‘But you’ve still got us!’ Leila said. ‘Even if you did covet that lady, which is a bad sin. But we forgive you because we love you.’
‘I don’t forgive you,’ Eloise said. ‘I hate both of you now,’ but she spoke without any venom in her voice, her bottom lip protruding like it used to when she was much younger.
‘Grown-ups are often a bit rubbish,’ Jimmy said. ‘They are a lot more rubbish than kids, because at least kids always know what they want. And they know what’s good and what’s bad and most of the time they stick to it. Sometimes grown-ups forget all of those things and they stuff up.’ He paused and grinned at his daughter. ‘Do you really hate me, Ellie?’
‘No,’ Ellie said sulkily.
‘And do you really hate Mummy?’ Jimmy asked her. ‘Especially now you know the truth?’
‘Well, she could let you come back now you’re sorry, couldn’t she?’ Eloise asked him. ‘If she wanted to.’
‘She could,’ Jimmy said, feeling his chest tighten with hope. ‘But if she doesn’t want me to then we still can’t be cross with her, OK? Not ever. She loves you two. She’d do anything for you. The pair of you are her sunshine.’
Jimmy looked up at the faultless blue sky. ‘You make her feel like spring is on its way even when it’s a rainy and cold day. So don’t be hard on her any more, OK? I know you don’t want to be.’
‘I have felt bad about it, actually,’ Eloise said. ‘Poor Mummy. It wasn’t like me at all to be so mean to her.’
‘That’s what I said,’ Leila said, chalking with enthusiasm. ‘Turn the other cheek, I said.’ She looked up.
‘Right then,’ Jimmy said, taking a deep breath and feeling the nerves of what he was planning to do when he got back fizzing in his gut. ‘Full steam ahead!’
‘Don’t be silly, Daddy,’ Leila said, returning to her drawing. ‘We don’t have any steam.’
The house was quiet when Jimmy let himself and the girls in through the back door. The living room was still and quiet, dust spiralling in the still air where the sunlight streamed in through the windows. Jimmy looked around. There were two cold cups of tea on the table. Two cups: someone had been round. Probably Kirsty, he reasoned, but still he stared hard at the cups for a moment as if he might be able to determine some masculine aura around one of them. Realising what he was doing, Jimmy blinked and shook his head briefly: this was not him. He had never been, as Lennon put it, a jealous guy. And now was not the time to start.
‘Cat!’ he called out. ‘Cat? Babe? We’re back.’
‘Mum!’ Eloise and Leila shouted at once. ‘Mummy! Mum! We’re here!’
They heard a creak of floorboard upstairs as somebody got out of bed and Jimmy composed himself, methodically shutting down every single image of Catherine’s long white limbs entangled in Marc’s hairy dark ones, which appeared to him on each heartbeat as he heard the sound of footsteps on the stairs. He fully expected his wife to appear, hair tousled, wrapped in a sheet and sleepy from an endless sex marathon.
He’d never been so glad to see her looking so terrible.
‘Hello.’ Catherine yawned, appearing in her pyjamas, rubbing her eyes, with what little make-up she wore ingrained into the skin. She mustered a weary smile. ‘Hello, girls,’ she said, holding her arms out. The girls ran to her and hugged her hard. ‘Oh what a lovely hug.’ Catherine sat down with a bump on the carpet and then toppled onto her back, a daughter in either arm. Jimmy smiled at the three of them giggling helplessly on the carpet.
‘You look terrible, Mummy,’ Leila said, peering at Catherine through the ropes of hair that lay across her face.
‘Thank you, darling,’ Catherine said. ‘I feel pretty awful. How was Nana Pam?’
‘She was great,’ Leila said. ‘We went to the multiplex and McDonald’s, and Nana Pam bought us loads of lovely things and best of all at Nana’s house it was warm so our noses and toes didn’t turn blue like –’
‘They would have done if we were Arctic explorers,’ Jimmy interjected hastily, not keen to lie to Catherine but quite keen not to see that lovely lazy smile disappear from her face quite yet.
