The Accidental Wife (13 page)

‘What makes you think I’m going to break up with Catherine?’ Marc asked her.

Alison looked at him, feeling suddenly out of her depth. ‘Well, you have to now, don’t you?’ she asked him. ‘We’ve had sex.’

‘I don’t have to do anything,’ Marc said, turning his face to the window.

Alison felt she should have some right over him, some extra hold now that she had surrendered to him what Catherine had not. But she had no idea how to play this person. He was nothing like the boys she knew at school, the boys that she could manipulate so easily. Only then did she realise it was he who had a hold over her. He had her in the palm of his hand.

‘Are we going to do this again?’ she asked him bluntly, because he seemed to like that about her. Marc turned his face back to her, his dark eyes in shadow. One hand reached out and touched her cheek.

‘I wish I’d met you first because, you’re right, I wouldn’t have looked at Catherine, I wouldn’t have noticed or known her at all. I’d have gone straight for you. You’re very beautiful, you’re …’ His fingers traced a line down her neck to her shoulder. ‘You’re hard not to touch.’

‘So?’ Alison pressed him, with a little smile. ‘Are we?’

‘Yes,’ he said simply. ‘I think we are.’

Every time they met after that, each secret hour of afternoon they spent together, they grew closer and closer, easier and easier together. Alison knew that Marc still saw Cathy whenever she could get away, that they still went walking in the park, or lay in the grass talking about his past because Cathy would tell her every night, her eyes shining. And somehow Alison could still manage to be happy for her friend because she knew the love that Marc felt for Cathy was entirely different from what he felt for her. He wanted the very bones of her, he wanted to consume her body from the inside out. He couldn’t get enough of her body and every single time they saw each other they went straight to bed.

One evening, just as the sun was low in the sky, bathing the room in gold as they were lying in his bed, Alison felt that something was different, something had changed between them. And then she realised: he had his arms around her, her head was resting on his chest, the unfamiliar sound she was hearing was the beating of his heart, slow and steady.

It was then she got a sense, the very first inkling, that eventually, one day, he would love her back.

Now, in the living room of their brand-new house, a lifetime later, Alison felt Marc shift his weight on top of her and she wondered where that desire, that unswerving love for him that she had sustained for so long had gone. He kissed her neck just as passionately as he had always done, his fingers as expert as they had always been in knowing how to please her. But although her body responded to him, her heart was still and silent.

The truth was that Alison was waiting to be in love with Marc again. She’d been waiting now for what seemed like the longest time, and so far this time, the love for him that she
had
defined her life by had yet to make a return. She felt nothing.

Not for the first time since she found out Marc was bringing her back to Farmington, Alison found herself wondering, whatever had happened to Cathy Parkin after she left her.

What she could not have known was that her husband, still wide awake despite his closed eyes and perfectly composed features, was wondering exactly the same thing.

Chapter Seven

‘THIS IS RIDICULOUS,’
Catherine said as Kirsty, one palm firmly securing her forehead, plucked her eyebrows.

‘Only you would say that,’ Kirsty said through gritted teeth as she jerked another hair out of Catherine’s tender skin. ‘Only
you
would think that having eyebrows that frame your eyes instead of hanging over them is not a good plan.’

‘I don’t think
anything
about eyebrows. Eyebrows are not important to me,’ Catherine said, beginning to regret agreeing to go out with Kirsty at all.

Kirsty paused for a minute, the tweezers hovering menacingly in Catherine’s eye line.

‘Tell me you shave your legs,’ she menaced.

Catherine looked at her sensible shoes and said nothing.

‘Good God, Catherine! What’s wrong with you?’ Kirsty exclaimed.

‘What’s right with me, you mean,’ Catherine retorted. ‘I don’t feel the need to denude myself in order to be attractive to men, and besides, what’s the point of shaving my legs? No one ever sees them.’

Kirsty attacked Catherine’s brow with renewed vigour.

