The Accidental Wife (43 page)

‘No! No,’ Jimmy said hastily. ‘No, I’m not saying that. I don’t know why your dad does what he does, but I do know that him and me are about as different as two blokes can get, which isn’t to say that I’m better than him, just really, really different. What I’m saying is when I saw the look on Cat’s face when she realised what was happening … the first thing I saw was shock and then, for about a split second, hurt and then …’ Jimmy blew out a breath of air and whistled, ‘anger. My God was she ever angry with me. She grabbed me by the hair and smacked me one right in the eye. Donna Clarke ran off before Cat could do the same to her. She was so angry because I’d betrayed her trust, you see, and because … I’d made her trust me, and on that night for the first time ever I could see in her face that she loved me. Her anger and pain showed me her love. But I saw it too late.

‘All of my stuff went out of the house window. All my vinyl ended in pieces on the concrete. All my shirts and even my Donnington eighty-nine T-shirt, limited edition, shredded. I’d be standing there outside the house, shouting and screaming, and the girls would be crying, begging us to stop, but we couldn’t … not for the longest time.’

‘But if you were bored, trapped, if you didn’t want to be with her any more, why did it matter?’ Dom asked him.

Jimmy sighed. ‘That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. It
was
only when I saw how angry she was that I realised she loved me, fiercely and deeply, even if those few minutes were the first time she felt that way. And at that exact same moment, the moment when I finally knew that she loved me as much as I loved her, I lost her. Her anger was like the last flare of a lit match. When it went out, her love went out too. It was burned out.’

Jimmy was silent for a moment as he looked into the stove.

‘I don’t get what this has got to do with me,’ Dominic said after a while.

‘I’m saying you and your dad make each other angry. Which means that you and your dad love each other. Now I’m not saying that he’s perfect. In actual fact, I think he’s a bit of a tosser. But I don’t doubt that he loves you. And as for you, well, pulling stunts like sleeping out all night on your own is a pretty low thing to do. It’s attention-seeking, the kind of thing little toddler girls do, not axe-men, not gods of rock. We are men of the guitar, Dom; we have our standards. But if you are willing to do something so stupid and dangerous to get his attention then you must still care about what he thinks of you. You must still love him.’

‘Shit,’ Dom said, after a while. ‘Mum’ll be doing her nut in.’

‘Your dad will be doing his nut too,’ Jimmy said, unable to resist a little smile. ‘You’ll have dropped him properly in it.’

‘Good,’ Dominic said gruffly.

‘Look,’ Jimmy said, ‘I had a dad once. He died when I wasn’t much older than you. Can’t say I argued with him, or hated him like you do yours. Me and my dad got along pretty well. He was always on my side, always knew what to do about everything. He was a decent bloke, straight up – no complications. I miss him, Dom. I miss him and I wish he was here now to sort me out. I know you hate your dad right now, but
if
you give him a chance, in a few weeks, a few months or even a few years, the two of you will grow together again and you’ll be friends. And when you are you’ll be so glad you’ve got him, Dom. Unless he is a total dickhead, that is, but my dad told me everyone’s got at least one redeeming quality, so I think we still have reason to be optimistic he isn’t a completely lost cause.’

‘I might …’ Dom blinked heavily and then got up, ‘I might go outside for a bit, get some air.’

‘You’ve got your mobile on you?’ Jimmy asked him. Jimmy held out his hand. ‘Give it to me. I’ll phone your mum. If you’re lucky they’ll be so glad to see you back in one piece they won’t kill you. And when you get a chance, talk to your dad. Say to him, “Hey, Dad, I’d love to talk to you.” Pretty much any dad is better than no dad at all.

‘Oh, and Dom?’ Jimmy held out his hand again. ‘Give me that spliff, mate. It’s going in the canal.’

However, when Jimmy had tried ‘Mum’ on Dominic’s phone it went straight to answer phone. His thumb hovered over the dial for a second or two before he took a breath and pressed ‘Dad’ instead. Marc arrived, after a brief and terse conversation, only a few minutes later to pick Dom up.

As soon as Dom, who had been sitting on the roof of the boat, saw him, he scrambled over the top of the boat and shut himself inside.

