“Blame yourself,” Alison said bleakly.
Marc looked into her eyes. “I do.”
Alison paused, struggling to frame the words she knew she had to say into a sentence.
“Listen, Marc, if there was ever a chance for us, even the smallest chance that somehow we’d make it through and stay together, then that was lost when you hit Dominic.” Marc flinched at Alison’s graphic explanation of what he had done. “You’re not a violent man, God knows you’re not even an angry man. You’re not even really a bad man. But you are weak and careless. You are a careless man, careless with the people you are supposed to love and more careless still with those who love you. You’ve destroyed my love for you and—for now, at least—you’ve done the same to Dom too. I don’t want to see that happen to Gemma and Amy. I thought that if we stayed together that would be the best for them, but I was wrong. I can’t be married to you anymore. For your sake, for my sake, and for our children.”
“I’ll change,” Marc began.
“You won’t,” Alison told him. “Not while you’re married to me. You’ll always be the same. We make each other the same.”
“No, you’re wrong. This has been a wake-up call,” Marc protested. “I know you hate me now, I can see it in your eyes. And I know Dom feels the same, but if you let me I can change that. I can make things better. Don’t I always fix things, Al? I always make them better.”
“Not this time.” Alison’s voice was tight. “Not that way.”
“But Al …”
“No, stop it,” Alison shouted. “Stop it! Stop it! Accept that you’ve done this. That you can’t change it. The only way you are going to be able to have any kind of relationship with your children now is outside of this home and outside of this marriage. There are no more second, third, fourth chances, Marc. It’s over.”
Marc stared at her for a second and she braced herself for a barrage of reasons and explanations as to why she was wrong. But he shook his head, his shoulder slumped, and she watched the fight drain out of him, leaving only a shell of a defeated man behind.
“I know,” Marc said simply on a sigh, all resistance gone. “I know. I’ll move out. I’ll find a place to stay tomorrow. Somewhere local. I’ll talk to my lawyer. You should find one too. We’ll make it as easy as possible for everyone. I’ll give you whatever you want, the house, the car, maintenance—I don’t want you to suffer because of me.”
As Marc spoke, Alison felt ice-cold panic grip her heart and squeeze it, and a sense of dizzying unreality, as if she were watching this next turn her life was taking on a movie screen.
“No … I mean yes, I need your help. I don’t think we should move the children again, not just yet. And you should support the children. But both of us have something to prove here, Marc. Me too, I need to be able to do something for myself. I need to be myself. I don’t want you to support me. I’ll find my own way.” Alison felt a surge of confidence as she said the words and she knew Marc had seen it too. “This time I’ll look after myself.”
And that was it. This was the moment she had seen coming for months, possibly years, and yet had never quite believed would arrive. Marc was really going. After all this time he was going to leave her to stand alone in the world, and even if this had been the very thing she knew had to happen, hearing him say it shocked and terrified her and all at once she felt so terribly, terribly sad. A dream that had been born on a summer’s afternoon fifteen years ago had finally ended and yet outside the kitchen window the world still seemed to go on as if nothing had happened.
“I’d better go and collect the girls,” she said, picking up her bag and car keys.
She hesitated by the back door.
“You’ll be here when I get back?” she asked him.
Marc nodded. “We need to talk to Gemma and Amy.”
Alison nodded but just as she opened the door Marc spoke again.
“Al?” he called.
“Yes?” She did not look at him.
“I always loved you. I never lied about that.”
“I know,” she said, and closed the door behind her.
Twenty-seven
Do you think you can sprain your vagina?” Kirsty asked Catherine and Alison when they met for lunch on Monday. “Do you think it’s possible that too much sex in too many positions can actually make you pull an internal muscle, let’s call it the love muscle, because I’m telling you I’ve had so much incredible sex this weekend I think I might actually have sprained my vagina. I might have made medical history, because you know what, it is actually true. Sex is better when you’re in love with someone, isn’t it?”
