The Accidental Wife (31 page)

Catherine thought for a moment and then, dropping her bag, she walked across the small room and put her arms around him, and held him. His heart was still racing.

‘Of course I’d do the same for you,’ she said. ‘I needed you at the weekend and you were there for me, but now … I’ve got to sort this out my own way, Jimmy. I’ve got to work out how to handle this. I’ve never really had to stand on my own two feet. I always had Alison or my mother telling me what to do, and then there was you, rescuing me, taking me away to safety. But I can’t let you rescue me this time – it’s not your place to even try any more. I have to sort this out for myself. You understand that, right?’

‘I understand that,’ Jimmy said, hugging her briefly back before stepping out of the embrace.

‘Coming to get the girls then?’ Catherine asked him.

Jimmy shook his head. ‘I need some air,’ he said. ‘Unpack my rucksack, that sort of stuff.’

‘See you later then?’ Catherine offered.

‘Maybe,’ Jimmy said. ‘I don’t know.’

‘OK.’ Catherine shut the front door behind her, leaving Jimmy standing alone in what had once been his living room.

He knew he couldn’t rescue Catherine this time. He’d understood that long before he’d seen her on the brink of so carelessly kissing the man that had once ripped her life to shreds. What Catherine didn’t know, what she could not understand, was that Jimmy was still hoping against hope, still believing with that same unshakeable ill-founded faith, that one day it would be Catherine that rescued him.

Chapter Sixteen

‘DO YOU EVER
think,’ Kirsty asked Catherine later that night as they sat in her back garden with a cup of tea each, after Kirsty had knocked on Catherine’s living-room window at just after ten, ‘that there is anything out there? You know, like a higher force or something. God sort of thing?’

Catherine looked up at the dark and crisp March night sky. The evening was chilly and the sky was perfectly clear so that the stars glittered with a particular brightness and a kind of intensity that made Catherine catch her breath to think that just a tiny bubble of atmosphere was keeping her here on the earth instead of wheeling out there lost in the magnitude of space. Only a couple of miles away from where she was sitting now, a huge sucking gaping, gulping universe waited to swallow her up, and after the last few days’ events there was a little part of her that couldn’t quite extinguish the desire to find a pin big enough to burst the bubble so she could go sailing out amongst the stars.

‘No,’ she said to Kirsty, her voice perfectly level, despite all the coincidences and consequences that had suddenly beset her, making her feel exactly like a rather panicky chesspiece on some cosmic board. ‘Not really.’

‘I do,’ Kirsty said, as Catherine knew she would. ‘I think there has to be. Because otherwise why are we here?’

‘Because this planet happened to be the right distance from the sun to allow the production of water and to facilitate life. Probably a billion- or even a trillion-in-one occurrence. Our existence is completely random,’ Catherine told her, because that was what she wanted to believe. It was easier to accept the tangled and chaotic mess her life had snowballed into if it was an accident. If some sentient being had thrust all this upon her then she was not only confused, she was extremely pissed off.

‘Now
that’s
madness; of course that is madness. You don’t get all of this … you and me, your children and love and heartbreak and happiness and music and
orgasms
from a freak random occurrence. You just don’t. There’s something else out there.’

Catherine sipped her tea, tasting the sweetness of the sugar on the back of her tongue.

‘There are probably aliens,’ Catherine conceded. ‘Given the vastness of the universe it would be insane to think that we lived on the only planet capable of sustaining life in some form. Probably on some planet far away from here male aliens are messing up the lives of female aliens with a wanton disregard for manners or decency.’

‘You say you didn’t actually kiss him,’ Kirsty said thoughtfully.

Catherine had filled her in on Marc’s unscheduled visit that afternoon, about five minutes after she had climbed over the back fence for a cup of tea, and unusually Kirsty had not said a word about it until now. For the first time in their friendship, Catherine realised uneasily, she was waiting to find out what Kirsty was thinking, which meant that what had happened was probably very, very,
very
bad, as opposed to just really bad, which is what Catherine had been hoping for.

‘No, I didn’t actually kiss him,’ she gushed, relieved that
Kirsty
had broken her unusually sagacious silence. ‘But if Jimmy hadn’t turned up when he did I think I would have kissed him. And what then? What would have happened then?’

