Another Mother's Life (19 page)

“Well, you’ll have to, as you lied about shaving your forests … I mean legs,” Kirsty added.

“And flat shoes,” Catherine added, looking at Eloise’s clear plastic play heels. That was one secret Nanna Pam item she had not discovered. She’d have to start looking harder.

“Well of
course
flat shoes, we don’t want you to tower over all the men, do we?” Kirsty replied glibly. “Actually, put on your long boots, they are like cleavage for the knees, you know—plus it makes you look a bit kinky.”

“I’ll put them on if you stop saying inappropriate words in front of my children that might get repeated in class,” Catherine warned her.

Kirsty nodded in satisfaction at the final effect.

“You are a fox,” she said. “You must be the last woman on the planet who doesn’t realize what a fox she is.”

“Mummy isn’t a fox,” Leila said, looking perplexed. “She’s a human bean, aren’t you, Mummy?”

“Well, my darling,” Kirsty said, putting an arm around the five-year-old and hugging her. “There is a rumor going round to that effect.”

Catherine was brushing out the backcombing that Kirsty had tried out on her hair when the doorbell sounded.

“I’ll get it,” Kirsty said. “It’ll be Jimmy.”

“Dad’s here, Mum!” Leila said, scrambling into her bedroom and grabbing her by the wrist, dragging her out before she could twist her mass of hair into its customary ponytail. “Come and show him your legs!”

“Leila, I …” Catherine felt herself freeze on the stairs. For some bizarre reason, although she had come to terms with half of Farmington seeing her legs from the knees down, the thought of her almost-ex-husband seeing them made her panic.

“Come on, Mummy,” Leila said, tugging her down the last few steps. “Look, Daddy—Mummy’s got legs!” Leila exclaimed.

Jimmy’s charmed chuckle at his daughter’s comment faded when he caught sight of Catherine, her head bowed, her hair obscuring half her face. But even though Jimmy knew how much she hated to be looked at, he seemed to spend an inordinately long time, at least five seconds longer than was acceptable, for an almost ex-husband looking at her thin, long legs.

Catherine felt her cheeks grow hot and herself grow cross. This was all Kirsty’s fault. She didn’t need to know that Jimmy found her effort at dressing up ridiculous. Her life was so much easier when she was in neutral, when he didn’t notice her or what she was looking like at all.

“You look …” Jimmy struggled to find a compliment.

“What?” Catherine asked him, wincing.

“You scrub up all right, don’t you?” Jimmy said with a shrug. “You’ve pushed the boat out, good for you.”

“Oh, how erudite! And they say the art of the compliment is lost,” Kirsty observed.

“I’m sorry.” Jimmy shrugged. “I mean you look really nice. Or whatever.”

“Are you really thirty-three or are you just an extremely old-looking fourteen-year-old?” Kirsty asked Jimmy, hooking her arm
through his and leading him out the front door before Catherine had to suffer any more embarrassment under his ham-fisted compliments.

“Right.” Catherine looked at her two children, dressed in nylon satin and fake silk and with glitter in their hair.

“I have never seen two such beautiful girls in my life,” she told them, her heart glued to every word. “So come on, then, let’s go to this party and see what the rest of Gemma’s family is like.”

“They’ll be perfect,” Eloise told her, taking the hand Catherine proffered. “They are bound to be perfect, because Gemma is.”

B
loody hell,” Jimmy said as the five of them walked through the wrought-iron electric gate that swung open on their approach.

“Magic gate!” Leila said with a little hop as they walked down the drive that led to the floodlit house.

“Electric gate,” Eloise told her, suddenly seeming a little more subdued.

“Nice place,” Jimmy said, nodding toward the double-fronted faux Georgian palace.

“Big place,” Eloise said quietly. “Much bigger than our house.”

“I’d say they paid at least one point two mil,” Kirsty added, turning to Catherine. “What do you think?”

“I think that all of those fairy lights are a wanton waste of energy,” Catherine said. “Just because you have money to burn doesn’t mean that you should.”

