The Accidental Wife

by Rowan Coleman

  ‘There is nothing to do, is there?’ Catherine asked.

  ‘Isn’t there?’ he said, looking up at her. ‘Look, on Sunday morning Alison told me she didn’t love me any more. It’s been like a set of scales over the years: the more I loved her, the more I hurt her and the less she loved me. I love her, Catherine, but I’ve used up all the love she had for me at last.’

  ‘What, and now you want me to make things better?’ Catherine asked, frowning.

  ‘No, I just want you,’ Marc said. ‘I want you.’

  Catherine made herself look at him and they held each other’s gaze for what felt like an age. He had just walked back into her life after fifteen years and told her that he wanted her back even though he was still in love with his wife, who was leaving him. She should be furious. She should be incandescent with rage, but all she could feel was the pull in her guts when he told her he wanted her.

  She needed to put distance between her and him right now.

  ‘I have to pick up my daughters,’ Catherine said eventually, scuffing the chair on the carpet as she stood up.

  Marc stood up too.

  ‘Are you happy?’ he asked her, reaching out and catching her hand. His fingers felt hot on hers.

  ‘Yes, thank you,’ Catherine said, unable quite to muster the energy required to withdraw her hand from his.

  Marc drew her hand closer to him, and her treacherous body followed.

  ‘Wouldn’t you like to know,’ he asked her, his voice diminishing to a whisper, ‘if our kiss would still feel the same?’

  He drew her body flush to his and brought his lips to within a whisper of hers.

  ‘I …’ Catherine had no idea what she was about to say and just as her lips formed a nameless word the back door opened.

  She sprung away from Marc as if he had given her an electric shock.

  Jimmy stood in the kitchen doorway and looked from Catherine to Marc. Catherine discovered that she could not look at her husband.

  ‘I came back,’ Jimmy said flatly. Marc turned and smiled at Jimmy, holding out his hand.

  ‘We meet again!’ he said pleasantly.

  At last Catherine made herself look up at Jimmy. His jaw was set, his hazel eyes clouded and dark.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ he asked Marc. Catherine rubbed her hands over her face, trying to wake herself from the stupor she’d been lulled into.

  ‘He just popped in to say hello, to catch up,’ she said, as guilty as Marc was of acting as if nothing had happened but desperate to diffuse the tension in the room. ‘Anyway, why aren’t you in London?’

  Jimmy did not take his eyes off Marc, the fury he felt illustrated quite clearly by the tension that pulled back his shoulders. ‘I got to Euston and I changed my mind. I don’t want work that’s going to take me away from … the girls. It’s not worth it. I came by to tell you I’d pick them up, if you liked. Now I’m here I think we should pick our children up together.’

  Catherine could not hide her surprise at his vehemence. Was Jimmy concerned about her welfare or had he decided to get territorial about two years too late?

  Marc hadn’t budged.

  ‘Well,’ Catherine said, looking at Marc, ‘you’d better go.’

  ‘OK,’ Marc said. ‘It was so good to see you again, Catherine.’

  ‘And you,’ she replied automatically.

  She watched him walk out of the front door and suddenly felt as if all the air had rushed back into the room and she could breathe again. She sat down on the dining chair with a bump.

  ‘What was going on?’ Jimmy demanded. Catherine looked up at him; she’d only ever seen him actually angry once and that was when she vandalised his amplifier soon after Donna Clarke.

  ‘Nothing,’ she said, not sure why she wanted to push his anger a little further. ‘He just came round, that’s all. I didn’t even know he was coming.’

  ‘You were about to kiss him!’ Jimmy shouted, catching his voice as it rose and struggling to contain it. ‘You were going to kiss him, Cat!’

  ‘Jimmy, back off,’ Catherine told him. ‘It was nothing … we just got nostalgic and, OK, maybe things were getting out of hand, but you came back and saved the day. Nothing happened.’

  ‘Is that what you really want?’ Jimmy asked. ‘To let something like that happen so easily between you and him, you just felt like giving it away?’

  ‘Jimmy!’ Catherine gasped. ‘I didn’t plan it, I don’t know if I wanted it. Maybe it would have been one way to finish things … or start something.’

