Catherine tore her eyes away from Marc’s face and looked at Lois as if she were the one who was the complete stranger.
“Lois, I’m afraid that Catherine is in shock because of me,” Marc said with an easy smile. Catherine was surprised to hear that his voice was different. It was refined now. He had lost his Midlands accent and picked up some h’s and t’s along the way. “She and I know each other, you see, although we haven’t seen each other for a long time. She has probably been struck dumb by how old and fat I’ve become, and she’s got every right to be. She doesn’t look a day older than the last time I saw her, only more beautiful.”
“Oh? Well, how unusual,” Lois said, clearly deflated by Marc’s turning his attention from her. “I’ll leave you to catch up, then. You can tell me everything later, Catherine.”
“I knew it,” Marc said a second or two after Lois had left them alone. “I knew I’d find you here.”
“At your party?” Catherine asked him banally.
“In Farmington,” Marc replied. “I think you’re the reason I came back. You might even be the reason for this party. I’ve been looking for you and I didn’t know it until I saw you.”
“What?” Catherine asked him. “What are you talking about?”
“Just recently you’ve been on my mind a lot.” Marc took a step closer to her, causing Catherine’s heels to graze against the wall’s skirting board. He smiled. “I thought about the way I … we … left and how it must have hurt you back then. Maybe it doesn’t matter anymore but I want you to know I didn’t plan anything to happen the way it did. I didn’t plan period. I didn’t plan to get involved with you or Alison, and I didn’t know I was leaving with her until the minute she told me I was. I let things happen to me back then, Cathy, and I didn’t care about the consequences. But that doesn’t mean I don’t regret them now.” Marc shook his head and laughed. “You know, I didn’t expect to have this conversation tonight either, but I’m glad that I am having it. I’m glad I’ve got the chance to say that I’m sorry. I’m sorry for hurting you, Cathy.”
Catherine looked into his dark eyes, at him standing there in the flesh right in front of her, and felt the ground shift a little beneath her feet. A few minutes ago he was a part of her history, a time past that could never be recaptured. Now it seemed as if he had never been gone.
He had no idea, she told herself steadily.
“We are not having this conversation tonight,” she told him, making herself smile, shrugging so that her loose hair fell over one shoulder. “When my husband gets back with my daughters we are leaving.”
Marc let go of her arm, leaving a residue of heat from a summer fifteen years ago.
“You don’t have to go,” he said. “It must be a shock, I know, but please don’t go. Stay and wait for the shock to wear off. Alison will be here somewhere. I know she’d be so pleased to see you. Catherine, please.”
Before Catherine knew it he was embracing her, hugging her thin frame against his. It wasn’t the hard, toned body that she had once known that she felt graze against her ribs now, but it was still his body, and at his touch a tiny spark of memory ignited in her belly and made her muscles contract.
She was relieved when he released her, and she glanced over his shoulder looking for Jimmy and the girls. They were nowhere to be seen.
Alison decided that she had spent long enough in the kitchen waiting for her husband to come and tell her what to do about the fact that they had run out of food about half an hour ago. Why she was waiting for him she didn’t know, there was nothing they could do about it now anyway. It was just if he was here, if he had come like she had asked him, then she would be able to show him the empty platters that were scattered across the kitchen and say “I told you so.” And that would make her feel better. At least they had plenty of champagne. Champagne that Alison had not had nearly enough of. Something she was keen to remedy.
“Right, well,” she said to the waitstaff who were hovering about. “Just make sure everyone gets drinks, okay?”
“Can’t we have a drink?” one boy asked. “This is a cool party.”
Alison looked at him and crossed her arms. If she spent one more minute in her expensive dress in this expensive kitchen with incompetent teenagers, as stone-cold sober as the Italian granite work surfaces, then she would literally implode.
“Just one,” she told the boy, “but if I catch any of you getting drunk, there will be trouble, okay?” She watched in relief as the teenagers filed sedately out of the kitchen, trays laden with champagne.
