Another Mother's Life (45 page)

“I am in a way,” Alison said. “My marriage is in the coffin. Marc is moving out of the house at the end of the week. We’re appointing solicitors. We’re doing it, we’re getting a divorce.”

“I’m sorry,” Catherine said, reaching over the table and touching her arm briefly. “I suppose everything that happened with Dom brought it to a head?”

“Among other things,” Alison said, biting down on her lip hard. “What’s so stupid is that I keep crying. But it’s me that wanted it. It’s me that doesn’t love him anymore and it’s him that’s a selfish, unfaithful pig, so why am I
crying
?”

“Because it’s the end of a part of your life,” Catherine told her. “A part of your life that when you started it you believed would always be wonderful, and would always be happy. And when you have to face up to the fact that that isn’t going to happen anymore it’s sad, it makes you want to cry.”

“Bloody hell,” Kirsty said. “You two are really bringing me down here.” She turned to Alison. “Look, you’re doing the right
thing. You’ve just got to tough it out now because things will sort themselves out. You might even end up being best friends like Catherine and Jimmy, although that degree of closeness can lead to confusion for some ex-spouses, particularly the less intelligent ones like Jimmy.”

“He is not less intelligent,” Catherine said indignantly. “He’s one of the cleverest, most brilliant and sensitive men I know, the ignorant pig.”

“Is he?” Kirsty said mildly. “You should marry him, then, oh no, wait, you already have.”

“He saved Dominic’s life,” Alison said.

“That was impressive,” Kirsty conceded.

“It was incredible,” Alison said, looking at Catherine. “He was incredible.”

Catherine stared at her tuna salad sandwich, “He is such a bastard.”

“Sorry?” Kirsty asked, confused.

“Jimmy. Jimmy is such a bastard,” Catherine said furiously. “I was happy with him, I trusted him—it nearly killed me to let myself do that after … well, after you know what. But I did it. And then he had sex with Donna Clarke in the ladies’ loos at the Goat. Now he’s saying that he still loves me, that he still wants me, and he’s going around rescuing teenage boys and he’s doing it all too late. Two years too late. And that makes him a selfish fucking bastard. And I hate him. I hate him because I can’t love him now. It’s too late.”

“Have you ever thought,” Alison said, laying each word down ever so carefully, “that the reason you feel so angry toward him is because you do still have feelings for him?”

“No,” Catherine said firmly.

“Okay, then,” Alison said, catching Kirsty’s eye.

“Come on, ladies, snap out of it,” Kirsty said, banging her fists
on the table, so hard it made the two old ladies at the next table send her disapproving glances.

“Let’s summarize. You,” she said, pointing at Catherine. “The man you say you don’t love has just cleared off to London for a few days. What’s the big deal? There is no big deal, that’s what.” Kirsty shifted her attention to Alison. “And as for you, your no-good cheating husband who you don’t love anyway has finally packed his bags, leaving you in the nice house with every chance of a great big fat divorce settlement. We should be celebrating! I know, let’s go out tonight. Let’s go to the Goat, I hear there’s a great new band playing and there’s every chance of catching some action if you play your cards right.”

Catherine and Alison looked at each other across the table.

“I suppose I’ve got free babysitting until the end of the week,” Alison said. “I should probably make the most of it.”

“And I’m sure Mrs. Beesley would babysit if I asked her,” Catherine said, a little less certainly.

“Great,” Kirsty said. “Let’s tear this town up. Monday night in Farmington, rock on! Two bitter single chicks and their blissfully happy friend—how can we fail to have a great time?” Kirsty flashed her best smile at the outraged old ladies. “Now, can we get back to talking about me and my vagina?”

“Mummy, what are you doing?” Eloise asked Catherine as she hovered in front of the mirror that hung over the fireplace, her nose about an inch from its surface.

“Applying eyeliner,” Catherine told her. “The trouble is, I don’t know how people do it, because as soon as I get this sharpened pencil anywhere near my eyes I want to screw them up, so I can’t see what I’m doing. I don’t understand eyeliner. It’s not natural. Why would anyone ever want to wear it?”

