The Accidental Wife (21 page)

‘I’m fine, really. Go and talk to your guests, please. I’m waiting for my husband,’ Catherine said, but Marc stood stock-still.

‘I don’t want to leave you like this,’ he said.

Catherine bit her lip, repressing the obvious retort. She shook her head and conjured an approximation of a smile, ‘Go, I’ll be fine.’

Catherine watched him watching her, his dark eyes intense. He’d looked at her in exactly that way on the day when they had first met and he’d kissed her. For one heady petrifying second Catherine got the feeling he might do exactly the same thing now. He took a step closer to her, his hand grazed her shoulder, striking sparks as it passed.

‘Liar!’ Suddenly Alison was in between them, causing Catherine to stagger backwards and into Jimmy, who was following at her heels.

‘What?’ she asked him.

‘Thing is …’ Jimmy began, but it was then that Alison slapped her husband hard around the face. The whole room stopped and looked.

‘Ouch, darling.’ Marc smiled at his wife. ‘The caterers weren’t that bad.’

‘Liar!’ Alison repeated, and was about to slap him again, but this time he caught her wrist.

‘Let’s take this outside, shall we?’ he said in a low voice as he gripped her wrist. ‘Remember our guests?’

‘You told me you never had sex with her,’ Alison accused him. ‘You were sleeping with both of us the whole time.’

‘Look, Alison,’ Marc pulled her closer to him, trying desperately to keep the conversation between themselves. ‘Please, we’ll talk about this later.’

‘You’ve lied to me for fifteen years,’ Alison said, her voice hard and cold. ‘After everything we’ve been through and all the promises you made, you’ve kept on lying. You’re still lying now. I used to think it would end one day, but it won’t ever end, will it, Marc? It comes as naturally to you as breathing.’

She jerked her wrist out of his grasp and looked around at the crowd of guests.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, this party is now over due to the unforeseen circumstance of my husband being a disgusting lying pig. Please collect your coats and make an orderly exit.’

Spinning on her heel she came face to face with Catherine. The two women stared at each other, aware that not one guest had made an attempt to leave yet.

‘Cathy,’ Alison said quietly, carefully avoiding looking at her husband because she was afraid of how he would react to what she was about to say. ‘I didn’t know. I didn’t know about the baby.’

‘Would it have changed anything?’ Catherine asked her, and Alison knew she was avoiding looking at Marc too. ‘If you’d known?’

‘It might have,’ Alison said. ‘It would have changed something.’

Catherine felt the scrutiny of all of those around her and knew that she had to be out of it within the next five seconds.

‘I have to go,’ she said. She looked at Jimmy. ‘We’ll find the girls and go, OK?’ He nodded.

‘Thank you for coming,’ Alison said to her foolishly. ‘Will you believe me if I say that it’s really good to see you again?’

Catherine nodded, tears standing in her eyes. ‘I do.’

‘Perhaps I’ll see you in the school playground. Perhaps we can talk, sort things out, put things … to rest.’

Catherine paused to look directly at Alison. ‘Why did you come back?’

‘To rescue my family,’ Alison said. ‘I don’t think it’s working out quite as we planned.’

Catherine nodded and then without saying another word she turned on her heel and, slotting her hand into Jimmy’s, walked out of the room as the crowd parted before her.

The cool air soothed Catherine’s hot face as they began their walk back home, Leila asleep on her shoulder and Eloise in Jimmy’s arms.

‘You handled that amazingly well,’ Jimmy said. ‘I was so proud of you, Cat. You were so serene and dignified. Even with him, the bastard. You were brilliant.’

‘I can’t believe you told her,’ Catherine replied. ‘I can’t believe it.’

They were silent for the rest of the walk home.

Chapter Eleven

ALISON LAY ON
her bed, staring at the ceiling. The room lights were out but the thousand or so fairy lights outside her bedroom window illuminated the room in pulsating glittering bursts of radiance.

Much to her deep irritation the party had not finished when she had declared that it was over. Far from it. That had been a good hour ago, and the chatter of Marc’s guests still rose in the hallway as if nothing had happened. After Cathy had made her exit, splitting the party crowd like Moses parting the Red Sea, with Jimmy Ashley loyally following in her wake, the room had fallen silent save for the background thrum of the disco in the marquee.

