Another Mother's Life (40 page)

“Is that why you are in your pajamas, Mummy?” Eloise asked her, leaning up on one elbow to peer at her mother’s face. “Were you in bed at four o’clock in the afternoon?”

“ ’Fraid so,” Catherine said, closing her eyes.

“Well, I think that’s cool,” Jimmy said. “Living it up, having a good time, remembering you’re still young and beautiful … it’s all good, so why not?”

Catherine screwed up her shut eyes. “Because it hurts,” she moaned.

“Well, if you like,” Jimmy suggested hesitantly, “if you’re okay to watch the girls for a bit, I’ll pop back to the boat, sort a few bits and bobs out, and then I can come back and cook dinner, if you want. I mean I don’t have to. But as you’re feeling rough, I could. If you like, but not if you don’t, but—”

“Would you?” Catherine asked, opening one eye. “
Could
you?”

“ ’Course I can, I don’t just live on ready meals and pot noodles when I’m on my own, you know,” Jimmy told her happily. “I can do a roast. Stick a chicken in an oven, how hard can it be?”

“Then thank you, Jimmy,” Catherine said, opening both eyes to smile at him, feeling a sudden rush of warmth and gratitude toward him. “You’re my hero.”

Jimmy looked at her lying there, flanked on either side by their daughters, and he knew that if he sat on that carpet for one more second the sight would bring him to tears.

“Right, then,” he said, jumping up in one agile move. “I’ll be back in an hour.”

Catherine flopped her head left to look at one daughter and then right to look at the other.

“You are going to have tea with Gemma and Amy next Wednesday,” she told them, wincing as they cheered at the news. Leila kissed her on one cheek, and then after a second of hesitation Eloise kissed her on the other.

“Mummy,” Eloise said, propping herself up on one elbow.

“Yes, darling,” Catherine said, smiling at her.

“I haven’t been kind to you very much, about you and Daddy. I thought that it was your fault, but Daddy explained it to me, about how he made you sad and angry even though he loved you and that really grown-ups are stupid a lot of the time, especially him so don’t blame you for it. So I’m sorry. I love you.”

“I love you too,” Catherine said, feeling tears spring to her eyes that somehow made the day seem all the more bright and clear. “You feel very sad, don’t you, about me and Daddy.” She looked at Leila. “You both do.”

Both girls nodded, but did not speak.

“It is sad, and I am so sorry,” Catherine told them, looking at each of them in turn. “And I am so sorry that it happened to you. When I married your daddy and we had you we never,
ever
planned that this would happen; we thought we would always be together, all of us. But sometimes life has a way of sweeping you off course when you are not looking and turning things upside down. So I’m sorry, I’m so sorry you have to feel sad because of me and Daddy getting swept off course. But you know, we both love you so much and we will always look after you. We will always be a family.”

She hugged the girls close to her and kissed each one on the forehead.

“I expect God is proud of you, Mum,” Leila said into her hair. “Because you are trying very hard, and God loves a trier, Mrs. Woodruff says.”

“Glad to hear it,” Catherine said.

A
lison took a deep breath before slotting her key into the lock and opening the front door. She had no idea how Marc was going to react to her being out all night and most of Sunday. She knew since she had missed breakfast and lunch and was only just making it home in time for tea that he was bound to have noticed, but her phone had run out of charge at some point in the night and had been spared any demanding or angry messages he might have left her. So, deciding that ignorance was bliss, Alison took a long time to get back home, because she didn’t want to face Marc. Besides, she knew what would happen the moment she saw him. He’d want to know all about her night with Catherine and she didn’t want to tell him. The time she’d spent with her old friend had gone better than she could have imagined and this morning she felt for the first time in a long time as if some unnamed disjointed part of her life had clicked back into place. After she had left Catherine’s, as tired and as nauseous as she was feeling, she
did for the first time what she had either neglected to do or had been unable to do since she had arrived back in Farmington. She went for a walk in her heeled tan boots and visited all of their old places.

At last Alison felt as if she had been handed a passport to her past.

Her first port of call was the tree in Butts meadow where they both used to climb and hide out for hours in its canopy, telling each other stories and jokes, reading comics and later magazines. Alison was delighted to see that the tree was still there, its branches bare now and braced for spring. She stood at the foot of its trunk and looked up into its tightly laced branches. It was there as a nine-year-old that Alison had persuaded Catherine to wind the hands on her watch back one hour so they could have some more time to finish their game. The following Monday at school Catherine had shown Alison the bruises on her legs she had suffered for the extra hour. Then Alison walked through the near silent town to the coffee shop, Annie’s Kitchen it used to be called. Alison pressed her nose against the window and peered through the glass, trying to imagine it as it used to be; now it was a PC repair shop.

It was in Annie’s Kitchen that she and Catherine had both tasted their first cappuccino when they were twelve, and where Alison had made them come back every single day until they got a taste for its bittersweetness and could tell the other girls with all honesty that they were bunking off from PE to go for a coffee. Thanks to Alison, Annie’s Kitchen had become the hot spot for schoolchildren for several years.

Taking a step back, Alison looked at her wan and transparent reflection in the glass and wondered how long the café had lasted in Farmington after she left, how long it had taken for change to overcome it so that all that remained of that hot and crowded
landscape of her childhood existed only in her memory. It was then, with her head pounding and her mouth parched, that she retraced her steps to her son’s school on the hill, the school that had once been hers and Cathy’s.

She felt the heels on her boots sink into the churned mud and grass as she crossed the playing field to find the copse at the back of the school, backing onto a paddock of horses. This had once been, and still was, judging by the butts that littered the muddy floor, the smokers’ den. It was here Cathy would sit, and smile and listen while Alison and the other girls smoked like troupers but did not inhale.

