The Happy Family Read online

  I drop a teabag into a mug and pour in the boiling water, yawning again. I’m not sure why, but I haven’t been sleeping well recently; my nights are restless, my dreams more often nightmares. Nightmares like the ones I used to have years ago, way back in my teens.

  Is it him, Mr Stalker, who’s making me feel so strange? Is that why the nightmares are back? It’s been so long …

  I stare into my mug, wondering, then jump as a voice shouts:

  ‘Bye Beth! See you tomorrow!’

  Robin is waving at me from the kitchen doorway.

  ‘Oh gosh! Sorry, didn’t mean to startle you,’ she says.

  I laugh and wave a hand dismissively.

  ‘Oh, it’s OK, I was in my own little world there for a minute! Bye, Robin. Thanks so much, as always. Have a nice evening!’

  ‘You too.’

  She smiles, waves again, and is gone. I turn back to my drink, fishing the teabag out, squishing it against the side of the mug, and depositing it in the food caddy that sits beside the sink. My heart is racing. How ridiculous. It was only Robin. What’s wrong with me?

  I walk slowly out into the hallway and make my way upstairs, bracing myself for the inevitable row I’m about to have with my strong-willed ten-year-old daughter when I try to persuade her to hand over the iPad to her little brother, and having a stern word with myself. Everything is fine. I’m fine, work is fine, the kids are fine. So I need to shake this nagging unease that keeps sweeping over me. There’s no reason for it. I probably just need a hot bath and an early night – a decent sleep. Whatever it is, it’ll pass, like everything does.

  I take a deep, steadying breath and yet, even as I push open the door of my daughter’s bedroom, I can feel that tight little knot of tension in my stomach growing. Because it’s not working. No matter how sternly I talk to myself, how firmly I tell myself everything is fine, I can’t entirely supress this creeping feeling of … dread. The clawing sensation that something that happened a long, long time ago, something I thought I’d managed to bury forever, might not be buried after all.

  Chapter 3

  ‘Do you think that poor woman is OK? It’s freezing. Is there nothing we can do?’

  I’m peering out of the window of the surgery waiting room. Across the street, in the doorway of the building adjacent to our car park, an old lady is sitting wrapped in a blanket, a big wheelie suitcase tucked in beside her. She has long, straggly grey hair and a brown felt hat pulled down low over her eyes, and she’s reading a battered paperback, gloved fingers shaking slightly as she turns the pages. She started using the doorway – that of a closed-down Indonesian restaurant – as a daytime reading spot a few weeks ago, spending a few hours at a time there before neatly folding her blanket and trundling slowly off again, leaving a little nest of cardboard behind her. It’s probably a lucrative spot for her – I’ve seen more than one of our patients stopping to drop a few coins in her lap as they arrive and depart – but it hurts my heart to see her there, alone in the cold.

  ‘Nadia? I took her over a coffee earlier.’

  Ruth is behind her reception desk, resplendent in red animal print today and sorting through some files. The waiting room is empty; the lunchtime lull before afternoon surgery begins at two.

  ‘Nadia?’ I say. ‘Is that her name?’

  Ruth looks up at me.

  ‘Yep. She’s a bit of a sweetie, actually. She doesn’t say much, but I’ve started popping over with a hot drink and a few biscuits every time she turns up and I’ve built up a bit of rapport with her. She’s staying in that shelter off the High Street, but they have to be out between breakfast and teatime, bless her.’

  ‘That’s pretty tough in this weather.’

  ‘It is. But at least that doorway’s quite deep, out of the wind. And she’s got a hot water bottle, which helps. I top that up for her too, if she needs it.’

  ‘That’s kind of you. Poor woman. What’s her story, do you know? How come she’s homeless? She must be, what? Seventyish?’

  I turn to look at Nadia again. She’s buried even deeper in her blanket now, just her nose peeking out, the book close to her face.

  ‘Probably. And I don’t know,’ says Ruth. ‘Didn’t like to ask really. She seems healthy enough at least. It’s so sad though, isn’t it? To be homeless and alone at her age. Well, at any age really.’

  I turn away from the window with a sigh.

