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.’
‘You look beautiful,’ Amy told her wrapping her arms around Alison and whispering in her ear, ‘Love you, Mama,’ as if it was their little secret, which Alison sometimes felt that it was.
‘Love you too, precious,’ Alison whispered back.
‘You’re welcome,’ Amy said, releasing Alison from her embrace. They had been learning manners at her old school and she had been responding arbitrarily to any comment with that phrase ever since. ‘Dominic said I had to tell you there was some “old minger unloading what looks like sandwiches from a clapped-out Volvo estate out the front and that you might want to go and check the tax disc because …” I forgot the rest.’
Alison gave Amy a little hug. ‘Thank you for being so helpful, darling, but don’t use that word. Don’t say “minger”. It’s not a nice word for little girls, OK?’
‘You’re welcome,’ Amy replied.
Alison was in a dilemma. She wasn’t sure whether to check if indeed the caterer had arrived in an untaxed Volvo or go and strangle her son about his cavalier use of language in front of his sisters first. Panic and emptiness won out over her violent thoughts in the end, and she made her way out to the drive.
‘Hello there, Mrs James?’ A surprisingly mature lady in a green body-warmer and red tartan pleated skirt waved at her. ‘I’m Home Hearth Caterers, at your service! It’s all gone swimmingly well considering it’s our first party. I think you’ll be pleased.’
Alison looked at Home Hearth Caterers’ mud-caked Wellington boots and wondered what ‘considering it was our first party’ meant.
‘Mind grabbing a couple of quiches?’ Home Hearth Caterers said, piling platters into Alison’s arms. ‘This way, is it? Don’t worry, I’ll follow my nose!’
Alison watched powerless as the old minger tracked mud all across her hallway, and she wondered where the hell her husband was when she needed him to blame.
‘You can’t wear that,’ Kirsty said, looking Catherine up and down.
‘I think you’ll find I can,’ Catherine said firmly. ‘Look, there’s only so many times I can take you coming round my house and insulting me. You’ve made me shave my legs, now leave me alone.’
‘You do realise that leg shaving is something you have to repeat, don’t you?’ Kirsty asked her. ‘Tell me you’ve done it for tonight, I beg you!’
‘Yes, I have,’ Catherine lied for a quiet life, looking sulkily at the outfit of a black chiffon shirt with jet-effect beading down the front that she had got from Oxfam last year, and a pair of straight-legged black trousers with a stay-press pleat ironed down the front that actually reached her ankles.
What Kirsty did not know was that this was her best outfit. This was, in actual fact, also her most daring outfit because it required her to wear it over a black camisole to prevent her bra from showing. (She was determined to wear a bra although Kirsty argued that one as flat-chested as she should go commando and let her nipples do the talking, a comment that practically made Catherine reach for her thermal vest, and certainly cling on to her firm support 32B.)
That was partly why Catherine had never worn it before; the whole see-through element threw her a bit. The other reason was because although she manned many a bar at many a PTA event, she hardly ever went to parties where she was actually invited as a guest and not simply required to pour drinks.
‘I like my outfit,’ she said, looking at Kirsty whose idea it had been to come over three hours before the party was due to start to have a girly getting-ready session.
‘Three hours? Catherine had asked her when she suggested it earlier that morning whilst having breakfast with her and the girls. ‘Do you mean three actual hours? It doesn’t take that long to get ready for anything, does it?’
‘Yes, it does if you are a proper girl, doesn’t it, ladies?’ Kirsty asked Eloise and Leila. ‘Tell your mum why.’
‘Well, you have to have a shower, hair wash, hair style and hair dry,’ Eloise listed, ticking off each item on her fingers.
‘And,’ Leila added, ‘there’s choosing what to wear, access-or-eees, see, Mummy? That means like earrings and necklaces and nail varnish – ooh, can I wear nail varnish? Nana Pam gave us some in secret that we are never to tell you about.’
‘Also,’ Eloise said, quickly attempting to cover her sister’s slip, ‘there’s eye make-up, putting on mascara and lip gloss. Can I wear lip gloss, Mum? Kirsty might lend me some.’
‘Or we could use the stuff that Nana Pam gave us …’
‘Shhhh!’ This time Eloise prevented her sister from saying any more by clamping her hand over her mouth. Catherine chose to let the revelations
go uncommented on only because she had found their secret stash of play cosmetics long ago and thought that everyone, even very small girls, deserved some secrets as long as their mother secretly knew what they were.
‘How do they know all this stuff?’ Catherine had asked Kirsty in amazement. ‘Are you creeping into their room at night and whispering it in their ears?’