“You are trying to wear it,” Eloise observed, tilting her head
to one side as she watched her mother jabbing at her eye. “Trying quite hard, and you never normally wear eyeliner, especially not green eyeliner.”

Catherine put the pencil down on the mantelpiece and looked at Eloise.

“On the way back to work from lunch today I bought a magazine. I thought spring is here, it’s a new start, a fresh beginning, I’ll give myself a spring cleaning …”

“Are you dirty, Mummy?” Leila asked as she stomped down the stairs in a pair of Nanna Pam’s special clear plastic high heels that set off her Dalmatian pajamas particularly well.

“No, not that sort of clean,” Catherine said, looking rather perplexed at the magazine article she had opened, balancing precariously on top of the TV so that she could refer to it while attempting eyeliner in the mirror. “Give Your Makeup a Spring Cleaning and Put a Spring in Your Step!” it yelled at her, the headline feeling more like a set of orders than a suggestion.

Catherine never normally bought magazines, especially not women’s magazines, because she supposed, perhaps a little loftily, that on some level she didn’t consider herself to be that kind of woman, concerned with earthly things such as shoes and makeup and … hairdos. But in the last couple of weeks her life had changed completely. Old wounds had closed and healed over, final breaks between herself and the past had been made at last, and she felt as if she should be a new woman. Somehow her tentative renewal of her friendship with Alison had helped her see her life from a new perspective, as though through a fresh pair of eyes. She hadn’t realized until she had told Jimmy point-blank that she was over what had happened between then, that it didn’t hurt her at all anymore. And seeing Alison again now, as an adult, a mother with her own problems engulfing her made Catherine realize she couldn’t blame either the woman she now knew or the seventeen-year-old
Alison had once been for what had happened to her back then.

She couldn’t even blame Marc because all that had happened to her was the same set of wrong turns and bad choices that had beset almost every seventeen-year-old girl since the dawn of time, mistakes that had to be made and owned up to in order to become a whole person, a grown-up woman. Just recently everyone had been telling her how strong she was, but it was only now that Catherine believed it. She would always mourn the loss of the baby that she never knew, always regret that she couldn’t have been close to her parents, but whereas once she thought those two things defined her, now she realized that although they were a part of her, they did not represent her whole. At the age of thirty-two, Catherine was finally ready to become herself.

The only trouble was she wasn’t entirely sure how to go about it.

And when she walked past WHSmith and saw the headline on a magazine that shouted out “Ten Steps to a New You!” she picked it up and bought it, because it seemed a good place to start, and after a quick scan of the article so did buying some eyeliner.

“When I say a cleaning, darling,” she told Leila, who had found her Dalmatian ears headband behind a cushion on the sofa and had shoved it unthinkingly on her head at a rather rakish angle, “I mean more like … well, a makeover.”

“A makeover?” Eloise perked up. “I can make you over, Mummy, I know all about makeovers. I’ve got makeover Barbie plus Nanna Pam makes us over all the time.”

“Yes,” Leila said. “From Orphan Annie to little princesses,” she said as if she was remembering a direct quote, which she no doubt was. “Nanna Pam said we could always look beautiful if
only you put in some effort. Is that what you want to do to yourself, Mummy, put in some effort?”

“Like Isabelle Seaman’s mum?” Eloise asked her. “She always puts in effort and she’s …” Eloise trailed off thoughtfully.

“You could have colored streaks in your hair,” Leila said, her eyes widening in awe. “And glittery eye shadow, Mummy. I’ve got some of that!” Leila was poised to race upstairs and retrieve it.

“No, no, not that kind of makeover either,” Catherine said hastily as she envisioned her youngest child tearing her room apart in a bid to locate all of her secret cosmetics stash. “Apart from perhaps a bit of eyeliner. More than changing how I look, I mean, it’s just trying to be a bit different, maybe doing things I wouldn’t normally do, being a bit more adventurous and impulsive.”

“What’s impulsive?” Leila asked her begrudgingly, clearly disappointed that she was not going to get to apply the glittery eye shadow.