Jimmy sighed and glanced at his watch. He’d told Catherine he would be back in a couple of hours with his precious chicken, which was even now languishing in his fridge, even though it was quite often colder outside the fridge than in it. It was now two and a half hours since he’d seen her and he hadn’t spent one minute of it working out how to tell her that he loved her and wanted her back. He was fairly sure that his pastoral
duties
as one of the boy’s extracurricular tutors shouldn’t have to extend to chatting with the man who was currently intent on seducing his wife, but the boy clearly needed a go-between here, someone to smooth the water for him. And besides, Jimmy was a man of principle, and one of those principles, taught to him by his father, was never to judge a book by its cover. Despite everything he’d heard, everything Cat, Alison and Dom had told him,
he
didn’t know Marc personally, and so he wouldn’t judge him. Just because the circumstantial evidence made him out to be a complete wanker, it didn’t mean that he actually was.

‘He turned up about half an hour ago,’ Jimmy said, as Marc approached the boat. ‘He just needed someone to talk to, I think.’

‘Half an hour ago?’ Marc snapped at him. ‘We’ve been going out of our minds and you’ve known where he is for half an hour?’

Jimmy took a breath, ‘Yeah, you’re right, I probably should have phoned you straight away, but I don’t have your number and the kid was skittish. I think if I’d said to him, give me your phone, I’m calling your parents, he would have legged it and then we wouldn’t have known where he was again.’

‘You should have just made him give you his phone number!’ Marc told him. ‘Why didn’t you?’

Jimmy paused, thrown for a second by the question.

‘Anyway, he’s back now so that’s good, isn’t it?’ Jimmy stated firmly, trying very hard not to judge Marc.

‘Yes, it is,’ Marc said, glancing at the closed boat doors. ‘If I can get him to come out.’ Jimmy saw the look on the other man’s face. Somewhere behind that square jaw and stubble he was nervous.

‘He’s pissed off with you,’ Jimmy said conversationally, looking up at the sky. His chicken was supposed to have been in Catherine’s oven a good half-hour ago.

‘Thanks, I had gathered that much,’ Marc said bitterly. But he didn’t make a move to go into the boat to fetch his son out.

‘What are you scared of?’ Jimmy asked him.

‘What?’ Marc looked at Jimmy. ‘What do you mean, what am I scared of?’

‘Well, why aren’t you going in there all guns blazing, hauling him out and whacking him round the ear? That’s what he expects you to do. You do know that he thinks you only ever notice him if you’re fucked off with him?’

Marc shook his head. ‘That’s just not true … I spend a lot of time with him, or at least I would do if he wanted me to. But he doesn’t. He’s made up his mind about me, and the conclusion he’s come to is that I’m a pretty low kind of person. I know what he thinks of me. So I try and stay out of his way. I try not to let his wind-ups get to me. If I let him get under my skin I lose it with him. I don’t mean to, because I love the boy. And I know I don’t have any right to get angry with him, but I do. I can’t reach him now. Even if I wanted to.’

‘Bollocks,’ Jimmy said simply.

‘I beg your pardon?’ Marc asked.

‘Listen, you’re not talking to a chick now,’ Jimmy said. ‘Don’t try all your touchy-feely “nobody understands me” crap out on
me
. You and me are both men. We know the score. You’ve been busy, you’ve been busy with work and quite possibly women other than your wife, maybe even mine. You’re caught up in your own mid-life crisis, having a drama and wondering how you ended up with a beautiful wife and three lovely kids – that’s something that confuses me too, as it goes – and you’re so involved in you that you haven’t got time for the boy. Your little girls are cute and adoring, and so you give them your attention when you’re there. But he,’ Jimmy hooked his thumb towards the boat, ‘he sees right through you, and he’s angry and prickly and frankly a bit stinky, and
on
your long list of priorities that mainly reads “me, me, me, me” you’ve put him at the bottom of it.’

Marc stared at him with those black eyes that seemed to turn sensible women to jelly, and Jimmy wondered how much it would hurt when the other man punched him. But Marc didn’t move a muscle.

‘Is this about me and your ex-wife?’ he asked Jimmy.

‘There is no you and my wife, and she’s still my wife. We are still married. Listen to yourself, man. You’re here to pick up your son, your fifteen-year-old son who has been gone all night, who slept rough, and you’re trying to score points off of me because you fancy my wife. I think I got it spot on when I listed your priorities: “you, you, you.”’

Marc dropped his head and shoulders for a moment before looking back up at Jimmy.