Glancing about, Marc had laughed, then put his arm around her and kissed her hard on the cheek.

‘May I introduce you all to my wonderful, fiery, impetuous and amazing wife, Alison James, a woman who certainly knows how to make an entrance almost as well as she does an exit.’

And somehow Alison had found herself standing side by side with Marc, her arm linked through his, smiling graciously while she received a round of applause from the good people of Farmington. Only Marc could have done this; only Marc could have the front and magic to turn a marital brawl into a
social
nicety, something that was even romantic, and, still reeling from the news that Jimmy had given her, Alison could quite happily have slapped him again for doing it.

However, with everyone’s eyes on her and the buzz of the champagne having eroded into a head-churning fuzz, not to mention the sight of her two daughters come to find her, Alison realised she didn’t have any choice but to go along with the illusion that Marc had created.

She put her arms around his neck and kissed him on the lips.

‘Anyone for more champagne?’ Marc asked the crowd in general the second the kiss was broken, leaving Alison’s side to go and arrange it before anyone could answer.

‘I’m tired, Mama,’ Amy said, putting her arms around Alison’s waist and resting her chin on her tummy. ‘When are all these people going home?’

‘Ellie’s mummy came and made her and Leila go home. She looked really cross,’ Gemma said. ‘I’m not tired, by the way. Can I stay up some more? You could come and dance with us, Mummy. And Daddy and Dominic – we could all dance together.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Alison said, crouching down so that her youngest could hook her arms around her neck, then hefting Amy onto her hip. ‘I think you two girls have had a good run and now it’s time for bed, OK?’

‘ ’K,’ Amy said, resting her head on Alison’s shoulder, her thumb in her mouth.

‘ ’Spose,’ Gemma sighed. ‘Although I could dance for at least another hour without getting tired.’

And Alison was finally able to make her escape, leading her two girls to bed, both of them falling asleep as soon as their heads touched the pillow. She briefly peered over the banister to the throng of people below. Marc was the centre of
attention
, talking, throwing his head back with laughter, gesturing like a hypnotist who had a whole room in his thrall. He was rescuing the situation, turning it around, making it happen, recreating the façade of their lives from scratch yet again, doing all the things he was so good at – except he hadn’t seemed to notice that she was up here on her own and he was down there running all of their lives single-handed as if he hadn’t lied to her for fifteen years. As if he hadn’t been sleeping with them both.

Alison closed her eyes, but the lights still twinkled cheerfully behind her lids, so she pulled the duvet over her head to blot them out, breathing in the scent of her relationship, her life, that was embedded in the sheets.

Of course he had been sleeping with them both, of course he had. If she had any kind of knowledge or experience of men back then other than trying to fend off the wandering hands of the boys from school she would have realised it was inevitable. She and Cathy were still girls – almost women but only just, and only in body. They were still making the choices and decisions that girls made when it felt as if there would be no consequences and no tomorrow.

And Marc had been a man – just a young man, that was for sure – but he had had to grow up fast, thrown out of the children’s home at the age of sixteen and left to fend for himself in a world of brutal and unsympathetic adults. At the age of seventeen Alison had believed that she had a sexual power over him. She had the breasts and the legs and the heat between them that he really wanted. But she was wrong. Cathy had it too, it was just that with Cathy it was much less obvious.

‘Have you ever done this with her?’ she’d asked him.

‘I’ve never done anything like
that
with her,’ he’d replied. He hadn’t lied; he couldn’t have been more blunt. Alison had chosen to believe what she wanted to.

Alison pressed the heels of her hands against her pounding forehead. Cathy had been pregnant. She had been pregnant with Marc’s baby, a baby that would only have been conceived a week or two apart from Dominic, maybe even on the same day as her son – it was quite possible. Looking back, Alison realised Jimmy was right: Cathy had tried to tell her, after it all came out. After she found out that Alison had been sleeping with Marc and everything started to disintegrate around her. Alison remembered she felt as if she was standing in the eye of a storm, perfectly calm, absolutely determined, while the rest of the world was whipped into chaos around her.

She remembered her last conversation with Cathy before she left.

It had been raining; thick rivulets of water blended with her friend’s tears as she stood on Alison’s doorstep and pleaded with her.

