The Accidental Wife (17 page)

‘You too, Alison,’ Jimmy said, because although he still couldn’t place exactly who she was, it was always good to see a good-looking woman who was pleased to see him.

Alison flashed him another dazzling smile as she trotted towards the head, her smaller girl lingering a step or two behind her.

It was just as she went into the building that Catherine appeared around the corner at full pelt, running right into Jimmy.

‘Jimmy! Why are you still here? Please tell me you haven’t had to sign Eloise into the late book, have you? I’m only still here because Lois would not stop going on about the sodding Easter Fayre. You don’t fancy dressing up in a bunny costume, do you?’

‘I bumped into this woman who thought she knew me,’ Jimmy began to tell her, ‘but I don’t know how because she’s this Gemma’s mum, the one whose party we’re all going to.’

‘Oh, was she nice?’ Catherine asked, although she clearly didn’t want a reply as she was walking backwards towards the gate as she talked. ‘Anyway, I’ve got to get to work. I have
three
minutes to make it down the high street. I’ll measure you up for that suit, OK?’

‘I’m off to work too,’ Jimmy called after her as she sprinted off at full pelt. ‘Laying down a demo today,’ he added in a lower voice as the playground had now entirely emptied of all people with purpose and direction. ‘Today’s the day. This is the day that’s going to change my life. This is the one.’

Alison practically skipped her way to the gym to take up the new membership.

It was foolish, she knew, literally idiotic, to feel so happy about bumping into a man who clearly had no idea who she was. But he’d had no idea who she was with some serious charm and a sexy smile. So what if he didn’t remember that she was the girl who used to lean forward on the edge of the stage in the hope he’d look right down her top? He’d never noticed that girl anyway. But he’d noticed her now, a grown woman. He noticed her and she was fairly sure he had flirted with her too. It might have been the first time a man had actually flirted with her since the early 1990s.

That, coupled with the tentative smile on Amy’s face as Mrs Woodruff had led her by the hand into class, put her in exactly the right mood for her one-on-one Pilates class with her new teacher.

‘Hello there,’ a woman about her age smiled at her and held out her hand as she walked into the private studio she had booked. ‘Mrs James, is it? I’m Kirsty Robinson. I’m going to be teaching you Pilates.’

‘Right,’ Kirsty said. ‘From that position step one foot forward and we’ll stretch out your hip flexors.’

‘So?’ Alison asked her with some effort as she stretched her left leg behind her. ‘Are you going to see him again?’ Her new
teacher
had been regaling her with the details of her love life for the last half an hour, something that Alison found most entertaining, not to mention diverting.

‘I think so,’ Kirsty considered. ‘We had a nice time in the pub, and he is a great kisser. I let him walk me home and everything, and he didn’t even
try
to invite himself in for sex, which I was slightly disappointed by, even though I would have definitely said no because I hardly ever do sex on the first date with men I like. But he didn’t call me over the weekend and today when I saw him he was playing it cool as if we hadn’t spent half an hour with our tongues down each other’s throat on Friday night. I still think he likes me, though. And if he doesn’t then I’ll just revert to Plan A until I’ve got over him.’

‘Ignore him and pretend nothing happened,’ Alison confirmed as she followed Kirsty’s movements in the mirror.

‘Exactly.’ Kirsty grinned at her. ‘OK, relax into child pose and then roll yourself slowly and carefully up into a standing position, working each vertebra.’ She and Alison rose in unison in front of the full-length mirror.

‘Shake yourself out and you’re done,’ Kirsty told her.

‘Thanks, I really enjoyed that,’ Alison said warmly.

‘Me too. It’s good to have a client that’s nice and not some stuffy old cow who thinks I’m one of her servants.’

‘I really hope you get things sorted with Sam and that he asks you out again.’

‘Well, he will or he won’t,’ Kirsty said with a sigh, catching sight of herself in the mirror and giving herself an admiring glance. ‘It’s not the end of the world if he doesn’t. Yes, I’m in love with him. But look at me: I’m gorgeous and still young. I’ll love again.’

