The Secret of Happy Ever After (6 page)

‘More than enough,’ said Becca with a grimace, pointing to her leather satchel, which was bulging with revision. ‘Passports, cash for the taxi, the internet check-in print-out, phone numbers, toothbrushes, hand sanitiser . . .’ She looked worried for a second, then patted the bag. ‘International charger adapters.’

‘Are we missing someone?’ Phil called loudly. ‘Or shall we just go now?’

‘No! Wait for me!’ Lily came running into the hall, closely followed by Pongo. He was bouncing with excitement, and Anna wished she’d had time to walk him round to Michelle’s in between all the packing. He was going to go nuts while they were out.

She checked her watch. Was there time to run him round the block now? No. Damn.

Anna couldn’t remember the last time she’d just slung her bag over her shoulder, grabbed her keys and walked out of the door. It seemed like a whole different life. Leaving the house now involved dealing with nine other things first, three of which would change while you were dealing with the other six.

‘Lily!’ Phil pretended to look shocked. ‘We nearly forgot you!’

‘I was saying goodbye to Pongo. Why can’t Pongo come?’ Lily whined.

‘Because he’s banned,’ said Chloe. ‘They found out about what happened with him and the daffodils in the park and they stamped his passport. He’d never get through immigration.’

Lily’s brown eyes widened. ‘How did they find out about that?’ she whispered.

‘I told them,’ said Chloe. ‘And I told them you helped him. So you’d better get your story straight when the man asks you at passport control.’

‘Chloe!’ Lily looked stricken. ‘You didn’t.’

‘Of course she didn’t,’ said Becca, saving Anna the trouble. She shot a poisonous look at Chloe. ‘Don’t start her off now, or you can deal with the nightmares at Mum’s.’

Of her three stepdaughters, Anna found Becca the easiest to get on with because she was more placid and pragmatic than the other two, but it was Lily that came closest to her secret dreams of how her family would be. Lily had an imagination – she worried, like Becca, but in a more creative, dramatic way. She wondered if Pongo didn’t mind not being able to speak. She refused to eat bread for a while, after finding out that yeast was an organism that was ‘baked to death’. And her face was like something from the
Flower Fairies
books: big brown eyes in a milk-pale face, a pointy nose and a small, expressive mouth that trembled sometimes, then broke into a melting smile.

‘Seriously, can we go?’ Becca begged. ‘The roads are going to be mad round the airport. Dad, hurry
up
.’

‘I hope you’re going to be more polite to the porters at JFK,’ muttered Phil, as he struggled under the weight of Chloe’s bag.

It wasn’t quite shut, and where the zip gaped open, Anna noticed a familiar splash of silver: her favourite Vivienne Westwood jersey top. The last stylish item of clothing she’d bought before the girls arrived, she lost her job and the New Budget Regime kicked in.

For a second, Anna struggled with the usual lose-lose dilemma – if she said something it would kick off an unwinnable fight, make them late, and leave a bad aftertaste for her time with Phil, as well as give Chloe something to whinge about to Sarah; but if she said nothing, Chloe would feel like she’d won, again. Doubly so, given the epic shopping trip she’d cajoled Anna into taking her on before Christmas.

Chloe specialised in petty but annoying incidents like this – mini tests of Anna’s endurance that didn’t mean anything on their own, but advanced the situation inexorably forward to one where Anna felt she couldn’t say or do anything without looking like the wicked stepmother. The worst thing was, if Chloe had asked to borrow the top, Anna would probably have said yes – admittedly under some duress – whereas if she said that
now
, it’d look like she was only saying it to make Chloe feel bad.

Oh God, thought Anna in despair. Why did dealing with teenagers make you behave like one? At least birth mothers got a ten-year run-up to this sort of thing.

Becca caught her looking at the bag and pulled a sympathetic face. But she didn’t reach in and pull out the top. Chloe’s meltdowns were notorious, and conducted as if cameras were hidden around her.

‘I thought we were going?’ said Phil, back at the door, ready for another load of luggage. ‘Tick tock.’

‘We are,’ said Anna.
Detach
, she told herself.
Focus
. The most important thing was to get them to the airport, not to satisfy Chloe’s need to be the centre of everyone’s attention, good or bad. ‘Come on, Lily.’

