Another Mother's Life (24 page)

Catherine moved and sat up away from him, brushing her hair behind her ear.

“Jimmy, I’ve known you a long time now, you’ve never once been tightly coiled in your life.”

“How long is it?” Jimmy asked, even though he knew exactly. “Not counting all those years we were at school together. It must be almost twelve years. I remember the first time I saw you. The first time I really noticed you, that is. You were at that party the band was playing, some bird’s twenty-first. We were on a break and I was at the bar getting a drink. You were standing at one end of it looking a bit lost, dressed all in black like you’d come to a funeral. I remember thinking to myself, that chick is
tall
.” Catherine laughed and rolled her eyes. “You were looking like you’d rather be anywhere else but there and then the girl whose party it was—what was her name? Denise something—came over and hugged you and she said something to you that made you laugh. And you lit up, Cat, sort of from the inside out, like a lantern. I wanted to get to know you then. You didn’t make it easy.”

“Because the whole of the town was queuing up to go out with you, I couldn’t think why you’d want me,” Catherine said.

“I wanted to be the one to make you laugh,” Jimmy said. “I wanted to be the one who lit you up every day. I blew that. I blew it big-time.”

He’d blown it because he’d cheated on Catherine exactly like Marc had, Jimmy thought bitterly to himself. He’d behaved no better than the other man. In fact, his act of betrayal was far worse than Marc’s because Marc had never loved Catherine the way he did. He’d hurt her because he loved her, and what kind of coward does that?

“No, you didn’t blow it,” Catherine said. “I mean you did, but it wasn’t just you. It was me too …” She sat up, pushing her fingers through her hair, shaking it from her shoulders as if she were trying to wake herself up from a dream. “Look, Jimmy, let’s not rake all this over now. Not now when we’re friends at last, okay?
Let’s just agree that we both did things wrong. That we’re better suited to being friends than husband and wife. Now that Alison and Marc are here, well, I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I know I’m going to need you to be my friend. And I don’t want us to run the risk of falling out again.”

“That’s not what I was trying to do,” Jimmy said awkwardly. “All I was trying to do was to … I don’t know. Make you see that you have changed, you’re not the same person you were at seventeen. You might feel like it tonight, but it’s temporary, I swear.”

“Will you stay here tonight?” Catherine asked. Jimmy felt his chest tighten. “The sofa’s quite comfy.”

“Yeah? I mean yeah, ’course. If you like.”

“I would,” Catherine said. “Do you want some more tea?”

“On second thought, have you got any whiskey?” Jimmy asked, and they got up and found the bottle that had been in the cupboard for two years, since Catherine won it in a raffle at the school fair.

Catherine had had perhaps two or three sips before she had fallen asleep upright on the sofa. Gently, Jimmy had taken the glass from her hand and then with infinite care had lifted her legs up onto the sofa and eased her shoulders down, placing a cushion beneath her head and drawing the crocheted throw over her. That had been about four hours ago and she still lay there now, her hair trailing over her face, one hand clenched around the corner of the cushion as if it were the last straw.

Jimmy had tried to sleep in the chair, but sleep had not come. Every time he’d closed his eyes, fireworks went off behind his lids, his brain hummed and his body ached. At some point during the night or early morning something had changed inside him, because whenever he looked over at Catherine sleeping on the sofa, he felt as if his whole body had been cleaved in half by the sight of her.

And then as the sun rose in the sky and burned the mist away, the realization that had been nudging at his thoughts all night suddenly dawned. Nothing had changed, nothing was different. For the last twelve years he had always felt like this, and only recently had he managed to convince himself that he didn’t. But now when she needed him, that pretense had fallen away like a sandcastle disintegrating under the incoming tide.

Jimmy still loved Catherine. It felt as if he always had.

He bit his lip and rested his head against the back of the chair. As he closed his eyes, he felt a tear trickle down his cheek.

The fact that he loved his wife was not in question.

Whether or not he’d have the guts to try to do anything about it, he couldn’t say.

A
lison opened her eyes and waited for the second or two it took for her to remember her life. She had been dreaming about being a child again. Not about any event in particular, but just about her and Cathy when they were around Gemma’s age, running along the canal towpath in the sunlight, the heat of the sun on their shoulders as Alison chased after Cathy, whose hair was made amber by the sunshine. That was all; nothing else had happened in the dream except that Alison had felt light inside, she had felt free.

Now that her eyes were open and she had reabsorbed her daily life back into her bones, she felt the weight of reality sinking into her skin. She truly had seen Cathy last night, she hadn’t dreamt that.

It was Rosie and not Marc who was in bed next to her. She rolled onto her side and looked at his side of the bed. The pillow was plumped and smooth, the duvet unruffled. He had not come
to bed at all. Briefly Alison wondered if he had followed Cathy home and was with her right now, and an ember of jealousy flickered in her throat, but she swallowed it down.

Pushing herself up onto her elbows, Alison made herself get out of bed, the dog springing off the bed after her, skipping around her ankles, keen to be let out. Alison opened the bedroom door, hearing Rosie yap once as she scampered headlong down the stairs.

She found that her legs felt heavy, her arms ached, and she felt as if her brain was somehow insulated by one or two layers from reality. Everything seemed just a little bit farther away than it normally did.

It couldn’t be a hangover, she told herself. Yes, she’d drunk a good deal of champagne very quickly, but champagne usually didn’t affect her poorly. If she was hungover from anything it was her life and its culmination the previous night. The choices she had made that had somehow brought her life to this point had finally caught up with her. There was nowhere left to hide anymore.

