The Accidental Wife (15 page)

‘What about him?’ Kirsty nudged her quite hard in the ribs, throwing her a little off balance even in her flat boots.

‘What about who?’ Catherine was confused. Surely Kirsty hadn’t moved on to the next love of her life already.

‘Him over there.’ Kirsty nodded to Catherine’s left and when she looked she caught the eye of a fair-haired man, perhaps a little younger than she was, who smiled at her fleetingly before dropping his gaze back to his drink.

‘What about him?’ Catherine asked her.

‘He was totally checking you out like a motherfucker!’ Kirsty exclaimed quite loudly so that one or two people (but not her trainer) looked over at them.

‘Was he?’ Catherine said drily. ‘I had no idea that one could be checked out in such a way.’

‘Well, one can, smart-arse, and he was. He’s been looking at you all night. And him.’ This time Kirsty nodded none too discreetly just over Catherine’s left shoulder.

‘Don’t look!’ she shrieked when Catherine automatically began to turn her head slowly. Kirsty stared at the point over her shoulder. ‘Wait … wait … – OK, now look.’

Catherine looked and this time shared a brief moment with a man with a goatee beard.

‘Loves you,’ Kirsty confirmed, with a nod.

‘Or alternatively he might just wonder why that short woman and that tall redhead keep staring at him and screaming,’ Catherine suggested. ‘Anyway, can we get back to you? What’s
your
plan?’

‘To be gorgeous, but so far it doesn’t seem to be working out too well. Have you got any ideas?’

Catherine thought for a moment. ‘Well, why don’t you go up to him, tap him on the shoulder and say hi?’ she ventured.

Kirsty shook her head. ‘Oh, you are so naïve,’ she said. ‘Where were you during your teens? Didn’t you learn anything from
Grange Hill
?’

‘Why not just talk to him?’ Catherine asked her with a bemused shrug.

‘Because then he’ll think I fancy him,’ Kirsty replied as if she was stating the obvious. ‘I don’t want him to know that. I want him to think that I, his beautiful and very bendy client, is merely flitting by him like a beautiful but unobtainable butterfly that he longs to capture … a woman who can only be – oh, hi, Steve.’

Kirsty went bright red as her trainer appeared at her shoulder.

‘Kirsty, I
thought
that was you.’ He smiled at her. ‘And it’s Sam, by the way.’

‘I knew it was an “S” name,’ Kirsty beamed at him. ‘Can I buy you a drink? I mean, water for me because, obviously, I don’t really drink, apart from this gin and tonic, and honestly it’s a lot more tonic than gin, gin-flavoured tonic really …’

Catherine unconsciously took a step back as Kirsty focused all her attention on Sam. He was nice-looking, Catherine had to concede, but not her type at all, although to be fair to Sam she’d never really established what that was. He was tallish, with friendly eyes and very nice arms. She could see why Kirsty would be smitten with him, even if he was completely bald. She smiled to herself. If Jimmy was here he’d be tossing his hair around and squaring up his shoulders the way he always did when he met a man who was so overtly masculine. Catherine wished very much that he was there right then. At least she could always talk to Jimmy. Tentatively, she glanced in the direction of the fair-haired man across the bar. He smiled at her; she didn’t look that way again.

‘So that’s your friend chatting up my friend then?’

Catherine started as Sam’s friend appeared at her side, a little of her drink splashing onto the back of her hand.

‘Sorry, didn’t mean to make you jump. Just thought you might like some company. Looks like your friend’s got mine monopolised for the evening. I’m Dave, by the way.’

He held out his hand and hesitantly Catherine took it. She hadn’t talked to a man she didn’t know and wasn’t somebody’s husband, including hers, in … well, it was certainly months and might even be years.

‘Hello,’ Catherine said. ‘I’m Catherine and I’m sure Kirsty won’t keep him all evening.’ She looked over at her friend in full flirt mode. ‘Actually, she might.’

‘Oh,
that’s
Kirsty,’ Dave said with a grin. ‘No wonder he was trying so hard not to notice her all evening. He digs her big time.’

‘Does he dig her big time?’ Catherine said, noticing Dave smile as she repeated his phrase. ‘That’s nice, because she digs him big time too. Like seriously a lot. I’m probably
not
meant to tell you that, but she never shuts up about him.’

