The Accidental Wife

by Rowan Coleman

  ‘She is and she’s the tallest in our class,’ Gemma said. ‘She’s tallest and I’m the prettiest and we’re both clever, so we can’t fail.’

  ‘Except in modesty exams,’ Dom said, opening the fridge door, glancing at the bags of shopping at his feet and closing it again.

  Alison looked at her entire family gathered under one roof, her successful husband, who made cups of tea unbidden, her musical son and her two smiling daughters. For a few rare minutes during which nobody was shouting, lying or crying she could pretend that she had it all, she had literally everything. She even had a waste-disposal unit and hose tap.

  ‘How nice, all of us will be in for dinner tonight!’ she said brightly, determined to conjure happiness out of so many good things.

  ‘Ah,’ Marc said, his tone immediately dashing her attempt.

  Alison looked at him and realised where the cup of tea came from. It was a rather low-rent peace offering. ‘You said you’d be in tonight. It’s Friday night, Marc. Remember, you said you’d always be home by four every Friday. That was part of our deal. Family time.’

  ‘You sound so surprised,’ Dominic said sarcastically.

  ‘I know I did, and it will be usually,’ Marc said, ignoring his son’s comment completely, causing the boy to slam out of the room, banging the door behind him. ‘But it’s the lads I’ve taken on at the showroom. They want to take me out for a drink and I think I need to go. It’s a team-building thing, Ali, before we launch this weekend. They’re young blokes, they need a bit of direction. It’ll just be a few drinks at some local pub. I’ll be back by ten at the latest, not much later than ten. It’ll give me a chance to schmooze a few locals while I’m at it. Network, that’s what it’s all about, love. That’s what we need to do to make it work for us here.’

  ‘Mum, look at this,’ Gemma held up her drawing. ‘This is what my pony is going to look like when I get her. Light brown with a yellow mane. I’m going to call her Amber. She’s going to be lovely.’

  ‘That’s beautiful, darling,’ Alison said, not taking her eyes off his face.

  ‘But you’re not looking!’ Gemma protested, thrusting the picture in front of her eyes. For a second Alison took in the bright blue sky, huge smiling sun and an image of a horse surrounded by happy smiling delirious stick people. That was how Gemma saw her family, like that. Not like this. Why couldn’t she be there, Alison wondered, where there was a gaping vacuum between the sky and the grass and where the mother and father always held hands?

  ‘Al,’ Marc offered her a conciliatory smile. ‘Look, it’s a one-off, I promise you. And you know I need to network, meet as many people as I can before the party next week. Which reminds me, have you got your invites out?’

  Alison noticed his deft change of subject but wearily decided to ignore it, taking a sip of tea instead. She didn’t want the kids to witness another fight. They were so rarely all together that even if it was only for a few minutes she wanted it to be happy, so that when Gemma looked at her drawing she would feel she had captured her family exactly.

  ‘Well, I don’t exactly know anyone yet.’ She thought of Jimmy Ashley in the school hall. ‘So I’ve left my invites with this woman called Lois at the school and told her to invite the PTA, and I’ve asked the girls’ teachers and the head. Anyway, how many people are coming to this party, Marc?’

  ‘Couple of hundred, give or take,’ Marc said, bending over to help Amy colour in the remainder of her smiling and benevolent sun, the symbol that featured in both girls’ drawings.

  ‘And when do you have to confirm final numbers for the caterers?’ Alison asked.

  ‘The caterers?’ Marc looked up at her sharply. ‘Fancy another cuppa?’

  ‘You know, the people you found to cater the party at such short notice?’

  Marc looked thoughtful and then went back to colouring studiously while Alison felt her insides begin to simmer.

  ‘I sort of thought you’d be doing that,’ he said inevitably.

  ‘You thought I’d be making sandwiches for two hundred people?’ Alison asked him. ‘Me?’

  ‘I sort of thought so,’ Marc said, winking at Gemma so she giggled.

  ‘Marc!’ Alison exclaimed. ‘I just can’t believe that after everything …’ She trailed off, unable to detail exactly what ‘everything’ was.

  ‘What I meant,’ Marc added hastily, ‘is I thought you’d find the caterers. That’s the sort of thing you usually do, isn’t it? Find caterers?’

