The Secret of Happy Ever After

  ‘Becca, it’s Dad,’ said Phil. ‘What’s going on?’

  Anna strained her ears to hear what Becca was saying, but Phil had the phone right against his head.

  It would be just the same with our kids, she told herself, then immediately knew it wouldn’t be. With their kids, she’d be allowed to take this call and deal with this problem. She’d want to. She’d be desperate to know what was upsetting Becca so much. It wouldn’t be a case of sitting here feeling involved but not needed.

  Anna closed her eyes and rested a hand on her stomach. The fact that Phil looked so concerned and fatherly only made her more anxious inside. He would love all his children exactly the same. But a new thought had started to spring tiny insidious shoots – what if she loved her own baby just that little bit more than these three? What if she just couldn’t be bothered as much any more, jumping through these endless hoops? Anna knew she’d make herself do it, because she’d never want to let them see, but what if . . . ?

  ‘Just tell me over the phone,’ he was saying. ‘Anna and I are in the car, we’re on our way to see her mum and dad for lunch.’ He frowned. ‘Becca, don’t talk to me like that. Just tell me . . . Sarah! Did you just grab the phone off Becca? What the hell’s going on?’

  ‘What?’ Anna mouthed at him, intrigued by the squawks coming from the mobile.

  He pressed the phone to his chest and turned to Anna, his brow wrinkled. ‘They’ve all gone mad. I can’t hear anything anyone’s saying because they’re all yelling at the same time. Becca’s on the phone, then Sarah’s in the background yelling at her, and someone’s crying . . .’

  ‘No singing?’

  ‘Not even any singing . . . OK. Chloe. What’s happening?’

  Phil started to tell Chloe off, but whatever he was saying died in his throat and his face became stony, then concerned.

  ‘Well, that’s not going to happen. You’re just being dramatic. You know that isn’t . . . Chloe, it makes no difference to how . . . Chloe! Put your mother back on. Actually no, put Becca on. Put Becca on. Becca, hello. Now just tell me, in plain and simple language – you want to come home tomorrow why?’

  Anna groaned silently. Please don’t come home yet, she thought. She had a lot lined up for the next six days: a mixture of all the fun things Phil claimed to miss doing, plus some important baby testing and preparation that, ideally, she’d share with him alone. She couldn’t say it aloud, obviously, but the last thing she wanted was for the girls to come back yet, unless something was seriously amiss. Like Sarah’s house had burned down.

  Although, even then, there were always hotels.

  Anna was starting to make ‘let me talk to her’ gestures to Phil, when he cleared his throat and said something that made the breath in her chest turn to dry ice.

  ‘Becca,’ he said slowly and too calmly, ‘just because your mother’s having another baby doesn’t mean she doesn’t love you lot any more.’

  The girls’ flights were exchangeable and the first one they could book themselves on to arrived back in Birmingham at 10 a.m. the following day. Sarah insisted on coming back with them too, ‘for a family summit’, so Phil took the day off work to deal with it all.

  ‘You don’t have to wade into this,’ he’d said, when Anna asked what she could do. ‘Unless you want to.’

  They’d had an awkward moment then, when Anna honestly hadn’t known what to say, or whether he wanted her there or not. On the one hand, she felt she probably should be there, to reinforce the fact that she was a bona fide member of the family; on the other, she wasn’t sure she could bear the pain of seeing the girls’ reaction to their mother’s pregnancy, knowing that whatever they were feeling now would only be doubled when they heard her news. Trebled, even.

  In the end, the car made the decision for her. There wasn’t room for three girls plus Sarah and Anna. It wasn’t a journey that she fancied sitting in on, not until the girls had worked through the first round of hysteria: the memory of Chloe ‘disappointed’ in a closed space was still fresh from the return journey from the Britain’s Got Talent auditions.

  When Phil had left for the airport, unable to eat more than a bit of dry toast after their sleepless night of circular conversation that had trailed off in the dark, Anna took herself and Pongo round to Michelle’s for an early morning walk and a dose of common sense.

  ‘I can’t believe you’re not squeezed in there somehow,’ Michelle said as they walked the dogs round the park in the lemony morning light. ‘I’d love to be a fly on the wall for that. Has Chloe gone into dramatic overdrive? I bet Sarah’s wishing she’d told them by Skype.’

  Anna pulled Pongo back from the Weimeraner he had a dog crush on. ‘Chloe’s already run through her Little Orphan Annie routine on the phone. No one’s going to love her. She never comes first with anyone. No one understands. By now she’ll probably have moved on to fury. I’m telling you, Phil’s longing for the days of “I want blue hair and teeth veneers”.’

  ‘What’s Phil promised to buy her to make up for this? A pony?’

