Another Mother's Life (6 page)

“Everyone in your class was crying?” Catherine asked her.

“Well, Amy and Alfie and Isabelle did,” Leila said with a shrug. “And when Amy’s mummy came to school to pick her up they had to go and talk to Mrs. Woodruff. About the crying I ’spect.”

“Typical.” Eloise sighed dramatically. “Can we wait for them to come out from Mrs. Woodruff’s office, Mummy, can we,
please
?”

“No, we can’t,” Catherine said firmly, feeling some empathy for this unknown mother and her attempts to get her children settled in a new school. “We’ll see her tomorrow, I expect, and I’ll go and say hello to your new friends then.”

“And you have to make best friends with Amy, okay? Even if she does cry all the time,” Eloise ordered her sister urgently.

“Okay,” Leila agreed as she fished a sawed-off plastic bottle from out of her mother’s bag and looked at it. “Actually, it was a pony. It was a good pony model, wasn’t it?”

“The best,” Catherine said. But as she shepherded her daughters out of the school gate, she was only thinking one thing. What if by trying to make things better with Jimmy for her daughters, she had actually made them worse? How was she ever going to be able to explain to Eloise or Leila that their daddy was never coming home?

As the three of them walked down their street toward their terraced house, they could hear music from three houses away.

“Dad’s home!” Leila exclaimed.

“And he’s written a new song,” Eloise said, listening as they approached the front door. “It’s good, isn’t it, Mum?”

Catherine listened for a moment to the wail of Jimmy’s electric guitar, which was barely muted by the walls of the house.

“It sounds very interesting,” she said diplomatically. This unscheduled appearance at home was exactly the kind of thing that was confusing the children. But it was also exactly the kind of thing that Catherine had encouraged over the last year. After
all, it was still half Jimmy’s house; he still paid the mortgage. And in order to be able to do that, he lived on a freezing-cold and leaky canal boat that his dead best friend had left him. And why shouldn’t he be there when his children got home from school? She’d have to talk to him; they’d have to find a way to help the children understand the situation.

Just as Catherine opened the front door for the girls, Kirsty stepped out of hers.

“Any chance you could get him to either shut up or cheer up? Whichever one is likely to happen … sooner?” She stopped shouting as the girls ran in and Jimmy put down his guitar to greet his daughters.

“Thank the Lord,” Kirsty said, briefly pressing her palms together in an expression of prayer.

“I’m sorry,” Catherine said. “He says he can’t really hear how it’s going to sound unless he plays it loud. Count yourself lucky you didn’t live next door when we were still together. Actually, that’s probably why the neighbor moved …”

“So divorce him and then it will be all your house and you won’t be a default wife anymore. I’d suggest taking him to the cleaners, but in his case I mean it literally. Look, I’m glad I caught you. I need you to come out with me on Friday night.”

“Come out with you? What do you mean come out?” Catherine frowned.

“I mean you coming out of your house, that’s the big thing with the bricks and the roof, by the way, and proceeding with me to the pub on Friday night for a drink. That’s another brick thing with a roof on top, only it has a license to sell alcohol too. Now do you understand or would you like me to draw you a diagram?”

“I’ve told you I don’t go to pubs …” Catherine started. “I’m not normally a pub person.”

“You’re not normally a normal person period, but you are
going to be one this Friday because the kids are going away with Bon Jovi in there, aren’t they? And because I need you.” Kirsty smiled like Leila in possession of a chocolate-filled doughnut and a DVD of
The Sound of Music
. “We’re going to just
happen
to be in the pub where my trainer drinks. I worked it all out this morning while I was teaching the over-fifties pilates class. He hasn’t fallen in love with me yet because he’s never seen me at my finest, with my hair done and my push-up bra on and mascara. So I’m going to
coincidentally
go to the pub where he always is on Friday nights in my new turquoise crocheted dress with the cleavage and he’s going to see me and think ‘Wow’ and fall in love with me on the spot for the kind and sensitive person I am. Do you
see
?”

“And you want
me
to come with you,” Catherine said. “You don’t want one of your other friends? You know, the friends who actually like people?”

