The Accidental Wife (3 page)

‘That’s lust, Kirsty!’ Catherine exclaimed, feeling her cheeks colour. A year of knowing Kirsty still had not made her immune to the other woman’s insistence on conducting full and frank discussions of a sexual nature in public places. ‘Lust is not love, and love isn’t even love – it’s hormones.’

‘It’s not lust.’ Kirsty was adamant. ‘It’s so much more than that. We talk and laugh and he
listens
to me. Plus he is the only
man
in the whole wide world who knows how much I weigh
exactly
. If that’s not grounds for marriage then I don’t know what is.’

‘It’s transference,’ Catherine went on. ‘Like when people fall for their psychiatrists. You are transferring your sexual urges on to the poor man. Remember, you pay him fifty-nine nighty-five an hour to train you. He doesn’t turn up out of the goodness of his heart or just so he can get a look at you sweating. And anyway, like you said, he fancies blonde eighteen-year-olds with breast implants.’

‘No, no, he
thinks
he fancies blonde eighteen-year-olds with breast implants but that’s only because he hasn’t met me yet. I mean, he’s met me, but he hasn’t met
me
. Once he truly knows me, he’ll see what love really is. Else there’s always plastic surgery.’

‘Just listen.’ Catherine took a much-needed sip of wine. ‘You are not in love with your trainer and he is not in love with you. He is probably in love with himself. Now get over it. Do me a favour and go and ask someone’s husband to dance with you. I could do with a laugh.’

Kirsty sighed but allowed the change of subject nevertheless.

‘You don’t just rush up to a couple and tap the woman on the shoulder and say, “Please can I dance with your husband?”’ she told Catherine. ‘There’s no fun to be had there, and besides, it never works; the married woman is a particularly fierce and protective creature. You have to bide your time, hunt the lone husband. Imagine that you are like a cheetah stalking a gazelle and then, at just the right moment, you pounce when no one’s looking and drag your prey off into the bush and devour them whole.’

‘On second thoughts maybe you’d better settle for just a dance. Some of those out there are quite scary when they are
drunk.
You should have seen Lois at the Christmas fair when she found out that Father Christmas had made off with the raffle-prize sherry. She charged like a rhino.’

‘Why do you do all this PTA lark?’ Kirsty asked her as she scanned the crowd for her prey, regardless of Catherine’s warning. ‘You should chuck it all in and have a proper grown-up life. After all, you and me – mainly me – we are single women, we should be doing proper single-woman stuff: going on ill-advised dates with men who don’t deserve us, setting a terrible example to children and falling out with our estranged husbands, with the emphasis on
strange
, and not inviting them round to Sunday tea! That’s what proper single women do.’

‘You haven’t got an estranged husband,’ Catherine remarked.

‘Well, there’s no need to brag,’ Kirsty sighed. ‘I could be in the Three Bells right now impressing my trainer with my all-natural if subtle cleavage. You could be with me; maybe he’s got a friend, I don’t know. The point is that you and I could be out on the town getting noticed.’

Catherine raised a brow. With her statuesque height and red hair, getting noticed had never been her problem. It was blending in that she had found so difficult for most of her life, trying as hard as she could to stay out of the limelight. She always wore black trousers and a black top and flat black boots or shoes. Usually she wore her long hair up, knotted on the top of her head, but she never dyed or cut it, except for every other month, with the kitchen scissors. Beauty and what it meant was something that Catherine had never quite got a handle on, except that she was fairly certain it didn’t apply to her. Most men were scared of her, and of the two men she had ‘known’ in her life, the one she had married had been caught having sex with a groupie in the ladies’ loo at The Goat. And what’s more, he’d been caught by Catherine. In the end she’d
scared
him off too. Getting noticed in any way at all was not at the top of Catherine’s to-do list.

She watched the crowd dancing for a minute or two, seemingly bobbing up and down just out of step with the music, and suddenly found herself remembering the last Valentine’s dance she had been to. It was a bittersweet memory, but this was true of all of her memories before she had got together with Jimmy. Recalling any of them required her to pay a certain price.

Catherine had been fifteen and she had planned a daring escape for the night, telling her parents she was due at a rehearsal at school for the public-speaking team. Instead, she was going to the school disco with Alison.

