The escape, p.1
The Escape, page 1
About the Author
Hilary Boyd was a nurse, a marriage counsellor and ran a small cancer charity before becoming an author. She has written twelve books, including Thursdays in the Park, her debut novel, which sold more than half a million copies and was an international bestseller.
By the same author
Thursdays in the Park
Tangled Lives
When You Walked Back into My Life
A Most Desirable Marriage
Meet Me on the Beach
The Lavender House
A Perfect Husband
The Anniversary
The Lie
The Affair
The Hidden Truth
Hilary Boyd
* * *
THE ESCAPE
Contents
Prologue
PART ONE Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
PART TWO 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
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Acknowledgements
‘My dad had limitations. That’s what my good-hearted mom always told us. He had limitations, but he meant no harm. It was kind of her to say, but he did do harm.’
Gillian Flynn
Prologue
Walthamstow, 10 December
Dearest Bel,
I’m so sorry to be writing this. I know what I’ve done will shock you to the core, but I felt I had no choice. Things have been hell recently, for both of us. But you’re so much better at handling it than me. I’ve been feeling as if my head would burst. I know the restaurant is history. And I know I’ve been in denial about the situation. But recently it’s begun to sink in that my lifelong dream for 83 is over. You’ve known for some time, of course. For me, realizing this was the last straw.
Something crazy has happened to me, Bel. I hoped you would never find out about this – I’m not proud of it – but back during lockdown I started dropping in on Trinny sometimes when I went for my run. (As you know, she lives near the park.) It was just sex at first. I like her, obviously, we all do, but I was really just being incredibly selfish and sounding off at what was a difficult time for us all. Then two weeks ago she told me she was four months pregnant. (Christ, even writing this is painful, as I know how I treated you in the past, faced with the same situation, and how devastating it was for you when things didn’t work out back then.) Anyway, Trinny wants to go back to her family – who live in south-west France, as you may remember. And it seemed like the ideal opportunity for a new start. So I’ve gone with her. I know what I said about being a father again, but somehow this feels different – maybe it’s my age. I can get work there easily, I imagine.
I realize you will hate me for this. And I deserve everything you throw at me. But neither of us has been particularly happy for a long while now, Bel. I partly blame my obsession with the restaurant – I haven’t been easy to live with, or very nice to you at times because of it, and I truly apologize for that. Things just seemed to fizzle out between us, didn’t they? Maybe working together, and the financial strain of 83, killed it for us, I don’t know … Anyway, sell the place, take what’s left. I relinquish my share of the flat and the business.
I wish you all the very best in your life, Bel. I will remember what we once had with love and great fondness.
And so, goodbye.
Louis xxx
As Bel sat, letter in hand, on the dusty step leading down to the street from their Walthamstow flat, emotions surged through her body, like a typhoon hurling everything about in its path. Shock, disbelief, excruciating hurt and contempt vied for pole position. But it was pure, uncontaminated rage that won out. Her whole being seemed electrified by it, to such a degree that she was catapulted upright, swinging the hand holding the letter round so hard in the narrow hallway that it hit the wall with brute force and she screamed. But instead of nursing her bruised hand to her chest, she ignored the pain. Instead Bel, who had never screamed in her life, just screamed some more, and louder. Unembarrassed, barely herself, she flopped over, knees bent, back arched, hands balled into fists, and allowed the sound to pour unfettered from her open mouth: an ear-shattering, visceral howl of agony.
No one heard, the blare of the London traffic drowning her out. If anyone did hear, like most city dwellers they would barely have registered it – just someone messing about. Finally she ran out of steam, the noise weakening with every breath until it was just a breathless squeak.
The letter was still in her right fist, crumpled into an angry wad, Louis’s small writing fractured by the heavy creases in the paper. But she unfolded it, smoothed out the single sheet with shaky fingers as she tried to get her breath back.
What shocked her almost more than his words, on this second reading, was his unwavering air of complacency. Yes, she’d hate him, he was saying, But, hey, it is what it is. They hadn’t been happy, after all. And what’s a guy to do, given this wonderful opportunity to dump all responsibility for the collapse of his business – plus his partner of nearly fifteen years, of course – and walk off into the sunset with 83’s pouty French waitress, their baby and a brand new life?
Their baby … That was a step too far. Bel could not deal with that particular agony right now.
Part One
1
March, three months later
‘Didn’t sleep a wink,’ Bel’s father complained, blinking at her.
She’d got up early – as she’d been doing every day since moving back to her childhood flat in late January – so she could make her breakfast in peace, potter around, do some chores and listen to the radio for a couple of hours on her own, before her father emerged from his lair. The vast quantities of wine or whisky he consumed on a nightly basis tended to knock him out till gone ten most mornings. But Dennis had beaten her to it today, and was already ensconced at the table in the kitchen reading the Telegraph, a cup of coffee cradled in one hand.
