by Jane Tara
About The Happy Endings Book Club
This Christmas, the women of the Happy Endings Book Club are about to uncover a world of love and magic as they discover how to have their own happy ending … or beginning, as they’re often the same thing.
Once a month, seven very different women come together to discuss books. They all love a happy ending, but have lost sight of how to get their own. Paige misses glimpsing the magic in the world. Sadie doesn’t see the beauty inside people. Amanda wonders what she ever saw in her ex husband. Tilda literally can’t see herself. Michi can’t bear looking at her family, while Clementine is blind to what’s right in front of her. And Eva looks for romance in all the wrong places.
But things are about to change ...
Meet the women of the Happy Endings Book Club as they celebrate Christmas, and themselves, in London, Paris, Vienna, New York, Sydney … and in love.
Contents
About The Happy Endings Book Club
Epigraph
THREE WEEKS AFTER CHRISTMAS
PAIGE
CLEMENTINE
MICHI
CLEMENTINE
EVA
CLEMENTINE
AMANDA
CLEMENTINE
TILDA
CLEMENTINE
SADIE
CLEMENTINE
PAIGE
JEAN
THE BOOK CLUB
About Jane Tara
Also by Jane Tara
Copyright
For Dominique ... who sees me.
A happy ending was imperative. I shouldn’t have bothered to write otherwise.
—E.M. Forster
PROLOGUE
Three weeks after Christmas
Paige flipped the open sign on her bookshop door to closed. Happy Endings was shut for the day, so let the festivities begin. Everyone was here. And early, which was unusual, but it was the book club’s first meeting of the year, so everyone was excited to see each other.
Paige stared out her shop window. London, resplendent in Christmas decorations only a few weeks before, was now weighed down by the bleakness of winter. Normally, she’d find that depressing, but tonight she had other things on her mind. She straightened a few books on the shelf near the door and made her way back to the counter. She tidied a pile of bookmarks that were sitting next to the register, free for the taking, and closed down her computer. She could hear everyone else laughing and talking at one hundred miles an hour.
“Come on, Paige,” called Michi in her Aussie accent. “Let’s get on with it.”
“I’ll be with you in a minute.” Paige unwrapped the tulips Tilda had given her. They were beautiful and for a moment tears threatened to erupt again. Fortunately Tilda appeared by her side with a vase and shooed her away.
“You finish up here so we can start,” Tilda said, and gave Paige’s hand a quick squeeze.
Paige made her way around the shop, quickly tidying and finishing up for the day. She switched off the main lights, leaving some sidelights on, which filled the store with a warm glow. She loved her shop, with its wood floors and oak shelves crammed with books. In one corner there was an unusual collection of sofas and coffee tables all on top of a rug she’d picked up cheap in Turkey. The reading corner, she called it.
In the opposite corner her assistant, Clementine, was tidying the children’s section, which was always in disarray by closing. With her cherry-red ponytail and rosy cheeks, Clementine looked barely older than a child herself.
“That looks good, Clem. Time to sign off,” Paige said. “Can you grab the wineglasses?”
Paige looked across at her friends, lounging on couches and chairs. They’d spent the past year getting together, initially to discuss books, but life and love and a lot of laughter had quickly crept into those meetings. Before long, many of them were catching up for coffee or a movie outside of their book club gatherings. They’d just immediately gelled.
Book clubs were tricky. Strangers came together, and no matter how compatible they seemed, if they didn’t like the same books—or at least respect what the other members liked—then the club would die a quick and often painful death. Put the wrong people together and books made them bitchy.
“I’m not judging you for it, but I don’t read romance.”
“You haven’t read In Search of Lost Time?”
“Did you hear her pronunciation of Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky?”
Paige found it very tedious indeed. Paige’s last book club experience had turned sour when Norma, the woman who ran it, constantly vetoed everyone else’s suggestions. The group read Wuthering Heights, Tess of the d’Urbervilles and The Age of Innocence. Finally, on the evening they got together to discuss The Road, Paige broached what everyone had been thinking.
“Can we have a happy ending?”
Norma looked at Paige as if she’d just farted. “What do you mean?”
“Norma, I enjoyed revisiting some of the books we’ve read. But I think everyone here agrees, we’d like a happy ending.”
Everyone did agree, which angered Norma even further.
Norma pulled at the gloves she was wearing. Norma always wore gloves. “If you’re finding these classics challenging …”
Paige shocked everyone in the room when she rolled her eyes and said, “Are you saying Pride and Prejudice, A Room with a View and To Kill a Mockingbird aren’t classics because the reader feels hopeful afterward?”
“Literary fiction, by its very nature, is rather dark.”
“Says who?”
“Excuse me?” Norma was visibly seething.
“Who says that literary fiction needs to be depressing?”
Norma seemed lost for words. Paige felt sorry for her. She knew Norma struggled with depression. But in Paige’s opinion she didn’t do herself any favors with the way she spent her time, swallowing antidepressants and curling up with Sylvia Plath. Something funny or hopeful would do her good.
