The Forgotten Guide to Happiness: The unmissable debut, perfect for anyone who loved THE KEEPER OF LOST THINGS

I looked around at the bookshelves, hoping to see the library copy of my own book so that I could ask her opinion of it. I spotted it on top of a small pile of Jiffy bags. Just a minute – was that a photograph of a young Kingsley Amis?

My heart soared. I loved this room. And I loved her. She was an inspiration, and surrounded by literature I was, for the first time in a long while, fired up with the urge to write.

Words, words, words!

Jack was quiet when we left.

The sun was low and golden and it was cold in the blue shadows of the buildings. He turned his jacket collar up and shoved his hands into his pockets.

‘What did you think?’ he asked as we walked past Hampstead Heath station on our way to the bus stop.

‘You didn’t tell me she was Nancy Ellis Hall the novelist; you just said she wrote a bit,’ I said indignantly.

‘I didn’t know if you’d have heard of her. She hasn’t been published for years.’

‘My mother was a fan, being a feminist and things. She signed a book for us once. Wow … So she’s taken to biting people.’

He gave me a strange look. ‘She hasn’t taken it up as a hobby. She just gets frustrated when she can’t find the words. It’s the illness.’

‘What’s wrong with her?’

‘She’s got dementia.’ He pressed his hand over his forehead. ‘It’s here, this is where the damage is. In the frontal lobe.’

‘Dementia.’ I couldn’t associate the word with the woman I’d just met. It didn’t fit my idea of it as a disease that gradually erodes the personality, the sense of self. Nancy Ellis Hall was all personality. ‘Apart from a bit of repetition she seems perfectly fine. I mean – she’s even writing a new book,’ I said.

‘She’s always writing,’ Jack said with a flicker of a smile. ‘She gets edgy when she doesn’t.’

‘I know the feeling,’ I said ruefully. ‘It wears off after a while.’ I couldn’t wait to tell my mother that I’d been in her house. ‘She’s lively, isn’t she?’

‘That she is.’ He looked at me, his eyes troubled. ‘Do you think she’s vulnerable?’

‘Not particularly – I can’t imagine anyone being brave enough to mug her.’

‘That’s the problem,’ he said sadly. ‘She isn’t scared of anyone. And according to the CPSOs, it makes her vulnerable. If she stayed in all the time, being fearful, that would be fine. How does that make any sense?’

I shook my head in sympathy.

‘All their worries are theoretical anyway,’ he went on. ‘People are nicer than you think – they can see that she’s odd and generally they make allowances for her. And that guy she met, she didn’t take him home, they went for a drink in the pub. She’s not stupid and she’s done nothing wrong. Police officers, they see bad things happening all the time and I get that. But most people live perfectly safe lives.’ He glanced at me. ‘You know what the secret is?’

‘No. What?’

‘Always keep under the radar.’

We stood by the bus stop and watched the bus creep slowly down the hill towards us in the line of traffic. I was going home – it was too late to go boating now.

‘Where do you live?’ I asked him.

‘Mornington Terrace,’ he said. ‘You?’

‘Parliament Hill Fields. The other side of the Heath from Nancy’s.’ We were heading in opposite directions.

The C11 bus pulled up alongside us, gusting hot air from the brakes.

‘I’m sorry our fake date didn’t work out,’ he said.

The bus stopped and the doors slid open. I tapped my Oyster card and turned round to wave goodbye. Didn’t work out? He had a famous literary stepmother!

I gave him my brightest smile to remember me by, because: ‘There’s always a next time,’ I said.

CHAPTER NINE (#ulink_1d51c905-bce9-53e6-9027-652db2d71789)

A New Dawn (#ulink_1d51c905-bce9-53e6-9027-652db2d71789)

After that small and intense burst of excitement, I was back to my depressing real life again.

By September my footsteps echoed hollowly in the bare flat and it no longer felt like home. I’d also sold the wardrobe, so I moved the Trek bike from the hall into the bedroom to use as a clothing rail. I was writing, sitting, eating and sleeping on my bed. The whole thing gave me a strong sense of nostalgic déjà vu – it was like being in the camper van again.

Potential tenants were turning up with tape measures and questions about the energy rating and how often the bins were emptied and whether the bedroom was soundproof – what were they thinking of doing in there?

I answered their questions resentfully. Especially annoying were the couples who stood happily radiating hearts in the middle of the room, holding hands and trying to imagine what the place would look like without me in it.

In one of the interludes I sat on my bed and opened my laptop and found an email from Carol Burrows with details of the Towards Publication: Romantic Prose class which was starting the following week. I downloaded the attachment. It was a list of names, but names are sometimes all you need. Call me name-ist, but take Joan Parker for instance. She had to be over seventy, right? And Arthur Shepherd; he’s going to be over seventy-five – or under ten. I didn’t have much to go on with Kathryn Smart and Neveen Barsome, but that was the least of my worries because I realised I only had four students.

Four.

That felt like failure in itself. It seemed I wasn’t such a fillip after all.

I lay on top of my bed with my hands behind my head and stared at a piece of silver tinsel that looked like a spider, left over from the previous tenants. I blew at it and a moment later it quivered frantically. I closed my eyes and listened to the night noises: a police siren, a helicopter circling the Heath. This was it; this was rock bottom.

I went into fight or flight mode and let the tears roll. Despite scientific research which has proven that crying ensures high levels of stress hormones don’t overwhelm the system, I didn’t feel any better for it and after twenty minutes or so I gave it up as a bad job.

As a diversion, I opened my laptop and looked up the video of Jack Buchanan on YouTube. There he was with the harness strapped on him, a grey cliff edge ahead of him and a forest below, talking into the camera.

‘Are you ready, Joe? How to be a hero, part one. This,’ he said, his face filling the screen, ‘is a balloon full of dye. We’re going to drop it on the target. I’ve been told to put it somewhere safe. Which,’ he said, tucking it into his sweater, ‘is apparently down here.’ He grinned into the lens. ‘Okay, this is it.’

Jack was strapped in front of another guy and they ran up to the cliff edge and with a triumphant yell they tumbled off it. The parachute billowed in a blur of colour, jerking them up, swaying and getting smaller, Jack’s screams fading, and they flew over the autumnal trees in silence apart from the low chuckling of the cameraman tracking their progress.

It made me smile. Actually, smiling is a much better antidote to misery than crying. I’ve never read any scientific research on why cheering up makes a person feel so much better than losing protein from tears – I suppose it’s not obscure enough to publish a paper on.

I googled Jack Buchanan and found a lot of entries for a Scottish actor who’d died in 1957. Then I remembered he had an IT company, and I found him at AFB, Apps for Business. There was a red-filtered photograph of a modern office with a group of people looking engaged, Jack in profile.