‘For that I’m going to make you come to the next session. Oh!’ she said, her memory jogged. ‘I meant to say – when we were collecting Evelyn this morning, who do you think we saw parked in the morning room?’
‘Princess Anne? Terry Wogan?’
‘Cyril Quentin. You know, from the bookshop. That’d explain why it’s been closed for the last week.’ Anna pulled on her duffle coat and started to wrap her scarf back round her neck.
‘It’s very hard to tell whether that bookshop is open or closed at the best of times.’ Michelle pursed her lips.
‘Oh, don’t.’ Anna’s face creased with guilt. ‘I tried to get half the books for the girls from his shop, but . . .’
‘You got them off the internet instead. That’s life. Bookshops are hard work these days. Especially when your window display still has Royal Wedding memorabilia in it – from Fergie’s big day.’
Anna knew Michelle was right, but it still made her sad. ‘It wasn’t always like that. I used to love dropping in there for a browse, when Agnes Quentin was alive. She must have done most of the buying. Last time I was in I had to plough through piles of military history to find anything, and there was a weird smell of—’
Anna’s phone buzzed, stopping her mid-sentence. ‘Phil,’ she sighed. ‘His mother’s woken up and the girls are fighting over the Wii. He wants Pongo back so he can take him out for a walk.’
At the sound of his name, Pongo emerged from under the table in his green babygro. ‘Christmas really has come for you, my old mate,’ observed Michelle. ‘Twice as many walkies as normal.’
‘Come on. Back to the fray,’ said Anna.
‘Keep the dog bag,’ said Michelle, fondling his ears affectionately. ‘Call it part of his Christmas present. Leave it on until you’re outside, though.’
‘Thanks.’ Impulsively, Anna hugged Michelle, feeling her small but sturdy frame crushed against her own lankier one. ‘Are you sure you don’t want to come back with us? Christmas supper? I hate leaving you here on your own.’
‘I’m fine. I’ve got a really expensive meal-for-one. Now let me go, you’re smearing my make-up.’ Michelle’s voice was muffled against her coat, and when Anna pulled away, she saw that though her eyeliner was just as pristine as before, her eyes were wet.
‘It’s going to be a good year,’ insisted Anna.
‘I know,’ said Michelle. ‘Stop trying so hard and let it happen.’
Anna thought that was rich, coming from Michelle, but she let it go.
2
‘I read the Narnia series at the back of my parents’ wardrobe, hoping the oak walls would become snowy branches.’
Francine Toon
Physically, Michelle wasn’t a typical runner – she was small, and her legs were slightly shorter than she’d have liked – but she had a determination that turned each circuit around the town into a race with herself.
Just because it was Boxing Day – maybe because it was Boxing Day – didn’t mean she’d abandoned her routine: her morning run, followed by a shower, a cafetiere of Kenyan coffee and two glasses of water, porridge, to-do lists and then a sneaky scan of the online gossip sites. Michelle liked to keep herself on a rail-like schedule, but today she wanted to be up, about and out in case her mother phoned back and tried to guilt-trip her into driving down to Surrey, to be guilt-tripped some more.
She jogged down the deserted towpath, past the silvery-grey waters of the canal where three brown ducks swished along in silence, and turned left onto the footpath that led into town. Her breath made puffs of white in the cold morning air, and she felt the blood pumping around her body, fresh and hot. A few dog-walkers were out, and she nodded at the ones she recognised – Juliet, Anna’s dog-sitter with the white terrier and the chocolate Labrador, and an old couple with a grizzly Dachshund, all of them wrapped up in waxed jackets.
Michelle’s route took her down the two upwardly mobile rows of white Georgian villas towards the Victorian terraces nearer town, her eye ticking off the list of poet streets, Tennyson Avenue, Wordsworth Road, Donne Gardens. They were her ideal customer areas, and she liked to monitor what was going on. She glanced into people’s front windows as she jogged past, and spotted a couple of her filigree silver stars and some of the outdoor tree lights that had sold out in one week. It gave her an extra burst of energy as she turned up the hill towards the main part of town.
At the top of Worcester Street, Michelle faced a choice: right, down and onto the high street, or left and round by the park. Normally, she wouldn’t jog down the high street, but it was quiet and a thought had been niggling at her since Milton Grove, where every front-room window revealed a packed bookshelf, and in some cases, floor-to-ceiling books. Michelle wasn’t a book person herself, unless you counted coffee-table art books, which she did love, especially arranged in height order on her footstool. But Anna’s interest in Quentin’s bookshop had made Michelle wonder if she might not be missing something that the poet streets might be interested in buying.
There were a few wandering souls escaping the morning after on the high street, but not many shops were open. Two women were gazing at the festive display in Home Sweet Home but they’d moved on before Michelle had gone past Boots. She slowed down outside the bookshop and peered in through the murky window, her heart still pounding in her chest as she stretched her burning hamstrings.