‘Yes,’ Eloise added. ‘That’s right. We were playing Arctic explorers at Nana Pam’s house, in the warm and not in the cold at all.’
‘Sounds lovely,’ Catherine said, smiling up at Jimmy. ‘I haven’t had much sleep so I’m a bit … you know, thingy.’
‘Good night?’ Jimmy asked her hesitantly.
‘Weird night,’ Catherine chuckled, ‘but a good one. Kirsty set me up on a blind date with … Alison.’
‘Really?’ Jimmy crouched down on the carpet, feeling rather left out being the only one of them who was perpendicular. ‘What was that like?’ he asked, wishing very much he could lean over and kiss that smile.
‘Tense, bitchy, and in the end sort of good,’ Catherine said. ‘And I think, I actually think, we might be able to co-exist, at the very least. Maybe even be friends again. I don’t know if it’s because I’m tired or if it’s because of Alison but I feel lighter, suddenly. Like I could float away.’ She hugged the two girls to her. ‘But we didn’t get in until six this morning so …’ The word evolved into a self-explanatory yawn.
‘Is that why you are in your pyjamas, Mummy?’ Eloise asked, leaning up on one elbow to peer at her mother’s face. ‘Were you in bed at four o’clock in the afternoon?’
‘ ’Fraid so,’ Catherine said, closing her eyes.
‘Well, I think that’s cool,’ Jimmy said. ‘Living it up, having a good time, remembering you’re still young and beautiful … it’s all good, so why not?’
Catherine screwed up her shut eyes. ‘Because it hurts,’ she moaned.
‘Well, if you like,’ Jimmy suggested hesitantly, ‘if you’re OK to watch the girls for a bit, I’ll pop back to the boat, sort a few bits and bobs out and then I can come back and cook dinner, if you want. I mean, I don’t have to. But as you’re feeling rough, I could. If you liked, but not if you don’t, but …’
‘Would you?’ Catherine asked him, opening one eye. ‘Could you?’
‘Course I can. I don’t just live on ready meals and Pot Noodles when I’m on my own, you know,’ Jimmy lied happily. ‘I can do a roast. Stick a chicken in an oven – how hard can it be?’
‘Then thank you, Jimmy,’ Catherine said, opening both eyes to smile at him. ‘You’re my hero.’
Jimmy looked at her lying there, flanked either side by their daughters, and he knew that if he sat on that carpet for one more second the sight would bring him to tears.
‘Right then,’ he said, jumping up in one agile move that his back would pay for later. ‘I’ll be back in an hour.’
Catherine flopped her head left to look at one daughter and then right to look at the other. ‘You are going to Gemma and Amy’s for tea next Wednesday,’ she told them, wincing as they cheered at the news. Leila kissed her on one cheek and then, after a second of hesitation, Eloise kissed her on the other.
‘Mummy.’ The elder girl propped herself up on one elbow.
‘Yes, darling?’ Catherine said, smiling at her.
‘I haven’t been kind to you very much, about you and Daddy. I thought that it was your fault, but Daddy explained it to me, about how he made you sad and angry even though he loved you and that really grown-ups are stupid a lot of the time, especially him, so don’t blame you for it. So I’m sorry. I love you.’
‘I love you too,’ Catherine said, feeling tears spring into her eyes that somehow made the morning seem all the more bright and clear. ‘You feel very sad, don’t you, about me and Daddy?’ She looked at Leila. ‘You both do.’
The girls nodded but did not speak.
‘It is sad, and I am so sorry,’ Catherine told them, looking at each in turn. ‘And I am so sorry that it happened to you. When I married your daddy and we had you, we never, ever planned that this would happen, that we wouldn’t always be together, all of us. But sometimes life has a way of sweeping you off course when you are
not looking, and turning things upside down. It makes you feel cross and sad, and it takes a while to get used to the fact that nothing is going to be the same any more. So I’m sorry, I’m so sorry you have to feel sad because of me and Daddy getting swept off course. But, you know, we both love you so much and we will always look after you, even if Daddy lives in a boat and we live here. We will always be a family.’
She hugged the girls close to her and kissed each one on the forehead.
