The House We Called Home: The magical, laugh out loud summer holiday read from the bestselling Jenny Oliver

Stella stared at herself a moment longer. Seeing in her face the features of her mother. Swallowing when she thought of the simmering animosity her mum was currently showing towards her father. It made her pluck up the courage to turn to Jack and ask, ‘Is everything all right between us?’

‘Fine,’ he said, looking up with a frown, bemused as to why she was asking the question.

Stella nodded.

Jack put the phone down. ‘Stel, we’re fine. Just a bit tired, probably.’ He scooched over the bed and gave her a kiss on the cheek, ruffling her hair a bit. She swatted his hand away with a half-smile.

‘All right?’ he checked.

‘Yes.’

That was the reassuring thing about Jack. Whatever happened he’d soldier on through, pick you and everyone else up who might be floundering without a moment’s pause to question.

But as she watched him go back to his phone, she knew it wasn’t fine. The car journey had proved as such – like a condensed version of their current relationship, normal one minute and bickering the next. Both of them too quick to react, like they knew each other so well there was no point plodding through the benefit of the doubt.

A couple of weeks ago, her editor had asked her if she’d wanted to write a piece called MOT Marriage for an upcoming edition of the magazine. They wanted it written as Potty-Mouth, picking up on the current trend for critiquing the minutia of stuck-in-a-rut long-term relationships with a list of tasks and questions for the married couple to complete. Stella agreed, and while she knew she and Jack had precisely the kind of long-term relationship that most of her readers had – a bit stuck in a rut but getting through the day-to-day via Netflix and the anticipation of mini-breaks – she had fully intended to make up the content. Nowadays, fierce competition in the Slummy Mummy marketplace had pushed the Potty-Mouth brand to be much cooler and far more exciting than Stella, like an older sister she was constantly trying to impress. Stella already had it plotted out: Potty-Mouth and her fictional husband were going to throw the questions out of the window and do it their way – going to a host of exciting erotic workshops, flamenco dance classes, and a bit of swinging with another set of parents at the fictional school gate. She’d researched it all, the article was practically written and in the bag.

Now, however, she stared at the face in the mirror, as she thought of the clear disintegration of her parents’ marriage and the strain on her own relationship since the Sonny incident, she wondered if maybe she should do it, for real.

She swivelled round on the bed to face Jack, feeling a nervous warmth creep up her neck.

Outside the sound of the waves rolled gently in the darkness.

Jack looked up. ‘What?’

‘Do you want to help me with an article I’m doing?’

He narrowed his eyes, uncertain. Stella never asked for any involvement in what she was writing. He usually just read about their souped-up life over his Shredded Wheat. ‘What’s it about?’

‘It’s called Marriage MOT,’ she said.

‘Oh Jesus, Stella. We just said everything was fine.’

‘Well, then it should be easy.’

Jack tipped his head back against the wall. ‘What do we have to do?’

‘You know the type of thing: are you having enough sex? Are you listening enough to each other? Harbouring any grievances … blah blah blah.’ She tried to spin it all casual.

Jack sighed. ‘I’m not harbouring any grievances.’

‘Great,’ she said. ‘We’ll tick that off the list.’

Jack thought about it and frowned. ‘We have enough sex, don’t we?’

‘Well that’s what we test. You think you’re fine but you can never be completely sure until you check. Like when we had the car done and he said the brake pads were worn out.’

‘Would the sex be the brake pads?’

‘Maybe?’ Stella smiled.

‘There’s nothing wrong with my brake pads,’ said Jack, puffing his chest out.

‘I’m not sure that analogy makes sense.’ Stella shook her head.

There was a pause. Jack bit down on his lip. ‘I don’t know, Stel. Seems all a bit forced.’

‘Yeah but maybe it’ll be fun. At the very least it might stop us from becoming like them,’ she said, angling her head towards her parents’ bedroom. ‘I don’t want you to go missing.’

Jack looked at her, his eyes softening. ‘I don’t want you to go missing either.’ Then he shook his head like he couldn’t believe what he was about to say. ‘All right, fine.’ He slid his phone onto the bedside table. Stella did a little cheer and came round the bed to get in next to him, the beautifully ironed sheet crisp and momentarily cool. ‘So, what’s the first step of this MOT?’ he asked.

