The Accidental Wife

by Rowan Coleman

  ‘No,’ Kirsty said, promptly bursting into tears.

  ‘I’ll make tea,’ Catherine said.

  ‘I’m fine really,’ Kirsty said, sometime and several tissues later. ‘I mean, yes, he was handsome and funny and great at sex – but he wasn’t really my type, not really.’

  ‘I didn’t think he was,’ Catherine said with a wry smile. ‘I always thought you were more into the ugly, dull and impotent men myself.’

  ‘Catherine, this is no time to be teasing me. I know you’re rusty at this best-friend lark but this part is where you give me a pep talk and say something to make me feel better, OK?’

  ‘OK,’ Catherine said. She had never considered herself to be Kirsty’s best friend but now that she mentioned the idea it made her feel quite pleased. The old best friend had stalked back into town all high and mighty and married to her first love, but it was OK because Catherine had a new best friend. One she was fairly sure would not run off with her husband. She thought for a moment.

  ‘There are plenty more fish in the sea,’ she said.

  ‘That is a bollocks pep talk,’ Kirsty said, sniffing. ‘You’re so right, you know. I never thought I’d say it but you, Catherine Ashley, are absolutely right about everything. I take it all back.’

  ‘Good,’ Catherine said. ‘What am I right about?’

  ‘Men. Men are shit, and you and me, we’re old, we’re past thirty. Boys in petrol stations calls us “madam”, men don’t look at us when we walk by any more. Our bosoms – or at least those of us who have bosoms – are collapsing. The wrinkle creams don’t work. The hair dye doesn’t cover all greys. We’ve had it. All we can do is what you’re doing, give up on love and sex and hope and life and all that bollocks completely, because it’s horrible out here, Catherine. It’s horrible being single and old.’

  ‘And you think I’m bad at pep talks,’ Catherine said mildly. ‘Look, you are nothing like me. First of all you are not old, and second of all men love you, Kirsty. You’re pretty and funny and fit and have hardly any wrinkles, and have really nice shiny hair that always goes into a style. You go out there and grab life and look for happiness instead of just waiting for it to somehow find you, tucked away in a terraced two-bedroom house, trimming your split ends with a pair of nail scissors. And probably Sam was just being an idiot man, a stupid idiot man who doesn’t know the rules of – what did you call it? – sexiquette, and thinks he’ll see you later at the gym to get your number off you and arrange a date. He’s a personal trainer, Kirsty. He probably had to go for a fifty-mile run before breakfast or something.’

  Kirsty smiled at Catherine. ‘Now that was a pep talk,’ she said. ‘But still, how will I know if he really loves me? How will I know?’

  ‘Well, when you see him today go up to him and say, hi there, great weekend – let’s hook up again, how about tonight? And if he says yes then he likes you, and if he says no then he might be busy tonight so suggest another date, and if he still says no then he probably doesn’t like you, but it’s best to be clear, so if he says no then ask him outright if he doesn’t like you and he’ll tell you and … that’s how you’ll know if he really loves you.’

  Kirsty stared at her. ‘That seems an awfully literal way of finding out.’

  ‘Well, what else can you do? Employ a psychic?’

  ‘Oh, you are so naïve,’ Kirsty said. She rubbed her eyes with the heel of her hands, completing the panda look. ‘Never mind all this asking business – what I’ll do is implement Universal Plan A.’

  ‘What’s Plan A?’ Catherine asked her, perplexed because Kirsty sounded as if she was quoting from a well-known textbook called How to Deal with Men: A User’s Guide.

  ‘Catherine, where have you been all of your life?’ Kirsty exclaimed. ‘Universal Plan A is act as if nothing has happened. You meet a boy, you like a boy, you and boy have sex, boy disappears into the night but you still have an appointment with boy to work on your buttocks on Monday at eleven fifteen. You attend the aforementioned appointment. You act as if none of the above has happened. Either the mystery of it will do boy’s head in and he’ll be forced to asked me if I’m still into him, or he’ll be so grateful I don’t want to pursue it any more that he’ll act as if nothing happened and we’ll be able to put it behind us for ever. And then I’ll know. I’ll know if he really loves me.’ Kirsty looked resolute. ‘That’s a much better way of sorting things out. Never mind asking him straight questions and expecting straight answers. That would blow all his circuits for sure!’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Catherine sounded unconvinced by Universal Plan A. ‘Would it not be better to perhaps try to talk to him about last night – clear the air, at least? Find out what happened so you don’t drive yourself mad thinking about it?’

