“This way,” Marc said, not leading her to the entrance but pulling her down a narrow alley that ran alongside the building.
“What are we doing?” Catherine asked him, giggling.
“I met this guy in the pub last night, works in the projection room.” He pulled her into a doorway with a locked fire door that was marked “Fire Escape, Keep Clear!”
“Years ago this old heap was the go-to place for miles around, he reckons. Gold paint on the ceiling, velvet chairs, cocktails brought to your table.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard that,” Catherine said with an uncertain smile. “I’ve seen some of the old photos in the local history books. So?”
“So, there were boxes, just like you get in a theater for the really posh people to sit in. They don’t use them now, except for storage, but they are still there …” He smiled at her and kissed her gently on the lips. “And the bloke said if I bought him a pint, he’d let us in the side entrance and we could watch the film in a box.”
“Really?” Catherine gasped, delighted more that Marc had been thinking of her when he came up with the plan than with the plan itself. Ghost was one of Alison’s favorite films and they had seen it so many times she was fairly sure she knew the script better than Demi Moore did.
Marc nodded, looking pleased with himself as he banged several times on the door. After a while the door swung open and Marc and the projectionist exchanged a few words.
“Don’t get up to anything too energetic in there,” the projectionist told Marc as he pointed them toward the box, chuckling to himself.
“Do you mind,” Marc said, smiling at Catherine as he held the door to the box open for her. “I’m with a real lady here.”
They sat side by side on plush old velvet seats, Marc’s arm around her shoulders.
“This film is crap,” Marc said after about twenty minutes, making Catherine laugh.
“Do you want to leave?” she asked him.
“No,” he said, looking into her eyes. “I want to make out.”
Almost every night that she came back from seeing Marc, Catherine would hear Alison’s latest exploits with Aran, the things he tried to do to her or make her do to him, the things she sometimes let him do and the things she sometimes did. But it was never like that with Marc, he never tried anything with her beyond kissing. They’d sit or lie in the long grass, out of sight of the passersby while he stroked her hair and told her about his life, how he’d grown up alone, pushed from one foster home to another. How he’d been kicked out of foster care at sixteen and had to look after himself, make the choice between getting a job and turning over the local off-license with some of the other boys from the home. He’d chosen laboring work because he knew what he was like, he knew he’d mess up and get caught and then his life would be over. Then suddenly he’d stop talking and Catherine knew he was going to kiss her. She would feel his hand in her hair, or on her waist, but never anything more.
She felt safe when she was talking to him, telling him about her parents, who did not love each other, let alone her, and all the anger and resentment they hid behind the facade of a neat and respectable Christian family. It didn’t seem so sad or so desperate anymore that she’d grown up in a house without any affection or compassion and that the nearest thing she had to a real family was the girl who lived down the road and climbed in through her bedroom window nearly every night.
Then on the ninth day something changed. Marc was kissing her, just as it seemed he always did, when suddenly without warning something shifted inside her. Catherine found her arms snaking their way around his neck, and she pulled his body hard into hers as she kissed him back, arching the small of her back so that their hips met. Marc stopped kissing her.
“Whoa,” he said, breathless.
“What?” Catherine asked him. “Did I do something wrong?
“Yes, I mean no, not wrong but …” Marc looked at her. “I don’t think you’re ready to …”
In the long pause that followed their bodies relaxed, and Catherine felt as if she was backing down from a fight.
“Can I ask you something?” she said.
“ ’Course you can,” Marc said, shifting his body weight to put some space between them.
“Do you want me, Marc? I mean in that way. Because we’ve been seeing each other for a while now and I love talking to you and kissing and I don’t even know what I’m asking you really except that do you really like me, or do you just kiss me when you haven’t got anything to say anymore? Because you feel sorry for me?”
Marc looked dumbstruck. “What?” he asked, sitting up and back on his heels.
“You’ve never tried to …” Catherine was at a loss for words to describe what she barely understood. “Do anything but kiss me.”
Marc laughed, flopping back onto the grass. “Oh Christ,” he said, his hands over his eyes.
“Don’t laugh,” she said, punching him lightly in the arm, unable to resist smiling. Suddenly he grabbed her forearm and pulled her on top of him, the expression in his eyes shifting in a second, all trace of humor gone.
“Of course I want you,” he said, making Catherine catch her breath. “But I told you. You’re different. You’re … precious. I’ve never talked to another person in my life the way I’ve talked to you. You know me, you understand me, and I think I know you. You’re pure.”
“So does that mean you don’t want to …” Catherine discovered in that moment that she was becoming very tired of her purity.
“No, it means I want to, I want to a lot. But look, Catherine, if we do that—have sex—it will change everything and I don’t know, I like this—the way things are. It doesn’t feel real, it feels like a dream, another world where it isn’t crazy for me to be in love with you.”
Catherine lay on top of him, her hair making a curtain for them both as she looked into his eyes.
“You’re in love with me?” she asked him.
