The Accidental Wife (4 page)

When she looked up from counting, 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 Ribena for your girlfriend.’

‘Ha, funny,’ Jimmy said with an easy grin. ‘I’ll have two wines then, don’t care which colour. 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 off his groupies, probably due to the rumour that persisted that Catherine had punched Donna Clarke so hard she broke her nose that night in the ladies’ loo at 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 toilet door, catching herself right between the eyes. Donna Clarke never told anyone how she got her black eyes and crooked nose (perhaps she couldn’t remember), and Catherine never talked about it, full stop. Thus a myth was born. A rather handy myth when it came to keeping Jimmy’s fans at arm’s length, at least while she was around.

‘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 reckon?’

‘I reckon good,’ Catherine nodded. ‘If you can crow-bar in a bit of Celine Dion then you’re laughing.’

Jimmy smiled.

‘What will you do with the rest of the weekend?’ he asked her. ‘Maybe a trip to Paris? Maybe find some handsome Frenchman to French kiss you under the Eiffel Tower?’

‘I’m planting up 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 quietly 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?’

‘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’s shoulders drooped 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?’

‘You know I am. You know you’re welcome.’

‘Cool.’ Jimmy broke into a happy grin. ‘I haven’t eaten hot food in three days.’

Chapter Three

ALISON 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 fragrancing the air. And she was worried about the children and about how the three of them would get on this first day at their new schools.

Rooted as she was to the, as yet, unwrapped mattress, she knew that the moment she got up and ventured out of this bedroom she would realise just exactly what remained to be done, and then her no-crying rule would go out of the window.

It was the surreal fact that she was back in Farmington that Alison found nearly impossible to believe. 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 life trying to interact with as few people as possible.

The Farmington of her childhood could not have been a more different place. It was a small rural town where everybody knew everybody else and, what’s more, they 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 they hadn’t driven her 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 said or done differently that would have meant she would have stayed at home and lived the safe, loving life her parents had planned for her.

The simple fact was that her love for Marc eclipsed everything else. Even the fact that she had been pregnant with Dominic on the night she left with Marc had seemed incidental compared to the urgent need she felt to escape with him and make him hers before anything could come between them. She hadn’t told him she was pregnant until two weeks after they had left, 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 with her and he had never gone back on a decision. On that night Alison had been glad 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 that her parents must have felt when she left. She and Marc and Dominic had visited them in their new home, in a small village on the other side of the county.

‘This is a nice village,’ Alison had said as she set out her mum’s best china for tea, a sign that at last she and Marc were accepted as a couple.

‘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 finally realised how difficult it must have been for her parents to explain to their friends and neighbours just exactly what had happened to their daughter. And now, sitting there on her Cellophane-covered mattress in her brand-new house after returning home to the place where her name had once been the hot topic of gossip, her mother’s simple sentence gained a new significance.

It was nice to live in place where people didn’t know everything about you.

Alison had taken Dominic to school 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 realised her 4x4 was just one of many on the roads that morning.

As she drove the children along the 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 shop and a Chez Gerard in situ now instead of the All-Day English Breakfast Café and the Italian place her parents always used to take her to on her birthday for a gigantic ice-cream sundae.

On the down side, the grocer’s and the butcher’s had been replaced with estate agencies, but on the up side 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. The old Co-op had been turned into an exclusive gym, and it was clear that Farmington had continued to go up in the world after she had left it. 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; you could see that by the cars parked along the side of the road: 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 and betrayed someone she had loved and who had trusted her.

And try as she might 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 amidst the coffee shops and boutiques, her past was still lying in wait for her.

While Alison was putting on a brave face for the children, and Amy had rallied, being 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 to this place he’d already referred to as ‘a dive’ and ‘a dump’ on numerous occasions since they had moved in over the weekend.

‘Like your room?’ Alison had asked him the first night in the new house. ‘Dad had the builder paint it black for you so that it would be just the way you like it.’

‘Why are you going along with this?’ Dominic had asked her.

‘Unpacking?’ Alison was deliberately obtuse.

‘You know what I mean. I mean this – this poxy house and shitty stuck-up town won’t change anything,’ her son told her. ‘It won’t change him and you know it. So why are you making us all go along with it?’

‘If I can try, so can you,’ Alison had told him, setting down the pile of clothes that she had brought in for him.

‘Why should I?’ Dominic asked her.

It was a question she had been unable to answer.

‘I used to go to this school, can you believe?’ Alison said lightly, as she pulled up outside her son’s school. She had had to cover the shock of emotion she felt at being confronted with the building that she had spent so many pivotal moments of her life in, forcibly reminding herself that it was just a building, a powerless pile of bricks and mortar. ‘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, the news about Rock Club run by a local music teacher was the only thing Dom 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 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.

‘Do you want me to come in with you?’ she offered impulsively. He looked at her as if she were mentally ill.

‘No,’ he said, his disgust giving him the impetus to get out of the car and slam the door shut behind him. ‘I’m not a kid.’

Alison watched him for a few more minutes as he walked away.

Once they had been so close, always side by side and hand in hand – in step with each other. It hadn’t been the birth of Gemma that had changed that, or even his bumpy and painful ascent into manhood. It was the day he realised that Alison was weak and flawed, and incapable of doing anything to change herself. Since then all he had ever seemed to be was angry with her.

‘He looks like a right old grump,’ Gemma said, leaning forward in her seat to watch Dominic slouch away.

‘Will he be all right, Mama?’ Amy asked anxiously. ‘It looks like a big place to be in on your own. Is our school this big?’

‘No, darling, it’s little. Remember when you looked round you said it looked like a doll’s house? And anyway, Dom won’t be alone; he’ll be making lots of new friends, just like you will.’

Alison waited for him to go through the gate and head
towards
the main entrance. Then, taking her mobile out of her bag, she phoned the school reception.

‘Hello, it’s Mrs James here. I just want to check that my son is signing in with you like he’s supposed to. It’s his first day and you know how boys are. He won’t let me come in with him to make sure he’s OK.’

‘Yes, thank you, madam,’ the receptionist said in an even tone. ‘The delivery has arrived safely. We are dealing with it now.’