Alison peered into the hallway where many guests were still congregating and searched the crowd for her husband, who was, no doubt, working the room somewhere in the house. She stood on her tiptoes and craned her neck but she couldn’t see him out there, and if he wasn’t out there then she didn’t want to brave the crowd without him, at least not until she’d had at least two more glasses of champagne. Retreating back into the safety of the kitchen, she reapplied her lip gloss and then, taking a bottle out of the fridge, poured herself first one glass and then another. She could feel the bubbles in the wine popping behind her eyes and she decided to go see if Jimmy Ashley had turned up at her party.
She found him in the tent that had been set up in their backyard, trying to persuade his daughters to come off of the dance floor. He wasn’t having much luck. The disco lights turned the melee of children green, red, and blue, making them look like multicolored fairies flitting across the floor, but there was something familiar about the tall girl, the one who had to be Gemma’s much-loved Ellie. She must take after her father, Alison thought, smiling warmly at Jimmy as he tried to catch his smallest girl and failed.
Tipping the bottle of champagne she had brought with her into her glass and immediately emptying it, Alison thought she might as well be at the sixth-form dance again, trying to pluck up the courage to get Jimmy Ashley to dance with her because that was exactly what she was doing now. Finishing the glass off in one long draft, Alison waited as the room tilted and swayed for a moment before setting itself right, and Alison heard a little sane voice inside her head telling her that this was not the right way to make a good impression as wife and mother and hostess of the party. But unfortunately for the sane little voice, Alison couldn’t care less. And besides, it was largely because her husband hadn’t introduced her to anyone that she felt fairly safe that most people here wouldn’t even know that she was the hostess.
Jimmy hadn’t noticed her coming until she was standing right next to him.
“Hi, Jimmy!” she said quite loudly, right in his ear, making him jump. “Come with me and have another drink.”
“Alison,” Jimmy said, stepping aside so that his daughters could race away from him unhindered.
“Oh, you remembered me!” Alison was thrilled. “Yay! Jimmy remembered me at last!”
“Alison from school,” Jimmy said. “That’s how I knew you. You hung about at band practice a lot. You were Catherine Parkin’s best friend.”
“Yes,” Alison said, a little more hesitantly this time. “Yes, that was me. I used to know Cathy.”
“She got married, Cathy Parkin,” Jimmy said. “Her name’s Catherine Ashley now.”
“Oh,” Alison said, her eyes widening, and then, “Oh shit.”
“We need to talk,” Jimmy told her.
A few minutes later as his eyes adjusted to the light, Jimmy saw Alison perched on what looked like an upturned box with a bottle of champagne in her hand, her bare legs crossed, showing a little upper thigh. She had led him outside to a sort of copse situated in a dip just behind the tent.
As Alison had led him into the darkness, Jimmy had gotten the distinct feeling that he shouldn’t be following any woman, never mind this one, into the woods, and that he should really be taking the girls back to Catherine and getting her out of there like he’d promised. He told himself that by talking to Alison he was trying to make things easier for Catherine. Alison had no idea about what had happened
to Catherine after she ran way. Catherine had never had the chance to tell her, and now the only people in the world who knew were Catherine’s parents, Catherine, and him.
Jimmy was afraid there was a good chance Alison would treat the whole thing as if it were a joke, something they could look back on and laugh over, but Jimmy knew that wasn’t the case. He felt he had to warn her. Not for her sake, but for Catherine’s.
“Well, talk then,” Alison said, retrieving another bottle from one of the boxes next to where she was sitting. She twisted the cork off a bottle, unbalancing herself a little, and realizing she no longer had a glass, she took a swig out of the bottle. “Jimmy Ashley who married Cathy Parkin. That’s poetic justice for you, isn’t it?” She tipped her head back and laughed like a little girl, which made Jimmy smile despite himself.
She took a long draft from the bottle and then, wiping the back of her hand across her mouth, handed it to Jimmy. “I’m a bit drunk actually. Which is good because when Cathy sees me she’s going to kill me.”
