Another Mother's Life

by Rowan Coleman

  “I bumped into this woman who thought she knew me,” Jimmy began to tell her. “But I don’t know how because she’s this Gemma’s mum, the one whose party we’re all going to.”

  “Oh, was she nice?” Catherine asked, although she clearly didn’t want a reply, as she was walking backward toward the gate as she talked. “Anyway, I’ve got to get to work. I have three minutes to make it down High Street. I’ll measure you up for that suit, okay?”

  “I’m off to work too,” Jimmy called after her as she sprinted off. “Laying down a demo today,” he added. “Today’s the day. This is the day that’s going to change my life.”

  Alison practically skipped her way to the gym to take up the new membership. She had secured Rosie in the back of her car, parked carefully in the shade with the back window left open a few centimeters so that the puppy wouldn’t get overheated. She put a bowl of water next to her and furnished her with a giant chew bone, which she hoped would keep Rosie off the leather trim for at least an hour.

  It was foolish, she knew, literally idiotic to feel so happy about bumping into a man who clearly had no idea who she was. So what if he didn’t remember that she was the girl who used to lean forward on the edge of the stage in the hopes he’d look right down her top? He’d never noticed that girl anyway. But he’d noticed her now, a grown woman. He’d noticed her and she was fairly sure he’d flirted with her too. It might have been the first time a man had actually flirted with her since the early 1990s.

  That, coupled with the tentative smile on Amy’s face as Mrs. Woodruff had led her by the hand into class, put her in exactly the right mood for her one-on-one pilates class with her new teacher.

  “Hello, there.” A woman about her age smiled at her and held out her hand as she walked into the private studio she had booked. “Mrs. James, is it? I’m Kirsty Robinson, I’m going to be teaching you pilates.”

  “Right,” Kirsty said. “From that position step one foot forward and we’ll stretch out your hip flexors.”

  “So?” Alison asked her with some effort as she stretched her left leg behind her. “Are you going to see him again?” Her new teacher had been regaling her with the details of her love life for the last half an hour, something that Alison found most entertaining.

  “I think so,” Kirsty considered. “We had a nice time in the pub, and he is a great kisser. I let him walk me home and he didn’t even try to invite himself in for sex, which I was slightly disappointed by even though I would have definitely said no because I hardly ever do sex on the first date with men I like. But he didn’t call me over the weekend and today when I saw him he was playing it cool, as if we hadn’t spent half an hour with our tongues down each other’s throats on Friday night. I still think he likes me, though. And if he doesn’t, then I’ll just revert to Plan A until I’ve gotten over him.”

  “Ignore him and pretend nothing happened,” Alison confirmed as she followed Kirsty’s movements in the mirror.

  “Exactly.” Kirsty grinned at her. “Okay, relax into child pose and then roll yourself slowly and carefully up into a standing position, working each vertebra.” She and Alison rose in unison in front of the full-length mirror.

  “Shake yourself out and you’re done,” Kirsty told her.

  “Thanks, I really enjoyed that,” Alison said warmly.

  “Me too, it’s nice to have a client that’s nice and not some stuffy old cow who thinks I’m one of her servants.”

  “I really hope you get things sorted with Sam and that he asks you out again.”

  “Well, he will or he won’t,” Kirsty said with a sigh, catching sight of herself in the mirror and giving herself an admiring glance. “It’s not the end of the world if he doesn’t. Yes, I’m in love with him. But look at me—I’m gorgeous and still young. I’ll love again.”

  Alison laughed. “And it’s better to shop around than buy the first thing you see and find out fifteen years later you don’t really want it anymore,” she said completely out of the blue. She paused for a moment as she realized what she had just said out loud for the first time.

  “You are so right.” Kirsty smiled. “You should meet my neighbor. She got married in her twenties to some guy she went to school with and of course it didn’t work out, and now it’s like she’s stuck in a time warp. Can’t go back, can’t go forward. I’m trying to crowbar her out of it, but it’s a challenge, let me tell you. So how long have you been married?”

  Alison pursed her lips and looked down at her painted toe-nails.

