Another Mother's Life (2 page)

“This house is in Farmington,” she said slowly, feeling suddenly chilled to the core. “We’re not moving to Farmington.”

“Why not Farmington?” Marc asked her. “We’ll be much closer to your parents, once they get back from their grand tour. They only live a few miles away from Farmington and you know how much you’d like to be nearer your mum, especially now that you
two get on so much better. You’re the only one of us with any family, and I happen to think we should make the most of that, for your sake and the kids’. You spent too long separated from your family; this is a chance, maybe a last chance, for you to make up for those years.” Marc paused, holding Alison’s gaze. He sounded so persuasive, so rational. As if he wasn’t asking her to go back to the place where her life had changed course forever, as if she was the mad one for not wanting to go back.

“Besides, you grew up there,” Marc carried on. “It’s the perfect place to bring the kids up, it’s surrounded by countryside, it’s got good schools and low crime rates … and look at what we’d get for our money over there compared to this place. So, why not Farmington?”

“You know why not Farmington,” Alison said, redirecting her gaze at him. “Marc, you’re incredible, you really are.”

Marc stared at her wide-eyed for a moment or two as she waited for him to catch up.

“What? You mean because of … ? Oh, Al, don’t be silly. That’s all in the past now, long gone and forgotten. Nobody cares about that anymore, not even your parents!”

“I care!” Alison told him, fighting to temper her tone because the girls were in the next room and Dominic would be home soon. “Would you move back to Birmingham, to the place where your foster mother told you she didn’t want you living with her anymore and that she was putting you back in a children’s home?”

Marc removed his hand from hers and she felt the chill of its departure.

“I wouldn’t move back to Birmingham because it’s a shithole,” he said, reacting angrily as he always did when Alison mentioned his childhood. “It’s not the same and you know it. I got dragged up through foster care and children’s homes, kicked about from pillar to post. You had everything you ever wanted. A nice safe
life, in a nice safe town, with nice safe parents. Is it so wrong that I want to give that life to my children, and especially to Dom, before he messes up his life for good?”

“You don’t give him enough credit,” Alison protested. “If you could have seen him in the school show, you would have seen how talented he is. Maybe if you talked to him every now and again—”

“I have talked to him,” Marc interrupted her impatiently. “I talked to him for hours after the car incident. I don’t know, I look at him and I see myself, Al. The boy needs straightening out. I think living in Farmington could be the answer.”

“Look, if you want to move from here then fine. I’m not thrilled to live here anymore either. But we don’t have to go to Farmington. That is the last place we should have to go,” Alison told him bleakly. “The night I left there with you I knew I was never going back, I never
could
go back.”

“Who cares now about what happened back then? It was an age ago, Alison, it doesn’t mean anything now.”

“Not to you?”

“Of course not to me!” Marc exclaimed. “Al, the last couple of months have been hard on you, you’re not thinking straight. If you were you’d see how perfect this is.”

“Even so”—Alison looked up wearily at Marc—“it doesn’t have to be Farmington. There are a hundred towns like Farmington, two hundred—a thousand even. Any one of those would give the children the kind of life you want them to have, but not this one, Marc. It doesn’t have to be Farmington. Mum and Dad don’t even live there anymore!”

Marc bowed his head, his hands folded in his lap as they sat side by side on the sofa. “When I came to Farmington I was a railway laborer,” he said, beginning the story she already knew so well. “Working nights repairing the lines, sleeping all day in
the park, drinking warm beer in the sun waiting for some girls to walk by, hoping they’d give me a second glance. I was twenty years old and I was already dead, my life was going nowhere. I looked around that town, and those people and those girls, and I knew that it was a world I couldn’t ever belong to. I knew I’d go on drifting from one place to the next until the day I died. I didn’t have anything, Alison, until I met you. I didn’t even have myself.”

“That’s not true,” Alison said, trying to interrupt him.

“You turned my life around. And now I have you. God knows I don’t deserve you, but I still have you and I want to keep you. I want to keep the family I love, with a successful business under my belt and another one in the pipeline. I want to go back to Farmington, Ali, I want to go back to the place that rejected me back then and I want to
own
it. Most of all I want to deserve
you
.”

“Tell me,” Alison said, feeling suddenly inexplicably sad as she looked into the same dark eyes that had beguiled her when she was only seventeen. “Is that any better a reason to go back than mine is to stay away?”

“We’re going back for you,” he whispered, moving his lips over hers, tucking a strand of her blond hair behind her ear. “Because that’s the place where you and I started. It’s the place where we belong, and all of the things you’re worried about are long dead and buried. I promise you when we’re there you and I will be happy again. You’ll be happy and I’ll be different. I’ll have more time to spend with you and the kids. Everything will be different, it will be better.”

He’d kissed her then, his hand sliding from her knee to her thigh, and because Alison had wanted so much for this to be the fresh start that Marc talked about, she’d let the discussion slide with it. It was one they would never have again, she knew. Once Marc had made up his mind about something he stuck to it like glue, which was something she supposed she ought to be grateful
for. After all, he’d made up his mind to choose her sixteen years ago.

She just had to hope that he was right, that all her fears and misgivings about going back to Farmington were foolish and irrational. That once she got settled back in, it would feel as if she had never been away.

The only problem was, that eventuality was what terrified her the most.

Dusk had fallen by the time their car finally rolled into the driveway of their new home. Amy and Gemma were both asleep in the backseat and Dominic was still nodding his head to some barely heard beat.

“Leave them for a second,” Marc whispered. “I’ve got something I want you to see.”

Glancing back at her children, Alison got out of the car and waited as Marc asked the moving men to give him another few minutes. Alison found herself smiling, suddenly engulfed in the warmth of nostalgia. In this light, in his jeans and jacket, he looked just like the dark-haired, olive-skinned boy she’d first fallen for, the boy she had sworn to do anything for.

