The Secrets of Happiness Read online

  She put an arm around Mabel. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said with fake cheer. ‘I’m sure there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation. I bet she’s just got held up and her phone’s out of charge, that sort of thing. She’ll probably be back any minute.’ There was a too-long pause while they both listened to the melancholic sawing of the violin, like a misery soundtrack, then Becca went on, trying to sound as upbeat as possible. ‘Where’s Scarlet, anyway? And has everyone had enough to eat? I can make pancakes or something if you like.’

  ‘Pancakes?’ The violin-playing stopped abruptly and another head popped out from a room along the hallway. It was Scarlet, her hair in two neat brown plaits with rectangular glasses perched at an angle on her freckled nose. ‘I bloody love pancakes. Hi, Aunty Bee.’

  Becca raised an eyebrow at the ‘bloody’, but decided not to comment. She smiled at her instead. ‘Hi, gorgeous. Lovely violin-playing there, very good.’

  ‘I wrote that tune myself,’ Scarlet replied, following Becca into the smart, taupe-painted kitchen. (Rachel had a Farrow & Ball loyalty card, at a guess.) ‘It’s called “Come Back Harvey, I Miss Your Silky Ears”.’

  Becca blinked. ‘Who’s Harvey? Your boyfriend?’

  There was a sniggered ‘Yeah, right’ from Mabel, but Scarlet merely put her chin in the air. ‘He’s our dog,’ she said darkly. ‘Or at least he was until Dad took him away.’

  ‘Oh,’ Becca said, sorry now for her lame joke. ‘That’s sad.’ It was getting dusky outside now, the sky a strange yellow-grey, as if it was going to rain, and darkness had begun filling in the edges of the garden; but she could see a swing out there, and a trampoline, and white roses gleaming in the shrubbery.

  ‘Yeah,’ Scarlet said, scuffing a foot against the table-leg. ‘It’s a bloody nightmare. He cries when we go back there, you know. He actually cries because he misses us so much. But Dad said it was his dog and it was only fair seeing as Mum got to keep us. They had a massive fight.’

  Ouch. ‘Poor you,’ Becca said. ‘And poor old Harvey.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Scarlet said again. ‘Poor Harvey because he has to live with Welsh Grandma and Dad. That sucks.’

  Lawrence was back at his mum’s? Becca had vague memories of a stern-faced old battleaxe at the wedding, unsmiling and steely in navy blue, and felt a stab of sympathy for the dog, as well as for the children. None of this had turned out very well.

  ‘And poor us, because we have to listen to Scarlet’s violin-playing,’ Mabel added heartlessly. ‘If you’re really lucky, she’ll play you one of her other tunes,’ she went on, dodging out of the way as her sister tried to kick her. ‘My favourite’s called “I Hate You, Mum and Dad”. Or – what was the new one? “I Am the Darkness”. It’s like a musical Armageddon. Violinageddon. Ow!’ she yelped as Scarlet’s foot finally made contact with her shin. ‘Get off me, mental-case.’

  Okaaaay, thought Becca, getting out flour, eggs and milk while the girls launched into a heated quarrel. Like that, then, eh? It was obviously time to recalibrate Rachel’s family from the magazine-perfect one she remembered to now include the blue-haired teenager, the shy anxious boy and the violin-playing firebrand currently trying to punch her sister – oh, and the missing husband and dog, of course. Not quite so perfect after all.

  ‘Hey! Guys!’ she pleaded, sieving flour into a mixing bowl. ‘Pancakes, remember? Who wants to break the eggs?’

  Eggs weren’t the only things that were broken around here, she thought as Scarlet came over to help with a last sullen glare at Mabel. Within five minutes of her arrival, the fractures within the family were already startlingly apparent. Come home, Rachel, wherever you are, she thought, as Mabel huffed out of the room. Your kids need you. Come home!

  Chapter Four

  Things were slowly returning to Rachel, as if a torch was shining around a dark room, illuminating details here and there. She vaguely remembered arriving at Manchester station now, being pushed from behind in the coffee queue and another person grabbing her bag; the sensation of falling hard, that split-second moment of shock and fright before everything went black. After that, though, there was nothing until she’d come round in the ambulance, however deeply she probed the shadowy fathoms of her memory. Cinnamon, coffee, vanilla, she thought woozily. And then, boom, on the floor, out.