Once when they had been alone Alison tried to explain to Cathy that all you had to do to fit in and look cool was to hold the smoke in your mouth and then blow it out again, tapping the ash off the end of your cigarette as often as possible so that it would burn down quicker. Eventually she had managed to get Cathy to try it, but Cathy had accidentally inhaled and thrown up all over her feet just as the other girls arrived.

Now Alison sat down on the same low branch of a tree in the copse that she always used to—and that somewhere under all the moss and mold still bore both her and Cathy’s names, carved rather inexpertly with a knife nicked from the canteen—and looked out across the field that glittered fiercely as the sun strove to evaporate the morning dew.

Even on that night when she had left Farmington with Marc, she’d always told herself that she was Cathy’s savior, her crusader, and her hero. Was the true sum of their friendship that she was always getting Cathy in trouble for being late, encouraged her to skip school, even tried to get her hooked on smoking? Not to mention breaking her heart. Alison had always thought that she was the strong one, the one that Cathy needed, but now she realized that was no longer true; it had never been true.

The girl she had been fifteen years ago, Alison, the hip kid, the sexy girl, the one who was in with the in crowd and fighting off the boys, had always needed Catherine to keep her anchored to the ground. And it was the moment, the very second that she had chosen to let go of her friend that her life had begun, ever so slowly at first, to spin out of control. But with each revolution had come a fractional increase in speed, like the earth spinning on its axis at over a thousand miles per hour, so fast that you don’t even notice it. So fast that Alison didn’t notice it until finally her world had spun off of its axis and she was floating free, flaying around in free fall without a clue how to land safely.

Cathy had always been the strong one, she’d always been the brave one, and if Alison was honest, she’d always been the beautiful one too. All Alison had even managed to do was to burn a little brighter than Cathy for a short while, to burn so angrily that she put her friend in the shade. Now, though, Alison’s light was almost extinguished.

And here she was now, in this town that Marc had brought her back to. Here with her children and one hundred promises she could not keep.

As Alison sat there, the sun beginning to warm the sky, she understood that now she had to be strong, she had to stand on her two feet alone for the first time in her life. Because now there was only her, and no one else to blame if she got it all wrong.

At eight o’clock Alison headed back to the gym, where she showered and changed into the workout gear she kept in her locker there, and rang home to speak to her daughters from a pay phone. But the home phone was engaged, probably knocked off the hook at one of its many extensions, and it went straight to voice mail.

“Hi guys, I stayed at Cathy’s last night, sorry I didn’t call but it was late by the time I decided to stay over. I’ll be home in a little
while. See you then!” Alison hung up the phone knowing that the message would languish undiscovered until someone picked up the phone to make a call, which on a Sunday might not be for hours.

Alison left the gym and was on her way home when she saw a train rumbling into the station. And the impulse to be anywhere except at home with Marc overtook her and she caught the next train to London, where she walked and shopped and ate a quiet lunch until she knew she could not put off returning home any longer.

It was just after four when she finally arrived home, hesitating with her key in the lock. But before Alison could turn the key, Marc opened the door, his clothes crumpled and his face heavy with dark stubble.

“Where have you been?” he demanded, his body barring her entrance to the house.

“Don’t start,” she said, ducking under his arm and heading for the stairs. “I’ve been out, Marc, I stayed out with Kirsty and Cathy last night and today I just needed some time to myself.” She leaned over and made a fuss of Rosie, who had come skidding round the corner to greet her. “And I’m sorry if you actually had to spend some time with your children instead of breezing in and out of their lives in five minutes flat, but frankly you are such a hypocrite. I left a message on the answering machine, at least. How many times have you never bothered coming home without ringing?”

Alison was racing up the stairs when Marc’s words stopped her in her tracks.

“Dominic went out last night and he hasn’t come home since,” Marc shouted. “I called you, I left you message after message. Where were you?”

Alison turned on her heel and looked at him.

“My phone went flat. What do you mean he hasn’t come home? Is he with friends?” she asked him urgently.

“You went out,” Marc began. “I was cooking the girls their tea when he came in, he’d obviously been drinking and he reeked of smoke. He said a few things, swore in front of the girls. So I said a few things and … it got out of hand.”

“Got out of hand?” Alison asked him, her voice tense. “Marc? Did you hit him?”

“Did I … ?” Marc looked stricken. “No, Alison, I did not hit our son. At least I didn’t mean to … he just makes me so furious, but I’d
never
hit him. I said a few things I shouldn’t have, but he … he makes me so mad. I don’t understand him, I don’t know him anymore.”

Alison stared at Marc for one fraught second as she attempted to decipher what he was saying to her.

“Marc,” she said, keeping her voice steady and calm. “Did you hit him?”

“I didn’t mean to.” Marc shook his head, as if the details were irrelevant. “He stormed off and I haven’t seen him since. I tried his mobile, it’s off. I’ve tried you a hundred times, where
were
you?”

“Oh my God, was he hurt, was he bleeding? … Marc?” Alison said, feeling the panic and fury surge in her chest. “Marc, what have you done?”

“No, no—I wouldn’t …” Marc trailed off. “He was angry, his pride was hurt more than anything. Like I said, he stormed off and I haven’t seen him since.”

She turned and walked slowly down the stairs, each descending step drawing her nearer to the fear she was beginning to feel for Dominic.

“I tried to find him,” Marc said, taking a step back as Alison approached him. “But I don’t know any of his friends. I don’t
know where he goes, I don’t know anything about him. I put the girls in the car last night and again this morning and we drove around the school and a few other places but we couldn’t see him. I don’t know where he is, I didn’t know what to do without you. I didn’t know what to tell the girls. I told them you were at a sleep-over. Amy cried for you.”