‘I won’t tell if you don’t,’ Dave said, taking a step closer to her. ‘So, anyway, enough about them, tell me about you.’

‘Me?’ Catherine tried to think of something, anything but the truth, which always sounded much worse when spoken out loud than in her head. This time was no exception. ‘I’ve got two kids and a sort of a husband, who I’m married to but don’t live with any more since he slept with another woman more or less right in front of my eyes, and I work in a local PR company. Oh, and I like growing my own vegetables. That’s about it.’

‘OK,’ Dave laughed. ‘Right, well – just an everyday kind of girl then.’

‘That’s me,’ Catherine said with a smile. She quite liked talking to Dave, as it happened.

‘So it looks like we’ve been abandoned then,’ Dave said, nodding at Kirsty and Sam, who in the blink of an eye had gone from chatting to deep, deep kissing.

‘I expected it,’ Catherine told him.

‘Well, why don’t we head off somewhere else then, somewhere a bit quieter. We can get a drink and talk, what do you think?’

Catherine looked at him. She was fairly sure he was chatting her up. Either that or he just wanted to hang out for a chat with a still-married yet single mother of two who was two inches taller than he was.

‘I … look, I have to go,’ she lied. ‘I’ve got kids, two under eight. The babysitter goes mad if I’m late back.’

‘But it’s only just past ten,’ Dave said, seemingly unfazed by her children. ‘Have one more drink with me.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Catherine said. ‘I can’t.’

And she raced out of the pub and back home as fast as she could until she was safe, back behind her own front door,
where
she could grow the hair on her legs, cook dinner for her ex and where she could be safe and shut off and never have to worry about what to say to mildly attractive men in pubs or, worse still, what they might say to her.

‘Women,’ Dave muttered, perplexed, as the pub door slammed shut behind Catherine.

‘Girlfriend giving you grief?’ Marc asked him as he tried to edge his way past. ‘I know how you feel. I’m late and if I don’t get home in the next half-hour the wife’s going to kill me.’

Dave took a step to one side to allow him to pass.

‘Beautiful women –’ Dave told Marc, glancing bitterly at Sam and his conquest –‘all the same, all think they’re too good for anyone normal.’

‘That’s true,’ Marc said, clapping him on the back in a conciliatory gesture. ‘And that’s why they’re the only ones worth chasing.’

Chapter Eight

‘MUM,’ ELOISE SAID
through a mouthful of toast on Monday morning, ‘can I ask Gemma to tea this week, can I, please? She said she might be getting her pony this weekend, so can I,
please
?’

Catherine looked at her daughter, who had twisted her long hair into her best approximation of a ballerina-style bun and secured it with some froufrou nonsense that Jimmy’s mother had probably inflicted on her during the girls’ last visit there. Catherine knew the scrunchie was a silent protest against what her daughter saw as a violation of her human rights, in that if she was not allowed to have ballet lessons on a Monday afternoon, she would do her best to look like the girls who were.

‘Don’t talk while you’re chewing,’ Catherine told her. ‘And, anyway, if you are so keen to see her pony you should be visiting her house. It’s not as if she can bring it round here.’

Catherine knew something that Eloise didn’t, but just for the moment she was refraining from telling her because she liked to be able to eat her breakfast in relative peace.

‘But she’s the new girl, like a guest at a party, and I am sort of the host. So I have to ask her first and then she’ll ask me back and I’ll get to see her pony.
Please
, Mum. You never let us do
anything!
’

The oblique reference to lack of ballet lessons again thus
reinforced
how meagre her request was to have one paltry friend back to tea in the hope that it would elicit a return invitation and the chance to visit a pony, another treasured wish that Catherine was not able to fulfil for her daughter. Feeling inadequate and depressed, Catherine rather wished she had told Eloise what she had known before this conversation had even started.

The new family were having a house-warming party, and Catherine and her daughters were both invited. Lois had rung her yesterday evening just after the girls got back, telling her that all of the PTA and their families had been invited to attend on the following Saturday. Lois told her it was a shameful bid on the part of the mysterious new mother to buy her way onto the PTA committee, despite the fact that new applicants weren’t normally considered until September. Still, Lois had pointed out, it would be an excuse to nose round her house. She’d being dying to look round one of those new builds for months – she’d heard they were terribly vulgar inside. Gold-effect taps. Then Lois told Catherine she had already RSVP’d on behalf of the whole committee.

