The Great Escape: The laugh-out-loud romantic comedy from the summer bestseller

‘What, about getting married?’ Sadie exclaims, unable to work out whether her friend’s distress has to do with Ryan’s kids, the dress or the Princess Anne bag.

‘I don’t know,’ Hannah says. ‘I … I just had to talk to you.’

‘Maybe it’s just the wedding,’ Sadie murmurs. ‘All the organising and preparations … you know what? You should have a hen party. Let your hair down and have a bit of fun.’

Hannah laughs weakly. ‘I’d love one, and the girls at work have been on at me to sort something out …’

‘Well, why don’t you?’ Somewhere in her distant past, Sadie remembers clubs with music playing, drinks flowing and women moving freely without lugging gigantic quilted bags. She pictures a glass of white wine, and her entire body tingles with longing.

‘Oh, I don’t know …’ Hannah tails off. ‘What’s that noise anyway?’

‘It’s the boys, they’re hungry. Sorry, Han, I’d better go …’ Sadie clamps her mobile between her shoulder and ear while gently bouncing Milo up and down and rocking the buggy. She eyes the hedge and wonders if anyone would mind if she crawled under it and fell asleep.

‘God, they sound upset. I won’t keep you a minute. Yes, I’ve thought about a hen party but you know what? I’d only want you – you and Lou, I mean – and that would be impossible, wouldn’t it?’

‘Maybe not. I’m only an hour away and York’s not that far … maybe you’d better speak to Lou. I haven’t talked to her in ages. Look, Han, I’d really better …’ Sadie’s attention is diverted by a large black dog bounding towards her, pink tongue lolling from its mouth.

‘D’you think Lou’s okay?’ Hannah asks. ‘I worry about her and Spike sometimes. He never seems to appreciate …’

‘Uh-huh,’ Sadie mutters, holding Milo tightly as she jumps up and tries to form a human barrier between the buggy and hound.

‘I mean, she’s working all hours at that horrible soft play place and keeping the jewellery thing going …’ Perhaps it’s chronic sleep deprivation, or the fact that becoming a mother has turned Sadie into a lumbering beast incapable of rapid movement. Whatever the reason, the dog shoots past her and proceeds to lash Dylan’s terrified face with its tongue.

‘No!’ Sadie screams with her mobile still clamped to her ear. Dylan squeals loudly.

‘I mean, what does Spike do all day?’ Hannah wants to know. ‘Sits on his arse, strumming a guitar, waiting for a recording contract to drop into his lap …’

‘Stop that!’ Sadie shrieks, shoving herself between the dog and Dylan, whose cries have morphed into hearty wails.

‘What’s happening?’ Hannah asks.

‘There’s a dog here! It’s trying to attack Dylan and there’s no bloody owner and—’ She drops her phone onto the path and its back pings off. ‘Shit,’ she mutters, deciding that her baby’s immediate wellbeing is more important than a three-year-old Nokia. A tall, scrawny man whistles for the dog at the rose garden’s entrance. No apology, no acknowledgement that his slavering beast has nearly devoured her child, or at the very least infected him with some terrible dog-tongue disease, and caused Sadie to wreck her phone. As the dog bounds away, Sadie blinks away tears of stress, unleashes Dylan from the buggy and sinks back onto the bench, clutching both of her boys and panting.

She doesn’t feed them straight away. She can’t, not with her heart banging madly and her children so distressed. Sadie just sits there, conscious of faint drizzle now falling on her hot cheeks, and an empty Bacardi Breezer bottle lying on the ground.

She glances down at her babies, taken aback as she always is by the fierce rush of love that engulfs her. Her sons, all round brown eyes and tufts of dark, fluffy hair, gaze up adoringly at her. The fact that they emerged from her own body still strikes her as nothing short of miraculous. All those years of debauchery as an art student, a lifestyle which continued steadily through her twenties, and she was still capable of incubating these utterly perfect human beings. Dylan is smiling now, and Milo is gazing up at her as if she were the most wondrous creature on earth.

This is what it’s all about, Sadie reminds herself. It doesn’t matter that I’m stained and knackered and every little thing Barney does irritates the hell out of me. It doesn’t matter because it’s all about this – being Milo and Dylan’s mum. Sadie bunches up her T-shirt, frees her breasts from her huge, shiny scaffolding-bra and clamps a child to each nipple. Both babies fall upon her as if they hadn’t been fed for weeks. Sadie inhales deeply, kicks the Bacardi Breezer bottle under the bench, then focuses hard on the cracked screen of her mobile which is lying at her feet.

