Ten Steps to Happiness

She’d been without any adult company, brooding solidly, ever since the BBC car had dropped her back at the cottage, and now here was a friendly face. Well, a face. It was all she needed. She couldn’t stop herself. ‘Didn’t you think Morrison was a creep? Or have I lost perspective on this? I mean – honestly, Les. Tell me honestly. Was I being paranoid? Was he exploiting my situation?…I felt so incredibly patronised…’

Les gazed at her long and hard before slowly turning away to start the engine. In the four hours it took to return to Fiddleford he didn’t speak another word. Chloe fell asleep.

It was eleven o’clock by the time they arrived.

‘I’m so sorry,’ said Jo nervously, rushing out of the house to greet her. ‘You must be exhausted. Les wasn’t – Les, why didn’t you call? You left the map behind. We’ve been worried to death.’

‘I don’t like maps.’

‘For Heaven’s sake!’ Until she came to Fiddleford Jo hadn’t really believed such stupid people actually existed. She sighed with the usual mixture of boredom and exasperation that overcame her when dealing with Les’s ‘working’ methods. ‘Les, you can’t not like maps. There’s nothing not to like about them.’ She sighed again, and was preparing (professional as always) to deliver an easy-to-understand discourse on the subject, when Grey, Charlie and the General came wandering out to join them. ‘Oh look, here are the others,’ she said with relief. ‘This is Grey…Grey, this is Messy. And Chloe…Who’s actually asleep, poor little mite…’

Grey shook Messy’s free hand without a great deal of interest but then seemed to reconsider, and bent down to scrutinise her more closely. ‘Oh!’ he said, pleasantly surprised. ‘You look much better than you do in the pictures.’

‘Depends which pictures,’ Messy muttered grumpily, but she blushed. It was the nearest thing she’d had to a compliment for a long time. ‘They tend to choose the ugly ones.’ She looked up at him with a smile. ‘You’re not so bad-looking yourself.’

‘Aye,’ he said, relinquishing her hand, gazing at her curiously. ‘It’s been said.’

‘And, er – Messy, this is my husband, Charlie.’

‘Hello, Messy. Welcome to Fiddleford,’ said Charlie. ‘You’re our first guest, as I expect Jo explained. So I hope you won’t be too disappointed if things don’t run perfectly straight away—’

‘And this,’ said Jo quickly, ‘is my father-in-law, General Maxwell McDonald.’

‘Crikey,’ said Messy doubtfully.

The General stepped smartly forward, determined to present a good face, however he might have been feeling. ‘But most people just call me General,’ he said, bowing slightly to avoid eye contact. ‘Well come in, come in, for Heaven’s sake. Somebody get the child to bed and then perhaps Miss Monroe would like a drink?’

They walked together into the hall. Messy looked up at the large gilt chandelier hanging from the ceiling, and then at the magnificent mahogany staircase sweeping up to the landing thirty-five feet above her head.

‘Crikey,’ she said again.

Weighed down by the child and still enormous, even in these vast surroundings, Messy looked very ill at ease standing there. It reminded Jo of the first time she came to Fiddleford, when in spite of all her kneejerk disapproval (of inherited wealth and environmentally unsound houses) this hall had still intimidated her. ‘I know it’s large,’ she whispered apologetically, ‘but we don’t actually heat the rooms we don’t use. And of course,’ (she lied, entirely unnecessarily. But she was nervous) ‘we grow all our own vegetables.’

Messy, who always imagined people were patronising her, buried her face in her daughter’s cheek and pretended not to hear.

‘Chloe’s in the smaller room, next door to you,’ said Charlie as they climbed the stairs together. ‘And there’s a bathroom up at the end. On the left. I’m sorry,’ he turned back to look at her, ‘Jo says it’s absolutely unheard of not to have adjoining bathrooms when you go to hotels these days, but then Fiddleford isn’t exactly a hotel. So I hope you can forgive us.’

‘I must admit,’ said Messy, puffing slightly, not quite keeping up, ‘it’s beautiful. Of course. But it isn’t exactly what I expected.’

‘Oh dear.’ He paused in front of her bedroom door, put down the three large suitcases he had been carrying. ‘What exactly has Jo been telling you?’

Months ago, before they were married, his and Jo’s relationship had nearly ended because of her unnerving inability to distinguish fact from fiction. Charlie knew (to his cost) that when she was working, and she set her sights on something, she was capable of telling any number of lies in order to bring it about. He had watched her in amazement. She lied so automatically sometimes, she didn’t even seem to notice she was doing it.

‘She told me it was a refuge for celebrities.’

