Another Mother's Life (34 page)

It was all very well for Kirsty to tell her to rejoice in being fully alive, but when you weren’t used to it, it wasn’t that easy. It was like waking up one hundred years into the future; everything seemed louder, faster and a whole lot more frightening—a world full of terrifying possibilities.

Despite what had happened on Monday, Jimmy had still been around for most of the week. He had still picked up the girls and taken them to school every other day, and on Tuesday he’d walked with Catherine to work because he knew she was dreading it even if she didn’t say so. He’d had dinner with them on Wednesday night and on Thursday had come round to replace the rotting floorboard in the bathroom, a job he’d been promising to do for at least three months. He’d been there physically, but he’d seemed emotionally absent.

On Friday afternoon, he came round to pick up the girls’ luggage before he collected them from school to take them straight
off to his mother’s. He stood there in silence holding up the rucksack while Catherine folded in changes of clothes for the girls and then carefully stowed favorite toys, books, blankets, and pillows.

They hadn’t talked again about what Jimmy had seen on Monday, but Catherine felt that she should be talking about something, because it just wasn’t like the two of them to be silent and polite, so she asked him another question.

“Are you sorry you missed the audition for session work?” she said. “I feel so bad that you missed it because of me. Maybe if you called them now it wouldn’t be too late.” Jimmy shook his head, bending to scoop one of Leila’s soft toys from the floor where Catherine had dropped it. He picked it up and squeezed it tenderly before dropping it into the bag.

“No,” he said. “I was of two minds about it anyway, and besides, I’m needed here right now.”

By his usual standards he was being singularly uncommunicative, and although Catherine could understand that walking in on her and Marc had made him angry, territorial even, unusually macho, she couldn’t work out why he’d seemed so sad. Catherine hated to see him sad.

“I just don’t like to think about you missing out because of me,” she said. “Because of my stupid mess. I can manage without you, if you want to go.”

“I know,” Jimmy said with a shrug, staring at the toes of his cowboy boots. “Session work is for losers anyway. I’ve got the band to think about. Right now the band needs me, we’re at a crucial writing stage. Plus we’ve got that wedding at the Holiday Inn week after next.”

“Jimmy?” Catherine said uncertainly, afraid that his sadness was a symptom of regret. “Do you ever wish you’d never met me, that we’d never gotten together and you’d never become a dad so
young? Because then you wouldn’t feel obliged to hang around me now and make sure I don’t make a total idiot of myself?”

Jimmy looked at her for a long time.

“I felt like that once, on one night for about half an hour, and that was enough to end our marriage.” He shrugged and, as Catherine put in the last toy, bent to strap up the rucksack. “But I’ve never felt that way for one moment before or since. Why do you ask? Is it because you think if you didn’t have me or the children in your life
you’d
be free now? Free to run off with arse-face?”

Catherine knew her laugh at the insult was probably ill advised, but it escaped before she could repress it. Jimmy glowered at her.

“I’m sorry,” she said, composing herself. “It’s just—look, I know you think I’m an idiot and possibly some kind of slut for getting as close to him as I did after knowing him again for about five seconds, but you know me, Jim. You know that in the last twelve years you’re the only person I’ve … I’m not the kind of woman who jumps into bed with people for the sake of it. I got swept away in the moment, in the past. I know what’s at stake and besides, I’ve never stolen another woman’s husband yet and I’m not going to start now. Please don’t be angry with me, please don’t be so … disappointed in me. For one thing I can’t take it, I need you to like me because what you think of me matters to me more than what anyone else thinks, and for another Kirsty says you are being a right royal hypocrite and that I should punch you for being so up your own arse.”

This time Jimmy’s mouth twitched a little, but only a little.

“Maybe it’s just hitting me now,” he said. “Maybe that’s why I’m so … down.”

“What is hitting you? Marc and Alison turning up?”