‘I expect God is proud of you, Mum,’ Leila said into her hair. ‘Because you are trying very hard, and God loves a trier, Mrs Woodruff says.’
‘Glad to hear it,’ Catherine said.
‘And, Mummy,’ Eloise said. ‘I’m sorry I was horrible to you.’
‘You don’t have to be sorry,’ Catherine said. ‘I know you didn’t mean it.’
‘Mummy …’ Leila said after a moment or two. ‘I was never horrible to you at all, was I? Do I get a treat?’
‘I think we all deserve one,’ Catherine said, pretending to look thoughtful. ‘How about we all … watch Beauty and the Beast until Daddy gets back with the food?’
She covered her ears to protect her pounding head from the cheers, but the meagre shelter of her hands was not nearly enough.
Chapter Twenty-two
ALISON TOOK A long time to get back home because she didn’t want to face Marc and, besides, she knew what would happen the moment she saw him. Her phone had run out of charge at some time in the night so she was spared any demanding or angry messages he might have left her. He’d want to know all about her night with Catherine and she didn’t want to tell him. The time she’d spent with her old friend had gone better than she could have imagined and this morning she felt for the first time in a long while as if some unnamed disjointed part of her life had clicked back into place. Last night was purely hers and she didn’t want to share it with Marc, so after she had left Catherine’s, as tired and as nauseous as she was feeling, she did for the first time what she had either neglected or had been unable to do since she had arrived back in Farmington. She went for a walk in her heeled tan boots and she visited all of their old places.
At last Alison felt as if she had been handed a passport to her past.
Her first port of call was the tree in Butts Meadow; they used to climb and hide out in its canopy for hours, telling stories and jokes, reading comics and, later, magazines. Alison was delighted to see that the tree was still there, its branches bare now and braced for spring. She stood at the foot of its trunk and looked up into its tightly laced branches. It was there as a nine-year-old that Alison had persuaded Catherine to wind the hands on her watch back one hour so they could have some more time to finish their game. The following Monday at school Catherine had shown Alison the bruises on her legs she had suffered for the extra hour.
Then Alison walked through the near-silent town to the coffee shop, ‘Annie’s Kitchen’ as it used to be called. Now it was a PC repair shop, and Alison pressed her nose against the window and peered through, trying to imagine how it used to be.
It was in Annie’s Kitchen that they’d tasted their first cappuccinos, aged twelve, and where Alison had made them come back every single day until they got a taste for its bitter sweetness and could tell the other girls with all honesty that they were bunking off PE to go for a coffee. Thanks to Alison, Annie’s Kitchen had become the hot spot for schoolchildren for several years.
Taking a step back, Alison looked at her reflection, wan and transparent in the glass, and she wondered how long the café had lasted in Farmington after she left, how long it had taken for change to overcome it so that all that remained of that hot and crowded landscape of her childhood existed only in her memory. It was then, with her head pounding and her mouth parched, that she retraced her walk to her son’s school on the hill, the school that had once been hers and Cathy’s.
She felt the heels of her boots sink into the churned mud and grass as she crossed the playing field to find the copse at the back of the school, backing on to a paddock of horses. This had once been, and still was, judging by the butts that littered the muddy floor, the smokers’ den. It was here Cathy would sit and smile and listen while Alison and the other girls smoked like troupers but did not inhale.
Once when they had been alone Alison tried to explain to Cathy that all you had to do to fit in and look cool was to hold the smoke in your mouth and then blow it out again, tapping the ash off the end of your cigarette as often as possible so that it would burn down quicker. Eventually she had managed to get Cathy to try it, but all that had happened was that Cathy had accidentally inhaled and thrown up all over her feet just as the other girls arrived.
Alison sat down on the same low branch of a tree in the copse that she always used to and that somewhere under all the moss and mould must still bear both her and Cathy’s names, carved rather inexpertly with a knife nicked from the canteen, and looked out across the field that glittered fiercely as the sun strove to evaporate the morning dew.
