“This says we’ve arrived,” he’d told Alison on the night they moved in, kissing her on the forehead. “Who’d have thought that you and I would have made it all the way here, hey? House, kids, dog—the works. We’ve beaten the odds, Al, we’ve proved them all wrong.”
Which had made Alison wonder—who did they have to prove anything to now? Except themselves.
Still sitting immobilized on the bed, Alison looked around at her new bedroom, the cellophane of the mattress squeaking beneath her bottom as she twisted to survey the mountain of boxes that required unpacking.
And she decided she would cry after all. Just then, crying seemed about the only thing she was confident she could do.
Four
Catherine was out of breath when she hit the school gate at three fifteen because she had run the length of High Street from work in order to be there in time. Her job, working as an administrative manager at a local PR agency, Stratham and Shah, couldn’t exactly be called a career, but the hours fit perfectly into the school day as long as she was prepared to sprint there and back every morning and afternoon. Aside from the vital if meager income it provided, it also gave her something to do outside of the house and apart from the girls. There wasn’t much glamour in binding presentations or managing the online calendar for the practice, but Catherine was very good at it. She enjoyed bringing order to the often chaotic and capricious office and garnered quiet satisfaction from the frequency with which the word “indispensable” was used in connection with her name.
Eloise was already on the playground, hopping randomly, her head bowed in concentration as if each hop was being placed with precise care. Catherine stopped just inside the gate to catch her breath and watched her daughter in her one-legged endeavors, her red hair flying in all directions, her green eyes glittering with laughter.
“Mum!” Eloise spotted her and raced up to her at full pelt, using her mother’s body to break her speed.
“Guess what, it’s so exciting!” Eloise hopped on Catherine’s toes. “I’ve got a new best friend! She started today and her name is Gemma and she’s got a sister in Leila’s class. She has just moved to Farmington from London and she has got a bedroom to herself and Mummy—guess what? She’s got a brand-new puppy called Rosie! A real dog! Where is she? I wish she were here, Mummy, and you could meet her!”
Catherine looked at Eloise’s face, her cheeks glowing hotly on her otherwise pale face and she felt her heart sink.
“A puppy?” she repeated. This was bad news. Her daughters begged her for a pet, any kind of pet, on a daily basis, frequently stating that even a gerbil would do. But Eloise’s heart’s desire, the one thing she longed for more than anything in the world, was a dog. And now here was a girl who was going to have her very own dog. Catherine would never hear the end of it.
“And,” Eloise went on, tugging at Catherine’s hand, “she says I can come round and see it whenever I like and walk it and play with it and groom it and everything,” Eloise was almost shouting in her excitement. “So can I go over tonight, Mummy, can I? Can I? Can I, please?”
“I expect tonight is a little bit too soon,” Catherine said. “They’ll still be unpacking.”
“But please can Gemma still come to tea one day soon?” Eloise begged. “Please!”
“Of course she can, one day,” Catherine said, deliberately noncommittal. “Let’s go round and pick up Leila and then when we get back we’ll see Gemma and her mummy and we’ll ask her, okay?”
“Yippee!” Eloise called out happily as she skipped along beside Catherine on their way round to Leila’s class, catching Catherine’s hand and swinging it back and forth.
“I knew eight was going to be my best age,” she said happily.
“How did you know that?” Catherine smiled in anticipation. While her younger daughter, Leila, had the light hazel eyes and wavy dark brown hair of her father, she also had the staunch practicality of her mother, as well as, since starting at St. Margaret’s First School, what appeared to be a quite sincere and devout belief in God.
Eloise, on the other hand, although a carbon copy of Catherine from the ends of her wild red hair to the tips of her long, skinny legs, was the dreamer and the rebel, like her father. Catherine couldn’t wait to hear Eloise’s theory on why eight was such a great age.
“Because one, two, three, four, five, six, and seven are baby years,” Eloise said, gesturing as if she were presenting a news report on TV. “But eight is halfway to sixteen. Halfway to being grown up. When you’re eight you start to count in the world, you’re not a baby anymore.”