“Catherine’s not like that,” Jimmy told her as he took the bottle and a swig. “But you should know it’s going to be hard for her. When you went you left her in a real mess. A real mess.”
“I know it must have hurt her losing him, Jimmy, but she got over it. Otherwise she wouldn’t have married you. You know, I bet she married you to get back at me.”
“What?” Jimmy asked her.
“I fancied you at school for years, Jimmy—did you really not notice? God, that is so depressing. I still do fancy you, actually. You’re a very sexy man, bringing me out here to talk about your lady wife.” Jimmy took a couple of steps back and glanced back at the lights of the house twinkling in the distance. Suddenly he felt very out of his depth.
“But Jimmy,” Alison went on. “He might have loved her but he never would have been any good for her, not in a million years. Trust me, I know.” Alison’s laugh was entirely mirthless. “Funny, really, I got her life and she got mine, all of this is your fault. If you had noticed me throwing myself at you back then, then I would have let her mess herself up with Marc and I would have had you. And we’d be happy.”
“I’m sorry,” Jimmy said for want of anything else to say. “But the truth is I didn’t actually discover women until I was in my twenties. I was too much into my music to get serious with anyone. I never had girlfriends at school, never had anything serious until I met Catherine. I didn’t even know I’d gone to school with her for ten years. That’s how blind I was. And if I didn’t even notice the stunning tall girl with the bright red hair, how would I have noticed you?”
“Mmmmph,” Alison said, pouting. “I’ll try not to take offense.”
“Look,” Jimmy said, trying to get back to why he was here in the woods with her. “The fact is that you’re here now.” He looked up at the house with a million twinkling lights. “And it looks as if you’re here to stay—but you’re going to have to be … sensitive with her, Alison. Allow for what she went through, give her time to adjust. She’s never had anyone to talk to about it all, except for me. She still cries about it sometimes. That’s how much the whole thing hurt her. It damaged her.”
“She still cries about Marc and me running off together?” Alison’s laugh was harsh. “Seriously? As her husband, doesn’t that piss you off?”
Jimmy looked at her. “She still cries about the abortion. The abortion her parents made her have when she found out that Marc had got her pregnant.”
There was a long silence punctuated by a hiccup as Alison stared at Jimmy, the defiant smile on her face faltering and then finally fading.
“You’ve got that wrong,” Alison insisted. “What are you talking about, Jimmy? There was no abortion, she wasn’t the one who he got pregnant,” Alison insisted. “I was the one who got pregnant. I know because he never had sex with her, he told me that at the time. He never felt that way about her, they didn’t have the passion we had.”
Alison swayed a little on her perch as she took another drink.
“Where did you get the story of an abortion from, anyway?” she asked Jimmy defensively. “I had him, I had Marc’s baby—my son’s in there now, probably secretly drinking and skulking around the waitresses.”
Jimmy sighed. How had it fallen on him to break this news to Catherine’s archenemy?
“Look, Alison, I don’t know what Marc told you back then, I expect he told you a lot of things that weren’t true. Men usually lie when they’re sleeping with two women at the same time. What I do know for certain is that Catherine was pregnant when you left.” Jimmy’s hot breath made his words visible, a mist in the chill of the air. “She was pregnant with Marc’s baby too, only she didn’t get to keep hers. Her parents saw to that.”
Jimmy watched as Alison’s glassy eyes brightened and filled with tears that glittered in the reflected glory of the decorated house.
“She was having his baby?” Alison asked, her voice a whisper. “She was having his baby too?”
“Yes, she was going to tell him—she wanted to tell you but in the end she decided she couldn’t …”
“No, you see, that’s not right.” Alison was determined. “Because it was me he wanted, me he needed. He played around with her, strung her along, but he didn’t do that with her. He told me. He told me that I was the one he couldn’t keep his hands off of. That was what made us special. Jimmy, I’m sorry, but Cathy’s made the whole thing up, I don’t know why—maybe to get you to feel sorry for her, but anyway, it’s a lie.”
