*
Almost every night Catherine would hear Alison’s latest exploits with Aran, the things he tried to do to her or made her do to him, the things she sometimes let him do and the things she sometimes did.
But it was never like that with Marc; he never tried anything on with her. They sat or lay in the long grass, out of sight of the passers-by, while he stroked her hair and told her about his life, how he’d grown up alone, pushed from one foster home to another. How he’d been kicked out of care at sixteen and had to look after himself, make that choice between finding himself a job or doing one on the local post office with some of the other boys from the home and a sawn-off shotgun one of them said they could get hold of. He’d chosen labouring work because he knew what he was like; he knew he’d mess up and get caught and then that would be his life over. Then suddenly he’d stop talking and Catherine knew he was going to kiss her. She would feel his hand in her hair, or on her waist but never anything more.
She felt safe and when she was talking to him, telling him about her parents, who did not love each other, let alone her, it didn’t seem so sad or so desperate any more that she’d grown up in a house without affection or compassion, and that the nearest thing she had to a real family was the girl who lived down the road and climbed in through her bedroom window nearly every night.
Then, on the ninth day, something changed. Marc was kissing her, and it felt just as it always did when suddenly, without warning, something shifted inside her. She found her arms snaking their way around his neck, and she pulled his body hard into hers as she kissed him back, arching the small of her back so that their hips met. Marc stopped kissing her.
‘Whoa,’ he said, breathless.
‘What?’ Catherine asked him. ‘Did I do something wrong?
‘Yes, I mean, no, not wrong but …’ Marc looked at her. ‘I don’t think you’re ready to …’
In the long pause that followed, their bodies relaxed. Catherine felt as if she was backing down from a fight.
‘Can I ask you something?’ she asked Marc.
‘Course you can.’ Marc shifted his body weight to create an almost imperceptible but significant space between them.
‘Do you want me, Marc? I mean in that way. Because we’ve been seeing each other for a while now and I love talking to you and kissing, and I don’t even know what I’m asking you really except that do you really like me, or do you just kiss me when you haven’t got anything to say any more? Because you feel sorry for me?’
Marc looked dumbstruck. ‘What?’ he asked her, sitting up and back on his heels.
‘You’ve never tried to …’ Catherine was at a loss for words to describe what she barely understood, ‘do anything but kiss me.’
Marc laughed, flopping back onto the grass. ‘Oh Christ,’ he said, his hands over his eyes.
‘Don’t laugh,’ she said, punching him lightly on the arm, unable to resist smiling.
Suddenly he grabbed her forearm and pulled her on top of him, the expression in his eyes shifting in a second, all trace of humour gone.
‘Of course I want you,’ he said, making Catherine catch her breath. ‘But I told you, you’re different. You’re … precious. I’ve never talked to another person in my life the way I’ve talked to you. You know me, you understand me, and I think I know you. You’re pure.’
‘So does that mean you don’t want to …?’ Catherine discovered in that moment that she was becoming very tired of her purity.
‘No, it means I want to, I want to a lot. But look, Catherine, if we do that – have sex – it will change everything and, I don’t know, I like this – the way things are. It doesn’t feel real, it feels like a dream, another world where it isn’t crazy for me to be in love with you.’
Catherine had lain on top of him, her hair making a curtain for them both as she looked into his eyes.
‘You’re in love with me?’ she asked him on an inward breath.
‘I want to be … I am in love with you,’ Marc repeated, unable to look at her this time. ‘But I don’t know if that is enough. I’m not the sort of bloke who’s going to take you away from this or even stick around …’
‘I don’t care,’ Catherine said. ‘I love you too. And I don’t care what happens next week or next month. These have been the best days of my life, Marc.’ She paused, nipping sharply at her lip. ‘You might as well know I’m a virgin.’ She saw Marc hide a smile.
‘That obvious?’ she asked him happily before looking levelly into his eyes. ‘But I want more between us. I want us to do more … to do everything.’
‘Are you sure about this?’ Marc asked.
