The Accidental Wife (20 page)

Marc let go of her arm, leaving a residue heat of a summer sixteen years old where his fingertips had been.

‘You don’t have to go,’ he said. ‘It must be a shock, I know, but please don’t go. Stay and wait for the shock to wear off. Alison will be here somewhere. I know she’d be so pleased to see you. Catherine, please.’

Before Catherine knew it he was embracing her, hugging her thin frame against his. It wasn’t the hard, toned body she had once known that she felt graze against her ribs now, but it was still his body, and at his touch a tiny spark of memory ignited in her belly and made her muscles contract.

She was relieved when he released her, and she glanced over her shoulder, looking for Jimmy and the girls. They were nowhere to be seen.

Alison decided that she had spent long enough in the kitchen waiting for her husband to come and tell her what to do about the fact that the food had run out about half an hour ago. Why she was waiting for him she didn’t know. There was nothing they could do about it now anyway. It was just that if he was here, if he had come like she had asked him to, then she would
be
able to show him the empty platters that were scattered across the kitchen and say, ‘I told you so.’ And that would make her feel better. Still, at least they had plenty of champagne. Champagne that Alison had not had nearly enough of. Something she was keen to remedy.

‘Right, well,’ she said to the waiting staff, who were hovering about. ‘Just make sure everyone gets drinks, OK?’

‘Can’t we have a drink?’ one boy asked. ‘This is a cool party.’

Alison looked at him and crossed her arms. If she spent one more minute in her expensive dress in this expensive kitchen, as stone-cold sober as the Italian granite work surfaces, with incompetent teenagers, then she would literally implode.

‘Just one,’ she told the boy, ‘but if I catch any of you getting drunk there will be trouble, OK?’ She watched in relief as the teenagers filed sedately out of the kitchen, trays laden with champagne.

Alison peered into the hallway where many guests were still congregating, and searched the crowd for the familiar shape of her husband, who was, no doubt, working the room somewhere in the house. She stood on her tiptoes and craned her neck, but she couldn’t see him out there and if he wasn’t out there then she didn’t want to brave the crowd without him, at least not until she’d had two more glasses of champagne. Retreating back into the safety of the kitchen she reapplied her lip gloss reflected in the stainless-steel oven door and then, taking a bottle out of the fridge, poured herself first one and then another glass. When both glasses were finished and she could feel the bubbles in the wine popping behind her eyes she decided to go and see if Jimmy Ashley had turned up at her party.

She found him in the marquee, trying to persuade his daughters to come off the dance floor, but he wasn’t having
much
luck. The disco lights turned the mêlée of children green, red and blue, making them look like multicoloured fairies flitting across the floor, but there was something familiar about the tall girl, the one that had to be Gemma’s much-loved Ellie. She must take after her father, Alison thought, smiling warmly at Jimmy as he tried to catch his smaller girl and failed.

Tipping the rest of the bottle of champagne she had brought with her into her glass and immediately emptying it, Alison thought she might as well be at the sixth form dance again, trying to pluck up the courage to get Jimmy Ashley to dance with her because that was exactly what she was about to do now. Alison waited as the room tilted and swayed for a moment before setting itself right and she heard a sane little voice inside her head telling her that this was not at all the right way to make a good impression as a wife and mother and the hostess of the party. But unfortunately for the sane little voice, Alison couldn’t give a stuff. And besides, it was largely because her husband had not introduced her to anyone that she felt fairly safe that most people here wouldn’t even know that she was the hostess.

Jimmy had not noticed her coming until she was standing right next to him.

‘Hi, Jimmy!’ she said, quite loudly, right in the shell of his ear, making him jump. ‘Come with me and have another drink.’

‘Alison,’ Jimmy said, stepping aside so that his daughters could race away from him unhindered.

‘Oh, you remembered me.’ Alison was thrilled. ‘Yay! Jimmy remembered me at last!’

‘Alison from school,’ Jimmy said. ‘That’s how I knew you. You hung about at band practice a lot. You were Catherine Parkin’s best friend.’

‘Yes,’ Alison said, a little more hesitantly this time. ‘Yes, that was me. I used to know Cathy.’

‘She got married, Cathy Parkin,’ Jimmy said. ‘Her name’s Catherine Ashley now.’

