Another Mother's Life (28 page)

“So that was some party,” he said, not knowing exactly what he should say to this woman, the other woman. Yes, she had betrayed his wife, but if she hadn’t betrayed Cat there was a good chance he would never have gotten together with Cat, which despite everything was something he couldn’t regret.

“Yeah, I’m sorry about that, weird or what?” Alison said, making Jimmy smile, because she sounded about fifteen instead of thirty-two.

“Weird is one way of saying it,” Jimmy said. “Definite proof of a small world.”

“Is she okay?” Alison asked. “Not too totally freaked?”

“She is totally too freaked,” Jimmy said, unable not to smile again. “Her head is completely done in.”

“Heavy, man,” Alison replied, and the pair of them chuckled. Once again Jimmy wondered if he should be trying harder not to like her as they reached the younger girls’ classroom door. Catherine hadn’t explicitly said don’t like her, but Jimmy felt it was probably more honorable not to.

“Come on, then,” Leila said, offering her hand to Amy, who
was half hidden behind her mother. “You can come in with me if you like and sit next to me at snack time; hopefully we won’t have raisins today because I can’t eat them because they look like dead flies with their arms and wings pulled off, don’t they?”

Hesitantly Amy took Leila’s hand and with one last glance at her mother followed Leila into school.

“That’s the first time since she’s started that she’s gone in without a fuss,” Alison said, suddenly reaching out to hold Jimmy’s forearm. He looked at her smooth hand with the perfectly manicured nails on the arm of his leather jacket and noticed she was not wearing her wedding ring.

“It would be so great if Amy and Leila would become friends.”

“Would it?” Jimmy asked her. “Or would it be seriously complicated and difficult?”

Alison looked at her watch as if she had somewhere particular to be.

“Can you come for a coffee with me?” she asked.

Jimmy looked at his watch, as if he had somewhere particular to be, and for once he did. He had a train to catch to town, but not for another half hour. “I don’t know …” he began.

“Why, don’t want to fraternize with the enemy?” Alison asked. She laughed but there was no humor in it. “Please, Jimmy, I think we have a lot in common in all of this, you and I.”

“But I’m on Cat’s side,” Jimmy said.

“Oh God, Jimmy, we’re not at school!” Alison exclaimed, which for a second made Jimmy feel exactly like he was.

She smiled at him, tucked her arm through his, and dragged him in the direction of the coffee shop, tossing her blond hair over her shoulder.

Jimmy put up no resistance as he went with her, telling himself
he wasn’t fraternizing with the enemy, he was going under-cover.

“So you like, slapped your husband,” Jimmy said conversationally once Alison had ensconced them on the sofa at the back of the coffee shop. The location was a little too clandestine to make Jimmy feel entirely comfortable. “How did that go down?”

“He dealt with it,” Alison said, loading her skinny latte with sugar. “Just like he deals with everything. He’s a master at it. It’s funny, really, because the man I met, the man Cathy met back then, isn’t there now. I don’t know where he is. I don’t even know when he disappeared. But when I … we fell in love with him he was tough and dangerous but sort of vulnerable and gentle too. Every teen girl’s, no every woman’s idea of heaven. Then he changed, and he changed because of me. Suddenly he was responsible for me and our baby. Being with me made him into the kind of man who could support a family, build a business—become successful. But not everything about him changed. He kept the bad bits. The bits that sleep around with other women right under my nose.”

Jimmy thought about the ladies’ loo in the Goat Pub.

“Well, nobody’s perfect,” he said. Alison looked up at him over the rim of her coffee cup with her tranquil blue eyes.

“Did you cheat on Cathy?” she asked. “Is that why you two aren’t living together anymore?”

Jimmy shrugged and nodded. The whole town knew about him and Cat, so there was no point in trying to cover it up. “It was only once, though.”

He waited for Alison to pass judgment but she didn’t, she just watched him through the steam from her drink and finally said, “Have you noticed that all of us have been unfaithful to Cathy in some way? We’ve all betrayed her.”

