Another Mother's Life (27 page)

“But you’ve said you are sorry and you want to come back, and me and Leila want you to come back. And anyway in assembly Mrs. Pritchard said that when someone’s done something bad you should try to forgive them.”

“That
is
what Jesus would do,” Leila counseled as she skipped by.

“Right.” Jimmy paused; it was hard to argue with the son of God. “Well, I expect he would, but the thing is when you’re grown-up it’s not always as simple as saying sorry and forgiving people and stuff … like that.”

“Why isn’t it?” Eloise asked, pinning him to the spot with her mother’s eyes.

Jimmy couldn’t answer her for a moment.

“Because when you’re grown up and you do something wrong, more people are affected. More people get hurt and it’s very complicated.”

“But what about me and her?” Eloise asked baldly, nodding at her sister. “We’re people, we got hurt—why doesn’t what we think matter? We think you should come home.”

As Jimmy looked at his daughters he felt the crushing weight of failure on his shoulders. He’d let them down.

“Sometimes,” he said finally, heavily, “even though grown-ups love their children very much, they just can’t live together anymore …”

He watched his daughter as her eyes darkened like a stormy sea.

“You shouldn’t have got married and had kids if you couldn’t keep loving each other properly. It’s not fair!”

The bell rang and Eloise snatched her school bag from Jimmy’s hand and ran into her classroom, along with most of the rest of her class.

“That didn’t go quite the way I planned,” Jimmy said, watching her go, feeling her words stinging like slaps on his skin. She was right, of course, according to all the songs ever written, many of them by him. It was impossible to make somebody love you just because you wanted them to. And yet with Catherine he had
truly believed that he would be able to make it happen, because he loved her so much. You couldn’t love a woman as much as he loved her and not inspire something similar in her, you just couldn’t. At least that was what he had always believed, and it was hard to let go of that kind of faith even when the facts had discounted it long ago.

Life had been very simple before Jimmy Ashley got to know Catherine Parkin. There had been the band, music, the band, his friends, the band, a few girls here and there, and the band. Jimmy hadn’t needed or wanted anything else. At the time he’d put his single-mindedness down to his ambition, but just recently he’d wondered if it wasn’t more to do with his dad dying when he was seventeen. Knowing that his dad wasn’t at home meant he didn’t want to be there either.

So when his mum had told him she was moving away to Aylesbury just as Jimmy was approaching his nineteenth birthday, it was with some relief that he told her he was going to be staying in Farmington, sharing a place with the rest of the band. Jimmy liked the feeling of being rootless, he liked the freedom it brought him, the idea that at any moment he could pack a bag and be gone, not that he ever did. But it didn’t matter that he hadn’t done that, what mattered was that he could. He had been ready, poised for life.

And then he met Catherine, no, not exactly met her, because she’d always been around on the periphery of his life, the skinny ginger-haired girl who hung out with the blond bombshell. But it was when he was twenty-one and Catherine was twenty that he first truly saw her. And once he started looking at her he couldn’t stop. She wasn’t good-looking in the traditional sense, the sense in which he and Billy had always defined an attractive woman, by her hair, breasts, and general availability for sex. Catherine had plenty of hair, that was true, but her body was long and thin with
skin that seemed almost translucent. Jimmy remembered that Catherine reminded him of his mum’s best bone china. If you held a piece of it up to the light, you could see your fingers through it.

He had known that something had happened with Catherine and her blond friend with the short skirts a few years before he first noticed her properly. He knew that she had dropped out of her A levels and never made it to university and that she still lived at home and worked in the Christian bookshop. But until he saw her smiling at that twenty-first birthday party he hadn’t wanted to know any more than that.

It had started with a conversation, his love for Catherine, a conversation that had begun with Catherine glancing over her shoulder as Jimmy approached her, unable to understand why he wanted to talk to her. There had been many conversations after that. Jimmy became a regular visitor to the Christian bookshop on the days that Catherine worked there and her mother did not. Eventually he managed to persuade her to come to a gig, made her promise that she would try to come so he could show her what he did best. He was proud of his music, but more than that he’d hoped that when she saw him up onstage she’d fancy him—it seemed to work on a lot of girls that way.

Jimmy remembered scanning the crowd at the gig until he caught sight of her, a good head taller than most people there, and then he’d played all night to her, never taking his eyes off of her.

“What is it with you and that skinny chick?” Billy asked him after he tried and failed to get Catherine to stay and have a drink with him after the gig.

“I like her, that’s all,” Jimmy said, disappointed that he’d played his very best and she still hadn’t let him buy her a drink, let alone fallen into bed with him.

“Don’t go falling in love, mate,” Billy warned him. “We can’t conquer the world with our music if one of us is in love.”

“Not me,” Jimmy told his friend. “Never me.”

But it was already too late. Before he’d ever kissed her he’d loved her.

Actually, getting to kiss her had been a lengthy process that had taken almost four months. It was hard to see her because her mother watched her like a hawk, but Catherine had developed a number of ways of getting time to herself, an act of rebellion that had made Jimmy love her all the more, especially when she used that precious stolen time to be with him. Mostly they would go for a drink, the two of them sitting in a quiet corner of a pub and talking about everything and anything. Jimmy found it became his mission to make her laugh, his heart quickening every time she smiled. A couple of times he’d taken her to the movies, to see films he couldn’t care less about, just so he’d be able to sit next to her in the dark and steal glances of her profile lit by the big screen. Funny, he remembered thinking, how he yearned to have the courage to simply pick up her hand and hold it. Once, though, she had a whole day to herself. When Jimmy asked her if she would like to hang out with him she refused, telling him she was going to London to visit art galleries. Without thinking, Jimmy found himself volunteering to go with her.

