The Accidental Wife

by Rowan Coleman

  He’d kissed her then, his hand sliding from her knee to her thigh, and because Alison wanted so much for this to be the fresh start that Marc talked about she let the discussion slide with it. It was one they would never have again, she knew that. Once Marc had made up his mind about something he stuck to it like glue, which was something she supposed she ought to be grateful for. After all, he’d made up his mind to choose her sixteen years ago.

  She just had to hope that he was right, that all her fears and misgivings about going back to Farmington were foolish and irrational. That once she’d got settled back there she would feel as if she had never been away.

  The only problem was that it was that eventuality that terrified her the most.

  It was dusk as their car finally rolled into the driveway of their new home. Amy and Gemma were both asleep on the back seat, and Dominic was still nodding his head to some barely heard beat.

  ‘Leave them for a second,’ Marc whispered. ‘I’ve got something I want you to see.’

  Glancing back at her children, Alison got out of the car and waited as Marc asked the removal men to give him another few minutes, slipping them each a twenty-pound note.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Hopefully, if all of my plans have worked, then …’

  Alison walked into the cavernous hallway just as Marc switched on the lights and she saw that it was filled with bouquets of red roses. Twelve of them, Alison counted, arranged on the marble-tiled floor in the shape of a love heart, their sweet scent struggling against that of the new paint but their colour vibrant and bloody against the magnolia walls. It was a dramatic gesture and typical of Marc.

  ‘Happy Valentine’s Day, darling,’ Marc said, wrapping his arms around her from behind. ‘And welcome home.’

  Chapter Two

  HOW CATHERINE ASHLEY came to be spending Valentine’s Day with her almost ex-husband was a story that pretty much summed up her life.

  ‘You don’t mind booking Jimmy, do you?’ Lois, the PTA chairperson, had asked her at the last meeting, with her own special brand of tact. ‘It’s not awkward at all booking your ex to play at the Valentine’s dance, is it? It’s just that I know how you two get on still, and he’ll give you a reduced rate. Every penny counts if we’re going to raise enough money to pay for the interactive whiteboards.’

  Catherine, PTA secretary, had said she didn’t mind, and mostly she didn’t. It was a fact of life that Jimmy and his band were present at every wedding, christening and even the odd funeral that she had attended, both before and since they had split up as a couple, playing covers for the masses to pay the bills while they waited for the stardom that had so far eluded them. Besides, for the last few months peace had broken out between them, and Jimmy had become almost as much a part of her daily life as he had been when they were living together. Maybe even more so, because the stress and tension that their being together had caused had dissolved at last now that she had stopped waiting for him to leave her and had kicked him out.

  Her friend Kirsty said they were the happiest married couple she knew, and she put it all down to the fact that they’d been separated and living apart for two years. Kirsty hadn’t been there for the first year, those long and difficult months when they had tried to find a way to be parents without ripping themselves or their children to shreds. But the last year had been OK – good, even. Friendship had finally emerged from the ashes of what they’d once had, and Kirsty was right: for the most part they got on well. One day Catherine knew they’d get divorced properly, but until something happened to push either one of them in that direction she was still officially Mrs Jimmy Ashley, so considering she managed to live quite happily with that on a daily basis, booking her husband’s band to play the Valentine’s dance was the least of her worries.

  The gas bill, the hours her boss wanted her to work, whether or not she’d have the money to get Eloise what she really wanted for her birthday – those were the worries that kept Catherine awake at night. But those were practical problems that Catherine could tackle and fight. It had been the utter paralysing fear of loving Jimmy the way he wanted her to, the way she often tried to, that would expose her long-guarded vulnerability. That threat of powerlessness had stalked her throughout her marriage until one day Jimmy proved all her misgivings right and betrayed her, making her thank God that she had never fully committed her heart to him because the shock of what he had done to her and their family was hard enough to bear as it was. If she had allowed herself to love him it would have been intolerable.

