THE PROMISE OF HAPPINESS

Chapter Fifteen

The taxi dropped the girls off and Joanne ran out…

Chapter Sixteen

Sian stared out the shop window decorated with paper snowflakes…

Chapter Seventeen

‘The nurse tells me you’ll get out tomorrow,’ said Andy…

Chapter Eighteen

Sian stood barefoot on the beach at Ballygally, the cool…

Read on for an exclusive reading guide to Promise of Happiness

Reading Group Questions

Read on for an interview with Erin Kaye

In Conversation with Erin Kaye

About the Author

Other Books by Erin Kaye

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter One

‘Nearly there, Oli!’ said Louise McNeill brightly to her three-year-old son, Oliver James.

Somewhere in the bowels of the ferry the engine growled and a shudder ran through the ship. Louise put her hand on her belly and her stomach lurched – though not with nausea. She’d spent her youth sailing on these waters – in the sheltered safety of Ballyfergus Lough or, sometimes, venturing out into the choppy waters of the Irish Sea – and not once had she been seasick. And she wasn’t pregnant. No, her nausea was caused by nerves. Louise took a deep breath, glanced at Oli and wondered – panicked suddenly – if she was doing the right thing by coming home.

Oli, restless, banged the fleshy pads of his palms against the sloping window, leaving smudges on it. ‘Now, now,’ said Louise, fretting that he might pick up germs from the glass. Instinctively, she reached out and caught one of his hands in her own. Oli’s olive skin tone came from his father’s side – it certainly hadn’t been inherited from the pale, Celtic-skinned and fair-haired McNeills. She touched a dimple on the back of his hand with her thumb – he was losing his baby fat rapidly, moving on to another stage of development.

Oli was a constant source of fascination to Louise – every new word was an achievement, every task accomplished a source of wonder. Each step along the long, slow road to independence seemed like a miracle. And it was a miracle – rather he was a miracle. Her baby. Hers alone. The child she had thought she would never have. Love and pride swelled in equal measure, threatening to choke her.

‘Are we nearly there yet?’ said Oli, in the high-pitched monotone common among children of his age. Louise found listening to other people’s children grating, but never Oli. He let out a long sigh, having long ago lost interest in the view of the calm, glittering sea, pale blue sky and swooping gulls. Louise put her arm around his waist where he stood on the blue leatherette bench beside her. She pressed her face into the small of his back and inhaled, knowing that if they were ever separated she could recognise him by smell alone.

The boat swung slowly round on its axis and hot July sunshine flooded through the glass. She squinted as the land mass of East Antrim, and the town of Ballyfergus, came slowly into view.

The town was just as Louise had remembered it. The shoreline was dominated by the big working port with its hulking cranes and drab, pre-fabricated buildings. A docked P&O ferry discharged its cargo, an endless stream of lollipop-coloured container lorries, onto the shimmering black asphalt of the quay. Further inland, arcs of slate-roofed white houses, none more than two storeys high, inched up the hills like cake mixture on the side of a bowl. And beyond that the gentle rounded green hills.

‘Look,’ she said and pointed through the window. ‘That’s Ballyfergus. Where Nana and Papa live. That’s where we’re going to live too.’ The idea of this, of bringing Oli home to his grandparents, to be amongst his own, filled her with pleasure. And the feeling of doing something right by her child momentarily displaced the gnawing doubt that she had failed him.

‘Where? Where are we going to live?’ persisted the child. His dark brows came together in a frown and he glared mistrustfully at the lush green hills overlooking Ballyfergus Lough, oblivious, it seemed, to the breathtaking beauty surrounding them.

‘There,’ said Louise pointing at the town, which had served as a port and gateway to the rest of the province for over one thousand years. She remembered that Oli had last visited when he was two and would not recall the trip. ‘See those houses there. Not up on the hill. Down there.’ She pointed at the sprawling cluster of grey and brown buildings on the flat plain. ‘They look really tiny, don’t they?’

Oli nodded.

‘That’s because we’re so far away. We’re going to live in a house down there.’ She pointed roughly in the direction of the indoor swimming pool, a grey block of a building, which sat only metres from the shore.

‘With Nana and Papa?’