SIX

‘Why aren’t you and Dad getting married in church?’ Daisy fixes Hannah with a cool stare as she enters the kitchen.

Hannah pauses, taken aback by the fact that Daisy’s query isn’t about why she crept outside to make a call on her mobile. Ryan is muttering about gym kits in the utility room and Josh is chewing slowly and rhythmically, like a bull, whilst staring blankly ahead. ‘Well,’ Hannah says brightly, ‘we’re only having a small wedding with the people we’re closest to, and it’s …’ She falters, deciding not to utter the unmentionable words: and it’s your dad’s second wedding, after all. ‘It just seemed right for us,’ she adds. ‘We don’t want anything too fancy or formal, you know?’

Clearly, Daisy doesn’t know. She gnaws on a toast crust and blinks down at Hannah’s bare feet. Josh continues to eat in silence, the Lynx Effect engulfing the kitchen as if being pumped in through a pipe. ‘Why not?’ Daisy asks.

‘Well, er,’ Hannah starts, deciding yet again that it’s ridiculous to feel intimidated by a ten-year-old, ‘I’m not really religious so it wouldn’t feel right for me to get married in church when I don’t go any other time.’

Hannah hears Ryan slamming the washing machine shut and switching it on. Daisy is now gawping at Hannah as if she’s just confessed to a liking for torturing kittens. ‘You mean you don’t believe in God?’ she gasps.

‘Well, not really,’ Hannah blusters, her cheeks flaring up. ‘I mean, I believe in something, I suppose, like we should treat people well and respect each other but, er … I’m not really a churchy type.’

Daisy purses her pink lips. ‘I believe in God.’

‘Well, that’s good, Daisy. It’s completely personal and up to you what you believe in.’

‘Don’t you believe in Heaven either?’

No, because I’m the Antichrist … ‘Er, not really, I mean …’

‘Dad doesn’t go to church either,’ Josh intercepts, pushing back a dark, shaggy fringe from equally dark, foreboding eyes. ‘But him and Mum got married in a church and that was all right.’ He juts out his bottom lip.

‘Well, I suppose what I mean, what I should’ve said,’ Hannah explains, feeling her jaw tighten and any semblance of hunger rapidly ebbing away, ‘is that I don’t really follow a religion.’

‘Do you follow a religion then?’ Josh meets her gaze over the gingham tablecloth.

Hannah frowns. ‘What d’you mean, Josh?’

He flares his nostrils at her, like a horse. ‘You said you don’t follow a religion. Like you’d say you follow Chelsea but you don’t follow Spurs. Like religion’s a football team.’ He sniggers and clamps his mouth shut like a trap.

‘Oh, right!’ She laughs a little too heartily. ‘Well, what I mean is that I don’t support – I mean practise – any particular religion.’ As Josh blinks slowly, waiting for her to dig herself into an even deeper hole, Hannah wonders if this is how it’ll be when she’s Ryan’s wife, and their stepmother. Like being sandwiched between a Gestapo interrogator and a belligerent English teacher who ticks her off for using an ill-chosen verb. Christ-on-a-sodding-bike. She has a sudden urge to shriek, Okay! We’re not getting married in church because your dad was married before, as you both know, a fact I’ve avoided mentioning because I’m trying to be nice. And actually, while we’re on the subject of marriage, why don’t we just forget the whole business and carry on living together? It was your dad’s idea in the first place, you know. Getting married, I mean. Because he loves me. Yes, I know you might find the idea completely repulsive, and God knows, his feelings might waver a bit when he sets eyes on my cauliflower nurse dress. But still …

‘What were you saying, Daisy?’ Ryan asks, emerging from the utility room with a bundle of sports kits.

‘We were just talking about the wedding, Dad,’ Daisy says pleasantly.

‘Oh, right.’ Ryan smiles at Hannah, his eyes meeting hers, making her stomach flip as it always does when he looks at her like that. ‘Well,’ he adds, turning to Josh, ‘speaking of the wedding, we should all go shopping next weekend and pick you both something to wear.’

‘But it’s ages away,’ Josh replies. ‘It’s weeks.’

‘Yes, I know there’s still six weeks to go. But you’ll be at Mum’s the next three, and then we’ll be cutting it fine, really, to get things organised …’

‘Eddie’s birthday’s on Saturday,’ Josh mumbles. ‘We’re going bowling.’

‘Oh,’ Ryan says. ‘Right. Well, that’s nice. Maybe we could do it on Sunday instead.’

‘And we’re staying over till Sunday,’ Josh adds, ‘like all day.’