‘Oh,’ Alison said, her eyes widening. ‘Oh shit.’

‘We need to talk,’ Jimmy told her.

A few minutes later, as his eyes adjusted to the light, Jimmy saw Alison perched on what looked like an upturned box with a bottle of champagne in her hand, her bare legs crossed, showing a little upper thigh. She had led him outside to a sort of a copse situated in a dip just behind the marquee.

As he’d allowed her to lead him out into the darkness Jimmy had got the distinct feeing that he shouldn’t be following any woman, never mind this woman in particular, into any kind of woods and that he should really be taking the girls back to Catherine and getting her out of there like he’d promised. But he told himself that by talking to her he was trying to make things easier for Catherine. Alison had no idea about what had happened to Catherine after she ran away – Catherine had never had the chance to tell her – and now the only people in the world who knew about her were Catherine’s parents, Catherine and him. Jimmy clearly remembered the night she had told him. It was the same night that he’d first asked her to marry him. As she’d told him what had happened and how she would always feel about it, he was convinced that she was using it as a reason to say no to him, but then he realised it was her way of showing him she trusted him. It was her way of saying yes, maybe. If he kept asking her, even after knowing everything about her, then maybe one day she would say yes.

Jimmy was afraid that there was every chance that Alison would treat the whole thing as if it were a joke, like something
they
could look back on and laugh over, but Jimmy knew that wasn’t the case. He felt he had to warn her, but not for her sake, for Catherine’s.

‘Well, talk then,’ Alison said, retrieving another bottle from one of the boxes next to where she was sitting. Marc had instructed the spare crates of champagne to be left there so they would keep cool. She twisted off the cork, unbalancing herself a little, and took a swig from the bottle. ‘Sooner or later my husband is going to find out that there isn’t anyone passing out drinks any more because the waiters have drunk it all and he’ll send someone down here to get some more. In fact he’ll probably want to send me, but he won’t be able to because I’ll be here with you! Jimmy Ashley Who Married Cathy Parkin. That’s poetic justice for you, isn’t it?’ She tipped her head back and laughed like a little girl, which made Jimmy smile, despite himself.

She took a long draught from the bottle and then, wiping the back of her hand across her mouth, she handed it to Jimmy. ‘I’m a bit drunk, actually. Which is a good job because when Cathy sees me she’s going kill me.’

‘Catherine’s not like that,’ Jimmy told her as he took the bottle and a swig. ‘But you should know it’s going to be hard for her. When you went you left her in a real mess. A real mess.’

‘I know it must have hurt her losing him, Jimmy, but she got over it otherwise she wouldn’t have married you. You know, I bet she married you to get back at me.’

‘What?’ Jimmy asked her.

‘I fancied you at school for years, Jimmy – did you really not notice? God, that is so depressing. I still do fancy you, actually. You’re a very sexy man, bringing me out here to talk about your lady wife.’ Jimmy took a couple of steps away and glanced back at the lights of the house twinkling in the distance. Suddenly he felt very out of his depth.

‘But, Jimmy,’ Alison went on, ‘he might have loved her but he never would have been any good for her, not in a million years. Trust me, I
know
.’ Alison’s laugh was entirely mirthless. ‘Funny, really. I got her life and she got mine. All of this is your fault. If you had noticed me throwing myself at you back then, then I would have let her mess herself up with Marc and I would have had you. And we’d be happy.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Jimmy said for want of anything else to say, ‘but the truth was I didn’t actually discover women until I was in my twenties. I was too much into my music to get serious with anyone. I never had girlfriends at school, never had anything serious until I met Catherine. I didn’t even know I’d gone to school with her for years. That’s how blind I was. And if I didn’t even notice the stunning tall girl with the bright red hair, how would I have noticed you?’

‘Mmmmphf,’ Alison said, pouting. ‘I have decided not to take offence.’

‘Look,’ Jimmy said, trying to get back to why he was here in the wood with her, ‘the fact is that you’re here now –’ he looked up at the house laden with a million twinkling lights – ‘and it looks as if you’re here to stay – but you’re going to have to be … sensitive with her, Alison. Allow for what she went through, give her time to adjust. She’s never had anyone to talk about it all to except for me. She still cries about it sometimes, Alison. That’s how much the whole thing hurt her. It damaged her.’