“No, us breaking up. The end of our marriage.” Jimmy sighed and looked at the ceiling. “Look, I’ve got a reputation, girls hang around me a lot of the time. I can’t blame them, I am Jimmy
Ashley, after all. But for what it’s worth, I want you to know that I haven’t been with anyone else in twelve years either. Apart from Donna Clarke in the ladies’ loos of the Goat Pub. At first I let you think I did what I did because I was angry at you for not forgiving me and I wanted to hurt you even more. And then I did it because I thought I actually might meet someone new, and sometimes, recently just because it seems easier to pretend that I’m something I’m not. That version of me is a lot easier to live with, the version that doesn’t give a bollock about what he’s messed up.” Jimmy shrugged. “Look, I know you have every right to see other men and move on, even arse-face if you really want to. I know that, but when I saw you with him then it hit me. We’re over. We’re really over, and sooner or later everything will change forever because we can’t go on like this and live our lives.”

Catherine was silent for a moment, listening to the radiators rumbling against the cold and the whoosh of the traffic splattering through the puddles outside of the window, and to her astonishment, as Jimmy’s words sunk in, she found she had to fight the well of tears in her eyes and blink them away.

“You’d better get the children,” she said, dipping her head to use her own hair as a curtain as she composed herself. “Got all their stuff?”

Jimmy picked up the big and battered old rucksack, the same one he’d had when he left home at the age of nineteen.

“Right here,” he said, mustering a smile. “Although why they need this much stuff for a weekend at my mother’s I don’t know.”

“Especially when she’ll send them home with a whole new wardrobe of pink anyway,” Catherine said, grateful for his smile. “Never could get her head round redheads and hot pink.”

The pair stood up and eyed each other cautiously.

“Have a good weekend,” Jimmy said, hugging her briefly. “And take care of yourself.”

“I will,” Catherine promised him. “And you make sure you keep the girls warm and dry. I want them on that rust bucket for the least amount of time possible. Give my love to your mother.”

“Seriously?” Jimmy said wryly. “She won’t send you any back, you know.”

“Well, give her my regards, then,” Catherine told him with a smile. “I can be magnanimous.”

And then on impulse she threw her arms around him and hugged him until his arms encircled her waist and he was holding her.

“No matter what has to change, you’ll always mean the world to me,” she told him.

Jimmy peered out from the hatch of his boat on Saturday morning and looked up at the rain; it was slicing down in thick sheets, colliding with the tin roof with a violent clatter.

He looked back at the girls, who were wrapped as one in his duvet, sitting on the bed and cowering from the leaky roof.

“We’ll try calling her again in a minute,” Jimmy said. His mother had been out when they arrived in Aylesbury on Friday evening. After mooring the boat they had waited for a break in the weather until it became apparent that no break was going to come, and Leila said she thought they’d be drier outside anyway. With no umbrellas, they had run the two hundred yards or so from the towpath to his mother’s house and Jimmy had knocked on the door, but no one answered.

After a few moments he’d knocked again, and again, and then he had gone round the back and peered through the French windows. The living room was silent and dark. Sensing his daughters’ expectancy, Jimmy knelt down and peered through the letter box; the hallway light was on. But that could mean anything. His mother had always lived by the conviction that burglars would
never rob a house with a hallway light on, on the off chance that the entire family plus a guard dog might be convening on the landing.

Shepherding the girls under the meager protection of the porch, he phoned both her home (although Leila pointed out that if she was in to answer it, they wouldn’t have been standing outside in the rain) and mobile number several times. Then Eloise noticed a milk bottle with a note sticking out of the top of it.

It was written in his mother’s loose handwriting; the ink was faded and had bled into the paper where the rain had reached it. It read, “No milk for two weeks, please.”

Jimmy stared at the note and got an uneasy feeling in the pit of his stomach. Mum never missed her chance to see the girls, and in the winter Jimmy always brought them here when it was his weekend. He didn’t like them spending the night on his boat. Especially not in this weather. He hated them having to see past the romance and fun of how he lived to the damp, cold reality.

