sarah about how unfair Anna was being about bedtimes.

  This was serious fury. Private, family, flesh and blood fury. It made Anna feel even more peripheral than she’d done before. The girls loved Sarah so much they could afford to be truly livid with her; they were angry because they loved her so much. That was why Sarah was so annoyingly calm about it; she was their mother and nothing could change it.

  ‘Anna?’ Phil pulled her round so she had to look at his face. It was the first time they’d been alone since the oestrogen maelstrom had flattened the house. Was it only this morning that he’d gone to the airport? Anna wondered. It seemed days ago.

  ‘What?’

  ‘At least she’s here and we’ve been able to have a family chat about it, face to face,’ he whispered.

  ‘I am in this family, Phil.’ She struggled to keep her voice down. ‘This will affect me too. Affect us.’

  He tried to hug her tightly to him. Anna resisted, wanting to punish herself more than him.

  ‘Do you think they’ll be OK with it? Having a half-brother or -sister?’

  Phil didn’t answer. His face said more than he could, and Anna was scared by how unfamiliar he suddenly seemed. They lay looking at each other, too afraid to make their thoughts real by saying them out loud.

  Despair washed over her. He hadn’t said anything, but she could sense a change in him, and she cursed her own naivety in thinking that it was all so easy. She’d just been lucky, up till now.

  The talk radio station burbled on in the background, the twenty minutes of noise that drowned out the sounds of the house and let Anna fall asleep over Phil’s snoring each night. She never really listened, but tonight there was a call-in about ‘dealbreakers’ in relationships, and some woman from Droitwich was railing hard against men who refused to commit and messed women around till their options were closed.

  Anna tried to shut her ears, but she couldn’t. The radio was on Phil’s side of the bed, so she’d have to lean over him to turn it off, attracting his attention to it. He never listened to lyrics, or background noise, whereas she couldn’t stop her brain catching words in a net, like butterflies.

  I don’t want to be one of those mad, bitter women, she thought. How long can I give the girls to get over this? And even if the girls get over this, will Phil?

  She closed her eyes, trying to push down the strange yearning impulses that made her a terrible, selfish stepmother, but still just a normal woman who wanted to create a baby with the man she was in love with. For the first time in her life, Anna’s bustling stockroom of words refused to help her, leaving the bare thoughts stark and ugly in her head.

  Do I want a baby more than I want Phil?

  ‘How are you feeling?’ he whispered. ‘You know . . .’ He twitched his eyebrows.

  He means the baby, but he can’t bring himself to say it, she thought.

  ‘Fine.’ Anna had actually hoped she’d be feeling a bit more by this stage. She’d felt a bit sick earlier, and a bit crampy, both of which were on her internet symptom list as strong indicators.

  ‘Have you actually done the test yet? That one that says pregnant or not pregnant? In actual writing?’

  ‘It’s in the bathroom. It didn’t . . . It didn’t seem appropriate.’

  ‘Go and do it now,’ whispered Phil. ‘You’re five days late, you should be testing positive by now.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘Then . . .’ He stopped. ‘Then we’ll know what we’re dealing with.’

  They looked at each other in the darkness for a long second.

  ‘I’m just a bloke,’ said Phil. ‘I need facts.’

  ‘OK.’ Anna was dying for a pee – another sign of pregnancy, she knew, although possibly helped by the endless cups of peppermint tea she’d drunk that night. She slipped out of bed and pulled on her dressing-gown, her heart already starting to thud with excitement.

  It’s going to be OK, she said to herself, finding the test she’d hidden in the cabinet. It’s one of those serendipitous things; the timing’s so bad it’s good. Michelle’s right. Get all the drama over at once for the girls.

  Anna didn’t put the light on because moonlight was flooding the bathroom with a romantic sort of glow, but as she ripped open the test stick, pulled down her knickers and readied herself to pee, she realised there was no need.

  Her period had started.

  There was still only one mother in the house, after all.

  She sank down on the side of the bath and wept.

  20

  ‘The Railway Children is a story of three Edwardian children growing up quickly. If you don’t want a red petticoat to wave in moments of crisis, or shed a tear when Daddy comes home, you must have a heart of marble.’

  Anna McQueen

  Michelle’s obsession with forward planning and weekly accounts meant that she normally had the year under control, but this year seemed to be slipping past far too quickly.