‘She still cries about Marc and me running off together?’ Alison’s laugh was harsh. ‘Seriously? As her husband, doesn’t that piss you off?’

Jimmy looked at her. ‘She still cries about the abortion. The abortion her parents made her have when she found out that Marc had made her pregnant.’

There was a long silence punctuated by a hiccup as Alison
stared
at Jimmy, the defiant smile on her face faltering and then finally fading.

‘You’ve got that wrong,’ Alison insisted. ‘What are you talking about, Jimmy? There
was
no abortion.
She
wasn’t the one who he got pregnant, it was me. I know because he never had sex with her – he told me that at the time. He never felt that way about her; they didn’t have the passion we had, have.’

Alison swayed a little on her perch as she took another drink.

‘Where did you get the story of an abortion from anyway?’ she asked Jimmy defensively. ‘I had him, I had Marc’s baby – he’s in there now, probably secretly drinking and skulking around the waitresses.’

Jimmy sighed. How it had fallen on him to break this news to Catherine’s archenemy was beyond him, but he felt it demanded some tact, some diplomacy – qualities that had never featured highly in what he considered his most obvious attributes.

‘Look, Alison, I don’t know what Marc told you back then. I expect he told you a lot of things that weren’t true. Men usually lie when they are sleeping with two women at once. What I do know for certain is that Catherine was pregnant when you left.’ Jimmy’s hot breath made his words visible, a mist in the chill of the air. ‘She was pregnant with Marc’s baby too, only she didn’t get to keep hers. Her parents saw to that.’

Jimmy watched as Alison’s glassy eyes brightened and filled with tears that glittered in the reflected glory of the decorated house.

‘She was having his baby?’ Alison asked, her voice a whisper. ‘She was having his baby too?’

‘Yes, she was going to tell him – she wanted to tell you but in the end she decided she couldn’t …’

‘No, you see, that’s not right.’ Alison was determined. ‘Because it was
me
he wanted,
me
he needed. He played around with her, strung her along, but he didn’t do
that
with her. He told me. He told me that
I
was the one he couldn’t keep his hands off. That was what made us special and what made her and him nothing more than a childish fling. She bored him, he told me that. Jimmy, I’m sorry but Cathy’s made the whole thing up. I don’t know why – maybe to get you to feel sorry for her – but anyway, it’s a lie.’

Jimmy’s face darkened as he took a step or two nearer to Alison. ‘Catherine doesn’t lie,’ he told her. ‘Does Marc?’

‘No!’ Alison stood up abruptly. ‘He doesn’t lie, he doesn’t … and anyway, don’t you see, Jimmy? I can’t not have known about that. I
would
have known. We knew everything about each other, Cathy and me.’

‘Not everything,’ Jimmy said. ‘Not this. I’m sorry, Alison, but it happened. Marc got Catherine pregnant, she had an abortion.’

Without warning Alison flung her arms around Jimmy, buried her face in his neck and wept. At a loss as to how to react, Jimmy kept his arms stiffly held out at a steady ninety-degree angle, her shoulders shook and he felt her hot breath against his neck.

‘This is too much,’ she said, into his neck. ‘This is one lie too many, and it’s not fair because it was the first lie, and if I’d known about the first lie then maybe I wouldn’t have stuck around for the second or the third or the hundredth or the millionth lie.’ She paused and looked up at Jimmy, her face very close to his, and Jimmy couldn’t help but notice that despite the drinking and the tears she still looked beautiful. ‘It must have been hard for Cathy.’

‘I think that is a bit of an understatement,’ Jimmy said, swiftly disentangling himself from her embrace and stepping
away
from her. ‘Like I said before, it damaged her and that’s why I’m asking you to back off, to take it easy.’

‘I’m going to kill him,’ Alison said, having to steady herself without Jimmy to lean on. ‘He fucked us both up and now I’m going to kill him.’

‘Look,’ Jimmy said, suddenly feeling uneasy. ‘I suppose it’s an obvious question, but Marc? He is here somewhere, isn’t he? And sooner or later he’ll find Catherine. She’s kind of hard to miss.’

Alison’s head snapped up and before Jimmy realised what was happening she was marching past him back towards the house. He had to jog to keep up with her.

‘Are you OK?’ Marc asked Catherine.