No Escape (12 page)

‘I couldn’t help it,’ he said, white-faced, swaying slightly, leaning against the wall near the front door. ‘She woke up, took one look at me and started,
and—’

‘Shut up, Tony.’ Joanne opened the door. ‘I don’t want to hear.’

‘She hates me, Jo. I’ve told you.’

‘Come on, sweetheart,’ Joanne said gently to Irina, heavy and now frighteningly quiet in her arms.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, to his wife’s departing back. ‘So sorry.’

‘Go to hell, Tony,’ she said over her shoulder.

‘How are you feeling now, my love?’ Joanne asked her daughter as she drove her Fiesta with great care towards Waltham General Hospital.

‘All right, Mummy.’ Small, sad, scared, brave voice.

‘I’m so sorry, Irina,’ Joanne said. ‘I love you so much.’

‘I love you too, Mummy.’

Joanne used her right hand to scrub away her tears, bit her lower lip hard to keep control, and concentrated on driving, looking for a signpost for the hospital.

‘Darling,’ she said, ‘I need you to listen to me, okay?’

‘Yes, Mummy.’

‘The nurses and doctors at the hospital are probably going to ask you how you got hurt, sweetheart. Yes?’

‘Yes, Mummy.’

‘The thing is, baby, you mustn’t say that it was anything to do with Daddy.’ Irina, strapped into the child seat in the back, was silent.

‘Darling? Are you all right?’

‘Yes, Mummy.’ Very soft again.

Joanne clenched her hands tightly around the steering wheel. ‘Only if you tell them anything about Daddy—’

‘He’ll get cross with Rina again,’ the little girl said.

Joanne swallowed more tears. ‘Worse than that, my love.’ She had to fight to steady her voice. ‘The doctors might want to take you away from Mummy, and Mummy couldn’t
bear that.’

‘Don’t let them take Rina, Mummy.’ Terrified now.

‘I won’t, sweetheart.’ Joanne saw the sign, slowed down. ‘I promise you, Irina.’ She strengthened her tone. ‘No one’s going to take you away from me.
Not ever. Just remember to tell them you fell down. Okay, baby?’

‘Okay, Mummy.’

‘I love you, my darling.’

‘I love you, too, Mummy.’

Joanne checked the rear-view mirror then, caught sight of her own eyes, and knew that she had never hated herself more.

Until the moment inside A&E, when she was telling the first nurse about Irina’s ‘fall’ and saw Irina’s dark eyes, saw a blankness in them that made her want to
scream. Or just to curl up and die.

They believed her. And, infinitely more important, Tony had done no serious physical harm. No internal injuries. No barbed questions. Just help and sympathy, for Irina and for her.

And Joanne left the Fiesta where she’d parked it, and took Irina home in a minicab so that she could cuddle her all the way, comfort her, praise her, tell her how much she loved her, try,
try
, to reassure her just a little.

And her daughter clung to her in the back of the cab, but said nothing more, not one single word for the entire journey back to the house.

And Joanne’s shame was boundless.

Mutual admiration and warm friendship had begun developing between Lizzie and Susan Blake years ago during the very first promotional tour in the
Fooling Around
series.
Now a director at Vicuna, Susan had then been a junior publicist, dispatched with orders to see that Lizzie Piper was kept calm and happy enough to fulfil the commitments on her schedule. After the
first day of that tour, a day during which almost everything that could had gone wrong, it had been Lizzie who had made Susan – a twenty-two-year-old, slim, pretty brunette – sit down
in the bar of their Manchester hotel and down a double malt whisky, in order to forget all about schedules and books.

‘It’s only a glorified cookbook,’ Lizzie had said.

‘It’s a wonderful book,’ Susan had managed to protest.

‘But not exactly brain surgery,’ Lizzie had said, and bought them a second drink.

‘This is supposed to be on Vicuna,’ Susan had said.

‘This is personal,’ Lizzie had told her. ‘From me to you to say thank you.’

‘For what?’ Susan had asked. ‘Everything went wrong.’

‘I’d have been a gibbering wreck without you,’ Lizzie had said.

‘I
have
been gibbering,’ Susan had confessed.

‘Didn’t show,’ Lizzie had assured her, then sat back to enjoy her own second malt. ‘Face it, we were both amazing.’

‘Troupers.’ Susan had raised her glass. ‘You’re a star, Lizzie Piper.’

‘Thank you.’ Lizzie had suddenly felt terribly happy. ‘Next drink’s on Vicuna.’

