Another Mother's Life

by Rowan Coleman

  “Would it have changed anything?” Catherine asked, and Alison knew she was avoiding looking at Marc too. “If you’d known?”

  “It might have,” Alison said. “It would have changed something.”

  Catherine felt the scrutiny of all of those around her and knew that she had to be out of there within the next five seconds.

  “I have to go,” Catherine said. She looked at Jimmy. “We’ll go and find the girls and then leave, okay?”

  He nodded.

  “Thank you for coming,” Alison said to her foolishly. “Will you believe me if I say that it’s really good to see you again?”

  Catherine nodded, tears standing in her eyes.

  “Perhaps I’ll see you in the school playground. Perhaps we can talk, sort things out, put things … to rest.”

  Catherine paused, looking at Alison. “Why did you come back?”

  “To rescue my family,” Alison said. “I don’t think it’s working out quite as we planned.”

  Catherine nodded and then, without saying another word, she turned on her heel, slotting her hand into Jimmy’s, and walked out of the room as the crowd parted before her.

  The cool air soothed her skin as they began their walk back home, Leila asleep on her shoulder and Eloise in Jimmy’s arms.

  “You handled that amazingly well,” Jimmy told her. “I was so proud of you, Cat. You were so serene, and dignified. Even with him, the bastard. You were brilliant.”

  “I can’t believe you told her,” Catherine replied. “I can’t believe it.”

  They were silent for the rest of the walk home.

  Twelve

  Alison lay on her bed, staring at the ceiling. The room lights were out but the thousand or so fairy lights outside of her bedroom window illuminated the room in pulsating glittering bursts of radiance. Rosie lay next to her, a small bundle of warmth, nestling companionably into her side, breaking in one fell swoop Alison’s vow that the animal was never to be allowed on beds or the sofa. Alison couldn’t bring herself to move the dog; the regular rise and fall of her rib cage was comforting.

  Much to her deep irritation the party had not ended when she’d declared that it was over, far from it. That had been a good hour ago and the chatter of Marc’s guests still rose in the hallway as if nothing had happened. After Cathy had made her exit, splitting the party crowd like Moses parting the Red Sea, with Jimmy Ashley loyally following in her wake, the room had fallen silent save for the background thrum of the disco in the tent.

  Glancing around, Marc had laughed and then he’d put his arm around her and kissed her hard on the cheek.

  “May I introduce you all to my wonderful, fiery, impetuous, and amazing wife—Alison James, a woman who certainly knows how to make an entrance.”

  And somehow Alison had found herself standing at Marc’s side, her arm linked through his, smiling graciously while she received a round of applause from the good people of Farmington. Only Marc could have done this, only Marc could have the audacity and magic to turn a martial brawl into a social nicety, into something that was even romantic, while she was still reeling from the news that Jimmy had given her and could have quite happily slapped Marc again.

  However, with everyone’s eyes on her and the buzz of the champagne having eroded into a head-churning fuzz, not to mention the sight of her two daughters, who had come to find her, Alison realized she didn’t have any choice but to go along with the illusion that Marc had created.

  She put her arms around his neck and kissed him on the lips.

  “Anyone for more champagne?” Marc asked the crowd in general the second the kiss was broken, leaving Alison’s side to go and arrange it before anyone could answer.

  “I’m tired, Mama,” Amy said, putting her arms around Alison’s waist and resting her chin on her tummy. “When are all these people going home?”

  “Ellie’s mummy came and made her and Leila go home. She looked really cross,” Gemma said. “I’m not tired, by the way. Can I stay up some more? You could come and dance with us, Mummy. And Daddy and Dominic, we could all dance together.”

  “I don’t think so,” Alison said, crouching down so that Amy could hook her arms around Alison’s neck, and then hefting her onto her hip. “I think you two girls have had a good run and now it’s time for bed, okay?”

  “ ’Kay,” Amy said, resting her head on Alison’s shoulder, her thumb in her mouth.