A huge party like that thrown only a couple of weeks after they had arrived meant that Gemma’s family must have a lot of money. Catherine was as proud of her daughters as any woman could be, and she loved the ramshackle cut-price charm of her terraced cottage. But it was difficult not to wonder what some of the other parents thought of her when they brought their children to one of the smallest houses in Farmington, with its second-hand sofa and only one loo. What did they really think of the thirty-two-year-old with a philandering, long-haired, largely unemployed, estranged husband, and vegetable patch in the back garden? Did they call each other at night and discuss the chipped enamel on her bath?

Catherine never craved normality in the sense that she wanted
things
. She didn’t want things. She would just like sometimes not to feel self-conscious about who she was and the life that she had chosen, or rather the life that had chosen her when she wasn’t really paying attention. She supposed when she was a girl she had the same expectations as everybody else, that, as plain and as awkward as she was, one day somebody would love her and then hand in hand they would lead a normal life, married in her twenties, children, a nice home, a steady but modest income. When she married Jimmy she’d hoped for it, the kind of simple life that seemed to be the right of other people. Jimmy had been her friend and her lover but also her escape route, lending her the extra strength she needed to leave home and a place to go to once she had left. Eventually she would have had the courage to leave her childhood behind on her own, but Jimmy made it happen faster and she was grateful for that, even if the first thing she ever saw in him was a way out. But their marriage, though often wonderful and occasionally painful, had never been normal, because, Catherine felt, they hadn’t begun it the normal way. There had been hope and expectation but certainty had never been present, and only twelve years later did Catherine realise she had always expected it to fail somehow. She just hadn’t been able to pin down when.

Farmington normality was a three-car family and a five-bedroom house. Catherine, with her part-time job and reliance on tax credits, was not anything like the norm. Even so, she couldn’t deny Eloise a new friend with a pony because of her own insecurities. Besides, Eloise was right about one thing: she was one of the few girls at her school who didn’t take ballet, or do gymnastics, or have riding lessons at weekends after stage school. After the mortgage and the bills had been paid the money for those things simply wasn’t there, and
guitar
lessons for free from your dad didn’t have quite the same cachet. Catherine was forced to deny her daughters those things, and she knew they didn’t really understand why, no matter how often she talked through money with them (if you haven’t got very much, Leila would say, just go to the bank and get some more. It’s easy!), so she would not deny them their friends.

‘Well, actually,’ she said, bracing herself for the squeals of excitement that were sure to follow her announcement, ‘you
are
going to be Gemma’s guest, because her mum and dad have invited us all, and just about everyone else in Farmington, to a party at her house next Saturday night!’

‘A party! A party at Gemma’s! Oh, thank you thank you thank you, Mum!’ Eloise jumped up and planted a buttery kiss on Catherine’s cheek, before scowling. ‘We are going, aren’t we?’

‘Of course we are going,’ Catherine said.

‘Is all of us going, me too?’ Leila asked her from the other end of the table, reserving her excitement until she had clarified that point.

‘Yes, of course,’ Catherine smiled.

‘And do we get to stay up late?’ Leila asked happily.

‘A little bit later than normal,’ Catherine said.

‘Thank you, God!’ Leila grinned at the ceiling as the girls sprung up from the table and clung on to each other as they jumped up and down.

‘It’s going to be great,’ Eloise told Leila, her eyes wide. ‘We’ll be able to play with Gemma and Amy as much as we like!’

‘Will it be dark, though?’ Leila asked.

‘Pitch-black,’ Eloise replied.

‘Ooooh, goody, goody, goody!’ Leila shrieked.

‘What’s going on?’ Jimmy asked as he appeared through the
back
door. ‘I’ve never seen them this keen to go to school on a Monday morning. I’ll have to brush up on their antiestablishment training.’

‘No, silly, we not being anti-dish-table-is-went, we’re all going to a party!’ Leila said, flinging herself at her dad’s legs, nearly knocking him off balance.

‘Are we?’ Jimmy asked, steadying himself against the door frame and smiling at Catherine. ‘Cool. Any chance of a quick shower? I’m laying down that demo today and then Mick’s going to take some photos after to put on the CD cover and I have to look my best. When’s this party?’