The Accidental Wife

by Rowan Coleman

  ‘Magic gate!’ Leila said with a little hop as they walked down the drive leading to the floodlit house situated in a little dip at its foot.

  ‘Electric gate,’ Eloise told her, suddenly seeming a little more subdued.

  ‘Nice place,’ Jimmy said, nodding at the double-fronted faux-Georgian palace.

  ‘Big place,’ Eloise said quietly. ‘Much bigger than our house.’

  ‘I’d say they paid at least one point two mil,’ Kirsty added, turning to Catherine. ‘What do you think?

  ‘I think that all of those fairy lights are a wanton waste of energy,’ Catherine said. ‘And that just because you have money to burn it doesn’t mean that you should.’

  ‘And I think I hope there’s plenty of booze,’ Jimmy said, whisking Leila up onto his shoulders and out of the way of a Mercedes SLK as it swept by, leaving a ricochet of gravel in its wake. ‘I’m going to need it.’

  The house was already filled with people; everywhere Catherine looked she saw someone she knew at least by sight. Half the PTA were instantly visible, as well as three or four teachers from the school, including Mrs Woodruff and the optician from Boots. It must have been the optician, because as soon as he saw Kirsty his eyes lit up, and as soon as she saw him she vanished. The massive hallway alone had to be accommodating fifty or sixty people talking, sipping champagne and taking sandwiches from a passing teenager with a tray. Catherine looked for someone new, who might be one of Gemma’s parents, but so far she already knew everyone she saw.

  ‘What do we do now?’ Jimmy asked Catherine. The pair of them stood there side by side, one daughter hanging off each of them as they manoeuvred their little party towards the relative safety of a sheltering wall.

  ‘We get a drink, I suppose, and mingle,’ Catherine answered as if she were just suggesting they smeared themselves in ketchup and jumped into a den full of starving lions. ‘Make small talk and all that stuff.’

  ‘Right,’ Jimmy said. ‘Or we could just take the girls to Harvester, get off our faces on the house white and forget about it. What do you reckon?’

  Catherine looked at Jimmy and felt a sudden rush of warmth towards him. At that exact moment in her life she could think of nothing that she would like to do more than run away with Jimmy and the girls, and yes, maybe even get a little bit tipsy with him over an onion relish dip. But before she could accept, Catherine found herself engulfed in squeals and yelps as her daughters were embraced by a blonde girl who must surely be the mythical Gemma.

  ‘Mum, this is her, this is Gemma,’ Eloise said, tugging dangerously hard on Catherine’s chiffon sleeve. ‘This is my best friend!’

  Catherine looked down at the pretty blonde little girl standing next to her daughter and suddenly she got a vivid flashback. She and Alison, standing side by side at Siobhan Murphy’s tenth birthday party, admiring the pink Miss Piggy cake. Edward Stone had come up to Catherine and told her that he didn’t want to be her boyfriend any more because she was too ugly. Alison had punched Edward Stone quite hard in the stomach, making him double over in pain and throw up iced rings on the carpet.

  Catherine blinked, and suddenly the moment had passed and she was looking at her own little girl again, standing next to Gemma. For a moment Catherine got the feeling that it was not the past she was looking back on but the future she was touching. Gemma looked exactly like Alison – exactly like her – but she couldn’t be hers … because it would just be too … Alison wouldn’t come here after …

  She stared at the plump little girl with her big blue eyes and smiled at her.

  ‘Hello, Gemma. Nice to meet you,’ she said, hoping she was the only one who noticed the tremble in her voice. ‘Eloise has talked about you a lot.’

  ‘Hello, Mrs Ashley. Nice to meet you too.’ Gemma smiled prettily at her. ‘Eloise has been so kind to me since I started at the school. I feel like I fit right in now.’

  ‘That’s great, Gemma. By the way, where’s your mummy? I’d like to meet her.’ Catherine glanced quickly round the room, her heart in her mouth, afraid of whom she might see, constantly telling herself that there must be a hundred blonde little girls in this town who bore a passing resemblance to Alison, this was purely a coincidence. That’s what Catherine told herself, yet at exactly the same time she knew with complete certainty what the truth was. Alison was back.