‘We have to start having loads of sex,’ she said.

‘Really?’ Jack looked sort of intrigued.

Stella nodded, the pillow soft beneath her head.

Jack nodded.

There was a pause as they lay in the sticky humid heat.

‘But I’m really tired,’ Stella said.

‘Thank God for that.’ Jack exhaled with relief. ‘Me too.’

CHAPTER 8

Moira caused quite a stir in the morning – while everyone else was either clearing up the breakfast things or, in the case of Sonny and Gus, playing on their phones while Rosie was watching TV – by hoiking her bag onto her shoulder and saying as boldly as she could, ‘Righto, I’m off to my book club.’

Glances had been exchanged.

‘What about Dad?’

‘There’s enough of you to cover all the bases,’ Moira said quickly before adding, ‘Sonny, can you look after the dog?’ and leaving the house without really waiting for an answer.

She didn’t know the protocol of going to one’s book club while one’s husband was missing but if she was quite honest, Moira just had to get away. She loved her children but when they were all in the house together sometimes it just got too overwhelming. She felt herself retreat like a snail; every comment about her clothes, her hair colour, her plans of action, her dog’s stupid name – every one left her edging away, till she hurried out to book club without even thinking about the propriety of it.

It was another bright, hazy day. She wove her way through the back lanes to the village, the sun piercing through the overhanging canopy of leaves to banks of lush ferns, the car clipping the odd wayward frond in her haste. In the past Moira would never have dreamed of joining anything like a book club. There was a twinge of shame now when she thought back. She’d always seen herself as rather above it all. She’d happily indulge in a bit of village gossip but always with the aloof air that she was humouring them all, donating a little of her very precious time. Her husband was an Olympic hero.

She had to touch her face now as she coloured at the cringing memories. Every summer Moira was renowned for throwing a party, a lavish summer bash – strings of Venetian lanterns bobbing across the garden, long tables laid with glasses and drinks served by kids from the private school dressed up as waiters, candles lighting the drive, a gazebo with a band. One year she’d made the marquee men pause their work to help her trail an extension lead all the way over the cliff edge to the beach in order to floodlight the sea. It had been magical. Now, it all seemed a bit too showy-off – done for herself rather than the guests. Her moment in the spotlight. She hadn’t thrown a party since Amy’s Bobby had died and she knew she would never reinstate the tradition. In the past she had viewed herself as the aspirational hostess. Now, she wondered if people had perhaps scorned her behind her back, enjoyed but ridiculed the ostentation. Pitied her even. They knew how often Graham was away. She hadn’t consciously done it for the attention but in retrospect it seemed so wincingly obvious.

She knew Stella would say not to worry about what people thought, to just live as you liked, that at the end of the day no one cared. But they did care. Moira knew they cared. She knew because she cared. She judged Joyce Matthews in the village for having a cleaner – how hard was it to clean your own home? She judged the mayor’s wife for having her Waitrose shopping delivered – get out into the community, for goodness sake. She judged the Adamses for having a monstrous new extension that looked like an alien invasion to house a live-in nanny so they could work all hours – those little children needed to see their parents. She knew what Stella would say to that as well. Tell her that the parents had a right to be happy too. And Moira would have to bite her tongue to prevent herself from snapping back, ‘Did I? I gave up everything for your father and you kids.’

It was her new friend Mitch who had called her on it. Walking the dogs one day on the beach, he had told her she was jealous when she had been muttering about the cleaner.

Moira had felt herself bristle. ‘I’m not jealous.’

He’d laughed. Easy and carefree. Not looking her way. ‘Yes, you are. Bitching is jealousy. It always is.’

She’d gone to say something but hesitated. Feeling both astonishment and affront at being called on her behaviour. Graham never called her on anything, just nodded along at her stories.

‘It’s not bitching, it’s an opinion.’

‘It’s a judgement,’ Mitch had said, his smile irritating. His chin raised to enjoy the wind in their faces. ‘And not a very nice one. Why shouldn’t she have a cleaner? She’s busy. She has other focuses for her time.’

‘It doesn’t take very long to run a Hoover about the house.’

