Another Mother's Life (4 page)

“Look”—she nudged Kirsty in the ribs—“Lois’s husband has been separated from the pack. Go in for the kill now, while he’s weak and vulnerable.”

“Right you are,” Kirsty said, her automatic vixen mode revving up, and then she was gone.

Catherine couldn’t decide what was funnier, Lois’s indignation at her husband doing the tango with Kirsty or Mr. Lois’s bright red cheeks and sweaty brow as Kirsty twirled him around the school hall as if they were in Argentina. Either way she kept her mirth to herself, watching with the same implacable mask she always wore to these functions.

The music changed tempo and Catherine realized that Jimmy’s band was taking a break. They put a mix tape on and the floor filled instantly to the opening strains of “Dancing Queen.”

As Catherine scanned the crowd, she spotted Jimmy fending off one of his groupies, who hung around his neck in a swoon,
clearly dying to be kissed. In his well-meaning attempt not to embarrass his wife in front of the whole school, Jimmy untangled himself from the girl’s advances and smiled at her as she attempted to lunge at him again.

Catherine looked down at the table and counted to twenty in the hopes that when she looked up again the girl would have stopped pursuing him. It wasn’t jealousy she felt. It was more embarrassment and discomfort in knowing that everybody else in the room who saw him would be thinking the same thing—“Poor Catherine, poor old Catherine, all on her own and heartbroken”—while her husband snogged another floozy in front of her very eyes.

When she stopped counting and looked up, Jimmy was standing right in front her.

“Hey, babe,” he said, pushing the shades he regularly wore in February up into his long, dark brown hair. “Any chance of a beer?”

“I’ve got white wine, red wine, or juice,” Catherine said with a smile. “I could probably rustle up some juice for your girlfriend over there.”

“Ha, funny,” Jimmy said with an easy grin. “I’ll have two wines then, don’t care which color. You look nice, by the way.”

“I look the same and you know it,” Catherine replied as she handed him a glass.

The girlfriend was loitering a few feet away, uncertain about whether to come over, probably intimidated by the Amazonian ex-wife, Catherine thought with some small satisfaction. She did tend to scare his groupies whenever she was around. Probably due to the rumor that Catherine had punched Donna Clarke so hard she broke her nose in the ladies’ loos of the Goat. The truth was far more seedy and mundane. Donna Clarke had been so drunk that in her hurry to exit the crime scene she had careered into the door, catching herself right between the eyes.

“She looks nice,” Catherine said, nodding at the girl. “Very … firm. What’s her name?”

Jimmy shrugged. “Suzie … she is a nice girl but not for me, you know. Nothing much in common.”

“Except for a mutual love of you,” Catherine teased.

“Well, yes, but I have that in common with all women,” Jimmy replied with a grin.

“Are you playing another set?” Catherine asked.

“Yeah, some power ballads to get them going. I was thinking of ‘The Power of Love’ followed by ‘Move Closer.’ What do you think?”

“I think good.” Catherine nodded. “If you can play any Celine Dion, then you’re laughing.”

Jimmy smiled. “What will you do the rest of the weekend?” he asked. “Maybe a trip to Paris? Maybe find some handsome Frenchman to French kiss you under the Eiffel tower?”

“I’m planting the vegetable patch in the back garden,” Catherine said. “We’re nearly self-sustainable now, you know. There’ll be enough for you too, if you want it.”

“Free veg,” Jimmy said, smiling as he watched Catherine realigning the glasses she had just polished. “Radical.”

“Hey, mate!” Gazza, the band’s bassist, beckoned Jimmy back to the stage. “We’re on!”

“I can drop you home later if you like, I’m the designated driver tonight,” Jimmy said with an offhand shrug. “I’ve got the van until tomorrow and I’m going that way after all.”

Catherine smiled at her husband. “Aren’t you forgetting something?” she asked.

“Just because we’re separated doesn’t mean I can’t drive you places,” Jimmy said defensively. “I worry about you out on the street at all hours.”

“No, I meant your girlfriend, idiot,” Catherine told him mildly.
“Hadn’t you better drop her home or take her somewhere and do whatever it is you do with them?”

“Oh yeah,” Jimmy said as he glanced back at Suzie.

“I might pop round tomorrow then,” he said casually. “See how you’re getting on.”

“ ’Bout lunchtime-ish?” Catherine asked.

“Why, are you cooking?” Jimmy said.

“You know I am,” Catherine said. “And you know you’re welcome.”

“Cool,” Jimmy said, breaking into a happy grin. “I haven’t eaten hot food in three days.”

A
lison sat on her new bed in her new bedroom in her new house and considered crying. She couldn’t allow herself the luxury, she decided. If she started now she’d never stop and then the house would look no better by the time her three children got home from school.

Besides, she wasn’t unhappy
exactly
. She was just exhausted and stressed and it felt strange being in this literally new house with the scent of paint and new carpet still in the air. The enormity of how her life had changed stunned her, to such an extent that as she tried to come to terms with it she let Rosie chew unchecked on one of her favorite green Nine West pumps. And she was worried about the children and about how the three of them would get on with their first days at new schools.

It seemed surreal to Alison to be back in Farmington. Whenever she looked out of the windows of her bedroom and saw the gentle rise of the hills rolling behind the tree line, she suffered an
immediate and unprecedented bout of agoraphobia. You knew where you stood in London, which was largely in the thick of it, shoulder to shoulder with the masses, each of you working through your daily lives trying to interact with as few people as possible.