  It had taken her a long time to readjust her feelings towards him, but she had done it for her girls, for Eloise and Leila, whom she lived for, content to let her life orbit them with the same ordered regularity as the Earth turns around the sun, letting their happiness and beauty warm her, because their love was all that she needed.

  And manning the bar at the Valentine’s dance with her friend and neighbour, while her ex-husband brandished his guitar like a mammoth outsized phallus on the stage was just one of those things. It was a Jimmy thing. Like talking endlessly about more or less nothing apart from sex was a Kirsty thing.

  ‘On reflection I think I am in love with my personal trainer,’ Kirsty said thoughtfully for the fourth or fifth time since she had started this one-sided debate. She was holding a plastic cup full of wine and gazing contemplatively at one of the many red cardboard hearts that had been hung from the ceiling and that stirred gently, wafted by warm air created by the dancing crowd below.

  Catherine looked at her, crossing her arms. ‘No, you are not in love with your personal trainer,’ she replied, also for about the fourth or fifth time. ‘How can you be in love with him? You hardly know him. You’ve seen him three or four times for an hour twice a week at most.’

  Catherine was grateful that Kirsty had offered to come with her to the dance, as the only other single woman in town without a date, because Catherine wouldn’t have come herself if it wasn’t for the fact that she was on the committee. But she had been volunteered to run the bar, so having Kirsty by her side did take the edge off the whole Valentine theme and helped to make the evening almost bearable.

  Still, if Catherine had known that she was going to be treated to two hours solid of how wonderful Kirsty’s personal trainer was, and the varying degree of likelihood that she was in love with him, then on balance she probably would have found standing on her own behind the table like a pariah marginally preferable. She might have looked a bit sad, quietly sipping glass after glass of cheap wine while the town’s couples danced happily to ‘(Everything I Do) I Do It For You’, and yes, it would have been more difficult to ignore the four twenty-year-old girl groupies who always seemed to follow her husband and his band around, despite the fact they were all past thirty and would have been has-beens if they had ever been anybody, staring at Jimmy like he was some rock god, but at least she wouldn’t be having the same meaningless conversation on a loop again.

  ‘So?’ Kirsty was questioning her. ‘What do you think I should do? It’s hard to pull your personal trainer, you know, because, after all, whenever you see him you are fat and red and sweaty. How can you make a man want you when you are fat and red and sweaty? Particularly when, based on the research I’ve done, I know the kind of women he likes are thin, blonde and have massive tits. Any ideas?’

  At six foot exactly, Catherine looked down at her friend, whom she towered above by several inches.

  ‘You are not in love with your trainer,’ she repeated firmly, as if she were telling her five-year-old, Leila, that no way was she staying up for the end of Strictly Come Dancing, ‘so you don’t have to try and pull him. You probably don’t even fancy him, not really.’

  ‘I think you’ll find I do,’ Kirsty avowed. ‘Have you seen his arms, his chest, his legs, his bum, his … oh God, I’m having a hot flush, and not on my neck.’

  ‘That’s lust, Kirsty!’ Catherine exclaimed, feeling her cheeks colour. A year of knowing Kirsty still had not made her immune
to the other woman’s insistence on conducting full and frank discussions of a sexual nature in public places. ‘Lust is not love, and love isn’t even love – it’s hormones.’

  ‘It’s not lust.’ Kirsty was adamant. ‘It’s so much more than that. We talk and laugh and he listens to me. Plus he is the only man in the whole wide world who knows how much I weigh exactly. If that’s not grounds for marriage then I don’t know what is.’

  ‘It’s transference,’ Catherine went on. ‘Like when people fall for their psychiatrists. You are transferring your sexual urges on to the poor man. Remember, you pay him fifty-nine nighty-five an hour to train you. He doesn’t turn up out of the goodness of his heart or just so he can get a look at you sweating. And anyway, like you said, he fancies blonde eighteen-year-olds with breast implants.’

  ‘No, no, he thinks he fancies blonde eighteen-year-olds with breast implants but that’s only because he hasn’t met me yet. I mean, he’s met me, but he hasn’t met me. Once he truly knows me, he’ll see what love really is. Else there’s always plastic surgery.’

