The Accidental Wife

by Rowan Coleman

  ‘No, Dom, I’ve decided. I’m not leaving your dad. I know things aren’t perfect, but, well, your dad and I talked. I’ve made my feelings really clear, and it’s shocked him. It’s hurt him and I don’t think he really understood before what was at stake, what he risked losing. I think that if I … if we make an effort now, then we can really come through. We can stick together. I think this time your dad really listened to me and understood how I felt. I think he’ll change, Dom. I think he’ll do his best to keep us all together. It’s what he wants and it’s what the girls want, and so then it’s what I want too. And I need you to understand that and to support me. Who knows, perhaps once things have calmed down you’ll start to get on better with Dad.’

  ‘You’ve talked and he’s changed,’ Dominic said, shaking his head as if he hadn’t heard half of what Alison said. ‘When did you talk? Tonight, after I’d gone? Tell me, Mum, when did you talk?’

  ‘Last Sunday after the party,’ Alison said. ‘He’s been really good since. I think he’s tried to be considerate. He’s given me space, he hasn’t tried to change my mind, even though that’s what he really wants, even though that is why he got so angry with you tonight. I thought he would do this one thing that I expected him to do right away. But he hasn’t done it, Dom. I’d know this time if he had been with … someone else. He gets sort of calm and still for a while. Peaceful. Not at all like he was tonight. He was that way because he is fighting to keep us. He’s going about it all wrong but still he’s trying, and after fifteen years I have to let that mean something. Dom, I’m not saying we’re all just going to be a happy family again. But when I saw how upset the girls were tonight I just knew I had to try, and if your father is prepared to try too then, who knows, we might just make it.’

  Alison felt a surge of hope bubble in her chest as she finished her speech, realising that she had been attempting to convince herself as much as her son.

  ‘Last Sunday,’ Dom said. ‘That’s funny, because on Monday I saw with him with another woman.’

  ‘What?’ Alison was stunned into silence for a few minutes. ‘What do you mean? How – you were supposed to be in school?’

  ‘We had a free period and it was almost the end of school so I went down the canal with some of the other kids,’ Dominic said.

  ‘You saw your Dad in the park with another woman?’ Alison laughed. The image was so absurd, it was as if Dominic had somehow glimpsed into the past.

  ‘No, I was walking on the road down the bridge and I saw him at the door of a house. I was going to sneak by because I didn’t want him to see me but then the door opened, and it was that woman. The woman that was at the party, Mum. Tall, with red hair. She only had PJs on and it was gone two. She let him in and closed the door.’

  ‘He was at Cathy’s,’ Alison whispered, almost to herself. ‘I knew he’d go there. I knew he would …’

  ‘That’s not all,’ Dom said. Alison looked up at him. ‘He was in there for a while, so I thought I’d hang about, you know, see if he came out, ask him what he was doing. But he was ages so I crept up and looked through the window. She’d got dressed by then. They were holding each other; it was pretty obvious what was going to happen next. What had probably already happened. I didn’t want to see that so I legged it. I didn’t know how to tell you, Mum. I hoped I wouldn’t have to tell you but then you said all of that stuff about trying and hope, and I had to.’

  ‘I really thought I’d know if he’d been with Cathy,’ Alison said bleakly. ‘I really thought I would.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Dom said. ‘But I’m not lying.’

  ‘I know,’ Alison told him. ‘I know.’

  She felt something flare in her chest, a reignited spark of those old passions, fury and jealousy, which had driven her to take Marc from Cathy fifteen years ago. That’s what had been between her and Marc at the beginning. And after any love they might have managed to conjure up between them had finally vanished for good, that was all that remained: fury and jealousy.

  ‘So when you thought he was hurt and worried and upset he was already trying to get off with someone else,’ Dominic said triumphantly. ‘Don’t you see that’s why we can’t go on like this? You have to end it.’

  Alison was silent.

  ‘I’m going to bed, before he gets in,’ Dom said, kissing her on the head as he got up. ‘I’m sorry I had to tell you, Mum, but can you see now why I got so angry?’

  Alison nodded. ‘I see,’ she said.

