Walking Back to Happiness

  CONTENTS

  Walking back to Happiness

  Also by Lucy Dillon

  Imprint Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Epilogue

  About the author

  Walking back to Happiness

  Lucy Dillon

  www.hodder.co.uk

  Also by Lucy Dillon

  LOST DOGS AND LONELY HEARTS

  THE BALLROOM CLASS

  First published in Great Britain in 2010 by Hodder & Stoughton

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © Lucy Dillon 2010

  The right of Lucy Dillon to be identified as the Author of the Work

  has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright,

  Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

  a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the

  prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any

  form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and

  without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance

  to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  Epub ISBN 9781444713923

  Book ISBN 9781444713916

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  338 Euston Road

  London NW1 3BH

  www.hodder.co.uk

  For Isobel

  Acknowledgements

  Walking a dog is like having a personal trainer, without the shouting or the fees. There’s no escaping your daily exercise session when your canine trainer is gazing up at you with baleful ‘walk me!’ eyes, but once you’re out, the fresh air is free, and the ever-changing view and conversations are so much better than you’d get on a sweaty treadmill.

  If you don’t have your own dog, there are many local rescue shelters crying out for volunteers to treat their residents to a good long walk. For the dog, it’s more than just a quick lap of the park: it’s a chance to practise their manners, keeping them people-friendly and socialised - and much more likely to find a new home. Although rescue workers do their best to make kennel life bearable, it’s just not the same as the human companionship dogs thrive on, and even a short walk means the world to a lonely hound. Volunteering a few hours’ lead-time a week makes all the difference to the dogs - and could lead to some interesting encounters for you too!

  On which note, thanks to the lovely dog-walkers in my village, and apologies for the barking.

  I’m lucky to have an editor like Isobel Akenhead at Hodder – I’m grateful for her encouragement, perceptive suggestions, patience, and, most of all, the essay crisis survival kit she sent to get me through the Longhampton Christmas period. I also have a fantastic agent in Lizzy Kremer, who despite being a Cat Person, is a fount of wisdom and jokes; thanks too to Laura West, and the David Higham Translation Rights team.

  Chapter 1

  Ben and Juliet’s Jack Russell terrier was called Minton because on the way to the rescue centre, Ben heard a terrible joke on the radio about a dog called Minton who’d swallowed a shuttlecock. He’d been a bad dog. Bad Minton.

  ‘Bad Minton!’ Ben had yelled gleefully. ‘That is the best name for a dog!’

  They’d been driving out of Longhampton, just past the big cherry tree that flooded the crest of the hill with a champagne pop of pink blossom. It was three years ago, on the May bank holiday – the first day Ben had taken off in months. Juliet could remember exactly how he’d looked as he’d turned in his seat, brown eyes crinkling with the rubbishness of the joke. ‘Bad Minton! Do you get it, Jools? Badminton? Ha ha, ha ha ha!’

  That moment stuck in Juliet’s mind because of two things that were so typically Ben. One was the giggle that bubbled unexpectedly out of his rugged, outdoorsy frame, an infectious delight that had always made her smile too, from the first time she’d heard it – over an equally terrible joke – at school.

  The other was the cherry tree. Ben loved it. He was a landscape gardener and had a geeky passion for trees in general, but that one was his favourite in the whole town. They never drove past it in spring without him making her promise that if he died before her, she’d have a big cherry tree planted so at least she could look at the cascading, ballerina-skirt blossom and be happy, once a year.

  Juliet couldn’t bear to think about that now. She’d found a different way to drive out of Longhampton because even seeing the tree made her vision blur dangerously at the wheel.

  The scruffy little terrier they’d been shown at the rescue centre had been called Dodger, but once he and Ben laid eyes on each other, he was Minton. With his eager eyes and wagging stump of a tail, he looked the type of dog who’d eat a shuttlecock just to make his master laugh. He’d run through sit, beg and down while they were still talking to the rescue manager.

  Minton gazed sadly at Juliet from his basket. He was the colour of double cream, apart from one brown patch over his left eye. She’d suggested Patch. Or Captain Hook. It had fallen on deaf ears; Minton and Ben were already shaking hands.

  From that moment, Minton was Ben’s dog, despite the fact that Juliet fed him, cleaned up after him and prised the socks out of his mouth. Ben took him to work, sitting up front in his van’s passenger seat, and it was Ben’s long stride that Minton scampered happily to keep up with. Minton and Juliet were best friends now, though. Sometimes she wondered who was looking after whom.