“Yeah, but me and Cat don’t have anything to do with you and him and her,” Jimmy said, shifting in his seat and glancing at his watch again. “We’re not part of that.”

“I think you are,” Alison said. “I think the mistakes we all made back then affected your chances of having a successful marriage with Cathy. I think I’ve stolen her life and she got mine by mistake.”

“What?” Jimmy leaned forward in his seat. “Alison,
what
are you talking about?”

“I don’t love Marc anymore,” Alison said, finding that saying it was oddly liberating. “I’m thinking of leaving him, which is a freaky and terrifying thought, but if I can get myself together and find the guts I need to be on my own for the first time ever in my life, maybe it might be the right thing to do. What really worries me is that I was always so sure that it was right for us to be together. I loved him so much that I couldn’t see how my life could ever be any other way. I wanted him, I was jealous of Cathy having him right from the moment I set eyes on him. I was obsessed with him, to the point that nothing else mattered but finding a way to be with him. Not my mum and dad, not Cathy, even the risk I was taking having unprotected sex with him, I’d do anything just to have those few minutes of his attention …”

“Okay,” Jimmy said, tapping the table. “Slightly too much info there.”

“Well, Cathy did it too,” Alison said, looking slightly hurt.

Jimmy was silent. He didn’t want to think about that.

“Anyway,” Alison went on. “What’s been driving me mad ever since I saw Cathy again and you is this—now that I don’t love him anymore, what have I got? I gave my future to him, gave up my dreams of university, a career for him. I conducted the last fifteen years of my life, had his children, put up with his affairs for nothing. If I still loved him it would almost be
bearable, but I don’t. And if I don’t love him then what’s left? An uneducated woman in her thirties with three children and no prospects.”

Jimmy looked over his shoulder as if he was hopeful of making a quick exit through the unisex toilets.

“Look,” he said after a while. “I’m not really qualified for all this chick stuff, about feelings and love. I don’t really know why you’re talking to me about it.”

“But this is important to you too,” Alison said.

“Er, how exactly?” Jimmy said.

“I stole Marc from Cathy, like a jealous child snatching a toy. He said he wouldn’t have stayed with her, but he never really got the chance to find out. Maybe if he had, things would have been different, right? Maybe he would have been different. If he’d stayed with her he might have changed for her, but in the right ways. By dropping all the bad bits and keeping all the good. He might have been a whole man for her. She might have been able to keep her baby.”

“And what about your baby?” Jimmy asked. “What would have happened to Dominic?”

Alison thought of her son, who she had delivered half asleep to the school gate earlier that morning, his tousled hair pulled over his eyes in a bid to try to hide the eyeliner he had applied that morning. She thought about him, his bravery and determination, and her heart ached. She’d like to think she would have kept him whatever had happened, but she remembered the terror that had engulfed her the second she realized what was happening to her body. And the absolute total determination she’d had to have Marc by her side while she had his baby no matter what. She couldn’t be sure that if Marc hadn’t yielded to her persuasions and her demands, then she wouldn’t have done the same thing Cathy and a hundred other lonely and frightened seventeen-year-olds
had done. All that mattered, she told herself, was that Dominic was here now and she loved him.

“Dominic exists and I love him,” Alison said. “He’s a fact.”

“Good,” Jimmy started, tapping his fingers restlessly on the arm of the leather sofa. “I’m glad you feel that way about him. But there’s no way Marc and Cat were meant to be together. It would never have worked, he couldn’t love her the way that … that she needs to be loved.”

“Maybe you’re right.” Alison looked at him thoughtfully, leaning a little closer to him. “But I don’t think Marc feels the same way.”

“What?” Jimmy leaned backward as far as the sofa’s plump cushions would allow him. “You think
what
?”

“I know my husband,” Alison said urgently. “I know that sooner or later his curiosity is going to take him back to Cathy. He is going to want to see how he feels around her, if he can recapture anything that he’s lost. He’s going to want to know how he makes her feel. And I’m going to let that happen. If he wants to try and get back anything of what he once had with her, then I won’t stand in his way because I want that too, I want her back too.”

