“I don’t mind,” Catherine said, her voice a little muffled by the cushion. After a moment or two she sat up and looked at Jimmy through her tousled hair. “You were pretty amazing today.”
“No need to sound so surprised.” Jimmy smiled ruefully.
“I’m not surprised, I’m just … I’m proud of you,” Catherine said, smiling at him.
The pair looked at each other for a moment, Jimmy standing at the foot of the stairs, Catherine perched on the edge of the sofa. Suddenly it seemed like neither one of them knew what to do or say next.
If was Catherine who broke the tension, slumping back onto the sofa. “What a weekend. You must be exhausted, I know I am. I feel too tired to go to bed,” she half groaned, half-giggled.
“I could take you up if you like,” Jimmy offered. “Like I did the night we moved in, do you remember?”
Catherine laughed, pushing her hair back from her face.
“Yes, I remember, I bumped my head about four times and you put your back out for a week! I don’t think it’s quite come to that yet.” Wearily she pushed herself into a sitting position, rubbing the palms of her hands over her face.
Jimmy looked at her, feeling his blood pounding in his veins. Earlier today he had been determined to tell her how he felt about her, how he loved her so much that he ached deep in his bones when he wasn’t with her.
“I could stay over if you like, help you with the girls in the morning,” he offered.
Catherine shook her head. “Thank you, but you should go, you must be worn-out after everything. You should go and get a proper night’s sleep.”
“What, on that boat, are you joking?” Jimmy said. “Actually … I feel a bit … well, everything that happened today made me feel a bit …”
“Shaky?” Catherine offered. Jimmy watched in dismay as she held her hand out to him, offering him her gesture of friendship. He took her hand and looked at it, her strong, pale fingers in his. The sight of them brought a lump to his throat and for a moment he was afraid to say anything else.
“I’m sorry,” Catherine said gently. “I should have realized, after everything that’s happened, you don’t want to be alone. Of course you can stay over, we can sit up and drink a bottle of wine and you can talk about it. I think there’s a bottle in the fridge, I’ll get it.”
“I would like to talk,” Jimmy said quietly, his eyes still fixed on Catherine’s hand.
“Great, will you pull me up?” Catherine held out her other hand to him, and Jimmy pulled her onto her feet a little more robustly than he planned so that she collided with his chest, and for a second they were nose to nose. Jimmy caught his breath as she stood so close to him.
“I love you,” he said seemingly out of the blue, dropping the three words into the millimeters of air between them without warning. Catherine stared at him for a second, her green eyes clear as glass, and then she smiled.
“Me too, you idiot,” she said, and she wrapped her arms around him and hugged him tightly. For a moment, for about two seconds as his arms enclosed her waist and he felt her warmth crushed against his rib cage, Jimmy marveled that it could be that easy, that to turn his life around completely was as simple as telling her he loved her. And then he felt Catherine tense in his arms and putting the palms of her hands on his chest. She pushed him away from her a few inches so she could look at his face again.
“God, Jimmy, your heart is pounding,” she said, her smile faltering as her hand rested on his chest.
“Because I love you,” he said quietly. “Like I said, I love you. And standing this close to the woman you love does tend to make a man’s heart pound a little.”
“You’ve been through a lot today …” Catherine said.
“I know, but that doesn’t change the fact that I love you. I don’t want to spend another moment apart from you.
“You’re fond of me,” Catherine insisted, fear suddenly lighting her eyes. “You care for me, the same way that I care for you. We’re close.”
“Yes, yes, we are close and I am fond of you and we are good friends,” Jimmy replied.
“Well, there you go, then,” Catherine said, conscious suddenly of the length of his thigh pressed against hers.
“But that’s not what I’m trying to tell you. What I am telling you is that I fully, madly, passionately love you,” Jimmy said, his voice dropping almost to a whisper. “And I need you, every single atom of my body needs you.”