She held out her hand, and Lily politely put her overnight bag in it.

At the airport the tearful goodbyes were halved, thanks to a combination of Christmas spending money and Duty Free shops. As usual, Phil was the one who looked most upset.

‘Call me if you need anything,’ he said, hugging them. ‘Anything at all.’

‘That’s not what you said when I missed the last bus last weekend,’ said Chloe into his shoulder.

‘You weren’t halfway round the world then.’ Phil’s worries about the children only seemed to apply when they were out of his reach, Anna noted; when they were at home, he was relatively blasé about abduction, drug-crazed rapists, WKDs, late homework, etc. She was the one who worried about all that.

Chloe wriggled out of his grasp. With a pair of shades wedged in her tawny hair, she already looked more like an extra from
Gossip Girl
, laden down with a bag of magazines, fruit she’d insisted on Phil buying but which she probably wouldn’t eat, and the obligatory bottle of mineral water. ‘Chill, Dad. We’ll be fine.’

‘Daddy, look after Pongo.’ Lily lifted her face for a kiss. ‘Tell him we miss him every day, in the morning and before bed.’

‘I will. Becca, please don’t spend the whole time revising, OK? Enjoy yourself too. Relax.’

‘Relax?’ Becca rolled her eyes. She looked tired already, even before the flight. ‘With Mum and Chloe around? Chance’d be a fine thing.’

‘I mean it,’ he said. ‘You’ve got your offer now. Have a few days off, OK? Plenty of time for stressing out when you’re running your own chambers.’

Becca had wanted to be a barrister since she was Lily’s age, something that Phil and Sarah were equally proud of, and, as of the first week in December, she had an offer to read Law at King’s College, Cambridge. Anna was proud too, but never quite knew how to express it, or whether she was ‘entitled’ to feel proud. She made lots of sandwiches instead, and left them outside Becca’s room when the light was still on after midnight.

‘Take care, Dad.’ Becca hugged him, then after a tiny pause, hugged Anna too, sending a grateful shower of sparks into Anna’s heart. ‘Don’t get used to the peace and quiet. We’ll be back before you know it.’

She turned back to her sisters, and started to usher them towards the gate.

‘Come on,’ said Anna, patting Phil’s arm. ‘Don’t watch them go through, we’re not in some disaster movie. They’ll be back in a week. And we’re cutting it fine with the car park.’

He sighed. ‘I know. It’s just that . . . every time they go, I wonder if they’re going to come back.’

Of course they’re coming back
, Anna wanted to scream.
Sarah’s only got them for six days because she’s going to Reno for a ‘vital conference’.

She took a deep breath. There was a lot she didn’t say to Phil, in the name of peace-keeping. It was backing up inside her like uncollected recycling. If she didn’t say it to Michelle, Anna suspected she’d end up doing a lot more talking to the dog.

‘Well, if they don’t come back,’ said Anna, ‘I’m definitely FedExing Pongo over to Sarah’s, pet passport or not.’

He turned to her, his handsome face all hangdog. ‘Do you think I’m a terrible father?’ he asked, semi-rhetorically.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I think you’re a very good one. That’s one of the reasons I married you.’

He slung an arm around her shoulders and hugged her to him, and Anna felt her own Christmas holiday start.

She retuned the car radio from Radio 1 to Radio 4 and, as they drove away from the airport without the sound of squabbling reverberating from the back seat, a weight lifted from her shoulders.

A whole week of just her and Phil, and no worrying about lists or bags, or putting her foot in it. And why wait for January to start the whole baby project? she thought, tingling with excitement. Why not get a few days’ extra practice in? September babies were always furthest ahead in class.

‘Phil,’ she said seductively, at the same time as he said, ‘Um . . .’

‘You go first,’ said Anna.

‘I didn’t want to discuss it in front of the girls, but I’ve been thinking about Mum,’ he said.

Oh God, thought Anna.
No
.

‘What about her?’ she asked, as evenly as she could.

‘I think she should stay in the home a bit longer. I’m not sure she’s really well enough to go back to her house.’