  ‘Juliet, you look tired. Are you eating?’

  She nodded at him.

  ‘Juliet!’

  Juliet squinted. She could have sworn Minton had rolled his eyes at her.

  Reluctantly, she tore her gaze away from him and directed it towards her mother. Diane was sitting on the sheet-covered chair, her knees clamped together. Her kind face was taut with worry – and the effort of not showing it. Ben had always said she wasn’t so much a ‘glass half full’ sort, as a ‘glass half empty and made of glass’ natural worrier.

  ‘You’re not eating,’ she went on. ‘I’ve just had a look in your fridge. All that food I sent over last week is still in there. All out of date now. And it was nice stuff too,’ she added, with a touch of resentment. ‘M&S meals. So you wouldn’t have to cook.’

  ‘Mum, I’m fine. Do I look like I’m fading away?’

  Diane squinted at her daughter. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Actually, you do.’

  Juliet knew for a fact that she didn’t. Ten years as a professional caterer, specialising in cupcakes for weddings and gourmet biscuits, meant she’d laid down a fair store of emergency flab rations that she was nowhere near depleting yet. Granted, she didn’t feel much like ploughing through a steak and kidney pi e, even a luxury one with organic pastry, but it was amazing how well KitKats still went down. She could eat a whole packet. Sometimes she did. There was no one there to tell her not to.

  Juliet looked down at her hands, which were now looking older, and thinner. There were fine lines around her gold wedding band. Proper widow’s hands. It gave her a morbid sense of satisfaction, something she could thrust at all those people whose faces said, ‘But you’re too young to be a widow!’ – as if losing the one person who held her entire life in his heart was somehow less devastating, less real, because she was only thirty-one.

  ‘You need to get some fresh air.’ Diane left a cunning pause. ‘Minton needs more exercise. You’re letting him down, keeping him cooped up in here with you.’

  Any hint of neglect towards Ben’s dog always nipped Juliet into a response. ‘I am walking him!’ she protested.

  ‘When?’

  ‘When I go to Tesc—’ She stopped, and looked up.

  Diane met her eyes, and her expression was woebegone. Juliet knew she knew. There was no point denying it, and something in her mother’s face – confusion, not just pity – made her jut out her chin and finish.

  ‘When I go to Tesco,’ she said. ‘I walk him then.’

  ‘And when are you going to Tesco?’ persisted Diane.

  Juliet didn’t answer.

  ‘Kathy Gibbon saw you,’ Diane said. ‘She was coming back off her shift at the hospital. She saw you in the car park. Oh, Juliet! What sort of person does their shopping at four in the morning?’

  ‘The sort of person who likes to go to the supermarket when it’s nice and quiet. When it’s not full of people asking me how I’m coping.’ Juliet patted her knee and Minton leaped up to her side, leaning into her with his firm body. ‘Minton doesn’t mind. He’s got one of those balls with a light in it. It’s fun. Isn’t it?’ she added, to him.

  Minton closed his eyes with pleasure as she scratched behind his ears. Making Minton happy was simple.

  ‘But I worry about you, wandering around in the middle of the night on your own.’ Diane’s voice wavered, her head clearly thronging with the full range of horrors that could befall a woman and a small dog in Longhampton’s retail park in the wee small hours. ‘Anything could happen!’

  It nearly made Juliet laugh, in an ironic sort of way. Being mugged would take her mind off everything else.

  ‘Mum,’ she said, very reasonably, ‘what’s the worst thing that could happen to me? My husband died eight months ago, I’m a cook who can’t work because I can’t taste anything, and our so-called forever house is going to have to be forever, with the property market like this. Being mugged doesn’t worry me. I could use the compensation to pay for the new bathroom.’

  Diane’s pale eyes widened in cartoon shock behind her glasses and Juliet missed Ben for the fifth time that day, this time for his cheerfully black sense of humour. They’d been the only ones in the family with any sense of humour, come to that.

  It’s the little things I miss you for most, she thought, bracing herself against the melancholy that washed over her whole body, even now. I just can’t get used to moments like these, when I feel worse than on my own, because you’d have laughed, and it’d have become one of those in-jokes.

  She flinched at the thought of the long strands of in-jokes they’d stored up over fifteen years, gone in a blink.