‘Better remember to have dinner,’ Susan had said. ‘One of my duties is not letting authors get totally smashed.’

‘That’s okay,’ Lizzie had said. ‘I’m starving anyway.’

‘You really do love food, don’t you?’

‘Isn’t that what I’m being paid to do?’

‘I met a gardening writer last year who said he couldn’t wait to move to a flat so he didn’t have to mow grass or weed ever again.’

Lizzie had thought about that for a moment. ‘You can live without cutting grass or pruning roses. You can’t live without food.’

Lizzie’s serious relationship with food had begun with simple comfort eating in her schooldays in the early period of her mother’s depression, developing – in
her all-too-brief time at Sussex – into something a little more intense. She’d been at some risk of turning into a blimp when she’d met Denis Cain, a very desirable fellow reader
of English who believed in taking care of his body. Through Denis, Lizzie began realizing how much real pleasure could be derived from preparation and the slower tease of cooking itself. Shopping
with him in markets and, when she could afford it, at some of the better shops in Rottingdean and Brighton, Lizzie had learned how the quality of ingredients could affect ultimate tastes and
textures of dishes. Even more so when she began to use her own imagination and, becoming gradually bolder, started to deviate from recipes in books and magazines.

Before long, she was hooked, though the downside was that the better her cooking became, the more she noticed Denis showing more passion for the meals she served him than for her. The sexual
part of their relationship had fizzled out long before she was forced, after Maurice Piper’s death, to come home and care for Angela, but for some years, until he moved to California, Denis
Kane had continued periodically to invite himself to dinner wherever Lizzie was living.

‘You should open a restaurant,’ he had said.

‘I’d have to get up in the middle of the night to go to markets.’

‘You could be a chef,’ he’d said.

‘I’d have to start at the bottom and get yelled at.’

‘You should at least get your recipes published,’ Denis had persisted.

‘They aren’t really recipes—’ Lizzie had gone on in the same negative vein ‘—just me fooling around in the kitchen. And anyway, I’m going to be a
journalist, not write cookbooks.’

‘Nothing wrong with good cookbooks,’ Denis had said. ‘And they make money. That Delia woman’s rich as Croesus.’

‘Money isn’t everything,’ Lizzie had said.

‘Of course it isn’t,’ Denis had agreed. ‘But it doesn’t hurt.’ He’d paused, poking one of his slender fingers into her Belgian chocolate and vanilla
mousse. ‘And you are the most spectacular cook.’

It had taken a few years of rather basic journalistic effort for Lizzie to remember that conversation, at a time when she had been finding it increasingly difficult to pay
bills. Maurice had left Angela well provided for, but nothing, Lizzie had learned, deflated a financial cushion more swiftly than the treatment of chronic illness.

She had begun by phoning Denis in Venice Beach, telling him that she was rather belatedly taking his advice and asking if, by chance, he remembered any of the dishes he’d enjoyed most in
the old days.

‘All of them,’ he’d said.

‘Seriously,’ Lizzie had told him. ‘I need a kick start. I told you I never wrote anything down, that I was only messing about.’

‘Fooling around, you said,’ Denis recalled. ‘Good title, by the way.’

She hadn’t got round to using it for a long while. She’d gone on writing articles for publication while playing with various concepts for the book that would, hopefully, finally make
it, but originality, whenever she thought she’d stumbled upon it, seemed to kill off the simplicity and freshness of her basic ideas.

And then, by the time she’d got it right, content, style, structure and title, Christopher Wade had blown into her life and changed everything forever.

‘That’s the way of things, isn’t it?’ Lizzie had told Susan Blake that first night over their rather (despite Susan’s best intentions) drunken dinner. ‘At
exactly the time when I no longer desperately needed to get a book accepted, when I had enough money, not to mention two children, along came Vicuna.’

‘But you’re glad it – we – did, aren’t you?’ Susan had asked her.

‘God, yes,’ Lizzie had answered.

Now, years later, over lunch at Isola in Knightsbridge, Susan and Lizzie had been talking over the plans for the Roadshow tour.

‘You all right?’ Susan asked Lizzie as they waited for coffee after she’d demolished Italian cheesecake with wild berry sauce and Lizzie had toyed with her own dessert.

‘Fine,’ Lizzie said. ‘Too full to eat any more.’

‘You just seem a bit . . .’ The publicist went on peering at her. ‘Down.’

