Catherine had had perhaps two or three sips before she had fallen asleep upright on the sofa. Gently, Jimmy had taken the glass from her hand and then with infinite care had lifted her legs up onto the sofa and eased her shoulders down, placing a cushion beneath her head and drawing the crocheted throw over her. That had been about four hours ago and she still lay there now, her hair trailing over her face, one hand clenched around the corner of the cushion as if it were the last straw.
Jimmy had tried to sleep in the chair, but sleep had not come. Every time he’d closed his eyes, fireworks went off behind his lids, his brain hummed and his body ached. At some point during the night or early morning something had changed inside him, because whenever he looked over at Catherine sleeping on the sofa, he felt as if his whole body had been cleaved in half by the sight of her.
And then as the sun rose in the sky and burned the mist away, the realization that had been nudging at his thoughts all night suddenly dawned. Nothing had changed, nothing was different. For the last twelve years he had always felt like this, and only recently had he managed to convince himself that he didn’t. But now when she needed him, that pretense had fallen away like a sandcastle disintegrating under the incoming tide.
Jimmy still loved Catherine. It felt as if he always had.
He bit his lip and rested his head against the back of the chair. As he closed his eyes, he felt a tear trickle down his cheek.
The fact that he loved his wife was not in question.
Whether or not he’d have the guts to try to do anything about it, he couldn’t say.
Fourteen
Alison opened her eyes and waited for the second or two it took for her to remember her life. She had been dreaming about being a child again. Not about any event in particular, but just about her and Cathy when they were around Gemma’s age, running along the canal towpath in the sunlight, the heat of the sun on their shoulders as Alison chased after Cathy, whose hair was made amber by the sunshine. That was all; nothing else had happened in the dream except that Alison had felt light inside, she had felt free.
Now that her eyes were open and she had reabsorbed her daily life back into her bones, she felt the weight of reality sinking into her skin. She truly had seen Cathy last night, she hadn’t dreamt that.
It was Rosie and not Marc who was in bed next to her. She rolled onto her side and looked at his side of the bed. The pillow was plumped and smooth, the duvet unruffled. He had not come to bed at all. Briefly Alison wondered if he had followed Cathy home and was with her right now, and an ember of jealousy flickered in her throat, but she swallowed it down.
Pushing herself up onto her elbows, Alison made herself get out of bed, the dog springing off the bed after her, skipping around her ankles, keen to be let out. Alison opened the bedroom door, hearing Rosie yap once as she scampered headlong down the stairs.
She found that her legs felt heavy, her arms ached, and she felt as if her brain was somehow insulated by one or two layers from reality. Everything seemed just a little bit farther away than it normally did.
It couldn’t be a hangover, she told herself. Yes, she’d drunk a good deal of champagne very quickly, but champagne usually didn’t affect her poorly. If she was hungover from anything it was her life and its culmination the previous night. The choices she had made that had somehow brought her life to this point had finally caught up with her. There was nowhere left to hide anymore.
In the bathroom Alison dunked her face in a basin full of cold water and then rubbed some more on her neck and between her breasts with a sponge, feeling the cold water trickle down over her belly. Roughly rubbing herself dry, she took a deep breath and looked in the mirror. Her reflection looked tired, her skin thin and frail. The trouble was, Alison thought, that all those years when she hadn’t seen Cathy, it had been easy not to think about her or about the kind of person that Alison had been. She hadn’t had to face up to that selfish, spoiled little brat, the thoughtless girl who had wrecked half a dozen lives just to get what she wanted.
But now Alison had seen Cathy face-to-face, and she had to acknowledge the truth.
This person, the woman looking back out of the mirror at her, was the very same girl who had abandoned Cathy to her parents. Of course, Alison hadn’t known that Cathy was pregnant. But in the cold light of day, as she looked at her reflection in the mirror, she knew that even if Cathy had told her, she would have left anyway. She would have done anything to be with the man she loved.