  ‘It really is. I’m so grateful that Dad is safe and warm and looked after. He was in great form just now.’

  ‘Oh good. Give him my love next time you see him. Tell him I’ll pop in one day early next week, take him a slice of cheesecake. I’m planning a baking session on Sunday.’

  ‘He’d love that. He always did love your cheesecake. Actually, so do I. You’ll be bringing some into work too, right?’

  Ruth grins.

  ‘Of course.’

  I smile back and head for my office. I called in to see Dad at lunchtime today so I could get home a little earlier; Jacob, my ex, is taking the kids tonight and Barbara and Brenda, my next-door neighbours and friends, are coming round for drinks and a takeaway, a Friday night treat. I try to see my father at least three or four times a week, but I don’t always manage it. He understands, but it doesn’t stop me feeling guilty. At eighty, he’s been in a care home for nearly a year now, since he had a major stroke, but even before that he’d been struggling. He’s got diabetic retinopathy, a complication of his diabetes which has gradually claimed more and more of his eyesight. He’s not blind, not totally, but his vision is pretty poor these days, and that combined with the partial leg and arm paralysis caused by the stroke finally made it impossible for him to live alone. I considered, briefly, moving him in with us, but his need for full-time care just made it too difficult, and anyway, he refused point blank.

  ‘I know a couple of lads who are about to move into Holly Tree anyway,’ he said – his words were slightly slurred, the stroke having affected his face too, but only a little – when he first mooted the idea of going to see the newly built residential and nursing care home on Lansdown Road. ‘Pretty fancy, apparently. Got a bar and everything.’

  He’d winked and smiled his newly lopsided smile, and I’d felt a surge of relief, then immediately felt guilty again. But when we did the tour, we discovered it was indeed pretty fancy: a state-of-the-art modern building with a bar and restaurant, swimming pool and gym, games room and library. It was expensive yes, but Dad, a former accountant, had always been thrifty and had enough money put aside to cover the fees for the first eighteen months or so. After that, the proceeds from the sale of his house, a tidy three-bed in Shurdington which sold within days of going on the market, will hopefully be enough to pay for his care for as long as he needs it.

  Today, when I popped in just after one, I found him sitting in his wheelchair by the window in the bar, nursing a glass of red wine in his good hand and snorting with laughter at something his friend Billy, another ex-accountant who was sitting in the armchair opposite, was telling him.

  ‘Well, you two look like you’re having a nice Friday,’ I said. ‘Wine at lunch? I’m jealous.’

  Dad turned to look at me, squinting, trying to focus on my face, then grinned.

  ‘Beth. Hello, love. Sit down. How are you?’

  He looked neat and groomed as usual, wearing a dark-brown cardigan done up to the neck with his thin grey hair recently brushed. He may be almost blind, but he still has pride in his appearance.

  ‘I’m OK,’ I said. ‘Tired. Ready for the weekend. Are you all right? And hi, Billy. How are you?’

  Billy, a kind-faced old man in a blue checked shirt, raised his glass of what looked like gin and tonic and nodded.

  ‘Grand, lass, grand.’

  ‘I’m all right, love,’ Dad said. ‘We’re going in for lunch at quarter to. Billy and I were just reminiscing about the old days. Some of the stories …’

  He laughed again, and I smiled. He’s frail, but he’s content here,
I can always see that. We chatted idly for a few more minutes, Billy joining in to regale us with another half-forgotten memory of some notorious local businessman and his attempts at money laundering. My mind drifted a little, the overheated room making me sleepy, and random thoughts tumbled over each other.

  Indian or Thai tonight?

  Did I remember to put the bubbly in the fridge?

  I need to put some clean pyjamas in Eloise’s overnight bag.

  Was that really him again last night in the car park, or was I imagining it? Who the hell is he? What does he want?

  A shiver ran through me, despite the warmth of the room. I sat up straighter in my chair, trying to concentrate on Dad and Billy’s conversation.

  I really need to stop thinking about him. Forget him, Beth.

  I’ve never mentioned him to Dad; it’ll only worry him, and he’ll try and make me go to the police, and what’s the point, really? The man has never tried to approach me or harm me, after all. He’s just been … well, there.