‘Well, based on my experience, probably foreplay followed by sex, possibly on the living-room floor,’ Kirsty remarked flatly, before adding a touch wistfully. ‘Do you know one of the saddest things about being over thirty is that you never get to just kiss any more. A kiss is always followed by sex these days. Kiss, sex, kiss, sex, kiss sex. Whatever happened to just making out?’

‘But what if I had slept with him?’ Catherine went on. ‘What would it have proved? Would it have changed anything except to make a really complicated situation worse? What was I trying to do, steal him back, get revenge? Why would I kiss him?’

‘Because you wanted to get your rocks off?’ Kirsty suggested, tipping her head to one side. ‘Not quite as emotionally delving as your reasons why, but the most likely one. It’s like you’re a bottle of milk of magnesia …’

‘A
what
?’ Catherine scowled at her friend.

‘And you’ve been sitting on the shelf in the back of the bathroom cabinet since nineteen ninety-four, well past your sell-by date, just going a bit stagnant and mouldy and then
suddenly
along comes this great big fuck-off complicated situation and shakes you right up. Kick-starts your natural womanly urges. You got turned on by seeing Marc again. He is quite hot in a sort of paunchy, suited way, so I don’t totally blame you. You experienced a physical reaction, not some deep psychological one. Seriously, Catherine, think about it – it’s not rocket science. This whole situation is actually extremely interesting. Beats
Desperate Housewives
into a cocked hat any day of the week …’

‘Oh, I’m so glad that you find my messed-up life interesting,’ Catherine said. ‘At last I’m the interesting one!’

‘I wouldn’t go quite that far,’ Kirsty said, with a little smile. She took a sip of her tea, feeling the steam curling out of the mug cool on her cheeks. ‘What is interesting, though, is that you, “Catherine the Nun” as I like to call you sometimes …’

‘I’ve never heard you call me that,’ Catherine said.

‘Not to your face, obviously. Anyway,
you
, the world’s most cautious, uptight and sexually stunted woman, nearly threw caution and your pants to the wind over this particular man. You weren’t thinking about consequences and implications. You weren’t thinking at all. Your lady parts were doing all the thinking, and that’s interesting because that is not you. Or maybe it is you, but a you you never knew you were until now.’

Catherine set down her tea and looked utterly appalled.

‘Promise me something,’ she said.

‘Anything,’ Kirsty offered.

‘Never give up Pilates to become a psychiatrist. The suicide rates would soar.’

‘God, you’re ungrateful,’ Kirsty said mildly, gazing up at the sky, her feet up on the bench seat, her knees tucked beneath her chin. ‘I believe in fate, I believe things happen for a reason, like a sort of cosmic symphony. Maybe it’s the stars, or God or … aliens. The two people who were a big part of making you into who you are today are back here for a reason. You can’t just go along pretending that nothing’s changed and go around all day going, “La-de-da-de dah, I nearly snogged the face off my married ex after about five minutes, but everything’s still normal and fine!” You can’t. You have to face up to it all. Face up to fancying him and wanting to shag him, if that’s what it takes.’

‘But if anything happened between me and Marc it would
be
a terrible, terrible mistake,’ Catherine moaned, leaning forward and dropping her forehead to her knees, so that the ends of her hair grazed the patio stones.

‘Yes, I
know
,’ Kirsty said with some emphasis. ‘You are talking to the queen of terrible, terrible mistakes here. But you have to crack a few eggs to make an omelette, right? Whole and grown-up people are made up of all the terrible, terrible mistakes they’ve made and learned from. If you are too afraid to take chances, if you’re too cautious, then you’re bound to get stuck in one great big fat boring motherfucking bastard of a rut.’

Catherine turned her head sideways and one eye glinted in the reflected light from the kitchen window as she peered at Kirsty.

‘I must be going mad because you are starting to sound quite sane,’ she said, straightening her back and sitting up. ‘Even slightly wise.’

‘I have hidden depths,’ Kirsty told her. ‘That’s why I’m so popular with men.’

‘So, are you telling me to seek Marc out and have sex with him?’ Catherine asked her. ‘Behind Alison’s back, behind Jimmy’s back, no matter what the consequences are?’

‘No, I’m telling you to follow your instincts for a bit. Find out why you felt the way you did around Marc, explore the way you’re reacting to him and Alison being back in your life. Perhaps,’ she added carefully, ‘you should see Alison too, see how that goes.’