“Of course I do,” Kirsty sighed. “But the bastards all have someone. You are all I have left, it’s the cross I have to bear. Besides, what you need most in the world is to be brought out of yourself a bit, and if me helping you do that also means that you are helping me in some tiny little way, then it’s synergy, isn’t it? It’s cosmic forces in balance. Plus, I put up with your husband wailing his head off for hours on end when I’m supposed to be teaching Tantric meditation to Mrs. Evans so that she can bring herself to have sex with her husband, so you owe me.”

“He’s my
ex
-husband and you’ve got a student in there—where is she?” Catherine asked.

“Meditating, obviously. Now, what do you say? Yes or no?”

Catherine tried to imagine herself standing in a pub full of Friday night drinkers and couldn’t. Then she tried to imagine herself successfully saying no to Kirsty and that seemed even more unlikely. Perhaps it would be better to just go and try to get the whole thing over and done with as quickly as possible.

“Okay,” she relented. “I’ll come for an hour tops, just long enough for you to pull him, then I’m going home.”

“Of course you are,” Kirsty said happily. “That’s what I’m counting on.”

Inside, Jimmy had thankfully unplugged his electric guitar in favor of his acoustic one and was now strumming his new song, singing to the girls, both of his feet up on the coffee table, an adoring daughter on either side of him on the sofa. Seeing the three of them together like that still gave Catherine a wrench; it was impossible not to imagine what their lives could have been like if she and Jimmy had been different people, or not even different but just the right people for each other. Jimmy glanced up at her and flashed her a grin as he played, reminding Catherine why so many women found him attractive. It wasn’t just his height, or broad shoulders and strong arms that they adored, or even his hazel eyes or expressive mouth. Jimmy was a handsome man, everybody knew that. But what was irresistible about him, for so many, was his intensity when he played guitar. It was as if he was burning with energy, and you couldn’t help but feel that if you picked up his hand in that second you’d feel the full force of the universe charging through your veins.

“The neighbors hate it when you play loudly,” Catherine told him, dumping her assortment of bags, drawings, and cartons on the dining table, keen to disconnect Jimmy from the universe for a moment or two.

“Sorry, babe,” Jimmy said, stopping his guitar by placing the flat of his palm against the vibrating strings, before handing it to Eloise and getting up to join Catherine in the kitchen. “We’re laying down a new demo tomorrow and I needed to hear how it sounded on the electric. If I tried it on the boat I’d probably sink it.”

“You know I don’t mind—it’s just that … well, if you could think about the volume now and again. I’m sure it doesn’t have to be that loud.”

“It’s rock and roll, babe,” Jimmy said, looking confused. “Of course it does.”

He watched her for a few minutes as she crouched and peered in the fridge and began to take out the ingredients for dinner.

“So what are you doing now?” he asked her after a few minutes.

“Chopping an onion,” Catherine said as she sliced into the vegetable.

“No, I don’t mean now this second. I mean this evening, generally,” Jimmy explained. “I mean do you mind if I hang out, have dinner with you and the girls? Put them to bed—that sort of thing?”

Catherine paused briefly. She needed to talk about what Eloise had said.

“Jimmy, do you ever think it’s weird that we still see so much of each other?”

“No,” Jimmy said firmly, pulling himself up into a seated position on the counter. “I think that after everything that happened, the fact we’re able to put our children first and be friends means we’re well adjusted and like, you know—cool.”

“So why aren’t we divorced yet?” Catherine asked him, lowering her voice.

Jimmy didn’t answer her for a second or two and then said, “Because it costs a lot of money and we haven’t got any right now.”

“It’s just sometimes I wonder …” Catherine trailed off.

“Wonder what?”

“Eloise told me today that she thinks you’re going to move back in, that we’re going to get back together. She’s taking you and
me getting on and you being here so much as a sign. We can’t let them have false hope, Jimmy. We need to talk to them again. Get them to see that this is the way things are for good.”

Jimmy drummed the heels of his cowboy boots against the kitchen cupboards.