“Doing things without thinking,” Catherine said.

“Like buying eyeliner?” Leila asked dubiously.

“Well, yes,” Catherine said, looking at the offending pencil and putting it back in her capacious and barely filled makeup bag.

“But why?” Leila asked. Catherine blinked at her.

“Because, you know, it’s spring, new plants, new … lambs everywhere, new me.”

“I like the old you,” Leila said. “I like the you that’s you, Mummy, only I don’t mind if we give up eating so many vegetables and maybe eat more cake. Is cake impulsive? Anyway, Jesus loves you if you wear eyeliner or not …” Leila thought for a moment. “He might actually prefer if you didn’t wear it, though, especially if it’s green.”

“What I’m trying to explain to you,” Catherine started again, well aware that it was more herself she was trying to enlighten
than her persistently curious five-year-old, “is that I’m not changing into a different person, I’m more sort of becoming more like me than I am already. Sort of Mummy, but more so.”

“Mummy but more vegetables so?” Leila asked.

“No, I just mean that from now on I might wear eyeliner sometimes and perhaps the odd skirt …”

“That is an odd skirt,” Leila said, looking at Catherine’s knees.

“And go out for drinks on a Monday night,” Eloise said, speaking for the first time in a while.

Catherine turned to her.

“Yes, you don’t mind me going out, do you?”

“Isabelle Seaman’s mum started putting on eyeliner, and wearing skirts and going out for drinks …” Eloise said with a tone of foreboding that made Leila widen her eyes. “And now she’s got a boyfriend with a beard. Is that what you are doing, Mummy, looking for a boyfriend?”

“Mummy!” Leila looked scandalized and Catherine wondered how her back-handed attempts to apply eyeliner had come to this.

“No, I am not looking for a boyfriend. I am trying out eye-liner. It’s not the same thing, Eloise, at all. I mean look at Kirsty, she always looks nice and … bad example. The thing is a person can decide to change how they look for other reasons than to get a boyfriend, so you don’t have to worry about that at all, ever, okay? I promise.”

“Mummy,” Eloise said in a slightly chiding tone, “you shouldn’t promise that. One day you might want to have a boyfriend, just like Isabelle Seaman’s mummy, and Daddy might want to have a proper girlfriend that he likes.”

Catherine tried to imagine herself with some unknown, unnamed, absurdly titled “boy” friend and for some reason all
she could picture was a beard. Was that really what this was about, buying a magazine and some eyeliner? Were these her first tentative steps to trying to meet someone again? She tried to imagine herself out there, like Kirsty had been for so many months, getting involved with opticians, among others, dating and dancing and flirting and chatting all because of the faint possibility that it might deliver her into the arms of a man who could make her happy. But she found it impossible to imagine. To even comprehend spending time with a man who wasn’t Jimmy—apart from that near kiss with Marc, which she was determined not to think about at all—and thinking about Jimmy with a proper girlfriend made her feel cross. She put the image out of her head and decided that she wasn’t ready for eyeliner of any shade.

“Perhaps you’re right,” Catherine said. “I think I’ll stay in tonight after all.”

“Hooray!” Leila yelled.

Eloise put her hand on Catherine’s shoulder and looked at her with that unnerving green-eyed stare. “I’m ever so proud of you, Mummy,” she said.

Catherine smiled and put an arm around Eloise.

“Are you, darling, I’m glad.” She considered leaving it at that, but the temptation to fish was just too great. “Why?”

“Because even when grown-up things are happening to you, you remember to love us,” Eloise said. “And because you know when not to wear green eyeliner.”

“Not coming?” Kirsty groaned, leaning against the door. “But it’s
arranged
. Alison is coming and this is important, it’s phase two of my plan to reunite you two. We’ve gotten over the hard bit, we’ve had an intermediate coffee. Now you need to get drunk together again and reaffirm your fledgling bond.”

“You see, I don’t think inebriation is necessary to get to know a person,” Catherine said. “Unlike you, I haven’t based all of my relationships on the consumption of alcohol.”