‘Moira.’ Mitch had stopped, his bare feet in the sand, his mutt that was humbly just called Dog on a long piece of faded orange rope, yapping at the surf. ‘If you could go back in time and have a cleaner and a live-in nanny, keep your job, and go for a drink on a Friday night guilt-free, would you? Do you think the kids would have turned out any different?’

‘Well, I don’t know.’ Moira felt herself getting defensive. ‘Yes, I think they probably would.’ Would they? She wondered. Amy might be a bit less dramatic. A bit more self-sufficient. Stella would be much the same. She paused, or perhaps if Moira had had something else to focus on, their relationship would have been completely different. Moira wouldn’t have been quite so envious of Stella: of her easy camaraderie with Graham, or her unequivocal natural swimming talent, of the ease with which she laughed at her mother’s neuroses.

‘Would you and Graham be happier?’

Moira had swallowed.

Mitch laughed again. ‘You don’t have to answer that. Bitching, judgement – Moira, they’re all jealousy. And jealousy, well, that’s just fear isn’t it? Fear of taking the leap yourself.’ Mitch had started walking again, his brushed cotton tartan trousers like pyjama bottoms getting wet in the surf. ‘I think you actually quite enjoyed your life. It’s just now your boxes are empty.’

Moira stopped abruptly. ‘Excuse me!’

Mitch laughed. Then jogging to the shoreline to pick up a driftwood stick he drew two boxes for her in the sand: ‘If all your life is taken up with these two roles’ – he’d written MOTHER and WIFE in two separate boxes – ‘then that’s what your whole life becomes. It’s as simple as that.’ He’d stood there in his cheesecloth shirt with a lump of jade round his neck on a black thong, freshly tanned from a meditation week on the Algarve, and stared at her directly until she’d got embarrassed by the eye contact and had to look away. ‘You need more boxes, Moira,’ he’d said, pointing to the two in the sand with his stick then drawing lots more all around them. ‘You need more elements that create you, that we can write in these,’ he said, gesturing to the new, empty boxes, ‘otherwise your life just gets smaller and smaller.’

Moira had wanted to say, ‘I have Frank Sinatra now.’ But luckily she’d run the sentence through in her head before saying it and realised how pathetic it sounded, on so many levels.

And so she had joined the book club at the library. Where she was sitting right now, with an AWOL husband, in a fancy pair of jeans, next to Joyce Matthews (of cleaner fame), looking about guiltily to check no one was watching because Joyce had tipped a slug of brandy from a hip flask into her cup of lukewarm Gold Blend.

‘Don’t, it’s half past ten in the morning, I’ll be pissed as a fart. I shouldn’t really be here.’ Moira waved the brandy away.

‘Nonsense,’ said Joyce, pouring a dash into her own. ‘Your husband’s gone missing. Sometimes you just need to escape.’

Moira thought of her house filled up with her children, the view like one of those funny optical illusion pictures – look at it one way and they’re all as close as close can be, squint your eye and it’s a room full of strangers.

‘I haven’t read the book,’ she said.

Joyce shook her head. ‘Neither have I.’

Moira gave her a sideways look. ‘You never read the book.’

‘Shall we escape?’

‘I couldn’t.’

Moira could see the librarian walking over. She had her slippers on. She always put them on for book club – she wanted to relax apparently. Moira hated it. Why couldn’t she wear shoes like everyone else? That was judgemental. Surely she couldn’t be jealous of the librarian’s hideous pink moccasins? Maybe she could. Maybe she was jealous of her audacity, or her desire for comfort above all else. Maybe she was jealous that this lady’s husband had not gone missing and all she had to think about was slipping on her slippers to happily chat about what might well be, had she read it, a very good book.

‘Come on.’ Joyce gave Moira a nudge.

‘I can’t. It’s bad enough that I’ve escaped to come to book club. I can’t escape book club as well.’

‘Oh Moira, if you can’t escape now when can you? Come on, let’s go for a coffee. Or to the pub.’

But Moira said no. Propriety got the better of her. She couldn’t bear the idea of the slipper-clad eyes of the librarian watching her back as she retreated, going home to tell her husband or her cat about the terrible woman who lived in the big house by the sea who skived book club when her husband had disappeared. She couldn’t bear the eyes of the locals in the pub – ‘Is that Moira? Moira, good to see you! Take it Graham’s back then?’ ‘No, no, still missing.’