  She had no idea why she was being so antagonistic, it was just that Marc had left, she felt furious and Jimmy was the only one here to turn her anger on.

  ‘He is a married man!’ Jimmy blurted out.

  ‘Yes, I know that, Jimmy, but it’s funny, I thought you’d be the last one to judge what a married man should or should not do.’

  ‘He messed you up, Cat. For years and years he blighted you, blighted our marriage, even the birth of our children. He made it almost impossible for me to keep loving you and impossible for you to love me. Him, that … shit of a man did that. And you let him breeze back in here, and what? You were about to climb back into bed with him?’

  ‘Why do I have to tell you anything?’ Catherine shouted at him, her fury giving her the strength to stand. ‘And who says Marc was the reason I didn’t love you? Maybe I just couldn’t love you. And anyway, none of this has got anything to do with you.’

  The instant the words were out of her mouth Catherine regretted them, but they were out there now and she knew they had hit Jimmy hard.

  ‘This has got everything to do with me,’ Jimmy told her darkly, his anger making him tremble. ‘I’m the one who sat up all night listening to you talk about how confused you were. I’m the father of your kids. I’m the man who … the man who really cares about what happens to you, despite what you may think about me. I’m the one who is always here for you.’ Jimmy stood firm. ‘Whether you like it or not this has got everything to do with me. So you tell me right now – were you going to kiss him back?’

  Catherine flung her hands in the air as she slammed past Jimmy, causing the chair she had been sitting on to sway and topple on the carpet.

  ‘Leave me alone, Jimmy,’ she told him as she marched to the front door. ‘Go back to London and make some money for a change.’

  ‘Were you going to kiss him?’ Jimmy demanded once more.

  ‘Why do you care?’ Catherine turned and asked him. ‘Really, what difference does it make to you?’

  ‘I need to know, Catherine.’ His voice caught, making her pause and take a breath.

  ‘I’m fine,’ Catherine replied. ‘Nothing happened and everything’s fine.’

  ‘Would you have kissed him?’ Jimmy repeated, frustration inhabiting every word.

  Catherine took her hand off the door latch. ‘Yes.’ She threw the word at him with full force. ‘Yes, I think I would have kissed him. But you came in and I didn’t and I’m glad I didn’t. Because it would have been a terrible idea; it would have been the biggest mistake I’d ever made. But, yes, I would have kissed him. I wanted to kiss him.’

  ‘Right.’ Jimmy seemed to deflate in front of Catherine’s eyes, the tension draining out of his muscles. ‘You would have kissed him.’

  ‘Look,’ Catherine said, ‘nothing happened and I’m glad nothing happened. Let’s just leave it at that, OK? I appreciate your concern and everything but, really, we’re arguing over nothing.’

  ‘What about the next time you see him?’ Jimmy asked her. ‘Will you kiss him then?’

  ‘I don’t know!’ Catherine exclaimed before catching hold of her tattered nerves. ‘No, probably not, and anyway, now he’s gone I don’t know what on earth I was thinking. I just got caught up in the moment.’ She chanced a half-smile. ‘Jimmy, I get that you are worried about me, and I appreciate that, but I don’t need you to march in here and start laying down the law. I’ve got to handle this my way and you should
have stayed in London. This mess shouldn’t stop you from getting on with your life.’

  ‘But you are my life,’ Jimmy said almost to himself. He looked up and caught Catherine’s expression. ‘I mean, you and the girls. Like it or not, you are a big part of my life. Whether we are together or not I have to make sure you are OK. You’d do the same for me, right?’

  Catherine thought for a moment and then, dropping her bag, she walked across the small room and put her arms around him, and held him. His heart was still racing.

  ‘Of course I’d do the same for you,’ she said. ‘I needed you at the weekend and you were there for me, but now … I’ve got to sort this out my own way, Jimmy. I’ve got to work out how to handle this. I’ve never really had to stand on my own two feet. I always had Alison or my mother telling me what to do, and then there was you, rescuing me, taking me away to safety. But I can’t let you rescue me this time – it’s not your place to even try any more. I have to sort this out for myself. You understand that, right?’