Tired of looking at her tired self, Alison went to check on her children.
Dominic was sprawled facedown diagonally across his bed, one arm flung over his guitar, his iPod still plugged into his ears. He looked fifteen again and nothing like the enraged and passionate young man who had visited her in her bedroom last night. Alison tiptoed carefully across the detritus of his teenage life and carefully pulled the earbud from his left ear. When she realized she couldn’t reach the left one she carefully located the iPod and switched it off.
Dominic mumbled something, brushing one hand outward in a spasm, as if he were attempting to swat a fly, before settling back into sleep, and then he didn’t look fifteen anymore but five, his face relaxing into that little boy who had once been her guide and beacon. Alison looked at those dark lashes and that soft mouth that used to tremble whenever he was sad, frightened, or furious, and, unable to resist, she bent and kissed him lightly on the head.
He wanted her to leave Marc, to strike out on her own. But he was young, and angry and full of fire. For the first time last night Alison had tried to think of a life without her husband and found she couldn’t imagine what it might be like. Perhaps she had created Marc, but he had made her too, he’d made her a mother and a wife, a woman who lived for her family or at least who told herself she did. But did she?
Alison dragged Dominic’s duvet cover over both boy and guitar and crept back out of the room to check on her daughters.
Gemma was arranged as neatly as always, the back of one hand resting demurely against her cheek, the other tucked neatly under the cover, like a true sleeping princess.
Amy, on the other hand, looked as if she had wrestled a crocodile in her sleep, which wasn’t past the realm of possibility, Alison thought as she looked at her, one leg hanging out of bed, soft vulnerable toes touching the floor. Her quilt was flung to one end of the bed, her head was twisted awkwardly to one side, and her pillow was on the floor.
Alison crept over to the bed and, kneeling tenderly, lifted Amy’s leg back onto the mattress and covered her with the duvet.
Perhaps Dominic was right, perhaps she had been so busy creating and re-creating this perfect family life for her children that she hadn’t noticed how the stress and tension between her and Marc was affecting her children. Gemma was so easy, that’s how Alison always described her middle child. She assumed that Gemma’s confidence was due to happiness but perhaps it was like armor, concealing her anxieties. Maybe her eight-year-old little girl was trying to protect herself. And Amy’s fears weren’t nameless or imaginary, not if she sensed that the fairy-tale castle her parents had built for her to live in might crumble away to nothing. If that was true, then no wonder she only ever relaxed when the whole family was in one room.
Alison sat on the pink wicker chair opposite Amy’s bed and put her face in her hands.
Her life had come full circle back here in her hometown. It was ironic that she had had to walk back into her past to finally face her future. The trick was going to be trying to work out exactly how to face it, how to face Cathy and Jimmy and especially her husband. How to make sense of the accidental life she had forced herself into, and of the accidental wife she had become.
The house smelled of stale alcohol and egg- and-watercress sandwiches, some of which were trodden into the stair carpet or ground into the hall tiles. Abandoned glasses were everywhere, filled with various liquids to varying degrees, giving Alison the almost irresistible urge to pick up her son’s drumsticks and play wi
th them.
Marc was not in the kitchen or any of the downstairs rooms. From the looks of things he hadn’t even slept on the sofa.
Alison walked gingerly over broken chips to the French windows.
The sun was almost up, burning the mist off the lawn, spiralling up into the air like magician’s smoke. Marc was in the garden, huddled up in his wool coat, sitting on the white wrought iron garden furniture he had bought at a job lot from the show home in the development. He had his back to the house and was looking at the hills that swelled and rolled across the valley, lush green and gold in the early morning, the horizon garlanded with trees. Above the mist, the sky looked bright blue and clear. Alison thought that this might be the first sunny day of the year.
The grass was wet and cold under her bare feet, slick with dew, but she didn’t go back into the house to find shoes or slippers, sensing that if she turned back she’d lose this moment.