‘The point of shaving your legs is the same as always wearing sexy underwear, even when you’re not on a date. It makes you feel both beautiful and womanly, and then your
sexiness
exudes from with
in
.’ Kirsty yanked hard on a particularly stubborn hair, making Catherine yelp. ‘No wonder you are so …’ Kirsty struggled to find a suitable adjective and failed. ‘Look, imagine that you suddenly meet the man of your dreams tonight. There you are, in the pub, I’m in the arms of my personal trainer …’

‘Out of interest, does your personal trainer have a name?’ Catherine asked her, hoping in vain to deflect Kirsty’s line of questioning. Ever since she’d let herself think about Marc it had been hard to stop, and for at least three nights this week he had populated her dreams, dreams in which she was seventeen again, before he met Alison, before everything went wrong. She was seventeen and living those few brief weeks when, for the first time in her life, she had been completely happy. Why she had let him back into her head now, Catherine couldn’t comprehend. She was crazy to have listened to Jimmy and his rock psychology at all, telling her she’d forgotten how to be in love, as if she hadn’t tried to love Jimmy as well as she was able to.

The truth was that after Marc had gone, after Alison had left the way she did, it had taken Catherine a long time to make herself whole again, because she felt as if her guts had been ripped out of her. But Alison abandoning her was a turning point too. It was the beginning of her own life, the life in which her head ruled her heart and every other part of her. It was the time when she first got to know Jimmy, when the two of them became friends, and then finally more, and he gave her the final strength she needed to be able to leave home. It was around that time that Jimmy Ashley had told her he loved her and swore blind that one day she’d love him back in exactly the same way. It was a prediction that she had never been able to fulfil to his satisfaction.

Jimmy had not been back for the rest of week, but if he had
Catherine
would have told him. She would have said right to his face that it was he who had hurt her, he who had knocked her for six and ripped up their family. It was Jimmy who had driven her to decide she didn’t want another relationship, and if he couldn’t live with the consequences then he should just stay away.

And it was probably because he already knew that he had stayed away, because the relationship they had now was one he was determined to preserve.

‘Of course my trainer has a name,’ Kirsty replied indignantly, pulling Catherine back into the conversation.

‘What is it then?’

‘Sam,’ Kirsty said firmly. ‘Or Steve. It’s an “S” name and anyway, don’t try and get me off the subject. You
know
it takes me a long time to remember names. I was calling you Clara for the first six months we knew each other, and it doesn’t mean I love him any less.
Anyway
, there I am, in his arms – kissing him passionately – and up comes this man. He’s tall, dark, handsome and he wants you, sexually. He sweeps you off your feet and into his arms. He takes you to his bed –’

‘What, in the pub?’ Catherine asked.

‘Don’t be an idiot – unless he’s a barman. I had a fling with a Croatian barman once, very convenient for nightcaps. But anyway, he takes you home and
then
to bed and as he goes to run his manly hands along your long lithe limbs he recoils in horror because he’s got carpet burns on his palms.’

‘If he was the man of my dreams he wouldn’t mind,’ Catherine said stubbornly, remembering with sudden shocking clarity the pressure of Marc’s palms on her thighs. For once she welcomed the distracting pain of Kirsty’s attacks on her facial hair.

‘If he’s any man at all, barring a German one, then trust me, he’ll mind,’ Kirsty said. ‘There are some people that work on
the
“sod’s law” ethos that if you don’t shave your legs and you wear your worst pants you are much more likely to pull. I do not think that way. I think that you have to treat pulling as if you were in the SAS. Always be prepared.’

‘Isn’t that the Boy Scouts?’ Catherine asked her. ‘Isn’t the SAS “Who Dares Wins”?’

‘Even better,’ Kirsty said, making Catherine’s eyes water as she removed three or four hairs at once. ‘And that should be your motto, love. It’s much better than your current one.’

‘OK,’ Catherine succumbed to the inevitable with a sigh, ‘what’s my current one?’

‘She who doesn’t dare sits about on her arse all day turning herself into a decrepit old woman at the age of thirty-two who is afraid to be happy.’

‘That’s it,’ Catherine said, folding over miserably on the bed, drawing her knees up under chin.

‘That’s what?’ Kirsty asked with some concern, tweezers poised.

‘I’m just going to have sex with the first man I meet tonight, whether I like him or not, and then maybe everybody will stop going on at me. Maybe you’ll stop telling me I need to have sex to be happy, maybe Jimmy will stop telling me I’m some headcase who’s trapped in the past just so he can pretend it wasn’t his fault our marriage is over, and maybe …’ Catherine stopped herself. She had been about to say maybe the images of her and Marc that had been crowding her memory would leave her alone. But she’d never told Kirsty about Marc, Alison and everything that happened. And she wasn’t ready to now.