In the bathroom Alison dunked her face in a basin full of cold water and then rubbed some more on her neck and between her breasts with a sponge, feeling the cold water trickle down over her belly. Roughly rubbing herself dry, she took a deep breath and looked in the mirror. Her reflection looked tired, her skin thin and frail. The trouble was, Alison thought, that all those years when she hadn’t seen Cathy, it had been easy not to think about her or about the kind of person that Alison had been. She hadn’t had to face up to that selfish, spoiled little brat, the thoughtless girl who had wrecked half a dozen lives just to get what she wanted.

But now Alison had seen Cathy face-to-face, and she had to acknowledge the truth.

This person, the woman looking back out of the mirror at her, was the very same girl who had abandoned Cathy to her parents.
Of course, Alison hadn’t known that Cathy was pregnant. But in the cold light of day, as she looked at her reflection in the mirror, she knew that even if Cathy had told her, she would have left anyway. She would have done anything to be with the man she loved.

Tired of looking at her tired self, Alison went to check on her children.

Dominic was sprawled facedown diagonally across his bed, one arm flung over his guitar, his iPod still plugged into his ears. He looked fifteen again and nothing like the enraged and passionate young man who had visited her in her bedroom last night. Alison tiptoed carefully across the detritus of his teenage life and carefully pulled the earbud from his left ear. When she realized she couldn’t reach the left one she carefully located the iPod and switched it off.

Dominic mumbled something, brushing one hand outward in a spasm, as if he were attempting to swat a fly, before settling back into sleep, and then he didn’t look fifteen anymore but five, his face relaxing into that little boy who had once been her guide and beacon. Alison looked at those dark lashes and that soft mouth that used to tremble whenever he was sad, frightened, or furious, and, unable to resist, she bent and kissed him lightly on the head.

He wanted her to leave Marc, to strike out on her own. But he was young, and angry and full of fire. For the first time last night Alison had tried to think of a life without her husband and found she couldn’t imagine what it might be like. Perhaps she had created Marc, but he had made her too, he’d made her a mother and a wife, a woman who lived for her family or at least who told herself she did. But did she?

Alison dragged Dominic’s duvet cover over both boy and guitar and crept back out of the room to check on her daughters.

Gemma was arranged as neatly as always, the back of one hand
resting demurely against her cheek, the other tucked neatly under the cover, like a true sleeping princess.

Amy, on the other hand, looked as if she had wrestled a crocodile in her sleep, which wasn’t past the realm of possibility, Alison thought as she looked at her, one leg hanging out of bed, soft vulnerable toes touching the floor. Her quilt was flung to one end of the bed, her head was twisted awkwardly to one side, and her pillow was on the floor.

Alison crept over to the bed and, kneeling tenderly, lifted Amy’s leg back onto the mattress and covered her with the duvet.

Perhaps Dominic was right, perhaps she had been so busy creating and re-creating this perfect family life for her children that she hadn’t noticed how the stress and tension between her and Marc was affecting her children. Gemma was so easy, that’s how Alison always described her middle child. She assumed that Gemma’s confidence was due to happiness but perhaps it was like armor, concealing her anxieties. Maybe her eight-year-old little girl was trying to protect herself. And Amy’s fears weren’t nameless or imaginary, not if she sensed that the fairy-tale castle her parents had built for her to live in might crumble away to nothing. If that was true, then no wonder she only ever relaxed when the whole family was in one room.

Alison sat on the pink wicker chair opposite Amy’s bed and put her face in her hands.

Her life had come full circle back here in her hometown. It was ironic that she had had to walk back into her past to finally face her future. The trick was going to be trying to work out exactly how to face it, how to face Cathy and Jimmy and especially her husband. How to make sense of the accidental life she had forced herself into, and of the accidental wife she had become.

The house smelled of stale alcohol and egg- and-watercress sandwiches, some of which were trodden into the stair carpet or ground
into the hall tiles. Abandoned glasses were everywhere, filled with various liquids to varying degrees, giving Alison the almost irresistible urge to pick up her son’s drumsticks and play with them.

Marc was not in the kitchen or any of the downstairs rooms. From the looks of things he hadn’t even slept on the sofa.

Alison walked gingerly over broken chips to the French windows.

The sun was almost up, burning the mist off the lawn, spiralling up into the air like magician’s smoke. Marc was in the garden, huddled up in his wool coat, sitting on the white wrought iron garden furniture he had bought at a job lot from the show home in the development. He had his back to the house and was looking at the hills that swelled and rolled across the valley, lush green and gold in the early morning, the horizon garlanded with trees. Above the mist, the sky looked bright blue and clear. Alison thought that this might be the first sunny day of the year.

The grass was wet and cold under her bare feet, slick with dew, but she didn’t go back into the house to find shoes or slippers, sensing that if she turned back she’d lose this moment.

As she approached Marc, he looked up and smiled at her.

“Good morning, beautiful,” he said. “You really should have something on your feet. It’s a bit nippy out here. Thought I’d take the morning air and survey my kingdom and have a think.” He nodded at Rosie, who was enthusiastically digging in the flower bed. “The dog did her business in the garden for once. That’s got to be something to celebrate.”

Alison sat down on one of the wrought iron chairs, drawing her feet up onto its seat and tucking her knees beneath her chin. She felt the cold of the dew seep through her nightdress.

They smiled at each other for a moment, like two old cohorts who were finally realizing the game was up.

“Well, I certainly didn’t picture this when we came back,”
Marc said eventually. “I just didn’t think Cathy Parkin would still be here. That was a surprise, wasn’t it?”

“Didn’t you?” Alison asked. He looked at her; his nose and cheeks were red from the chill and his eyes looked puffy and sore. Briefly Alison wondered if Marc had been crying, but in all the years she had been with him she’d never seen him shed a tear.

“I didn’t plan it,” Marc said. “I swear to you.”

“I’m sorry I slapped you,” Alison said, hugging her arms around her knees.

“I deserved it,” Marc said.