  ‘I think Mummy’s in the kitchen being cross about the sandwiches,’ Gemma told her, before saying to Eloise, ‘And Amy’s in the tent being Beauty from Beauty and the Beast, dancing to the disco. Want to dance?’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes!’ Eloise said. ‘Can we, Mum, please?’

  Catherine paused. ‘OK then,’ she agreed reluctantly because she would rather have kept them close to her just in case she needed to make a quick exit. ‘But don’t go out of the house, OK? Don’t talk to anyone you don’t know … or some people you do know, and when I say it’s time to go it’s …’ but the three girls had disappeared.

  ‘I guess that’s the Harvester idea canned then,’ Jimmy said regretfully. ‘We definitely can’t go without them … can we?’

  ‘Jimmy, what’s the name of the people whose party this is?’ Catherine asked him urgently.

  Jimmy looked perplexed. ‘I don’t know, Cat. I never exactly saw the invitation. I met the woman, the mother, though in the playground, do you remember? She said her name was …’ Jimmy trailed off, unaware that Catherine was hanging on every nuance of his silence.

  ‘It’s gone,’ he said, shaking his head and shrugging.

  ‘What did she look like, the mother?’ Catherine pressed him.

  ‘What’s up, Cat?’ Jimmy asked her. ‘I didn’t crack on to her, if that’s what you’re worried about, even if she did fancy the arse off me.’

  Catherine’s stomach dropped ten storeys.

  ‘Just tell me, what did she look like?’

  ‘Blonde, money all over her, you know, the usual. Great teeth, nice smile. Said we used to know each other but I couldn’t think how I’d know a chick like that …’

  ‘Oh my God,’ Catherine said, looking around her with wide-eyed horror. ‘Oh. My. God.’

  ‘What?’ Jimmy exclaimed.

  ‘It’s Alison.’

  ‘You’re right!’ Jimmy clicked his fingers. ‘Alison, that was her name. How did you …? Oh Christ. It’s that Alison. The actual Alison.’

  The two of them stared at each other. Catherine nodded, unable to move.

  ‘How do we feel about that?’ he asked her, his hand steadying her arm.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Catherine told him. ‘I don’t – it shouldn’t matter after all these years, should it? So what if she’s come back and my daughter is her daughter’s new best friend? It’s all in the past, water under the bridge, it doesn’t matter any more, right? Right?’

  Jimmy didn’t say anything for a moment, as he watched Catherine’s wide-eyed face drain of any colour.

  ‘We’re upset about it then,’ he confirmed.

  ‘I don’t know how else to be,’ Catherine admitted. ‘I feel sick, Jimmy. Why did she have to come back here, that’s what I don’t get. Why now?’

  ‘Look,’ Jimmy felt now was the time to be decisive and take control, ‘I’ll get the girls and we’ll go, OK? You don’t need to deal with this now. You need to go home, have a think about it. Let it sink in.’

  ‘She can’t have known I was still here. If she’d known she wouldn’t have come back,’ Catherine said, her voice low and dark. ‘She wouldn’t want to see me.’

  ‘Maybe, maybe not – but the point is, you don’t need to see her tonight. Wait there, I’ll get the girls. We’ll go home and talk this through. OK?’

  Catherine gripped his hand hard in hers. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘And thank you. Thank you for not thinking I’m stupid and irrational and delusional.’

  ‘You forget, Cat,’ Jimmy said, placing the palm of his hand briefly on her now blazing cheek. ‘I know.’

  *

  Catherine waited, standin
g in the hot and busy room, with all the good people of Farmington chatting and laughing around her, and she was glad for once that she had developed the talent to fade into the background, folding in on herself until she became near invisible.

  Even so, her heart was racing, her skin was pulsating with the blood that was careering around her body. She felt lightheaded and hot, as if she had a fever, as if she’d suddenly been stuck down by the flu.

  ‘She was just a girl you once knew, a girl you fell out with over a boy,’ she told herself, braced against any eventuality. ‘It doesn’t matter, why should it matter now?’ An answering thought slowly descended, slotting into place with exacting care. Alison hadn’t come back to Farmington alone. She’d come back with two girls and a teenage son and her husband.