  “Married fourteen years, together nearly sixteen years,” she said sheepishly.

  “So you bought the first thing you saw in the shop, then?” Kirsty laughed.

  “More like shoplifted him out from under my best friend’s nose,” Alison said. “But you know, when you’re seventeen you don’t really think.”

  “Well, it’s obviously worked out for you,” Kirsty said. “So tell me, what’s your secret?”

  “I don’t know,” Alison said with a shrug. “We implement Plan A a lot.”

  As she picked up her bag, she pulled out her last few remaining invitations. “Listen, we’re having a housewarming party and …”

  “Oh, I already know about that,” Kirsty said. “All the sports center staff are coming. Even Sam.”

  “Well, maybe while you’re not ignoring him you’ll have a drink with me. I don’t know anyone in town yet and the thought of having two hundred strangers in my new house is slightly intimidating.”

  “I’d love to,” Kirsty said. “And I’ll introduce you to my neighbor. She’s a bit like a young Miss Marple, but once you get to know her she’s pretty cool, and then you’ll have two friends and I’ll know two people to lead astray instead of one.”

  Alison grinned at her. “I’m perfectly capable of leading myself astray, thank you very much. I’m a world expert at it.”

  Ten

  Are you sure that you can plug all of those fairy lights into my house and it won’t explode?” Alison asked the electrician as he plugged yet another extension into yet another extension on the morning of the party.

  He scowled at her. “Yes, I’m completely sure.” He hadn’t been very amiable since Rosie chewed through one of his extension cords. Fortunately it hadn’t been plugged in at the time.

  “Okay, well, I’ll leave it up to you, then,” she said, trying to get back into his good graces so he wouldn’t short the fuses just to spite her. “You’re the professional. I don’t know anything!”

  He turned his back on her and resumed plugging more things into more things, which Alison took as a sign of agreement with her self-assessment. She could imagine what he thought of her: a spoiled rich housewife who treated all tradesmen like servants and believed that the working classes were born to serve her. Maybe that was what she was like a little bit now, even if her upbringing on the immaculately kept but down-to-earth council estate couldn’t have been more different. Her life with Marc had transformed her. Now she was new money and that was the way she sometimes sounded and acted, even if she didn’t truly feel that way.

  It had been a challenging week up to this point, and Alison had had a hard time keeping up the good mood her pilates class had left her in on Monday. The first set of caterers she thought she’d miraculously managed to book for Saturday had let her down, citing some lame excuse like a death in the family and referring her to a friend’s brand-new business called Home Hearths.

  From that moment Alison had felt that luck was not on her side. She had been well aware that any caterer available for booking a scant five days before an event was not exactly going to be top of the range, but by that time she had very little choice but to go with the new company. She’d even booked them blind without any tasting or menu discussion. Alison had told them she wanted canapés for two hundred people and they told her they’d provide the waitstaff. That, as far as Alison was concerned, was as good as it was likely to get.

  Marc had not been around for almost the whole
week. He’d been at the office until past eleven every night working on getting the new showroom running smoothly. If Alison wasn’t asleep by the time he got in, then she was in too bad a mood to make small talk with him, something he always annoyingly wanted to do regardless of the hour, because he’d be high as a kite and wouldn’t care that the children and the low-level bone-splintering radioactive stress of her day had drilled her into the ground. But it wasn’t just the contrast in their days that infuriated her and nearly drove Alison to murder her husband. No, it was the sheer bloody thoughtless optimism that had infected him ever since they’d decided to come back to Farmington.

  She’d never imagined that Marc’s determination to change himself would have brought them quite this far. It was as if he was on a quest that would never be satisfied. A three-bedroom house in Kennington would have made Alison happy once. But she had a feeling that no such comforting middle ground was available to her and Marc now. For them the only way was either up, up, and away or a very fast journey back down. It all depended on Marc. Everything had always depended on Marc.

  Suddenly Alison remembered everything that still needed to be done, and, furious that she was letting Marc stop her in her tracks again, she found herself saying out loud, “Get a grip, woman—good God, act your age!”