She pulled the book out of her bag and sat with it on her knee as the librarian started flicking through her own copy to the book club questions printed at the back.

As Moira hadn’t read it, the whole chat went straight over her head. So she sat staring at all the people’s shoes in the group and thought instead about Graham. About what a relief it was to come downstairs this morning and not find him sitting on the sofa.

She hadn’t minded Graham’s numb passivity when Bobby had first died. She understood that it was a bit like losing Stella all over again. Bobby had been the first athlete since Stella that Graham had got excited about. Bobby was a star in the making. An ace little surfer when he first met Amy. He just wasn’t strong enough, didn’t have the killer instinct. And so Graham had taken it upon himself to train him up. He had him swimming every morning at six, in the gym every evening on the free weights, constantly pushing him to better his maximums. It was Graham who gave him his pep talks and made his competitive acumen sharper and stronger with visualisation and meditation. It was Graham who got him his first big win. And when Bobby moved into a league higher than Graham could take him – not being a surfer himself – they would still train together, still swim those early mornings. Just like he had with Stella.

But Bobby had died over two years ago. And still Graham sat. To the point that it felt like he’d almost forgotten why he was sitting. The grief subsiding while the hopeless lethargy remained. He seemed to shrink away from life, getting grumpier, angrier, and more annoyed with the world he barely ventured into – bar the occasional trip to the pub but even that he muttered about – too far, TV too loud, beer not cold enough. It had been OK when Amy had moved back in. Her sadness after the accident enough to consume all their lives. It had given Moira back her familiar sense of motherly purpose, like having a baby bird to look after: feeding it, caring for it, keeping it safe and warm until it was strong enough to fly the nest again.

Unfortunately, when Amy did get strong enough she showed no intention of flying the nest again. And the two of them – Amy and Graham – just became a permanent fixture in the house, a morose little team staring zombified at the TV flickering in the corner. Moira had started to worry she might go mad. Even getting the builders in had barely shifted them, after Graham had absolved himself of project management duties they’d just decamped to a makeshift living room upstairs for a couple of weeks. That was why Moira had got the dog – an excuse to get herself away from them. And that was when she’d met Mitch. When she’d found joy in life again. When she’d started, for the first time in almost forever, to see herself as a person in her own right. When she’d plucked up the courage to give Amy a gentle nudge out of the house – which Amy had taken very badly and flounced off to London in an impetuous show of defiance, leaving Moira worried sick that she’d done the wrong thing, hardly hearing from Amy the whole time she was there. She’d only been able to console herself recently when Sonny showed her Instagram selfies of a perfectly happy-looking Amy eating brunch overlooking the Thames.

But with Amy gone, it just left Moira and Graham in the house. The gulf between them ever widening. She thought of the silent dinners, the two of them on either side of the table, when just the sound of him chewing made her body tense with irritation. The sighs when she’d make him lift his feet for the Hoover. The noise of his incessant snoring. It saddened her to think he had become just a litany of annoying noises, that there was no spark left between them. But she had tried to help him and she was exhausted from trying. At some point enough had to be enough.

In the book club circle a small row had broken out which the librarian was ineffectually trying to quash by steering the discussion back to the official book club questions. Moira glanced over at Joyce who rolled her eyes and then gestured towards the door with a tilt of her head, trying again to get Moira to make an escape.

Moira shook her head.

Then she sat annoyed with herself for staying. She couldn’t even leave book club – what hope did she have of leaving Graham? She had thought she was getting braver. Fiddlesticks. That was before the children had arrived, before she saw herself through their eyes as well as her own. Now it all felt a bit silly, the idea of her leaving. Like a flying dream, when you get hooked on the adrenaline of soaring free then wake up to find yourself lying boringly in bed.

The determination she had felt to leave was forever being tempered by propriety, like a game of ping pong, always batted back. But she hoped it was still somewhere deep within her, simmering, because now she was trapped, trapped till the stubborn old fool decided to come back, where she had been poised ready to jump. Ready to soar.

And her fear was that as time ticked, her children – just their raised brows at her jeans was almost enough – and the comforting pressure of respectability, the omnipresent fear of judgement, of being gossiped about as she had gossiped, of being pitied should she fail, would kill her little sliver of courage, and she’d wake up, boringly, in bed forever.