“Jimmy.” Catherine couldn’t look into his eyes anymore. “Think about what you are saying,” she whispered urgently. “You’ve had a shock, you’re feeling muddled and confused.”
“I’ve tried so hard not to love you, Catherine,” Jimmy told her. “I wanted to forget I loved you because it seemed so bloody pointless. But love is love and there it is. I can’t do anything to stop it. It was the night Marc and Alison came back and you were so upset and confused that I understood. I realized I’d do anything to stop you hurting, because I still love you. I love you, Cat.” He took a deep breath. “And I wanted to ask you if …”
Catherine took three steps backward and sat down heavily on the sofa.
“Jimmy, don’t,” she said, shaking her head. “Don’t say it. I can’t hear this right now, I can’t say what you want me to say. I’m tired.”
“I know,” Jimmy said, impulsively kneeling at her feet. “I know you’re tired and I know I probably shouldn’t say any of this now, but I have to because I can’t go on hanging around you all day every day without you knowing how I feel. You don’t have to say anything, decide anything. Just listen.”
Catherine dropped her head into her hands, but she did not say no. Jimmy watched her for a second, her hair flowing over her fingers like water. This was it, he told himself. This was his moment.
“When I had sex in the loo with Donna Clarke at the Goat I made a mistake,” Jimmy said, watching Catherine’s fingers tighten in her hair. “Not just because I had sex with her, although that was a massive, massive mistake. I made the mistake because I thought I didn’t want our marriage anymore. I thought I was worn-out with loving you. I thought I wanted to be young and free and single and alive again. Billy had drunk himself to death and I didn’t want to go the same way as him, I didn’t want to have the hopelessness he had at the end. That sense of losing something he’d never even had.
“I thought about the gigs the band got, the weddings and parties, and I thought about the tutoring I did and how you and I managed just about from hand to mouth, week to week and month to month, and I thought this isn’t it, this isn’t my life. It can’t be because sooner or later I’m going to end up dead like Billy or Dad and I won’t have lived my life. Touring Japan and bedding groupies, that was the life I was supposed to have. I was angry with Billy for giving up the way he did, I was angry at myself for failing, and I blamed you for not bloody delivering something you never once promised. For not loving me. And I’ve never told you how sorry I am about that. So now I’m telling you. I’m sorry, Cat, because while I was with you I had the best life I could have ever hoped for, I had everything that a bum of a musician like me didn’t deserve and everything Billy deserved but couldn’t have. But I couldn’t see it. So I’m asking you to forgive me for what I did, for what I threw away, and to say that you’ll give me another chance, because I promise you I won’t let you down ever again and I know there isn’t another man alive who can love you as much as I do.”
Slowly Catherine lifted her head, raking her hair off of her face with her fingers. She looked white, all traces of color drained from her cheeks, her expression taut.
“I … I don’t know what you want me to do,” she said, her voice expressionless. “I don’t know why you are saying all of this to me now, now, Jimmy, when things are finally at peace between us. Is it because of Marc? Is it because suddenly he’s back on the scene and you’ve decided to get protective of me? Jimmy, this is typical you, you think you love me but you don’t, not really. You care about me, you’re worri
ed about what I might do, and you love your children and you’d like them to be happy. You’re thirty-three and the band isn’t taking off, maybe it never will. You’re feeling low, and maybe all of those things muddled up inside you make you think that you love me, but you don’t. This is just a phase. It will pass.”
“It won’t pass,” Jimmy said urgently. “Christ, Catherine, can’t you see how much I want you, how much I need you, if I could only touch you …”
“Jimmy, stop it,” Catherine pleaded with him urgently. “Don’t say all this, don’t make things difficult between us again. You and me being together that way is in the past. Finally, finally I can deal with that. I can accept it. We’ve made peace for us and for the children. I don’t want to rake it up again, Jimmy. I don’t want to …”
“But don’t you see, you don’t have to accept it,” Jimmy said, grabbing her hands in his. “You don’t have to. Because I love you and I think that finally you could love me if only you’d let yourself. We can be together again. After all, we’re still married. I could move back in tomorrow and it would be as if the last two years had never happened.”