Alison laughed. ‘And it’s better to shop around than buy the first thing you see and find out fifteen years later you don’t
really
want it any more,’ she said completely out of the blue, then paused for a moment as she heard the words that she had just said out loud for the first time.

‘You are so right,’ Kirsty smiled. ‘You should meet my neighbour. She got married in her twenties to some guy she went to
school
with, and course it didn’t work, and now it’s like she’s stuck in a time warp. Can’t go back, can’t go forwards. I’m trying to crowbar her out of it, but it’s a challenge, let me tell you. So how long have you been married?’

Alison pursed her lips and looked down at her painted toenails.

‘Married fourteen, together nearly sixteen years,’ she said sheepishly.

‘So you bought the first thing you saw in the shop then?’ Kirsty laughed.

‘More like shoplifted him out from under my best friend’s nose,’ Alison said. ‘But you know, when you’re seventeen you don’t really think.’

‘Well, it’s obviously worked out for you,’ Kirsty said. ‘So tell me, what’s your secret?’

‘I don’t know,’ Alison said with a shrug. ‘We implement Plan A a lot.’

As she picked up her bag she pulled out her last few remaining invitations. ‘Listen, we’re having a house-warming party and –’

‘Oh, I already know about that,’ Kirsty said. ‘All the sports centre staff are coming. Even Sam.’

‘Well, maybe while you’re not ignoring him you’ll have a drink with me. I don’t know anyone in the town yet and the thought of having two hundred strangers in my new house is slightly intimidating.’

‘I’d love to,’ Kirsty said. ‘And I’ll introduce you to my
neighbour
. She’s a bit like a young Miss Marple but once you get to know her she’s pretty cool, and then you’ll have two friends and I’ll know two people to lead astray instead of one.’

Alison grinned at her. ‘I’m perfectly capable of leading myself astray, thank you very much. I’ve lived my life by it.’

Chapter Nine

‘ARE YOU SURE
that you can plug all of those fairy lights into my house and it won’t explode?’ Alison asked the Fairy Light Man as he plugged yet another extension into yet another extension on the morning of the party.

He scowled at her. ‘Yes, I’m completely sure,’ he said, his voice a weary monotone.

Maybe it was because in his daily life he was commonly referred to as the Fairy Light Man, Alison thought. Maybe that gave him a complex, challenged his masculinity, perhaps that was why he was so surly and ungrateful for the several hundred pounds they was paying him to plug in a few lights. Very charitably, she decided to give him the benefit of the doubt.

‘OK, well, I’ll leave it up to you then,’ she said, trying to get back into his good books in case he shorted the fuses just to spite her. ‘You’re the professional. I don’t know anything, me!’

He turned his back on her and resumed plugging more things into more things, which Alison took as a sign that he agreed with her self-assessment. In a flash of Fairy Light Man insight she could picture just exactly what he thought of her: a spoiled rich housewife who treated all tradesmen like servants and still believed that the working classes were born
to
serve her. Maybe that
was
what she was like, a little bit now, even if her upbringing on the immaculately kept but down-to-earth council estate couldn’t have been more different. Her life had transformed with Marc, and Alison supposed that it was inevitable that she would change too, because now she was new money and that was the way she often sounded and acted, even if she didn’t
truly
feel that way.

Sometimes she just couldn’t stop herself. She’d hear her own voice, and even as she was talking she’d be thinking, who
is
that stuck-up stupid cow? That’s not really me, is it? Invariably she was disappointed to find out that it was.

It had been a challenging week to get to this point and Alison had had a hard time keeping up the good mood her Pilates class had left her in on Monday. The first set of caterers she thought she’d miraculously managed to book for Saturday let her down, citing some lame excuse like a death in the family and referring her on to a friend’s brand-new only-just-started family-run business called Home Hearths.

From that moment Alison had felt that luck was not on her side. She had been well aware that
any
caterer available for booking a scant five days before an event was not exactly going to be top of the range, but by that time she had very little choice but to go with the family company. She’d even booked them blind without any tasting or menu discussion. Alison had told them she wanted canapés for two hundred people and they told her they’d provide the waiting staff. That, as far as Alison was concerned, was as good as it was likely to get.

