The Accidental Wife (6 page)

Just as Catherine opened the front door for the girls, Kirsty came out of hers.

‘Any chance you could get him to either shut up or cheer up? Whichever one is likely to happen … sooner.’ She stopped shouting as Eloise ran in first and Jimmy put down his guitar to greet her.

‘Thank the Lord,’ Kirsty said, briefly pressing her palms together in an expression of prayer.

‘Amen,’ Leila said as she followed her big sister inside.

‘I’m sorry,’ Catherine said. ‘He says he can’t really hear how it’s going to sound unless he plays it loud. Count yourself lucky you didn’t live next door when we were still together. Actually that’s probably why the neighbour moved …’

‘So divorce him and then it will be all your house and you won’t be a default wife any more. I’d suggest taking him to the cleaners, but in his case I’d mean it literally. Look, I’m glad I caught you, actually. I need you to come out with me on Friday night.’

‘Come out with you? What do you mean, come out?’ Catherine frowned.

‘I mean you coming out of your house – that’s the big thing with the bricks and the roof, by the way – and proceeding with me to the pub on a Friday night for a drink. That’s another brick thing with a roof on top only it has a licence to sell
alcohol
too. Now do you understand or would you like me to draw you a diagram?’

‘I’ve told you I don’t go to pubs,’ Catherine started. ‘I’m not normally a pub person.’

‘You’re not normally a normal person, full stop, but you are going to be this Friday because the kids are away with Bon Jovi in there, aren’t they? And because I need you.’ Kirsty smiled like Leila in possession of a chocolate-filled doughnut and a DVD of
The Sound of Music
. ‘We’re going to just
happen
to be in the pub where my trainer drinks. I worked it all out this morning while I was teaching the over-fifties Pilates. He hasn’t fallen in love with me yet because he’s never seen me at my finest, with my hair done and my push-up bra on, and mascara. So I’m going to
coincidentally
go to the pub where he always is on a Friday night in my new turquoise crocheted dress with the cleavage, and he’s going to see me and think, wow, and fall in love with me on the spot for the kind and sensitive person I am. Do you see?’

‘And you want
me
to come with you,’ Catherine said. ‘You don’t want one of your other friends? You know, the friends that actually like people.’

‘Of course I do,’ Kirsty sighed. ‘But the bastards all have someone. You are all I have left. It’s the cross I have to bear. Besides, what you need most in the world is to be brought out of yourself a bit, and if me helping you do that also means that you are somehow helping me in some tiny little way then it’s synergy, isn’t it? It’s cosmic forces in balance. Plus I put up with your husband wailing his head off for hours on end when I’m supposed to be teaching Tantric meditation to Mrs Evans so that she can bring herself to have sex with her husband, so you owe me.’

‘He’s my
ex
-husband and if you’ve got a student in there, where is she?’ Catherine asked.

‘Meditating, obviously. Now what do you say? Yes or no?’

Catherine tried to imagine herself standing in a pub full of Friday night drinkers and couldn’t. Then she tried to imagine herself successfully saying ‘no’ to Kirsty, and that seemed even more unlikely. Perhaps it would be better to just go and try to get the whole thing over and done with as quickly as possible.

‘OK,’ she relented. ‘I’ll come for an hour then, tops, just enough for you to pull him. Then I’m going home.’

‘Of course you are,’ Kirsty said happily. ‘That’s what I’m counting on.’

Inside Jimmy had thankfully unplugged his electric guitar in favour of his acoustic one and was now strumming his new song, singing to the girls, both of his feet up on the coffee table, an adoring daughter either side of him on the sofa. Seeing the three of them together like that still gave Catherine’s heart a wrench. It was impossible not to imagine what their lives could have been like if she and Jimmy had been different people – or not even different, but just the right people for each other. How perfect things could have been if she could have loved him the way he wanted her to, or if she had been enough for him as she was, damaged and incomplete.

But that was a future that had always been impossible, even when they had first got together and for the first time in her life everything seemed possible. They had always been doomed to fail, at least at being together. What they could not allow themselves to fail at was being parents.

‘The neighbours hate it when you play that loudly,’ Catherine told him, dumping her assortment of bags, drawings and cartons on the dining table.