‘You said it yourself. We make each other different, better. This is right, I know it is.’
Marc brushed her hair back from her face. ‘It can’t be in the park,’ he told her, his implicit assent making Catherine want to laugh and scream and cry in one instance.
‘No,’ she said, blushing only now.
He rolled her off his chest and sat up. ‘There’s my bedsit, but it’s not exactly romantic. You should have somewhere nice, candles and flowers.’
‘Marc,’ Catherine laughed, pulling him to his feet, ‘let’s go.’
Marc picked up her hand and kissed the back of it.
‘Come on,’ he said. And he didn’t let her hand go.
The bedsit was small, a single bed against a wall, a sink, a stove, a tiny fridge that burred and hummed in the corner as if it was fighting for its life. The room was neat and clean, and it seemed to Catherine that there was hardly anything of Marc in the room. His fluorescent work jacket hung over the back of the chair. There was a four-pack of Special Brew on the kitchen worktop and nothing at all in the fridge.
‘Cup of tea?’ Marc asked her as she stood in the centre of the room.
‘Um, no, thanks,’ Catherine said. ‘Can we just …’
‘Get on with it?’ Marc asked her, laughing. ‘I’m nervous. I don’t know why I’m nervous.’
‘Don’t you be nervous! I’m far more nervous than you,’ Catherine told him.
‘We don’t have to go the whole way today, you know,’ Marc said. ‘We can just take it slow. One step at a time.’
‘No,’ Catherine insisted. ‘I’m here now. Let’s do it.’
Marc nodded. He took two steps closer to her. Catherine had to refrain from taking the same number backwards.
He pulled his T-shirt over his head, and then Catherine’s singlet over hers. She felt the touch of air against her skin raise a legion of goose bumps across her slender pale body, while the sunlight filtered a bloody orange through the bedsit curtains. And then the heat of his hands on her skin as he pulled her into an embrace. He was kissing her neck and shoulders, not the dreamy gentle kisses Catherine knew from the park – these were new, deeper and commanding. In one movement Marc had undone her bra and slid it off her shoulders, pulling her back onto the bed. She heard a moan deep in his throat, she felt herself respond to him, and at last she knew for certain what it felt like to be desired.
‘I love you, Catherine,’ Marc told her as his hand ascended her thigh. ‘Always remember that at this moment I love you more than anything in the world.’
Catherine snapped back into the present, her wine glass in her hand, as she heard a noise on the landing.
‘Mummy?’ It was Leila.
‘Yes, darling?’ Catherine called back.
‘I went to the toilet on my own!’ Leila informed her proudly.
‘Good girl. Well, get back into bed then. I’ll be up in a minute to kiss you. Don’t wake your sister.’
‘She already has,’ Eloise called out grumpily.
Catherine set the wine glass down on the table.
Jimmy had told her to remember the last time she was in love, and she had, because, despite the huge leap of faith it had taken her to trust her husband with her heart in the twelve years she had known him, she’d never felt the same intensity of emotion for Jimmy as she had during that summ
er with Marc James. When Marc walked out of her life, just a few weeks later, she felt as if he took with him the part of her that could feel that way again. It frightened Catherine to think that Marc James had been the love of her life, but his was the love that had changed her life – had changed her – for ever.
That afternoon in his bedsit had been the most wonderful, most perfect experience of her life.
At last she’d felt that she belonged to someone.
Amazingly she’d felt that he’d belonged to her.
And then she’d introduced him to Alison.
Chapter Six
ALISON LOOKED AT the clock on the kitchen wall. It was almost eleven and Marc was not home.
This was to be expected, she told herself as she took a sip from what was her fourth glass of wine, on the grounds that she deserved a drink after the day she had had. It was not unusual for Marc to work late, well into the night without ringing her to tell her what time he would be home. That was just him, or rather that was the way he was now, after fifteen years with Alison. It was the way she had made him.