“I want to be … I am in love with you,” Marc repeated, unable to look at her this time. “But I don’t know if that is enough. I’m not the sort of bloke who’s going to take you away from this or even stick around …”
“I don’t care,” Catherine said. “I love you too. And I don’t care what happens next week or next month. These have been the best days of my life, Marc.” She paused, nipping sharply at her lip. “You might as well know I’m a virgin.” She saw Marc hide a smile.
“That obvious?” she asked him happily, before looking levelly into his eyes. “But I want more between us. I want us to do more … to do everything.”
“Are you sure about this?” Marc asked her.
“You said it yourself. We make each other different, better. This is right, I know it is.”
Marc brushed her hair back from her face. “It can’t be in the park,” he told her, his implicit assent making Catherine want to laugh and scream and cry all at once.
“No,” she said, blushing only now. He rolled her off of his chest and sat up.
“There’s my lodgings, but it’s not exactly romantic. You should have somewhere nice, with candles and flowers.”
“Marc.” Catherine laughed, pulling him to his feet. “Let’s go.”
Marc picked up her hand and kissed the back of it.
“Come on,” he said. And he didn’t let her hand go.
The room in the lodging house was small, a single bed against a wall, a sink, a stove, a tiny fridge that burred and hummed in the corner as if it was fighting for its life. The room was neat and clean and it seemed to Catherine that there was hardly anything of Marc there. His fluorescent work jacket hung over the back of the chair. There was a six-pack of beer on the kitchen counter and nothing at all in the fridge.
“Cup of tea?” Marc asked her as she stood in the center of the room.
“Um no, thanks,” Catherine said. “Can we just …”
“Get on with it?” Marc asked her, laughing. “I’m nervous. I don’t know why I’m nervous.”
&nbs
p; “Don’t you be nervous! I’m far more nervous than you,” Catherine told him.
“We don’t have to go the whole way today, you know,” Marc said. “We can just take it slow. One step at a time.”
“No,” Catherine insisted. “I’m here now. Let’s do it.”
Marc nodded and took two steps closer to her. Catherine had to refrain from taking the same number of steps backward.
He pulled his T-shirt off over his head and then Catherine’s singlet over hers. She felt the touch of air against her skin raise goose bumps across her slender, pale body, the sunlight filtered a bloody orange through the curtains. And then the heat of his hands on her skin, and as he pulled her into an embrace, he was kissing her neck and shoulders. These were not the dreamy, gentle kisses Catherine knew from the park, but new, deeper and commanding kisses. In one movement Marc had undone her bra and slid it off her shoulders, pulling her back onto the bed. She heard a moan deep in his throat and she felt herself respond to him, and at last she knew for certain what it felt like to be desired.
“I love you, Catherine,” Marc told her as his hand ran up her thigh. “Always remember that at this moment I love you more than anything in the world.”
Catherine snapped back into the present, her wineglass in her hand as she heard a noise on the landing.
“Mummy?” It was Leila.
“Yes, darling?” Catherine called back.
“I went to the toilet on my own!” Leila informed her proudly.
“Good girl, well, get back into bed, then. I’ll be up in a minute to kiss you. Don’t wake your sister.”
“Too late,” she heard Eloise call out grumpily.
Catherine set the wineglass down on the table.
Jimmy had told her to remember the last time she was in love, and she had, because despite the huge leap of faith it had taken her to trust her husband with her heart, in the twelve years she had known him she’d never felt the same intensity of emotion for Jimmy that she’d experienced during those few weeks with Marc James. When Marc had walked out of her life, just a few weeks later, she’d felt as if he’d taken with him the part of her that could feel that way again. It frightened Catherine to think that Marc James had been the love of her life. But his was the love that had changed her life—had changed her—forever.
That afternoon in his lodgings had been the most wonderful, most perfect experience of her life.
At last she’d felt that she belonged to someone.
Amazingly she’d felt that he belonged to her.
And then she’d introduced him to Alison.
Six
Alison looked at the clock on the wall. It was almost eleven, the children had long since gone to bed, and Rosie was curled up in a hot little ball at her feet, twitching occasionally as she dreamt about chasing rabbits. Marc was not home.
This was to be expected, she told herself as she took a sip from what was her fourth glass of wine, on the grounds that she deserved a drink after the day she’d had. It was not unusual for Marc to work late, well into the night, without ringing her to tell her what time he would be home. That was what running your own car dealership was like. Sourcing suppliers, keeping on top of the paperwork, taking out big corporate clients in a bid to supply their company fleet. Especially now that he was opening another branch, there would be a lot of work to do to get everything up to a high enough standard. That’s what he told Alison, and she accepted it because she knew that Marc would be throwing everything into making this new venture a success. That was just him, or rather that was the way he was now after sixteen years with Alison.
Alison smiled to herself and tried to imagine that dark and brooding young man she had first set eyes on, on that hot summer’s day all those years ago, the heat in his eyes blazing almost as intensely as the sun. He had been the most beautiful thing she had ever seen, like an exotic creature that had somehow wandered into their safe white middle-class town, where everything and everyone looked the same. He was a drifter, without aim or purpose, restless and resentful. The young man he was then didn’t look anything like a man who would one day work himself like a dog to make his business a success, keep his family secure, and buy himself a life in the very same safe white middle-class town that Alison had once begged him to run away from with her. He didn’t look anything like that person she had fallen so hard for at the age of seventeen, the man she’d left everything behind for, including herself.
