The Secret of Happy Ever After

by Lucy Dillon

Becca was watching her reaction, her face wreathed with concern as she rested one hand unthinkingly on her bump.

  ‘I don’t know what to say,’ she managed, trying to smile. ‘That’s a yes from me. You’re going to boot camp!’

  Chloe looked very pleased with herself.

  ‘Yay!’ said Lily. ‘Do you like what we did? Michelle gave us the keys to the shop and said we could have what we liked! It’s like an extra Christmas picnic!’

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ said Anna. ‘Thank you!’

  ‘Why don’t you go through to the kitchen and put some of that food onto plates,’ said Phil. ‘I want a word with Anna.’

  ‘Come on,’ said Becca, hustling them through. She closed the door behind them with a nervous backwards glance at her dad.

  Phil and Anna stood in the fairy lights, each waiting for the other to speak.

  He’s got to go first, Anna willed herself. He’s got to make the first move.

  After what felt like an hour, Phil took a deep breath and said, ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Sorry for what?’

  ‘For not being the husband you thought you were marrying. For not being able to give you your big happy ever after.’ He looked desolate.

  Anna’s heart plunged. ‘That sounds like a goodbye, not an apology.’

  He reached out and took her hands, and she could feel him trembling. ‘You are the most articulate person I’ve ever met. You always have the right words on the tip of your tongue and I don’t. I’ve spent the last few months trying to find the right way to express how I feel, and hating myself that I can’t. I still don’t think I’ve got it.’

  ‘Try.’ Her voice sounded thick.

  ‘OK. I love you,’ said Phil simply. ‘I love you so much I don’t have the right words to tell you. I feel like I waited my whole life to meet you, and when I did, I couldn’t believe my luck. You’re not my second chance, you’re my first real love, Anna. My life is a complicated mess but you make it seem straightforward, just as long as you’re there with me. Please come home. I need you.’

  ‘For the girls?’

  ‘For all of us.’ He looked her straight in the eyes. ‘I know I’ve messed you about this year, about having our own baby. I’m sorry. It’s not that I don’t want to have one, I just . . . I have a crap track record as a dad. I didn’t have a father. I had no idea what dads were meant to do, just my mother going on and on about what they shouldn’t be like. And then suddenly when I was twenty I was one. And again, at twenty-two. You’re a much more natural parent than me, and I’ve got three kids.’

  ‘You’re a great father.’ Anna couldn’t believe he was saying this. ‘Look at your girls.’

  ‘Do you realise how much of that is down to you?’ He held her gaze. ‘If it hadn’t been for you, putting yourself last for the past couple of years, just so they’d feel they were always coming first, who knows how much worse it could have been? I don’t think I realised. And you know who told me?’

  ‘Michelle?’

  ‘No. My mother.’

  ‘Evelyn?’ Anna just stopped herself adding, ‘That old bag?’, as was her mental habit.

  Phil rubbed his chin, like a guilty boy. ‘I went up to see her on Boxing Day and she told me she’d said something mean to you the day Becca . . . the day Becca told us about the baby. She said she felt bad about it, because you’d done a much better job with them than Sarah was doing.’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘Well, she actually said if they’d been with Sarah, Chloe would probably have been pregnant too, and Lily would have an imaginary friend. But still . . .’

  ‘Is that a compliment? I’m only a semi-negligent stepmother?’

  ‘No,’ said Phil. ‘You are the best stepmother any child could have hoped for. Ask the girls. You make Mary Poppins look like . . . like . . . Oh God, I don’t know enough children’s books.’

  ‘Try The Witches,’ said Anna. She could feel something melting inside her, warming her like mulled wine. ‘Or Cruella de Vil. You should do more reading with Lily.’

  ‘I should.’ He held out his arms and slowly she stepped into them, thinking she could be dignified about it. But then Phil’s strong arms were round her, and his nose was pressed into her neck, and she was clinging to him as if she could somehow merge her body with his. He smelled so familiar and safe, and it scared her how close she’d come to losing everything she loved most.