“Look, if you want to be Cat’s friend again then that’s cool. I actually think she might go for it,” Jimmy said. “But there is no way, there is no way at all that I’m letting that creep back into my wife’s life again to mess with her all over again. No way.”

“But she’s not your wife anymore, is she?” Alison said. “I mean for all practical purposes you are single. If you wanted to you could …” Alison caught herself on the verge of saying something highly inappropriate to Jimmy Ashley. “You could come to bed with me,” she had been about to say, but instead she bit her tongue, her heart pounding with the thought of what she had nearly said.

“Could what?” Jimmy said.

“Could be with anyone you wanted,” Alison said, dropping her gaze and studying the contents of her cup. “Like I said, you’re not really Catherine’s husband anymore.”

“She’s … look, I know that, but I still care about her.” Stung from the slap of reality that Alison had just dealt him, Jimmy stood up quickly. “I’ve got to go,” he said, and he walked away.

As Jimmy’s train rolled into the station he hesitated. Maybe he shouldn’t get on the train after all, maybe he should go straight back round to the house and see how Cat was. Alison might be right. Marc might be heading there right now. Jimmy had no idea what would happen. But given that he’d only just worked out that he had never stopped loving her, he wasn’t quite ready for her to move on yet. The train squealed to a halt alongside the platform and a handful of people got out, walking past Jimmy as he stared at the carriage.

A
lison looked at herself in the wall of mirrors in the private exercise room as she waited for Kirsty. Her cheeks were pink, her eyes were hot and glittering, and she hadn’t done a stroke of exercise yet.

Since she had told Marc she didn’t love him anymore she felt as if she was going a little bit more mad as each minute passed, especially in that second when she had almost asked Jimmy to go to bed with her. The thought of saying those words out loud shocked and exhilarated her almost as much as saying them. It was as if, after fifteen years of keeping herself on track, suddenly she’d derailed and was careering out of control downhill. Alison had no idea what was happening with her and Marc, because since they’d talked on the lawn in the morning mist they hadn’t spoken at all. She had barely even seen him. He’d spent the rest of the weekend at the dealership and when he came home he went to sleep in one of the guest bedrooms. Alison felt as if she should feel more about
what was happening, but it was hard to accept that this was reality. It was hard to accept that things wouldn’t eventually go back to the way they had always been, even though this time she knew this was really the end. She should be crying, she supposed. She should be screaming and tearing her eyes out, but just at that moment there was nothing there, a void. A vacuum of emotion waiting to be filled with a sudden indrawn breath.

The door swung open and Kirsty walked in. Alison smiled at her. Kirsty didn’t smile back.

“You might as well know, I’m Catherine’s best friend,” she said, crossing her arms under her chest. “I had no idea who you were when I started teaching you. But if it’s a question of sides, then I’m on hers and don’t try and make it any different. Got it?”

Alison looked at her. “God. It’s exhausting always being the villain,” she said, and sat down on the floor and wept.

“Well,” Kirsty said, handing her a tissue she had retrieved from her handbag. “I didn’t expect you to cry. That’s kind of thrown me a bit.”

“All this is happening to me too, you know,” Alison sobbed into the tissue. “I don’t want you to take sides, I don’t want there to be sides. It’s just that I’m breaking up with my husband and I’ve just come face-to-face with my best friend again after fifteen years and it’s very confusing. I’m not evil, you know. I’m not some crazy scheming witch, I’m just trying to sort out this whole mess and put things right again.”

“I didn’t know you and him were breaking up,” Kirsty said. “Catherine doesn’t know that.”

“No, well, I didn’t know it until I saw Cathy. Until I realized there was an alternative to being miserable married to him. I don’t love him anymore and when I saw how he looked at her … I don’t know if the way he loves me will ever be enough. And now
my only friend is a fifteen-year-old boy who wears eyeliner and periodically despises me.”