  ‘I understand that,’ Jimmy said, hugging her briefly back before stepping out of the embrace.

  ‘Coming to get the girls then?’ Catherine asked him.

  Jimmy shook his head. ‘I need some air,’ he said. ‘Unpack my rucksack, that sort of stuff.’

  ‘See you later then?’ Catherine offered.

  ‘Maybe,’ Jimmy said. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘OK.’ Catherine shut the front door behind her, leaving Jimmy standing alone in what had once been his living room.

  He knew he couldn’t rescue Catherine this time. He’d understood that long before he’d seen her on the brink of so carelessly kissing the man that had once ripped her life to shreds. What Catherine didn’t know, what she could not understand, was that Jimmy was still hoping against hope, still believing with that same unshakeable ill-founded faith, that one day it would be Catherine that rescued him.

  Chapter Sixteen

  ‘DO YOU EVER think,’ Kirsty asked Catherine later that night as they sat in her back garden with a cup of tea each, after Kirsty had knocked on Catherine’s living-room window at just after ten, ‘that there is anything out there? You know, like a higher force or something. God sort of thing?’

  Catherine looked up at the dark and crisp March night sky. The evening was chilly and the sky was perfectly clear so that the stars glittered with a particular brightness and a kind of intensity that made Catherine catch her breath to think that just a tiny bubble of atmosphere was keeping her here on the earth instead of wheeling out there lost in the magnitude of space. Only a couple of miles away from where she was sitting now, a huge sucking gaping, gulping universe waited to swallow her up, and after the last few days’ events there was a little part of her that couldn’t quite extinguish the desire to find a pin big enough to burst the bubble so she could go sailing out amongst the stars.

  ‘No,’ she said to Kirsty, her voice perfectly level, despite all the coincidences and consequences that had suddenly beset her, making her feel exactly like a rather panicky chesspiece on some cosmic board. ‘Not really.’

  ‘I do,’ Kirsty said, as Catherine knew she would. ‘I think there has to be. Because otherwise why are we here?’

  ‘Because this planet happened to be the right distance from the sun to allow the production of water and to facilitate life. Probably a billion- or even a trillion-in-one occurrence. Our existence is completely random,’ Catherine told her, because that was what she wanted to believe. It was easier to accept the tangled and chaotic mess her life had snowballed into if it was an accident. If some sentient being had thrust all this upon her then she was not only confused, she was extremely pissed off.

  ‘Now that’s madness; of course that is madness. You don’t get all of this … you and me, your children and love and heartbreak and happiness and music and orgasms from a freak random occurrence. You just don’t. There’s something else out there.’

  Catherine sipped her tea, tasting the sweetness of the sugar on the back of her tongue.

  ‘There are probably aliens,’ Catherine conceded. ‘Given the vastness of the universe it would be insane to think that we lived on the only planet capable of sustaining life in some form. Probably on some planet far away from here male aliens are messing up the lives of female aliens with a wanton disregard for manners or decency.’

  ‘You say you didn’t actually kiss him,’ Kirsty said thoughtfully.

  Catherine had filled her in on Marc’s unscheduled visit that afternoon, about five minutes after she had climbed over the back fence for a cup of tea, and unusually Kirsty had not said a word about it until now. For the first time in their friendship, Catherine realised uneasily, she was waiting to find out what Kirsty was thinking, which meant that what had happened was probably very, very, very bad, as opposed to just really bad, which is what Catherine had been hoping for.

  ‘No, I didn’t actually kiss him,’ she gushed, relieved that Kirsty had broken her unusually sagacious silence. ‘But if Jimmy hadn’t turned up when he did I think I would have kissed him. And what then? What would have happened then?’

  ‘Well, based on my experience, probably foreplay followed by sex, possibly on the living-room floor,’ Kirsty remarked flatly, before adding a touch wistfully. ‘Do you know one of the saddest things about being over thirty is that you never get to just kiss any more. A kiss is always followed by sex these days. Kiss, sex, kiss, sex, kiss sex. Whatever happened to just making out?’