  Kirsty looked at her friend, her face an expression of pure pity.

  ‘Oh, my dear,’ she said, ‘for one so old you have so very much to learn. Rarely in the history of humanity has a woman actually talking to a man about anything ever got her anywhere. You have to manipulate them, Catherine. It’s the only language they understand. But don’t worry, I actually feel better now that I’ve talked to you. So tell me, where did you go to at the party? If you tell me that you went home and had sex with your husband you owe me five hundred pounds because I bet you months ago that that would eventually happen.’

  ‘No you didn’t!’ Catherine exclaimed.

  ‘I did, I just didn’t tell you.’

  ‘Well, anyway, I didn’t have sex with Jimmy, of course I didn’t. We are well past all of that now. No, what happened was far more weird and strange and … I don’t know what I’m going to do about it, Kirsty. I have no idea how to handle it at all …’

  ‘So tell me then!’ Kirsty shouted. ‘I’ve got hours to kill before I have to go to the gym to ignore Sam.’

  Catherine looked at Kirsty’s empty mug. ‘I’d better make another cup of tea first,’ she said.

  ‘Da-ad,’ Eloise said, stretching out the word, swinging Jimmy’s hand as they walked to school. Jimmy with his rucksack on his back and his guitar, in its case, slung over one shoulder.

  ‘Yes, love,’ Jimmy said. He was watching Leila, who had run a few feet ahead and was mid-performance in her latest staging of Leila –The Musical as she danced and sang her way along the high street.

  ‘Litter bin! Litter bin!’ she sang as she stopped to do star jumps in front of a rubbish bin. ‘People put litter in you and that is goooooooooood! Yeah!’

  One thing Jimmy could say about his younger daughter was she was never afraid to use a jazz hand. He wasn’t sure if that was a good or a bad thing.

  ‘Well … is Mum OK? I know you stayed up all of the night after the party talking, and you’ve stayed in the house all weekend. What does it mean, Dad? Does it mean you’re moving back home for good?’

  Jimmy was very careful not to let the question break the rhythm of his stride at all.

  ‘No, love,’ he said. ‘No, I’m not moving back in. Mum just needed a friend around this weekend to talk to and I’m her friend now.’

  ‘Kirsty next door is her friend,’ Eloise said. ‘You’re her husband and she wanted you around all weekend so that might mean she wants you to move back in, mightn’t it, Dad? It might mean that it’s nearly time?’ Eloise hopped a little, tugging on Jimmy’s hand.

  ‘Ellie,’ Jimmy began purposefully, ‘I don’t think I am going to be moving back home at all. In fact, I might get this job soon. That means –’

  ‘But you would, wouldn’t you?’ Eloise interrupted him, dropping his hand. ‘If Mummy said you could move back home for good, you would, right?’

  Jimmy sighed inwardly. He’d promised Catherine never to lie when it came to questions like this one, that he’d never gloss over the truth or give the girls false hope. Yet how could he, a grown man – a parent – confide in his eight-year-old daughter everything that he was still struggling to come to terms with? Of course he’d move back in if Catherine asked him to, he’d m
ove back in like a shot. But she wasn’t going to, and the nearest he was ever going to get to her now was being her friend, her children’s father, and soon enough even that would be nothing more than a periphery character on the edge of her life as she blossomed and grew and found her own way in life, which she was bound to do. Jimmy knew that Catherine was really only at the beginning of herself, even if she didn’t realise it yet. But how could he explain all of that to Eloise, who just wanted to hear that her daddy would come home if he could?

  ‘I don’t know,’ Jimmy tried to explain uncomfortably. ‘I live on the boat now …’

  ‘Yes, I know, but if Mummy says you can come home you will, won’t you?’ Eloise persisted.

  ‘No, I mean, I would but …’ Jimmy got the distinct feeling he’d said something that he shouldn’t.