  ‘I love you, Anna,’ he said, his breath hot against her skin, whispering so they wouldn’t be overheard. ‘All I care about is giving you the happy ever after you want. In our own messy, complicated way.’

  ‘You’re doing that. And I don’t think we’re quite at the end yet,’ she said.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the kitchen door was open, a tiny wedge of yellow light against the darkness of the sitting room. Some of the light was blotted out by bodies, but at the bottom was a black-and-white spotted nose.

  ‘Let’s go home,’ said Anna, feeling a sudden need to hold her whole family tightly around her and cover them with the love bursting out of her. ‘I want to have Christmas all over again.’

  Anna McQueen’s childhood favourites for recommended bedtime reading*

  Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl

  James and the Giant Peach, Roald Dahl

  In fact, everything by Roald Dahl!

  Ballet Shoes, Noel Streatfeild

  One Hundred and One Dalmations and The Starlight Barking, Dodie Smith

  What Katy Did, Susan Coolidge

  Charlotte’s Web, E. B. White

  Tom’s Midnight Garden, Philippa Pearce

  The Sheep-Pig, Dick King-Smith

  Little Women, Louisa May Alcott

  The Famous Five, Enid Blyton

  Anne of Green Gables, Lucy Maud Montgomery

  The Secret Garden and The Little Princess, Frances Hodgson Burnett

  Pippi Longstocking, Astrid Lindgren

  Peter Rabbit, Beatrix Potter

  The Worst Witch, Jill Murphy

  Winnie the Pooh, A. A. Milne

  Mary Poppins, P. L. Travers

  First Term at Malory Towers, Enid Blyton

  Harry Potter 1–7 (all of them, you can’t just read one!)

  The Railway Children, Edith Nesbit

  The Jungle Book, Rudyard Kipling

  Any of the Chalet School series, Elinor Brent-Dyer

  Mrs Pepperpot, Alf Prøysen

  Madeline, Ludwig Bemelmans (not necessarily in French, although that adds a certain je ne ces quois!)

  * Children and Dalmatians are optional

  Read on for an interview with Lucy Dillon . . .

  The books from our childhoods seem to form very powerful, evocative memories. What are the books you most fondly remember from your childhood, and why?

  Looking back now I realise how lucky I was growing up in the 70s and 80s in the middle of a creative boom in children’s fiction, and with an English-teacher mother who read a book a day, and also ran the school library. I read, and was read to, all the time, so I probably only spent about 50% of my waking childhood in the real world. As well as the classics like Enid Blyton, E Nesbit and Arthur Ransome (which I gobbled up, living in the Lake District), I have vivid memories of all the Roald Dahl books, Pippi Longstocking, the Pullein-Thompson sisters’ pony books, Judy Blume (v racy!), The Worst Witch, which predated Harry Potter by quite a long time. . . The ones that stick in the mind most, though, are the Roald Dahl books like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Danny, Champion of the World; I suppose that’s partly because they’re incredibly vivid narratives, written in Dahl’s instantly recognisable style, but partly because they were read to me at bedtime, when words seem to sink in deepest. And also, maybe, because they’re classics that engage an adult imagination just as much as a child’s.

  Is there a character or story that you particularly identified with?

  Jo March – I wasn’t a tomboy but I had one sister, and loved scribbling away in the attic, like her. I knew exactly
how she felt on discovering libraries in her aunt’s house - those bookworm butterflies of excitement at all the different worlds hidden in the shelves. That was the first book I longed to ‘go into’, button boots and cotillions and all. My lifelong fascination with American baking – grits and muffins, pies and biscuits – started with the Marchs’ dinners, and Katy Carr’s tuckbox.

  Was there a hero you dreamt of running away with and marrying?

  I wish I could say Mr Darcy, but my first crush was on sensible Julian from the Famous Five series. He probably grew up to be a very sensible accountant with sensible shoes and a Volvo, but at the time I thought his quick thinking and good manners were splendid. Soon after, I went through a Greek mythology phase, and rather fancied Hercules (setting the bar quite high there for future boyfriends), but then I found a tatty copy of Gone with the Wind and it’s been all about Rhett ever since.