  ‘Ha! He’s a one-man Argos catalogue of guilt. Although I suppose this is just a delayed reaction to Sarah leaving, rather than the baby,’ Anna added gloomily. ‘They’ve been so good up until now. No major tantrums about moving in with us, coping with their mum being away from them . . . I should have known it would all kick off eventually. I knew it was all too easy.’

  Just thinking about the girls’ reaction made her wince. Were they going to do exactly the same to her when they found out? Was it better or worse that Sarah was their real mum? It wouldn’t be about her, though. It would be about Phil.

  ‘You’ve worked bloody hard, you mean.’ Michelle gave her afirm look. ‘Fair enough them kicking off about their mum leaving, but not fair enough when they kick off about something that’s not really their business. Chloe’s sixteen, not six. Did they really think Sarah wouldn’t want another baby?’

  ‘They’re kids, they don’t even like to think of their parents having sex.’ Anna’s headache throbbed. She’d meant to do another test that morning, but when it came to it, she was too scared to pee on the stick, in case it said no. In case there was only room in the cosmos for one of Phil’s wives to be pregnant at any one time. Which was ridiculous. ‘I didn’t see it coming, either. Sarah only went out there to push her career on as far as she could. Making up for all the time she took off having Chloe and Becca, or so she told me when she dropped all their gear round.’

  ‘How old is she?’

  ‘Nearly forty, same as Phil. Apparently’ – Anna made air commas as best she could while holding Pongo’s lead – ‘it wasn’t planned but she and Jeff are both very happy about it. I think she’s hoping for a little boy.’

  ‘Good for her.’ Michelle pulled Tavish away from the litter bin he was sniffing. Anna noted his black fur was looking a lot neater than normal, almost as if Michelle had taken him to a proper groomer to be trimmed. ‘And how about Phil? How’s he taken this? Retreated to his imaginary shed yet? Or have you kept him to his promise?’

  ‘How do you mean?’ Anna felt her cheeks heat up under Michelle’s direct gaze.

  ‘Well, he could have his own little boy, couldn’t he? If he got on with it, and stopped putting everyone ahead of his own wife.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Anna honestly. ‘He blows hot and cold about the whole thing. I, um . . .’ She wondered how much Michelle could tell just from her face. She’d always been able to read her, even when she thought she was being super poker-faced.

  ‘Are you pregnant?’ said Michelle, and Anna glanced shyly sideways.

  ‘Maybe. I don’t know. I hope so. Don’t say anything. It’s early days,’ she warned. ‘Very, very early days. Too early.’

  ‘Congratulations!’ Michelle hesitated for a split second, then slipped an arm through hers, squeezing her waist in a side-hug, all they could manage with dog leads. ‘Masterstroke timing. They can hardly complain if it’s half-siblings all round.’
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  ‘Well, that’s one way of looking at it.’

  Michelle steered Tavish – and Anna – towards the park coffee stall, already open and doing business with other dog-walkers.

  ‘Chloe and Becca will be fine, but to be honest I’m more worried about Lily,’ Anna went on. ‘She’s only just got used Sarah being away. She can be really chatty, then she’ll go all quiet and you have no idea what’s going on in her head until she speaks again, and it’s always about something completely different. I told you that she’s been letting me read to her at night? I think it’s helping us bond. I don’t want her to think that she’s being pushed out again.’

  ‘Anna,’ said Michelle, stopping to get her purse out. ‘Why are you acting so guilty? None of this is your fault.’

  ‘But it is, though. I feel like it is. Sarah and Jeff sound really excited about their baby and I just don’t know if Phil’s . . .’ She stopped, then made herself say it. ‘I don’t know if Phil really wants any more kids. Deep down.’

  The words were out in the air and Anna felt shocked by them. Had she meant that? That Phil might ask her not to have the baby? Surely not. But how did she know that? How could you ever know what someone would do, when all the rules were suddenly wiped out like this, and you were the only one sticking to them?

  ‘Really?’ Michelle looked stunned. ‘What, ever?’

  ‘I don’t know. The longer he leaves it, the less he’s going to want the upheaval.’

  ‘And if it was a choice between your own kids and Phil? Phil and the children you’ve already got?’ She paused. ‘And the child you’re already having?’

  Anna tried to read Michelle’s face but she couldn’t. There was an odd sort of neutrality about her expression that she’d seen before when the topic of children came up, as if it was all a bit theoretical.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she confessed. ‘Actually, I probably shouldn’t be having coffee.’

  Without speaking, Michelle u-turned from the coffee stall where a short queue had formed and directed the two dogs towards the free dog run, where a pair of terriers were already leaping joyously in the sand.