Even on that night when she had left Farmington with Marc she’d always told herself that she was Cathy’s saviour, her crusader and her hero. Was the true sum of their friendship that she was always getting Cathy in trouble for being late, encouraging her to skip school, even trying to get her hooked on smoking? Not to mention breaking her heart. Alison had always thought that she was the strong one, the one that Cathy needed, but now she realised that not only was that no longer true, it had never been true.
The girl she had been sixteen years ago, Alison the hip kid, the sexy girl, the one who was in with the in crowd and fighting off the boys, had always needed Catherine to keep her anchored to the ground. And it was the moment, the very second, that she had chosen to let go of her friend that her life had begun, ever so slowly at first, to spin out of control. But with each revolution had come a fractional increase in speed, like the earth spinning on its axis so fast that you don’t even notice it. So fast that Alison didn’t notice until finally her world spun off its fixing point and she was floating free, flaying around in freefall without a clue how to land safely.
Cathy had always been the strong one, she’d always been the brave one, and if Alison was honest she’d always been the beautiful one too. All Alison had ever managed to do was to burn a little brighter than Cathy for a short while, to burn so angrily that she put her friend in the shade. Now though, Alison’s light was, if not out entirely, then almost extinguished.
And here she was, in this town that Marc had brought her back to. Here with her children and one hundred promises she could not keep.
As Alison sat there, the sun beginning to warm the sky, she understood that now she had to be strong, she had to stand on her two feet alone for the first time in her life. Because now there was only her, and no one else to blame if she got it all wrong.
At eight o’clock Alison headed back to the gym where she showered and changed into the workout gear she kept in her locker, and rang home to speak to her daughters from a payphone in reception. But the home phone was engaged, probably knocked off the hook at one of its many extensions, and it went straight to voice mail.
‘Hi, guys. I stayed at Cathy’s last night. Sorry I didn’t call but it was late before I decided to stay over. I’ll be home in a little while. See you then!’ Alison hung up the phone, knowing that the message would languish undiscovered until someone picked up the phone to make a call, which on a Sunday might not be for hours. She could have used her last twenty-pence piece to dial Marc’s mobile, she supposed. But then it would be him and only him that answered the phone and she still wasn’t ready to talk to him without the buffer zone her children provided, keeping things even and calm between them.
Alison left the gym and was on her way home when she saw a train rumbling into the station. The impulse to be anywhere except at home with Marc overtook her and she caught the next train to town, where she walked and shopped and ate a quiet lunch until she knew she could not put off returning home any
longer. Once or twice she glanced at her dead phone, the screen silent and dark, and wondered what messages might wait for her locked inside it. Perhaps there were none. Maybe Marc was either too angry or not angry enough to phone her and ask her where she was.
Alison didn’t know which situation was preferable.
It was just after four that she finally arrived home, hesitating with her key in the lock, suddenly aware that she had no idea at all how to proceed with her life, and that for some reason she felt guilty. She felt as if she’d been seeing someone behind his back, and she supposed that in a way she had.
But before Alison could turn the key, Marc opened the door. His clothes were crumpled and his face was heavy with dark stubble.
‘Where have you been?’ he demanded, his body barring her entrance to the house.
‘Don’t start,’ she said, ducking under his arm and heading for the stairs. ‘I’ve been out, Marc. I stayed out with Kirsty and Cathy last night and today I just needed some time to myself. And I’m sorry if you actually had to spend some time with your children instead of breezing in and out of their lives in five minutes flat, but frankly you are such a hypocrite. I left a message on the answer phone at least. How many times have you never bothered coming home without ringing?’
Alison had begun to race up the stairs when Marc’s words stopped her in her tracks.
‘Dominic went out last night and he hasn’t come home since,’ Marc shouted at her. ‘I called you, I left you message after message. Where were you?’
Alison turned on her heel and looked at him.
‘My phone went flat. What do you mean, he hasn’t come home? Is he with friends? What do you mean?’ she asked him urgently.
‘You went out,’ Marc began. ‘I was cooking the girls their tea when he came in. He’d obviously been drinking and he reeked of smoke. He said a few things, swore in front of the girls. So I said a few things and … it got out of hand.’
The Accidental Wife Page 32
