The Accidental Wife (35 page)

Catherine had been silent for a moment, listening to the radiators rumbling against the cold and the whoosh of the traffic splattering through the puddles outside the window, and to her astonishment, as Jimmy’s words sank in, she found she had to fight the well of tears in her eyes and blink them away.

‘You’d better get the children,’ she said, dipping her head to use her hair as a curtain as she composed herself. ‘Got all their stuff?’

Jimmy picked up a big and battered old backpack, the same one he’d had when he left home at the age of nineteen.

‘Right here,’ he said, mustering a smile. ‘Although why they need this much stuff for a weekend at my mother’s I don’t know.’

‘Especially when she’ll send them home with a whole new wardrobe of pink anyway,’ Catherine said, grateful for his smile. ‘Never could get her head round redheads and hot pink.’

The pair stood up and eyed each other cautiously.

‘Have a good weekend,’ Jimmy said, hugging her briefly. ‘And take care of yourself.’

‘I will,’ Catherine promised him. ‘And you make sure you keep the girls warm and dry. I want them on that rust bucket for the least amount of time possible. Give my love to your mother.’

‘Seriously?’ Jimmy asked her wryly. ‘She won’t send you any back, you know.’

‘Well, give her my regards, then,’ Catherine told him with a smile. ‘I can be magnanimous.’

And then on impulse she had thrown her arms around him and hugged him until his arms had encircled her waist and he’d held her.

‘No matter what has to change you’ll always mean the world to me,’ she told him.

‘Same,’ Jimmy said, looking briefly into her eyes. ‘And all of that bollocks.’

Eloise had not been sad but she had been angry. She had been silently, resolutely furious with Catherine since Monday afternoon when it became clear that Jimmy was not moving back in for good.

The eight-year-old had made a point of not holding Catherine’s hand on the way home, and pretending she was asleep before Catherine could even kiss her good night.

At breakfast the following day she had been surly and rude, and on Thursday Leila had watched open-mouthed as Eloise told her mother to mind her own business and shut her mouth, storming upstairs just as they were about to leave for school.

‘All you did was ask her if she’d remembered her gym kit!’ Leila exclaimed with theatrical despair. ‘Mummy, you are going to tell her off now, aren’t you? She’s being extremely naughty and disrespecting you!’

‘I know,’ Catherine had said, putting her hand on Leila’s
shoulder
and looking up the stairs. ‘But she’s a bit upset at the moment and cross with me …’

‘Cos you won’t let Daddy move back in?’ Leila said matter-of-factly, crossing her arms.

‘Yes,’ Catherine looked at her younger daughter with some concern. ‘How do you know, poppet?’

‘Because Ellie told me and because I know anyway,’ Leila said with a shrug. ‘I wish Daddy would come back too. Ellie says he loves you and he loves us, but you don’t love him, and you probably don’t love us very much either otherwise you’d let him move back in.’

‘Oh, Leila,’ Catherine said, kneeling to hug the five-year-old tightly. ‘You know that I love you two so much, don’t you?’

Leila looked at her mother with her father’s hazel eyes.

‘I know that, Mummy,’ she said. ‘I told Ellie that you love us about a million otherwise you’d really kill us if you knew about the toffees under Ellie’s bed, but you do know and you haven’t killed us, so you must love us. Plus, mums must always love their children, even when they are bad, a bit like God always loves us even if we let him down, which we do quite a bit.’

Catherine put the palm of her hand on the heart-shaped curve of Leila’s face.

‘You are completely right.’

‘Well, then,’ Leila said, ‘I don’t know what all the fuss is about. I told Ellie I love you and Daddy about a million and her about four to five hundred, and we all love each other as much as we can and that’s that.’

‘And what did Ellie say?’ Catherine asked her gently.

‘Well, she said I was a stupid little baby and didn’t understand anything,’ Leila replied with a cheerful shrug.

‘You are not a stupid little baby,’ Catherine told her. ‘You are a very clever, wonderful girl.’

‘I know,’ Leila said. ‘God gave me an extra big brain. So are you going to shout at Ellie now? I think you have to shout at her, Mummy, or she’ll become a
monster
. I can come and watch, if you like.’

‘I’m not going to shout at her,’ Catherine said. ‘But I’ll go and talk to her and fetch her down, otherwise we’ll be late for school.’