‘No, I shout it over the garden fence when you’ve got them out digging potatoes in the bleak midwinter,’ Kirsty said, rolling her eyes at the girls and making them giggle. ‘They know all that stuff because it is ingrained in their DNA. It is the primal urge to make yourself look beautiful. Since the dawn of time, soon after woman invented the wheel and discovered fire, she also realised how much fun it was to paint herself with bright colours.’ Kirsty had clapped a hand on Catherine’s shoulder. ‘You too were born with it once, my friend, but somehow you have lost your feminine way and need to be brought back to the one true path that leads to uncomfortable shoes and exfoliation. Follow the lead of your daughters, follow me, for we have the key to the world of womanhood.’
Catherine had been unable to resist a smile, particularly when all three of the other females at the table started fluttering their eyelashes at each other, hands arranged under their chin like Botticelli’s angels.
It was a sort of club, feeling feminine and pretty, and if Kirsty was in it then maybe she wasn’t too old to feel that way too, at least sometimes. Besides, she knew it would make her daughters happy to have a mum that made a bit more of an effort. (‘Did you see Isabelle Jackman’s mum this morning?’ Eloise would often say to her. ‘She wears high shoes and it’s only a Wednesday. Isabelle says that’s because she’s not letting herself go. That’s good, isn’t it, Mummy?’ And Catherine would give her a talk about looks not being everything and Leila would say something like, ‘Maria von Trapp is pretty and good of heart and you can be both. Look at the Virgin Mary,’ at which point Catherine would change the subject.) So, in short, in a moment of weakness, she had agreed to the three-hour pre-party preparation party.
It was a decision she regretted the minute she realised that Kirsty had engineered the whole thing, first so that she could drink the bottle of Cava that Catherine had had in the fridge since Christmas, and secondly so that she could try to get her to wear something that she had brought with her.
‘For one thing,’ Catherine said when Kirsty held up a short black denim skirt that belonged to her, ‘I am six foot tall. You are five foot two. If I put that on it will barely reach below my bum.’
‘I know,’ Kirsty said. ‘That’s the advantage of not having one. You’ll look great.’
‘I’ll look like a tart!’ Catherine exclaimed, lowering her voice on the last word lest her daughters stop screaming with excitement for long enough to hear her.
‘And looking like a tart is the first of many steps you will need to take to have sex. That’s when a man and a woman who like each other very much have a special cuddle and the man puts his –’
‘You don’t need to look like a tart to have sex,’ Catherine admonished her neighbour. ‘If I were ever to have sex again, I’d want it to be with someone who respected and cared about me.’
‘Interesting.’ Kirsty tipped her head to one side so her sleek brown bob fell at an angle. ‘You are now not entirely ruling out the possibility of ever having sex again. And OK, you don’t have to look like a tart to have sex, but it can help. It’s sort of the express checkout to shagging, if you like. Ten items of clothing or less gets you laid much faster.’
‘God, you’re crass, and I’m not wearing that skirt.’ Catherine pushed the bedroom door shut as if to limit the contamination of Kirsty’s filthy mind to her own bedroom.
‘I knew you’d say that,’ Kirsty said. ‘I only brought it to push your boundaries because what you are actually going to wear is this … tad-dah!’ She pulled out a Primark bag. ‘I picked you up this knee-length pencil skirt for a few quid today. Please just try it. I promise you, you’ll still have that harbinger-of-doom-at-a-funeral look you like so much, only with your foxy long legs on display.’
Catherine said nothing as she looked at the skirt. She hadn’t worn a skirt in two years. That wasn’t a joke, she actually hadn’t. Not since the night she caught Jimmy in the ladies with someone whose skirt was wrapped around her neck at the time. Whether the two facts were related in some way she didn’t know; she didn’t want to think about it.
‘Please try it for me, Catherine,’ Kirsty pleaded. ‘After all, what other friend have you got who is prepared to narrow down her own chances of pulling at this party by helping her insanely gorgeous neighbour realise her full potential? That’s love, that is. Any other woman would be drawing your eyebrows on, not trying to prune them back.’
Kirsty tried her best encouraging ‘you can do it’ smile on Catherine.
The smile in itself didn’t work. What did work was not only that Kirsty was Catherine’s only friend who was prepared to try to get her out of her rut and into a short skirt, she was really more or less her only friend, full stop. More than that, Kirsty was the only real female friend she’d had since she was seventeen.
‘I’ll try the skirt,’ Catherine said, unable not to sound begrudging. ‘But that’s all.’