She and Alison had met outside the church on the high street and got changed together in the public loos outside Tesco, putting on lipstick haphazardly as they peered into the scratched Perspex mirrors screwed to the walls. Alison had brought Catherine a skirt to wear and she tied a piece of black lace into her red hair. She must have looked a sight, but Catherine didn’t care then. When she was with Alison she felt invincible.

Of course, none of the boys had asked Catherine to dance, but she was glad of it. She couldn’t think of anything worse than turning in a slow deathly circle to ‘Love Is All Around’ with some boy’s hand on her bottom and his nose in her cleavage. Alison had refused to dance with any of the many boys that kept asking her, telling all of them she wanted to dance with Catherine instead, and have a laugh.

When Lee Britton accused her of being a lesbian, she’d grabbed Catherine’s hand and kissed it, winking at him.

‘You’ve got that dead right, Lee,’ she’d said. ‘Imagine that when you’re tossing off in bed tonight!’ And she had spun Catherine round and round in a circle until the pair of them,
dizzy
with laughter from the look on Lee’s face, had collapsed on the floor.

On the way home that night the two of them had stopped once again in the loos outside Tesco and got changed back into jeans and jumpers – Alison too, even though her parents knew she’d been going to the disco and all she had to hide from them was make-up.

‘Your parents are weirdos, babe,’ Alison had said as she wiped the lipstick off Catherine’s mouth, holding her chin between her thumb and forefinger.

‘It’s just their way,’ Catherine tried to explain, although the older she got the harder she found it to understand them herself. ‘They were old when they had me. They still haven’t got used to having a kid around.’

‘Well, you might not be able to choose your family but at least you’ve got me, right? And that makes you lucky.’

The pair of them had hugged there in the public loos outside Tesco before going their separate ways. And for a long time, for almost all of her childhood, Catherine had thought that Alison was right: she thought that she was the luckiest girl in the world to have Alison as her best friend, her protector and her confidante. It had seemed like the kind of friendship that would last for ever, a friendship to be relied on.

But Catherine couldn’t have been more wrong about that. What was more, when Alison left her she was in the biggest mess of her life with no one to help her out of it.

When she had got home that night her mum was waiting on the other side of the front door for her, her wooden spatula in her hand. Somehow she had found out Catherine’s lie. And until tonight Catherine had never been to another Valentine’s dance again. She smiled to herself. If her parents could see her now they’d probably still be furious.

‘This dance sucks,’ Kirsty said, snapping Catherine’s
attention
back into the room. ‘I thought all the best men were supposed to be married. Why are none of them here?’

‘I’m sorry, Kirsty, I should have told you that the school PTA Valentine’s dance would be no place to meet a man.’

‘And
that
is why you are alone,’ Kirsty lectured her. ‘Everywhere is a place to meet men if you look hard enough – a pub, a club, the gym, the supermarket, even the opticians …’

‘The opticians?’

‘Long story,’ Kirsty said. ‘What I’m saying is, if you really want to meet a man then you have to try a bit harder.’

‘I’m not trying to meet a man,’ Catherine said. ‘I don’t want to meet a man. I’m a happily nearly divorced married wife.’

‘Your trouble is that you don’t realise what a fox you are. Men would queue up to go out with you if you weren’t so uptight and always slightly scary-looking. You know, plucking your eyebrows would make you seem a lot less frowny – I’m just saying.’

‘I’m not uptight,’ Catherine replied mildly. ‘I just don’t want to do it again.’

‘Do you mean you don’t want to have a relationship again, or do you mean you don’t want to do
it
again? Because if you are telling me you never want to have sex again I refuse to believe it. You’re thirty-two, Catherine. You are at your sexual peak. Why on earth wouldn’t you want sex in your life again? Preferably with an eighteen-year-old. I’ve heard that’s the perfect match sexual peak-wise.’