‘Are you? Oh …’ Hannah can detect the stress creeping across Ryan’s forehead, and longs to ask Josh why he’s being so bloody difficult when all his dad wants to do is festoon him with new clothes. However, she suspects that that would be even more outrageous than admitting she doesn’t follow Christianity. Anyway, perhaps Ryan doesn’t mind this rudeness, or has become immune to it over the years. Maybe he thinks Josh and Daisy’s behaviour is perfectly fine and it’s the wedding that’s stressing him out. They’ve planned it together, with the intention of keeping it low-key and simple. But the guest list has grown, and Ryan’s new suit came back from being altered with the trousers so short they flapped pathetically around his ankles. He’s been worrying about the food when Hannah would be perfectly content with a pile of sausage rolls dumped on the table if that’d put a smile on his kids’ faces. Now, what started as Ryan blurting out, ‘I want to marry you, Han, and spend my whole life with you’ has morphed into something stressful and dark, like a storm cloud billowing towards them.

‘And I’ve got stuff to wear anyway,’ Josh mumbles, looking down at his crumb-strewn plate.

‘I know, but I thought you might like something new.’ Regaining his composure, Ryan rolls his eyes good-naturedly at Hannah. How he manages to scrabble together these reserves of patience, she has no idea. Perhaps it just happens when you have children. You suddenly develop this bottomless well of kindness and goodwill.

‘You’re not going to turn down your dad’s offer of new clothes, are you, Josh?’ Hannah asks lightly.

‘Well, I’ve got plenty of T-shirts and jeans.’

‘Right, so which T-shirt were you thinking of?’ Ryan asks with a snort.

‘Dunno. My dark green one maybe.’

‘The one with the rip in the shoulder?’ Ryan laughs. ‘Sure, that’ll look great in the photos, Josh.’

Josh stares at him uncomprehendingly. ‘Photos?’

‘Yes, wedding photos, like people usually have when they get married,’ Ryan says with exaggerated patience.

‘What’s wrong with my T-shirt?’

‘Well, apart from the rip, it does tend to whiff a bit even when it’s been washed,’ his father explains, ‘like something’s actually embedded in its fibres and will never come out, even if I boil-wash it which I’ve done on several occasions …’

Daisy starts giggling. ‘You smell, Josh. That horrible T-shirt stinks of BO and even washing powder can’t get it out.’

‘And it’s age nine-to-ten,’ Ryan reminds him, ‘and you’re fourteen, Josh, if I remember rightly. Now, I know you’re fond of that T-shirt but we could be radical and buy you something in the right size.’

‘Oh, Josh can wear whatever he likes,’ Hannah cuts in. ‘It’s not going to be formal, is it, Ryan?’ She smiles at his son. ‘It’s probably best to wear what you feel happy and comfortable in.’

‘He’s not wearing that T-shirt,’ Ryan mutters.

‘I just don’t think it’s worth falling out over …’ Hannah glances at Josh. Instead of responding, and being grateful to her for not trying to cram him into a suit, he takes a big gulp of orange juice, wipes his lips on his cuff and allows his mouth to hang open, as if airing its interior. Trying to decipher these kids is a bit like learning to drive, Hannah decides as Ryan shoos them upstairs to fetch their schoolbags. In fact it’s harder than driving because at least she was able to pay for a teacher. As far as Hannah is aware, there’s no British School of How to Handle Daisy and Josh.

‘I’d better be going,’ Hannah tells Ryan, trying to quash the trace of relief from her voice.

‘Okay. Have a good day, darling.’ He steps forward and pulls her close, smelling freshly showered and delicious.

‘What are you wearing to the wedding?’ Daisy has reappeared in the kitchen doorway.

‘Me?’ Ryan springs away from Hannah. ‘Erm, a suit, Daisy. A new one that’s being altered for me.’

‘I meant Hannah, Daddy.’ Daisy gives them a fake smile.

‘Oh, just a simple dress,’ says Hannah quickly.

‘Aren’t you wearing a veil?’

Hannah pauses. ‘No, but Lou, one of my best friends from—’

‘Why not?’

Because I don’t like them! ‘Well, veils are lovely but my friend Lou from college is an amazing jeweller and she’s made me this beautiful silver tiara with—’

‘Mum’s wedding dress was pretty, wasn’t it, Dad?’ Daisy beams at her father.

‘Er, yes. It was very nice …’ Ryan turns away and swills out the washing-up bowl noisily.

‘Mum’s dress,’ Daisy continues, eyes fixed determinedly on Hannah, ‘was white and low at the front like this.’ She draws an invisible V-shape to indicate a plunging neckline.