‘Oh!’ He sounded relieved. ‘Well it is. Or it will be. But not just for celebrities. Obviously. That would be very unfair. It’s for anyone who’s being attacked, really. For anyone who doesn’t stand a chance to stick up for themselves because whatever they try to do or say it gets drowned out by a sort of mass jeering, or sneering, or general bullying. If that makes any sense. Which I’m sure it does to you, Messy. After your last week.’

‘You don’t need to feel sorry for me,’ she said curtly.

‘No, no. Of course not.’

‘Am I the only guest you’re feeling sorry for at the moment? Or is the tall guy, Grey—’

‘Grey? Oh no. Grey lives here.’

‘He looks very familiar. What’s his second name?’

‘McShane. Grey McShane. You may remember—’

‘The sex offender?’

‘Well, he isn’t actually—’

‘You’ve asked me and Chloe to stay here with a sex offender in the house?’

‘You shouldn’t—’ Charlie made an effort to smile – ‘believe everything you read in the press.’

‘He was convicted. I remember reading about it. He went to prison.’

Charlie shrugged. ‘He has a bad reputation. But that’s the whole point of this place. Who did you think you were going to find here?’ He opened her bedroom door, switched on the light and quickly slid the suitcases inside. He didn’t want to have this conversation. Grey was innocent. If she wanted any more details, she would have to prise them from him – and good luck to her. Because Grey didn’t much like talking about it either. ‘We’ll be up for another half an hour or so, if you want to come down and have a drink,’ he said, backing towards the stairs. ‘You’ll meet Grey. And perhaps you can decide for yourself.’

When she first walked into the room, still carrying her daughter, she was so pleasantly overwhelmed – by the size, the general impression of worn elegance and welcoming, cosy grandeur – she let out an involuntary gasp.

Against the far corner, almost reaching the ceiling and upholstered in the same faded pink flowers as the walls, was a four-poster bed so high off the ground it came with its own set of steps. Jo had put a large bunch of pink and white roses on the table beside the bed, and the room smelled delicious, she noticed: of smoky, polished wood and fresh flowers. There were thick, pale blue velvet curtains already drawn across the two large windows, and to the left of the windows, fifteen or twenty feet from the end of the bed, was an armchair with a little footstool, and in front of the footstool, lit in her honour, a flickering fire crackling in the grate. It was lovely. Like a film set. She didn’t notice the paint splodges, or the damp patch above the bed. It was the loveliest room she had ever seen.

The next-door room, where Chloe was meant to be sleeping, was smaller and more homely than hers, with a two-poster instead of a four, and a large old-fashioned doll’s house in the window bay. ‘Hey-ho, Chloe,’ Messy whispered. ‘It’s not so bad here, is it?’…The little girl slept on. But she would be beside herself when she woke up. She would never want to leave.

After putting the child to bed, changing her own clothes, unpacking their suitcases and finally running out of excuses to delay the moment any longer, Messy braced herself and headed downstairs.

She found everyone in the library, listening with varying degrees of inattention while Jo illustrated some point by reading out loud from a book about natural childbirth. She was sitting in the lotus position, looking flexible, Messy noticed, and exceptionally luminous.

‘“Pregnancy,”’ Jo read, ‘“can be a magical time. Many women feel sensuous, harmonious and naturally creative…These are—” Listen to this, OK, everyone. “These are all primitive expressions of fertility…” That’s what I’m saying, of course. Women are by necessity more in touch with their fundamental life rhythms. Because we have to be. There simply isn’t any choice…’

The General, scowling over a copy of Heat magazine, sat in his usual upright position but with a finger stuck into each ear. Grey McShane lay flat out on a sofa with his eyes closed and a tumbler of gin balanced on his chest. He was smirking. And Charlie was leaning on the mantelpiece, gazing forlornly into the fire.

‘Sounds fantastic,’ he said vaguely, ‘I think you’re probably right. But Jo, come on, be fair. This isn’t exactly Dad’s favourite subject. Or Grey’s, I don’t suppose. Perhaps we could—’

‘I don’t see why not,’ said Jo indignantly. ‘I really don’t see why pregnancy has to be such a taboo subject.’

‘Excuse me,’ murmured Grey, still with his eyes closed, ‘but taboo is not the fuckin’ word. You’ve read that soddin’ book to us every night for a week. It’s been givin’ me nightmares.’

‘Well, you shouldn’t be so squeamish.’

‘Och, bollocks!’ said Grey. ‘I don’t read you books about what it feels like to have a crap—’

‘That is not remotely the same thing—’

Messy, who for the last minute had been standing awkwardly in the doorway wondering how to announce herself, suddenly burst out laughing.