Eventually he found himself standing by her side opposite a painting of some red-haired chick in a lake.

“She looks like you a bit,” Jimmy said as Catherine stared very hard at the painting.

“She’s Ophelia,” Catherine said. “Driven mad by love. I’m not like her at all. I’m never going to be like her.”

Then one spring evening Jimmy walked her home after a gig she had stayed at long enough to have one drink. As always they stopped at the bottom of her road.

“I can walk you to your door if you like,” Jimmy offered. “I’m also available for coffee and the full range of hot drinks.”

Catherine laughed at his joke, standing underneath a cherry tree in full blossom, the scent of it mingling with his memories. The sound of her laughter made him happy.

“You can’t walk me home,” Catherine told him. “My mum doesn’t know I went out to a gig in a pub with a man. She thinks I went to a book group. And she can’t know about you, because if she did it would spoil everything. I’m not supposed to listen to rock music.”

“What?” Jimmy exclaimed. “Am I in
Footloose
? You’re twenty, you can do what you like.”

“I do do what I like,” Catherine replied defiantly. “Which is why I have to keep secrets from her … she’s very hard to live with.”

“Then leave home,” Jimmy told her.

“It’s harder than you think,” Catherine said, and suddenly she looked hopeless. “I don’t know how to.”

On impulse and after weeks of being too afraid to touch her, Jimmy put his arms around Catherine and held her close to him. He’d waited for a long time in the moonlight, the night silent and still, until her rigid body, which had stiffened instantly when he’d touched her, relaxed and softened. He remembered the feeling of her bones against his.

“I like you, Catherine,” he said, holding her, her chin resting on his shoulder.

“I’d worked that out,” Catherine replied. “I don’t get it, why
you
would like
me
of all people, but I know that you do.”

“Do you like me at all?” Jimmy asked her nervously, because in the four months they had spent together he had no idea what she felt about him other than that she tolerated him with a certain degree of fondness.

“I like you …” Catherine began. “I don’t know about anything else, Jimmy. I don’t know if I can do anything else. I’m not sure I know how to love someone. I don’t want to be like Ophelia.”

Jimmy pulled back from the embrace just as a warm breeze disturbed the branches of the cherry tree, causing its blossom to waft lightly into her hair, glowing silver in the moonlight.

“Listen,” he said softly. “I don’t know what’s happened to you to make you feel like you can’t love someone, but you can. You of all people could love better than any of those half-asleep idiots in their houses who think they’ve got it all. You just need to believe that you can be free to grow, and go to gigs and invite blokes in for coffee whenever you like, especially if they are me because I am so in love with you, but anyway you can do it. You just need someone to show you how.”

“What did you say?” Catherine asked him.

Puzzled, Jimmy started ticking off the major points in his speech on his fingers.

“I said you can find love, grow … er … go to gigs and um, oh yeah, invite guys in—”

“You said you were in love with me,” Catherine interrupted him, and Jimmy realized she was angry. “You shouldn’t go around telling girls that you love them just because you want to sleep with them.” She pushed herself out of his arms. “I’m not that naive, Jimmy.”

“Huh?” Jimmy was confused. “Did I say that? I never meant to say it out loud, at least not yet, I haven’t spent four months getting you to let me spend time with you to freak you out now. But you might as well know I do love you, which is pretty weird considering all we’ve ever done together is talk and hang out. But I do love you and I’m not even trying to get you into bed, talking about extreme weirdness. I just want to be near you. Obviously I’d like to have sex with you too but not until you’re ready. I can wait for as long as it takes, and for the record I actually mean that. I love you, Cat.”

Catherine was silent for a long time before she said anything.

“Cat?” she asked him.

“Yeah, sorry,” Jimmy said, shrugging. “It’s your eyes, cat’s eyes. I won’t call you that again.”

“I like it,” she said. “It’s new. And I like you, Jimmy. A lot, but maybe not like you want me to, and I don’t know why because you are a great guy.”

Jimmy picked up one of her hands. “Plus way sexy too,” he added.

“Yes.” Catherine smiled slowly. “I suppose so.”

“Never thought I’d be trying to get a girl to like me,” Jimmy said. “Normally it’s the other way around.”

“Perhaps it’s the thrill of the chase you can’t give up,” Catherine suggested. “Maybe once you’ve got me you won’t want me anymore. I’m not very experienced at sex, for example.”

Jimmy had to take a minute to think about that.

“Are you implying that I may have a chance of ‘getting you,’ as you put it?” he asked her.

Catherine took a step closer to him.

“What if I don’t fall in love with you?” she said.

“I’m Jimmy Ashley,” he told her. “Of course you’re going to fall in love with me.”

And then as the cherry blossoms drifted down, he kissed Catherine for the very first time, completely certain that he was right.

Only now, with the benefit of hindsight, could he finally accept that he had been wrong. Because no matter how much Catherine cared for him, desired him, protected him, and relied on him, she had never once looked him in the eyes and told him she loved him.

Which meant that Eloise and the pantheon of rock was right. He never should have believed that he could make the impossible happen.

Jimmy pulled himself back into the present as his younger daughter hopped over to him.

“Was Ellie mean to you, because never mind, because she’s mean to me all the time and she doesn’t mean it really.”

“Right,” Jimmy said. “Come on, love, I’ll take you round to your classroom.”

“Mind if we join you?”

Jimmy turned around to find Alison at his side, her hair brushed and smooth, just the right amount of makeup on. She was wearing a pristine white wool coat and caramel-colored boots. It seemed as if the night of the party hadn’t affected her at all. When he looked at her he was conscious of his fifteen-year-old leather jacket creaking at every movement.