The Farmington of her childhood could not have been more different than the Farmington she lived in today. It had been a small rural town where everybody knew everybody else and felt as if they had some form of ownership over the lives of others. That’s why her mother especially had suffered so terribly when she and Marc ran away. It had taken Alison a long time, years actually, to see her parents’ side of her unexpected departure. What she had never been able to explain to them was that it wasn’t their fault that she had run away before she could take even one of the A levels she’d been studying for. Just as she couldn’t make them see that there was nothing either one of them could have done or said differently that would have kept her at home to live the safe, loving life her parents had always planned for her.

The simple fact was that her love for Marc had eclipsed everything else. Even the fact that she had been pregnant with Dominic on the night she’d left with Marc had seemed incidental compared to the urgent need she’d felt to escape with him, to make him hers before anything could come between them. She hadn’t told him she was pregnant until two weeks later on an evening when he was drunk and angry and she was tearful and desperate.

“I’m having your baby!” she had screamed at him. “Are you staying with me or what?” He’d decided to stay. That night Alison had been glad for the first time that she was pregnant, not because she wanted a baby but because she wanted to keep Marc.

At least six years had passed before her mother said something that had finally given Alison an insight into the devastation her parents had experienced when she’d left. She and Marc and Dominic
had visited them in their new home, in a small village about twenty miles outside of Farmington.

“This is a nice village,” Alison had said as she set out her mum’s best china for tea, a sign that her parents had at last accepted her and Marc as a couple because the best china came out only for people her mum approved of.

“It is nice,” her mother had said quietly. “It’s nice living in a place where people don’t know everything about you.”

At that moment Alison realized how difficult it must have been for her parents to explain to their friends and neighbors what had happened to their daughter, why she had felt the need to run away from home for a life with a man she hardly knew. And now, sitting on her cellophane-covered mattress in her brand-new house after returning to the place where her name had once been the hot topic of gossip, her mother’s simple sentence gained a new significance.

Alison had driven Dominic to school first, before the girls, negotiating her way gingerly around the familiar roads and streets as if she half expected her past to leap out from some dark corner and run her off the road. But the town was indifferently busy, caught up as it was in the midst of the school run, and Alison was able to relax as she realized her 4x4 was just one of many on the roads that morning. Although hers was perhaps the only one with a determinedly destructive puppy in the pack. Rosie, it seemed, could not be left alone in the house unless Alison was ready to sacrifice her real oak kitchen cupboards or specially carved banister rails. As large as the house was, Alison was fairly confident the puppy would be able to eat it in its entirety in just under a month.

As she drove the children along High Street, she even felt a surge of affection for the old place, still so pretty with its Victorian shop fronts and medieval church. There was a Costa coffee and a Chez Gerard in situ now instead of the All Day English Breakfast
Café and the Italian restaurant her parents had always taken her to on her birthdays for a gigantic ice cream sundae.

The grocers and the butchers had been replaced with several estate agents and nowadays there were a number of smart fashion boutiques that looked as if they were brimming with exactly the kind of clothes that Alison had far too many of, designer and expensive, the kind of top or dress that would only do for one season and then could never be seen in smart company again. The old co-op had been turned into an exclusive gym. Alison knew if she looked in the estate agents’ windows, it would be difficult to find even a modest house priced under five hundred thousand pounds, which made it a place where it was almost impossible for those on an average income to live. It was an exclusive town now; you could see that by the cars parked along the side of the road. In how many other places on the planet could you see an Aston Martin, a Porsche, two Mercedes, and countless BMWs all lined up nose to tail? The town she had grown up in had been middle class, suburban, and staid, where respectability was treasured and flashiness frowned upon. Back then it was a fusty maiden aunt of a town, prim and proper. Now it was a showy trophy wife, with diamonds on its fingers, a pair of gold leather sling-backs on its feet and a year-round fake tan.

But Farmington’s apparent face-lift offered Alison little comfort; this was not the town that she had once fled, that was true. But it was also not a place that she wanted to come back to. Gentrified or not, this was still the scene of Alison’s darkest hour, the place where she had behaved in the most terrible way, leaving her parents in the middle of the night with only a note of explanation, and, worse still, betraying someone she had loved and who had trusted her.

And although she tried to believe Marc’s all-too-rational comment that no one would care or even remember what had happened
back then, from the moment Marc had begun to move their lives back here it had been hard not to believe that somewhere amid the coffee shops and boutiques, her past was still lying in wait for her.

While Alison had been putting on a brave face for the children and Amy had rallied, bravely stoical about the upheaval, Dom was openly disgusted. The thunderous expression on his face as she drove him to the school gates said it all. He was furious with his parents for bringing him here to this place he had already referred to as a dive and a dump on numerous occasions since they had moved in over the weekend.

“I used to go to this school when I was your age, can you believe,” Alison said lightly as she pulled the car up to Dominic’s new high school. She had had to cover the shock of emotion she felt at being confronted with the building that she spent so many pivotal moments of her life in, forcibly reminding herself that it was just a building. “It’s a good school, Dom, you’ll make new friends really quickly here. And there’s Rock Club, don’t forget. Once you’ve started there you’ll be right at home.”

Alison had been pinning all of her hopes of winning her son over on the flimsy promise of Rock Club. He was a dedicated guitarist, it was one of the few things he openly took pleasure in, and he had worked for two summers without complaint to earn half the two thousand pounds required to buy his dream guitar. When the head teacher had taken them on a tour of the school a couple of weeks before they had made the move, the news about Rock Club, run by a local music teacher, was the only thing he had shown any interest in despite his very best attempts to hide it.

“This sucks,” he told Alison as he opened the car door reluctantly. “It really sucks that you are making me go through with this.”

Alison knew he was resentful and possibly even a little bit
scared about what his new set of peers would think of him. But she also knew she couldn’t reach out and put an arm around his shoulders to comfort him because he’d find that almost as distressing as getting out of the car and walking through the gates.