Another Mother's Life (14 page)

“Are we going to do this again?” she asked him bluntly, because he seemed to like that about her. Marc turned his face back to her
and looked at her, his dark eyes in shadow; one hand reached out and touched her cheek.

“I wish I’d met you first because, you’re right. I wouldn’t have looked at Catherine, I wouldn’t have noticed her at all. I’d have gone straight for you. You’re very beautiful, you’re …” His fingers traced a line down her neck to her shoulder. “You’re hard not to touch.”

“So?” Alison pressed him, with a little smile. “Are we?”

“Yes,” he said simply. “I think we are.”

Every time they met after that, each secret hour of afternoon they spent with each other they grew closer and closer, easier and easier together. Alison knew that Marc still saw Cathy whenever she could get away, that they still went walking in the park, or lay in the grass talking about his past, because Cathy would tell her at night, her eyes shining. And somehow Alison could still manage to be happy for her friend because she knew the love that Marc felt for Cathy was entirely different from what he felt for her. He wanted the very bones of her, he wanted to consume her body from the inside out. He couldn’t get enough of her body, and every single time they saw each other they went straight to bed.

One evening just as the sun was low in the sky, bathing the room in gold as they lay in his bed, Alison felt that something was different, something had changed between them. And then she realized: he had his arms around her, her head was resting on his chest; the unfamiliar sound she was hearing was the beating of his heart, slow and steady.

It was then she got a sense, the very first inkling that eventually, one day he would love her back.

Now, in the living room of their brand-new house a lifetime later, Alison felt Marc shift his weight on top of her and she wondered where that desire, that unswerving love for him had gone. He kissed her neck just as passionately as he had always done, his
fingers as expert as they had always been, knowing how to please her. But although her body responded to him, her heart was still and silent.

What had happened to her love for Marc, which had defined her life for so long? Alison couldn’t tell if it would ever come back, she only knew that at that moment she felt nothing.

Not for the first time since she’d found out Marc was bringing her back to Farmington, Alison found herself wondering what had happened to Cathy Parkin.

What she could not have known was that her husband, still wide awake despite his closed eyes and perfectly composed features, was wondering exactly the same thing.

T
his is ridiculous,” Catherine said as Kirsty, one palm firmly securing her forehead, plucked her eyebrows.

“Only you would say that,” Kirsty said through gritted teeth as she jerked another hair out of Catherine’s tender skin. “Only
you
would think that having eyebrows that frame your eyes instead of hanging over them is not a good plan.”

“I don’t think
anything
about eyebrows, eyebrows are not important to me,” Catherine said, beginning to regret agreeing to go out with Kirsty at all.

Kirsty paused for a minute, the tweezers hovering menacingly in front of Catherine’s face.

“Tell me you shave your legs,” she pleaded.

Catherine looked at her sensible shoes and said nothing.

“Good God, Catherine! What’s wrong with you?” Kirsty exclaimed.

“What’s right with me, you mean,” Catherine retorted. “I don’t
feel the need to denude myself in order to be attractive to men, and besides, what’s the point of shaving my legs? No one ever sees them.”

Kirsty attacked Catherine’s brow with renewed vigor.

“The point of shaving your legs is the same as always wearing sexy underwear even when you’re not on a date. It makes you feel both beautiful and womanly, and then your sexiness exudes from with
in
.” Kirsty yanked hard on a particularly stubborn hair, making Catherine yelp. “No wonder you are so …” Kirsty struggled to find a suitable adjective and failed. “Look, imagine that you suddenly meet the man of your dreams tonight. There you are in the pub, I’m in the arms of my personal trainer …”

“Does your personal trainer have a name?” Catherine asked, hoping in vain to deflect Kirsty’s line of questioning. Ever since she’d let herself think about Marc again, it had been hard to stop, and for at least three nights this week he had populated her dreams, dreams in which she was seventeen again, before he’d met Alison, before everything went wrong. She was seventeen and living those few brief weeks when for the first time in her life she had been completely happy. Why she had let him back into her head now, Catherine couldn’t comprehend. She was crazy to have listened to Jimmy and his rock psychology, telling her she’d forgotten how to be in love.

The truth was after Marc had gone, after Alison had left the way she did, it had taken Catherine a long time to feel whole again because she’d felt as if her guts had been ripped out. But Alison’s abandoning her was a turning point too. It was the beginning of her own life, the life where her head ruled her heart and every other part of her. It was the time when she first got to know Jimmy, when the two of them became friends and then finally more, and he gave her the strength she needed to be able to leave home. It was around that time that Jimmy Ashley had told her he
loved her and swore that one day she’d love him back. It was a prediction that she had never been able to fulfill to his satisfaction.

“Of course my trainer has a name,” Kirsty replied indignantly, pulling Catherine back into the conversation.

“What is it, then?”

“Sam,” Kirsty said firmly. “Or Steve. It’s an
S
name and anyway don’t try and get me off the subject, you
know
it takes me a long time to remember names. I was calling you Clara for the first six months we knew each other, and it doesn’t mean I love him any less.
Anyway
, there I am in his arms—kissing him passionately—and up comes this man. He’s tall, dark, handsome and he wants you, sexually. He sweeps you off your feet and into his arms. He takes you to his bed …”

“What, in the pub?” Catherine asked.

“Don’t be an idiot—unless he’s a barman. Anyway, he takes you home and
then
to bed, and as he goes to run his manly hands along your long, lithe limbs, he recoils in horror because he’s got carpet burns on his palms.”

“If he was the man of my dreams he wouldn’t mind,” Catherine said stubbornly, remembering with sudden shocking clarity the pressure of Marc’s palms on her thighs. For once she welcomed the distracting pain of Kirsty’s attack on her eyebrows.