“And I think I hope there’s plenty of booze,” Jimmy said, whisking Leila up onto his shoulders and out of the way of a Mercedes SLK as it swept by, leaving a ricochet of gravel in its wake. “I’m going to need it.”

The house was already filled with people. Everywhere Catherine looked she saw someone she knew at least by sight. Half the PTA were instantly visible, as well as three or four teachers from the school, including Mrs. Woodruff, and the optician from Boots. It must have been
the
optician, because as soon as he saw Kirsty his eyes lit up and as soon as she saw him she vanished. The massive hallway alone accommodated what had to be fifty or sixty people talking, sipping champagne, and taking sandwiches from a passing teenager with a tray. Catherine looked for someone new who might be one of Gemma’s parents, but so far she already knew everyone she saw.

“What do we do now?” Jimmy asked Catherine as the pair of them stood there side by side, one daughter hanging off each of them as they maneuvered their little party toward the relative safety of a sheltering wall.

“We get a drink, I suppose, and mingle,” Catherine answered, as if she were suggesting they smear themselves in ketchup and jump into a den full of starving lions. “Make small talk and all that stuff.”

“Right,” Jimmy said. “Or we could just take the girls to the all-you-can-eat buffet at the place in town, and get drunk on the house white, and forget about it, what do you reckon?”

Catherine looked at Jimmy and felt a sudden rush of warmth toward him. At that exact moment in her life she could think of nothing that she would like to do more than run away with Jimmy and the girls and, yes, maybe even get a little bit tipsy with him over onion relish dip. But before she could accept, Catherine
found herself engulfed in squeals and yelps as her daughters were embraced by a blond girl who surely must have been the mythical Gemma.

“Mum, this is her, this is Gemma,” Eloise said, tugging dangerously hard on Catherine’s chiffon sleeve. “This is my best friend!”

Catherine looked down at the pretty little blond girl standing next to her daughter and suddenly got a vivid flashback. She and Alison standing side by side at Siobhan Murphy’s tenth birthday party, admiring the pink Miss Piggy cake. Edward Stone had come up to Catherine and told her that he didn’t want to be her boyfriend anymore because she was too ugly. Alison had punched Edward Stone quite hard in the stomach, making him double over in pain and throw up frosted cupcakes on the carpet.

Catherine blinked and suddenly, the moment had passed and she was looking at her own little girl again, standing next to Gemma. For a moment Catherine got the feeling that she wasn’t looking back at the past but touching the future. Gemma looked exactly like Alison. Exactly like her but she couldn’t be hers … because it would just be too … Alison wouldn’t come
here
after …

She stared at the plump little girl with her big blue eyes and smiled at her.

“Hello, Gemma, nice to meet you,” she said, hoping she was the only one who noticed the tremble in her voice. “Eloise has talked about you a lot.”

“Hello, Mrs. Ashley. Nice to meet you too.” Gemma smiled prettily at her. “Eloise has been so kind to me since I started at the school. I feel like I fit right in now.”

“That’s great, Gemma. By the way, where’s your mummy? I’d like to meet her.” Catherine glanced quickly around the room, her heart in her throat, afraid of whom she might see, constantly telling herself that there must be a hundred blond little girls in this
town who bore a passing resemblance to Alison. This was purely a coincidence. That’s what Catherine told herself, yet at exactly the same time she knew with complete certainty what the truth was. Alison was back.

“I think Mummy’s in the kitchen being cross about the sandwiches,” Gemma told her before saying to Eloise, “and Amy’s in the tent being Beauty from
Beauty and the Beast
, dancing to the disco. Want to dance?”

“Yes, yes, yes!” Eloise said. “Can we, Mum? Please?”

Catherine paused. “Okay, then,” Catherine agreed reluctantly, because she would rather have kept them close to her just in case she needed to make a quick exit. “But don’t go out of the house, okay? Don’t talk to anyone you don’t know … or some people you do know, and when I say it’s time to go it’s …” But the three girls had disappeared.