  ‘Just listen.’ Catherine took a much-needed sip of wine. ‘You are not in love with your trainer and he is not in love with you. He is probably in love with himself. Now get over it. Do me a favour and go and ask someone’s husband to dance with you. I could do with a laugh.’

  Kirsty sighed but allowed the change of subject nevertheless.

  ‘You don’t just rush up to a couple and tap the woman on the shoulder and say, “Please can I dance with your husband?”’ she told Catherine. ‘There’s no fun to be had there, and besides, it never works; the married woman is a particularly fierce and protective creature. You have to bide your time, hunt the lone husband. Imagine that you are like a cheetah stalking a gazelle and then, at just the right moment, you pounce when no one’s looking and drag your prey off into the bush and devour them whole.’

  ‘On second thoughts maybe you’d better settle for just a dance. Some of those out there are quite scary when they are drunk. You should have seen Lois at the Christmas fair when she found out that Father Christmas had made off with the raffle-prize sherry. She charged like a rhino.’

  ‘Why do you do all this PTA lark?’ Kirsty asked her as she scanned the crowd for her prey, regardless of Catherine’s warning. ‘You should chuck it all in and have a proper grown-up life. After all, you and me – mainly me – we are single women, we should be doing proper single-woman stuff: going on ill-advised dates with men who don’t deserve us, setting a terrible example to children and falling out with our estranged husbands, with the emphasis on strange, and not inviting them round to Sunday tea! That’s what proper single women do.’

  ‘You haven’t got an estranged husband,’ Catherine remarked.

  ‘Well, there’s no need to brag,’ Kirsty sighed. ‘I could be in the Three Bells right now impressing my trainer with my all-natural if subtle cleavage. You could be with me; maybe he’s got a friend, I don’t know. The point is that you and I could be out on the town getting noticed.’

  Catherine raised a brow. With her statuesque height and red hair, getting noticed had never been her problem. It was blending in that she had found so difficult for most of her life, trying as hard as she could to stay out of the limelight. She always wore black trousers and a black top and flat black boots or shoes. Usually she wore her long hair up, knotted on the top of her head, but she never dyed or cut it, except for every other month, with the kitchen scissors. Beauty and what it meant was something that Catherine had never quite got a handle on, except that she was fairly certain it didn’t apply to her. Most men were scared of her, and of the two men she had ‘known’ in her life, the one she had married had been caught having sex with a groupie in the ladies’ loo at The Goat. And what’s more, he’d been caught by Catherine. In the end she’d scared him off too. Getting noticed in any way at all was not at the top of Catherine’s to-do list.

  She watched the crowd dancing for a minute or two, seemingly bobbing up and down just out of step with the music, and suddenly found herself remembering the last Valentine’s dance she had been to. It was a bittersweet memory, but this was true of all of her memories before she had got together with Jimmy. Recalling any of them required her to pay a certain price.

  Catherine had been fifteen and she had planned a daring escape for the night, telling her parents she was due at a rehearsal at school for the public-speaking team. Instead, she was going to the school disco with Alison.

  She and Alison had met outside the church on the high street and got changed together in the public loos outside Tesco, putting on lipstick haphazardly as they peered into the scratched Perspex mirrors screwed to the walls. Alison had brought Catherine a skirt to wear and she tied a piece of black lace into her red hair. She must have looked a sight, but Catherine didn’t care then. When she was with Alison she felt invincible.

  Of course, none of the boys had asked Catherine to dance, but she was glad of it. She couldn’t think of anything worse than turning in a slow deathly circle to ‘Love Is All Around’ with some boy’s hand on her bottom and his nose in her cleavage. Alison had refused to dance with any of the many boys that kept asking her, telling all of them she wanted to dance with Catherine instead, and have a laugh.

  When Lee Britton accused her of being a lesbian, she’d grabbed Catherine’s hand and kissed it, winking at him.