  “Forty-seven.”

  Alison spun around to find Amy standing behind her decked out in her Cinderella outfit, Rosie tugging playfully on the hem.

  “Pardon, sweetie?” Alison knelt down to her daughter’s level. She loved to see Amy dress up. It was one of her few moments of self-expressiveness and even then she only seemed to be able to manage it if she was pretending to be a Disney princess.

  “You said act your age and I said forty-seven. That’s your age, isn’t it, Mama?”

  “Thirty-two, darling,” Alison said, unoffended. “But I feel forty-seven a lot of the time, so you’re spot-on really.”

  “You look beautiful,” Amy told her, wrapping her arms around Alison and whispering in her ear, “Love you, Mama,” as if it was their little secret, which Alison sometimes felt it was.

  “Love you too, precious,” Alison whispered back.

  “You’re welcome,” Amy said, releasing Alison from her embrace. They had been learning manners at her old school and she had been responding arbitrarily to any comment with that phrase ever since. “Dominic said I had to tell you there was some ‘old tart’ unloading what looks like sandwiches from a beat-up Volvo station wagon out front and that you might want to go and check if it’s legal because … I forgot the rest.”

  Alison gave Amy a little hug.

  “Thank you for being so helpful, darling, but don’t call anyone a tart. It’s not a nice word for little girls, okay?”

  “You’re welcome,” Amy replied.

  “Run along and try and keep Rosie out of trouble,” Alison told Amy, unable to repress a smile as she watched the puppy skid and slide over the polished floor in a bid to keep up with Amy. Her younger daughter had really bonded with the puppy. Perhaps it hadn’t been one of Marc’s worst ideas after all. But there were still plenty to choose from.

  Alison wasn’t sure whether to check to see if indeed the caterer had arrived, or to go and strangle her son about his cavalier use of language in front of his sister first. In the end, she made her way to the drive.

  “Hello there! Mrs. James?” A surprisingly mature lady in a green raincoat and a red tartan pleated skirt waved at her. “I’m Home Hearth Caterers at your service! It’s all gone swimmingly well considering it’s our first party. I think you’ll be pleased.”

  Alison looked at Home Hearth Caterers’ mud-caked Wellington boots and wondered what “considering it’s our first party” meant.

  “Mind grabbing a couple of quiches?” Home Hearth Caterers said, piling a couple of platters into Alison’s arms. “This way, is it? Don’t worry, I’ll follow my nose!”

  Alison watched helplessly as the old tart tracked mud all across her hallway and she wondered: Where the hell was her husband when she needed someone to blame?

  “You can’t wear that,” Kirsty said, looking Catherine up and down.

  “I think you’ll find I can,” Catherine said firmly. “Look, there’s only so many times I can take you coming round my house and insulting me. You’ve made me shave my legs, now leave me alone.”

  “You do realize that leg shaving is something you have to repeat, don’t you?” Kirsty asked her. “Tell me you’ve done it for tonight, I beg you!”

  “Yes, I have,” Catherine lied, looking sulkily at the black chiffon shirt with jet beading down the front that she had bought from a charity shop last year, and the straight-legged black trousers with a stay-press pleat ironed down the front that actually reached her ankles. “I like my outfit,” she said, looking at Kirsty, whose idea it had been to come over three hours before the party to have a girly getting-ready session.

  “Three hours?” Catherine had asked her when she suggested it earlier that morning while having breakfast with her and the girls. “Do you mean three actual hours? It doesn’t take that long to get ready for anything, does it?”

  “Yes, it does if you are a proper girl, doesn’t it, ladies?” Kirsty had asked Eloise and Leila. “Tell your mum why.”

  “Well, you have to have a shower, hair wash, hair dry, and hair-style,” Eloise listed, ticking off each item on her fingers.

  “And,” Leila added, “there’s choosing what to wear, access-or-eees, see, mummy? That means like earrings and necklaces and nail varnish—ooh, can I wear nail varnish? Nanna Pam gave us some in secret that we are never to tell you about.”