As she approached Marc, he looked up and smiled at her.
“Good morning, beautiful,” he said. “You really should have something on your feet. It’s a bit nippy out here. Thought I’d take the morning air and survey my kingdom and have a think.” He nodded at Rosie, who was enthusiastically digging in the flower bed. “The dog did her business in the garden for once. That’s got to be something to celebrate.”
Alison sat down on one of the wrought iron chairs, drawing her feet up onto its seat and tucking her knees beneath her chin. She felt the cold of the dew seep through her nightdress.
They smiled at each other for a moment, like two old cohorts who were finally realizing the game was up.
“Well, I certainly didn’t picture this when we came back,” Marc said eventually. “I just didn’t think Cathy Parkin would still be here. That was a surprise, wasn’t it?”
“Didn’t you?” Alison asked. He looked at her; his nose and cheeks were red from the chill and his eyes looked puffy and sore. Briefly Alison wondered if Marc had been crying, but in all the years she had been with him she’d never seen him shed a tear.
“I didn’t plan it,” Marc said. “I swear to you.”
“I’m sorry I slapped you,” Alison said, hugging her arms around her knees.
“I deserved it,” Marc said.
“Maybe fifteen years ago you did. I mean of course you were sleeping with her,” Alison said. “I don’t know why I hadn’t worked that out years ago. I don’t even think that was why I slapped you. Or the fact that you’d gotten her pregnant too. It was seeing her there in front of me. I realized I’d missed her and I blamed you. So I slapped you. And I shouldn’t have. It must have been very embarrassing.”
“I carried it off, though,” Marc said. “And anyway I understand, because I felt the same way.”
“Embarrassed?” Alison said, tucking the hem of her nightgown under her toes.
“No, when I saw her, I missed her. Missed the way she used to make me feel back then … missed who I was when I was with her.”
They sat in silence and Alison tried to work out if the burning she felt in her chest was caused by hurt or relief. Because although Marc’s comments were painful, at least he was being honest with her.
“What would you have done?” Alison asked him. “If you’d known she was pregnant too? Would you have stood by her as well? That would have given the town something to talk about. ‘Man Fathers Two Children Born Within a Week of Each Other.’ ”
Marc’s laugh surprised Alison. “I knew she was pregnant,” he explained. “I think I knew long before she did. I was waiting for her to tell me that we couldn’t go to bed because her period had come. I waited for three weeks, four weeks, five weeks and the subject never came up. I knew we couldn’t carry on forever then. I knew there would be a moment when she had to tell me and I wanted to leave before it arrived.”
“You knew she was pregnant and you still chose me?” Alison said. Once she would have left it at that, let herself believe that that one action fifteen years ago stood as a testament to how much she had meant to Marc, but not today. Because for once in his life he was being honest and she needed to know the truth. “Why?”
Marc didn’t answer for a moment as he looked out toward the horizon. Then taking a breath, he began to talk.
“You told Catherine about us, I knew you would sooner or later,” he said. “I’d been expecting it since that first afternoon. It must have been a school day because Catherine turned up at the rooming house in her uniform. I’ll never forget it, seeing her there in her blue-checked kilt and school sweater.
“She was crying. She asked me if it was true that I’d been sleeping with you and I said that it was. And she asked me if that meant me and her were over. I was shocked, upset for her even if I didn’t show it. She should have told me it was over, not asked me. She should have been stronger than she was. But she wasn’t strong, I knew that when I got involved with her. I warned her. So I told her that it was; it was over.
“I braced myself, waiting for her to tell me she was pregnant, but she didn’t. She must have known by then that she was but she didn’t mention it. She just turned on her heel and walked away.” Marc looked up at the clear sky. “It was pouring rain.”
“She was coming to see me,” Alison said, more to herself than to Marc. “She tried to tell me about the baby. But I wouldn’t let her.”
