Another Mother's Life Read online

  “It’s peed on the floor,” she said.

  “So she has,” Marc said. “But the breeder says it should only take you a couple of weeks to house-train her. You’ll be fine.”

  “Me? I’ll be fine?” Alison exclaimed. “Marc, no way. We are not getting a dog. The puppy has to …”

  “A puppy!” Gemma shrieked as she raced into the kitchen. “A puppy! Daddy’s got a puppy, she’s soooooo cute!” Immediately Gemma went over to the young dog and hefted the animal up into her arms, giggling as the puppy licked her face.

  “He’s kissing me!”

  “He’s so lovely,” Amy said, wide-eyed, stroking the dog’s back as Gemma held it. “Let me hold him now, Gemma.”

  Alison had to concede that as Gemma handed the dog over to her sister, it was the first genuine smile she had seen on Amy’s face all day.

  “Actually,” Marc told them, “she’s a girl. Her name’s Rosie, but look, don’t get too attached to her. Mummy’s not sure that having a dog is the best thing, and I expect that Mummy is right. We might have to give her back …”

  “Mummy, no!” Gemma was horrified.

  “Please, Mummy, don’t make us send Rosie back,” Amy wailed, clutching the dog tighter to her chest.

  Alison sighed, still holding her Valentine roses, as she realized that her husband had stitched her up.

  “We can keep her …” Alison had to hold her hand up until the cheers stopped. “As long as I am not the only one walking her, cleaning up after her, or toilet-training her,” she added, reaching out to stroke one of Rosie’s soft ears. “She is quite sweet, I suppose.”

  Amy wrinkled up her nose. “And I think she just peed on my foot,” she said.

  “Oh well,” Alison said, setting down her bouquet of flowers to look for the box with detergent in it. “Every rose has its thorn.”

  Two

  How Catherine Ashley came to be spending Valentine’s Day with her almost ex-husband was a story that pretty much summed up her life.

  “You don’t mind booking Jimmy, do you?” Lois, the PTA chairperson, had asked her at the last meeting, with her own special brand of tact. “It’s not awkward at all booking your ex to play at the Valentine’s Dance, is it? It’s just that I know how you two get on still and he’ll give you a reduced rate. You know that every penny counts if we’re going to raise enough money to pay for the new computer suite.”

  Catherine had said she didn’t mind, and mostly she didn’t. It was a fact of life that Jimmy and his band were present at every wedding and christening, and even the odd funeral that she attended both before and since they had split up as a couple, playing for the locals in order to pay the bills while they waited for the stardom that had so far eluded them. Besides, for the last few months peace had broken out between her and Jimmy and he had become almost as much a part of her daily life as he had been when they were living together. Maybe even more so, because all the stress and tension between them had dissolved away now that she had stopped waiting for him to leave her and had kicked him out.

  Her friend Kirsty said they were the happiest married couple she knew, and she attributed it to the fact that they’d been living apart for two years. Kirsty hadn’t been there for the first year, those long and difficult months when Catherine and Jimmy had tried to find a way to be parents without ripping themselves or their children to shreds. But the second year had been okay, good even. Friendship had finally emerged from the ashes of what they had once had. Catherine knew that one day they’d get divorced properly, but until something happened to push either one of them in that direction, she was still officially Mrs. Jimmy Ashley. That’s why booking her husband’s band to play the Valentine’s Dance was the least of her worries.

  The gas bill, the hours her boss wanted her to work, whether or not she’d have the money to get Eloise what she really wanted for her birthday—those were the worries that kept Catherine up at night. But those were practical problems that Catherine could tackle and fight. What she had never been able to overcome was the utterly paralyzing fear of loving Jimmy the way he wanted her to love him, the way she often tried to love him, because doing so would expose her long-guarded vulnerability. That fear had stalked her throughout her marriage until one day Jimmy betrayed her, proving all her misgivings correct and making her thank God that she had never fully committed her heart to him, because the shock of what he had done to her and their family was hard enough to bear as it was.

  It had taken her a long time to adjust her feelings for him, but she had done it for her girls, for Eloise and Leila, who she lived for, content to let her life orbit around them with the same ordered regularity with which the earth turns around the sun, letting their happiness and beauty warm her, because their love was all that she needed.

  And manning the bar at the Valentine’s Dance with her friend and neighbor while her ex-husband played his guitar, which looked like a mammoth outsized phallus, onstage was just one of those things. It was a Jimmy thing. Like talking endlessly about sex was a Kirsty thing.

  “On reflection I think I am in love with my personal trainer,” Kirsty said thoughtfully, for the fourth or fifth time since she had started this one-sided debate. She was holding a plastic cup full of wine and gazing contemplatively at one of the many red cardboard hearts that had been hung from the ceiling and stirred gently, wafted by warm air created by the dancing crowd below.

