No Escape (11 page)

‘We had a tiff last night.’

‘Serious?’ Lizzie hoped not. Her mother had been so happy since their engagement. Even if no date had been set – which had struck both her and Christopher as slightly odd given
their ages – romance definitely agreed with Angela.

‘Not a bit.’ Her mother was cheery. ‘We made it up at bedtime.’

‘Good.’

‘All thanks to Christopher,’ Angela said.

‘What is?’ Lizzie asked.

‘You know what, darling. Giving me back my life.’

‘Long time ago now, Mum,’ Lizzie said. ‘And you got it back yourself.’

‘Still down to him,’ Angela insisted.

Lizzie gritted her teeth till the end of the call, but when she put down the phone, some of the loveliness had gone out of the day.

Should be used to it by now.

Lord knew she’d grown used to so many things. Like cherishing the times when her husband had to travel (Jack’s concerns notwithstanding), and the awareness that she often nowadays
used her own work to block out her problems rather than for its own pleasure.

‘The Lizzie Piper Roadshow’, as the forthcoming project had now been named, was, however, starting to thoroughly absorb her. Once the contracts had all been signed, Lizzie had begun
feeling better about it. Both Howard Dunn and the television series producer, Richard Arden, had voiced their thoughts as to how she might deal with the idea over a string of lunch meetings, but
then they’d left it to her to come up with her own outline, which was the way Lizzie preferred it. She’d toyed with a number of concepts, some conventional, others more inventive and
complex, but then, during a meeting at the Vicuna offices in Chancery Lane, Howard Dunn had persuaded her to return to the precept she usually worked by: simplicity was best, whenever and wherever
possible.

The fact was, she was being given virtual
carte blanche
to pick and choose seven locations, provided they were colourful, European, and would inspire her, her readers and viewers.

‘You don’t actually need a gimmick, Lizzie,’ Dunn told her in his office, a charmingly crooked room with sloping ceiling and beams.

‘Not a gimmick as such,’ she’d agreed, ‘but I thought a hook of some sort to hang it all on, to drag in the audience.’

‘You’re the hook, darling,’ her editor said. ‘Why else do you imagine they’re prepared to put so much money into this thing?’

‘Really?’ She was dubious.

‘Of course, really.’

‘But why? I’m not dependable like Delia, or dishy like Jamie, and I’m certainly not gorgeous like Nigella.’

‘You’re gorgeous like Lizzie,’ Howard Dunn pointed out.

‘Don’t be silly.’

‘Don’t be coy.’ Dunn smiled. ‘Anyway, it’s not just your looks, it’s your personality.’

‘I’m just me,’ Lizzie had said.

‘Which is precisely what we and the TV people are paying you to be. Just Lizzie Piper.’

Even the research was fun after that, wandering through travel books and histories and browsing her atlas in search of places that would most pleasurably tickle her own tastebuds.

‘I feel a bit of a fraud,’ she’d told Christopher one evening. ‘This should be harder, less fun.’

‘Give it time,’ he’d said astutely.

‘I suppose you’re right.’

She had smiled at him, knowing that he was, of course, absolutely right, that as the book ran its course she would become subject to panics, become fed up with it and with herself and her lack
of talent or inspiration or application. And Christopher would listen to her, let her take her mood swings out on him and would seldom object, though he would often, calmly and rationally, set her
back on track. And at times like that, Lizzie would see again exactly why she had married him, and part of the reason she had stayed with him, and if only it could have been like that all the
time.

If only.

More than six years had passed since Jack’s diagnosis and her subsequent decision to put up with Christopher’s ‘other’ side, and the shock that had enabled Lizzie to
accept his behaviour had long since faded, natural repugnance soon returning with a vengeance.

Not that it had made any real difference. She had begun to object again, to protest or even threaten him when it all became too much, but the threats were empty and Christopher knew it. The man
who found fulfilment through using violence against his wife while he fucked her, who used foul language
while
fucking her – and that
was
what it was, that was how Lizzie
thought of it, for it had nothing whatsoever to do with lovemaking – who regularly still bit and hurt her and frightened her, the bites and other marks always now in places no one else would
see, and he had enough self-control for
that
, Lizzie, in distress and anger, had pointed out more than once. That man,
that
Christopher Wade, knew she would not leave him, or take the
children, or report him.