‘Well, that sounds gorgeous.’ Hannah smiles tightly.

‘And it was long with millions of sparkly beads sewn on, and the veil was so massive two people had to walk behind and carry it through the church, didn’t they, Dad? So it didn’t drag on the floor and get dirty. Didn’t they, Dad?’

‘Er, yes,’ Ryan croaks, now scraping the remains of the kids’ breakfasts into the bin.

‘Wow,’ Hannah says hollowly. Why don’t we get out the album, she thinks darkly, then we can all gather round and ooh and ahh over Petra’s incredible dress before I go to work, and I can show you how crappy and plain I’m going to look in my dumpy little shift that I must have chosen in a fit of madness …

‘Mummy looked beautiful,’ Daisy breathes.

‘I’m sure she did.’

Sorry, Ryan mouths from the sink. Taking a deep breath, Hannah pauses for a moment, focusing on the area behind Daisy, where the family-sized super-deluxe fridge stands proudly, with its ice maker gadget which once spurted frozen crystals in her face, causing Daisy and Josh to keel over with helpless laughter. It had never done that before, Daisy had informed her when she and her brother had finally managed to compose themselves. Well, of course it hadn’t. Petra had chosen it – she’d picked virtually every appliance and piece of furniture – and at times like that, Hannah couldn’t help feeling that the whole house was against her. ‘D’you want to see a picture of Mummy’s dress?’ Daisy enquires.

‘Daisy!’ Ryan barks. ‘Could you hurry up and get your shoes on?’

‘But, Dad …’

‘Sometime, maybe,’ Hannah says briskly, ‘but I’d better get off to work now. I’m running late as it is.’

SEVEN

As Lou pulls on her uniform – a brown nylon tabard bearing the soft play centre’s ‘Let’s Bounce’ logo across the chest – it occurs to her that the person who designed it might possibly be a pervert. Lou turns this thought over in her mind almost daily, and as she’s been working at Let’s Bounce for nearly a year, that makes it – well, at 8.30 am she’s incapable of working out the exact figure off the top of her head. But it’s something in the region of 230 times, which she fears is verging on obsessional. It can’t be normal to allow dark thoughts about play centre uniforms to occupy such a large part of her brain.

Yet that vile piece of clothing really ticks all the boxes, Lou thinks, teasing her curly auburn hair with a long-toothed comb and sweeping on powder and lip gloss at the dressing table mirror. No one, apart from people who go in for medieval jousting contests, wear tabards. Even worse, Dave, her boss, insists that said garment is worn on arrival at work and has even ticked off Lou’s friend Steph for not modelling hers on the bus on the way in. ‘You’re all walking advertisements,’ he’s fond of reminding the staff during his ‘motivational talks’.

In their bed behind her, Spike emits a long mmmmmm sound, and Lou turns to see a faint smile flicker across his lips. His eyes are closed, his dark lashes dusting his lightly-tanned skin like tiny brushes, his strong, defined jaw bearing its customary blur of dark stubble. Looks as if he’s having a pleasurable dream, lucky sod. Lou’s friends often tease her about living with a man with a super-charged libido, and she knows she should feel flattered that he’s so up for it, especially as they’ve been together for sixteen years. In fact, if anything, Spike’s sexual appetite has intensified as he’s grown older. Maybe it’s the tabard, Lou thinks wryly. ‘You up, babe?’ Spike has awoken from his reverie.

‘Yep. Running a bit late actually.’ Lou pads over to the bed and dispenses a speedy kiss on his slightly clammy forehead. ‘Gotta go,’ she adds, grabbing her bag from the floor, pulling on her tabard-concealing black trenchcoat and hurrying out of the flat, down one flight of dusty wooden stairs and into the hazy April morning.

It feels good to be outside. The flat seems even dingier when Spike isn’t working, which happens to be most of the time. It’s been six months since he last had a job, and the more time Spike spends in bed, or comatose on the sofa, the staler their surroundings become. Some mornings, like today, Lou is almost grateful to be escaping to Let’s Bounce. Although she loves Spike, and he’s still handsome and ridiculously youthful-looking at forty-eight, Lou can’t help worrying that his lethargy might engulf her completely until it’s too late to fight her way out.

Is sitting on your arse all day actually contagious? she wonders as she walks briskly to work. Does it become progressively worse, until the sufferer is unable to separate himself from the sofa apart from occasionally staggering to the loo? Spike can’t even be bothered to drop used teabags into the kitchen bin. He just lobs them into the sink, and every time she removes them – unwilling to start an argument over something as petty as teabags – Lou is seized by an urge to pelt them in his face.