  Once her son had gone up she found that she was crying. But not because Marc had betrayed her. Because her friend had. And for the first time in sixteen years Alison knew what that felt like.

  Chapter Eighteen

  CATHERINE LAY IN bed and listened to her empty house. When it was her weekend to have the girls they would be downstairs by now, bashing about in the kitchen making themselves cereals, slopping milk onto the floor and sloshing juice into cups. And then they’d eat, sitting on the carpet in front of the TV because it was the only day of the week their mother would let them get away with it.

  But this weekend they were away with Jimmy and the house was quiet. No, it was more than quiet, it was hollow. It echoed with their absence.

  Catherine stretched her fingers above her head and her toes towards the bottom of the bed, sat up and paused, not for the first time, to reflect on how her absent family had been thrown off balance by everything that had happened. The return of Marc and Alison hadn’t just pitched her into turmoil, but the feelings and thoughts of those around her too, including her children, and she couldn’t stand that.

  It frightened Catherine to death when she thought about the sane and steady life that she had worked so hard to shore up over the last couple of years being threatened, and she knew she would do whatever she could to try to protect the makeshift harmony that she had created for her daughters. But, just as she was resolved to do that at any cost, a stealthy image of Marc and the remembrance of the heat of his touch intervened, so that her heart beat a little faster and she felt the blood pumping in her veins, and for a few terrifying seconds she had the impulse to throw everything away just to feel like that again, and hang the consequences. She had felt like that once before and it hadn’t ended well.

  Catherine got out of bed and pulled the curtain back. It was cold outside, a sharp blue sky promising chilly sunshine. She pressed the heat of her cheeks against the cool glass for a moment until the thought of what might have happened next if Marc had kissed her faded to a bearable level.

  It was all very well for Kirsty to tell her to rejoice in being fully alive, but when you weren’t used to it, it wasn’t that easy. It was like waking up one hundred years in the future; everything seemed louder, faster and a whole lot more frightening, a world full of terrifying possibilities.

  Despite what had happened on Monday Jimmy had still been around for most of the week. He had picked up the girls and taken them to school every other day, and on Tuesday he’d walked with Catherine to work because he knew she was dreading it, even if she didn’t say so. He’d had dinner with them on Wednesday night and on Thursday had come round to replace the rotting floorboard in the bathroom, a job he’d been promising to do for at least three months. He’d been there, but at the same time he’d been absent too.

  On Friday afternoon, he’d come round to pick up the girls’ luggage before he collected them from school to take them straight off to his mother’s. He’d stood there in silence, holding up the rucksack while Catherine folded in changes of clothes for each of them and then carefully stowed favourite toys and books.

  They hadn’t talked about what Jimmy had seen on Monday since then, but Catherine felt that she should be talking about something, because it just wasn’t like the two of them to be silent and polite, so she’d asked him a question.

  ‘Are you sorry you missed the audition for session work? I feel so bad that you missed it because of me. Maybe if you called them now it wouldn’t be too late.’

  Jimmy
shook his head, bending to scoop one of Leila’s soft toys from the floor where Catherine had dropped it. He picked it up and squeezed it tenderly before dropping it into the bag.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I was in two minds about it anyway, and besides, I’m needed here right now.’

  By his usual standards he was being singularly uncommunicative and although Catherine could understand that walking in on her and Marc had made him angry, territorial even, and unusually macho, she couldn’t work out why he’d seemed so sad. Catherine hated to see him sad.

  ‘I just don’t like to think about you missing out, because of me,’ she said. ‘Because of my stupid mess. I can manage without you, if you want to go.’

  ‘I know,’ Jimmy said with a shrug, staring at the toes of his cowboy boots. ‘Session work is for losers anyway. I’ve got the band to think about. Right now the band need me. We’re at a crucial writing stage. Plus we’ve got that wedding at the Holiday Inn, week after next.’

  ‘Jimmy?’ Catherine had asked him uncertainly, afraid that his sadness was a symptom of regret. ‘Do you ever wish you’d never met me, that we’d never got together and you’d never become a dad so young? Because then you wouldn’t feel obliged to hang around me now and make sure I don’t make a total idiot of myself.’