‘Good luck, Mummy,’ Leila said, holding a hand out for Catherine to shake. ‘May the love of Christ be with you.’

‘Thanks,’ Catherine said as she advanced up the narrow stairwell. ‘I think I’m going to need him.’

And she hadn’t been wrong. Eloise had kicked and screamed, flounced and shouted all the way to school. It was so unusual, so out of the ordinary for Catherine to be at odds with either of her children, that she felt at a loss to know what to do, and she wished that just for once she would be able to give them exactly what they wanted instead of only ever being able to offer them cut-price solutions and an imperfect bargain-basement life.

This time, like too many times before, she couldn’t make their dreams come true.

Jimmy peered out from the hatch to his boat and looked up at the rain. It was slicing down in thick sheets, colliding with the tin roof of the boat with a violent clatter.

He looked back at the girls, who were wrapped as one in his duvets, sitting on the bed-cum-seat, cowering from the leaky roof.

‘We’ll try again in a minute,’ Jimmy repeated. His mother had been out when they arrived in Aylesbury on Friday evening. After mooring the boat they waited for a break in the weather until it became apparent that no break was going to come, and Leila said she thought they’d be drier outside
anyway
. With no umbrellas, they ran the two hundred yards or so from the towpath to his mother’s house and Jimmy knocked on the door, but no one answered.

After a few moments he knocked again, and again, and then he went round the back and peered though the french windows. The living room was silent and dark. Sensing his daughters’ expectancy, Jimmy kneeled down and peered through the letterbox: the hallway light was on. But that could mean anything. His mother had always lived by the conviction that burglars would never rob a house with a hallway light on, on the off chance that the entire family plus a guard dog might be convening on the landing.

Shepherding the girls under the meagre protection of the porch, Jimmy phoned both her home (although Leila had pointed out if she was in to answer it they wouldn’t have been standing outside in the rain) and mobile number several times. Then Eloise noticed a milk bottle with a note sticking out of the top of it.

It was written in his mother’s fat, loose handwriting, the ink faded and bleeding into the paper where the rain had reached it. It read, ‘No milk for two weeks, please.’

Jimmy stared at the note and got an uneasy feeling in the pit of his stomach. Mum never missed her chance to see the girls, and in the winter Jimmy always brought them here when it was his weekend. He didn’t like them spending the night in his boat at all, but especially not in this weather. He hated them having to see past the romance and fun of how he lived to the damp cold reality.

Jimmy recalled the last conversation he’d had with his mum when he’d phoned to give her the dates they’d be visiting in March.

‘Now that first weekend I won’t be back from Spain till Saturday morning, OK? So bring them on Saturday at about
eleven
. It’ll be lovely to see their little faces and I’ll bring them back some presents.’

‘OK,’ Jimmy had said, or something like that.

‘Did you get that?’ his mum had persisted. ‘Bring them Saturday morning? Write it down, James. You know what you’re like.’

‘I don’t need to write it down,’ Jimmy now remembered saying testily. ‘I’m not an idiot, Mum.’

As if he needed any further proof of his general inadequacy, it was official: he was an idiot.

He had forgotten that his mum wasn’t going to be back until Saturday morning; probably from the moment he had put the phone down on her until this very second, that piece of vital information had floated out of his head. Jimmy looked at his girls huddled in the porch and did his best to hide his frustration from them. If he’d remembered that his mum wasn’t due back until tomorrow morning then he could have told Catherine, she would have let him pick up the girls dry and warm and happy then, and maybe he would have had one more night to stand between her and the next part of her life, the part that was not going to include him.

At a loss over what to do, he’d taken the girls to McDonald’s, where they had sat over three Happy Meals (Jimmy didn’t have quite enough cash for anything else) until the early evening crowd thinned out and the late evening collections of angry-looking boys and bored-looking girls began to fill it up. At that point even Jimmy, who was noted for being hip with the kids, thought the girls probably didn’t need to hear language quite so Anglo-Saxon. By the time they got back to the boat it was almost ten and he could see his girls were cold and damp and miserable, even though they were trying their best to look as if they were having a good time, especially Eloise, who was determined to prove that nothing her father did could ever be wrong.