Contrite, Kirsty sat on the bed next to her and patted her shoulder.

‘Don’t have sex with the first man you meet tonight,’ she said gently. ‘He might be an old or a fat man, and besides, that’s not why I’m taking you out.’

‘No, I know why you’re taking me out: so I can be the gooseberry when you finally pull Sam.’

‘Or Steve,’ Kirsty added. ‘And that’s not why, either. Well, it is, but it’s not the only reason.’ Kirsty lay on the bed too so that she was facing Catherine, looking into her eyes. ‘You don’t see yourself, Catherine. You don’t see how stunning you are, with your incredible legs and all that hair and those eyes and those cheekbones. And I just thought if I got you dolled up a bit and we went to the pub, you’d see the way men look at you. The way they
turn their heads
to look at you when you walk past. And no, you don’t need to have sex to be happy and you’re not some headcase who’s trapped in the past, whatever the past is. But you are my friend now. And you are fit. And as well as being a mum and an entirely arbitrary wife, you are also a beautiful woman. So don’t have sex with any of the men you meet tonight, just come out and stand in a room with your eyebrows plucked, some lippy on and smooth legs, and see what effect you have. Because when you do I bet you’ll feel great, I bet you’ll feel free.’

‘I’d like to feel free,’ Catherine said thoughtfully. ‘And actually the thought of having sex with the first or any man I meet makes me want to be sick, so I don’t mind leaving that part out after all.’

‘That’s what I thought,’ Kirsty said, pulling Catherine into a sitting position. ‘We take baby steps, Catherine, baby steps. Right, now, where’s your razor?’

When Alison got home from the supermarket, her reluctant son in tow, Marc was in the kitchen with the girls, whose heads were bent over the drawings they were creating, felt-tips fanned out across the marble worktop.

Alison looked at her husband leaning over the girls as they coloured. The last fifteen years hadn’t been as kind to him as
they
had to Jimmy. Marc had filled out too, but it was a slight paunch and not muscle that had materialised underneath his shirt. And his hair had receded quite considerably, not that either of them ever mentioned it.

Of course, the change in his appearance wouldn’t matter if she could love him again, it was just that the more she tried, the harder it seemed to be, which wasn’t fair because when she loved him, everything else was bearable.

‘Mummy!’ Amy cried happily, as she caught sight of Alison’s arms laden down with bags. ‘And Dom, we’re all here in our new big house.’

‘All right, Muffin.’ Dom greeted his little sister with the first hint of a smile that Alison had seen since she announced to him he was helping to get the shopping for the weekend. ‘How was school today?’

‘It was OK today,’ Amy said. ‘There’s this quite nice girl I like.’

‘I had the best time,’ Gemma told him, glancing up from her colouring. ‘My teacher is lovely and all the girls like me. Eloise is going to be my best friend, though, because she understands me.’

‘Oh, does she now?’ Marc said, handing Alison a cup of tea. ‘Eloise must be a very clever girl.

‘She is and she’s the tallest in our class,’ Gemma said. ‘She’s tallest and I’m the prettiest and we’re both clever, so we can’t fail.’

‘Except in modesty exams,’ Dom said, opening the fridge door, glancing at the bags of shopping at his feet and closing it again.

Alison looked at her entire family gathered under one roof, her successful husband, who made cups of tea unbidden, her musical son and her two smiling daughters. For a few rare minutes during which nobody was shouting, lying or crying
she
could pretend that she had it all, she had literally everything. She even had a waste-disposal unit and hose tap.

‘How nice, all of us will be in for dinner tonight!’ she said brightly, determined to conjure happiness out of so many good things.

‘Ah,’ Marc said, his tone immediately dashing her attempt.

Alison looked at him and realised where the cup of tea came from. It was a rather low-rent peace offering. ‘You said you’d be in tonight. It’s Friday night, Marc. Remember, you said you’d always be home by four every Friday. That was part of our deal. Family time.’

‘You sound so surprised,’ Dominic said sarcastically.