The Secret of Happy Ever After (36 page)

Stop it.

Anna glanced down to see Pongo lurking by her feet and she nudged him gently. ‘Go on,’ she said. ‘Lily’s home! Go say hello!’

But he crouched down on the floor, his tail between his legs and his bright eyes wary. Could he smell Sarah? Was he confused about where he’d be going?

Anna rallied herself, trying to suppress the churning in her stomach. If they’ve heard the door, they’ll wonder why you haven’t come in. You don’t have to show how you feel. Just . . . show your face.

She took a deep breath, ruffled up her hair and walked down the hall towards the kitchen. Even the concentration of McQueens was unsettling. Normally the girls spread out through the house to get away from each other – Chloe in the cellar ‘dance studio’, Becca in her room, Lily watching television with Pongo by her side – but it sounded as if they were all standing around the kitchen table yelling, while Phil tried to referee things ineffectually.

Anna could hear him trying to break through the wall of female voices, with the ‘now, come on . . . be reasonable’ tactics that generally only stoked Chloe’s dramatic fires. It wasn’t working now, either. He sounded desperate and a bit pathetic.

She could hear Sarah, too, trying to control the meeting as if it was an unfair dismissal tribunal. ‘Everyone gets a turn to speak,’ she was saying over the top of Phil.

Chloe, meanwhile, was using all her voice projection coaching to drown out Becca, who was yelling for the first time in all the years Anna had known her. ‘You’re not listening to us . . . you don’t care about us!’ Chloe and Becca kept saying, then suddenly louder as the door cracked open and Lily slid out like an eel, her face a mask of distress.

Anna held out her arms and Lily ran to her in tears, Pongo trotting over to lick what little of her face he could reach after she’d buried it in Anna’s jumper. She half led, half carried Lily away from the kitchen door, not wanting her to hear some of the things Chloe was shrieking, and ended up on the stairs where she held her in her arms and stroked her hair while she shook with sobs and jet-lagged exhaustion.

Anna rested her lips on the top of Lily’s rabbit-soft hair and murmured soothingly, rocking her back and forth, wishing she knew the right thing to say. While she sobbed, Anna stared sightlessly at the baby photos of the girls, hanging on the wall up the stairs, starting with Becca, already serious, in a white christening gown, then Chloe beaming like a child star in a headband. Sarah had a matching set in her house; copies were part of the divorce settlement.

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.