  ‘But what?’ Eloise asked him. ‘You do want to come home, don’t you, Daddy? You do miss us, you’ve just said so. So, but what?’

  ‘But Mummy doesn’t want me to move back home,’ Jimmy blurted out before he really knew it. He grabbed Leila’s hand as they came to the zebra crossing and for a few awkward moments Leila performed her self-taught version of Irish dancing over the black and white stripes while Eloise was silent as she walked next to him. Once on the other side Jimmy released Leila again and watched her gallop off through the school gate and into the playground, where she immediately commenced skipping around in a circle, an activity that soon attracted four other participants. Those were the days, Jimmy thought, the days when all you had to do to feel good was skip in a circle.

  He looked down at Eloise, whose face was filled with thunderclouds. She was so like her mother, his breath stalled in his chest.

  ‘Look, it’s not really Mummy’s fault,’ he attempted to explain, resorting guiltily to trotting out the standard speech. ‘These things happen. Sometimes grown-ups who still care about each other just can’t live together, and it doesn’t mean they don’t love their children …’

  ‘I hate her,’ Eloise said quietly as they followed Leila into the playground.

  ‘Now, listen.’ Jimmy stopped and put his hand on his daughter’s shoulders, bending to look in her green eyes. ‘You don’t hate your mummy, you love your mummy.’

  ‘But you’ve said you are sorry and you want to come back, and me and Leila want you to come back. And anyway, in assembly Mrs Pritchard said that when someone’s done something bad you should try to forgive them.’

  ‘That is what Jesus would do,’ Leila counselled as she skipped by.

  ‘Right …’ Jimmy paused, it was hard to argue with the son of God. ‘Well, I expect he would but the thing is, when you’re grown up it’s not always as simple as saying sorry and forgiving people and stuff … like that.’

  ‘Why isn’t it?’ Eloise asked him, pinning him to the spot with her mother’s eyes.

  Jimmy couldn’t answer her for a moment. ‘Because when you’re grown up and you do something wrong, more people get affected. More people get hurt and it’s very complicated.’

  ‘But what about me and her?’ Eloise asked him baldly, nodding at her sister. ‘We’re people, we got hurt – why doesn’t what we think matter? We think you should come home.’

  As Jimmy looked at his daughters he felt the crushing weight of failure on his shoulders. He’d let them down. He’d done this to them and he couldn’t bear to admit it.

  ‘Sometimes,’ he repeated finally, heavily, ‘even though grown-ups love their children very much they just can’t live together any more …’

  He watched his daughter as her eyes darkened like a stormy sea.

  ‘You shouldn’t have got married and had kids if you couldn’t keep loving each other properly. It’s not fair!’

  The bell rang and Eloise snatched her school bag from Jimmy’s hand and ran into her classroom, along with most of the rest of her class.

  ‘That didn’t go quite the way I planned,’ Jimmy said, watching her go, feeling her words stinging like slaps on his skin. She was right, of course. According to all the songs ever written, many of them by him, it was impossible to make somebody love you just because you wanted them to. And yet with Catherine he had truly believed that he would be able to make it happen, because he loved her so much. You couldn’t love a person as much as he loved her and not inspire something similar in them, you just couldn’t. At least that is what he had always believed, and it was hard to let that kind of faith go, even when the facts had discounted it long ago.

  Life had been very simple before Jimmy Ashley got to know Catherine Parkin. There had been the band, music, the band, his friends, the band, a few girls here and there and the band. Jimmy hadn’t needed or wanted anything else. At the time he put his single-mindedness down to his ambition, but just recently he wondered if it wasn’t more to do with his dad dying when he was seventeen. Knowing that his dad wasn’t at home meant he didn’t want to be there either.

  So when his mum told him she was moving away to Aylesbury just as Jimmy was approaching his nineteenth birthday it was with some relief that he told her he was going to be staying in Farmington, sharing a place with the rest of the band. Jimmy liked the feeling of being rootless, he liked the freedom it brought him, the idea that at any moment he could pack a bag and be gone – not that he ever did. But it didn’t matter that he hadn’t done that; what mattered was that he could. He was ready, poised for life.

