The Accidental Wife

by Rowan Coleman

  ‘I like you …’ Catherine had begun. ‘I don’t know about anything else, Jimmy. I don’t know if I can do anything else. I’m not sure I know how to love someone.’

  Jimmy pulled back from the embrace just as a warm breeze disturbed the branches of the cherry tree, causing its blossom to waft lightly into her hair, glowing silver in the moonlight.

  ‘Listen,’ he said softly. ‘I don’t know what’s happened to you to make you feel like you can’t love someone, but you can. You of all people could love better than any of those half-asleep idiots in their houses, who think they’ve got it all. You just need to believe that you can be free to grow, and go to gigs and invite blokes in for coffee whenever you like, especially if they are me because I am so in love with you. But anyway, you can do it. You just need someone to show you how.’

  ‘What did you say?’ Catherine asked.

  Puzzled, Jimmy started ticking off most of the major points in his speech on his fingers.

  ‘I said you can find love, grow … er … go to gigs and, um, oh, yeah invite guys in –’

  ‘You said you were in love with me,’ Catherine interrupted, and Jimmy realised she was angry. ‘You shouldn’t go around telling girls that you love them just because you want to sleep with them.’ She pushed herself out of his arms. ‘I’m not that naïve, Jimmy.’

  ‘Huh?’ Jimmy was confused. ‘Did I say that? I never meant to say it out loud, at least not yet. I haven’t spent four months getting you to let me walk you home to freak you out now. But you might as well know I do love you, which is pretty weird considering all we’ve ever done together is talk and have a laugh. But I do love you and I’m not even trying to get you into bed, talking about extreme weirdness. I just want to be near you. Obviously I’d like to have sex with you too, but not until you’re ready. I can wait for as long as it takes, and for the record, I actually mean that. I love you, Cat.’

  Catherine was silent for a long time before she said anything.

  ‘Cat?’ she asked.

  ‘Yeah, sorry,’ Jimmy said, shrugging. ‘It’s your eyes, cat’s eyes. I won’t call you that again.’

  ‘I like it,’ she said. ‘It’s new. And I like you, Jimmy, a lot, but maybe not like you want me to, and I don’t know why because you are a great guy.’

  Jimmy took one of her hands. ‘Plus way sexy too,’ he added.

  ‘Yes,’ Catherine had smiled, slowly. ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Never thought I’d be trying to get a girl to like me,’ Jimmy said. ‘Normally it’s the other way round.’

  ‘Perhaps it’s the thrill of the chase you can’t give up,’ Catherine suggested. ‘Maybe once you’ve got me you won’t want me any more. I’m not very experienced at sex, for example.’

  Jimmy had had to take a minute to think about that.

  ‘Are you implying that I may have a chance of “getting you”, as you put it?’ he asked her. Catherine took a step closer to him.

  ‘What if I don’t fall in love with you?’ she asked him.

  ‘I’m Jimmy Ashley,’ he told her. ‘Of course you are going to fall in love with me.’

  And then, as the cherry blossom drifted down, he had kissed Catherine for the very first time, completely certain that he was right.

  Only now, with the benefit of hindsight, could he finally accept that he had been wrong. Because no matter how much Catherine cared for him, desired him, protected him and relied on him, she had never once looked him in the eyes and told him she loved him.

  Which meant that Eloise and the pantheon of rock was right. He never should have believed that he could make the impossible happen.

  Jimmy pulled himself back into the present as his younger daughter, seeing him hanging his head, hopped over.

  ‘Did Ellie be mean to you, because never mind, because she’s mean to me all the time and she doesn’t mean it really.’

  ‘Right oh,’ Jimmy said. ‘Come on, love, I’ll take you round to your classroom.’

  ‘Mind if we join you?’ Jimmy turned round to find Alison at his side, her hair brushed and smooth, just the right amount of make-up on, a pristine white wool coat and caramel-coloured boots. It seemed as if the night of the party hadn’t impacted on her at all. Nevertheless, when he looked at her he was conscious of his fifteen-year-old leather jacket creaking at every movement.

  ‘So that was some party,’ he said, not knowing exactly what he should say to this woman, the other woman. Yes, she had betrayed his wife, but if she hadn’t betrayed Cat then there was a good chance he would never have got together with her, which, despite everything, was something he couldn’t regret.