  Her husband. The day after Alison had gone it was as if she had disappeared into a parallel universe. Catherine’s parents had banned any discussion about her, the boy she had run off with and what might have become of them. Catherine gleaned snippets of rumours, whispered in hushed tones behind half-closed doors, but since her parents had taken her out of school she had been unable to find out what had really happened with Alison and Marc. After her mother found out about what had happened between her and Marc, she had been a virtual prisoner in the house for almost a year while her parents sought to purge her of the evil she had become tainted with, and it took exactly the same amount of time for Catherine finally to learn to let them think that they had. Only when Catherine began to show them outwardly, at least, that she was calm and obedient did they let her have any freedom. A little bit more each week until eventually she had begun to lead her own life in secret, for the first time without Alison to tell her what to do, climbing in and out through her own bedroom window when her parents were both asleep.

  Catherine had never known what became of Alison and Marc, but maybe it was possible that she had married him and if she had …

  Once again Catherine’s eyes swept the room, but this time she was looking for something different and the sight that stopped her heart was the back of a man’s head, dark hair cut short into the nape of his neck. That in itself was unremarkable, but the shape of the head and the angle it was set on those shoulders was not. She was looking at her living, breathing past.

  And then, as if he sensed the touch of a gaze on his skin, slowly and uncertainly the man turned round and looked right at her, and recognised her.

  In that one second it seemed as if time was standing still and Catherine found it so hard to breathe that for a second she wondered if that thin layer of atmosphere that came between her and the magnitude of space had evaporated, collapsing her lungs and halting the pounding of her blood in her ears.

  It was Marc. She hadn’t seen him for nearly sixteen years and then suddenly there he was. He was smiling at her. He looked happy to see her.

  It was Lois’s scything voice that brought her back to her senses, shocking her into living again.

  ‘And you must meet our Catherine,’ Lois said, bringing Marc over to where Catherine was standing, dumbstruck. ‘She is an absolute treasure. I simply do not know what we would do without her.’ She looked from Catherine to Marc again and, when neither spoke, filled in the void. ‘I was telling Marc about the PTA, Catherine?’ Silence. ‘Catherine, are you quite well?’

  Catherine tore her eyes away from Marc’s face and looked at Lois as if she was the one who was the complete stranger.

  ‘Lois, I’m afraid that Catherine is in shock because of me,’ Marc said with an easy smile. Catherine was surprised to hear that his voice wasn’t the same. It was refined now. He had lost his Midlands accent and picked up some ‘h’s and ‘t’s along the way. ‘She and I know each other, you see, although we haven’t seen each other for a long time. She has probably been struck dumb by how old and fat I’ve got, and she’s got every right to be. She doesn’t look a day older than the last time I saw her, only more beautiful.’

  ‘Oh? Well, how unusual,’ Lois said, clearly deflated by Marc turning his attention from her. ‘Well, I’ll leave you to catch up then. You can tell me all later, Catherine.’

  ‘I knew it,’ Marc said a second or two after Lois had left them alone. ‘I didn’t even know that I knew, but I did. I knew I’d find you here.’

  ‘At your party?’ Catherine asked him, banally.

  ‘In Farmington,’ Marc replied. ‘I think you’re the reason I came back. You might even be the reason for this party. I’ve been looking for you and I didn’t know it until I saw you.’

  ‘What?’ Catherine asked him. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Just recently you’ve been on my mind a lot,’ Marc took a step closer to her, causing Catherine’s heels to graze against the skirting board. He smiled. ‘I thought about the way I … we … left and how it must have hurt you back then. Maybe it doesn’t matter any more but I want you to know I didn’t plan anything to happen the way it did. I didn’t plan, full stop. I didn’t plan to get involved with you or Alison, and I didn’t know I was leaving with her until the minute she told me I was. I let things happen to me back then, Cathy, and I didn’t care about the consequences. But that doesn’t mean I don’t regret them now.’ Marc shook his head and laughed. ‘You know, I didn’t expect to have this conversation tonight either, but I’m glad that I am having it. I’m glad I’ve got the chance to say that I’m sorry. I’m sorry for hurting you, Cathy.’