  ‘Did you ever have that conversation with the girls about having sisters? Do you know how they’d react to you and Phil having a baby?’

  ‘Sort of.’ There’d been a conversation with Becca, when they’d been discussing Little Women in the bookshop, and Becca had joked about them being one sister short of the March family . . . Anna pulled herself up. No, she’d thought that it would be a good time to start putting out feelers to find out how Becca would feel about a baby brother or sister, but she hadn’t actually mentioned it to her. She’d just thought about doing it, and in her head, that had become a conversation.

  Michelle peered over her shades, her sharp eyes squinting against the sun. ‘You never know, Lily might like having a kid brother. She can boss him around.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s going to be as simple as that,’ said Anna. ‘Phil’s the problem. He just wants a quiet life. What if he decides we’ve got to wait? Or decides that he doesn’t want any more? I can’t just walk out on the girls when everyone else is letting them down, but . . .’

  ‘But what? Anna, get it off your chest. Stop bottling this stuff up!’

  ‘I’m thirty-one.’ She didn’t know how to go on from there, and stared out at the flowerbeds full of rosebushes, her lips clamped shut against the tide of panic and bitterness threatening to pour out.

  ‘You’re thirty-one,’ Michelle prompted her.

  ‘I want this baby,’ she said. ‘How many chances do you get? Even if I started again now, it could take me a year to find someone else. A year to trust them enough to get pregnant. Another year to get pregnant, if I could. And I love Phil. I want his kids. Not someone else’s.’ She looked up at Michelle and her eyes swam with tears at the unfairness of it. ‘I don’t want to let anyone down, but what about me? You can’t ask someone to choose between the three children they agreed to take on, and their own unborn child.’

  ‘Phil wouldn’t ask you to choose like that,’ said Michelle, horrified. ‘Anna – it won’t come to that.’

  ‘I don’t want to let them down,’ she repeated, but it sounded more as if she were trying to convince herself. Pongo strained at the end of his lead, unable to understand why they’d stopped walking within sniffing distance of the dog run. She closed her eyes and tried not to cry, and a dull ache began in the pit of her stomach. ‘I thought this would be the happiest moment of my life, but it’s turning into the worst.’

  ‘Anna.’ Michelle’s voice was gentle but firm. ‘They’re not your kids. You love them, I know, but they’re not yours, at the end of the day. Someone else has the responsibility for loving them.’

  Anna didn’t open her eyes, but she felt Michelle’s hand on her arm. ‘They are mine,’ she insisted. ‘I married Phil, they’re mine.’

  But she wasn’t theirs. Not when it mattered. They weren’t running to her because Sarah was pregnant. They weren’t crying on the phone to her, needing reassurance.

  Michelle gently circled her shoulder in a hug. Anna felt her take Pongo’s lead out of her hand, and let herself lean forward, her wet eyes pressed into Michelle’s shoulder. She could hear the dogs barking happily as they bounced free in the sand, and she could smell fresh coffee and the lilac bushes and Michelle’s familiar fig perfume, and she wished she could stay like this until everything was sorted out.

  Only she couldn’t. That wasn’t what parenthood was about, even when you weren’t actually a parent. You had to do the sorting out.

  19

  ‘The Hobbit is a great book to read at bedtime.

  The mysterious, magical worlds spread out of the page into your own imagination as you drift off to sleep. The realms and rules of the quest seem to make sense on the edge of a dream.’

  Rory Stirling

  The change in the house was obvious from the moment Anna put her key in the door and let herself in that evening. It wasn’t just the sound of voices in the kitchen, it was a tension in the atmosphere, the smell of someone else’s perfume that made the place suddenly unfamiliar to her.

  Pongo held back, sniffing the air as if he knew something was afoot, and then stuck to her heels instead of charging in to see the girls as he usually did.

  Anna paused by the hall mirror and checked her reflection, smoothing back the stray wisps of blond hair so she just looked windswept, rather than outright dishevelled.

  I’m not putting off going into my own house, I’m just . . . preparing, she told herself, as her ears strained to pick up what was going on in the kitchen. She’d been on tenterhooks in the bookshop all day, but her phone hadn’t rung and there’d been no appearances from Phil or the girls. She guessed they had a lot to talk about.

  Anna hesitated, then pulled a pale lipgloss out of her bag and hastily applied it. But that’s it, she added silently. No point wearing more slap to come home than I did when I left the house. Phil will just wonder what I’ve been up to.

  Sarah was always immaculate and Anna, with her floaty, creative style, had never seen the point in competing with her sharp suits and statement bags. She wondered if Sarah was starting to show yet, whether she had that pregnancy bloom that everyone went on about, or if she was throwing up everywhere.

  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.