  ‘Yeah, I’m sorry about that. Weird or what?’ Alison said, making Jimmy smile because she sounded about fifteen instead of thirty-two.

  ‘Weird is one way of saying it,’ Jimmy said. ‘Definite proof of a small world and all that bollocks.’

  ‘Is she OK?’ Alison asked him. ‘Not too totally freaked?’

  ‘She is too totally freaked,’ Jimmy said, unable not to smile again. ‘Her head is completely done in.’

  ‘Heavy, man,’ Alison replied, and the pair of them chuckled. Once again Jimmy wondered if he should be trying harder not to like her as they reached the younger girls’ classroom door. Catherine hadn’t explicitly said he was not to like her, but Jimmy felt on balance it was probably more honourable not to.

  ‘Come on then,’ Leila said, offering her hand to Amy, who was half hidden in the skirts of her mother’s coat. ‘You can come in with me if you like and sit next to me at snack time. Hopefully we won’t have raisins today because I can’t eat them because they look like dead flies with their arms and wings pulled off, don’t they?’

  Hesitantly Amy took Leila’s hand, and with one last glance at her mother, followed Leila into school.

  ‘That’s the first time since she’s started that she’s gone in without a fuss,’ Alison said, suddenly reaching out and holding Jimmy’s forearm. He looked at her perfectly manicured hand on the arm of his leather jacket and noticed she was not wearing her wedding rings. Both her painted nails and bare fingers made him feel anxious, he couldn’t exactly pin down why.

  ‘It would be so great if Amy and Leila would make friends.’

  ‘Would it?’ Jimmy asked her. ‘Or would it be seriously complicated and difficult?’

  Alison looked at her watch as if she had anywhere particular to be.

  ‘Can you come for a coffee with me?’ she asked Jimmy.

  Jimmy looked at his watch as if he had anywhere particular to be, and for once he did; he had a train to catch up to town, but not for another half-hour, when the cheap rate started. He could go for a coffee with her but whether or not he should was another matter entirely.

  ‘I don’t know …’ he began.

  ‘Why? Don’t want to fraternise with the enemy?’ Alison asked him. She laughed but there was no humour in it. ‘Please, Jimmy, I think we have a lot in common in all of this, you and I.’

  ‘But I’m on Cat’s side,’ Jimmy said.

  ‘Oh God, Jimmy, we’re not at school!’ Alison exclaimed, which for a second made Jimmy feel exactly like he was.

  She smiled at him, tucked her arm through his and dragged him in the direction of the coffee shop, tossing her hair over her shoulder.

  Jimmy put up no resistance as he went with her, telling himself he wasn’t fraternising with the enemy, he was going undercover.

  ‘So you, like, slapped your husband,’ Jimmy said conversationally once Alison had ensconced them on the sofa at the back of the coffee shop. The location was a little too clandestine to make Jimmy feel entirely comfortable. It was a little bit too much as if they were meeting in secret, behind people’s backs, and he felt bad for feeling relieved about it. ‘How did that go down?’

  ‘He dealt with it,’ Alison said, loading her skinny latte with sugar. ‘Just like he deals with everything. He’s a master at it. It’s funny really, because the man I met, the man Cathy met back then, i
sn’t there now. I don’t know where he is. I don’t even know when he disappeared. But when I … we fell in love with him he was tough and dangerous but sort of vulnerable and gentle too. Every teen girl’s – no, every woman’s – idea of heaven. Then he changed, and he changed because of me, because I made him change. But he changed the good bits, the bits I loved, and kept the bad bits. The bits that sleep around with other women right under my nose.’

  Jimmy thought about the ladies’ loos in The Goat pub.

  ‘Well, nobody’s perfect,’ he said. Alison looked up at him over the rim of her coffee cup with her tranquil blue eyes.

  ‘Did you cheat on Cathy?’ she asked him ‘Is that why you two aren’t living together any more?’

  Jimmy shrugged and nodded. The whole town knew about him and Cat – there was no point in trying to cover it up. ‘It was only ever once, though.’