‘Sorry, babe,’ Jimmy said, stopping his guitar by placing the flat of his palm against the vibrating strings, before handing it
to
Eloise and getting up to join Catherine in the kitchen. ‘We’re laying down a new demo tomorrow and I need to hear how it sounds on the electric. If I tried it on the boat I’d probably sink it.’

‘You know I don’t mind – it’s just that … well, if you could think about the volume now and again. I’m sure it doesn’t have to be that loud.’

‘It’s rock and roll, babe,’ Jimmy said, looking confused. ‘Of course it does.’

He watched her for a few minutes as she crouched and peered in the fridge and began to take out the ingredients for dinner.

‘So what are you doing now?’ he asked her after a few minutes.

‘Chopping an onion,’ Catherine said as she sliced into the vegetable.

‘No, I don’t mean now this second. I mean this evening, generally,’ Jimmy explained. ‘Do you mind if I hang out, have dinner with you and the girls? Put them to bed – that sort of thing?’

Catherine paused briefly. She needed to talk about what Eloise had said.

‘Jimmy, do you ever think it’s weird that we still see so much of each other now?’ She tested the subject on him.

‘No,’ Jimmy said firmly, pulling himself up into a seated position on the worktop. ‘I think that after everything that happened, the fact we’re able to put our children first and be friends means we’re well adjusted and like, you know – cool.’

‘So why aren’t we divorced yet?’ Catherine asked him, lowering her voice.

Jimmy didn’t answer for a second or two, and then he said, ‘Because it costs a lot of money and we haven’t got any right now.’

‘It’s just sometimes I wonder …’ Catherine trailed off.

‘Wonder what?’

‘Eloise told me today that she thinks you’re going to move back in, that we’re going to get back together. She’s taking you and me getting on and you being here so much as a sign. We can’t let them have false hope, Jimmy. We need to talk to them again. Get them to see that this is the way things are for good.’

Jimmy drummed the heels of his cowboy boots against the kitchen cupboards. ‘I don’t want to do that,’ he said.

Catherine turned to look at him, onion tears standing in her eyes. ‘But why not? It’s the truth.’

Jimmy paused for a moment. ‘I know it’s the truth, but I don’t want to take hope away from an eight-year-old, let alone her kid sister. When you’re a kid is practically the only time when hope seems like a real possibility. We might as well tell them Father Christmas isn’t real, or that it’s been us they’ve been bankrupting and not the tooth fairy all this time. Next you’ll be wanting to tell Leila that Jesus is no more than a historical figure and not the son of God.’

‘This is different, Jimmy, and you know it,’ Catherine said in a low voice. ‘We can’t lie to them about
this
. It’s their lives we’re talking about.’

‘We’re not lying, we’re not doing anything,’ Jimmy corrected her. He hopped off the counter, put one hand on each of Catherine’s shoulders and looked into her eyes.

‘Look, we hurt each other pretty badly. We tore each other up and those two were in the middle of it. And now you don’t hate me any more, and that’s all right by me, and I’m not messed up by you any more and that’s all right by you. Those two girls in there have had enough pain in their lives already. It can’t be wrong to let an eight-year-old have hope, it just can’t.’

‘But it’s false hope,’ Catherine persisted, wiping the back of her hand under her eyes and feeling an instant sting.

‘All hope is false hope – that doesn’t make it a bad thing,’ Jimmy said. ‘Look, if they ask me anything like, “When are you moving back in, Dad?” then I’ll tell them I’m not, and you’ll do the same, and in a few months they’ll stop asking. In a year or two they won’t even think about it any more and the way we live will seem normal to them. The hope will fade all by itself, don’t you worry.’

‘That sounds wrong coming from you, the eternal optimist,’ she said, catching a low note in his voice with some concern.

‘Oh, don’t get me wrong,’ Jimmy said, mustering a grin. ‘I’m still an optimist. It’s just that I’m starting to realise eternity is a very long time. So what do you say – is that a plan?’

Catherine looked into the living room where Eloise was picking out the riff from ‘Hotel California’ on Jimmy’s acoustic guitar, her head bent over the strings while Leila watched her fingers, trying to pick up the notes herself. Just at that moment her children felt safe and happy, and it was a feeling that Catherine was as desperate to preserve as her husband was.