Jimmy made them hot chocolate and they huddled together around the stove, singing Meat Loaf numbers until finally sleep overtook first Leila and then Eloise. Jimmy was still kicking himself when he drifted off at last, and finally the three of them slept sitting up, huddled like birds in a nest.

The rain hadn’t stopped all night. It was just after six, when a hint of grey daylight was struggling to appear through the sodden gloom, that Jimmy woke up. He’d been phoning his mother’s mobile on and off ever since, though he knew she wouldn’t turn it on until she got back into the house. She always said she didn’t want to be a slave to it, because it was only for emergencies and she didn’t want to run the battery down. She never had quite grasped the mobile part of a mobile phone.

‘Try again,’ Eloise whined miserably, nodding at Jimmy’s phone. ‘It must be past eleven now and I want to be warm, Daddy.’

‘We’ve had lovely time,’ Leila said consolingly. ‘It’s just we can’t feel our noses now. It’s a bit like when Jesus spent forty days and nights in the desert. Only cold.’ She sank her chin into the neck of her coat, which she had worn all night, adding, ‘I love you, Daddy,’ just before the lower half of her face disappeared completely.

Jimmy bit the inside of his mouth and pressed the redial on his phone.

As his mother answered he knew at least one thing for certain. He was
never
going to hear the end of this.

‘Look at my girls,’ Pam said as she put another plate of toast in front of the children, who were bathed and changed into the brand-new and largely pink outfits that she had bought them in duty free. ‘Pretty as a picture.’

Pam was always buying her granddaughters things, pretty things, nice things. The things their mother didn’t seem to
give
two hoots about. Her gifts and outfits went home with them, but since she never saw them wear anything she’d ever given them again, she wouldn’t put it past that woman to sell them on.

‘I’ve missed you,’ she said, hugging first one and then the other, and then adjusting the bow in Leila’s hair.

‘We missed you too, Nana Pam,’ Leila said, with feeling. ‘Especially when we were freezing like ice cubes and penguins.’

‘Hmph …’ Pam caught her son’s look and bit her tongue. ‘Well, if your daddy didn’t love that leaky old boat so much …’

‘I’m like a pirate, girls,’ Jimmy said, mustering himself now that he had his own plate of toast, not to mention some dry old clothes that his mum still kept in his wardrobe, and which were only marginally too tight for him now. ‘I sail the high seas looking for adventure.’

‘You sail the canal, you mean,’ Leila said.

‘And you don’t even sail it ’cos you haven’t got a sail,’ Eloise added.

Jimmy sipped his tea and said nothing. Sometimes he felt like he was the best father in the history of fathers. Like last night – yes, he’d got his daughters cold and wet, and with nowhere decent to sleep because of his own stupidity, but when he and the girls had been singing ‘Bat Out of Hell’ and he realised they knew all the words, at that moment he was officially the coolest father in the world. But then the real world came crashing in and he’d acknowledged that a comprehensive knowledge of the Meat Loaf catalogue was not what an eight- and five-year-old really needed from their father. When Eloise looked at him the way she just had, he felt inconsequential. Like someone his daughter had to endure in their lives because of the inconvenience of having him as a
father
. He knew they didn’t think or feel like that, at least not consciously, but somehow that made him feel worse because they didn’t know any different. They didn’t know exactly how much he’d stuffed up their little lives. And worse than that, just now Eloise was blaming the whole sorry mess on Catherine.

This wasn’t what he had planned when he’d first met Catherine twelve years ago. He’d planned to marry her, yes, about twelve minutes after he’d met her. And after half an hour he wanted to have children with her. But not like this. He’d never seen his future panning out like this.

‘Well, it’s chucking it down out there,’ Leila said, making everyone laugh. ‘What are we going to do, Nana? Not another puzzle of kittens, please – I’m bored of puzzles of kittens.’

‘How about shopping?’ Pam suggested, which always got a roar of approval from the consumerism-starved girls. Their mother wouldn’t like it, which was principally why Pam did.

‘Ooh, yes, can I get some nail varnish?’ Leila asked her, her hands clasped to her face in excitement. ‘I really need some.’

‘I’d like some new bobbles, please, Nana,’ Eloise added. ‘Some of those floaty sparkly ones with the stars and hearts on that the girls who go to ballet class wear.’