‘Please don’t do this, Alison,’ she’d begged her. ‘You don’t love him, not really. You only want him because I’ve got him. Please, you don’t understand what you’re doing to me!’

‘It’s no good,’ her seventeen-year-old self had replied. ‘He loves
me
, Cathy, he wants
me
– not you. You have to realise that. And besides, I need him now. I
really
need him.’

‘But what about us?’ Catherine had wept. ‘You and me? Who will I have if I don’t have you? If I lose him I lose you too. I don’t know what I’ll do, Alison. You don’t know what you’re doing to me. I need you, I’m –’

‘Look, I’m pregnant,’ Alison had hissed, taking a few steps forward into the rain and drawing the front door almost to a close behind her so that her parents would not hear. ‘Nobody knows yet, not even him, but I’m having his
baby
, Cathy. And I
love
him. I love him and he loves me, and that’s the way we’ve felt about each other since the minute we met because it
was
me that he should have met in the park, and not you. If it wasn’t for bloody Aran Archer, it would have been me. He’s angry now with both of us, but tonight I’m going to find him and I’m going to ask him to leave Farmington with me and he will. I’ll make him come with me because I know that he wants me more than anything else in the world. You were never anything important to him, you have to see that, Cathy. I mean, look at you – can you really picture the two of you together? Now I have to put myself and my baby first and if you can’t get used to that then …’ Alison had shrugged.

Catherine hadn’t said a word. She’d just stood there in the pouring rain, as if her whole body was melting into the salt water, her mouth open, speechless as she tried to understand what Alison was telling her. Alison had stepped back under the shelter of her porch and waited.

‘But you’re my best friend,’ Catherine had begun. ‘The only person in the world I could talk to and trust …’

‘Not any more,’ Alison had said. ‘Not any more. I’m sorry, Catherine. You’ll just have to get used to it. Marc belongs to me now.’

Now Alison tried her hardest to get back into the head of the girl she was then, and she asked herself what she would have done differently if she had known that her friend was pregnant too. And she couldn’t say that she wouldn’t have still left Cathy behind. Back then she didn’t know any better. She didn’t want to know anything except that she was meant to be with Marc and that he belonged to her.

Another nagging uneasy thought was tugging away at her as she lay in bed and that was the memory of her husband standing behind her downstairs at the party when she had told Cathy she didn’t know about the baby. It should have been news to Marc too, but there was nothing. Not a gasp, not a movement – there was no reaction at all. He was perfectly still.
Did
that mean that he knew about the baby when he ran away with Alison? It could have been that, or it could just have been Marc maintaining appearances no matter what sledgehammer came swinging out of the past to floor him. It was impossible to know and, Alison decidedly wearily, she didn’t want to know. Not yet, at least. She was growing weary of discovering secrets.

There was a knock at the door. Alison composed herself for Marc, and then she realised he would never knock.

‘It’s me,’ Dominic called. He opened the door a crack, the blaze of the hall light momentarily blinding Alison as she peered over the covers. ‘Are you OK?’

‘I’m fine,’ Alison told him, mustering a smile. ‘I’ve just got a headache. What’s the time?’

Dominic shrugged, he didn’t wear a watch. Alison glanced at the clock. It was almost midnight.

‘You should be thinking about bed,’ she told him as he came in the room, shutting the door behind him.

‘What was all that about, Mum?’ Dominic asked her. ‘You shouting at him, and slapping him. You looked proper angry. It was mental, well cool.’

Alison frowned. She didn’t know how to feel about impressing her son with an act of violence, but it was hard not to feel pleased because he was so rarely impressed by her these days.

‘You should have arrived fifteen seconds earlier, he was all over that woman, the tall scary-looking one. Is she why you slapped him? Has he gone and done it again already?’

Alison, who had been rubbing her eyes, froze for a second. She hated that Dominic knew about Marc. She hated the fact that her son’s expectation of his father, of both of his parents, was now so low.

She sat up and turned on the bedside lamp.

‘Don’t be silly, Dom. Dad hasn’t done anything,’ she told her son, as he sat on the edge of the bed. She ventured out a hand and touched his soft as yet unshaven cheek with the back of it. ‘You know Dad: he’s a charmer and a flirt, all touchy-feely. But it doesn’t mean anything.’