Catherine ignored her tuna salad sandwich and Alison sipped her coffee.
“God, I thought the whole point of you two making up was that the world would be a happier, lighter place, cease-fire would be called across international war zones, mammals on the verge of extinction would start mating again, the ozone layer would repair itself overnight. If I’d known you were both going to be so miserable, I wouldn’t have bothered getting you back together again, let alone asking you to meet for lunch. What is the point of me being blissfully happy and in love if I can’t share it?”
Catherine looked at her. “I think that being blissfully happy and in love is sort of the point.”
Kirsty raised a brow.
“If you say so,” she said. She looked from Alison to Catherine.
“Okay, I give in, go on, tell me what the problems are and make it snappy because I want to talk about me and Sam and the sex we’re having again before I have to go back to work, although if I’m lucky I probably could have sex in the storage closet with Sam if I got back before my two o’clock, so …”
“Jimmy told me he loved me, that he wanted to get back with me, and then he went to London,” Catherine blurted out.
“That’s incredible,” Alison said.
“According to Jimmy, he’s always been in love with me,” Catherine said bleakly. “Never stopped for a second. And then he was all passionate and sexy and I’m really, really pissed off with him.”
“Interesting,” Kirsty said on a yawn, wincing as both women looked daggers at her. “Well, the fact that he’s in love with you and wants to get back together with you is old news. I could have told you that months ago. The part where he gets on a train and goes to London is a bit confusing. How does he think that’s going to help?”
“He doesn’t,” Catherine said. When Kirsty looked perplexed she went on. “Of course I’m not going to get back with him, am I?”
“Aren’t you?” Kirsty asked her.
“Of course I’m not!” Catherine exclaimed. “I told him that I didn’t love him. I told him that we weren’t going to get back together. And he looked really sad and said he was going to London to find work.”
“And let me guess, now you’re feeling really sad?” Kirsty asked her.
“What if I am? I don’t want things to be bad between us, do I?” Catherine snapped at her. “He’s the father of my children …”
“The love of your life …” Kirsty mumbled.
“He’s not,” Catherine protested. “I told him. It took me long enough to get over him. But I did. Our relationship is finished and that’s that.”
“Okay,” Kirsty said, more than a little skeptically. “If you say so. What about you, Alison? Why are you in such a mope? I mean I know your son had a near-death experience that was really bad, but he’s over the worst now, right? Yet you still look like you’re going to a funeral.”
“I am in a way,” Alison said. “My marriage is in the coffin. Marc is moving out of the house at the end of the week. We’re appointing solicitors. We’re doing it, we’re getting a divorce.”
“I’m sorry,” Catherine said, reaching over the table and touching her arm briefly. “I suppose everything that happened with Dom brought it to a head?”
“Among other things,” Alison said, biting down on her lip hard. “What’s so stupid is that I keep crying. But
it’s me that wanted it. It’s me that doesn’t love him anymore and it’s him that’s a selfish, unfaithful pig, so why am I crying?”
“Because it’s the end of a part of your life,” Catherine told her. “A part of your life that when you started it you believed would always be wonderful, and would always be happy. And when you have to face up to the fact that that isn’t going to happen anymore it’s sad, it makes you want to cry.”
“Bloody hell,” Kirsty said. “You two are really bringing me down here.” She turned to Alison. “Look, you’re doing the right thing. You’ve just got to tough it out now because things will sort themselves out. You might even end up being best friends like Catherine and Jimmy, although that degree of closeness can lead to confusion for some ex-spouses, particularly the less intelligent ones like Jimmy.”
“He is not less intelligent,” Catherine said indignantly. “He’s one of the cleverest, most brilliant and sensitive men I know, the ignorant pig.”
“Is he?” Kirsty said mildly. “You should marry him, then, oh no, wait, you already have.”
“He saved Dominic’s life,” Alison said.
“That was impressive,” Kirsty conceded.