  Catherine looked at her, crossing her arms.

  “No, you are not in love with your personal trainer,” she replied, also for about the fourth or fifth time. “How can you be in love with him? You hardly know him. You’ve seen him three or four times for an hour twice a week at most.”

  Catherine was grateful that Kirsty had offered to come with her to the dance as the only other single woman in town without a date, because Catherine wouldn’t have come herself if she hadn’t been on the committee. She had been volunteered to run the bar, so having Kirsty by her side took the edge off the whole Valentine theme and helped to make it almost bearable.

  “So?” Kirsty was questioning her. “What do you think I should do? It’s hard to pick up your personal trainer, you know, because whenever you see him you are fat and red and sweaty. How can you make a man want you when you are fat and red and sweaty? Particularly when based on the research I’ve done, the kind of women he likes are thin and blond and have massive tits. Any ideas?”

  Catherine looked down at her friend. At six feet exactly, she towered over Kirsty by almost five inches.

  “You are not in love with your trainer,” she repeated firmly, as if she were telling her five-year-old Leila that no way was she staying up for the end of Strictly Come Dancing. “So you don’t have to try and pick him up because you don’t love him. You probably don’t even fancy him, not really.”

  “I think you’ll find I do,” Kirsty avowed. “Have you seen his arms, his chest, his legs, his butt, his … oh God I’m having a hot flash and not on my neck.”

  “That’s lust, Kirsty!” Catherine exclaimed, feeling her cheeks color. After a year of knowing Kirsty she was still not comfortable with the other woman’s insistence on conducting full and frank discussions of a sexual nature in public places. “It’s lust, 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 exactly 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 onto the poor man. Remember, you pay him £59.95 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 blond eighteen-year-olds with breast implants.”

  “No, no, he thinks he fancies blond 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. Or else there’s always plastic surgery.”

  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 favor 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.

  “Why do you do all this PTA lark?” Kirsty asked. “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 for children and falling out with our estranged ex-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 ex-husband,” Catherine remarked.

  “Well, there’s no need to brag,” Kirsty sighed. “I could be in the Three Bells Pub 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. At six feet tall with red hair, she had never had a problem getting noticed. She’d always tried to blend in, to stay out of the limelight. She always wore black trousers, 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 it and only cut it every other month with the kitchen scissors. Beauty was something that Catherine had never quite understood, but she was fairly certain she wasn’t it. 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’ loos at the Goat Pub. 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 and suddenly found herself remembering the last Valentine’s Dance she had been to. It was a bittersweet memory, tinged with sadness, but this was true of all her memories before she had gotten 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 going to a rehearsal for the school public speaking team so that she could go to the school disco with Alison.

  She and Alison had met outside the church on High Street and got changed together in the public loos outside the supermarket, putting on lipstick haphazardly as they peered into the scratched mirrors that were 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. 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.

  When Lee Britton accused her of being a lesbian, Alison had 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 around and around 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 the supermarket and changed back into jeans and sweaters. Alison too, even though her parents knew she’d been going to the disco and all she had to hide from them was makeup.

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

  “It’s just their way,” Catherine had 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.”

  They had hugged each other before going their separate ways. And for a long time, Catherine had thought that Alison was right, 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 forever.

  “This dance sucks,” Kirsty said, snapping Catherine back into the present. “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 a man if you look hard enough, a pub, a club, the gym, the supermarket, even the optician’s …”

  “The optician’s?” Catherine asked.

  “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 woman.’’

  “Your trouble is that you don’t realize 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’d 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 afterward. He’s 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. She was able to stand tall in a crowd, happy in the knowledge that the man she was holding hands with was two inches taller than her. But although she had cared for him, needed him, she had never fallen in love with him the way he always told her she would do. In all the years they had been married she had never found the courage to let herself go 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 with a total stranger that she understood why their marriage was over.

  “It’s not that I don’t love you,” Jimmy told her, holding both her wri
sts so that she wouldn’t punch him anymore. “But you don’t … you don’t …”

  “Don’t what—excite you? Is that it? Have you finally realized 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 tile 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 walk into your life. 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 let yourself go with again. I’ve spent years trying to make you love me, and it hasn’t worked. And why should you love me? Look at what a shit I am …” Jimmy paused and took a breath as Catherine studied his face. “Tonight has proved it to you and it’s proved it to me. I don’t deserve you, Catherine, and I can’t stand seeing the disappointment in your eyes anymore, just like I can’t stand loving a woman who doesn’t feel the same way about me. I’m worn out. I can’t do it anymore.”

  “But …” For a moment Catherine was lost for words, acutely aware that she hadn’t denied his charge. “Why didn’t you just tell me, why do this?”

  “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 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. So she decided not to.