CHAPTER 9

While Moira was at book club, two teams set off to find clues as to Graham’s whereabouts. The decision as to who was on which team essentially came down to the proximity to ice cream. When Gus and Amy were handed their list of places to check, including Londis, Rosie peered at the piece of paper and squeaked, ‘Ooh, they sell Twisters at the Londis. I’m coming with you.’

‘I like a Twister,’ Amy agreed, searching the living room for her sunglasses.

Gus, who had been ready for the last hour and was waiting at the door, made a face. ‘They’re vile.’

Rosie came to stand by Amy and said, eyes wide with disbelief, ‘They’re like the best ice lolly in the world.’

Sonny sloped over to stand by Gus, ‘I’m going to have a Calippo.’

Gus nodded. ‘Wise choice.’

Stella had been rummaging in her bag for the car keys, only to discover Jack was holding them, and when the ice cream chat had finished said, ‘So, I take it you four are going together?’

Amy and Rosie looked disparagingly at Gus and Sonny. ‘I suppose so,’ said Amy, putting her sunglasses on and poofing her hair. Then she looked down at the list again. ‘So, we’ve got the pub, John and Sandra’s house … Oh, that’s going to be awkward – what am I going to say? Have you seen my dad?’

Stella raised a brow. ‘Sounds about right.’

Amy sucked in a breath and went back to the list. ‘Post office, other shops, Londis. OK.’ She nodded, grabbed her bag, and said, ‘Come on then.’ Rosie trotted after her like an adoring puppy, dressed today in her own emoji vest, while Amy was wearing skin-tight white jeans and an acid yellow T-shirt. Sonny and Gus followed a little less enthusiastically, both now checking their phones.

The easiest walk to the village was across the headland. They walked the road part of the way then Amy paused by a gate and started to climb the stile, lifting her legs over it really high so she didn’t mark her jeans.

Gus watched, thinking of when he’d first seen her profile picture online. In it she had long blonde hair in high pigtails, dressed up like Britney Spears for – hopefully – a fancy-dress party. Gus remembered all his friends passing it round the pub table sniggering because it was clear she was a bit of a dimwit, but also mocking because there was no denying she was good-looking and well out of his league in the looks department. That was why, when he’d seen them the next time, he’d sat down all cocky and full of it, making the fact he’d slept with her unmistakable. They hadn’t believed him at first, but when he didn’t back down, didn’t crack a smile and agree that he was winding them up, his best mate had blown out a breath, held up his pint and said, ‘Gus shagged Baby Spice. Nice one.’

Baby.

He felt suddenly woozy.

The air seemed to get muggier and more humid. Above him a gauzy layer of clouds locked in the heat, smothering them all like a huge white duvet.

The kids followed Amy over the stile. Rosie tripped and in the process trod in a cow pat. Sonny laughed. Rosie slapped him on the stomach. Sonny laughed even more and called her Cow Pat Rosie, which made Amy have to hold in a laugh as she told him not to call his sister names while Rosie cried.

It made Gus think about his own family. About the near constant bickering with his siblings – all five of them – and his own parents’ house on a farm in Suffolk, crammed full of stuff and people and kids. There were always more babies, more cats, more dogs, more tiny chicks in the airing cupboard; everything mismatched, spotlessly clean but worn and tired. He couldn’t imagine anyone going missing other than because they’d got lost on the land somewhere. He had spent his life appreciative of it but desperate to escape it. He had lain on his triple bunk bed dreaming of one day having his own space. A place where he and he alone would be in control, where he could do as he pleased, where it would be silent. And now he had it. He cherished his independence, barely had long-term relationships, and shuddered inside when a girlfriend tried to make him commit to a holiday a couple of months in advance. Yet here he was, on the verge of being permanently tied to this Britney Spears wannabe because of one stupid, drunken mistake. He had to make her see sense.

They walked single file down the side of the field, the footpath jagged with stones, the air scented with cows and wild garlic, and the barbs of the blackthorn bushes clutching at their T-shirts.

‘Amy,’ Rosie said, idly plucking at the long grass. ‘Is Gus your boyfriend?’

Gus snorted a laugh at the back as Amy visibly bristled, her hand fluffing up her hair like a nervous tick. ‘No,’ she said, short and sharp without turning round.