Marc had not been around for almost the whole week. He’d been at the office until past eleven every night, working on getting the new showroom up and running. If Alison wasn’t asleep by the time he got in then she found she was in too bad a mood to make small talk with him, something he always
annoyingly
wanted to do, regardless of the hour, because he’d be as high as a kite and wouldn’t care that the children and the low-level bone-splintering radioactive stress of her day had drilled her into the ground. But it wasn’t just the contrast in their days that infuriated her: him high-flying and go-getting, making things happen and living the dream he seemed to be able to believe in so entirely, despite considerable evidence to the contrary; and she, who literally ran just to stand still, putting in thirty minutes on the treadmill at the gym because she was determined not to let her body look one second older than it absolutely had to, arguing with her children over yoghurt vs. fromage frais, withstanding the barrage of passive aggression that radiated out from her son whenever he was in a room, a feat that was only just eclipsed by the constant nagging fear about what he was doing whenever he wasn’t.

It wasn’t the unjust disparity in their lives, even though Alison knew that her lifestyle was privileged and rare. No, it was her husband’s sheer bloody thoughtless optimism that had infected him ever since they decided to come back to Farmington that nearly drove her to murder him.

She’d never imagined that Marc’s determination to change himself to adapt to her dreams would have brought them quite this far. It was as if he was on a quest that would never be satisfied. A three-bedroom semi in Kennington would have made Alison happy once. But she had a feeling that no such comforting middle ground was available to her and Marc now. For them the only way was either up, up and away or a very, very fast journey back down. It all depended on Marc. Everything had always depended on Marc.

At least the week was over, the weekend was here and, even if the house was about to razed to the ground by an entire town, at least she had two whole days when she didn’t have to worry
about
getting into school so late that she had to sign the late book, something she had done for four days in a row.

Usually the playground at St Margaret’s was empty when she and her two girls charged in through the gates at full pelt, after Alison had performed her daily miracle of raising Dominic from his bed and delivering him a mutually agreed distance from the school gates. Gemma would be laughing and dancing, enjoying the thrill of the race, and Amy clutching on to her wrist with both hands as if her mother was about to toss her into a pool of piranhas. The only time in the girls’ second week at the school she had managed to escape the ignominy of the dreaded late book was when she had bumped into Jimmy Ashley in the playground and the head had called her in.

Alison felt a foolish little flutter in her chest when she thought of the conversation she and Jimmy had had. There was maybe a very small part of her that was deliberately trying to recreate the circumstances of that meeting by turning up to school at almost the same time every day, even if it did mean her daughters were late to class; the same part of her that used to be accidentally outside the Civic Centre just around the time his judo class finished, or happened to be walking down his street for an hour and half in the rain on the off chance he would either leave or return to his house while she was there, and give her a second glance. But in the year and a half she’d been mad about him he’d never even given her a first glance, let alone a second one. Alison laughed to herself. All those hours she’d spent deciding what to wear or where to be to attract his attention had all been for nothing. She’d left too soon for him even to be able to remember who she was.

But now she had the chance to rectify that, Alison reminded herself as the Marquee Men began to set up in the drizzly back garden. She didn’t have to try to engineer encounters with
Jimmy
Ashley any more. Because Jimmy Ashley would be at her house this very weekend. She’d even be able to flirt with him a little bit, if she could just remember how.

Alison caught her train of thought slipping from flirtation into something much more radical and largely naked, and found herself saying out loud, ‘Get a grip woman – good God, act your age!’

‘Forty-seven.’ Alison spun round to find Amy standing behind her decked out in her Cinderella outfit.

‘Pardon, sweetie?’ Alison kneeled down to her daughter’s level. She loved to see Amy dress up. It was one of her few moments of self-expressiveness, and even then she seemed only to be able to manage it if she was pretending to be a Disney princess.

‘You said act your age and I said forty-seven. That’s your age, isn’t it, Mama?’

‘Thirty-two, darling,’ Alison said, unoffended. ‘But I feel forty-seven a lot of the time, so you’re spot on really.’