“There goes the dinner-in-town idea,” Jimmy said regretfully. “We definitely can’t go without them … can we?”

“Jimmy, what’s the name of the people whose party this is?” Catherine asked him urgently.

Jimmy looked perplexed. “I don’t know, Cat, I never exactly saw the invitation. I met the woman, the mother in the playground. Do you remember? She said her name was …” Jimmy trailed off, unaware that Catherine was hanging on every nuance of his silence.

“It’s gone,” he said, shaking his head and shrugging.

“What did she look like, the mother?” Catherine pressed him.

“What’s up, Cat?” Jimmy asked. “I didn’t crack on to her if that’s what you’re worried about, even if she did fancy the arse off me.”

Catherine’s stomach dropped ten stories.

“Just tell me, what did she look like?”

“Blond, money all over her, you know, the usual. Great teeth,
nice smile. Said we used to know each other but I couldn’t think how I’d know a chick like that …”

“Oh my God,” Catherine said, looking around her with wide-eyed horror. “Oh. My. God.”

“What?” Jimmy exclaimed.

“It’s Alison.”

“You’re right!” Jimmy clicked his fingers. “Alison, that was her name. How did you … ? Oh Christ. It’s
that
Alison. The actual Alison.”

The two of them stared at each other. Catherine nodded, unable to move.

“How do we feel about that?” he asked her, putting his hand on her arm to steady her.

“I don’t know,” Catherine told him. “I don’t—it shouldn’t matter after all these years, should it? So what if she’s come back and my daughter is her daughter’s new best friend? It’s all in the past, water under the bridge, it doesn’t matter anymore, right? Right?”

Jimmy didn’t say anything for a moment, as he watched Catherine’s wide-eyed face drain of any semblance of color.

“We’re upset about it, then,” he confirmed.

“I don’t know how else to feel,” Catherine admitted. “I feel sick, Jimmy, why did she have to come back here, that’s what I don’t get. Why now?”

“Look.” Jimmy felt now was his time to be decisive and take control. “I’ll get the girls and we’ll go, okay? You don’t need to deal with this now. You need to go home and think about it. Let it sink in.”

“She can’t have known I was still here. If she’d known she wouldn’t have come back,” Catherine said, her voice low and dark. “She wouldn’t want to see me.”

“Maybe, maybe not—but the point is you don’t need to see her
tonight. Wait here. I’ll get the girls. We’ll go home and talk this through. Okay?”

Catherine gripped his hand hard in hers.

“Okay,” she said. “And thank you. Thank you for not thinking I’m stupid and irrational and delusional.”

“You forget, Cat,” Jimmy said, placing the palm of his hand briefly on her blazing cheek. “I know.”

Catherine waited, standing in the hot, crowded room, with all the good people of Farmington chatting and laughing around her, and she was glad for once that she had developed the talent of fading into the background.

Even so, her heart was racing, her skin was pulsating with the blood that was careering around her body. She felt light-headed and hot, as if she had a fever, as if she’d suddenly been struck down by the flu.

“It’s just a girl you once knew, a girl you fell out with over a boy,” she told herself, braced against any eventuality. “It doesn’t matter. Why should it matter now?” An answering thought slowly descended, slotting into place with exacting care. Alison hadn’t come back to Farmington alone. She’d come back with two girls and a teenage son and her husband.

Her husband.

The day after Alison had left Farmington it was as if she had disappeared into a parallel universe. Catherine’s parents had banned any discussion of her, the boy she had run off with, and what might become of them. Catherine gleaned snippets of rumors, whispered in hushed tones, but since she had had to leave school before taking her exams, she had been unable to find out what had really happened with Alison and Marc. After her mother had discovered the full extent of her involvement with Marc, she decided that the freedom of school was too dangerous for her daughter and
that was the end of Catherine’s education, the end of her hopes of going to university and her dreams of freedom. Catherine could have fought them, she could have left them, but at that point in her life she didn’t have the energy. At the age of seventeen she turned her face to the wall and gave up all hope of a normal life.