The Accidental Wife (30 page)

And there he was. There was Marc.

And with the cooling insulation of her husband gone, all she could feel was how he burned with heat, as if he had somehow captured all the sunshine from that distant summer in his eyes.

‘Afternoon,’ Marc said, looking at her pyjamas and then looking away. ‘I looked you up in the phone book. I was going to phone but the address was there and I just got this feeling I should call round, see for myself how you were after the party. Maybe talk a bit about … everything.’

He gestured at her attire. ‘Are you ill?’ he asked.

‘No,’ Catherine said, her rebellious body stepping aside to allow him in even though her head was shouting at her to slam the door in his face. ‘Just tired.’

She held her breath as Marc walked into her tiny living room. She saw her home through new eyes, through his eyes: the tiny room, the shabby sofa, the grubby carpet and breakfast things still piled on the dining table. She wondered if it would have been possible for their lives to take more divergent paths than they had.

Marc turned and looked at her where she was still standing by the front door. He was wearing a camel coat over a suit and he held a pair of black leather gloves in his hand. The living-room light that had been burning all morning reflected in the leather of his shoes. She could still feel the heat of him, even from three or four feet away.

‘Drink?’ she asked him, unable to think of anything else to say.

‘Coffee?’ Marc suggested. ‘I tell you what, I’ll make it, you go and get dressed, OK?’

‘Sorry,’ Catherine said, dropping her head so that her hair fell over her face.

‘What for?’ Marc asked her.

‘For being in my pyjamas.’

‘Don’t apologise,’ he said, walking into the kitchen. ‘Just get dressed. You look far too appealing that way.’

Catherine practically ran up the stairs and set the shower to freezing cold.

Twenty minutes later, when she came down in her black trousers and black long-sleeved top, with her skin still rosy from the cold water, Marc was sitting at the table and the breakfast dishes had been cleared.

‘I could only find instant,’ he said, gesturing to a mug he had set on a coaster that Catherine had forgotten she’d ever had.

‘I’ve only got instant,’ Catherine said.

She sat down at the table and took a sip of the coffee. All the time she was trying to adjust to this new reality. Marc James,
the
Marc James, the man that had stalked her dreams for so long, was sitting at her table in her house drinking instant coffee. He’d even cleared away her breakfast things. It was as if by somehow allowing her to think about him again,
to
dream about him, she had conjured him up out of thin air, like letting a genie loose from its lantern.

‘This is all a bit odd, isn’t it?’ Marc said finally.

‘Yes,’ Catherine agreed. ‘I sort of can’t believe that you’re here.’

‘Do you hate me?’ Marc asked, glancing briefly sideways at her.

‘I don’t think I ever hated you,’ Catherine said. ‘But even if I did, all of that business was a long time ago. I’ve got married, had children, moved on.’

Catherine wasn’t sure if she was lying or not, but it seemed like a sensible thing to say. It was a way to put distance between herself and him, even across this three-foot-wide table.

He looked at her, his sudden smile causing her to grip the sides of her chair beneath the table.

‘You haven’t changed,’ he said.

‘I have,’ Catherine replied. ‘And so have you.’ Marc laughed once and nodded.

‘I think about the kid I was back then, and wonder if I am the same person. I mean, I can’t understand how I turned from him into me. It doesn’t seem possible.’

‘Alison made it possible, I suppose,’ Catherine said carefully. ‘It looks as if you two were meant to be together after all.’

‘I didn’t want to let her down,’ Marc said. ‘But I have. I never learned to resist that urge to spoil things that were good for me. You were good for me, you made me feel human. I couldn’t wait to ruin that.’

Catherine didn’t say anything for a long time.

‘We were all young,’ she replied eventually. ‘How many twenty-year-old men would turn down the chance to have two teenage girls on the go? I was naïve and you were you. I was
passive
. Alison fought for you, she won you. She deserved you.’

‘Some would say she got what she deserved,’ Marc said. ‘You do realise I only left with her because I didn’t love her? It seemed easier to be with a girl I didn’t love than to be with one I did.’

Catherine looked out of the back window, down her long thin garden where the grass was overgrown and the vegetable patch was covered in polythene sheeting to protect the seedlings from the frost.

She had absolutely no idea where the next few minutes would take her, and knowing that made her feel dizzy, as if she were balancing on a knife edge.