Sharply Catherine pulled her hands out of his.
“The last two years happened, Jimmy,” she said, an edge of anger flashing on the blade of her voice. “Donna Clarke in the ladies’ loos happened. Me trying to get used to the idea that the man who begged me from one month to the next for almost a whole year to marry him, who promised me that he loved me and he would never let me down and kept on promising until I believed him, just ripped all of those promises and that marriage to shreds and in a matter of minutes happened.” Catherine stopped catching the rise in her voice and closed her eyes for a second as she steadied herself. “You say you still love me, but I don’t think you do. And even if you did, even if you were as stupid and as arrogant to think that after everything you’ve put me and your children through you can just waltz back in here and pick up where you left off, well, then I don’t love you. I got over you, Jimmy. It happened.”
Jimmy didn’t move, he didn’t breathe, he felt caught in that moment, afraid to break it because the very next second and every second that would ever follow it seemed pointless to him if she didn’t feel the same way.
“We get on okay, don’t we?” Catherine asked him, leveling her voice. “I like you being around. The girls need you around. So please let’s just both go to bed and forget we ever had this conversation. I think you should go back to the boat and tomorrow we will carry on as if nothing happened. Please, Jimmy.”
“I can’t do that,” Jimmy said, standing slowly. “I can’t because I’ve said it now, it’s out there and I can’t hide it or lie about it anymore. I can’t go back to the way things were before tonight.” He paused, looking around him as if he didn’t recognize where he was anymore. “Look, I knew you might not feel the same, I knew that maybe I got it wrong, but for a few seconds when I was holding you just then it felt so right, so perfect, Cat. And I thought … I thought I could sense you felt the same way.”
“But you didn’t sense that,” Catherine said doggedly. “I don’t feel that way about you.”
“Right.” Jimmy stood up straight and squared his shoulders. “I think I’ll catch the late train to town. See my mates about that session work, after all. You’ve got the situation covered here. And besides, I could really do with the money, and you never know what it might lead to.”
“Jimmy, don’t.” Catherine stood up. “Don’t go because of this. Please.”
“You’re not being fair to me, Cat,” Jimmy said, his voice tense. “You don’t want me, but you want me to stay. And I can’t live like that anymore. I can’t hang around and be your friend and your babysitter, because I need more. So I have to go for a bit. Tell the girls I’ll call them and I’ll see them soon, but right now I have to go.”
“Please, Jimmy, don’t go like this …” Catherine began.
“Don’t!” Jimmy raised his voice, making Catherine start a little. “Don’t ask me to stay if you don’t feel the same,” Jimmy said. “It’s not fair. You must see that.”
Catherine reached out a hesitant hand and touched his face. “Take care up there,” she said.
“You know me,” Jimmy said, with a twist of a smile. “It’s London that had better take care.”
He leaned forward and kissed her just barely on the cheek.
“I’ll see you,” he said.
“See you,” Catherine said, standing perfectly still in the middle of the room.
Jimmy closed the front door softly behind him so as not to wake the girls, and he headed for the boat. He would have just about enough time to pick up his guitar and catch the late train into town.
After that he had no idea what he was going to do.
Twenty-six
Alison sat down opposite Marc at the table and waited for him to say something.
The hospital had discharged Dominic earlier that afternoon. Alison was frightened, afraid it was too soon. How could they be sending him home hardly more than twenty-four hours after he’d been found not breathing in a ditch? But Dr. Malik insisted that Dominic was well enough. She had told them the results of Dominic’s test, explaining gravely that her son was exceptionally lucky to be alive, not to mention surviving without any kind of brain damage and escaping with relatively little damage to his liver. They had made an outpatient appointment for him, and while he was still in the hospital he had seen a counselor.
