By Monday morning Bel was frazzled. She couldn’t sleep properly on the blow-up bed. The cold from the stone – even in the summer heat – seeped up through the mattress, and each time she turned over, trussed like a sausage in the sleeping bag, the thing threatened to tip her out onto the unforgiving, uncarpeted floor. There was no successful way to lie, except very still, flat on her back, like a corpse: she’d never been able to sleep properly on her back. And today she had to be on her best form for her interview with Mr Ajax.
Leaving her father to sleep, she crept out for an early swim, which woke her up and gave her the energy to face the day.
‘Hmm. So you can do savoury tarts as well as bread?’ Mr Ajax asked, continuing to peruse the handwritten list Bel had given him, which lay on the worktop between them.
Bel nodded nervously. ‘I thought I could start with two types of loaf – white sourdough and seeded wholemeal – which I know are both popular. Plus maybe muffins and individual quiches, a vegetarian option.’ She pointed to the plan. ‘Do croissants at the weekend, because they’re too time-consuming for every day.’
Mr Ajax, head bowed, said nothing. He seemed to be tussling with something in his mind. Maybe giving over to me the place his wife had cooked in is hard, she thought. But then she saw him take a deep breath. Leaning his palms on the counter, he finally looked up and met her eye. ‘We’ll need to work out the finances.’
Bel nodded, trying not to smile yet.
‘You’ll be able to do this on your own?’
She’d thought about it. ‘I think so. If it takes off, I might need help. But your kitchen is really well set up.’
Mr Ajax sighed. ‘Elowen managed, of course.’
‘Harris said she was a first-class cook,’ Bel ventured, hoping this wasn’t the wrong thing to say.
But her employer only nodded, a faint smile on his lips. ‘She was, indeed.’
‘Right,’ Ron Ajax said, standing up straight and looking relieved, almost happy for once, as if he’d just successfully hurdled a high barrier. ‘It’ll be good for the shop. The customers aren’t big fans of the bread we currently sell. Come and find me when your shift’s over and we can discuss the nitty-gritty.’
Bel did as he asked. He wanted her to start as soon as possible, to get the best of the summer trade. Her mind was whirring with all that she had to put in place – working out the supplies she’d need, checking out the kitchen equipment, finding recipes – as she cycled home later. She felt hamstrung by her father, though, her joy slightly tarnished by his continued presence in her house. It was hard to have a clear enough head to plan as she didn’t know when he was leaving. And there was no sign of that.
A couple of days later, Dennis, despite appearing to be moving with a lot more freedom than he had at the weekend, still claimed to be unable even to contemplate the long drive home. He was cosy, she could tell, getting his feet firmly under the proverbial table.
‘This is nice,’ he’d said, on more than one occasion, cocooned comfortably in his orange throne, when the two of them had been eating supper in the sitting room, bowls on their knees, chatting because there was no TV and she hadn’t got Wi-Fi yet. Or he would stand in the warm sunshine on one of the walks she insisted he do every day and close his eyes, breathe deeply with pleasure. ‘This is nice,’ he’d say again.
In fact, he was behaving so astonishingly well, Bel might have begun to relax, if she hadn’t been well aware of the rock-solid purpose behind Dennis’s effort to keep his temper, hold back from his usual tormenting behaviour. Her father was nothing if not strategic – wilful, even – in pursuit of a goal. Harassing her, he must have realized, wasn’t working this time. Instead he was adopting Patsy’s softly-softly approach that favoured chatting up the enemy rather than sending in the tanks.
Patsy was firm in the face of Bel’s anxiety. Although she could see why Bel had issues with her father, she still maintained the way forward was to stand up to him. ‘He’s the sort that likes it if you do,’ Patsy stated, when Bel escaped her father’s company for half an hour to go for a swim with her friend. Bel, who attributed much wisdom to her, did not correct her. Dennis relished sparring with Patsy, maybe. He did not appreciate doing so with his daughter.
Micky and JJ – who’d both clearly enjoyed their respective snooker and paddleboarding sessions with her father before his back went – paid daily court to Dennis while he was laid up at Bel’s, taking it in turns to pop in and see how things were going. They would settle down on Jaz’s beanbag with a beer and engage in long, meandering conversations together. Even Zid padded in and took up residence on Dennis’s knee as if he’d known him all his life. It’s a man thing, her father seemed to be saying, as he tacitly excluded Bel.