The minute she had it on, along with her chiffon shirt, Kirsty called the girls into her bedroom. Having got themselves ready by digging out all the secret and largely glittery contraband that Nana Pam smuggled into their lives, and covering more or less every inch of themselves in netting, shiny nylon satin and glittery bits of lace, the minute they saw Catherine in a simple skirt they ooohed and ahhhed as if it were she who was dressed up like a psychotic ballerina.
Kirsty, Catherine realised, had pulled off a tactical stroke of genius. If she took the skirt off now her girls would be disappointed, and if there was one thing Catherine could not stand to do it was to disappoint her girls when it was in her power not to. It was something that happened all too rarely.
‘I’m wearing it with opaque tights then,’ she said, and Kirsty, clearly feeling she had won the war if not the battle, cheered.
‘Well, you’ll have to as you lied about shaving your forests … I mean legs,’ Kirsty added.
‘And flat shoes,’ Catherine added, looking at Eloise’s clear plastic play heels. That was one secret Nana Pam item she had not discovered. She’d have to start looking harder.
‘Well, of course flat shoes. We don’t want you to tower over all the men, do we?’ Kirsty replied glibly. ‘Actually, put on your long boots – they are like cleavage for the knees, you know – plus they make you look a bit kinky.’
‘I’ll put them on if you stop saying words in front of my children that will get repeated in class,’ Catherine warned her.
Kirsty nodded in satisfaction at the final effect.
‘You are a fox,’ she said. ‘You must be the last woman on the planet who doesn’t realise what a fox she is.’
‘Mummy isn’t a fox,’ Leila said, looking perplexed. ‘She’s a human bean, aren’t you, Mummy?’
‘Well, my darling,’ Kirsty said, putting an arm around the five-year-old and hugging her, ‘there is a rumour going round to that effect, it’s true.’
Catherine was brushing out the backcombing that Kirsty had tried out on her hair when the doorbell sounded.
‘I’ll get it,’ Kirsty said. ‘It’ll be Jimmy.’
‘Dad’s here, Mum!’ Leila said, scrambling into her bedroom and grabbing her by the wrist, dragging her out of the bedroom before she could twist her mass of hair into its customary ponytail. ‘Come and show him your legs!’
‘Leila, I …’ Catherine felt herself freeze on the stairs. For some bizarre reason, although she had come to terms with half of Farmington seeing her legs from the knee down, albeit beneath seventy deniers of nylon protection, the thought of her almost ex-husband seeing her made her panic.
‘Come on, Mummy,’ Leila said, tugging her down the last few steps. ‘L
ook, Daddy, Mummy’s got legs!’ Leila exclaimed.
Jimmy’s charmed chuckle at his daughter’s comment faded when he caught sight of Catherine, her head bowed, her hair obscuring half her face. But even though Jimmy knew how much she hated to be looked at, he seemed to spend an inordinately long time, at least two seconds longer than was acceptable, looking at her long and thin legs.
Catherine felt her cheeks grow hot and herself grow cross. This was all Kirsty’s fault. She didn’t need to know that Jimmy found her effort at dressing up ridiculous. Her life was so much easier when she was in neutral, when he didn’t notice her or what she was looking like at all.
‘You look …’ Jimmy struggled to find a compliment.
‘What?’ Catherine asked him, with a wince.
‘You scrub up all right, don’t you?’ Jimmy said with a shrug. ‘You’ve pushed the boat out. Good for you.’
‘Oh, how erudite! And they say the art of the compliment is lost,’ Kirsty observed.
‘I’m sorry,’ Jimmy shrugged. ‘I mean, you look nice. Whatever.’
‘Are you really thirty-three or are you just an extremely old-looking fourteen-year-old?’ Kirsty asked Jimmy, hooking her arm through his and leading him out of the front door before Catherine had to suffer any more embarrassment under his ham-fisted scrutiny.
‘Right.’ Catherine looked at her two children. Every part of them that was dressed was covered in nylon satin and fake silk, and every part of them that was not was adorned in glitter, including their hair. ‘I have never seen two such beautiful girls in my life,’ she told them, her heart glued into every word. ‘So come on then, let’s go to this party and see what the rest of Gemma’s family are like.’
‘They’ll be perfect,’ Eloise told her, taking the hand she proffered. ‘They are bound to be perfect, because Gemma is.’
Chapter Ten
‘BLOODY HELL,’ JIMMY said as the five of them walked through the wrought-iron electric gate, which swung open on their approach.
The Accidental Wife Page 14