Anna looked across the car at him, trying to read his face. He sounded matter-of-fact, but this was a big thing. It had taken the combined efforts of Phil, Evelyn’s GP, a consultant and Becca, the favourite grandchild, to persuade Evelyn to move into Butterfields Residential Home while she recovered from a knee replacement. Anna knew the staff there from her reading programme, and, after she’d had a quiet word, they’d made a special fuss of Evelyn when she’d gone to ‘view’ the place – the reason she’d finally agreed to go. Evelyn responded well to a fuss.

‘But the consultant says she’s made a good recovery,’ Anna pointed out. ‘I can’t see her wanting to stay longer than she has to with the “bunch of dribbling cabbages”, as she calls most of them. I mean, whether she can manage the house on her own’s a different thing, but we can get Magda to come in more often.’

‘It’s not that. I just . . .’ Phil hesitated, as if he wasn’t sure he should be saying what was on his mind.

‘What?’ said Anna.

‘Yesterday she called me Ron. She looked straight at me, and said, “Ron, why are you wearing those awful slip-on shoes? You know I can’t stand them.”’

Ron was Phil’s dad, a successful surveyor who’d died when Phil was a baby. Phil had no memories of him at all, but from what Anna had gathered or worked out for herself, Ron had married fairly late in life to Evelyn, his much younger secretary, a blonde bombshell with a golf handicap to match his. Golf aside, the strained photos in Evelyn’s stuffy house suggested that the marriage hadn’t been an entirely happy one. Phil had been born when Evelyn was forty, ‘a complete shock’, as she still put it, and Ron had died suddenly of a heart attack two years later.

‘So she got your name wrong,’ said Anna, trying to sound reassuring. ‘She probably spent her whole married life starting every sentence with the words, “
Ron
, why on earth dot dot dot”. Had she just woken up?’

‘No, she was definitely awake. It was more the way she looked at me – spoiling for a fight.’ Phil took a deep breath. ‘It made me really uncomfortable. Like she was seeing him there, not me.’

‘Well, old people get confused,’ said Anna. ‘Half of them up at Butterfields call me their daughter’s name when I go in. They can remember the plots of romances they read half a century ago, but they can’t remember what I’m called.’

‘I didn’t even know my dad wore slip-on shoes,’ he added, with a very slight crack in his voice.

Anna could barely imagine how hard it must have been growing up without a father. She loved her dad, he was her source of warmth and love and companionable silences. She hated the way Evelyn refused to talk about Phil’s dad, but occasionally threw out barbs like, ‘You don’t get your pigheadedness from me.’

‘She’s pretty hearty for nearly eighty,’ she said. ‘I’m sure it was just a temporary lapse of concentration.’

‘That’s what I’m worried about. I don’t want her hale and hearty but losing her marbles. Setting the house on fire, or leaving doors open for burglars to walk in.’ He gripped the steering wheel. ‘Becca found the remote control in the fridge. We made a joke about it, but Mum must have put it there. That’s a sign, isn’t it? Of dementia? Putting things in the wrong place.’

Anna shook her head automatically. It was impossible to reconcile Evelyn, hair set in a candyfloss helmet, imperious and red-clawed, still capable of delivering a cutting remark just for the fun of it, with the dementia sufferers she read to, groping for some purchase on their surroundings like babies struggling to walk.

And, a smaller voice in her head added, was Evelyn going to be her responsibility too? As well as Phil’s children?

‘It might not be.’ She reached out and caressed the back of his neck, where his hair, cut short for work, was growing out for the holidays. ‘I’m going up there this week to do a Reading Aloud session – I’ll have a word with Joyce. She sees this sort of thing all the time.’

‘Would you?’ He glanced over. His eyes were troubled, and she wanted to comfort the concern away.

‘Course.’

‘Thanks.’ Phil managed a smile. ‘Now, it’s just you and me for the next week. Just like old times, eh? Where do you want to go for lunch?’

‘Home,’ said Anna. ‘Back to bed. I’ll make you a sandwich later if you’ve worked up an appetite.’

‘No, seriously. Simon from work says the Bridge Inn’s been done up – he had a great steak there before Christmas. Fancy that?’