The Secret of Happy Ever After by Lucy Dillon Page A

had kept the same energetic driving style. Michelle was relieved when she finally indicated down the tree-lined drive to an Edwardian mansion with a sweeping turning circle and neat box hedges marking out the lawn. No croquet hoops, just a discreet sign saying, ‘Butterfields Residential Home’ and a wheelchair-adapted minibus outside.
    ‘I didn’t even know this was here,’ said Michelle, admiring the ivy-covered frontage and long windows. ‘It must have been quite a place in its day.’
    ‘It used to belong to the town’s one and only captain of industry,’ said Anna, as she parked next to the only other car there. ‘Some of the older residents can remember the family. Don’t get them started on the Parrys. I’ve had to avoid any Catherine Cookson novels with servants in them, because some of the current residents’ forebears were disgruntled parlourmaids.’
    Michelle stood back from Anna as she marched across the gravel in her flat boots and announced their arrival via the security buzzer. She looked at them in the plate-glass of the entrance porch. They made a funny-looking couple, like a pair of comedians: sharp-edged Michelle in her jeans and leather boots, and graceful Anna in her long skirt, her blond hair stuffed under a knitted hat and her book bag slung over her shoulder.
    Their reflections hovered on the glass, somewhere between the crisp winter air outside and the dingy institutional walls inside. Like ghosts, she thought. Michelle didn’t want to say so to Anna, but old people’s homes gave her the creeps. If she hadn’t been set on charming Mr Quentin into changing his mind about the bookshop, there was no way she’d have got herself across the threshold.
    As Anna pulled open the door and directed her into the once-imposing entrance hall, the majestic first impression of the exterior dissolved in a whiff of boiled vegetables and cleaning fluid. Michelle cast her eyes around urgently for any shreds of elegance that remained. There wasn’t much to go on.
    Everything’s so grey, she thought – grey and thick. Where are the colours, the soothing smells, even some nice wallpaper?
    Oblivious to her friend’s reaction, Anna pushed open a heavy fire door and smiled at a helper in a nylon housecoat who was pushing a vacant-eyed man in a wheelchair down the corridor.
    ‘That’s Albert,’ she said, under her breath. ‘Only time I ever heard him speak was after we’d read some chapters of Atonement . At the end, without any warning, he said, “I met my Noreen in an air-raid shelter in Solihull, and I thought she was her sister. Had to marry her after that.” The nurses nearly fell over.’
    ‘And after that you couldn’t stop him chattering away?’
    ‘Well, no.’ Anna stopped at another fire door and pulled it open to let Michelle through first. ‘But it gave the carers something to think about when his family next came to visit.’
    They’d reached the main day room, a grand, high-ceilinged reception room with chintzy winged chairs arranged in a circle, containing hunched-up old men and women, some of whom turned to see who’d come in. The others just carried on staring into space, their hands clawed around the arms of their chairs.
    A chill went through Michelle at the solitude in the room, despite all the people in it. She loved living alone – couldn’t bear the thought of sharing her beautiful house with anyone – but this, as her mother kept reminding her, was where it could all end up. Slow, featureless days in a room with other unloved people, forced into cells of single old folk, without even a horde of cats to eat you.
    The fact that this house had once been loved too made it worse than one of those purpose-built retirement homes, she thought. Butterfields felt as abandoned as its residents. The plaster mouldings were partially boarded over, hiding what little decoration there was in the room. That marble fireplace would once have had invitation cards and photographs crammed