  He waited for Alison to pass judgement but she didn’t. She just watched him through the steam from her drink and said finally, ‘Have you noticed that all of us have been unfaithful to Cathy in some way? We’ve all betrayed her.’

  ‘Yeah, but me and Cat don’t have anything to do with you and him and her,’ Jimmy said, shifting in his seat and glancing at his watch again. ‘We’re not part of that.’

  ‘I think you are,’ Alison said. ‘I think the mistakes we all made back then affected your chances of making it work with Cathy. I think I stole her life and she got mine by mistake.’

  ‘What?’ Jimmy leaned forward in his seat. ‘Alison, what are you talking about?’

  ‘I don’t love Marc any more,’ Alison said, finding that once she said it out loud it was oddly liberating. ‘I’m thinking of leaving him, which is a freaky and terrifying thought, but if I can get myself together and find the guts I need to be on my own for the first time ever in my life, maybe it might be the right thing to do. What really worries me is that I haven’t ever loved him, not from the beginning. I wanted him, yes, I was jealous of Cathy having him right from the moment I set eyes on him. I was obsessed with him, to the point that nothing else mattered but finding a way to be with him. Not my mum and dad, not Cathy, even the risk I was taking having unprotected sex with him – I’d do anything just to have those few minutes of his attention …’

  ‘OK,’ Jimmy said, tapping the table. ‘Slightly too much info there.’

  ‘Well, Cathy did it too,’ Alison said, looking slightly hurt.

  Jimmy was silent. He didn’t want to think about that.

  ‘Anyway,’ Alison went on, ‘what’s been driving me mad ever since I saw Cathy again and you is this – what if I never loved him? What if I’ve conducted the last fifteen years of my life, had his children, put up with what I did based on the false idea that I loved him more than anything, when really I didn’t? When really I tricked myself into thinking I was having feelings I wasn’t to justify what I did?’

  Jimmy looked over his shoulder as if he were hopeful of making a quick exit through the unisex toilets.

  ‘Look,’ he said after a while, ‘I’m not really qualified for all this chick stuff, this “what if” bullshit. Want to discuss who’d win in a riff-off between Hendrix and Clapton then I’m your man. Hendrix, by the way, every time. But chick stuff – do I love him, does he love me – not really my field of expertise.’

  That wasn’t exactly true. In fact, Jimmy spent quite a lot of his many lonely nights on the boat thinking about exactly that, but he didn’t want anyone, least of all Alison, to know.

  ‘But this is important to you too,’ Alison said.

  ‘Er, how exactly?’ Jimmy asked.

  ‘I stole Marc from Cathy, like a jealous child snatching a toy. I stole him and I think I might have stolen her life too. Maybe if he’d stayed with her things would have been different, right? Maybe he would have been different. If he’d stayed with her he might have changed for her, but the right way. By dropping all the bad bits and keeping all the good. He might have been a whole man for her. She might have been able to keep her baby.’

  ‘And what about your baby?’ Jimmy asked her. ‘What would have happened to Dominic?’

  Alison thought of her son, whom she had delivered half asleep to the school gate earlier that morning, his tousled hair pulled over his eyes in a bid to try to hide the eyeliner he had applied that morning. She thought about him, his bravery and determination, and her heart ached. She’d like to think she would have kept him whatever happened, but she remembered the terror that had engulfed her the second she realised what was happening to her body. And the absolute total determination she had to have Marc by her side while she had his baby, no matter what. If Marc had not yielded to her persuasions and her demands then she couldn’t be sure she wouldn’t have done the same as hundreds of other lonely and frightened seventeen-year-olds, the same as Cathy had done. All that mattered, she told herself, was that he was here now and that she loved him.

  ‘Dominic exists and I love him,’ Alison said. ‘He’s a fact.’

  ‘All right then,’ Jimmy said. ‘So what’s the point of the “what ifs”? We’ve all got a long list of what ifs, not just you and me but everyone in this coffee shop, in the entire bloody world. What if Marc Bolan never wrapped his Mini round a tree … what if Mark Chapman hadn’t shot Lennon in the back of the head … what if I hadn’t let my wife find me with another woman? But you can’t dwell on them, it would drive you mental.’

  ‘You can try to put things right, though,’ Alison said.