Catherine looked at Kirsty and wondered how to answer that question. By the time she went to bed with Jimmy she more or less qualified as a virgin again, such was the length of time that had passed between her first sexual experience and her second. It had been clumsy and difficult, and she had been embarrassed and awkward, but to her surprise and relief Jimmy hadn’t run away as fast as he could afterwards. He
treated
her sweetly and gently, and gradually the two of them began to work together well, becoming easy and familiar lovers. For a while they brought out the best in each other. Catherine inspired Jimmy’s tender and protective side, and he made her laugh and relax, standing tall in a crowd, happy in the knowledge that the man she was holding hands with was two inches taller than she was. But although she had adored him, cared for him, needed him, she had never fallen in love with him the way he always told her she would. In all the years they had been married she had never found the courage to let herself go those few extra degrees it would take to love him, until the night she found him having sex with Donna Clarke in the ladies’ loos of The Goat pub. Ironic really that the peak of her passion for Jimmy had manifested itself on the day he decided to cheat on her, the day she knew she would never be able to trust him again.

It was only when Jimmy tried to explain to her why he’d been having sex in the ladies’ loo with a total stranger that she understood why their marriage was over.

‘It’s not that I don’t love you,’ Jimmy had told her, holding both her wrists so that she wouldn’t punch him any more. ‘But you don’t … you don’t …’

‘Don’t what – excite you? Is that it? Have you finally realised, after making me marry you, after making me trust you and rely on you, after persuading me to build my life with you and have your children, that I’m not good enough for you?’ Catherine had shrieked at him.

‘No!’ Jimmy protested, letting go of her wrists so that she sprang forward and pushed him to the tiled wall with a thud. ‘No,’ he repeated as she stepped back hanging her head, her shoulders heaving. ‘You don’t love me, not really, you can’t. You’re still waiting for the man you can love to arrive in your life and you want it to be me, but I’m never going to be that
person,
Cat. I’m never going to change into the kind of man you need.’

‘The kind of man I need?’ Catherine asked him furiously. ‘Tell me, Jimmy, what
is
the kind of man I need?’

‘Someone you can really love, someone you can let yourself go with again. I’ve spent years trying to make you love me and it hasn’t worked. You never will love me and why should you?’ Jimmy paused, and took a breath as Catherine studied his face, her fury draining away. ‘Tonight has proved it to you and to me. I’m never going to deserve you, Catherine, and I can’t stand seeing that disappointment in your eyes any more. I’m worn out.’

‘You didn’t have to do this,’ Catherine said, gesturing around her, acutely aware that she hadn’t denied anything he said. ‘You could have just
told
me.’

‘I didn’t plan this; I never plan anything, you know I don’t. I didn’t tell you how I was feeling because I didn’t have the guts,’ Jimmy had said levelly.

It had taken Catherine a long time to stop being angry about that.

Now at last Catherine’s life was a calm ocean and she had some peace. There was no way she could explain to someone as restless and as searching as Kirsty how important peace was in her life, and that she’d take order and regularity over excitement and change any day of the week.

‘Look,’ she nudged Kirsty in the ribs, ‘Lois’s husband has been separated from the pack. Go in for the kill now, while he’s weak and vulnerable.’

‘Right you are,’ Kirsty said, her automatic vixen mode revving up, and she was gone.

Catherine couldn’t decide what was funnier, Lois’s indignation at her husband doing the tango with Kirsty, or Mr
Lois’s
bright red cheeks and sweaty brow as Kirsty twirled him around the school hall as if they were in Argentina itself. Either way, she kept her mirth to herself, watching on with the implacable mask that she always wore to these functions.

The music changed tempo and Catherine realised that Jimmy’s band was taking a break. They’d put a mix tape on instead and the floor filled instantly to the opening strains of ‘Dancing Queen’.

As Catherine scanned the crowd she spotted Jimmy fending off one of his groupies, who hung around his neck in a swoon, clearly dying to be kissed. In his clumsy but well-meaning attempt not to embarrass his wife in front of the whole school, Jimmy untangled himself from the girl’s advances and smiled at her as she attempted to lunge at him again.

Catherine looked down at the table and counted to twenty in the hope that when she looked up the girl would have stopped pursuing him. It wasn’t jealousy she felt, it was more embarrassment and discomfort in knowing that everybody who saw him would be thinking the same thing: Poor old Catherine, all on her own and heartbroken, while her husband snogs another floozie in front of her very eyes.