  “ ’Spose,” Gemma sighed. “Although I could dance for at least another hour without getting tired.”

  And leading her two girls to bed, Alison was finally able to make her escape. With both of them falling asleep as soon as their heads touched the pillow, she briefly peered over the banister to the throng of people below. Marc was the center of attention, talking, throwing his head back with laughter, gesturing like a hypnotist who had the whole room in his thrall. He was rescuing the situation, turning it around, re-creating the facade of their lives from scratch yet again, doing all the things he was so good at, except he hadn’t seemed to notice that she was up here on her own and he was down there running all of their lives single-handedly, as if he hadn’t lied to her for fifteen years. As if he hadn’t been sleeping with them both.

  Alison closed her eyes, but the lights still twinkled cheerfully behind her lids, so she pulled the duvet over her head in a bid to blot them out, breathing in the scent of her relationship, her life, that was embedded in the sheets.

  Of course he had been sleeping with them both, of course he had. If she’d had any kind of knowledge or experience of men back then other than trying to fend off the wandering hands of the boys from school, she would have realized it was inevitable. She and Cathy were still girls, almost women, but only physically. They were still making the choices and decisions that girls made when it felt as if there would be no consequences and no tomorrow.

  And Marc had been a man, a young man, but he’d had to grow up fast, thrown out of the children’s home at the age of sixteen and left to fend for himself in a world of brutal and unsympathetic adults. At the age of seventeen Alison had believed that she had sexual power over him. She had the breasts and the legs and the heat that he really wanted. But she was wrong. Cathy had it too, it was just that with Cathy it was much less obvious.

  “Have you ever done this with her?” she’d asked him.

  “I’ve never done anything like that with her,” he’d replied. He hadn’t lied, he couldn’t have been more blunt. Alison had chosen to believe what she’d wanted to believe.

  Alison pressed the heels of her hands against her pounding forehead. Cathy had been pregnant. She had been pregnant with Marc’s baby, a baby that would have been conceived only a week or two apart from Dominic, maybe even on the same day as her son. It was possible. Looking back, Alison realized Jimmy was right. Cathy had tried to tell her, after it all came out. After she’d found out that Alison had been sleeping with Marc and everything started to disintegrate around her. Alison remembered she’d felt like she was standing in the eye of a storm, perfectly calm, absolutely determined, while the rest of the world was whipped into chaos around her.

  It had been raining; thick rivulets of raindrops blended with her friend’s tears as she stood on Alison’s doorstep and pleaded with her.

  “Please don’t do this, Alison,” she begged her. “You don’t love him, not really. You only want him because I’ve got him. Please! You don’t understand what you’re doing to me!”

  “It’s no good,” her seventeen-year-old self replied cruelly. “He loves me, Cathy, he wants me—not you. You have to realize that. And besides, I need him now. I really need him.”

  “But what about us?” Catherine said, weeping. “You and me? Who will I have if I don’t have you? If I lose him I lose you too. I don’t know what I’ll do, Alison. You don’t know what you’re doing to me. I need you, I’m …”

  “Look, I’m pregnant,” Alison hissed, taking a few steps forward into the rain and drawing the front door closed behin
d her so that her parents would not hear. “Nobody knows yet, not even him, but I’m having his baby, Cathy. And I love him. I love him and he loves me and that’s the way we’ve felt about each other since the minute we met. Tonight I’m going to ask him to leave Farmington with me and he will, I’ll make him come with me because I know that he wants me more than anything else in the world. You were never important to him, you have to see that, Cathy—I mean look at you. Can you really picture the two of you together? Now I have to put myself and my baby first and if you can’t understand that, then …” Alison shrugged.

  Catherine didn’t say a word. She just stood there in the pouring rain, as if her whole body were melting, her mouth open, speechless as she tried to understand what Alison was telling her. Alison stepped back under the shelter of her porch and waited.