“Come on.” Marc held out a hand to her. “Hopefully if all of my plans have worked, then …”

Alison walked into the cavernous hallway just as Marc switched on the lights, and she saw that it was filled with bouquets of red roses. Twelve of them, Alison counted as she looked around, arranged on the marble tiled floor in the shape of a love heart, their sweet scent struggling against that of the new paint, but their color vibrant and bloody against the magnolia walls. It was a dramatic gesture. It was typical Marc.

“Happy Valentine’s Day, my beautiful blond bombshell wife,” Marc said, wrapping his arms around her from behind.

“And welcome home.”

Alison couldn’t help but smile as she bent over and picked up one of the bouquets. Suddenly she heard a noise—a sharp yelp and a whimper coming from somewhere deeper in the house.

“What was that?” she asked Marc, wide-eyed. “Rats?”

Marc laughed. “As far as I know rats don’t bark. That, if everything has gone according to plan, is the other part of my surprise. Only this part is mainly for the kids, to help them settle in. Follow me.”

“Marc, what have you done?” Alison asked ominously as she followed him into her brand-new kitchen.

“Well, they’ve been asking and asking for years, and it turns out that one of my new clients is a breeder, so I did her a deal and this was part of it.” Marc gestured to a pen that had been set up in the corner of the kitchen, a pen that was inhabited by a small chocolate brown Labrador puppy. “Meet Rosie, our new dog.”

Alison’s jaw dropped as she watched the puppy climb up the sides of its pen, yapping excitedly, its whole body waggling in greeting.

“It’s peed on the floor,” she said.

“So she has,” Marc said. “But the breeder says it should only take you a couple of weeks to house-train her. You’ll be fine.”

“
Me? I’ll
be fine?” Alison exclaimed. “Marc, no way. We are not getting a dog. The puppy has to …”

“A puppy!” Gemma shrieked as she raced into the kitchen. “A puppy! Daddy’s got a puppy, she’s soooooo cute!” Immediately Gemma went over to the young dog and hefted the animal up into her arms, giggling as the puppy licked her face.

“He’s kissing me!”

“He’s so lovely,” Amy said, wide-eyed, stroking the dog’s back as Gemma held it. “Let me hold him now, Gemma.”

Alison had to concede that as Gemma handed the dog over to
her sister, it was the first genuine smile she had seen on Amy’s face all day.

“Actually,” Marc told them, “she’s a girl. Her name’s Rosie, but look, don’t get too attached to her. Mummy’s not sure that having a dog is the best thing, and I expect that Mummy is right. We might have to give her back …”

“Mummy, no!” Gemma was horrified.

“Please, Mummy, don’t make us send Rosie back,” Amy wailed, clutching the dog tighter to her chest.

Alison sighed, still holding her Valentine roses, as she realized that her husband had stitched her up.

“We can keep her …” Alison had to hold her hand up until the cheers stopped. “As long as I am not the only one walking her, cleaning up after her, or toilet-training her,” she added, reaching out to stroke one of Rosie’s soft ears. “She is quite sweet, I suppose.”

Amy wrinkled up her nose. “And I think she just peed on my foot,” she said.

“Oh well,” Alison said, setting down her bouquet of flowers to look for the box with detergent in it. “Every rose has its thorn.”

H
ow Catherine Ashley came to be spending Valentine’s Day with her almost ex-husband was a story that pretty much summed up her life.

“You don’t mind booking Jimmy, do you?” Lois, the PTA chairperson, had asked her at the last meeting, with her own special brand of tact. “It’s not awkward at all booking your ex to play at the Valentine’s Dance, is it? It’s just that I know how you two get on still and he’ll give you a reduced rate. You know that every penny counts if we’re going to raise enough money to pay for the new computer suite.”

Catherine had said she didn’t mind, and mostly she didn’t. It was a fact of life that Jimmy and his band were present at every wedding and christening, and even the odd funeral that she attended both before and since they had split up as a couple, playing for the locals in order to pay the bills while they waited for the stardom that had so far eluded them. Besides, for the
last few months peace had broken out between her and Jimmy and he had become almost as much a part of her daily life as he had been when they were living together. Maybe even more so, because all the stress and tension between them had dissolved away now that she had stopped waiting for him to leave her and had kicked him out.

Her friend Kirsty said they were the happiest married couple she knew, and she attributed it to the fact that they’d been living apart for two years. Kirsty hadn’t been there for the first year, those long and difficult months when Catherine and Jimmy had tried to find a way to be parents without ripping themselves or their children to shreds. But the second year had been okay, good even. Friendship had finally emerged from the ashes of what they had once had. Catherine knew that one day they’d get divorced properly, but until something happened to push either one of them in that direction, she was still officially Mrs. Jimmy Ashley. That’s why booking her husband’s band to play the Valentine’s Dance was the least of her worries.

The gas bill, the hours her boss wanted her to work, whether or not she’d have the money to get Eloise what she really wanted for her birthday—those were the worries that kept Catherine up at night. But those were practical problems that Catherine could tackle and fight. What she had never been able to overcome was the utterly paralyzing fear of loving Jimmy the way he wanted her to love him, the way
she
often tried to love him, because doing so would expose her long-guarded vulnerability. That fear had stalked her throughout her marriage until one day Jimmy betrayed her, proving all her misgivings correct and making her thank God that she had never fully committed her heart to him, because the shock of what he had done to her and their family was hard enough to bear as it was.

It had taken her a long time to adjust her feelings for him, but
she had done it for her girls, for Eloise and Leila, who she lived for, content to let her life orbit around them with the same ordered regularity with which the earth turns around the sun, letting their happiness and beauty warm her, because their love was all that she needed.