Chapter Thirteen

ALISON OPENED HER eyes and waited for the second or two it took for her to remember her life. She had been dreaming about being with Cathy. Not about any event in particular, but just about her and Cathy when they were around Gemma’s age, running along the canal towpath in the sunlight, the heat of the sun on their shoulders as Alison chased after Cathy, whose hair was made amber by the sunshine. That was all; nothing else had happened in the dream except that Alison had felt light inside, she had felt free like she thought Christina’s friend Sophie had looked that night in that bar in London.

Now that her eyes were open and she had reabsorbed her daily life back into her bones, she felt the weight of reality sinking into her skin. She truly had seen Cathy last night; she hadn’t dreamed that.

Marc was not in bed next to her. She rolled over and looked at his side of the bed. The pillow was plumped and smooth, the duvet unruffled. He had not come to bed at all. Briefly Alison wondered if he had followed Cathy home and was with her right now and some ember of jealousy flickered in her throat, but she swallowed it down.

Pushing herself up onto her elbows, Alison made herself get out of bed. Her legs were heavy, her arms ached and she felt as if her brain was somehow insulated by one or two layers from reality. Everything seemed just a little bit further away than it normally did.

It couldn’t be a hangover, she told herself. Yes, she had drunk quite a bit of champagne very quickly, but not that much. If she was hungover from anything it was not alcohol, it was her life and its culmination the previous night. The choices she had made that had somehow brought her life to this point had finally caught up with her. There was nowhere to hide any more.

In the bathroom Alison dunked her face in a bowlful of cold water once or twice and then rubbed some more on her neck and between her breasts with a sponge, feeling the cold water trickle down over her belly. Roughly rubbing herself dry, she took a deep breath and looked in the mirror. Her reflection looked tired, dark shadows under her eyes, her skin thin and frail. The trouble, Alison thought, was that when she never saw Cathy, it was easy not to think about her or about the kind of person that she herself had been. It was easy not to have to face up to that selfish spoiled little brat, the thoughtless girl that would wreck half a dozen lives just to get what she wanted.

But now Alison had seen Cathy face to face it was inevitable: she had to acknowledge the truth.

This person, the woman looking back out of the mirror at her was the very same girl who had abandoned Cathy, alone and in the hands of her parents. Of course Alison hadn’t known that Cathy was pregnant. But in the cold light of day, as she looked at her reflection in the mirror, she knew that even if Cathy had told her she would have left anyway. She would have done anything to be with the man she loved.

Tired of looking at her tired self, Alison padded barefoot out of the bathroom and went to check on her children.

Dominic was sprawled face down diagonally across his bed, one arm flung over his guitar, his iPod still plugged into his ears. He looked fifteen again and nothing like the enraged and passionate young man that had visited her in her bedroom last night. Alison tiptoed carefully through the detritus of his teenage life smeared across the floor and gently pulled the earplug from his right ear. When she realised she couldn’t reach the left one she carefully located the iPod and switched it off.

Dominic mumbled something, brushing one hand outward in a spasm as if he were attempting to swot a fly, before settling back into sleep, and then he didn’t even look fifteen any more but five, his face relaxing into that little boy that had once been her guide and beacon. Alison looked at those dark lashes and that soft mouth that used to tremble whenever he was sad, frightened and furious, and, unable to resist, bent and kissed him lightly on the head.

He wanted her to leave Marc, to strike out on her own. But he was young and angry and full of fire. For the first time, last night Alison tried to think of a life without her husband and found she couldn’t imagine it. Perhaps she had created Marc, but he had made her too. He’d made her a mother and a wife, a woman who lived for her family or at least who told herself she did. But did she?

Alison dragged Dominic’s duvet cover over both boy and guitar and crept back out of the room to check on her daughters.

Gemma was arranged as neatly as always, the back of one hand resting demurely against her cheek, the other tucked neatly under the cover, like a true sleeping princess. She always looked so ordered and so tidy. For the first time Alison wondered if that was right, if it was natural for an eight-year-old always to be in such control of herself, even in sleep.

Amy, on the other hand, looked as if she had wrestled a crocodile in her dreams, which wasn’t past the realms of possibility, Alison thought, as she looked at her youngest child, one leg hanging out of bed, soft vulnerable toes touching the floor, her quilt flung to one end of the bed, her head twisted awkwardly to one side and her pillow on the floor. Although Amy had slept through the night since the age of two she seldom seemed to have a peaceful sleep, except for those rare occasions when she shared a room with Gemma on holiday or when she was allowed to creep in bed with her mum, which was only ever when Marc was away.