Alison smiled to herself and tried to imagine that dark and brooding young man she had first set eyes on, on that hot summer’s day all those years ago, the heat in his eyes blazing almost as intensely as the sun. He had been the most beautiful thing she had ever seen, like an exotic creature that had somehow wandered into their safe, white middle-class town where everything and everyone looked the same. He was a drifter, without aim or purpose, restless and resentful. The young man he was then didn’t look anything like the man who would one day work himself like a dog to make his business a success, keep his family secure and buy himself a life in the very same safe, white middle-class town that Alison had once begged him to run away from with her. He didn’t look anything like that person she had fallen so hard for at the age of seventeen, the man she’d left everything behind for, including herself.
Alison stopped that train of thought. She could hardly complain that time had changed him. The intervening years and three children had changed her too, even if she worked hard at the gym to try to slow down time as much as possible. Of course, Marc was still out at the dealership, getting it ready for the grand opening at the weekend. There was a lot to do and he would not leave until everything was perfect. Everything else, including his wife, would have to wait until then. Alison knew that because she had created the man he had become and this, sitting drinking wine alone at eleven o’clock at night, was the price she now paid for her creation.
Topping up her wine, Alison looked at the clock again. The house was quiet at last. Dominic had either turned his music off or plugged his headphones in, and the girls had been asleep for hours, Amy drifting into oblivion the second her head touched the pillow, as if her restless dreams would be a welcome escape from the harrowing day her mother had put her through.
Her two daughters’ first day at their new school could not have been more different and Alison was afraid that that was how it was going to be for them for the rest of their lives. Gemma, she didn’t have to worry about. Gemma was exactly like Alison had been as a child: she breezed through every social situation, supremely confident and happy, utterly unconcerned by the children who did not like her (and there were a few of those, because Gemma had a knack for rubbing people up the wrong way) and completely adored by those she chose as her friends.
Amy, on the other hand, could have been a changeling. She was not like her father – driven and single-minded, always chased by nameless demons at his heels – and she was not like her mother. Or perhaps that wasn’t entirely true. Because Alison had not been the same woman she was when she conceived Gemma as she was when she became pregnant with Amy. During those three years she’d lost a little of her shine, a little of her certainty. Sometimes Alison worried that Amy was a replica of her mother after all, that somehow she had let her younger daughter down by not being the person she used to be, by not being the kind of woman who had daughters like Gemma.
Gemma had been in the playground when Alison had arrived bang on time to pick her girls up, and had come racing up to her mother, full of news and gossip and talk of new best friends whom she simply had to have over to tea at the first possible opportunity. They had been about to go round and find Amy when Mrs Woodruff popped her head out of the reception door and asked Alison to go into her office. Amy and Mrs Pritchard were waiting there for her.
The moment Amy had spotted Alison she had scrambled onto her lap and buried her face in her neck, the child’s tiny shoulders shaking as she sobbed silently, her small fingers wound tightly in Alison’s hair.
Amy had cried all day. Literally all day, Mrs Woodruff had told Alison kindly, her sympathetic face crumpled with compassion.
‘Why, darling?’ Alison asked Amy, gently lifting her face from beneath the curtain of her hair by placing her forefinger under her daughter’s chin. ‘Why did you cry so much?’
‘I don’t like my new teacher,’ Amy sobbed woefully. ‘I want Miss Howard, Miss Howard is beautiful and young.’
‘Um, well,’ Alison looked apologetically at Mrs Pritchard and was relieved to see a twitch of a smile round her lips.
Amy’s face disappeared into Alison’s hair again.
‘Not coming tomorrow,’ she hiccuped miserably. ‘Mama, p … please don’t make me come again. I’m worried.’
Alison had encircled her arms more tightly around Amy and set her mouth in a thin line of determination. She knew she had to be firm and force herself not to give in to her daughter’s pleas. Her youngest child had been born fragile and full of fear, equipped with the thinnest of skins, and yet Alison knew that of all her children Amy was the bravest, because, despite her fears and her uncertainty, as long as her mother told her everything would be all right, come tomorrow morning she would get up and face the whole terrifying process again.