  ‘I was saying to Billy earlier about what we talked about the other day … about it being Alice’s sixtieth birthday next month. Seems strange to think of your mother as an older woman, doesn’t it?’ Dad said suddenly.

  ‘I know,’ I said. We looked at each other in silence for a moment, then I said: ‘Well, wherever she is, I hope she has a good one. Sixty’s a big deal.’

  He shrugged, then grimaced.

  ‘Not as big a deal as eighty.’

  ‘True.’

  I smiled, then leaned over to squeeze his hand. Dad turned eighty recently, with a Saturday afternoon knees-up here in the home, tea and cake and a few tots of whiskey, and a singsong in the bar. The twenty-year age gap between him and Mum could well have been one of the reasons she left, I’ve sometimes thought on the rare occasions I’ve allowed myself to think about it. I could be wrong though – that’s probably just me, as an adult woman, trying to make excuses for her. But a twenty-year age gap is big, isn’t it, especially when you’re young? Who knows, though; it’s not something Dad and I have really discussed, not ever. She was unhappy, she cried a lot, and then she left. It was what it was; we suffered through it and then just got on with it, me and him. He was fifty when she went, she was just thirty, and already mother of a ten-year-old, me. Married at eighteen, to a man who was already nearly forty. My memories of her are hazy now – a vague image in my head of blonde hair, smiley eyes, the smell of the coconut-oil body lotion she loved, the tiny triple star tattoo on her collar bone.

  One star for her, one for Dad, one for me.

  She must have loved him once, must have loved me, to get that tattoo, mustn’t she? Or did she know, even as she sat there in the tattooist’s chair, the needle pushing colour into her skin, the smell of antiseptic in her nostrils … did she know even then that she was going to leave us? Was the tattoo enough, a souvenir, a memory, of the family she no longer wanted to spend her life with? Over the years that followed – those dreadful teenage years when being without a mother led me to dark places I no longer allow myself to remember – I painted a picture of her in my mind, a picture of a free spirit, wild and beautiful, too wild in the end for marriage and children and suburbia, a woman who could not be tamed. But they were the romantic musings of a teenager, for I don’t know why she went at all in truth, not really.

  I have only one photograph of my mother, Alice, on her wedding day in the late 70s, Dad dapper in white trousers and a navy blazer, Mum in flowing lace with flowers in her hair. In a rare fit of rage – Dad never gets angry – he threw the rest of the photos, every album, every framed picture, on a bonfire a few months after she went, once it became clear she was gone for good, that it wasn’t just a temporary thing, something that could be fixed. But I squirrelled the wedding photo away, slipping it under my mattress. I would take it out to look at, to weep over, when I was alone in my room at night, and run my finger across her face, whispering: ‘Please come home, Mummy. Please, please come home,’ over and over and over again.

  She didn’t of course. The emptiness was so … so big, at first. It got smaller over time, slowly shrank away over the years until I could barely feel it anymore, but now and again, even decades later and usually when I’m least expecting it, it returns, just briefly. That void, that pain.

  ‘What’re you doing tonight, love? Hitting the town?’

  Dad was speaking to me again and I dragged my attention back to him, to my father, the one person who’s always been there for me. I smiled.

  ‘Girls’ night in,’ I said. ‘Jacob’s taking the kids and Brenda and Barbara are coming round. An Indian probably, and a couple of bottles of wine. That will do nicely.’

  ‘Sounds good. Enjoy, love. You deserve it.’

  Now, back in my office, I think again of Nadia, the poor homeless woman, then I sit down at my desk and try to count my blessings. My dad is safe and happy and looked after, the kids are doing well, I have a secure job that I love, great friends and colleagues. I’m even on amicable terms with my ex. There’s nothing to worry about. I tap my keyboard to wake up my computer and get back to work, but as the afternoon drags on one niggly, persistent thought repeatedly wriggles its way to the forefront of my brain.

  Everything might be fine now. But that’s only because nobody knows what happened back then. What if that changed?

  That would be the end of everything, wouldn’t it?