She was grateful, of course, relieved to be able to share the burden of entertaining her physically compromised father in the confined space. Although she couldn’t help feeling a little peeved at Dennis’s seduction of her friends. He could be charming, of course, a man who’d travelled widely and was a good raconteur, who’d lived a lively social life before the pandemic, when age and solitude soured his mood.
Right now, though, she felt isolated in her historical fear of him, the eggshells she seemed perpetually to walk on in his presence, the memory of the crushing feeling of worthlessness his put-downs engendered in her soul. She even began to wonder if she was exaggerating his unkindness. It made her question herself. Louis was the only person who would understand, and she couldn’t seek his help without giving entirely the wrong signal.
Work was her only reprieve. She had agreed with Mr Ajax that she would prepare the kitchen over the next week, get the supplies in, then swap her job on the till for five days of baking – starting very early each morning. Meanwhile, she was still not sleeping, exhausted, on edge with anxiety about her father and her new role in the farm shop.
Today, as ten o’clock approached, she was eagerly listening for Harris’s footfall. She hadn’t seen him all week and realized how dull the farm shop was without his morning visits. He was also the only one of her friends who didn’t seem to have fallen under either Louis’s or her father’s spell.
‘I’ve missed you,’ she told him, when he did eventually appear, trying for a bright grin and a light delivery, not entirely managing either.
‘Sorry, I was going to tell you, then your father arrived and Ron booted me out. I was in Falmouth for an artist’s retreat thing. I shared the sessions with this other wildlife artist, Glenda Wynne. Have you heard of her?’
Bel shook her head. Now he was here, she wanted to pour her heart out to him about all that was happening in her life, the shop being momentarily empty. But, overcome with tiredness, she suddenly felt like crying instead.
Harris, eyeing her, looked concerned. ‘Are you OK?’
She replied softly, ‘Not really.’ Then explained what was going on as succinctly as possible. This was not the moment to break down, although she sensed the sleepless nights were making her slightly out of control.
‘You poor thing.’ His eyes searched her face. ‘Good news about the baking, but is your father being a nightmare?’
Bel gave a short laugh. ‘No. The opposite, in fact. I just never know when he’ll flip.’
‘He’s not violent, is he?’ Harris asked.
She bit her lip but didn’t reply. I don’t want to be this person, she railed silently. I just want to get on with my life. Her last words were a silent scream.
‘You know you can always escape, come round to mine any time.’ A thought seemed to strike him. ‘You could even stay in my shed while he’s here, if you want.’
A shed? She was touched by his offer, but couldn’t help wondering. Bel’s face must have betrayed her, because Harris hurried on: ‘It’s more of a summerhouse, really. It’s got a proper bed and shower and hob and everything. My sister happily camps out there for three weeks every summer.’ He looked a bit sheepish. ‘I’m not great at guests in the house.’
She laughed. ‘Thank you, Harris. That’s incredibly kind.’ Is he serious? ‘I probably shouldn’t leave Dad alone but if he stays much longer …’ She was half joking, not quite able to imagine treading all over Harris’s space – he was, by his own admission, such a private man.
‘I mean it. You’d be very welcome,’ Harris said sincerely. ‘Gill’s a head teacher. She isn’t due till August, after she’s put the school into mothballs for the summer.’
‘Bel?’ Mr Ajax shouted from the lane. ‘Stop rabbiting with old Leonardo there and help with these spuds, will you?’
That night, Bel and Dennis were at Patsy’s for supper, although Bel had cooked this time. There was no room in the cottage for them all, but she was determined to take her turn at the stove, despite Patsy’s protests. Rhian was there, but Jaz had gone for a sleepover with a friend in Penzance. Bel’s supper was lightly fried goujons of haddock – which she’d bought from the pop-up fish truck by the beach – with nutty, buttery brown rice and Mr Ajax’s tomatoes, slow-roasted, rocket and black olives.
‘How’s the new baking project coming along?’ Rhian asked, as Patsy placed a large bowl of strawberries on the table, sticking a dessertspoon into the tub of creamy Cornish vanilla ice cream Bel had bought. ‘Those croissants you made were so yummy.’ She kissed her fingertips in appreciation.
‘What croissants? You haven’t made me any,’ her father said reproachfully. ‘Although if your lockdown bread was anything to go by …’ He gave her a patronizing grin.