Jimmy recalled the last conversation he’d had with his mum when he’d phoned to give her the dates they’d be visiting in February.

“Now, that third weekend I won’t be back from Spain till Saturday morning, okay? So bring them on Saturday at about eleven. It’ll be lovely to see their little faces and I’ll bring them back some presents.”

“Okay,” Jimmy had said, or something like that.

“Did you get that?” his mum had persisted. “Bring them Saturday morning? Write it down, James. You know what you’re like.”

He had forgotten that his mum wasn’t going to be back until Saturday morning. He had known, but then he’d caught Marc and Catherine together and suddenly there wasn’t space for anything else in his head except for the two of them, together. He’d been so
busy trying to picture Catherine with that man that he’d forgotten. He’d let his girls down.

Jimmy looked at his girls huddled on the porch and did his best to hide his frustration from them. At a loss over what to do, he took the girls to McDonald’s, where they sat over three happy meals until the early evening crowd thinned out and the late evening groups of angry-looking boys and bored-looking girls began to fill it up. At that point even Jimmy, who was noted for being hip with the kids, thought the girls probably didn’t need to hear language quite so Anglo-Saxon. By the time they got back to the boat it was almost ten, and he could see his girls were cold and damp and miserable, even though they were trying their best to look like they were having a good time, especially Eloise, who was determined to prove that nothing her father did could ever be wrong.

Jimmy had made them a hot chocolate and they’d huddled together around the stove singing Meat Loaf songs until finally sleep overtook first Leila and then Eloise. Jimmy had still been kicking himself when he’d drifted off.

The rain hadn’t stopped all night. It was just after six when a hint of gray daylight struggled to appear through the sodden gloom and Jimmy woke up. He’d been phoning his mother’s mobile on and off ever since, but true to form he knew she wouldn’t turn it on until she got back into the house.

“Try again,” Eloise whined miserably, nodding at Jimmy’s phone. “It must be past eleven now and I want to be warm, Daddy.”

“We’ve had a lovely time,” Leila said consolingly. “It’s just we can’t feel our noses now. It’s a bit like when Jesus spent forty days and nights in the desert. Only cold.” She sank her chin into the collar of her coat, which she had worn all night, adding, “I love you, Daddy,” just before the lower half of her face disappeared completely.

Jimmy bit the inside of his mouth and pressed the redial on his phone.

As his mother answered, he knew at least one thing for certain: he was
never
going to hear the end of this.

“Look at my girls,” Pam said as she put another plate of toast in front of the children, who were bathed and changed into the brand-new and largely pink outfits that she had bought them in duty-free. “Pretty as a picture.”

Pam was always buying her granddaughters things, pretty things, nice things. The things their mother didn’t seem to give two hoots about.

“I’ve missed you,” she said, hugging first one and then the other, and then adjusting the bow in Leila’s hair.

“We missed you too, Nanna Pam,” Leila said, with feeling. “Especially when we were freezing like ice cubes and penguins.”

“Hmph …” Pam caught her son’s look and bit her tongue. “Well, if your daddy didn’t love that leaky old boat so much.”

“I’m like a pirate, girls,” Jimmy said, mustering himself, now that he had his own plate of toast, not to mention some dry old clothes that his mum still kept in his wardrobe. “I sail the high seas looking for adventure.”

“You sail the canal, you mean,” Leila said.

“And you don’t even sail it cos you haven’t got a sail,” Eloise added.

Jimmy sipped his tea and said nothing. Sometimes he felt like he was the best father in the history of fathers. Like last night, yes, he’d gotten his daughters cold and wet because of his own stupidity, but when he and the girls had been singing “Bat Out of Hell” and he realized they knew all the words, at that moment he was officially the coolest father in the world. But then the real world came crashing in and he’d realized that a comprehensive knowledge
of the Meat Loaf catalog was not what an eight- and five-year-old really needed from their father. They didn’t know exactly how much he’d messed up their little lives. And even worse, Eloise was now blaming the whole sorry mess on Catherine.