Lizzie picked up her wine glass and glanced around the busy and unashamedly opulent restaurant. ‘Not down at all,’ she said. ‘Just a little nervous about the plans, I
suppose.’

‘I can understand that,’ Susan said.

‘Can you?’

‘Sure. It’s a pretty huge undertaking.’ Susan paused. ‘You’re not worried about how the children are going to cope with it, are you? Not with Christopher organizing
things for them?’

‘Of course not,’ Lizzie said quietly.

Susan smiled. ‘He’s just so extraordinary.’

‘Isn’t he,’ Lizzie said.

‘What’s the matter, Mum?’ Jack asked her later, as she prepared toad-in-the-hole.

‘Nothing’s the matter, darling,’ she told him.

Edward was in his room doing homework, Sophie was in bed, and Christopher, due to operate at the Beauchamp first thing, was spending the night in Holland Park. Gilly, who’d waited for
Lizzie to get back, had gone off now for three days, which was fine with Lizzie, because frankly there was nothing she wanted just now more than a few days of normality with the children.

‘You’ve been a bit funny,’ Jack said.

Lizzie looked over at him. At her beloved middle child, so like his father to look at, with hair the identical colour to Christopher’s, eyes the same grey, yet much less sharp, far softer
than his dad’s. Even his smile almost the same. And Jack did smile a great deal, despite his sufferings.

Nothing yet, by comparison to what was, almost certainly, to come. Jack had already endured, and been forced to discard, braces and crutches, and in time he would no longer be able to manage his
manually operated wheelchair and would graduate to electric. He knew about that, managed to joke about it, boasted to Edward – who adored his younger brother and would, had Lizzie and
Christopher not been watchful, have become his willing slave – that he’d be breaking speed limits long before Edward ever drove his first car.

He knew other things, too, more, much more than his parents – yearning to protect him for as long as possible – wanted him to; Jack had learned those things through his PC, as Lizzie
herself had supplemented her own knowledge. Those things, facts, details, that gave her nightmares, sleeping and waking, the things that tortured and tormented her.

She wondered, sometimes, how it might have been if her maternal grandparents had not chosen to bury the nature of the disease along with Angela’s brother, if she had grown up knowing the
chances and had been tested. Might there have been no Edward or Sophie – both healthy and strong, thank God?

No Jack?

Could that possibly have been better? The question Lizzie and Christopher and Angela all asked themselves over and over again, pointless and agonizing as it was.

Not better for me.
Lizzie’s response, every time, guilty, anguished, but absolute. For how else could she answer, knowing her beloved boy? The disease was not Jack. It was an alien
invader, an enemy, robbing him of dystrophin, that one crucial muscle protein, in its conspiracy to hide the real Jack Wade, to trap and lock away the bold, energetic, beautiful, strong-limbed
potential of him.

His limbs might be weakening, but it had not yet succeeded in locking away any of those other things, and it had never touched his intelligence or humour. Or the lovely smile that linked him so
inextricably to his family’s hearts.

Yet, oh, dear Lord, the things that lay ahead. Operations, treatments. Pain and numbing fatigue. Frustrations no able-bodied person could imagine. Fear of the need for spinal surgery. Dread of
the struggle to breathe, of tracheotomy and tubes, of carers to suction and irrigate the tubes, to feed and wash.

‘Not yet,’ Christopher would remind Lizzie now and again. ‘Not now. Look at our boy
now
.’ And he would take her hand and squeeze it tightly and make her look at
Jack, and she’d see that he was right, that their son was playing some game with Edward, or stroking Sophie’s hair, which he loved to do, or reading Harry Potter, or watching a video,
or listening to a CD, or doing his homework.

Not yet
. Please, God, not ever.

‘You’ve been a bit funny,’ Jack said, now.

Jack Wade, over whose eyes it was not possible to pull even the finest strands of wool.

So pull yourself together, Lizzie Piper.

‘I’ve had a bit of a headache,’ she lied. ‘Nothing too bad.’

‘Sure that’s all?’

‘Absolutely sure,’ she said, and carried on with her toad-in-the-hole.

‘Loads of Bisto, please,’ Jack said.

‘But of course, Mr Gourmet.’ Lizzie smiled, then paused. ‘Are you quite happy about us all going away this summer, Jack?’

‘Course I am.’ The smile was there like a flash. ‘It’s going to be wicked.’ He hesitated. ‘Is
that
why you’ve been weird, Mum? Worrying about me
and the travel and stuff?’