  Since being brought to the hospital, she had been patched up physically, if not quite mentally yet: the emergency doctors had put her fractured wrist in a rough cast, bandaged her injured head and dosed her up with morphine. Tomorrow they would be wiring her jaw and operating on her wrist. So that was plenty to look forward to. Lolz, as Mabel would say, deadpan.

  By late afternoon, she had managed at last to tell them, despite the broken jaw, blood oozing from her lips and the grinding pain that left her feeling faint, that her name was Rachel. It had felt like huge progress when she haltingly made the sound and the kind Glaswegian nurse replied, ‘Rachel? Rachel! Okay, great,’ back at her. ‘You’re Rachel, that’s lovely. How about your second name?’

  It was the weirdest thing. She opened her mouth to reply but there was nothing there, no answer. She had stared back at the nurse in horror as her mind remained silent and stubbornly blank. ‘I . . .’ This was ridiculous. Her own name. It was on the tip of her tongue as well, just out of reach. Come on, Rachel! Of course you know your second name!

  The nurse must have seen the panic in her eyes because she patted her soothingly. ‘Don’t worry, you’re concussed, that’s all. It’ll come back. I don’t suppose you can remember a contact number in the meantime, can you? People must be worrying about you.’

  A contact number – yes. Absolutely. She wanted to cry with relief at the thought of a call being made, a nurse or doctor phoning home so that the children could be told what was happening. Hopefully Sara would sort something out. Rachel was not exactly pally with her but needs must when you were a single mum. She hoped the other woman would understand.

  The nurse was hovering expectantly for the number, she realized, and Rachel made a gargantuan effort to form the necessary sounds with her broken mouth. ‘Oh,’ she began in a strangled voice. ‘Wuh-wuh-one.’ To think that she had taken speech for granted all these years. You just opened your mouth and out it came, long chains of words to articulate whatever tiny trivial thing you might be thinking. Now, after one hard shove, one single fall, it had become a Herculean task to make herself understood.

  Then it happened again. It was so strange, as if her brain had seized up, jamming midway through. She frowned, shutting her eyes in order to concentrate, but all she could see were numbers, all shapes and sizes and colours, swinging around like a carousel in her brain, making her feel nauseous all of a sudden.

  ‘Keep going,’ the nurse encouraged, and Rachel opened her eyes again, the room tilting and lurching. ‘What’s the next number?’

  Good question. Her mind had gone completely blank now, all numbers receding into the distance. It was as if she was searching wildly through dark empty space and nothing was there. She couldn’t remember. She just couldn’t remember!

  ‘Don’t worry,’ the nurse said again. ‘I find it tricky enough remembering my PIN number at the best of times, let alone when I’ve had a wallop on the head, like you. Just relax, take your time. Try again in a bit.’

  She had tried – repeatedly – but the correct sequence of numbers stubbornly refused to reveal itself, jumbling and re-ordering in her mind whenever she tried to focus. She couldn’t remember Sara’s surname either, so there was no way of having someone look her up. What was it? Fitzgerald? Something fancy-sounding. Fauntleroy. Forbes. Think, Rachel. Think! But all that came to her mind through the shadowy depths were her children’s faces – Where’s Mum? – and she found herself spiralling into panic and angst, the numbers sliding ever further from her grasp. What would happen to the children if she couldn’t get in touch by this evening? Would Sara keep them with her? Luke’s lip would tremble, he would panic, Scarlet would go very quiet, bottling u
p her anxiety. Mabel, no doubt, would try to brazen it out. ‘Social services alert!’ she would say theatrically, as she did whenever she considered Rachel’s parenting to be below standard (often). ‘I’m phoning ChildLine!’

  Wait – no. A new option struck her. Would Mabel ring Lawrence? A chill ran through her at the thought of him turning up and taking charge. Oh dear, she imagined him drawling. Talk about an unfit mother. Wait till my lawyer hears about this.

  Tears trickled from her eyes, rolling sideways into her ears. Think, Rachel, think. For every minute her brain was fuzzy, that was another minute of Luke retreating into himself, Scarlet gnawing down her nails, Mabel doing her best to brazen out the situation, her resolve gradually shrinking . . .