Replying to Rhian, Bel said, ‘I’m setting up the kitchen, getting stuff organized. But I must make another batch.’ Despite her impending job, though, she realized she had no real heart for baking at the moment. She should have been trying out bread, tart and muffin recipes, but she kept putting it off. She just couldn’t settle with her father taking up all the space in her house and her head, her fate hanging in the balance.
Shortly, though, she would need to be very much on point – she couldn’t afford to mess up this golden opportunity. I’ll be all right when Dad leaves, she kept repeating to herself.
Now, she made a show of offering strawberries to her father in an attempt to dispel her thoughts.
Rhian was talking. She had just been to visit her mother in Plymouth again. ‘She’s the only family I’ve got left,’ she said sadly. ‘There’s an uncle in Porthmadog, but we don’t speak. He and Mum never got on.’
‘I haven’t spoken to my sister in twenty years,’ Dennis said surprisingly – he never talked about Phyllis. He turned to Bel, giving her a wistful smile. ‘That’s why I want to move here, be close to my daughter. She’s all I’ve got, too.’
In that moment, Bel felt a strange mixture of love for her father – fundamental, but so often obscured – along with pity and a weary dread.
‘She’s resisting me,’ she heard him say. ‘She doesn’t want me anywhere near her. Other fish to fry, I suspect.’ He shot a woebegone smile at the two women.
Bel, who watched Patsy and Rhian’s faces become still with uncertainty about how to react, was about to object when Dennis added, his tone turned steely, ‘Bella, here, would rather live alone in her pea-sized hovel than throw in her lot with her poor old dad in a proper house by the sea.’ He raised his eyebrows at her, just a brief, angry flick, as if throwing down the gauntlet. The mask was slipping.
Patsy said, ‘This is all a bit sudden, Dennis, your moving here.’
‘I don’t have time to hang about at my age, do I?’ he muttered pathetically.
No one spoke until her father went on, ‘I’ve no doubt you’d have your mother living with you like a shot, Rhian, if she wasn’t demented and you weren’t a vicar with commitments.’
The vicar, looking a little shocked by his callous assessment of her situation, hesitated just long enough to make clear that he was right.
‘Aha!’ he jumped in, triumphant. Turning to Bel, he said, ‘See?’
She didn’t know what to say. She was beyond reiterating for the umpteenth time that she loved her cottage and wanted to live there, alone – if her father would agree to the debt being paid back more slowly – however selfish that might sound. It was a week, now, since Bel, sitting with her father on the bench by the beach in the sunset, had last raised the question about the debt. He’d ignored her pleas then, and had not mentioned it since. And Bel felt too shattered – with all the pressures – to face a confrontation with him that might result in renewed demands for her to sell her home.
Patsy got up and began to clear the bowls. ‘You can’t always make people do what you want, Dennis,’ she stated emphatically.
Her father narrowed his eyes at her, but Patsy didn’t flinch. ‘If it’s not working for Bel …’
Dennis waved a dismissive hand. ‘What neither of you realize, because you haven’t known my daughter very long, is that Bella doesn’t always know her own mind.’
Bel felt the familiar twisting in her gut.
‘Hmm,’ said Patsy, with a slight raise of the eyebrows. ‘She seems to me like a woman who very much knows her own mind. If I were you, Dennis, I’d try to respect that.’
Her father’s face fell. He’d obviously counted on Patsy and Rhian to back him in the cause of family.
Bel wanted to hug Patsy, despite the potentially dire consequences. She was ashamed it hadn’t been her who’d stood up to her father.
‘Well, I see I’m not getting much support around here,’ Dennis grumbled, getting up abruptly and throwing his napkin onto the table. Without another word – and with no sign of back pain or stiffness in his gait – he stalked out of the kitchen, leaving the door open behind him.
Bel sighed. ‘Thanks, Patsy.’
Patsy said, ‘Plant your feet firmly on the ground, love. He’s trying to uproot you.’ She came over and gave Bel a long hug.
When she got in later, having helped Patsy clear the supper, her father, thank goodness, had already gone up to bed, his door closed. Another miserable night on the airbed lay ahead, but she felt something had shifted tonight. My friends are with me, she thought. They didn’t think her mad or bad for wanting to live her own life.
By the following morning a switch had been thrown, her father reverting to his old modus vivendi: curmudgeonly sniping. There was no sign of the urbane, charming man who had seduced the whole village.
‘How’s your back?’ Bel asked tentatively, when he appeared back downstairs mid-morning. He looked spruce, she noticed, in a clean white shirt and jeans, his chin shaved, his hair brushed. But the expression on his face was ominous.