  ‘You’ve got that dead right, Lee,’ she’d said. ‘Imagine that when you’re tossing off in bed tonight!’ And she had spun Catherine round and round in a circle until the pair of them, dizzy with laughter from the look on Lee’s face, had collapsed on the floor.

  On the way home that night the two of them had stopped once again in the loos outside Tesco and got changed back into jeans and jumpers – Alison too, even though her parents knew she’d been going to the disco and all she had to hide from them was make-up.

  ‘Your parents are weirdos, babe,’ Alison had said as she wiped the lipstick off Catherine’s mouth, holding her chin between her thumb and forefinger.

  ‘It’s just their way,’ Catherine tried to explain, although the older she got the harder she found it to understand them herself. ‘They were old when they had me. They still haven’t got used to having a kid around.’

  ‘Well, you might not be able to choose your family but at least you’ve got me, right? And that makes you lucky.’

  The pair of them had hugged there in the public loos outside Tesco before going their separate ways. And for a long time, for almost all of her childhood, Catherine had thought that Alison was right: she thought that she was the luckiest girl in the world to have Alison as her best friend, her protector and her confidante. It had seemed like the kind of friendship that would last for ever, a friendship to be relied on.

  But Catherine couldn’t have been more wrong about that. What was more, when Alison left her she was in the biggest mess of her life with no one to help her out of it.

  When she had got home that night her mum was waiting on the other side of the front door for her, her wooden spatula in her hand. Somehow she had found out Catherine’s lie. And until tonight Catherine had never been to another Valentine’s dance again. She smiled to herself. If her parents could see her now they’d probably still be furious.

  ‘This dance sucks,’ Kirsty said, snapping Catherine’s attention back into the room. ‘I thought all the best men were supposed to be married. Why are none of them here?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Kirsty, I should have told you that the school PTA Valentine’s dance would be no place to meet a man.’

  ‘And that is why you are alone,’ Kirsty lectured her. ‘Everywhere is a place to meet men if you look hard enough – a pub, a club, the gym, the supermarket, even the opticians …’

  ‘The opticians?’

  ‘Long story,’ Kirsty said. ‘What I’m saying is, if you really want to meet a man then you have to try a bit harder.’

  ‘I’m not trying to meet a man,’ Catherine said. ‘I don�
�t want to meet a man. I’m a happily nearly divorced married wife.’

  ‘Your trouble is that you don’t realise what a fox you are. Men would queue up to go out with you if you weren’t so uptight and always slightly scary-looking. You know, plucking your eyebrows would make you seem a lot less frowny – I’m just saying.’

  ‘I’m not uptight,’ Catherine replied mildly. ‘I just don’t want to do it again.’

  ‘Do you mean you don’t want to have a relationship again, or do you mean you don’t want to do it again? Because if you are telling me you never want to have sex again I refuse to believe it. You’re thirty-two, Catherine. You are at your sexual peak. Why on earth wouldn’t you want sex in your life again? Preferably with an eighteen-year-old. I’ve heard that’s the perfect match sexual peak-wise.’

  Catherine looked at Kirsty and wondered how to answer that question. By the time she went to bed with Jimmy she more or less qualified as a virgin again, such was the length of time that had passed between her first sexual experience and her second. It had been clumsy and difficult, and she had been embarrassed and awkward, but to her surprise and relief Jimmy hadn’t run away as fast as he could afterwards. He treated her sweetly and gently, and gradually the two of them began to work together well, becoming easy and familiar lovers. For a while they brought out the best in each other. Catherine inspired Jimmy’s tender and protective side, and he made her laugh and relax, standing tall in a crowd, happy in the knowledge that the man she was holding hands with was two inches taller than she was. But although she had adored him, cared for him, needed him, she had never fallen in love with him the way he always told her she would. In all the years they had been married she had never found the courage to let herself go those few extra degrees it would take to love him, until the night she found him having sex with Donna Clarke in the ladies’ loos of The Goat pub. Ironic really that the peak of her passion for Jimmy had manifested itself on the day he decided to cheat on her, the day she knew she would never be able to trust him again.