So now when her tear-stained daughter asked why she had to go to school, even though Alison struggled to find an answer and wanted more than anything to keep her at home and safe by her side, she knew she had to say the right thing. There was no alternative, Amy would have to learn to live her life in this world, as frightening and as harsh as it must seem to her, and all Alison could do for her little girl was to teach her how to cope with it and somehow manage to get through these difficult first few weeks until eventually Amy found the same kind of uneasy peace here as she had done at her old school.
For a second Alison thought of her husband, of his insistence that they move back, and she had to swallow down her bitter anger. They all seemed to be paying the price for his mistakes, even Amy.
‘It will take a while for her to adjust,’ she told Mrs Woodruff and Mrs Pritchard apologetically. ‘I think there’ll be a good few tears till then.’
‘Of course,’ Mrs Pritchard agreed. ‘It takes a long time to settle into a new life, no matter how old you are. We’ll get there in the end, won’t we, Amy?’
‘I’ll try,’ Amy said. ‘It’s just that I’m so worried.’
And then it had been Alison who had to try to stop herself crying.
At least Alison had been able to get the girls home, safe and in one piece, even if one of them was so miserable.
She had made Dominic come out of the gate to meet her before Rock Club because she wanted to go in with him, meet his new tutor and pay for the term. Dominic had flung himself into the car, slapping his body into the seat.
‘I’ve changed my mind,’ he said, tucking his chin into his neck as some girls from, Alison guessed, his year strutted past. ‘I don’t want to go to Rock Club. It’s for losers anyway.’
Alison looked at him clutching his guitar by the neck and felt her stomach contract in sympathy. He felt pretty much the same way she had ever since they had arrived here – as if she was waiting to go home to a place where she could relax and be herself, or rather the self she had spent the last fifteen years inventing. That self hardly seemed relevant here.
‘Don’t be nervous, kiddo,’ sh
e told him, putting her arm around him. ‘It will be fine. You’re a tough kid. Go and rock the joint.’
Dominic’s sideways look was one of pure recrimination.
‘I’m not nervous,’ he countered, shrugging her arm off. ‘I just don’t want to go in there. It’s totally lame, Mum. And anyway how many other kids do you see whose mums made them wait until they arrived to take them in. They’re going to slaughter me and it’s all his fault.’
As if to prove him right, three boys about his age and similarly attired in black combats and printed T-shirts slouched past with that awkward wheeling gait that seemed to be how all boys of a certain age walked, peering at him through the car window as if he were a piece of dirt.
‘Look, I have to come in to pay. I promise that after today I’ll never come near the place again. I’ll even walk ten paces behind you now and pretend I don’t know you.’
She had been joking but Dom exploded out of the car and took off ahead, taking her at her word.
‘Right, well, wait here, girls, then,’ Alison said. ‘I’ll lock you in. Don’t open the doors to anyone. I won’t be long.’
‘Hurry, Mama,’ Amy said, her voice quivering, her big brown eyes looking up at the sky as if it might fall in on her at any moment.
‘Oh, come on, Muffin,’ Alison heard Gemma say as she grabbed her bag. ‘Let’s play I spy – I’ll let you win.’
As she walked back into her old school Alison was unprepared for how the building and its surroundings would make her feel.
It wasn’t an especially old building – it had been built in the 1920s – but it was an exact replica of a grand eighteenth-century building, complete with palisades, colonnades and even a chapel. From a distance, set in its own expansive grounds, it looked like a very grand private school, not like the local comprehensive at all.
Close up, though, it was another story. The smell, that slightly musty and acrid combination of disinfectant and damp, was still exactly the same, and, as Alison followed Dominic through the impressive panelled double oak doors that marked the main entrance to the school, she was fairly certain that the interior hadn’t been decorated once in the sixteen years since she had last set foot in it. The walls were still that insipid greyish green colour with patches of pink plaster showing through where paint had chipped or peeled away. Even the same framed prints lined the corridors: faded and dusty scenes from Shakespeare, so grimed with dirt that Alison was sure it had been a long time since anyone had looked at them properly or even noticed they were there.
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