“It was incredible,” Alison said, looking at Catherine. “He was incredible.”
Catherine stared at her tuna salad sandwich, “He is such a bastard.”
“Sorry?” Kirsty asked, confused.
“Jimmy. Jimmy is such a bastard,” Catherine said furiously. “I was happy with him, I trusted him—it nearly killed me to let myself do that after … well, after you know what. But I did it. And then he had sex with Donna Clarke in the ladies’ loos at the Goat. Now he’s saying that he still loves me, that he still wants me, and he’s going around rescuing teenage boys and he’s doing it all too late. Two years too late. And that makes him a selfish fucking bastard. And I hate him. I hate him because I can’t love him now. It’s too late.”
“Have you ever thought,” Alison said, laying each word down ever so carefully, “that the reason you feel so angry toward him is because you do still have feelings for him?”
“No,” Catherine said firmly.
“Okay, then,” Alison said, catching Kirsty’s eye.
“Come on, ladies, snap out of it,” Kirsty said, banging her fists on the table, so hard it made the two old ladies at the next table send her disapproving glances.
“Let’s summarize. You,” she said, pointing at Catherine. “The man you say you don’t love has just cleared off to London for a few days. What’s the big deal? There is no big deal, that’s what.” Kirsty shifted her attention to Alison. “And as for you, your no-good cheating husband who you don’t love anyway has finally packed his bags, leaving you in the nice house with every chance of a great big fat divorce settlement. We should be celebrating! I know, let’s go out tonight. Let’s go to the Goat, I hear there’s a great new band playing and there’s every chance of catching some action if you play your cards right.”
Catherine and Alison looked at each other across the table.
“I suppose I’ve got free babysitting until the end of the week,” Alison said. “I should probably make the most of it.”
“And I’m sure Mrs. Beesley would babysit if I asked her,” Catherine said, a little less certainly.
“Great,” Kirsty said. “Let’s tear this town up. Monday night in Farmington, rock on! Two bitter single chicks and their blissfully happy friend—how can we fail to have a great time?” Kirsty flashed her best smile at the outraged old ladies. “Now, can we get back to talking about me and my vagina?”
“Mummy, what are you doing?” Eloise asked Catherine as she hovered in front of the mirror that hung over the fireplace, her nose about an inch from its surface.
“Applying eyeliner,” Catherine told her. “The trouble is, I don’t know how people do it, because as soon as I get this sharpened pencil anywhere near my eyes I want to screw them up, so I can’t see what I’m doing. I don’t understand eyeliner. It’s not natural. Why would anyone ever want to wear it?”
“You are trying to wear it,” Eloise observed, tilting her head to one side as she watched her mother jabbing at her eye. “Trying quite hard, and you never normally wear eyeliner, especially not green eyeliner.”
Catherine put the pencil down on the mantelpiece and looked at Eloise.
“On the way back to work from lunch today I bought a magazine. I thought spring is here, it’s a new start, a fresh beginning, I’ll give myself a spring cleaning …”
“Are you dirty, Mummy?” Leila asked as she stomped down the stairs in a pair of Nanna Pam’s special clear plastic high heels that set off her Dalmatian pajamas particularly well.
“No, not that sort of clean,” Catherine said, looking rather perplexed at the magazine article she had opened, balancing precariously on top of the TV so that she could refer to it while attempting eyeliner in the mirror. “Give Your Makeup a Spring Cleaning and Put a Spring in Your Step!” it yelled at her, the headline feeling more like a set of orders than a suggestion.
Catherine never normally bought magazines, especially not women’s magazines, because she supposed, perhaps a little loftily, that on some level she didn’t consider herself to be that kind of woman, concerned with earthly things such as shoes and makeup and … hairdos. But in the last couple of weeks her life had changed completely. Old wounds had closed and healed over, final breaks between herself and the past had been made at last, and she felt as if she should be a new woman. Somehow her tentative renewal of her friendship with Alison had helped her see her life from a new perspective, as though through a fresh pair of eyes. She hadn’t realized until she had told Jimmy point-blank that she was over what had happened between then, that it didn’t hurt her at all anymore. And seeing Alison again now, as an adult, a mother with her own problems engulfing her made Catherine realize she couldn’t blame either the woman she now knew or the seventeen-year-old Alison had once been for what had happened to her back then.