Jimmy’s face darkened as he took a step or two nearer to Alison. “Catherine doesn’t lie. Does Marc?”
“No!” Alison stood up abruptly. “He doesn’t lie, he doesn’t … and anyway, don’t you see, Jimmy? I can’t not have known about that, I would have known. We knew everything about each other, Cathy and me.”
“Not everything,” Jimmy said. “Not this. I’m sorry, Alison, but it happened. Marc got Catherine pregnant, she had an abortion.”
Without warning, Alison flung her arms around Jimmy, buried her face in his neck, and wept. At a loss as to how to react, Jimmy stiffly held out his arms at a steady ninety-degree angle as her shoulders shook and he felt her hot breath against his neck.
“This is too much,” she said into his neck. “This is one lie too many, and it’s not fair because it’s the first lie, and if I’d known about the first lie, then maybe I wouldn’t have stuck around for the second or the third or the hundredth or the millionth lie.” Alison paused and looked up at Jimmy, her face very close to his, and Jimmy couldn’t help but notice that despite the drinking and the tears she still looked beautiful. “It must have been hard for Cathy.”
“I think that is a bit of an understatement,” Jimmy said swiftly, untangling himself from her embrace and stepping away from her. “Like I said before, it damaged her and that’s why I’m asking you to back off and take it easy.”
“I’m going to kill him!” Alison said, having to steady herself without Jimmy to lean on. “He fucked us both up and now I’m going to kill him.”
“Look,” Jimmy said, suddenly feeling uneasy. “I suppose it’s an obvious question. But Marc? He is here somewhere, isn’t he? Sooner or later he’ll find Catherine. She’s kind of hard to miss.”
Alison’s head snapped up and before Jimmy realized what was happening she was running past him back toward the house.
“Are you okay?” Marc asked Catherine.
“I’m fine, really. Go and talk to your guests, please. I’m waiting for my husband,” Catherine said, but Marc stood stock-still.
“I don’t want to leave you like this,” he said.
Catherine bit her lip, repressing the obvious retort. She shook her head and conjured an approximation of a smile. “Go, I’ll be fine.”
Catherine watched him watching her, his dark eyes intense. He’d looked at her in exactly that way on the day they had first met, when he’d kissed her. For one heady petrifying second Catherine got the feeling he might
do exactly the same thing now. He took a step closer to her and his hand grazed her shoulder, striking sparks as it passed.
“Liar!” Suddenly Alison was in between them, causing Catherine to stagger backward and into Jimmy, who was following at her heels.
“What?” she asked him.
“Thing is …” Jimmy began, but it was then that Alison slapped her husband hard across the face. The whole room stopped and looked.
“Ouch, darling.” Marc smiled at his wife. “The caterers weren’t that bad.”
“Liar!” Alison repeated, and was about to slap him again but this time he caught her wrist.
“Let’s take this outside, shall we,” he said in a low voice as he gripped her wrist. “Remember our guests?”
“You told me you never had sex with her,” Alison accused him. “You were sleeping with both of us the whole time.”
“Look, Alison.” Marc pulled her closer to him, trying desperately to keep the conversation between themselves. “Please, we’ll talk about this later.”
“You’ve lied to me for fifteen years,” Alison said, her voice hard and cold. “After everything we’ve been through and all the promises you made, you’ve kept on lying. You’re still lying now. I used to think it would end one day, but it won’t ever end, will it, Marc? It comes as naturally to you as breathing.”
She jerked her wrist out of his grasp and looked around at the crowd of guests.
“Ladies and gentlemen, this party is now over due to the unforeseen circumstance of my husband being a disgusting, lying pig. Please collect your coats and make an orderly exit.”
Spinning on her heel, she came face-to-face with Catherine.
The two women stared at each other, both aware that not one guest had yet made an attempt to leave.
“Cathy,” Alison said quietly, carefully avoiding looking at her husband because she was afraid of how he would react to what she was about to say. “I didn’t know. I didn’t know about the baby.”
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