  “But you’re my best friend,” Catherine began. “The only person in the world I could talk to and trust …”

  “Not anymore,” Alison said. “I’m sorry, Catherine. You’ll just have to get used to it. Marc belongs to me now.”

  Alison tried her hardest to get back into the head of the girl she’d been then, and she asked herself what she would have done differently if she had known that her friend was pregnant too. And she couldn’t say that she wouldn’t still have left Cathy behind. Back then she didn’t know any better, she didn’t want to know anything except that she was meant to be with Marc and that he belonged to her.

  Another uneasy thought was nagging at her as she lay in bed, and that was the memory of her husband standing behind her downstairs at the party when she had told Cathy she didn’t know about the baby. It should have been news to Marc too, but he hadn’t reacted at all. Not a gasp, not a movement. He was perfectly still. Did that mean that he knew about the baby when he ran away with Alison? It could have been that, or it could just have been Marc maintaining appearances no matter what sledgehammer came swinging out of the past to floor him. It was impossible to know, and Alison decided wearily she didn’t want to know. Not yet, at least. She was growing weary of discovering secrets.

  There was a knock at the door, rousing Rosie briefly from her slumber before exhaustion overtook her once more and she settled back into sleep. Alison composed herself for Marc, and then she realized he wouldn’t knock.

  “It’s me,” Dominic called. He opened the door a crack, the blaze of the hall light momentarily blinding Alison as she peered over the covers. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” Alison told him, mustering a smile for him. “I’ve just got a headache. What’s the time?”

  Dominic shrugged. Alison glanced at the clock; it was almost midnight.

  “What was that all about, Mum?” Dominic asked her. “You shouting at him, and slapping him. You looked really angry. It was wild, well, cool.”

  Alison frowned; she didn’t know how to feel about impressing her son with an act of violence.

  “You should have arrived fifteen seconds earlier, he was all over that woman, the tall, scary-looking one. Is she why you slapped him? Has he gone and done it again already?”

  Alison, who had been rubbing her eyes, froze for a second. She hated that Dominic knew about Marc. She hated the fact that her son’s expectations of his father, of both of his parents, were now so low.

  She sat up and turned on the bedside lamp.

  “Don’t be silly, Dom. Dad hasn’t done anything,” she told her son as he sat on the edge of the bed, reaching out absently to stroke Rosie. She reached out and touched his soft, as yet unshaven cheek with the back of her hand. “You know Dad, he’s a charmer and a flirt, all touchy-feely. But it doesn’t mean anything.”

  “I call fucking some tart a bit more than being touchy-feely, Mum,” Dominic said, his words brutal even if his tone was not. “Look, I’m not a kid anymore. I see things, I hear things. We both know that everyone was talking about him before we left London. And you—they talked about you too. About what kind of woman you must be to put up with him. I know you like to tell everyone including yourself that we moved because I’m such a dead loss and on the verge of becoming a hardened criminal. I don’t even care if that’s what people think. But we both know that’s not the real reason. We left London because you finally found out Dad was fucking that tart at the showroom. But not because of the actual fucking, because you’ve put up with that in the past and it didn’t seem to bother you. No, this time we had to leave because you realized that everybody, all your friends, all his slimy mates knew about it for months and you didn’t.” Dominic shrugged. “Dad did what he always does and promised that it would never happen again and you did what you always do and believed him. Only this time you couldn’t stand living on the same street, going to the same gym and the same school, where everybody knew what he’d done to you, and what a fool you were. So you made us move back here and blamed it on me.”

  “Dominic,” Alison said, still reeling from her son’s so nearly accurate portrayal of her life. “You can always talk to me, but please don’t use that language. Your father wanted to come here.”

  “Why?” Dominic asked.