  “Also,” Eloise said, quickly attempting to cover her sister’s slip, “there’s eye makeup, putting on mascara and lip gloss. Can I wear lip gloss, Mum? Kirsty might lend me some.”

  “Or we could use the stuff that Nanna Pam gave us …”

  “Shhhh!” This time Eloise prevented her sister from saying any more by clamping her hand over Leila’s mouth. Catherine chose to let the revelations go uncommented on because she had found their secret stash of play cosmetics long ago and thought that everyone, even very small girls, deserved some secrets as long as their mother secretly knew what they were.

  “How do they know all this stuff?” Catherine asked Kirsty in amazement. “Are you creeping into their room at night and whispering it in their ears?”

  “No, I shout it over the garden fence when you’ve got them out digging potatoes in the bleak midwinter,” Kirsty said, rolling her eyes at the girls and making them giggle. “They know all that stuff because it is ingrained in their DNA. It is the primal urge to make yourself look beautiful. Since the dawn of time, soon after woman invented the wheel and discovered fire, she also realized how much fun it was to paint herself with bright colors.” Kirsty clapped a hand on Catherine’s shoulder. “You too were born with it once, my friend, but somehow you have lost your feminine way and need to be brought back to the one true path that leads to uncomfortable shoes and exfoliation. Follow the lead of your daughters, follow me, for we have the key to the world of womanhood.”

  Catherine was unable to resist a smile, particularly when all three of the other females at the table started fluttering their eyelashes at each other, hands arranged under their chins like Botticelli’s angels.

  It was a sort of club, feeling feminine and pretty, and if Kirsty was in it, then maybe she wasn’t too old to feel that way too, at least sometimes. Besides, she knew it would make her daughters happy to have a mum that made a bit more of an effort. (“Did you see Isabelle Seaman’s mum this morning?” Eloise would often say to her. “She wears high shoes and it’s only a Wednesday. Isabelle says that’s because she’s not letting herself go. That’s good, isn’t it, Mummy?” And Catherine would give her a talk about looks not being everything and Leila would say something like “Maria von Trapp is pretty and good-hearted and you can be both, look at the Virgin Mary,” at which point Catherine would change the subject.) So
in short, in a moment of weakness she had agreed to the three-hour preparty preparation party.

  It was a decision she regretted the minute she realized that Kirsty had engineered the whole thing firstly so that she could drink the bottle of sparkling wine that Catherine had had in the fridge since Christmas, and secondly so that she could try to get Catherine to wear something that she had brought with her.

  “For one thing,” Catherine said when Kirsty held up a short black denim skirt that belonged to her, “I am six feet tall. You are five foot two. If I put that on it will barely reach below my butt.”

  “I know,” Kirsty said. “That’s the advantage of not having one, you’ll look great.”

  “I’ll look like a tart!” Catherine exclaimed, lowering her voice on the last word lest her daughters stop screaming with excitement for long enough to hear her.

  “And looking like a tart is the first in many steps you will need to take to have sex. That’s when a man and a woman who like each other very much have a special cuddle and the man puts his …”

  “You don’t need to look like a tart to have sex,” Catherine admonished her neighbor. “If I were to ever have sex again, I’d want it to be with someone who respected and cared about me.”

  “Interesting.” Kirsty tipped her head to one side so her sleek brown bob fell at an angle. “You are now not entirely ruling out the possibility of ever having sex again. And okay, you don’t have to look like a tart to have sex, but it can help. It’s sort of the express checkout to shagging, if you like. Ten items of clothing or less get you laid much faster.”

  “God, you’re crass and I’m not wearing that skirt.” Catherine pushed the bedroom door shut as if to limit the contamination of Kirsty’s filthy mind to her own bedroom.

  “I knew you’d say that,” Kirsty said. “I only brought it to push your boundaries, because what you are actually going to wear is this … ta-da!” She pulled out a shopping bag. “I picked up this knee-length pencil skirt for you for a few quid today. Please just try it. I promise you, you’ll still have that harbinger-of-doom-at-a-funeral look you like so much, only with your foxy long legs on display.”