  Catherine looked into his black eyes, at him standing here in the flesh right in front of her, and felt the ground shift a little beneath her feet. A few minutes ago he was a part of her history, a time past that could never be recaptured. Now it seemed as if he had never been gone.

  He had no idea, she told herself steadily.

  ‘You are not having this conversation tonight,’ she told him, making herself smile, shrugging so that her loose hair fell over one shoulder. ‘When my husband gets back with my daughters we are leaving.’

  Marc let go of her arm, leaving a residue heat of a summer sixteen years old where his fingertips had been.

  ‘You don’t have to go,’ he said. ‘It must be a shock, I know, but please don’t go. Stay and wait for the shock to wear off. Alison will be here somewhere. I know she’d be so pleased to see you. Catherine, please.’

  Before Catherine knew it he was embracing her, hugging her thin frame against his. It wasn’t the hard, toned body she had once known that she felt graze against her ribs now, but it was still his body, and at his touch a tiny spark of memory ignited in her belly and made her muscles contract.

  She was relieved when he released her, and she glanced over her shoulder, looking for Jimmy and the girls. They were nowhere to be seen.

  Alison decided that she had spent long enough in the kitchen waiting for her husband to come and tell her what to do about the fact that the food had run out about half an hour ago. Why she was waiting for him she didn’t know. There was nothing they could do about it now anyway. It was just that if he was here, if he had come like she had asked him to, then she would be able to show him the empty platters that were scattered across the kitchen and say, ‘I told you so.’ And that would make her feel better. Still, at least they had plenty of champagne. Champagne that Alison had not had nearly enough of. Something she was keen to remedy.

  ‘Right, well,’ she said to the waiting staff, who were hovering about. ‘Just make sure everyone gets drinks, OK?’

  ‘Can’t we have a drink?’ one boy asked. ‘This is a cool party.’

  Alison looked at him and crossed her arms. If she spent one more minute in her expensive dress in this expensive kitchen, as stone-cold sober as the Italian granite work surfaces, with incompetent teenagers, then she would literally implode.

  ‘Just one,’ she told the boy, ‘but if I catch any of you getting drunk there will be trouble, OK?’ She watched in relief as the teenagers filed sedately out of the kitchen, trays laden with champagne.

  Alison peered into the hallway where many guests were sti
ll congregating, and searched the crowd for the familiar shape of her husband, who was, no doubt, working the room somewhere in the house. She stood on her tiptoes and craned her neck, but she couldn’t see him out there and if he wasn’t out there then she didn’t want to brave the crowd without him, at least not until she’d had two more glasses of champagne. Retreating back into the safety of the kitchen she reapplied her lip gloss reflected in the stainless-steel oven door and then, taking a bottle out of the fridge, poured herself first one and then another glass. When both glasses were finished and she could feel the bubbles in the wine popping behind her eyes she decided to go and see if Jimmy Ashley had turned up at her party.

  She found him in the marquee, trying to persuade his daughters to come off the dance floor, but he wasn’t having much luck. The disco lights turned the mêlée of children green, red and blue, making them look like multicoloured fairies flitting across the floor, but there was something familiar about the tall girl, the one that had to be Gemma’s much-loved Ellie. She must take after her father, Alison thought, smiling warmly at Jimmy as he tried to catch his smaller girl and failed.

  Tipping the rest of the bottle of champagne she had brought with her into her glass and immediately emptying it, Alison thought she might as well be at the sixth form dance again, trying to pluck up the courage to get Jimmy Ashley to dance with her because that was exactly what she was about to do now. Alison waited as the room tilted and swayed for a moment before setting itself right and she heard a sane little voice inside her head telling her that this was not at all the right way to make a good impression as a wife and mother and the hostess of the party. But unfortunately for the sane little voice, Alison couldn’t give a stuff. And besides, it was largely because her husband had not introduced her to anyone that she felt fairly safe that most people here wouldn’t even know that she was the hostess.

  Jimmy had not noticed her coming until she was standing right next to him.

  ‘Hi, Jimmy!’ she said, quite loudly, right in the shell of his ear, making him jump. ‘Come with me and have another drink.’