‘Now why would my dear daughter want to know about the state of my back?’ he mused sardonically. He took the mug of coffee Bel held out to him without thanks and glared at her over the rim as he took a large gulp. ‘So you can tell me to bugger off back to London with a clear conscience, eh?’
‘Dad, please. Can’t I ask how you are without you biting my head off?’
He didn’t answer, appearing suddenly to remember something, his face losing its peevishness as he checked the time on his watch. ‘Why aren’t you at work?’
‘It’s Friday. I don’t work on a Friday.’
Her father seemed a bit nonplussed. ‘Oh. So what are you up to this morning? Don’t feel you need to look after me.’
Bel was puzzled by the sudden volte-face. ‘Umm, it’s gorgeous out there. Do you want to go for a walk? Maybe your back’s better enough for a swim.’
‘No, no,’ Dennis said, too quickly. ‘I’ll stay here.’ He forced a smile. ‘You go and have a swim. Don’t hurry back, I’m fine.’ He was almost shooing her out of the door.
What’s he up to? she wondered, as she got into her swimsuit in the bathroom – it was the only place she could dress in peace – and collected her dry robe from the hook beside the front door. But it was a beautiful warm summer morning as she walked past the gardens bordering the lane, thick with fragrant blooms and the gentle drone of honey bees. She couldn’t think of many things her father could get up to, alone in the cottage, after all. Unless he’s planning a Pauline-type visit. Bel shuddered at the thought.
She sat on the beach and FaceTimed Tally after her swim, twirling the phone round to take in the golden sands, the sunshine and the shimmering water.
‘So you were right. Dad’s on the move again,’ her stepdaughter stated, after she’d groaned with envy at the slide show.
‘What do you mean?’ Bel hadn’t seen or talked to Louis, she realized, since the awkward encounter in Martine’s garden. In fact, she’d barely given him a thought, enmeshed as she was in her father’s manipulative and confusing web.
‘He says he’s been contacted by some woman who owns a chain of gastro-pubs in the Oxford area. Wife of a mate of a guy he used to work with – something like that. She wants Dad to come and see her about a head-chef job.’
‘Wow.’ Bel didn’t know what to think. She was surprised to feel a small pang of sadness at the knowledge that Louis was leaving.
‘He said …’ Tally paused. ‘He said he was pretty sure you didn’t want him around any more.’ She was trying, unsuccessfully, to sound neutral, Bel could tell.
There was a short silence.
‘I’m sorry, Tally.’
‘You were the best thing that ever happened to him,’ her stepdaughter said sadly.
‘It just wouldn’t have worked …’
‘No. I know.’
‘Has he left already?’ Bel asked.
‘In the morning. The landlord’s gutted, obviously.’
More like incandescent with fury, Bel thought, knowing the devastation Louis’s midnight flits left in their wake.
‘I’m so glad we’ve survived Dad behaving badly, Bel. I don’t know what I’d do without you,’ Tally said, sounding infinitely weary.
‘Oh, sweetheart, I’m glad too. You know how much you mean to me.’
‘Can I come and visit you in Cornwall?’
‘Once I get rid of my dear father, absolutely. It’s a blow-up bed, I’m afraid. Hideously uncomfortable.’
Tally laughed. ‘I don’t care. The beach looks divine.’
There was another moment’s silence.
‘I’ll bike up later, check on your dad, make sure he’s OK.’
‘Thanks.’ Tally sighed. ‘I suppose Oxford’s a lot nearer than Cornwall. Every cloud …’
A shiny blue Golf was parked outside the cottage when Bel got home around lunchtime. She wondered who it belonged to. Maybe Patsy has guests, she thought, as she pushed open the front door.
Her father was standing, arms crossed, talking earnestly to a slim blonde in a navy pencil-skirt, flimsy cream blouse with a Peter Pan collar and pumps, her pretty face and tanned limbs setting off the simple outfit to perfection. She had a clipboard in her hand, on which balanced a phone. When Dennis saw Bel, he jumped, his face a picture of guilt.
‘You’re home,’ he said, blinking fast. Collecting himself, he went on, ‘This is my daughter, Bella.’
The blonde smiled professionally and bowed her head, still using the greeting favoured during the past pandemic. ‘Lucy Cutler-Jones,’ she said. ‘Miller Countrywide,’ she added, as if this might mean something to Bel, which it did not.