  Chapter 4

  ‘Right, got everything? I’m not going to get a call in two hours’ time asking me to drive over with your nightie or your book or something else crucially important?’

  I poke Eloise gently in the tummy and she squirms and slaps my hand away.

  ‘Get off, Mum! No, I haven’t forgotten anything this time. Check if you don’t believe me.’

  She points at her little rose-gold weekend case which is still open on the hall floor, and I shake my head.

  ‘Nope, I believe you. Thousands of mums wouldn’t, however.’

  I grin at her and she rolls her eyes, then grins back and kneels down to zip up the case. I watch her, my heart twisting a little as it always does when she and Finley have to leave me. She’s growing up so quickly, my little girl, fine, dark-brown hair swishing around her slender shoulders, long lashes like her dad’s. She’s only ten, not quite at the stage where she wants to start putting make-up on her smooth olive skin or punching holes in her soft earlobes, but I know those days are getting closer and I dread them. Finley, who’s now trudging down the stairs, dragging his own bag behind him – THUMP! THUMP! THUMP! – is as like me in appearance as Eloise is like her father: blonder, paler, rounder of face.

  ‘OK you two, let’s get out of here. Give your mother some peace.’

  Jacob is standing in the doorway and I drag my gaze from my children – our children – and I smile at him. Over his shoulder, I can see Crystal sitting in the front seat of his blue Land Rover which is parked in the driveway, long black hair pulled into a neat knot on top of her head. She’s still in her business suit – he must have picked her up from work – and she’s holding her phone to her ear, nodding, her face solemn. I meet her eye, raise a hand, and she waves back, flashing her perfect white teeth. We’re OK now, Jacob and Crystal and I. Not close friends, but amicable, cordial, all three of us putting Finley and Eloise’s happiness first. It took a while, but it’s as good as it can be under the circumstances.

  It was all so clichéd really: Jacob and I started dating at university, got engaged the day we graduated, and were married a couple of years later, both of us just twenty-four. Too young. We did, at least, wait a while before we had children, building our careers, buying a house. I had Eloise when I was thirty, Jacob’s landscape gardening business finally making enough money for me to take extended maternity leave, and Finley was born three years later. On his fifth birthday, as we tried to restore order to the chaos our son and sixteen over-excited classmates had wrought on our living room, as I picked party popper streamers off the pot plants
and wiped jammy fingerprints from the cushions, Jacob told me he’d been having an affair with one of his clients and was leaving me.

  Our marriage was over, just like that. My happy bubble was popped like the deflated balloons lying limply on the sofa, my world falling to pieces like the cake trampled into the carpet. Of course there’d been signs – many of them, in the previous months – and more arguments. Jacob had worked late or at weekends more and more frequently, and there had been a general sense, unvoiced but felt by both of us, that we’d slowly grown apart as we’d grown up. But when the end came, it left me reeling. Crystal Williams, the woman now sitting in my driveway, waiting to spend the weekend with my children, is a beautiful thirty-five-year-old barrister with creamy caramel skin, a stunning home in Charlton Kings, and the most extensive shoe collection of anyone I know.

  I should hate her – she shagged, and eventually stole, my husband as he worked on a three-month garden redesign for her, after all – and at first I did, with a passion. But the hatred slowly dissipated, and it has, miraculously, now gone completely. They’re still together, she and Jacob, happy and settled in her gorgeous house, and the kids … well, I’m still loath to say they love her, but I think they do, just a little. They fell for her accent first (she’s originally from Barbados, and speaks, they say “just like Rihanna, Mum!”). But she’s also kind to them, generous but not in an ostentatious or over-the-top way and, although she apparently has no desire to have children of her own, she has willingly accepted my offspring into her life and home as often as they want to be there, as part of Jacob, the man she genuinely seems to love. A few months after the split she rang me, asked if we could meet, told me how ashamed she was, but also how in love. She was so humble, so deeply apologetic, so bloody nice, that despite myself I could feel the burning anger I felt towards her for hastening the end of our marriage begin to cool almost immediately. After all, if it hadn’t been her, it would have been somebody else, eventually; it might even have been me who’d had the affair, who’d left first. That’s the truth of it, and there’s no point in pretending otherwise.