  ‘Hey, come on, it’s all right.’ The nurse was back again. Rachel had lost all track of time by now, all sense of what was happening beyond the walls around her. Was it still the same day? Was it night-time? The nurse gently dabbed her eyes with a tissue and Rachel had to try very hard not to lean against her and start bawling. ‘How is your pain at the moment? I can top up your morphine again if you need it?’

  Rachel nodded again. The pain was still excruciating. ‘Yes. Please,’ she managed to get out through her mangled lips. I’m Rachel, she repeated to herself, her mind starting to drift as the drug stole into her bloodstream. I’m Rachel and I’ve got to get home. I just need to remember how . . .

  Chapter Five

  Meanwhile, over in Rachel’s kitchen, with a stack of fluffy American pancakes liberally spread with golden syrup and strawberry jam (‘Mum would go crazy if she could see this,’ Scarlet confided with a mixture of guilt and glee), Becca was trying to ascertain what might have led to her sister’s out-of-character disappearance. ‘So she dropped you at school as usual this morning, did she? Do you remember her saying anything about what she was doing later on? Where she was going?’

  The girls exchanged a glance. ‘She was in a weird mood this morning,’ Mabel said, reflecting. ‘Bad-tempered, sort of snappy.’ She rolled her eyes with teenage world-weariness. ‘Like that’s anything new.’

  ‘She told me off for spilling the milk,’ Scarlet said, licking her sticky fingers. ‘And when I found my lunchbox from yesterday that I’d forgotten to empty.’

  ‘She was checking something on the laptop,’ Mabel remembered. ‘And then I had to go, and she was like, oh my God, is it that time already? We’re going to be late!’ The high-pitched breathy imitation of her mother was verging on cruel, Becca thought, wincing.

  ‘And then she took me and Luke to school, and we had to take Henry and Elsa too, because their mum was going to pick us up later and they’d done a swap,’ Scarlet said and pulled a face. ‘Elsa is so freaking annoying. God!’

  ‘Anything else?’ Becca prompted.

  Scarlet thought, head tilted on one side, small dark eyebrows angling together in a frown. ‘Not really. When she dropped us all off, she said, “Remember, Sara’s picking you up after school but I’ll come and get you before teatime.” Only she never did.’ She bit into her pancake and a splodge of jam plopped out onto her white school shirt. ‘Whoops.’

  ‘Hmmm,’ said Becca. ‘So it just felt like . . . an ordinary day, then?’

  ‘Yep,’ both sisters chorused.

  ‘And she took the car, I’m guessing? There’s nothing outside.’

  Scarlet was trying to suck the jam off her shirt but paused in order to answer. ‘We usually walk to school but we went in the car this morning,’ she explained, ‘because Mum said she was in a rush.’

  Car crash, thought Becca immediately, feeling sick at the thought of crumpled metal, squealing brakes, her sister’s body flung through the windscreen like a rag doll. She shook her head, not wanting to imagine any more. But then again, no – if it had been a car crash, they would have heard from the police by now, surely? The registration plate would have been traced, someone would have been in touch, uniformed officers at the door, caps in hand, grave expressions . . .

  She got up from the table and began washing up the frying pan and batter bowl, so that the girls couldn’t see the twinge of panic on her face. ‘Maybe she’s got a flat tyre,’ she said, trying to stay calm. ‘Your poor mum! By the time she gets in, she’ll be fed up, I bet.’ Her fingers shook on the washing-up brush; she had never been a very good liar. ‘In any case, I’m sure she’ll be back soon. Why don’t you go and get ready for bed now? I’ll tell her to pop in and give you goodnight kisses just as soon as she’s home, okay?’

  Later on, when the house was quiet, Becca sat in her sister’s tidy (and very beige) living room and watched the small slate mantelpiece clock tick its way round till nine o’clock, nine-thirty, ten. Elsewhere in the street, good little families were closing their curtains and settling down for the night. Here at the Jacksons’, the phone remained silent, the front door resolutely shut, and no car headlights came sweeping up the road.