She waited for someone to explain. After a moment of awkward silence, her father said, ‘Lucy has been kind enough to come round and give us a valuation for the cottage.’ He spoke defiantly, cocking his head as if daring her to object.
Bel, almost too stunned to speak, managed to croak, ‘Valuation?’
The agent – for that was clearly what she was – must have seen Bel’s expression, because she faltered. ‘I … Your father …’
Bel pulled herself up and took a deep breath. She didn’t look at her father. ‘Thank you, that’s very kind, Lucy,’ she said, trying for her most dignified – not made easy by the wet hair and bare, sandy legs. ‘But this cottage belongs to me. And I will decide if and when it’s for sale.’
‘Oh.’ Lucy blushed, as if caught out in something underhand – although it was not she who was in the wrong. ‘I’m so sorry. Mr Carnegie said –’
‘My father was mistaken,’ Bel cut across her apology. ‘I’ll see you out,’ she added grandly, although the door was only a long step away.
Lucy grabbed her bag from the worktop and meekly followed Bel, giving an embarrassed wave in Dennis’s direction.
Bel waited until she heard the slam of the Golf’s door, the ignition firing, waited some more until the sound of the car’s engine had faded up the lane. She stood stock still, as did her father. There was not a sound in the small room except the soft hissing of the stove. As she turned to him, she could feel her body – recently so relaxed on the warm summer sand – becoming stiff with anger.
‘Listen, it’s not what you think,’ her father began, seeing her expression and reaching out to lay a placating hand on her arm. ‘I bumped into the girl in the village and we got talking, and I thought, since she was here, she might as well pop in and take a look.’
Don’t take me for a fool, Bel thought, shaking him off, her breath coming in controlled gasps.
Dennis attempted an urbane smile. ‘I thought it was a good idea. Get things moving while the market’s hot.’ A pause. ‘You said you were up for it.’
But Bel could see that for a change it was he who was nervous of her mood, not the other way around.
‘I think it’s best if you start getting your stuff together, Dad, plan on going home tomorrow.’ Her insides felt solid as iron. It was difficult to speak. ‘I’ll help you.’ She moved briskly towards the stairs.
Dennis panted after her. ‘Don’t be snippy, sweetheart. My back’s still crooked. I can’t manage that journey, not yet.’ He sounded frightened, and she was ashamed to realize that she was glad.
‘You should have thought of that before you tried to sell my house from under me.’ She began to climb the stairs, but Dennis grabbed at her arm, pulling her back.
His expression hardened and, for a second, they eyeballed each other in silence, neither willing to concede.
‘Can we stop all this nonsense?’ he said coldly. ‘Just sell the fucking place, pay me the money you owe me and come back to London, where you belong.’ Then he sighed heavily, his beady eyes looking suddenly weary and old. ‘I’m just trying to help, make you see sense, girl. Your mother always claimed you were stubborn.’ He gave a sad laugh. ‘But, bless her, she saw it as a sign of character …’
As she stood there, face to face with her difficult father, Bel felt overcome by a sense of hopelessness. The conflict between them was never going to end. It was like trying to struggle out of a closed trunk. And each time she reached the rim, poked her head out into the sunshine of freedom, the lid was slammed firmly shut again. I can’t go on doing this, she thought. The battle between a sense of duty to her father – exacerbated by the money she owed him – and the independence she craved seemed impossible to resolve.
‘I’m going out,’ Bel said, turning away from him and mounting the stairs again. Pulling open the drawers in her bedroom, she hurriedly gathered a T-shirt and a pair of knickers, collected her toothbrush and face cream from the bathroom, all of which she stuffed into her backpack, hanging on the bedroom door. With no space in her head to know what she was doing or where she was going, she only knew she had to escape: the atmosphere in the cottage was threatening to choke her.
Coward. The word rang loudly through her brain as she packed. This is your home, your inheritance. Stand up for your rights, for God’s sake. Talk to him. Persuade him to change his mind. But she didn’t think she knew how. Her father always bested her in any argument … Always got his way.
When she went back downstairs, Dennis was sitting tense in the chair, arms crossed. ‘Running away?’ he questioned, as she passed him on the way to the front door, his tone contemptuous. ‘Remind dear Louis, as you climb into his bed tonight, that I’m still waiting for the fucking money he owes me.’
‘I’ll be back to see you off,’ she said, through clamped teeth.