  ‘Have there been attacks?’ Diane demanded. ‘In the retail park?’

  ‘No, it’s perfectly safe, Mum.’ Juliet could have kicked herself: that would be going on to Diane and Louise’s list of ‘Places That Were Too Dangerous to Take Toby’. The soft-play area where someone’s toddler had eaten a marble, the coffee shop on the High Street that allows dogs inside, now the retail park.

  Minton hadn’t settled. He was still turning round and round on Juliet’s knee, unable to find a comfy spot. He’d always been sociable, but now he seemed to share Juliet’s resentment at having their solitude interrupted.

  ‘Poor little fella,’ sighed Diane. ‘Is he still sleeping by Ben’s—’

  ‘Yes,’ said Juliet shortly. ‘Shall I make us a cup of tea?’ She got up, glad of the chance to move.

  Diane and Minton trailed after her into the kitchen, which still had no units or proper floor. Or tiles. She and Ben had been brainstorming ideas for their ideal kitchen the day before he died, blithely ripping out the tatty old MDF units, thinking they’d be replaced soon enough. Magazine pages were still sellotaped to the bare plaster, creased and tatty now.

  Juliet could sense her mother looking around at the mess, assessing the exposed wires and sharp edges. Her sister, Louise, had been over a few times with Toby, her son, but she kept him firmly in the sitting room, or strapped in his buggy, if she could get away with it.

  ‘You know, I could ask your dad to come round and sort out the plastering,’ said Diane, as if it had just occurred to her. ‘He’s quite handy with the Polyfilla.’

  ‘That’s very kind, but it’s OK.’ Juliet unplugged the toaster from the adapter and plugged the kettle in. Her dad, Eric, was already ‘popping in’ to tidy up the garden for her once a week. That was fine; it was a family joke that Juliet had whatever the opposite of a green thumb was, and besides, Dad liked gardening. He said it was because he couldn’t bear to see Ben’s efforts go to seed, but Juliet suspected he didn’t trust her with sharp implements. She was so spacey these days that she’d probably take her own foot off if she had to mow the lawn.

  The decorating was something else entirely, though, and she didn’t want any interference from her family, however well-meaning. She and Ben had had grand ideas for the kitchen, the heart of their first proper house. They were going to buy an Aga (cream, reconditioned), with a whistling kettle and clothes drying rack. Minton would curl up against it in winter, and she’d make jam and drop scones on it. If she closed her eyes, Juliet could still hear Ben telling her about renovating the original Victorian tiles, and custom-building shelves, how he was going to make her a baker’s paradise.

  They were the plans. For the time being, Juliet was still using the toaster and the travel kettle she’d had at college.

  ‘It’s better that it’s all left as it is,’ she said stubbornly, feeling her mother’s despairing glances at the chaos.

  ‘But you’ve got to live here, darling,’ said Diane. ‘Life goes on.’ The word was swallowed up in a guilty gulp. Juliet knew without turning round that her mother had her hand to her mouth; she could see her stricken reflection in the mirror opposite. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean . . .’

  Juliet got out a cloth and wiped the toast crumbs from her breakfast off the counter. ‘I’m going to get builders in. They’ll want to see it as it is. Give them a better sense of what needs doing.’

  ‘You’ve been saying that for weeks. I know it’s hard, but Ben wouldn’t want you to be living in a house with no proper shower.’ Diane was trying to be firm, but her voice cracked. ‘Let me call Keith. He did a lovely job on our conservatory. You’ll barely know he’s there. If it’s money, your dad and I can tide you over. Just a couple of rooms. Just so I know you’re not living in a building site.’

  Something tightened inside Juliet, like cling film wrapping round her heart, suffocating her. I don’t want anything to be changed in here, she thought. She’d got over that initial paralysis, where even experiencing a birthday without Ben seemed like a betrayal, but she couldn’t bring herself to call the builders. This had been their project. Their forever house. She didn’t want to turn it into a forever house Ben would never share.

  The kettle boiled and Juliet reached out for it, but Diane stopped her.

  ‘Juliet,’ she said, ‘I can’t sleep for worrying about you. Your dad can’t sleep for worrying about both of us. Please. Let us pay for you to get a decent shower put in.’

  ‘Please don’t worry about me.’ Juliet gently freed her hand and reached for the mugs. Wedding presents. Pink Emma Bridgewater hearts. ‘I’m actually . . .’