‘OK, we’ll do that then,’ she said. ‘We won’t lie but we won’t say anything either.’

The two of them stood in silence for a moment in the small galley kitchen, sensing another thread of the lives they had once woven together so confidently and hopefully, unravelling and drifting apart. Somehow the closer they got now as individuals, the further away the reality of the couple they once were seemed, and it was a loss that Catherine, at least, still mourned. Not because the relationship they had once shared was right, but because she had wanted it to be so much.

‘So are you staying for dinner then?’ she asked him finally, breaking the thread in two.

Jimmy’s smile was weary. ‘I thought you were never going to ask.’

It was past eight when Catherine finally got the girls into bed. It was Jimmy’s fault. After his quiet resolve in the kitchen he’d returned to his tall-tale self by the time Catherine served dessert, regaling the girls with stories of what a wonderful life they were going to lead as soon as the band was discovered and he hit the big time – which would be any time soon, now that they had the funds in place to make a new demo. Eloise asked for a pony and Jimmy told her she could have a field full if she wanted, and there was to be an unending supply of sweets for Leila who planned to distribute them to the world’s less privileged children.

Jimmy and the girls had still been singing by the time Catherine finally managed to shepherd the little ones up the stairs, and she did have to admit, as they hummed whilst brushing their teeth, that Jimmy’s new song had a catchy tune. Jimmy was good at catchy tunes, but somehow they never seemed to fit his rock-and-roll image. Surely a man who wore leather trousers to go to the supermarket shouldn’t be writing soppy love songs; he should be writing about mayhem and devil worship and possibly drugs of some description. But Jimmy had never been like that. Yes, he had a skull and crossbones tattooed on his right shoulder, but it was wreathed in roses and once, many years ago, when Catherine had teased him about his rock credentials he’d replied, ‘I’m a lover, not a fighter, babe.’

He’d more than proved himself right since then.

When she came down Jimmy was still there strumming on his guitar and humming the now-familiar tune. He’d opened
a
bottle of wine and poured two glasses out, which meant he wasn’t planning on going back to the boat any time soon. Catherine realised that she was glad. They would sit and talk about the girls, and her job and the PTA, and he’d entertain her with stories of the band’s latest exploits or whichever kid he was teaching in Rock Club had the most promise, and things would be easy between them, and comfortable. What Catherine missed most about being with him was simply having him in the room on a weekday night sipping a glass of wine and talking. Loving each other had been a trick they had never quite pulled off, but even after everything that had happened they still had the knack of liking each other.

‘Do you mind?’ Jimmy asked her, nodding at the wine. ‘I’ll go back to the boat in a mo, but the forecast said frost overnight. I could do with a drink to help keep the cold out.’

‘You need a proper home, really,’ Catherine said as she sat down, picking up her glass.

‘I’ve got one,’ Jimmy said with a shrug. ‘It’s just that I don’t live in it any more.’

Catherine took a sip of wine.

‘I mean, you need a proper home for you. You can’t go on living in that boat. It’s not even a proper boat, just some floating rust bucket that Billy cobbled together when he was half cut and off his face.’

‘Don’t talk that way about Billy,’ Jimmy said mildly. His oldest friend and one-time bandmate had died – some said deliberately, although never in front of Jimmy – from an alcohol and prescription drug overdose almost three years ago. ‘If anybody had a good reason to drink it was him. He went from the brightest, best-looking, most talented bloke I’ve ever known to a shell of himself in less than five years. He could never let go of what he had once been, that’s the worst tragedy of schizophrenia. He knew he’d never be that bloke again,
never
get married and have kids. So he loved that boat instead. He poured every ounce of love and dedication he could have given to a family into it, if only he’d ever got the chance. I miss him.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Catherine said. ‘I know you do. And it’s a great boat, but it’s not a home, not for you. If paying the mortgage on this place is stopping you getting a flat or something, then we need to think again. I might be able to manage if we cut down a bit.’

‘Cut down on what?’ Jimmy asked her. ‘You haven’t got anything to cut down on, Catherine. And it’s not a rust bucket. Billy might have been a drunk but he was a master craftsman, a carpenter. He poured his soul into that boat.’

‘I just don’t think it’s fair that you should be freezing to death on a canal boat,’ Catherine said.