  ‘What?’ Jimmy asked her. ‘Is it coffee you’ve got there or vodka?’

  ‘If Cathy had stayed with Marc and I’d stayed in Farmington then maybe, maybe when you finally looked up from your guitar and noticed girls, you would have noticed me. I’d had a crush on you for the longest time. All I could think about was you. If I’d never met Marc I would have still been hanging around waiting for you to notice me. I’d have been standing right in front of you when the right moment came.’

  ‘Yeah, but,’ Jimmy started, tapping his fingers restlessly on the arm of the leather sofa, ‘I didn’t fall for Cat because she was right in front of me. I fell for her because she’s her, beautiful and brave and funny and clever and sexy and … look, no offence. You’re a nice-looking girl and everything, but you’re not her.’

  ‘I know that, but maybe you should have just had a teenage fling with me and we both would have moved on with our lives, found the right path instead of getting caught up with them. I think those two should have been together.’ Alison paused and leaned a little closer to Jimmy. ‘And I think we need to put it right.’

  ‘What?’ Jimmy leaned backward as far as the sofa’s plump cushions would allow. ‘You think what?’

  ‘I know my husband,’ Alison said urgently. ‘I know that sooner or later his curiosity is going to take him back to Cathy. He is going to want to see how he feels around her, if he can recapture anything that he’s lost. He’s going to want to know how he makes her feel. And I’m going to let that happen. If he wants to try and get back anything of what he once had with her then I won’t stand in his way because I want that too; I want her back too.’

  ‘Look, if you want to be Cat’s friend again then that’s cool. I actually think she might go for it,’ Jimmy said. ‘But there is no way, no way at all, that I’m letting that creep into my wife’s life to mess with her all over again.’

  ‘But she’s not your wife any more, is she? Not really,’ Alison said.

  ‘She’s … look, I know that, but I still care about her,’ Jimmy answered, stung from the slap of reality that Alison had dealt him.

  ‘I just want to know,’ Alison said. ‘To know if somehow we ended up with each other’s lives. And to ask you if …’

  ‘What?’ Jimmy asked her.

  ‘If you’d like to have that teenage fling with me now,’ Alison said, with a small dangerous smile.

  ‘I’ve got to go,’ Jimmy said, getting up quickly.

  ‘Look, I’m sorry.’ Alison reached out
and held his wrist. ‘I didn’t mean to embarrass you but I just had to say it. I still fancy you like mad, Jimmy.’

  ‘You say you want to be friends with Cat again,’ Jimmy said. ‘Sleeping with me isn’t going to help.’

  ‘I know that,’ Alison said. ‘And I knew how you’d react but I had to ask you because I had to know. And now I do. See? That’s one “what if” that won’t drive me crazy any more.’

  ‘I have to go.’ Jimmy broke her grip and left.

  As Jimmy’s train rolled into the station he hesitated. Maybe he shouldn’t get on the train after all, maybe he should go straight back round to the house and see how Cat was. Alison might be right and Marc might be heading round there now. He had no idea how his wife would react to seeing her first love again, no idea what would happen. But given that he’d only just worked out that he had never stopped loving her, not even for the fifteen minutes in the ladies’ loo in The Goat pub, he wasn’t quite ready for her to move on yet. He wasn’t quite ready to deal with her being in love with someone else. If he was there at home with her, then nothing could happen. He’d be able to preserve this precious non-relationship they had for a little longer. The train squealed to a halt alongside the platform and a handful of people got out, walking past Jimmy as he stared at the carriage.

  He’d just told Alison that dwelling on ‘what ifs’ would drive you mental, but wasn’t that exactly what he was doing now? In the scheme of things, in the big picture, it didn’t matter if he loved Catherine or not. What mattered was that she did not love him, she never had. He’d thought he had a choice, but he hadn’t.

  With a sense of finality Jimmy got on the train and swung himself into a seat by the window. As he watched Farmington slip out of view he clutched the neck of his guitar as if it were a life jacket. He knew there was nothing that he could do now.

  Chapter Fifteen

  ALISON LOOKED AT herself in the wall of mirrors in the private exercise room as she waited for Kirsty. Her cheeks were pink, her eyes were hot and glittering and she hadn’t done a stroke of exercise yet.