She marches on, now feeling more annoyed with herself than Spike for allowing yesterday to slip away in a fug of TV and housework instead of making the most of her one day off. She always imagines Sadie and Barney taking their babies to some beautiful spot in the Cambridgeshire countryside for a picnic on Sundays. And Hannah and Ryan probably take his kids on a family walk in some particularly photogenic part of London – Primrose Hill or Hampstead Heath – like characters in a Richard Curtis movie. Lou sees expensive white wine being lifted from a coolbox and Ryan’s kids chatting nicely with Hannah, laughing at her jokes and feeling lucky that their dad has found himself such a cool girlfriend. And here’s Lou in York – not that she’s blaming York for the situation she’s found herself in – wearing a synthetic tabard on her way to extract stray nappies heavily laden with pee from the ballpool.

Still, she thinks, approaching the redbrick former factory which houses Let’s Bounce, at least there’s Hannah and Ryan’s wedding to look forward to. Six weeks to go now. A trip to London will shake her up. She’s made a pact with herself to get out of this crappy job by then, after which … well, she isn’t quite sure what will come after that. Something to do with Spike, she suspects. Something to change her life and lift her out of the humdrum existence which has somehow sucked her in. Yes, after the wedding she’ll do it. She’ll be refreshed and energised then. But it’s far too big and scary to think about right now.

EIGHT

Hannah cycles like a maniac, legs pumping and heart banging against her ribs. It feels good being out; in fact after the interrogation over breakfast, about weddings and veils and God, for Christ’s sake, having a toenail ripped off would feel pretty damn fantastic. Even though she’s lived in London for thirteen years, Hannah can still taste the traffic fumes on her tongue. It tastes of excitement and life going on all around her. Her childhood in a tiny fishing village made her yearn for a fast-paced city life: first Glasgow, where she’d studied illustration, followed by a succession of insalubrious rented studio flats and shared houses scattered all over north London. Now, as she zips between vehicles, heading for Islington, she feels the stress of her interrogation blowing away in the light breeze.

The trouble is, Hannah has never imagined herself becoming a stepmother. She’d have been no less amazed if someone had announced that she must fly a helicopter or raise a family of baboons. Yet, when you meet a man in his mid-thirties, you can hardly fall over in a dead faint when it transpires that he has children. Ryan became a father relatively young, at twenty-three. Parenthood has occupied a huge portion of his life, making his two years with Hannah a mere dot on the map in comparison. Checking her watch as she turns into Essex Road – she’s early for work, as is often the case these days – she replays the Saturday night when Ryan Lennox dropped into her life.

It was a bitterly cold evening and Hannah had recently ended her year-long relationship with Marc-with-a-‘c’. Actually, ‘relationship’ was too grand a term for what had consisted mainly of him showing up infuriatingly late for dates, or not at all – then drunkenly buzzing the bell to her flat at 3.30 am, crying and blurting out declarations of love loud enough to wake everyone in her post code. When he’d mistaken her T-shirt drawer for the loo and peed into it, that had been the final straw. Hannah hadn’t been looking to meet anyone that night as she’d waited for her friend Mia. She was enjoying her single, Marc-free life, cycling to Catfish, working hard, knowing that nothing untoward was going to happen to her T-shirts.

She and Mia had arranged to meet in Nell’s, a cavernous bar in Frith Street. Ryan was standing at the bar, and although the place was already bustling, Hannah sensed an aura of calm around this tall, slim man in jeans, a pale shirt and fine, wire-rimmed glasses. Squeezing her way through a bunch of loud girls on a hen night, she ordered a beer and looked around for Mia. Hannah was five minutes early and, as she paid for her drink, she had an overwhelming urge to talk to this man standing a couple of metres to her right.

Sipping from her glass, Hannah conjured up possible scenarios. He was a Saturday dad having a restorative pint after showing his children armadillos or Egyptian artefacts in museums before heading home to his new wife. The wife would be astonishingly pretty, obviously (Hannah had already assessed his striking dark eyes, the nicely full mouth, his cute dimple). Or maybe he was single and putting off the miserable business of going home to a chilly flat and a meal for one. Yet neither scenario seemed right. There was no wedding ring, nor did he seem like someone who’d limp off home to peel the foil lid off a shrunken frozen lasagne. He’s probably just waiting for his girlfriend, she decided, feeling foolish for letting her thoughts run away with her.

The man glanced at Hannah as her mobile rang. ‘Han?’ Mia croaked. ‘I’m really sorry. I set off to meet you but I feel so crap, really sick, that I just had to come home …’