  ‘You said all I had to do was open my house to the whole of Farmington and look glamorous. You didn’t say anything about catering. And no, I don’t usually organise it, usually your PA organises it, or have you forgotten?’

  A brief flash of the Christmas party burned across Alison’s eyes and she knew that Marc had seen it too. They stared at each other for a beat of silence.

  ‘Well, look, darling,’ Marc said, choosing to brush the moment aside like he always did, ‘how about you find a caterer – there’s still over a week to go, after all. Don’t worry about the cost – however much it takes.’

  ‘It will be “however much it takes” to find a caterer at this short notice, and if I do end up making two hundred egg mayonnaise sandwiches there will never be an upper limit on how much it’s going to cost you!’

  At last Marc got up and came around the table. He put his arms round her waist and, at almost exactly her height, looked straight into her eyes.

  ‘I messed up,’ he said frankly. ‘I forgot something huge and big and I tried to pass the buck on to you. Balloons, I remembered, fairy lights and music. I’ve ordered the champagne, the wine and the beer. But I forgot food and you remembered it. Which is why I need you, Ali. Remember that kid I was when we met? Working nights for the railways? I’d still be doing it now if I hadn’t found you. And if you can turn me from that kid into this man – the man who is lucky enough to be your husband – then you can sort out the catering for the party, can’t you?’

  ‘Yes, I can,’ Alison said, despite herself. The trouble was, he was right. She knew him inside out, just like he knew her. In the end it always came back to this. They’d found each other when they were very young and they had clung on to each other from that moment on, riding their choices with the conviction of those who are determined never to be wrong. She’d made her bed a long time ago, and now who was she to complain that it wasn’t comfortable any more?

  ‘You know I love you, don’t you?’ Marc asked her finally, not because of the catering, but because of the PA who usually did the catering. Alison made herself look at him.

  ‘I do,’ she conceded, because he did love her, albeit imperfectly.

  ‘Then that’s all that matters right?’

  Not all that matters, Alison thought. He never asked her if she loved him back.

  ‘Good, well, I’ll be back by ten. Make sure you wait up for me, we’ve still got a lot of rooms to christen.’

  ‘You’re going now?’ Alison asked him. ‘It’s not even six o’clock.’

  ‘There’s some curry house they want to take me to first. I’d much rather be eating with you but …’ Marc shrugged.

  ‘What can he do?’ Gemma finished for him with a copycat shrug.

  Alison wasn’t surprised. It was Marc’s favourite phrase, after all.

  ‘I feel so … violated,’ Catherine said as they approached the Three Bells. ‘I can’t believe you made me have another shower. I was perfectly clean.’

  ‘There’s no point in being clean if you’re hairy,’ Kirsty said firmly. ‘Now, how to do I look?’

  Catherine looked down at her friend, who was wearing her best turquoise crocheted dress worn over black underwear and leggings and long boots. She looked like she always looked, well-dressed, stylish and sexy. Whatever it was that transformed a woman from being merely attractive into an out-and-out sex kitten, Kirsty certainly seemed to have it.

  ‘You look spectacular,’ Catherine told her, suddenly feeling self-conscious in h
er black shirt and trousers, despite her newly naked legs being swathed in denim.

  ‘Thought so,’ Kirsty said, nodding at the cloud-ridden sky. ‘This time I’m going to give the universe a helping hand. It’s about time it got something right.’

  ‘Same again?’ Marc asked Joel and Craig.

  In their early twenties, the pair of them were hungry for money and the kind of success that Marc had already achieved at thirty-six. They admired him and they aspired to be like him one day. It was a kind of recognition that Marc enjoyed. He liked to impress his employees, it meant he could inspire them to achieve greater results.

  Ali hadn’t been pleased when he’d left her and the kids for a night in the Three Bells but he was sure she’d understand in the end. Ali always understood in the end. That was why they were still together after all this time. She’d understood him from the moment she’d laid eyes on him.

  He had known exactly what Alison was feeling when he’d told her that he had to go out. It was the same low-light simmering fury that had been bubbling beneath her skin since Christmas. This time it was taking her a lot longer to forgive him for his indiscretion, but he knew she would, eventually. She always did because, despite everything, she knew that he’d move heaven and earth to make her happy. And because he’d changed his life, changed himself to be with her. After all, he’d chosen her all those years ago. He’d chosen Alison and everything that being with her would mean. And that’s why she’d come back to him again, because she had to.