‘I don’t know what to say to him,’ he confessed. ‘He used to think I was a god, that I was the bee’s knees. And I loved that, you know. I never had a dad myself, but I thought, this is what it’s all about: father and son. I let him down. The
one
thing I can’t let myself mess up is what I have with my children. I never had that, not having had a dad. I
need
to get this right somehow, but I keep getting it wrong.’

‘That’s parenting,’ Jimmy said. ‘You try your best but sometimes you let them down. I think the trick is to keep picking them up again and to not let them think even for one second that you don’t care about them more than anything else in the world. Even if they are fifteen, stink of stale smoke and swear like a bastard. He’s a good kid, your son. He’s funny and smart. He’s got real musical talent. He loves his mum and his sisters. You can be that father to him, the father he used to look up to as a god, if you try. You’d be amazed at how great it would make you feel. I know what it’s like to be without a dad too. It’s shit. Don’t make him go through that. Because,
after
all, you’re the parent. It’s up to you to make the first moves. If you spend all your time waiting for him to forgive you, you’ll never work things out. But if you ask him to forgive you then he will because he loves you. And if you do then you have to be certain that you will never ever let him down again, because you can only ever ask someone to forgive you once and mean it.’

Jimmy let his own words sink in for minute. That was it. That was what he had to say to Cat. In the aftermath of the ladies’ loos in The Goat, in all the yelling and the fury, he’d never once asked her to forgive him. Not even over the last few months when they’d finally clicked back into some sort of friendship again. They never talked about that night. They talked about the consequences of it and how to deal with them the best way for the children, but they never talked about why it happened. And Jimmy had never once told her that he was sorry, and that he regretted those few minutes more than anything else in his life. She didn’t know he was sorry. She didn’t know that he was desperate for her to forgive him, because until recently he hadn’t understood it himself and because he’d never asked her to. Maybe she would be able to love him again and maybe she wouldn’t, but Jimmy knew he had to tell her how sorry he was for that night. He owed her an apology.

‘Maybe you’re right,’ Marc said, cutting into his thoughts. ‘But things are difficult at home. Our lives are changing and he’s going to blame me for that. If Alison leaves me he’s going to blame me for that and if she stays then he’s going to blame me for that too so …’

‘So what’s the point of trying?’ Jimmy asked him.

Marc shrugged. ‘Everyone thinks I’m a terrible person,’ he said. ‘Sometimes it’s just easy to go along with them.’

‘Look, I don’t know you and what I do know of you doesn’t
exactly
put you in the running for a Nobel Peace Prize or anything,’ Jimmy said, ‘but I can see you love your kids. This is your opportunity to be a good person, a great dad. Go for it.’

‘Thank you.’ Marc looked at him, ‘I will, I will go for it. Look, about Catherine …’

‘Don’t talk to me about Catherine,’ Jimmy said. ‘Don’t say a word about her, not now when I’m doing my best not to judge you.’

‘I still have feelings for her,’ Marc said. ‘And I think she still has feelings for me. And I think both of us need to discover what they are and if they mean anything.’

Jimmy focused very hard for the twenty or so seconds it took him to stop wanting to punch Marc.

‘Take your son home,’ he said. ‘I’m going to cook dinner for my wife.’

Chapter Twenty-three

WHEN JIMMY CAME
back down the stairs after settling the girls in bed he found Catherine lying on her back on the sofa, a cushion over her face.

‘Dinner wasn’t that bad, was it?’ he asked her, a smile in his voice.

‘No,’ she said, her voice a little muffled by the cushion. ‘Actually it was really nice, even if nine at night is a bit late to be giving a five- and an eight-year-old their tea.’

‘Yeah, I’m sorry about that,’ Jimmy said. ‘That was one big mother of a chicken. Who knew they took so long to cook?’

He waited, standing at the bottom of the stairs. It was normally round about now that Catherine would ask him if he fancied a glass of wine before he went home and he invariably said yes. But tonight, of all nights, the night when he had a speech and declarations to make, she just lay there like a wet rag on the sofa, a cushion covering her face.

‘I’m too tired to go to bed,’ she half groaned, half giggled.

‘I could take you up if you like?’ Jimmy offered. ‘Like I did the night we moved in, do you remember?’

Catherine laughed and batted the cushion off her face so that it tumbled to the floor.