‘I can’t,’ Catherine said. ‘I think I would have but then I almost got off with her husband. Funny, I can stand her stealing him off me much better than I can stand the reverse, it seems. And anyway, while I’m off following my instincts and exploring my feelings, what about Jimmy?’ Catherine felt anxiety well in her chest when she thought of the expression
on
Jimmy’s face when he’d seen her and Marc together. Since that moment, whenever she thought about her husband, she felt jangled and disconnected, and she couldn’t quite work out why, except that it was something more than the embarrassment and discomfort she had felt at being found in such an unorthodox situation.

‘You should have seen him; he was so angry when he came back.’

‘Why do you care?’ Kirsty asked her flatly. ‘He has all the half-witted women in the county after him and you still make him Sunday dinner. You nearly snog the only other man you’ve slept with in your entire life and he goes nuclear. What a hypocrite! Ignore it, Catherine. He’s just getting all male and territorial when he had no business to be and, frankly, considering he wears his hair in a scrunchy, he should know better. Don’t feel bad about him. You’re not together any more, remember?’

Catherine nodded. ‘I know, but he’s such a big part of my life, and the girls’, and I don’t want to fall out with him.’

‘You don’t fall out with him over his girlfriends, do you?’ Kirsty reminded her. ‘Why should you fall out with him over what you do?’

Catherine didn’t answer because she could not think of any.

‘If I ask you a full and frank question will you give me a full and frank answer?’ Kirsty asked her, leaning a little closer and peering at Catherine in the darkness.

‘Suppose,’ Catherine replied cautiously.

Kirsty smirked. ‘That’s not exactly the affirmative I was hoping for, but nevertheless it will have to do.’ She sat up straight. ‘Are you, Catherine Elizabeth Ashley, still in love with your sham of an ex-husband, the spandex-wearing Jimmy … er … Hendrix Ashley?’

‘No!’ Catherine said immediately. ‘No, don’t be stupid. Of
course
I’m not still in love with him. If I was still in love with him would I have been tempted to kiss Marc? No I wouldn’t. It was hard for me to get everything under control after he did what he did, but I have done that. And we’ve got a relationship now that I care about. But I don’t love him. Of course I don’t love him.’

‘Well, then,’ Kirsty said. ‘All I’m saying is that at some point you will have to make a choice between what you want for you, and being Jimmy’s friend. And if, when it comes to it, you put Jimmy’s friendship first then maybe you’ll want to rethink your answer.’

‘What does this mean?’ Catherine asked the sky, standing up suddenly. ‘If I still have one type of feeling for Jimmy and another altogether for Marc – what does that mean?’

The two women were quiet for a moment as if both of them hoped for a reply, but the night was silent, except for the distant sound of traffic.

‘I don’t know what to do,’ Catherine groaned. ‘I don’t know how to be, or how to feel about anything!’

Kirsty stood up and put an arm around her friend. ‘This is actually all good,’ she said.

‘How is this good?’ Catherine asked her, her voice small.

‘Because you are awake and
feeling
, Catherine,’ Kirsty told her. ‘Your heart is racing, your blood is pumping, you’re scared and confused, and you have no idea what is going to happen to you. You’re alive, my friend, you’re alive!’

Catherine looked up at the star-spangled sky. ‘I’m not sure I like it.’

She glanced up at the window of her daughters’ bedroom, where the night-light behind the pink curtain glowed steadily. Eloise would be sucking her thumb, even though she vehemently denied she did any such thing, and Leila would have wound her finger so tightly into her hair that in the morning
it
would take Catherine minutes to extricate it. Catherine smiled and shivered in one instant. They were so small, her girls, and so fragile. It seemed wrong somehow that all that stood between them and the freezing fathomless universe was a thin stretch of atmosphere and their mother, who was only now waking up after one hundred years of slumber, with no idea what was still a dream and what could be a reality.

‘Something’s going to happen,’ Kirsty said after a little while with the confident air of an oracle.

‘Yes, piles, if we stay out here much longer,’ Catherine said, grimacing as she shifted on the seat.

‘No, I mean something big is going to happen to help you decide how you feel, and you’ll have an epiphany and everything will be fine.’