  What Alison might not understand was that on the night he chose her he had not loved her at all. There had been something there: growing affection and acceptance of the way things were between them. But on the evening after it had all kicked off he’d still been in love with Catherine. If Alison was running away from her parents and her exams, he was running away from Cathy and all the confusing and consuming things he felt for her. He hadn’t known that Alison was pregnant, he’d had no idea that leaving with her would not be the simple escape route that he had initially planned. But once it became clear that going with her would change a lot more in life than his postal address, he accepted those changes. Because even loving Catherine as much as he did, he still could not get Alison out of his head.

  Alison at seventeen had been a lot like the girls in this pub, glowing with youth and beauty. The sight of her smiling and gleaming at him woke him up from a kind of a dream. Being with Catherine had been like existing in a bubble. The hours he’d spent with her had transformed him into another person entirely – someone as intense and as thoughtful as she was. And she was so intent on keeping him a secret from her puritanical parents that the time they spent together was always alone and always in secret. It was time that felt unreal, as if for those few hours they were trapped together between the pages of a book. It was Alison that had brought him back to his animal senses and the twenty-year-old boy that he was. It was Alison that he had had to have, despite, perhaps even because, he knew how it would hurt Catherine and even himself. It was the only way he could think of at the time to break this hold she had on his heart.

  A flash of memory went off behind his eyelids. An image of Cathy, her long white limbs intertwined in his, her green eyes holding his, willing him, daring him to let her down. To say he hadn’t thought of Cathy properly in years, not until he announced that he was bringing his family back to Farmington, would not have been true. Often she’d drift into his thoughts, catching him out, but he’d never felt anything but a kind of oblique nostalgia for her. That was, until he decided to come back here. Christmas had happened and he’d sensed that Alison was almost through with him for good. The only thing he could think of doing to stop her going and taking his children with her was to bring her back to the place where they began, the place where the passion that they had for each other had been so strong, they’d given up everything to pursue it.

  When he’d been looking at the house and searching for business premises, the thought of Catherine being somewhere in the town hadn’t really occurred to him. She’d always said she wanted to leave home as soon as she could, and he was certain that she wouldn’t have hung around any longer than she had to once it all came out; her parents would have made her life hell.

  But then he made the final journey back with Alison and it was as if the three of them together again in this place, even if one of the triptych was merely a memory, had set his head spinning. Everywhere he looked he expected to see Catherine, almost as if he could feel her somewhere behind him, just out of view.

  Marc shook his head, firmly leaning across the bar, his folded twenty-pound note in his hand as he tried to make eye contact with the barman. What would he say to Catherine if he were to see her again, Marc wondered as he gave the barman his order. Would he have the guts to tell her that he’d abandoned her, not because he didn’t love her but because he did? And that he was sorry not only for the hurt and humiliation he had caused her, but because of the secret she thought she had kept from him, the secret he had known and, knowing it, had left anyway.

  Finally the barman delivered his drinks just as the pub door opened and a gust of cold February air swept through the bar, garlanded with a peal of female laughter. Marc was glad to turn his back on the chill and return to his young employees, feeling the goose bumps rising on his arms as he walked away.

  ‘Has he looked at me yet?’ Kirsty asked Catherine in a whisper.

  It was remarkable really, Catherine thought. Kirsty had stood right next to Steve or Sam at the bar whilst ordering the drinks, had brushed past him – breasts first – on the way to the ladies and had laughed and tossed her hair at full capacity ever since, in a bid to get his attention, but he hadn’t actually looked her way once.

  ‘He might be gay,’ Catherine ventured. ‘Or maybe have tunnel-vision syndrome and slight deafness in both ears, because that is the only way he would not be able to notice you. You are many things but subtle isn’t one of them.’

  ‘He’s not gay,’ Kirsty said firmly. ‘He used to go out with a pole dancer, and anyway, Catherine, I’m ashamed of you conforming to such an obvious stereotype. Just because he’s well turned out and takes care of himself doesn’t make him gay.’