‘Anyway,’ he had said to her one night at the flat, ‘you like it.’

‘I
hate
it. It disgusts me.’

‘You’re a strong woman,’ Christopher said. ‘If you hated it so much, you wouldn’t be here.’

‘You know why I’m here.’

‘You’re here,’ he said, ‘because of our children, but not only because of them. You’re here because you still love me, and this is a part of me.’

‘Yes,’ Lizzie said. ‘That’s true enough. But it’s the part I loathe.’

‘Yet you’re party to it, you
acquiesce
to it.’

‘Yes,’ she had said. ‘And I despise myself for it, and I wish you had the strength to do what you once swore you would, and fight it.’

‘That was before,’ he said.

‘I don’t understand,’ Lizzie said. ‘I can’t comprehend why a man with so much goodness, a man with such a
mind
and so much strength, can give in to this . .
.’

‘This what?’ he asked, softly. ‘Depravity?’

She had said nothing.

‘It’s my curse, Lizzie.’

‘Not only yours.’

‘No,’ he said.

If only.

She played that game again now, after her mother’s phone call. If only life could always be as it had been this week, with Christopher away and just herself and Gilly managing the children
and the household, then she could be more or less the Lizzie Piper that the outside world believed in.

Reality was the game she always needed to play next, to counteract the first. The reality was that Jack was only feeling comparatively good because his pain levels had been temporarily reduced
and because his beloved daddy was only away on a short trip. The reality was that if Christopher were to move out permanently, the misery of the wheelchair-trapped ten-year-old boy and his brother
and sister, would be vast and unbearable.

The reality was that there was no such person as ‘Just Lizzie’. There was a mother, and a daughter, and a woman who wrote reasonably well, and who cooked extremely well.

And, whether she always liked it or not, a wife.

A wife who, come the end of July, all preliminary meetings over, all plans completed, her outline, hopefully, transformed into a television running order and some kind of intelligible script,
would set off on her travels with an as-yet unknown quantity of comparative strangers, to be joined, soon after, by her vastly respected husband and their wholly innocent, still gloriously
oblivious children.

Business was down at Patston Motors, mostly because Tony’s drinking was leading him to make too many mistakes, which meant he was losing customers, and one man had
already threatened to report him for shoddy practice, which had been enough to send Tony straight to the Bell’s he kept in his desk drawer.

If only, he told himself, Irina – the bottomless human pit into which he’d had to chuck all that hard-earned cash – would show him a
little
love and gratitude, things
might have been more tolerable. And Joanne, for whom he’d
done
it all, was no better these days, always giving him little sideways glances that said she thought he was some kind of
monster, conveniently forgetting that if anyone was to blame for all this, it was her. Her hormones, her needs, her fucking insensitivity about his failure to give her a
real
baby, and now,
more than anything, her complete inability to teach Irina how to behave.

‘What’s wrong with you?’ Paul Georgiou asked him as they were propping up the bar in the Crown and Anchor one evening in May.

‘Nothing.’ Tony wished to Christ, for the hundredth time, that he could share some of his problems.

‘Something’s wrong,’ Paul insisted. ‘You’ve got a face on you like a wet kipper. You’ve been like it for months, mate.’

‘Business is crap.’ At least that was no lie.

‘Is that all?’

‘It’s bloody well enough,’ Tony said. ‘I’ve got bills coming out my ears, one customer threatening to take me to court or have me beaten up—’

‘What did you do to him?’ Paul looked impressed.

‘Nothing. He had an accident after I serviced his Merc.’

‘Bad accident?’ Paul asked.

‘Not that bad, but he’s making a meal of it.’

‘So that’s it?’

‘That’s what?’

‘That’s what you’ve been so pissed off about?’

‘Yeah,’ Tony said. ‘It’s enough, I can tell you.’

‘Only . . .’ Paul stopped.

‘What?’

Paul looked uncomfortable. ‘It’s just that Nicki and I – we can’t help hearing, mate, the walls are so fucking thin, aren’t they?’