  “Because …” Alison remembered Marc’s reasons, but none of them seemed very plausible anymore. “He said it’s a nice place. It’s the place where we started and the place where he still has something to prove. And as much as you’d like to deny it, moving here has got plenty to do with you. You of all people shouldn’t listen to gossip, Dom. People say things that aren’t true … maybe that was part of the reason for leaving, but it wasn’t all of it. Both your dad and I wanted a fresh start …”

  “A fresh start?” Dominic looked disgusted with her. “Mum, I don’t know what was going on back there with that woman, but this isn’t a fresh start, it’s an … old ending. Are you sure Dad didn’t just come here for that? For her?”

  Alison stared at her son, the boy who might have been conceived around the same time as Cathy’s baby … who’d never been born.

  “You don’t have to worry about any of this …” she began, reaching out to pat his hand. Dominic snatched it away.

  “Yes I do. Of course I bloody do. Do you think your shit marriage only happens to you two? Do you think the rest of us aren’t involved? And it’s not just me. Gemma puts on a front but before we moved away she came and asked me to go to her school and beat up this boy who’d been saying things about Dad …”

  “You didn’t, did you?” Alison asked, horrified on both counts.

  “Of course I didn’t, I’m not a psycho. And do you think Amy would really be so shit scared of everything if it wasn’t for the fear of you and Dad busting it all wide open? You think that everyone else looks at us and sees a perfect family, living in a nice house, with a perfect life. But you’re wrong. Everyone in London knew the truth about us and before long everyone in this dump will too.”

  Alison didn’t say anything for a moment, she just stared at her hands on the bed covers, flat and immobile.

  “You’d be better off without him,” Dominic said.

  “I … you can’t say that, Dom,” Alison reacted at last. “You don’t understand. You don’t know what we went through to be together and how hard we’ve fought for everything. We were only a little bit older than you when we met. No one thought we’d make it, and look at us. Grown-up life isn’t pretty, it isn’t easy. You do your best, you keep going, you wait for things to even out.”

  “Me,” Dom said matter-of-factly.

  “What?” Alison asked.

  “What you two had to go through to be together was me. I can do math, Mum, I know he got you pregnant when you were seventeen. You two got together because you had to, because of me, and you’ve been stuck together ever since even though you don’t fit.”

  “No, no!” Alison said firmly, leaning forward and holding his wrists. “You’re a clever boy, Dom, but you’ve got that bit wrong. I loved your father so much, I wanted him so much. I was mad for him. When I realized I was having you it was a bit of a shock. I was frightened and it was
hard to know how to cope. But when your dad and I got together it was because we thought we could make a go of it, not because we had to. Not because of you, even though you would be the best reason in the world. We loved each other.”

  “But not anymore,” Dom stated.

  “That’s not … stop it, Dom, stop saying all of these things just because you are angry with us. This is your father you are talking about and no matter what you say about him, he loves you and you love him.”

  “I don’t,” Dom said simply.

  “You do,” Alison insisted.

  “Mum, I don’t even know him. I never see him except when he wants to scold me. I never speak to him. He never looks at me. And I think it’s because he resents me, because it was me in your belly that got him tied up in this family he’s so keen on wrecking.”

  “Now you’re just being silly,” Alison said. “You and Dad talk and spend time together, look at … well, what about when …” Alison trailed off. She couldn’t remember the two of them talking in the last month, let alone the last week. “He’s very busy at the moment,” she said instead.

  Dominic dropped his head so that his dark hair fell over his face, and Alison wondered if he was crying.

  “Leave him, then,” he said.

  “I can’t just—” Alison began.

  “Leave him. We’d be all right on our own. I’d help look after you and the girls and you could be you again.”

  “I can’t just leave him,” Alison said with some surprise, because despite everything, the thought had never once occurred to her until now.

  “You could,” Dominic said. “If you wanted to.”

  “But I don’t want to,” Alison said automatically. “Look, Dom, I’m glad we’ve talked, I really am. Dad and I are going through a rough patch but it will be over soon. We’re not going to split up because, well, we’re just not. We are meant to be together.

  “In the morning I’ll talk to him about you, about how you’re feeling. We’ll sort out some time for you two to spend together— how about that, huh?”