  ‘OK then,’ Catherine said. ‘Maybe he’s just really, really interested in what his friend has to say.’ Steve or Sam was certainly deep in conversation with his friend, a tallish, fair-haired and pleasant-looking man of about her age, Catherine guessed. This was the friend that Kirsty had deemed it her destiny to distract when she went in for the kill. She studied him covertly. She had no idea how to distract anybody, let alone a man, other than point at some unnamed object over his shoulder and shout, ‘It’s behind you!’

  If Kirsty ever did get to talk to her trainer Catherine was fairly sure that she would mess up the friend-distraction bit. But there was an if, because what Kirsty hadn’t thought of, and what Catherine didn’t want to point out, was that if her personal trainer wasn’t gay and didn’t have a sight and hearing problem then the alternative was that he was ignoring her because he didn’t want to have anything to do with her. It didn’t seem to be a conclusion that Kirsty was likely to reach on her own, and Catherine didn’t want to be the one to bring it up.

  ‘What about him?’ Kirsty nudged her quite hard in the ribs, throwing her a little off balance even in her flat boots.

  ‘What about who?’ Catherine was confused. Surely Kirsty hadn’t moved on to the next love of her life already.

  ‘Him over there.’ Kirsty nodded to Catherine’s left and when she looked she caught the eye of a fair-haired man, perhaps a little younger than she was, who smiled at her fleetingly before dropping his gaze back to his drink.

  ‘What about him?’ Catherine asked her.

  ‘He was totally checking you out like a motherfucker!’ Kirsty exclaimed quite loudly so that one or two people (but not her trainer) looked over at them.

  ‘Was he?’ Catherine said drily. ‘I had no idea that one could be checked out in such a
way.’

  ‘Well, one can, smart-arse, and he was. He’s been looking at you all night. And him.’ This time Kirsty nodded none too discreetly just over Catherine’s left shoulder.

  ‘Don’t look!’ she shrieked when Catherine automatically began to turn her head slowly. Kirsty stared at the point over her shoulder. ‘Wait … wait … – OK, now look.’

  Catherine looked and this time shared a brief moment with a man with a goatee beard.

  ‘Loves you,’ Kirsty confirmed, with a nod.

  ‘Or alternatively he might just wonder why that short woman and that tall redhead keep staring at him and screaming,’ Catherine suggested. ‘Anyway, can we get back to you? What’s your plan?’

  ‘To be gorgeous, but so far it doesn’t seem to be working out too well. Have you got any ideas?’

  Catherine thought for a moment. ‘Well, why don’t you go up to him, tap him on the shoulder and say hi?’ she ventured.

  Kirsty shook her head. ‘Oh, you are so naïve,’ she said. ‘Where were you during your teens? Didn’t you learn anything from Grange Hill?’

  ‘Why not just talk to him?’ Catherine asked her with a bemused shrug.

  ‘Because then he’ll think I fancy him,’ Kirsty replied as if she was stating the obvious. ‘I don’t want him to know that. I want him to think that I, his beautiful and very bendy client, is merely flitting by him like a beautiful but unobtainable butterfly that he longs to capture … a woman who can only be – oh, hi, Steve.’

  Kirsty went bright red as her trainer appeared at her shoulder.

  ‘Kirsty, I thought that was you.’ He smiled at her. ‘And it’s Sam, by the way.’

  ‘I knew it was an “S” name,’ Kirsty beamed at him. ‘Can I buy you a drink? I mean, water for me because, obviously, I don’t really drink, apart from this gin and tonic, and honestly it’s a lot more tonic than gin, gin-flavoured tonic really …’

  Catherine unconsciously took a step back as Kirsty focused all her attention on Sam. He was nice-looking, Catherine had to concede, but not her type at all, although to be fair to Sam she’d never really established what that was. He was tallish, with friendly eyes and very nice arms. She could see why Kirsty would be smitten with him, even if he was completely bald. She smiled to herself. If Jimmy was here he’d be tossing his hair around and squaring up his shoulders the way he always did when he met a man who was so overtly masculine. Catherine wished very much that he was there right then. At least she could always talk to Jimmy. Tentatively, she glanced in the direction of the fair-haired man across the bar. He smiled at her; she didn’t look that way again.