‘Why are you here, Marc?’ she asked. ‘Not why are you back in Farmington, although I could ask you that too, I mean why are you here now, sitting at my table, drinking instant coffee?’

‘For the same reason I’m back in Farmington,’ Marc said, sitting very still. ‘To find you.’ Catherine heard the sound of her own indrawn breath, and she knew that Marc must have heard it too.

‘I don’t suppose I expected to actually find you standing in my hallway at a party. I honestly thought you’d be long gone. But I wanted to find the
memory
of you. I wanted to get close to that person I was for those few weeks I was with you. I’ve never been like him before or since then, Catherine. That person was the best I’ve ever been. Almost since the day Alison and I left I keep letting people down. I keep hurting them even when I don’t want to. It just seems to happen around me. I thought in this place I might find you and I might find the man I was when I was with you. I thought that you, the memory of you at least, might heal me and make me whole.’ Marc smiled and looked at his hands. ‘And then there you
were
, the living, breathing you, standing right in front of me in the hallway and now I don’t know what to do.’

‘There is nothing to do, is there?’ Catherine asked.

‘Isn’t there?’ he said, looking up at her. ‘Look, on Sunday morning Alison told me she didn’t love me any more. It’s been like a set of scales over the years: the more I loved her, the more I hurt her and the less she loved me. I love her, Catherine, but I’ve used up all the love she had for me at last.’

‘What, and now you want me to make things better?’ Catherine asked, frowning.

‘No, I just want you,’ Marc said. ‘I want you.’

Catherine made herself look at him and they held each other’s gaze for what felt like an age. He had just walked back into her life after fifteen years and told her that he wanted her back even though he was still in love with his wife, who was leaving him. She should be furious. She should be incandescent with rage, but all she could feel was the pull in her guts when he told her he wanted her.

She needed to put distance between her and him right now.

‘I have to pick up my daughters,’ Catherine said eventually, scuffing the chair on the carpet as she stood up.

Marc stood up too.

‘Are you happy?’ he asked her, reaching out and catching her hand. His fingers felt hot on hers.

‘Yes, thank you,’ Catherine said, unable quite to muster the energy required to withdraw her hand from his.

Marc drew her hand closer to him, and her treacherous body followed.

‘Wouldn’t you like to know,’ he asked her, his voice diminishing to a whisper, ‘if our kiss would still feel the same?’

He drew her body flush to his and brought his lips to within a whisper of hers.

‘I …’ Catherine had no idea what she was about to say
and
just as her lips formed a nameless word the back door opened.

She sprung away from Marc as if he had given her an electric shock.

Jimmy stood in the kitchen doorway and looked from Catherine to Marc. Catherine discovered that she could not look at her husband.

‘I came back,’ Jimmy said flatly. Marc turned and smiled at Jimmy, holding out his hand.

‘We meet again!’ he said pleasantly.

At last Catherine made herself look up at Jimmy. His jaw was set, his hazel eyes clouded and dark.

‘What are you doing here?’ he asked Marc. Catherine rubbed her hands over her face, trying to wake herself from the stupor she’d been lulled into.

‘He just popped in to say hello, to catch up,’ she said, as guilty as Marc was of acting as if nothing had happened but desperate to diffuse the tension in the room. ‘Anyway, why aren’t you in London?’

Jimmy did not take his eyes off Marc, the fury he felt illustrated quite clearly by the tension that pulled back his shoulders. ‘I got to Euston and I changed my mind. I don’t want work that’s going to take me away from … the girls. It’s not worth it. I came by to tell you I’d pick them up, if you liked. Now I’m here I think we should pick our children up together.’

Catherine could not hide her surprise at his vehemence. Was Jimmy concerned about her welfare or had he decided to get territorial about two years too late?

Marc hadn’t budged.

‘Well,’ Catherine said, looking at Marc, ‘you’d better go.’

‘OK,’ Marc said. ‘It was so good to see you again, Catherine.’

‘And you,’ she replied automatically.

She watched him walk out of the front door and suddenly felt as if all the air had rushed back into the room and she could breathe again. She sat down on the dining chair with a bump.

‘What was going on?’ Jimmy demanded. Catherine looked up at him; she’d only ever seen him actually angry once and that was when she vandalised his amplifier soon after Donna Clarke.