  ‘But what if I had slept with him?’ Catherine went on. ‘What would it have proved? Would it have changed anything except to make a really complicated situation worse? What was I trying to do, steal him back, get revenge? Why would I kiss him?’

  ‘Because you wanted to get your rocks off?’ Kirsty suggested, tipping her head to one side. ‘Not quite as emotionally delving as your reasons why, but the most likely one. It’s like you’re a bottle of milk of magnesia …’

  ‘A what?’ Catherine scowled at her friend.

  ‘And you’ve been sitting on the shelf in the back of the bathroom cabinet since nineteen ninety-four, well past your sell-by date, just going a bit stagnant and mouldy and then suddenly along comes this great big fuck-off complicated situation and shakes you right up. Kick-starts your natural womanly urges. You got turned on by seeing Marc again. He is quite hot in a sort of paunchy, suited way, so I don’t totally blame you. You experienced a physical reaction, not some deep psychological one. Seriously, Catherine, think about it – it’s not rocket science. This whole situation is actually extremely interesting. Beats Desperate Housewives into a cocked hat any day of the week …’

  ‘Oh, I’m so glad that you find my messed-up life interesting,’ Catherine said. ‘At last I’m the interesting one!’

  ‘I wouldn’t go quite that far,’ Kirsty said, with a little smile. She took a sip of her tea, feeling the steam curling out of the mug cool on her cheeks. ‘What is interesting, though, is that you, “Catherine the Nun” as I like to call you sometimes …’

  ‘I’ve never heard you call me that,’ Catherine said.

  ‘Not to your face, obviously. Anyway, you, the world’s most cautious, uptight and sexually stunted woman, nearly threw caution and your pants to the wind over this particular man. You weren’t thinking about consequences and implications. You weren’t thinking at all. Your lady parts were doing all the thinking, and that’s interesting because that is not you. Or maybe it is you, but a you you never knew you were until now.’

  Catherine set down her tea and looked utterly appalled.

  ‘Promise me something,’ she said.

  ‘Anything,’ Kirsty offered.

  ‘Never give up Pilates to become a psychiatrist. The suicide rates would soar.’

  ‘God, you’re ungrateful,’ Kirsty said mildly, gazing up at the sky, her feet up on the bench seat, her knees tucked beneath her chin. ‘I believe in fate, I believe things happen for a reason, like a sort of cosmic symphony. Maybe it’s the stars, or Go
d or … aliens. The two people who were a big part of making you into who you are today are back here for a reason. You can’t just go along pretending that nothing’s changed and go around all day going, “La-de-da-de dah, I nearly snogged the face off my married ex after about five minutes, but everything’s still normal and fine!” You can’t. You have to face up to it all. Face up to fancying him and wanting to shag him, if that’s what it takes.’

  ‘But if anything happened between me and Marc it would be a terrible, terrible mistake,’ Catherine moaned, leaning forward and dropping her forehead to her knees, so that the ends of her hair grazed the patio stones.

  ‘Yes, I know,’ Kirsty said with some emphasis. ‘You are talking to the queen of terrible, terrible mistakes here. But you have to crack a few eggs to make an omelette, right? Whole and grown-up people are made up of all the terrible, terrible mistakes they’ve made and learned from. If you are too afraid to take chances, if you’re too cautious, then you’re bound to get stuck in one great big fat boring motherfucking bastard of a rut.’

  Catherine turned her head sideways and one eye glinted in the reflected light from the kitchen window as she peered at Kirsty.

  ‘I must be going mad because you are starting to sound quite sane,’ she said, straightening her back and sitting up. ‘Even slightly wise.’

  ‘I have hidden depths,’ Kirsty told her. ‘That’s why I’m so popular with men.’

  ‘So, are you telling me to seek Marc out and have sex with him?’ Catherine asked her. ‘Behind Alison’s back, behind Jimmy’s back, no matter what the consequences are?’

  ‘No, I’m telling you to follow your instincts for a bit. Find out why you felt the way you did around Marc, explore the way you’re reacting to him and Alison being back in your life. Perhaps,’ she added carefully, ‘you should see Alison too, see how that goes.’