  Jimmy had looked at her for a long time.

  ‘I felt like that once, on one night for about half an hour, and that was enough to end our marriage.’ He’d shrugged and, as Catherine put the last toy in the rucksack, bent to strap it up. ‘But I’ve never felt that way for one moment before or since. Why do you ask? Is it because you think if you didn’t have me or the children in your life you’d be free now? Free to run off with arse-face.’

  Catherine had known her laugh at the insult was probably ill advised, but it escaped before she could repress it. Jimmy glowered at her.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, composing her features. ‘It’s just – look, I know you think I’m an idiot and possibly some kind of slut for getting as close to him as I did after seeing him again for about five seconds, but you know me, Jim. You know that in the last twelve years you’re the only person I’ve … I’m not the kind of woman that jumps into bed with people for the sake of it. I got swept away in the moment, in the past. I know what’s at stake and besides, I’ve never stolen another woman’s husband yet and I’m not going to start now. Please don’t be angry with me, please don’t be so … disappointed in me. For one thing, I can’t take it. I need you to like me because what you think of me matters to me more than what anyone else thinks, and for another, Kirsty says you are being a right royal hypocrite and that I should punch you for being so up your own arse.’

  This time Jimmy’s mouth twitched a little, but only a little.

  ‘Maybe it’s just hitting me now,’ he said. ‘Maybe that’s why I’m so … down.’

  ‘What is hitting you? Marc and Alison turning up?’

  ‘No, us, breaking up. The end of our marriage.’ Jimmy sighed and looked at the ceiling. ‘Look, I’ve got a reputation, girls hang around me a lot of the time. I don’t really blame them: I am Jimmy Ashley, after all. But for what it’s worth I want you to know that I haven’t been with anyone else in twelve years either. Apart from Donna Clarke in the ladies’ loos of The Goat. At first I let you think I did go with other women because I was angry at you for not forgiving me, and I wanted to hurt you even more. And then I did it because I thought I actually might meet someone new and sometimes, recently, just because it seems easier to pretend that I’m something I’m not. That version of me is a lot easier to live with, the version that doesn’t give a bollock about what he’s messed up.’ Jimmy shrugged. ‘I know you have every right to see other men and move on, even arse-face, if you really want to – I know that – but when I saw you with him then it hit me. We’re over. We’re really over, and sooner or later everything will change for ever because we can’t go on like this and live our lives.’

  Catherine had been silent for a moment, listening to the radiators rumbling against the cold and the whoosh of the traffic splattering through the puddles outside the window, and to her astonishment, as Jimmy’s words sank in, she found she had to fight the well of tears in her eyes and blink them away.

  ‘You’d better get the children,’ she said, dipping her head to use her hair as a curtain as she composed herself. ‘Got all their stuff?’

  Jimmy picked up a big and battered old backpack, the same one he’d had when he left home at the age of nineteen.

  ‘Right here,’ he said, mustering a smile. ‘Although why they need this much stuff for a weekend at my mother’s I don’t know.’

  ‘Especially when she’ll send them home with a whole new wardrobe of pink anyway,’ Catherine said, grateful for his smile. ‘Never could get her head round redheads and hot pink.’

  The pair stood up and eyed each other cautiously.

  ‘Have a good weekend,’ Jimmy said, hugging her briefly. ‘And take care of yourself.’

  ‘I will,’ Catherine promised him. ‘And you make sure you keep the girls warm and dry. I want them on that rust bucket for the least amount of time possible. Give my love to your mother.’

  ‘Seriously?’ Jimmy asked her wryly. ‘She won’t send you any back, you know.’

  ‘Well, give her my regards, then,’ Catherine told him with a smile. ‘I can be magnanimous.’

  And then on impulse she had thrown her arms around him and hugged him until his arms had encircled her waist and he’d held her.

  ‘No matter what has to change you’ll always mean the world to me,’ she told him.

  ‘Same,’ Jimmy said, looking briefly into her eyes. ‘And all of that bollocks.’

