‘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.
Chapter Sixteen
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.
‘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.
Chapter Seventeen
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.
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