She couldn’t even blame Marc because all that had happened to her was the same set of wrong turns and bad choices that had beset almost every seventeen-year-old girl since the dawn of time, mistakes that had to be made and owned up to in order to become a whole person, a grown-up woman. Just recently everyone had been telling her how strong she was, but it was only now that Catherine believed it. She would always mourn the loss of the baby that she never knew, always regret that she couldn’t have been close to her parents, but whereas once she thought those two things defined her, now she realized that although they were a part of her, they did not represent her whole. At the age of thirty-two, Catherine was finally ready to become herself.
The only trouble was she wasn’t entirely sure how to go about it.
And when she walked past WHSmith and saw the headline on a magazine that shouted out “Ten Steps to a New You!” she picked it up and bought it, because it seemed a good place to start, and after a quick scan of the article so did buying some eyeliner.
“When I say a cleaning, darling,” she told Leila, who had found her Dalmatian ears headband behind a cushion on the sofa and had shoved it unthinkingly on her head at a rather rakish angle, “I mean more like … well, a makeover.”
“A makeover?” Eloise perked up. “I can make you over, Mummy, I know all about makeovers. I’ve got makeover Barbie plus Nanna Pam makes us over all the time.”
“Yes,” Leila said. “From Orphan Annie to little princesses,” she said as if she was remembering a direct quote, which she no doubt was. “Nanna Pam said we could always look beautiful if only you put in some effort. Is that what you want to do to yourself, Mummy, put in some effort?”
“Like Isabelle Seaman’s mum?” Eloise asked her. “She always puts in effort and she’s …” Eloise trailed off thoughtfully.
“You could have colored streaks in your hair,” Leila said, her eyes widening in awe. “And glittery eye shadow, Mummy. I’ve got some of that!” Leila was poised to race upstairs and re
trieve it.
“No, no, not that kind of makeover either,” Catherine said hastily as she envisioned her youngest child tearing her room apart in a bid to locate all of her secret cosmetics stash. “Apart from perhaps a bit of eyeliner. More than changing how I look, I mean, it’s just trying to be a bit different, maybe doing things I wouldn’t normally do, being a bit more adventurous and impulsive.”
“What’s impulsive?” Leila asked her begrudgingly, clearly disappointed that she was not going to get to apply the glittery eye shadow.
“Doing things without thinking,” Catherine said.
“Like buying eyeliner?” Leila asked dubiously.
“Well, yes,” Catherine said, looking at the offending pencil and putting it back in her capacious and barely filled makeup bag.
“But why?” Leila asked. Catherine blinked at her.
“Because, you know, it’s spring, new plants, new … lambs everywhere, new me.”
“I like the old you,” Leila said. “I like the you that’s you, Mummy, only I don’t mind if we give up eating so many vegetables and maybe eat more cake. Is cake impulsive? Anyway, Jesus loves you if you wear eyeliner or not …” Leila thought for a moment. “He might actually prefer if you didn’t wear it, though, especially if it’s green.”
“What I’m trying to explain to you,” Catherine started again, well aware that it was more herself she was trying to enlighten than her persistently curious five-year-old, “is that I’m not changing into a different person, I’m more sort of becoming more like me than I am already. Sort of Mummy, but more so.”
“Mummy but more vegetables so?” Leila asked.
“No, I just mean that from now on I might wear eyeliner sometimes and perhaps the odd skirt …”
“That is an odd skirt,” Leila said, looking at Catherine’s knees.
“And go out for drinks on a Monday night,” Eloise said, speaking for the first time in a while.
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