  Was storytime an important part of your bedtime ritual as a child? Is it still?

  It was always the highlight of the day. My younger sister and I had a bedtime story every single night for years and years – my parents took it in turns to read to us, and I think they enjoyed it as much as we did, although we learned the stories very quickly and knew if they were trying to cut them short by ‘abridging’. There’s nothing more soothing than dropping off to the sound of someone’s voice, letting the pictures bloom in your imagination as sleep rolls in – I think that’s why children’s books take root so firmly in our memories. Listening to someone read, rather than reading yourself, seems to let even more of your imagination loose, especially when the setting is unfamiliar: I have extremely vivid mental images of the European children’s stories like Mrs Pepperpot and Emile and the Detectives, for that reason. Now I listen to Talk Radio on a sleep timer when I drop off, which isn’t always quite so soothing.unfamiliar: I have extremely vivid mental images of the European children’s stories like

  Why do you think bedtime storytelling has become such a tradition?

  Storytelling has always been an important part of the human cultural instinct, the sharing of stories between one generation and the next, and it’s one of the reasons that children’s classics endure for so long, because there’s real pleasure in revisiting them as an adult. Modern life is busy and also visual; sharing a slower, aural experience, in which imaginations connect by telling stories that the parent or grandparent loved when they were the same age as the child, is special. It’s almost like Tom’s Midnight Garden, in a way – the ‘ghost’ of the parent’s own childhood comes back to life again in the same story. It’s lovely to think of all the children who grew up on Harry Potter dusting down their editions in twenty years’ time and sharing them with children and grandchildren; I read the Potter books as an adult and a big element of their charm for me was the echoes of so many familiar story traditions hidden inside.

  Animals, especially dogs, feature prominently in children’s literature – and indeed in your novels. Do you think that animals can sometimes help the human characters in stories express themselves better?

  It’s an interesting point! I think, looking at it with a grown-up reader’s eyes, that often the animals in books are aligned with the children, as co-conspirators in the magical non-human world – the innocent child can see and understand the animal much better than the adults can, and the animals reward the child’s honest trust by sharing some secret with them or saving them from the consequences of the adults’ stupidity. Animals (OK, dogs and horses) don’t have very vested interests beyond being warm and being fed, but in return they give disproportionate amounts of loyalty, courage, and love, something humans usually end up learning from in children’s books.

  Although, having said that, I’m a real wuss when it comes to animals in books; from Black Beauty onwards, there’s a huge pile of stories that I’ve never been able to finish, thanks to the constant shedding of tears. Even Michael Morpurgo is too hardcore for me. We had to read White Fang by Jack London when I was at school, and I never really recovered.

  You show that the pleasure of sharing a story isn’t exclusive to childhood: Anna’s visits to Butterfield’s to read aloud bring the resident’s great joy. What do you think it is about this activity that so draws people in?

  Reading aloud is such a positive community experience – it builds an instant relationship between the listeners, and opens up a whole map of different discussions, such as their interpretation of what everyone’s just heard, or their related experiences, or perhaps their memory of reading it themselves for the first time. When I was researching The Secret of Happy Ever After, I found a lot of inspiration in The Reader Organisation, which works to promote reading in communities; they run ‘Get into Reading’ sessions all over the country, particularly among groups who’ve lost their connection to literature, either through blindness, or lack of reading skills, or other social or mental problems. The website is www.thereader. org.uk and it has lots of interesting information about joining or starting a group, as well as glowing testimonials from happy readers!

  As the Reader Organisation’s work demonstrates, reading aloud has many positive therapeutic effects beyond basic entertainment; for example, it seems to help dementia sufferers to access different areas of their memory, by retreading familiar old narrative ground. It’s a gentle way of making a connection with an elderly relative; if you struggle to find the right conversations to engage each other, why not offer to read from a favourite book for half an hour? The Reader Organisation has produced A Little Aloud, an anthology of easy-to-read, inspiring-to-listen-to selections from different genres of literature, for all age groups. I really recommend it.