‘So?’ Tony’s still handsome but thickening face took on its tight, belligerent look. ‘What do you and Nicki hear?’

His neighbour’s discomfiture grew. ‘Nothing. Just you and Joanne rowing.’

‘So we row,’ Tony said. ‘Who doesn’t?’

‘No one. Me and Nicki fight all the time.’

‘Well then,’ Tony said. ‘No big deal, right? We’re human, okay?’

‘Sure,’ Paul said. ‘I didn’t mean to stick my nose in, mate.’

‘Good,’ Tony said.

Joanne lived with fear now almost every day of her life.

The slaps that Tony administered to Irina, now four, driving her mother half out of her mind with misery and rage, were bad enough, but it was the punches that really frightened Joanne. First,
most
, she was terrified that one day her little girl might really be hurt, that Tony would lose all control and hit Irina on her head or her body rather than on her arms or legs as he did
now. But then again, the fact that the child’s limbs were so often dark with bruises led to the second great fear that soon, very soon, someone was going to find out.

‘Are you sure,’ Sandra had asked her a few weeks earlier, ‘about not sending her to nursery school?’

‘Quite sure,’ Joanne had said.

‘It’s just that, well, I’ve said it before . . .’

‘You have, Mum.’

‘I know you want the best for Irina, but staying so close to you
every
minute might not necessarily be the best.’

‘She gets nervous,’ Joanne had told her.

‘And she’ll stay that way the longer you let her,’ Sandra had said.

‘I know what I’m doing,’ Joanne had said, and her mother – who’d surmised by now that Tony was not quite the angel she had once believed – had backed off.

Sandra wouldn’t back off when it came to real school. And she’d already hinted more than once that she felt Joanne was deliberately keeping Irina from her.

‘I don’t know why you insist on changing every nappy yourself when you have a perfectly good granny on hand who’s happy to do it,’ Sandra had said in the past.

‘She gets upset when anyone else changes her,’ Joanne had lied.

‘But I’m not anyone else,’ her mother had said.

No difference, of course, when potty-training had arrived and Sandra had told Joanne she’d bought a nice cheery one so that Irina could spend time at her house.

‘She only seems to like her own,’ Joanne had said.

‘Then bring hers with you,’ Sandra had reasoned patiently.

If she knew the truth, Joanne thought, if she knew a
quarter
of the truth, she wasn’t sure that her mother would ever speak to her again. And she’d be right, of course,
because the fact was that Joanne was the worst mother in the world, because however great her love for Irina, however vast her terror that her daughter would be taken from her, she was nothing
short of
wicked
letting this go on, letting
him
go on.

Yet still she said nothing, just prayed to God to make it stop.

Make
him
stop.

One evening in June, Tony came home in what he later claimed had been a ‘really good mood’ which Joanne had spoiled by asking him not to wake Irina, who’d
been fretful all day and had only just gone off to sleep.

‘I only want to look in on her,’ he said.

‘Do it quietly,’ she said.

‘Of course I’ll do it quietly,’ he said. ‘I’m not a complete fucking moron, whatever you might think.’

‘I don’t think anything of the kind,’ she said. ‘I’m just tired, and I don’t need Irina being woken up again.’

‘Because it’s always me who does that, is it?’

‘No, of course not.’ She knew, already, what was going to happen, could have strangled herself for not keeping her mouth shut.

‘Because it’s always me and
only
me who upsets her, isn’t it?’

‘Don’t start, Tony,’ Joanne said, quietly. ‘Please.’

‘I haven’t started anything,’ he said. ‘All I’ve done is come home in a halfway decent mood for once in my fucking mess of a life.’

He was at the staircase by then, foot on the first tread, and Joanne knew it was too late to stop him, not that she
could
have stopped him anyway, except maybe by chucking something
really heavy, like a lamp, at his head, and dear God, she’d thought about it more than once in the last few years, she really had.

‘Please,’ was all she said.

It was the worst yet. The first time Joanne had known that she had no alternative but to wrap her little girl in a blanket and drive her straight to hospital in order to be
sure that Tony had not seriously injured her.

‘You’re a monster,’ she told him, quite quietly, just before they left.