“If he’s any man at all, barring a German one, then trust me, he’ll mind,” Kirsty said. “There are some people that work on the Murphy’s Law ethos that if you don’t shave your legs and wear your worst pants you are much more likely to hook up. I do not think that way. I think that you have to treat hooking up as if you were in the army in the Special Air Services. Like their motto says, ‘Always be prepared.’ ”

“Isn’t that the Boy Scouts?” Catherine asked. “Isn’t the SAS ‘Who dare wins’?”

“Even better,” Kirsty said, making Catherine’s eyes water as
she removed three or four hairs at once. “And that should be your motto, love. It’s much better than your current one.”

“Okay.” Catherine relented to the inevitable with a sigh. “What’s my current one?”

“She who doesn’t dare sits about on her arse all day turning herself into a decrepit old woman before the age of thirty-three who is afraid to be happy.”

“That’s it,” Catherine said, folding miserably on the bed, drawing her knees up under chin.

“That’s what?” Kirsty asked with some concern, tweezers poised.

“I’m just going to have sex with the first man I meet tonight, whether I like him or not, and then maybe everybody will stop going on at me. Maybe you’ll stop telling me I need to have sex to be happy, maybe Jimmy will stop telling me I’m some head case who’s trapped in the past just so he can pretend it wasn’t his fault our marriage is over and maybe—” Catherine stopped herself. She had been about to say maybe the images of her and Marc that had been crowding her memory would leave her alone. But she’d never told Kirsty about Marc, Alison, and everything that had happened. And she wasn’t ready to now.

Contrite, Kirsty sat on the bed next to her and patted her shoulder.

“Don’t have sex with the first man you meet tonight,” she said gently. “He might be an old man or a fat man, and besides, that’s not why I’m taking you out.”

“No, I know why you’re taking me out, so I can be the goose-berry when you finally catch Sam.”

“Or Steve,” Kirsty added. “And that’s not why either. Well, it is, but it’s not the only reason.” Kirsty lay on the bed so that she was facing Catherine, looking into her eyes. “You don’t see yourself, Catherine, you don’t see how stunning you are, with your
incredible legs and all that hair and those eyes and those cheekbones. And I just thought if I got you dolled up a bit and we went to the pub, you’d see the way men would look at you. The way they’d
turn their heads
to look at you when you walk past. And no, you don’t need to have sex to be happy and you’re not some head case who’s trapped in the past, whatever the past is. But you are my friend now. And as well as being a mum and an entirely arbitrary wife, you are also a beautiful woman. So don’t have sex with any of the men you meet tonight, just come out and stand in a room with your eyebrows plucked, some lipstick on, and smooth legs and see what effect you have. Because when you do I bet you’ll feel great, I bet you’ll feel free.”

“I’d like to feel free,” Catherine said thoughtfully. “And actually the thought of having sex with the first or any man I meet makes me want to be sick, so I don’t mind leaving that part out after all.”

“That’s what I thought,” Kirsty said, pulling Catherine into a sitting position. “We take baby steps, Catherine, baby steps. Now, where’s your razor?”

When Alison got home from the supermarket, her reluctant son in tow, Marc was in the kitchen with the girls. Their heads were bent over the drawings they were creating, felt tips fanned out across the marble counter. As she entered, Rosie skipped around her feet in greeting before sticking her head in the bags that Alison set on the floor.

“This dog is a hooligan,” she said, picking the bags up once again and putting them on the countertop. “You can’t take your eyes off of her.”

Alison looked at her husband leaning over the girls as they colored. The last sixteen years hadn’t been as kind to him as they had to Jimmy. Marc had filled out too, but it was a slight paunch
and not muscle that had materialized underneath his shirt. And his hair had receded quite considerably, not that either of them ever mentioned it.

Of course the change in his appearance wouldn’t matter if she could love him again. If things were right between her and Marc, it wouldn’t matter that she had never had the life she’d dreamed of as a girl, never got to university or had a job of her own or really had any part of herself that wasn’t wholly dependent on Marc or their children. Take her away from her family and she might as well not exist, she had made such a little mark on the world.

“This is nice!” Amy said happily as she kissed Alison on the cheek. “We’re all here in our new big house.”

“All right, Muffin.” Dom greeted his little sister with the first hint of a smile that Alison had seen since she’d announced to him he was helping her do the food shopping for the weekend. “How was school today?”

“It was okay today,” Amy said. “There’s this one nice girl I like.”

“I had the best time,” Gemma told him, glancing up from her coloring. “My teacher is lovely and all the girls like me. Eloise is going to be my best friend, though, because she understands me.”

“Oh, does she now?” Marc said, handing Alison a cup of tea. “Eloise must be a very clever girl.”

“She is and she’s the tallest in our class,” Gemma said. “She’s the tallest and I’m the prettiest and we’re both clever, so we can’t fail.”

“Except in modesty exams,” Dom said, opening the fridge door, looking at the remaining shopping bags at his feet, and closing the door again.

Alison looked at her entire family gathered under one roof, her successful husband who made cups of tea unbidden, her musical
son and her two smiling daughters. For a few rare minutes during which nobody was shouting, lying, or crying she could pretend that she had it all. If any other woman was to see her life laid out in a magazine or on a TV show, then chances were she’d feel envious. Three lovely children, a handsome husband who provided for them, a wonderful new home fitted with every luxury. But the one thing Alison didn’t have, the one essential ingredient that would enable her to enjoy all of this perfection, was a sense of herself. Somewhere between running away at the age of seventeen and now, she had lost the woman she had always meant to become, and her waning feelings for Marc threw the realization into sharp relief. Despite all the outward trappings of a happy and successful life, Alison was not happy, she was not fulfilled, and worst of all she was not herself.

“How nice, all of us will be in for dinner tonight!” she said brightly, determined to conjure happiness out of so many good things.