“You’ll always be my baby,” Catherine said, putting her arms around Eloise and squeezing her tight on impulse.
“I won’t, Mummy.” Eloise wriggled free. “I’m growing up, you know!”
“I know you are,” Catherine said, picking up a strand of her daughter’s hair. She remembered the morning when Jimmy had put their firstborn in her arms. Her touch, her weight, her smell, and the joy of her tiny fingers enclosing around Catherine’s fingers made the world seem so much brighter and so sharp, as if she was looking at her life through a new pair of eyes. “But I’ll always love you and your sister just as much as I did from the moment you were born.”
“And now I’ve met Gemma, and she’s got a puppy and Leila’s stopped snoring at night and well, things are getting better. They are starting to go the right way, aren’t they, Mummy?”
Catherine paused and looked down at her daughter.
“Are they?” she asked her tentatively. Although it was Eloise who had suffered the most visibly during the pain and mess of the breakup, the first year after Jimmy had moved out had been raw, confusing, and difficult for them all. If Eloise was now beginning to see the separation in a better light, if the work that she and Jimmy had done to restore some stability to their daughters’ lives was finally paying off, then Catherine could not have been happier. “How’s that?”
“Well, now that you aren’t so angry with Daddy anymore and he’s stopped making you angry. Now you let him come round when he likes and have dinner and put us to bed. Things are nearly back to the way they were, aren’t they, Mummy? It won’t be long now.”
“What won’t?” Catherine asked, battling the sensation that she knew exactly what Eloise was going to say next.
“Well, soon Daddy will come home for good, won’t he?”
Just at that second Leila came tearing out of her classroom, her coat attached to her only by its hood, which was hooked over her head, and her arms filled with several sheets of artwork and some junk models, leaving bits of toilet paper and empty yogurt cartons flying in her wake.
“Leila, put your coat on properly,” Catherine said automatically, picking the coat off her daughter’s head and holding it out for her to put on.
“Look!” Leila said, thrusting out a jumble of what had formerly been food containers of various descriptions. “It’s great, isn’t it?”
Catherine hazarded a guess. “It’s an amazing … car.”
“Is it a car?” Leila scrutinized the object. “I thought it was an octopus, but anyway it’s good, isn’t it?”
“Well?” Eloise asked Leila as she unburdened her sister of her treasure and Catherine helped her on with the coat.
“Well …” Leila looked thoughtful. “I learned about China today, Mummy. Did you know its flag is bright red and there are dragons there, but not real dragons because there aren’t really dragons in this world. There are real dragons in Australia, though, and kangaroos, which are true animals because we saw them at the zoo, do you remember, and they went bounce … bounce … bounce … do you think there were kangaroos on the Ark, can we look it up when we get home?”
Leila bounced into her sister, dashing her model octopus/car to the ground, where it promptly exploded. Catherine bent down and began picking it up, stuffing its various components into her capacious bag.
“Not that, silly,” Eloise said impatiently as Catherine, still on her kn
ees, buttoned up Leila’s coat. “I mean what about the new girl in your class? Have you made best friends with her? Has she told you she’s got a puppy called Rosie?”
Leila’s face looked blank.
“Did you meet the new little girl that started today?” Catherine interpreted. “Did you play with her?”
“Oh well,” Leila said, instantly transforming herself into a world expert on the subject. “The new girl’s name is Amy and she cried the whole time and Miss Pritchard didn’t even shout at her or put on her sad face or anything and we were all nice to her, Ryan didn’t even try to chase her, but she cried all day and didn’t do any reading because she cried and said she wanted her mummy, which made Isabelle cry for her mummy and then Alfie did and then everyone was crying for a bit. I joined in too, but I only pretended because I quite like reading.”
“Everyone in your class was crying?” Catherine asked her.