“Perhaps we just have different taste,” Paige said kindly.
“And how would you describe your taste, Paige?”
“I prefer to focus on the positive.”
“How Panglossian.” Norma gave Paige a look that would wither steel. “Life is difficult. Books that end happily are misleading.”
“I disagree.” Paige was over it. She stood and straightened her skirt. “I’m working on having one in real life. But in the meantime … I’ll have them in books.”
Paige never went back to that book club, but the incident with Norma was what motivated her to follow through on her life-long dream of opening her own bookshop in Muswell Hill.
The Happy Endings Bookshop.
Well, that was what she was going to call it until her husband Tim put a stop to it.
“Christ, it sounds like a massage parlor.”
“It’s a great name for a bookstore.”
“Yeah, an adult bookstore with a little room out the back providing extra services,” he said. “I was wondering how you’d make this little business of yours work. Promote happy endings and they’ll be lining up down the street.”
Turned out he’d know. But at that stage she was still taking his advice and decided to name the shop Paige’s Pages instead. She went ahead and had the signs and website made. Then, two weeks before she was due to open, she discovered her husband was having an affair. It was her fiftieth birthday. His timing always had been dreadful. She packed her bags and moved out that night. The next day, she ordered new signs and renamed her shop Happy Endings. The shop was going to be her happy ending, or a least a part of it.
It was also what she promoted. Yes, she sold books of other genres, just as she read books of other genres, but her specialty was roman
ce, and any story that had a happy ending. She knew that was an ambiguous category. A happy ending for one person might not be so happy for another. Or it might not be a happy ending, but a beginning, or even both, because they’re often the same thing.
Paige was too old and had been hurt too badly to ever think again that a happy ending meant meeting someone and riding off into the sunset. As much as she enjoyed her romance novels, she knew that was unrealistic. Waking up one day and knowing you were okay and able to live life alone—that was a happy ending. It was certainly hers.
Paige’s shop stocked an interesting and upbeat mix of titles. She regularly held author signings and talks, always with a positive theme. It was why, in a time when little independent bookstores were a dying breed, Happy Endings was doing okay. It filled a need.
A year ago Paige had decided to form the book club she’d always wanted to belong to: the Happy Endings Book Club. She asked a few of her regular customers to join, starting with Eva, who seemed lost, and Sadie, who came across as sexy and funny yet often hung around the store as though she needed someone to talk to. Paige’s assistant Clementine brought her roommate Michi along. She also invited a couple of the local shopkeepers she’d become friendly with, like Tilda, who ran the florist up the road, and Amanda from the lovely little boutique opposite. Muswell Hill had a real community feel to it.
Everyone got together at their first meeting and agreed the club should have the same name and purpose as Paige’s shop. And yes, there had been many jokes about that name over wine on that first evening:
“Who said going to bed with a book wasn’t satisfying?”
“Get some real action under the covers.”
“The fictional boyfriend always has a spine.”
“The romantic hero: pick him up when it suits you.”
“With a well written book, there’s no premature ending.”
The women had spent the first book club meeting laughing hysterically, which immediately secured their friendship. They all had a similar sense of humor, but they all got it, too. They all wanted it. They all yearned for their own happy endings, both in real life and in the pages of the books they read. But mostly, there was just that added magic that some groups have when they meet.
As Paige finished tidying the shelves, she couldn’t help but smile. Magic. She saw it in a million different ways now.
“C’mon, Paige. Come tell us how you’re holding up.”
Paige made her way over to the group. She needed this tonight. She needed the support of these women. She needed to share her sadness and joy. She hadn’t seen some of them since before Christmas. And while a couple of the women had been particularly supportive of her over the past couple of weeks, no one knew the whole story. She certainly did have a story to tell. She just wasn’t sure they’d believe it.
Eva handed her a wine. “The floor is yours, my friend.”
PAIGE
The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.
Eden Phillpotts
*
One week before Christmas
Paige stared at the bottle of blood-red nail polish on the table in front of her and then turned back to her elderly mother.
“You want your toenails painted?”
“That’s what I said.”
“Now?”
“No, next week, when I might be dead.” Jean propped a bare foot on her daughter’s knee. Her toes looked as surprised to see the light of day as Paige was to see them.
Paige finally picked the bottle up. “Did you buy this?”
“One of the nurses bought it. I gave her the money.”
“You don’t think this color is a bit … bold?”
“That’s exactly why I chose it.” Jean gave her daughter a wink, which almost knocked Paige from her seat. “I haven’t always been this dull, you know.”
Paige found that hard to believe. She’d often looked at her mother and thought, like many people did, that Jean would be beautiful, if only she put some effort into it. But it wasn’t Jean Macintyre’s style. She was the type of woman who bowed her head and walked faster if a man dared whistle her way. She wore high-buttoned blouses and sang loudly in the church choir. She never wore make-up, never painted her toes, and her hair, while neat and clean, was always cut efficiently short.