‘Our Spanish friend was stamping around into the wee hours,’ her father went on. ‘I was of a mind to go up and give him what for, but I couldn’t be arsed.’ The ‘friend’ in question was a very polite banker in his fifties, who was clearly an insomniac, his slippered feet shushing back and forth across the parquet floor in the flat above Dennis’s room on the rare nights he was in town. Bel had been summoned to listen on one occasion. The sound was barely audible – but she appreciated it was hard to ignore once you’d begun to notice.
‘Poor you,’ she said lightly. It didn’t do to get too involved or this popular bellyache could gather momentum very quickly. Like the one about the boots and the buggy the Argentinian family on the ground floor left cluttering the hall, or the fact that the owners of the top flat rented to Airbnb customers every summer.
She went over and pulled a mug from the cupboard. ‘Is the coffee still hot?’
‘I’d make some more, if I were you.’ She felt his eyes on her back as she did so, watching, always watching, or so it seemed to her. ‘So what are you up to later? I can hardly bear the excitement of my own day.’ He accompanied his words with a jaundiced snort.
Bel had observed, since she’d been back living with her father, that life for him and his age group had never quite returned to normal, post-pandemic. The bridge club, for example, had still not re-formed. The wine club had lost Petroc, its driving force, to the virus. And her father’s social life generally had suffered, routines lost, with ongoing anxiety from those of his friends who remained. For someone who had always been sociable and busy, the losses had left a big gap. It was clear Dennis was bored and had too much empty time on his hands.
‘I’ve still got paperwork to finish,’ she said, with an inward sigh. The flat and restaurant premises in Walthamstow had sold quickly. A young entrepreneur who planned to open another in a chain of vape stores had taken swift advantage of Bel’s misfortune. She was left with nothing, the negative equity and defaulted mortgage payments – which Louis had hidden from her for months – eating up the sale money and more, her life with Louis dismantled amid a humiliating pile of baffling online meetings and paperwork.
Her father, much to his quite reasonable irritation, had felt obliged to shell out a substantial sum to cover the shortfall. The loan, he’d grudgingly agreed, she and Louis would repay gradually, over time – an arrangement of which she’d informed Louis in France via email, although he had not chosen to respond. So Bel had had little option but to move in with her father again – although that part Dennis seemed to be enjoying.
Her father harrumphed. ‘Well, you can make me some breakfast before you start, then. And not one of those nancy poached eggs you’re so fond of. I need a proper full-fat fry-up this morning, bacon and the works, after the night I’ve had.’
&n bsp; Since her arrival back in the large West London flat where she’d grown up – and spent much of her thirties, indeed, following her devastating accident – Bel had taken over the cooking in a vain attempt to improve the appalling diet her father favoured: anything fried, sausage rolls, tinned soup, cake, and vast quantities of cheese and crackers, not a vegetable or piece of fruit in sight. Her efforts, though, met with such regular complaints that she might not have bothered if cooking hadn’t been such a pleasure for her – particularly baking, when she tended to lose herself delightfully in the absorbing manipulation of the dough. ‘We don’t have any bacon,’ she said.
‘Christ, girl.’ He rolled his eyes. ‘What are you trying to do to me? I’m seventy-eight years old, pushing eighty. If I can’t eat as much bacon as I like at this stage in my life, then when the hell can I?’ Dennis Carnegie was thickset and of medium height, shorter than Bel. With his fleshy nose, smallish eyes, high forehead and mane of hair – originally black from his Italian grandmother, now white – people said he resembled the actor, Dustin Hoffman. And, like Hoffman, when he chose, Dennis had an easy, seductive charm and a quick wit. Women flirted with him, men wanted to hang out with him.
Ignoring his tetchiness, she said, ‘True. If you die, you die, I suppose.’
Her father seemed to find this funny, his face breaking into a grin. ‘That’s the spirit. You’ll get some for tomorrow, then, eh?’
‘If you give me some food money, I will,’ she said. It was agony having to ask for every penny, only to watch Dennis pore over the supermarket receipt and query every purchase. ‘I loathe anchovies. Why did you buy anchovies?’ he would grumble. Or ‘One pound seventy for four rolls of toilet paper? Daylight bloody robbery.’
Bel made him fried eggs and fried bread, all of it squelching with grease so she wouldn’t face any more complaints. For herself, she poured some muesli and chopped a banana on top.
Eyeing her as he munched, Dennis swallowed, then asked, ‘Trying to lose weight?’
Bel winced. She had put on weight since Louis’s defection, no longer rushed off her feet all day, or the recipient of her partner’s elegant cooking. For a while, she found herself giving in to supermarket ready meals, or anything that required the minimum effort or thought. Plus chocolate … and biscuits. Sometimes a whole bar in one sitting, or an entire packet of Bourbons, eaten standing furtively at the kitchen counter, shovelling one after another into her mouth as if to fill the void. The sugar produced a guilty haze for a blissful hour or so, before the crashing low sent her reeling.