  Maybe it was having to do double the work in keeping two shops bustling, accounted, stocked and staffed, or maybe it was feeling more tied to her routine by the small but authoritative presence of Tavish, who only tolerated half an hour or so of after-hours pottering round the shop before he started nudging her ankles to go home. Each day seemed to pass twice as quickly, hurrying her towards the end of each week before she had time to tick off half the stuff on her ever-growing to-do list. She hadn’t cleaned her oven in weeks, and the boxes she’d brought back from her birthday lunch were still in the spare room in the flat, untouched.

  If Anna’s life revolved around the girls’ exam timetables, Michelle’s revolved around lead times and stock orders and VAT returns, and they were just as demanding. It was May now, and she was starting to feel anxious about some of the stock she’d planned to introduce into the bookshop as part of her subtle slow change. She’d stumbled across a local dressmaker who was prepared to give her an exclusive supply of baby-soft cotton pyjamas, based on Edwardian bloomers – if she put in an order for autumn delivery, with a sizeable cash deposit.

  Michelle knew this was a good thing but it meant finding some more money, which meant juggling the figures, and looking at the figures wasn’t quite the comfort it usually was for her on a Sunday night. The bookshop was still ticking over better than expected, and Home Sweet Home had had a good spring, but her business instinct was chafing at every week that went by with a tiny profit where there could be a much bigger one.

  She chewed her pen and stared at her Year Plan, open next to the fourth cup of coffee of the evening on her kitchen table. Halfway through the year, nearly, and still not anywhere near her target turnover.

  Of course, a voice in her head pointed out, the obvious answer would be get the flat upstairs as well as the shop and have both. Books downstairs, beds upstairs. ‘Upstairs to Bed’, even.

  Oh, that was a good name, she thought, scribbling it down. Michelle dangled her pen from her fingers and idly wondered how easy it would be to persuade Mr Quentin to evict Rory.

  She told herself not to be so mean. Rory was growing on her, despite his awful socks. Maybe when Owen moved on – and now the website was finished, he should be thinking about moving back to London, where he’d find some proper work – she could offer Rory the flat above the shop, and move him sideways? It wasn’t as if he’d done anything with the place; he wouldn’t even need to unpack those bachelor boxes.

  But Owen didn’t seem in any hurry to move on. Michelle had been watching him and Becca like a hawk, and she knew Anna was watching them too – and watching her, watching them. That was . . . sometimes awkward. Although she’d reassured Anna that Owen was trustworthy (what else could she say?), she couldn’t be everywhere at once, and Owen’s behaviour wasn’t following normal patterns. Sometimes Michelle wondered if he might actually be in love.

  In any case, she conceded, she knew Rory well enough by now to know that he wasn’t going to move to make way for what he still referred to as knick-knacks, albeit m
ore jokily. Without her realising, Rory had filled in the pockets of emptiness that Anna had left when she had to give her time to the girls. The Sunday afternoons. An occasional Saturday dog walk. Neither of them were over-sharers, but looking after Tavish had brought them in and out of each other’s lives like a tide, and each visit washed up a personal detail here and there, almost by accident. Esther had insisted on reading his horoscopes, which he, like Michelle, loathed. He hadn’t chosen the name Zachary. They both liked porridge made with water.

  There was a knock at the front door and she knew it was him; Rory was always punctual when it came to Tavish. Michelle pushed her chair away from the table and closed her laptop, messing up her hair to make it look as if she’d just got in from somewhere more interesting.

  ‘Hey!’ he said, when she opened the door. Tavish was next to him, wagging his tail. Rory had the Sunday papers under his arm, even though it was six in the evening.

  Michelle let them in and Tavish trotted down the hall, sniffing the air as if he disapproved of the deep clean she’d done to pass the afternoon. ‘Cup of tea?’

  ‘If you’re not dashing out?’

  ‘If you don’t have somewhere to go?’

  Rory pretended to think, then said, ‘No, don’t think I do.’

  ‘I’ll put the kettle on then.’

  Michelle could pinpoint the first time Rory had come round with his Sunday papers – it was when he asked if he could read them at her house, as he ‘couldn’t go back to his flat because they’re resurfacing the high street’ and she couldn’t think of a non-rude way of saying no – but she couldn’t remember when it had turned into part of her weekend routine. For the past few weeks he’d brought them over with Tavish and they’d sat and read in silence for an hour before he left on the dot of five to seven and went home. Rory read the news and review sections and grumbled at the articles, and Michelle scanned Property and ripped pages out of the supplements for her mood boards.