“I don’t want to do that,” he said.

Catherine turned around to look at him, onion tears standing in her eyes. “But why not, it’s the truth.”

Jimmy paused for a moment. “I know it’s the truth, but I don’t want to take away hope from an eight-year-old girl, let alone her kid sister. When you’re a kid is practically the only time when hope seems like a real possibility. We might as well tell them Father Christmas isn’t real and that it’s been us they’ve been bankrupting and not the tooth fairy all this time. Next you’ll be wanting to tell Leila that Jesus is no more than a historical figure and not the son of God.”

“This is different, Jimmy, and you know it,” Catherine said in a low voice. “We can’t lie to them about
this
. It’s their lives we’re talking about.”

“We’re not lying, we’re not doing anything,” Jimmy corrected her. He hopped off the counter, put his hands on Catherine’s shoulders, and looked into her eyes.

“Look, we hurt each other pretty badly. We tore each other up and those two were in the middle of it. And now you don’t hate me anymore, and that’s all right by me, and I’m not messed up by you anymore, and that’s all right by you. Those two girls in there have had enough pain in their lives already. It just can’t be wrong to let an eight-year-old have hope, it just can’t.”

“But it’s false hope,” Catherine persisted, wiping the back of her hand under her eyes and feeling an instant sting.

“All hope is false hope, that doesn’t make it a bad thing,” Jimmy said. “Look, if they ask me anything like ‘When are you
moving back in, Dad?’ then I’ll tell them I’m not and you’ll do the same and in a few months they’ll stop asking. In a year or two they won’t even think about it anymore and the way we live will seem normal to them. The hope will fade all by itself, don’t you worry.”

“That sounds wrong coming from you, the eternal optimist,” she said.

“Oh, don’t get me wrong,” Jimmy said, mustering a grin. “I’m still an optimist, it’s just that I’m starting to realize eternity is a very long time. So what do you say—is that a plan?”

Catherine looked into the living room, where Eloise was picking out the riff from “Hotel California” on Jimmy’s acoustic guitar, her head bent over the strings while Leila watched her fingers, trying to pick up the notes herself. At that moment her children seemed safe and happy, and it was a feeling that Catherine was as desperate to preserve as her husband was.

“Okay, we’ll do that, then,” she said. “We won’t lie but we won’t say anything either.”

The two of them stood in silence for a moment in the small galley kitchen, sensing the unraveling of another thread of the lives they had once woven together so hopefully. Catherine still mourned the loss. Not because this relationship had once been right, but because she had wanted so much for it to be.

“So are you staying for dinner, then?” she asked him finally, breaking the thread.

Jimmy’s smile was weary. “I thought you were never going to ask.”

It was past eight when Catherine finally got the girls into bed. It was Jimmy’s fault. After his quiet resolve in the kitchen, he’d returned to his tall-tale self by the time Catherine served dessert, regaling the girls with stories of what a wonderful life
they were going to lead as soon as the band was discovered and he hit the big time—which would be sometime soon, now that they had the funds to make a new demo. Eloise asked for a pony and Jimmy told her she could have a fieldful if she wanted, and there was to be an unending supply of sweets for Leila, who planned to distribute them to the world’s less privileged children.

Jimmy and the girls were still singing by the time Catherine finally managed to shepherd them up the stairs, and she did have to admit, as they hummed while brushing their teeth, that Jimmy’s new song had a catchy tune. Jimmy was good at catchy tunes, but somehow they never seemed to fit into his rock-and-roll image. When you looked at Jimmy you saw a tall, long-haired, strong, purposeful-looking man. The sort of man who, if you didn’t live in Farmington and didn’t know Jimmy Ashley, you might be slightly threatened by. After all, Jimmy stood out in a crowd in his full-length leather coat. He should be writing songs about mayhem and seducing countless women, but it was always these softy lyrical love songs that he kept on producing. Jimmy might have a skull and crossbones tattooed on his right shoulder, but it was wreathed in roses, and once many years ago when Catherine had teased him about his rock credentials, he’d replied, “I’m a lover, not a fighter, babe.”