Inside the main room was gloomy, with stacks of books all over the place, and the mess alone made Michelle want to break in and tidy it up. It had been teetering on the edge of closure for weeks now; some days the open sign would never be turned round. Michelle had popped in a few times to say hello, but she hadn’t been in for ages, mainly because Cyril Quentin was the sort of book maniac who could spot a ‘nonreader’ a mile off, and he made her feel thick. The impression she’d had the last time she went in was of a sort of clubby stillness that didn’t, to Michelle’s mind, fulfil a shop’s only brief: to seduce and thrill the customer into parting with cash to take some of that thrill home with them.
A strange, forlorn feeling swept over her as she tried to make out where the front ended and the back room began. She wondered if the Quentins ever decorated. The shelves looked as if they’d been there since the shop was built, looming like ribs throughout the room. Michelle couldn’t see where any light was coming from, it was so dark.
But the shop had potential. Massive potential. If you sanded the floorboards, she thought, and painted everything a soft oatmeal colour with bright accents, and put in some clever lighting, and took down those shadowy shelves, this could be the perfect bedlinen emporium. Home Sweet Home II.
Bedlinen was going to be the next big thing; Michelle knew it from her own obsessive browsing on the internet for featherbeds and baby-soft blankets. Her regulars complained that their gym membership and nights out had been crunched, but they still wanted to cosy up inside, especially in chilly Longhampton with its drizzly springs that never seemed to burst into flower until the last possible moment, and the damp, leafy autumns that started the day after Wimbledon finished.
Michelle gazed into the bookshop with her X-ray decoration vision, replacing the piles of paperbacks with brass-framed double beds made up with crisp white cotton and duck-down duvets, set on scrubbed floorboards with crimson-and-cream rag rugs dotted between. The shelves filled up with neatly folded blankets, Irish lambswool in sherbet stripes, lavender bags in the shape of hearts, and her signature purple ribbon tying up cleverly colour-coded bed sets.
Her heart beat faster, but not from the exercise. All she’d done was write down ‘New Shop’ and here it was – the shop right next door, Anna tipping her off before anyone else heard. It was meant to be. Someone up there had decided to throw her a chance, for once.
Michelle pulled out her phone, made a note to herself about tracking down the solicitors – she had a vague memory that Flint and Cook handled the older traders’ businesses – then turned her music back on and jogged home, her mind full of paint chart
s, uplighters and soft mohair throws.
She was so busy planning her next move that she didn’t even notice the man sitting on her step until he got up, and nearly made her swerve into the canal.
‘Hello, Michelle,’ said Owen, and flashed her the cheeky grin that worked on every woman with breath in her body – except her.
‘OK, girls. Have you got everything?’ asked Phil for the twentieth time.
Anna thought it was a pretty redundant question because, going by the huge bags piled up by the front door, there wasn’t much the girls hadn’t packed. She didn’t say anything, though.
‘Presents for your mum?’ she asked instead, as neutrally as she could. Sarah, she knew, was getting a fabulous basket of gifts she’d helped Chloe and Lily to wrap. They’d spent hours on it.
‘Yes,’ said Becca.
‘Presents for Jeff?’
Jeff was Sarah’s boyfriend, although given he was nearly fifty and a senior director at the management company she worked for, ‘boyfriend’ did seem to be pushing it. When Anna felt that she got the rough end of the girls’ attitudes, she had to remind herself that she wasn’t poor Jeff, the thoroughly pleasant American Sarah had met when he came over to restructure the UK operation, who’d committed the ultimate sin of being neither Phil, nor the George Clooney-a-like they felt their mother should have remarried, Phil no longer being available.
Chloe tossed her hair over her shoulder. She had beautiful hair, long and blond and naturally streaky like a tortoiseshell cat, and she used it as punctuation when she couldn’t make her voice sarcastic enough. ‘I still don’t see why we have to give Jeff anything.’
‘Yes,’ said Becca firmly, speaking over her. ‘English condiments. Mum says he misses English mustard.’
Chloe tossed her hair the other way and muttered, ‘We should have got him breath mints.’
‘Give it a rest, Chloe,’ said Becca, checking her own bag.
Becca, at nearly eighteen, was only two years older than Chloe, but sometimes Anna thought she seemed to have accelerated straight out of her teens and into her thirties. She had long blond hair too, but wore it plaited and out of the way; for the last few months, it had been wrapped Heidi-style across the top of her head.
‘Breath mints? Why?’ As Phil looked up from his bag-balancing act, Anna caught the ghost of satisfaction that crossed Chloe’s face, and she knew who the comment had been intended for.
‘Oh my God, Dad, you know cheese and onion crisps? Well, Jeff’s like the cheese and onion breath monster and he’s—’ Chloe’s huge eyes looked ready to pop out of her face, so inexpressible was her revulsion.
‘Jeff’s all right,’ Becca interrupted. ‘And Mum clearly thinks he’s all right and she’s the one who has to smell his breath every morning. Can we hurry up, please? I don’t want to be late.’
‘Have you got . . . something to read on the plane?’ Anna suggested tentatively. She hadn’t wanted to shove the books into their bags, but the thought of an eight-hour flight without a good read was like torture to her. She’d put some flight-length books in her Christmas selection for that very reason.
‘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.