“I went to the pub that night, my first night off in ages. I wanted to get drunk, really out of it, I didn’t want to think about anything. The work in Farmington was coming to an end, I heard there was some work coming up near Croyden. Not that far away, but that night it seemed like a welcome refuge. And then suddenly you appeared. I don’t know how you found me …”
“I looked in every single pub.”
“You walked in and all the blokes looked at you, your hair all wet, your top soaked through. All that eyeliner you used to wear running down your cheeks. I saw you and my heart sank. I thought, here we go again. Ding, ding, round two. But I was ready to take whatever you wanted to dish out, I thought I deserved it.”
“I asked you to go outside with me,” Alison remembered. “Told you I needed to talk to you. I had no idea what I was going to do if you didn’t come, but you did come.”
“We stood outside in the rain,” Marc went on. “I had both my hands in my pockets and I was staring at my work boots, I couldn’t look at you. Because you were the one thing I hadn’t been able to resist, like a bloody greedy kid in a sweet shop. You were the one thing that made me mess up again.”
“I said, I’m running away from home. I’ve done it already. I’m going anyway, whatever. But I want you to come with me. Will you come with me? And I felt like screaming because I was so frightened,” Alison recalled.
“I just kept on staring at my boots, I heard you talking but words weren’t going in. And then you said, ‘I want to be with you more than anything, I have to be with you and you have to be with me because I know that we are meant to be together. Come with me and I’ll be your family. I’ll stand by you, I’ll help you. I’ll look after you.’ That’s what you said. ‘I’ll look after you.’
“You said you’d look after me,” Marc repeated. “I knew that there was no way a seventeen-year-old girl would be able to look after me, but nobody had ever said that to me before. Not anyone. I didn’t realize how much I wanted to hear it.”
“And is that why?” Alison prompted him. “Is that why you came with me?”
Marc shook his head, taking a deep breath.
“It was one reason, but there was another one. A stronger one.” He looked Alison in the eye. “I was obsessed with Cathy, Alison. Back then at that very moment, standing outside of the pub in the rain, when you asked me to run away with you like I was some kid in a play and not a twenty-year-old railway worker. Catherine had got to me, got inside of me. I was consumed by her, but I couldn’t be a better person for her. I couldn’t make myself be good enough to deserve her. Even feeling as deeply and as passionately as I did about her I still went to be
d with you, and I kept on going to bed with you because I couldn’t stop.
“For most of my life I’d had nothing, so when I got the chance to have everything I took it.” Marc paused. “I tried to imagine what it would be like to do the right thing, to stay with Cathy and try to look after her baby. But I couldn’t. All I knew was that Catherine was having my baby and that I couldn’t, wouldn’t be there for her or her kid. I was frightened, I wanted to get away. Then suddenly there you were standing in the rain, shivering, asking me to run away with you, telling me you’d take care of me. And that meant a lot to me. I didn’t love you, but I knew you loved me, I needed to be loved by someone I wasn’t frightened of loving back. So I took my hands out of my pockets and put my arms around you and held you until you stopped shivering and I said, ‘Okay, then.’ I said ‘Okay, come on, let’s go.’ ”
He let out a deep sigh.
“The thing is I didn’t run away with you, Al. I ran away from her.”
Alison put her chin on her knees and rubbed her toes.
“So when I told you about my baby, why didn’t you leave me then?” she asked. “Why weren’t you scared then?”
Marc stood up and shrugged his coat off; underneath it he was still wearing the shirt and trousers he’d worn to the party. He draped the coat around Alison’s shoulders and she gathered the edges close around her.
“You had the most balls of anyone I’d ever seen,” Marc told her. “Putting up with that shitty flea-ridden room when I knew you wanted to go home about a million times a day. You stuck it out, you didn’t cave. The longer you did that the more I respected you. The more I believed you meant what you said. And then you told me. You said, ‘Well, I’m having a baby, so there. You know about it now. I’m keeping it, it’s up to you what you do—stay or go, I don’t care.’”
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