  And then he met Catherine. No, not exactly met her because she’d always been around on the periphery of his life, the skinny ginger girl who hung out with the blonde bombshell, but it was when he was twenty-one and Catherine was twenty that he first truly saw her. And once he started looking at her he couldn’t stop. She wasn’t good-looking in the traditional sense of the word, the sense in which he and Billy always defined an attractive woman, by her hair, breasts and general availability for sex. Catherine had plenty of hair, that was true, but her body was long and thin, with skin that seemed almost translucent. Jimmy remembered that Catherine reminded him of his mum’s best bone china, the set that, if you held a piece up to the light, you could see your fingers through it.

  He had known that something had happened with Catherine and her friend with the short skirts a few years before he first noticed her properly. He knew that she had dropped out of her A levels and never made it to university and that she still lived at home and worked in the Christian bookshop. But until he saw her smiling at that twenty-first birthday party he hadn’t wanted to know or even thought about knowing any more than that.

  It had started with a conversation – his love for Catherine – a conversation that had begun with Catherine glancing over her shoulder as Jimmy approached her, unable to understand why he wanted to talk to her. There had been a lot of conversations after that. Jimmy became a regular visitor to the Christian bookshop on the days that Catherine worked there and her mother did not. Eventually he managed to persuade her to come to a gig, made her promise that she would try to come so he could show her what he did best. He was proud of his music, but, more than that, he’d hoped that when she saw him up on stage she’d fancy him. It seemed to work on a lot of girls that way, and he’d hoped that, seeing as simply showing an interest in her had won her over this far, then maybe Catherine would be the same.

  Jimmy remembered scanning the crowd at the gig until he caught sight of her, a good head taller than most people there, and then he’d played all night to her, never taking his eyes off her.

  ‘What is it with you and that skinny chick?’ Billy had asked him after he’d tried and failed to get Catherine to stay and have a drink with him after the gig.

  ‘I like her, that’s all,’ Jimmy said, disappointed that he’d played his very best and she still hadn’t let him buy her a drink, let alone fallen into bed with him.

  ‘Don’t go falling in love, mate,’ Billy had warned him. ‘We can’t conquer the world with our music if one of us is in bastard love.’

  ‘Not me,’ Jimmy had told his friend. ‘Never me
.’

  But it was already too late. Before he’d ever kissed her he loved her.

  Actually, getting to kiss her had been a lengthy process that had taken almost four months.

  ‘I can walk you to your door, if you like,’ Jimmy had offered one warm spring evening as he walked her home after a gig she had stayed at long enough to have one drink. ‘I’m also available for coffee and the full range of hot drinks.’

  Catherine had laughed at his joke, standing underneath a cherry tree in full blossom, the scent of it ever after mingling with his memories. The sound of her laughter made him happy.

  ‘You can’t walk me home,’ Catherine told him. ‘My mum doesn’t know I went out to a gig in a pub with a man. She thinks I went to a book group. And she can’t know about you because if she did it would spoil everything. I’m not supposed to listen to rock music.’

  ‘What?’ Jimmy exclaimed. ‘Am I in Footloose? You’re twenty, you can do what you like.’

  ‘I do do what I like,’ Catherine had replied defiantly. ‘Which is why I have to keep things secrets from her. She’s very hard to live with.’

  ‘Then leave home,’ Jimmy told her.

  ‘It’s harder than you think,’ Catherine said, and suddenly she looked hopeless. ‘I don’t know how to.’

  On impulse and after weeks of being too afraid to touch her, Jimmy put his arms around Catherine and held her close to him. He’d waited for a long time in the moonlight, the night silent and still, until her rigid body, which had stiffened instantly at his touch, relaxed and softened. He felt her bones against his.

  ‘I like you, Catherine,’ he said, holding her, her chin resting on his shoulder. He found it was much easier to talk to her when he didn’t have to look at her.

  ‘I’d worked that out,’ Catherine replied. ‘I don’t get it – why you would like me, of all people – but I know that you do.’

  ‘Do you like me at all?’ Jimmy asked her nervously, because in the four months they had spent together he had no idea what she felt about him other than that she tolerated him with a certain degree of fondness.