‘Nothing,’ she said, not sure why she wanted to push his anger a little further. ‘He just came round, that’s all. I didn’t even know he was coming.’

‘You were about to kiss him!’ Jimmy shouted, catching his voice as it rose and struggling to contain it. ‘You were going to
kiss
him, Cat!’

‘Jimmy, back off,’ Catherine told him. ‘It was nothing … we just got nostalgic and, OK, maybe things were getting out of hand, but you came back and saved the day. Nothing happened.’

‘Is that what you really want?’ Jimmy asked. ‘To let something like that happen so easily between you and him, you just felt like giving it away?’

‘Jimmy!’ Catherine gasped. ‘I didn’t plan it, I don’t know if I wanted it. Maybe it would have been one way to finish things … or start something.’

She had no idea why she was being so antagonistic, it was just that Marc had left, she felt furious and Jimmy was the only one here to turn her anger on.

‘He is a married man!’ Jimmy blurted out.

‘Yes, I know that, Jimmy, but it’s funny, I thought you’d be the last one to judge what a married man should or should not do.’

‘He messed you up, Cat. For years and years he blighted
you
, blighted our marriage, even the birth of our children. He made it almost impossible for me to keep loving you and impossible for you to love me.
Him
, that … shit of a man did that. And you let him breeze back in here, and what? You were about to climb back into bed with him?’

‘Why do I have to tell you
anything
?’ Catherine shouted at him, her fury giving her the strength to stand. ‘And who says Marc was the reason I didn’t love you? Maybe I just couldn’t love
you
. And anyway, none of this has got anything to do with you.’

The instant the words were out of her mouth Catherine regretted them, but they were out there now and she knew they had hit Jimmy hard.

‘This has got everything to do with me,’ Jimmy told her darkly, his anger making him tremble. ‘I’m the one who sat up all night listening to you talk about how confused you were. I’m the father of your kids. I’m the man who … the man who really cares about what happens to you, despite what you may think about me. I’m the one who is always here for you.’ Jimmy stood firm. ‘Whether you like it or not this has got everything to do with me. So you tell me right now – were you going to kiss him back?’

Catherine flung her hands in the air as she slammed past Jimmy, causing the chair she had been sitting on to sway and topple on the carpet.

‘Leave me alone, Jimmy,’ she told him as she marched to the front door. ‘Go back to London and make some money for a change.’

‘Were you going to
kiss
him?’ Jimmy demanded once more.

‘Why do you care?’ Catherine turned and asked him. ‘Really, what difference does it make to you?’

‘I need to know, Catherine.’ His voice caught, making her pause and take a breath.

‘I’m fine,’ Catherine replied. ‘Nothing happened and everything’s fine.’

‘Would you have kissed him?’ Jimmy repeated, frustration inhabiting every word.

Catherine took her hand off the door latch. ‘Yes.’ She threw the word at him with full force. ‘Yes, I think I would have kissed him. But you came in and I didn’t and I’m glad I didn’t. Because it would have been a terrible idea; it would have been the biggest mistake I’d ever made. But, yes, I would have kissed him. I wanted to kiss him.’

‘Right.’ Jimmy seemed to deflate in front of Catherine’s eyes, the tension draining out of his muscles. ‘You would have kissed him.’

‘Look,’ Catherine said, ‘nothing happened and I’m glad nothing happened. Let’s just leave it at that, OK? I appreciate your concern and everything but, really, we’re arguing over nothing.’

‘What about the next time you see him?’ Jimmy asked her. ‘Will you kiss him then?’

‘I don’t know!’ Catherine exclaimed before catching hold of her tattered nerves. ‘No, probably not, and anyway, now he’s gone I don’t know what on earth I was thinking. I just got caught up in the moment.’ She chanced a half-smile. ‘Jimmy, I get that you are worried about me, and I appreciate that, but I don’t need you to march in here and start laying down the law. I’ve got to handle this my way and you should have stayed in London. This mess shouldn’t stop you from getting on with your life.’

‘But you are my life,’ Jimmy said almost to himself. He looked up and caught Catherine’s expression. ‘I mean, you and the girls. Like it or not, you are a big part of my life. Whether we are together or not I have to make sure you are OK. You’d do the same for me, right?’