Once, a lifetime ago, she had dreamt of being a writer. She had talked about it to Catherine often enough, and only Catherine. At school Alison had been the good-time girl, the girl who always sported the shortest skirt she could get away with, or smoke the most lipstick-imprinted cigarettes around the back of the building. Everyone liked her, but nobody took her seriously, except Catherine. When they were about twelve she had confessed to her best friend that she wrote short stories in her diary and that nobody had ever seen them. With her stomach in knots, wild with nerves, she had brought them to school one day and allowed Catherine to read them in secret when they should have been in drama class. Catherine had hugged her and told her the stories were wonderful.
“You could be a writer when you grow up,” Catherine had said, wide-eyed with admiration.
“That’s what I thought too,” Alison had exclaimed happily. “But I wasn’t sure if I was any good!”
“You could do it.” Catherine had seemed certain. “You could do anything.”
Yet the most defining action that Alison had ever taken in her life was to run away with Marc. The moment she had made that decision all of her old dreams had evaporated, and at seventeen she hadn’t given a second’s thought to their passing. She hadn’t really thought about those dreams until now. Until another late night at home on her own without a single thing in her life that felt like hers alone, waiting for the man who was now an entirely different person from the one she had sacrificed everything for.
Alison stopped that train of thought. She could hardly complain that time had changed him; the intervening years and three children had changed her too, even if she worked hard at the gym to try to stem the change as much as possible. Of course Marc was still out at the dealership, getting it ready for the grand opening over the weekend. He would not leave any stone unturned until everything was perfect. Everything else, including his wife, would have to wait until then. Alison knew that because she had created the man he had become, and this, sitting drinking wine alone at eleven o’clock at night, was the price she paid for her creation.
Topping off her wine, Alison looked at the clock again. The house was quiet at last. Dominic had either turned his music off or plugged his headphones in, and the girls had been asleep for hours, Amy drifting into oblivion the second her head touched the pillow, as if her restless dreams would be a welcome escape from the harrowing day her mother had put her through.
Her two daughters’ first day at their new school could not have been more different, and Alison was afraid that that was how it was going to be for them for the rest of their lives. Gemma she didn’t have to worry about. Gemma was exactly like Alison had been as a child. She breezed through every social situation, supremely confident and happy, utterly unconcerned by the children who did not like her (and there were a few of those because Gemma had a knack for rubbing people the wrong way) and completely besotted by those she chose as her friends.
Amy, on the other hand, could have been a changeling. She was not like her father, driven and single-minded, always chased by nameless demons at his heels, and she was not like her mother. Or perhaps that wasn’t entirely true. Because Alison had not been the same woman when she’d conceived Gemma as she was when she’d become pregnant with Amy. During those three years she’d lost a little of her shine, a little of her certainty. Sometimes Alison worried that Amy was a replica of her mother after all, that somehow she had let her youngest daughter down by not being the person she used to be, by not being the kind of woman who had daughters like Gemma.
Gemma had been in the playground when Alison had arrived to pick her girls up, Rosie dancing at her heels and doing her best to chew through her leash. Gemma had raced up full of news for her mother and cuddle for her dog and talk of new best friends who she simply had to have over to tea at the first possible opportunity. They had been about to go round and find Amy when Mrs. Woodruff popped her head out of the reception door and asked Alison to come into her office.
Alison looked down at Rosie.
“I would, but it’s the dog, you see. If I tie her up out here she’ll howl the place down.”
Mrs. Woodruff frowned. “Bring it in, just this once. But for future reference dogs are not permitted on the school grounds.”
Amy and Mrs. Pritchard were waiting in Mrs. Woodruff’s office. The moment Amy saw Rosie her eyes lit up and she rushed over to the dog, burying her face in its fur, her slender shoulders shaking as she sobbed silently, her small fingers wound tightly in Rosie’s coat.
Amy had cried all day. Literally all day, Mrs. Pritchard told her kindly, her sympathetic face crumpled with compassion.
“Why, darling?” Alison asked Amy, gently lifting her face from the dog’s coat. “Why did you cry so much?”
“I don’t like my new teacher,” Amy sobbed woefully. “I want Miss Mill, Miss Mill is beautiful and young.”
“Um, well.” Alison looked apologetically at Mrs. Pritchard and was relieved to see a twitch of a smile round the teacher’s lips.
Amy’s face disappeared into Rosie’s fur again.
“Not coming tomorrow,” she hiccupped miserably. “Mama, p-please don’t make me come again. I’m worried.”
Alison folded her arms more tightly around Amy and set her mouth in a thin line of determination. She knew she had to be firm and force herself not to give in to her daughter’s pleas. Her youngest child had been born fragile and full of fear, equipped with the thinnest of skins, and yet Alison knew that of all of her children Amy was the bravest, because despite her fears, as long as her mother told her everything would be all right, come tomorrow morning she would get up and face the whole terrifying process again.
Another Mother's Life Page 7