“Well, Amy and Alfie and Isabelle did,” Leila said with a shrug. “And when Amy’s mummy came to school to pick her up they had to go and talk to Mrs. Woodruff. About the crying I ’spect.”
“Typical.” Eloise sighed dramatically. “Can we wait for them to come out from Mrs. Woodruff’s office, Mummy, can we, please?”
“No, we can’t,” Catherine said firmly, feeling some empathy for this unknown mother and her attempts to get her children settled in a new school. “We’ll see her tomorrow, I expect, and I’ll go and say hello to your new friends then.”
“And you have to make best friends with Amy, okay? Even if she does cry all the time,” Eloise ordered her sister urgently.
“Okay,” Leila agreed as she fished a sawed-off plastic bottle from out of her mother’s bag and looked at it. “Actually, it was a pony. It was a good pony model, wasn’t it?”
“The best,” Catherine said. But as she shepherded her daughters out of the school gate, she was only thinking one thing. What if by trying to make things better with Jimmy for her daughters, she had actually made them worse? How was she ever going to be able to explain to Eloise or Leila that their daddy was never coming home?
As the three of them walked down their street toward their terraced house, they could hear music from three houses away.
“Dad’s home!” Leila exclaimed.
“And he’s written a new song,” Eloise said, listening as they approached the front door. “It’s good, isn’t it, Mum?”
Catherine listened for a moment to the wail of Jimmy’s electric guitar, which was barely muted by the walls of the house.
“It sounds very interesting,” she said diplomatically. This unscheduled appearance at home was exactly the kind of thing that was confusing the children. But it was also exactly the kind of thing that Catherine had encouraged over the last year. After all, it was still half Jimmy’s house; he still paid the mortgage. And in order to be able to do that, he lived on a freezing-cold and leaky canal boat that his dead best friend had left him. And why shouldn’t he be there when his children got home from school? She’d have to talk to him; they’d have to find a way to help the children understand the situation.
Just as Catherine opened the front door for the girls, Kirsty stepped out of hers.
“Any chance you could get him to either shut up or cheer up? Whichever one is likely to happen … sooner?” She stopped shouting as the girls ran in and Jimmy put down his guitar to greet his daughters.
“Thank the Lord,” Kirsty said, briefly pressing her palms together in an expression of prayer.
“I’m sorry,” Catherine said. “He says he can’t really hear how it’s going to sound unless he plays it loud. Count yourself lucky you didn’t live next door when we were still together. Actually, that’s probably why the neighbor moved …”
“So divorce him and then it will be all your house and you won’t be a default wife anymore. I’d suggest taking him to the cleaners, but in his case I mean it literally. Look, I’m glad I caught you. I need you to come out with me on Friday night.”
“Come out with you? What do you mean come out?” Catherine frowned.
“I mean you coming out of your house, that’s the big thing with the bricks and the roof, by the way, and proceeding with me to the pub on Friday night for a drink. That’s another brick thing with a roof on top, only it has a license to sell alcohol too. Now do you understand or would you like me to draw you a diagram?”
“I’ve told you I don’t go to pubs …” Catherine started. “I’m not normally a pub person.”
“You’re not normally a normal person period, but you are going to be one this Friday because the kids are going away with Bon Jovi in there, aren’t they? And because I need you.” Kirsty smiled like Leila in possession of a chocolate-filled doughnut and a DVD of The Sound of Music. “We’re going to just happen to be in the pub where my trainer drinks. I worked it all out this morning while I was teaching the over-fifties pilates class. He hasn’t fallen in love with me yet because he’s never seen me at my finest, with my hair done and my push-up bra on and mascara. So I’m going to coincidentally go to the pub where he always is on Friday nights in my new turquoise crocheted dress with the cleavage and he’s going to see me and think ‘Wow’ and fall in love with me on the spot for the kind and sensitive person I am. Do you see?”
“And you want me to come with you,” Catherine said. “You don’t want one of your other friends? You know, the friends who actually like people?”