  Eloise had not been sad but she had been angry. She had been silently, resolutely furious with Catherine since Monday afternoon when it became clear that Jimmy was not moving back in for good.

  The eight-year-old had made a point of not holding Catherine’s hand on the way home, and pretending she was asleep before Catherine could even kiss her good night.

  At breakfast the following day she had been surly and rude, and on Thursday Leila had watched open-mouthed as Eloise told her mother to mind her own business and shut her mouth, storming upstairs just as they were about to leave for school.

  ‘All you did was ask her if she’d remembered her gym kit!’ Leila exclaimed with theatrical despair. ‘Mummy, you are going to tell her off now, aren’t you? She’s being extremely naughty and disrespecting you!’

  ‘I know,’ Catherine had said, putting her hand on Leila’s shoulder and looking up the stairs. ‘But she’s a bit upset at the moment and cross with me …’

  ‘Cos you won’t let Daddy move back in?’ Leila said matter-of-factly, crossing her arms.

  ‘Yes,’ Catherine looked at her younger daughter with some concern. ‘How do you know, poppet?’

  ‘Because Ellie told me and because I know anyway,’ Leila said with a shrug. ‘I wish Daddy would come back too. Ellie says he loves you and he loves us, but you don’t love him, and you probably don’t love us very much either otherwise you’d let him move back in.’

  ‘Oh, Leila,’ Catherine said, kneeling to hug the five-year-old tightly. ‘You know that I love you two so much, don’t you?’

  Leila looked at her mother with her father’s hazel eyes.

  ‘I know that, Mummy,’ she said. ‘I told Ellie that you love us about a million otherwise you’d really kill us if you knew about the toffees under Ellie’s bed, but you do know and you haven’t killed us, so you must love us. Plus, mums must always love their children, even when they are bad, a bit like God always loves us even if we let him down, which we do quite a bit.’

  Catherine put the palm of her hand on the heart-shaped curve of Leila’s face.

  ‘You are completely right.’

  ‘Well, then,’ Leila said, ‘I don’t know what all the fuss is about. I told Ellie I love you and Daddy about a million and her about four to five hundred, and we
all love each other as much as we can and that’s that.’

  ‘And what did Ellie say?’ Catherine asked her gently.

  ‘Well, she said I was a stupid little baby and didn’t understand anything,’ Leila replied with a cheerful shrug.

  ‘You are not a stupid little baby,’ Catherine told her. ‘You are a very clever, wonderful girl.’

  ‘I know,’ Leila said. ‘God gave me an extra big brain. So are you going to shout at Ellie now? I think you have to shout at her, Mummy, or she’ll become a monster. I can come and watch, if you like.’

  ‘I’m not going to shout at her,’ Catherine said. ‘But I’ll go and talk to her and fetch her down, otherwise we’ll be late for school.’

  ‘Good luck, Mummy,’ Leila said, holding a hand out for Catherine to shake. ‘May the love of Christ be with you.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Catherine said as she advanced up the narrow stairwell. ‘I think I’m going to need him.’

  And she hadn’t been wrong. Eloise had kicked and screamed, flounced and shouted all the way to school. It was so unusual, so out of the ordinary for Catherine to be at odds with either of her children, that she felt at a loss to know what to do, and she wished that just for once she would be able to give them exactly what they wanted instead of only ever being able to offer them cut-price solutions and an imperfect bargain-basement life.

  This time, like too many times before, she couldn’t make their dreams come true.

  Jimmy peered out from the hatch to his boat and looked up at the rain. It was slicing down in thick sheets, colliding with the tin roof of the boat with a violent clatter.

  He looked back at the girls, who were wrapped as one in his duvets, sitting on the bed-cum-seat, cowering from the leaky roof.

  ‘We’ll try again in a minute,’ Jimmy repeated. His mother had been out when they arrived in Aylesbury on Friday evening. After mooring the boat they waited for a break in the weather until it became apparent that no break was going to come, and Leila said she thought they’d be drier outside anyway. With no umbrellas, they ran the two hundred yards or so from the towpath to his mother’s house and Jimmy knocked on the door, but no one answered.