So who was this woman who suddenly wanted a pedicure?
“How’s your hip today, Mum?”
“Good as new.”
“Well, technically it is new. That’s what a hip replacement is.”
“They’re telling me I could be back home by Christmas.”
“That’s only a week, Mum. We don’t want to rush things.” Paige didn’t add that she also wanted her mother well enough to go back to her own apartment. She didn’t think she’d cope living with her. “I think I should speak to your doctor.”
“I told you, that’s not going to happen. I’m not a child.”
“I just think they should investigate what caused the fall, Mum.”
“I told you, it was a little turn.”
“And that’s the proper medical term for it? A turn?”
“That’s right.” Jean stared at her daughter. “You should do your own nails after you’ve finished with me. You haven’t made an effort for quite a while.”
Paige ignored her mother and shook the nail polish. It was true. She hadn’t made an effort now for more than two years. She’d given up the day she left Tim. She’d tried to stay attractive for her husband, and in the end it didn’t matter. He left for a younger version of her anyway. And all Paige could think was why did she bother?
“Which foot do you want me to do first, Mum?”
Jean wiggled the toes on her left foot and Paige started painting. They sat in silence for a long time. Usually Jean chatted nonstop. Not about anything personal or important, but about the weather, local news. It was the type of conversation you had briefly with a neighbor, not over a period of hours with your only child. Paige always left with a headache. But today Jean was quiet.
“Something wrong, Mum?” Paige asked as she painted Jean’s big toenail.
“No.”
“Are you feeling unwell?”
“No.”
Paige put her mother’s foot down and lifted the next one. “You’re awfully quiet today,” she said as she shook the polish again.
“I’m thinking about your father.”
Paige looked at her mother in shock. She never, ever mentioned Paige’s father. Paige had been told he’d died when she was very young, that he’d been a perfectly nice man, but that it was best not to dwell on it. The few times Paige had tried to broach the subject of her father, she’d been firmly rebuffed. She’d learned early on not to speak of him.
“What about my father?” Paige spoke quietly. She didn’t want to scare her mother into silence, for she knew this was a rare opportunity to glean some information about him.
“He was a dreadful shit.”
Paige was so shocked she dropped her mother’s foot. Jean didn’t seem to notice and carried on talking.
“Couldn’t keep it zipped. Had such a wandering eye. Probably still does.”
Paige felt sick to the stomach. “Still?”
“The most magnetic man to ever walk god’s earth. And handsome!”
Paige could feel her heart pounding. Handsome? She’d never seen a photo. What did her mother mean by still? Could she … could her mother … be losing her marbles? Was Alzheimer’s setting in?
Jean smiled. “We met in Cornwall, where he lives … It was quite unexpected. And love at first sight, for both of us. Ridiculous … I knew from the beginning that it was an impossible match. But lord how I loved him.”
Paige was gobsmacked. Was her uptight mother speaking this way about love? About her father?
Jean turned to her daughter and looked her square in the eye. “I don’t think I’m long for this world, Paige, so I was thinking … perhaps you should look him
up.”
“B … but my father is dead.”
“No, I lied. He’s alive and well, and given who he is, he’ll probably outlive you.”
“What do you mean? Who is he?”
“Paige, dear, don’t be shocked, but your father is a fairy.”
*
Paige stumbled out of her mother’s room and made her way to the empty visitors lounge nearby. Had her mother just told her that her father was gay? Is that why they split up? Is that why she never mentioned him?
She stared around the room, as if the answers would be there, in the generic framed landscape that decorated the white wall, or in the corner with the cheap Christmas tree covered in candy canes.
She put some money in the vending machine and bought herself a Coke, then sipped it while she tried to make sense of what her mother had just told her. Perhaps the strangest thing of all was the cheery, matter-of-fact manner in which she’d told her.
Paige shook her head. Impossible. Her father was not gay and he definitely wasn’t still alive. She would have known. No one could keep such a secret without giving something away at least once. Certainly not Jean Macintyre, who found it difficult to keep secret what she’d bought someone for Christmas.
“I’ve just bought you a lovely nightgown, Paige. I know I shouldn’t ruin the surprise, but I’m so excited. It was sixty percent off.”
“Hi, Paige. Penny for your thoughts.”
Paige looked up into the impossibly handsome face of Jean’s physiotherapist, Arley Douglas, and immediately blushed, as she always did when she saw him. She was certain he noticed, but she comforted herself with the fact that Arley Douglas probably had this effect on most women, so he’d be used to it.
“Oh, hello, Arley, I was just …” Paige let her words drift off and tossed the Coke can into the trash. “Pondering … I guess.”
“Is there a problem with your mother?”
“We can discuss it later. I know you’re busy.”
Arley sat on one of the lounges nearby. He stretched his legs out in front of him and cocked his head to one side as he searched her face. “No time like the present.”