“Of course I do,” Kirsty sighed. “But the bastards all have someone. You are all I have left, it’s the cross I have to bear. Besides, what you need most in the world is to be brought out of yourself a bit, and if me helping you do that also means that you are helping me in some tiny little way, then it’s synergy, isn’t it? It’s cosmic forces in balance. Plus, I put up with your husband wailing his head off for hours on end when I’m supposed to be teaching Tantric meditation to Mrs. Evans so that she can bring herself to have sex with her husband, so you owe me.”
“He’s my ex-husband and you’ve got a student in there—where is she?” Catherine asked.
“Meditating, obviously. Now, what do you say? Yes or no?”
Catherine tried to imagine herself standing in a pub full of Friday night drinkers and couldn’t. Then she tried to imagine herself successfully saying no to Kirsty and that seemed even more unlikely. Perhaps it would be better to just go and try to get the whole thing over and done with as quickly as possible.
“Okay,” she relented. “I’ll come for an hour tops, just long enough for you to pull him, then I’m going home.”
“Of course you are,” Kirsty said happily. “That’s what I’m counting on.”
Inside, Jimmy had thankfully unplugged his electric guitar in favor of his acoustic one and was now strumming his new song, singing to the girls, both of his feet up on the coffee table, an adoring daughter on either side of him on the sofa. Seeing the three of them together like that still gave Catherine a wrench; it was impossible not to imagine what their lives could have been like if she and Jimmy had been different people, or not even different but just the right people for each other. Jimmy glanced up at her and flashed her a grin as he played, reminding Catherine why so many women found him attractive. It wasn’t just his height, or broad shoulders and strong arms that they adored, or even his hazel eyes or expressive mouth. Jimmy was a handsome man, everybody knew that. But what was irresistible about him, for so many, was his intensity when he played guitar. It was as if he was burning with energy, and you couldn’t help but feel that if you picked up his hand in that second you’d feel the full force of the universe charging through your veins.
“The neighbors hate it when you play loudly,” Catherine told him, dumping her assortment of bags, drawings, and cartons on the dining table, keen to disconnect Jimmy from the universe for a moment or two.
“Sorry, babe,” Jimmy said, stopping his guitar by placing the flat of his palm against the vibrating strings, before handing it to Eloise and getting up to join Catheri
ne in the kitchen. “We’re laying down a new demo tomorrow and I needed to hear how it sounded on the electric. If I tried it on the boat I’d probably sink it.”
“You know I don’t mind—it’s just that … well, if you could think about the volume now and again. I’m sure it doesn’t have to be that loud.”
“It’s rock and roll, babe,” Jimmy said, looking confused. “Of course it does.”
He watched her for a few minutes as she crouched and peered in the fridge and began to take out the ingredients for dinner.
“So what are you doing now?” he asked her after a few minutes.
“Chopping an onion,” Catherine said as she sliced into the vegetable.
“No, I don’t mean now this second. I mean this evening, generally,” Jimmy explained. “I mean do you mind if I hang out, have dinner with you and the girls? Put them to bed—that sort of thing?”
Catherine paused briefly. She needed to talk about what Eloise had said.
“Jimmy, do you ever think it’s weird that we still see so much of each other?”
“No,” Jimmy said firmly, pulling himself up into a seated position on the counter. “I think that after everything that happened, the fact we’re able to put our children first and be friends means we’re well adjusted and like, you know—cool.”
“So why aren’t we divorced yet?” Catherine asked him, lowering her voice.
Jimmy didn’t answer her for a second or two and then said, “Because it costs a lot of money and we haven’t got any right now.”
“It’s just sometimes I wonder …” Catherine trailed off.
“Wonder what?”
“Eloise told me today that she thinks you’re going to move back in, that we’re going to get back together. She’s taking you and me getting on and you being here so much as a sign. We can’t let them have false hope, Jimmy. We need to talk to them again. Get them to see that this is the way things are for good.”
Another Mother's Life Page 4