  Becca might not be close to her sister but she knew instinctively that this was not how Rachel operated. Organized, in control, achieving – that was Rachel. While Becca’s life tended to pinball from one shambles to another, Rachel had children, responsibilities, this nice suburban detached house in a well-to-do neighbourhood: a proper, grown-up life to come home to, in other words. She gazed around the room, searching for clues, and her eyes fell on a vase of white roses standing on a side table, scent spilling from their velvety heads. People who were going to run away didn’t bother cutting flowers and thinking about vases, did they? So where was she?

  The sky was dark outside now; she hoped the children had managed to fall asleep despite the unusual situation. She didn’t know them well enough to gauge whether they were acting out of character, if Mabel was usually so scathing about her mum’s driving (‘I bet she’s lost. She can’t even read a map, you know, let alone park without having a nervous breakdown’) and whether Scarlet always needed her bedroom door to be ajar just so, the bathroom light left on, her school uniform laid out for the next morning, or if it was her way of trying to wrest back some control. Poor girls! They were toughing it out, but you could see in their eyes they were worried. So was Becca.

  Mabel had hesitated before going up to bed and said, ‘I hope it was all right, me giving Sara your name. Only . . . Dad’s not around now and Grandma – Welsh Grandma – would only make a massive fuss and be mean about Mum.’ She shrugged, looking self-conscious and suddenly much younger. ‘I just remembered that time at Grandad and Wendy’s anniversary party when you were really nice to me. That’s all.’

  Becca’s heart melted at the girl’s awkwardness. ‘I’m glad that you asked me,’ she said, dimly recollecting how Mabel had confided in her on that occasion, something about a bullying classmate who was picking on her. It was nice to hear that the moment had lodged in her niece’s mind; that Mabel associated her with a rescuer, someone who could help. So that made one person in the family who thought Becca was remotely competent, anyway.

  A thought occurred to her. Checking something on the laptop, Mabel had said earlier. Might that be a clue to where Rachel had gone? She remembered seeing a laptop skew-whiff on the kitchen dresser and went to retrieve it, feeling uneasy as she switched it on. What if Rachel came back right now, walked in to her own living room to find Becca sitting there snooping at her laptop? It would be like getting caught trying on her big sister’s make-up all those years ago; there would come the same shriek of horror, no doubt, the same outrage in her eyes. What the hell do you think you are doing?! That’s mine!

  But what else was she supposed to do? she thought defensively. Relax and sit back in front of the telly with her feet on the coffee table, hands behind her head? As if. And it wasn’t like she was going to snoop, anyway, she was only going to . . .

  Oh. Maybe she wasn’t, after all. A screen had appeared requesting a password, and Becca’s shoulders sank.

  MabelScarletLuke, she tried. Incorrect password, the message came back.

  JacksonFive, she tried next. They
were the Jackson Four now, technically, with Lawrence having left, but maybe it would still . . . Incorrect password. Ahh.

  Racheliscool, she typed, if only because her own password to lots of things was Beccaiscool. (Well, come on. If you couldn’t big yourself up in secret digital code, then when could you?) But no. Incorrect password. Rachel was obviously not as tragic and insecure as her stepsister – surprise, surprise.

  There was a pattering sound and she jumped before realizing it was a gust of raindrops that had been flung at the window like small pebbles. Here came the storm. She shivered to think of Rachel still out there somewhere, rain spattering a cracked windscreen maybe, drumming against the roof of her car, plastering her blonde hair wetly to her skull if she was outside . . . No. Don’t think like that. She pushed the laptop away, aware that she could try different passwords all night and still not get anywhere. She’d ask Mabel about it in the morning if need be.

  As the clock ticked on and the evening became later still, Becca felt increasingly unsure about what to do next. She didn’t want to go to bed in her sister’s room in case Rachel arrived home in the middle of the night and freaked out about her being there. Nor had she thought to ask about spare bedding and blankets so that she could camp out on the sofa. Not that she felt remotely tired yet, anyway. Her mind was turning like a hamster wheel, running through lists of what she should do tomorrow morning if Rachel still wasn’t back. Look after the children, obviously, and try to keep everything feeling as normal as possible, for starters. Then she’d have to start contacting her sister’s friends and colleagues to see if anyone had seen her. She would have to tell Lawrence too, she supposed, with a jolt of trepidation.