Alison didn’t know what had been said between her son and the sensible-looking middle-aged man who referred to himself as Mike. She and Marc had been asked to wait outside while the two of them talked. Since coming round Dominic had barely said three words to either of them, let alone looked either her or Marc in the eye.
It had been down to Alison to do the talking for all three of them, filling the room with senseless, pointless chatter, as if her words could cement the three of them together against their will.
She couldn’t imagine what Dominic would say to Mike, but after forty-five minutes the sensible-looking man emerged and told Alison and Marc that he was confident that Dominic had not been trying to kill himself, that he was a normal adolescent boy who had let things get out of hand. In need of some care and attention, but he wasn’t at risk of suicide.
“Does he know?” Alison asked the man urgently. “Does he understand that he could have died?”
“He does,” Mike told her. “It’s frightened him, so go easy on him. Take things slowly. He says he doesn’t want to talk to me again, but if I were you I’d encourage him to talk to a professional counselor. Give it a few days until things have settled down a bit.”
When they got back from the hospital Alison followed Dominic up to his room, running a bath for him while he sat on the bed, enduring a comprehensive wash from Rosie with a kind of boyish pleasure that made Alison’s heart contract.
“It will be time to go and fetch the girls soon,” she said. “I bet they’ll be glad to see you. They were so worried.”
“I know,” Dominic said. Alison sat next to him. As she put her arm around him she felt as if her robust and vivid son had become fragile and thin overnight.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t here for you, Dom,” she said.
“I know,” he replied.
“Look, Dom, what Dad did was wrong, but …”
“Mum, I just want to get in the bath and then get some sleep,” Dom told her. “Can we talk about this later?”
“Okay.” Alison looked at the tub of steaming water through the bathroom door anxiously.
“I could sit in here and chat to you while you’re in the bath if you like,” she offered.
Dominic raised one sardonic eyebrow, a familiar gesture of affectionate disdain that lifted Alison’s heart more than she thought possible.
“Yeah, because it’s every teenage boy’s dream to have his mummy chat to him at bath time,” he teased her gently. He put his hand over hers. “Look, I’m not going to drown myself, I promise
. I never wanted to die. I was angry and I wanted to get drunk. I went to find Mr. Ashley because I figured that he really gets me, you know? And thought he probably hated Dad as much as I did. But he wasn’t there. So I sat down under a bush and I drank and I waited. I fucked up. But I don’t want to die, Mum, even if it does seem tempting with this hangover.”
He rallied a smile for her and Alison had done her best to return it.
“You are so precious to me,” she told him.
“Yeah, yeah, whatever,” Dom said with an embarrassed smile. “Now go, before my bath gets cold.”
At the door Alison paused and then asked her son the question she had been dreading. “Dom, what about your father?”
“What about him?” Dom asked. He closed the bathroom door behind him.
As she watched Marc, he remained immobile, his eyes fixed on the tabletop, his hand gripping a bottle of beer he had opened soon after they had arrived back from the hospital.
“Do you want another beer?” Alison asked him, hoping to break his silence.
Marc looked up at her. “No,” he said. “I’m fine, really.”
“I’ll go and pick the girls up from school soon, they’ll be so relieved to see Dom home. He gave us all quite a scare.”
Marc did not reply and Alison closed her eyes momentarily, tried to calm herself and failed.
“You can’t do this,” she said finally, the tone of her voice causing Marc to look up and meet her eyes.
“What do you mean?” he asked her.
“You can’t make this all about you,” she said.
“It is all about me,” Marc told her, suddenly animated. “I hit my own son, Alison. I drove him out into the night where he was so angry and hurt that he almost drank himself to death. It is about me. I did this to him. I did this to us.” He paused, a frown slotted between his brows. “Perhaps I’m like my father. Do you think my father was a violent man? The type of man to hit women and children and sleep around? If I’d known him, if he’d raised me, I’d be able to understand why I am like I am. But I don’t have a single memory of him. I don’t even think I ever set eyes on him. So I can’t blame him, can I? But I want to blame someone.”
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