‘No, Oli,’ said Louise and he plopped down suddenly onto his bottom. ‘Just you and me. Like always,’ she added, careful to deliver this news in a neutral tone and eradicate any hint of disappointment or anxiety from her voice. She brushed his straight brown fringe, so different from her fine fair hair, off his forehead. He swatted her hand away absent-mindedly.

‘Why?’ said Oli.

‘Oh,’ said Louise, not expecting this question, not here, not now. ‘Well,’ she said carefully and took a deep breath. ‘Because your daddy doesn’t live with us, does he? He lives in Scotland. But of course it might not always be just the two of us. One day Mummy might meet a nice man and …’

Suddenly, Oli slid onto the floor and disappeared under the table. Mischievous brown eyes, the same colour as his father’s, stared up at her. ‘But why can’t we live with Nana and Papa?’

Louise put a hand over her heart and let out a silent sigh of relief. In her zeal to ensure Oli understood, she had yet again answered the question she thought Oli had asked, rather than the one he actually had. It was a fundamental pitfall she’d read about more than once in the library of parenting books that now lay in storage, boxed up in some Edinburgh warehouse.

‘Come on out of there, Oli,’ she said, pulling him gently out from under the table. ‘You don’t know what’s on that floor.’

Louise extracted a bottle of antibacterial gel from her bag. ‘We can’t live with Nana and Papa because they haven’t got enough room for us. Their house is very small.’

But Oli was now more interested in the gel than pursuing this topic of conversation. Louise held his hand by the wrist and squeezed a translucent green blob onto the centre of his palm. ‘This’ll kill all the nasty germs. Now, rub your hands together like this,’ she said, squirting some of the gel onto her own palm and rubbing her hands briskly together.

Oli held his hand inches from his face, stared at the gel and said, ‘It’s got bubbles in it, Mummy.’

‘Yes, I know, darling.’

‘Why?’

‘It just has.’

He extended his hand towards her face, his chubby fingers spread like the fat arms of the starfish that Cameron, her former husband, had once fished out of Tayvallich Bay on the west coast of Scotland. Together they’d knelt on the pebbly beach and wondered at its pale lilac beauty, heads bent together like children. Oli smeared a blob of gel, wet and surprisingly cold, on Louise’s nose. She blinked, surprised, and he let out a squeal of delight.

She laughed then, coming back to the moment, to her perfect boy, and he said, ‘I love you, Mummy.’

She swallowed, fought back the tears of joy. ‘I love you too, my sweet angel.’ She beamed at him and added, ‘Now, hurry up. It goes runny if you don’t do it quickly.’

‘Okay, Mummy.’ Oli slapped his hands together, sending splatters across the Formica table. He let out a cry and looked up at her, slightly shocked-looking, for reassurance.

Louise smiled. ‘That’s it. Now rub them together,’ she said and Oli complied.

She loved the unquestioning trust her son placed in her. She was the epicentre of his world, his everything. And he was hers – she craved his neediness and the fulfilment it gave her as a mother. And for the last three years – no, from the moment of his conception – he had been her obsession.

Her decision to relocate from Edinburgh to Ballyfergus had been taken entirely with Oli’s welfare at the forefront of her mind. Though it was also true that, after many years in Edinburgh, she now primarily associated the city with disappointment and heartache. She had been glad to leave. Her only regret was leaving her best friend, Cindy, behind. But this, she told herself bravely, was a new chapter for her and Oli, though coming back to the town of her birth induced an odd feeling. It was a fresh start but it also felt like she was returning to an old, familiar life. A life she had carelessly left behind as an eighteen-year-old without so much as a backwards glance.

A voice over the tannoy told them to return to their car and Louise gathered up their possessions – colouring books and crayons, books, snacks, a copy of Marie Claire magazine (an optimistic purchase from the shop on the ferry) and her mobile phone. She stuffed them into the stylish, capacious patent leather bag that had become her constant companion since Oli’s birth. Not that she cared much for fashion – not any more. She liked to look her best, of course, and she had not, like some other mums she knew, let herself ‘go’.

Louise descended the first lethal flight down to the car deck, gripping Oli’s hand like a vice. Twice he slipped on the steep metal steps and she hauled him back to his feet. Her left shoulder ached with the weight of the bag and her heartbeat accelerated, her brow beaded with sweat. Her stomach flipped with nerves and excitement. She squeezed Oli’s hand even tighter. He glanced up at her.