‘Your mother always had such a perfect figure,’ Dennis commented, with a wistful smile. ‘I’m not sure who you take after. There’s no one like you on my side of the family. And Agnes’s lot were all like her: dark and petite and pretty. I loved the way your mum looked.’
Her cheeks burned with shame. Bel would willingly accept she could never be described as ‘petite’ but she didn’t consider herself big either. Just tall, with an athletic build, her weight gain only moderate. She didn’t respond, the muesli turning to sawdust in her mouth.
Dennis, perhaps realizing he’d offended her, reached across the table and laid his palm against her face for a second. ‘You have the most beautiful violet eyes, though, sweetheart. Just like my own dear ma.’ Leaning back, he added, ‘Your generation are bigger on the whole, of course. Better nutrition in childhood, I imagine.’
‘OK, Dad,’ Bel cut in softly.
Dennis eyed her balefully. ‘I was only saying. You go on about healthy eating, but it’s not me who’s carrying the extra pounds.’
Which was uncomfortably true. Unable to bear his scrutiny any longer, she got up and took her bowl to the sink, putting it down with deliberate care, as if it were her own heart. ‘I’m going for a walk,’ she said, feeling like a child again. She was being over-sensitive. She knew he didn’t mean it. Knew he probably wasn’t even aware of the effect he had on her.
Outside, the streets were still quite empty so early. It was a bright March Monday, and soon the gloomy red-brick West London square would be hectic with children, buggies, harassed parents on the way to school or people hurrying to work – the Tube station was only two hundred yards from Dennis’s front door, on the busy main road.
A jogger almost collided with her as she stepped onto the pavement from the flat entrance, then swerved round her, giving her a wide berth as she began walking away from the roar of traffic – rising up, twenty-four/seven, from Earls Court Road like an insatiable beast – towards Holland Park via the quieter streets. She’d been walking a lot in recent weeks. Not in a conscious effort to get fit or lose the weight her father had mentioned, but because it went some way to soothing her jittery mind, gave her a temporary break from the constant anxiety about her future, the oppressive gloom of the flat and the brooding presence of her bored father. Sometimes she felt so isolated, it was as if she and her dad were the only people left alive in the whole world. This is my life now, she told herself, as she entered the high, wrought-iron gates of the park. But she struggled to find the positives in that statement.
‘So, how’s the job-hunting coming along?’ Later that morning, the Zoom face of Krishna, the accountant who’d dealt with their restaurant business for years and had become a friend, peered at Bel with her usual fast-blinking, distracted expression, her dark hair in a disordered ponytail, her brown eyes rimmed grey with tiredness. She had four children under ten and a husband who worked most of every week in Marseille. She has every right to be tired, Bel thought.
They had been in regular touch since the debacle last December, and on many occasions returned to prod at the bruise that was Louis de Courcy. Krishna was kind, but tough with Bel. It was all about financial security in her book.
‘I’ve got an interview tomorrow morning,’ Bel replied, with more enthusiasm than she felt. ‘A sort of bar-restaurant place on Kensington High Street, wanting a front-of-house. Not sure it’s really my scene but I’ll give it a go.’ In fact, she was worried about her age. Would a trendy establishment like that – industrial-style decor, neon signage, a young crowd by the look of its Tripadvisor reviews – want a woman of fifty-seven? She doubted it. Plus her CV made her seem overqualified. She had virtually run her father’s wine-importing business, then managed all the front-of-house side of 83. She was willing to do any work for the time being, though, that would get her out of the flat and give her some cash, even if it wasn’t what she was used to, or paid badly. They’re probably looking for someone less than half my age, she thought.
Krishna nodded encouragingly. ‘At least you can stay on with your father. You don’t have to worry about rent.’
‘True,’ Bel agreed, not mentioning the emotional price she felt she was paying in lieu. An independent woman, reduced to creeping home to her ageing father because she didn’t have a bean to her name? It wasn’t something to be proud of.
‘You have your property in Cornwall, of course. What’s the situation with the sitting tenant, these days? Prices out of London are still really strong.’ Krishna cocked an eyebrow. ‘It would free up some cash.’
Property? Bel couldn’t help a smile. It made the house her mother, Agnes, had left her sound so grand. More of a shack, really. Situated in a small village on the not-so-trendy south-west coast, near Penzance, it was a tiny stone one-and-a-half up, one down that had belonged to Bel’s grandmother before Agnes. But her mother had a kind heart, and as a favour to the then vicar had allowed Lenny Bright, a vulnerable young man, to move in, rent free. It was meant to be temporary, until he was found accommodation by Social Services. But Lenny had stayed on these past forty years.
‘The cottage is yours,’ Agnes had said to her twenty-two-year-old daughter, not long before she died. ‘I haven’t been there in years, I’m afraid. I know the community help Lenny with repairs and such – they never ask me for money – but you should go and check it out. Be kind to him, won’t you? It’s your inheritance, but it’s his home for now.’