Alison crept over to the bed and, kneeling, tenderly lifted Amy’s leg back onto the mattress and covered her with the duvet again. She might have been imagining it but she thought she saw her daughter’s face relax as she became dimly aware that she was not alone any more.

Perhaps Dominic was right, perhaps she had been so busy creating and recreating this perfect family life for her children that she didn’t noticed how the stress and tension between her and Marc was affecting them. Gemma was so easy – that’s how Alison always described her middle child. She assumed that Gemma’s confidence was due to happiness but perhaps it was like armour, hiding away her anxieties. Maybe her eight-year-old was trying to protect her. And Amy’s fears weren’t nameless or imaginary, not if she sensed that the fairy-tale castle her parents had built for her to live in might crumble away to nothing. If that was true then no wonder she only ever relaxed when the whole family was in one room.

Alison sat on the pink wicker chair opposite Amy’s bed and put her face in her hands.

Her life had come full circle back here to her home town. It was ironic that she had had to walk back into her past to finally face her future. The trick was going to be trying to work out exactly how to face it, how to face Cathy and Jimmy, and especially her husband. How to make sense of the accidental life she had forced herself into, and of the accidental wife she had become.

It was impossible to shake the feeling that she was not meant for this life, that she was the interloper, the impostor. And for the sake of the children, herself and even Marc, she had to try finally to make some sense of that, make sense of the person she had become since the day she ran away from Cathy.

The house smelled of stale alcohol and egg and cress sandwiches, some of which were trodden into the stair carpet or ground into the hall tiles. Abandoned glasses were everywhere, filled with various liquids to varying degrees, giving Alison the almost irresistible urge to pick up her son’s drumsticks and play them.

Marc was not in the kitchen, or any of the downstairs rooms, and from the look of things he hadn’t even slept on the sofa.

Alison walked gingerly over broken crisps to the french windows.

The sun was almost up, burning mist off the lawn, which spiralled up into the air like magician’s smoke. Marc was in the garden, huddled up in his wool coat, sitting on the white wrought-iron garden furniture he had bought in a job lot from the show home on the development. He had his back to the house and was looking at hills that swelled and rolled across the valley, lush green and gold in the early morning, the horizon garlanded with trees. Above the mist, the sky looked bright blue and clear. Alison thought that this might be the first sunny day of the year.

The grass was wet and cold under her bare feet, slick with dew, but she didn’t go in to find shoes or slippers, sensing that if she turned back she might not return, and this moment, this clear new day, might be lost in the routine of their lives again.

As she approached Marc, he looked up and smiled at her.

‘Good morning, beautiful,’ he said. ‘You really should have something on your feet. It’s a bit nippy out here. Thought I’d take the morning air and survey my kingdom. Have a bit of a think.’

Alison sat down on one of the wrought-iron chairs. Drawing her feet up onto its seat and tucking her knees beneath her chin, she felt the cold of the dew seep through her nightdress.

They smiled at each other for a moment, like two old cohorts who were finally realising the game was up.

‘Well, I certainly didn’t picture this when we came back,’ Marc said. ‘I just didn’t think Cathy Parkin would still be here. That was a turn-up, wasn’t it?’

‘Didn’t you?’ Alison asked him. He looked at her. His nose and cheeks were red from the chill and his eyes looked puffy and sore. Briefly Alison wondered if Marc had been crying, but in all the years she had been with him she’d never seen him shed a tear.

‘I didn’t plan it,’ Marc said. ‘I swear to you.’

‘I’m sorry I slapped you,’ Alison said, hugging her knees, the thin cotton of her nightgown proving inefficient at protecting her from the ice in the air.

‘I deserved it,’ Marc said.

‘Maybe fifteen years ago you did. I mean, of course you were sleeping with her,’ Alison said. ‘I don’t know why I hadn’t worked that out years ago. I don’t even think that was why I slapped you. Or the fact that you’d got her pregnant too. It was seeing her there in front of me. I saw her and I missed her, and blamed you. So I slapped you. And I shouldn’t have. It must have been very embarrassing.’

‘I carried it off, though,’ Marc said. ‘And anyway, I understand, because I felt the same way.’

‘Embarrassed?’ Alison asked him, tucking the hem of her nightgown under her toes.

‘No, when I saw her, I missed her. Missed the way she used to make me feel back then … missed who I was when I was with her.’

They sat in silence and Alison tried to work out if the burning she felt in her chest was caused by hurt or relief. Because although Marc’s comments were painful, at least he was being honest with her.

‘What would you have done,’ Alison asked him, ‘if you’d known she was pregnant too? Would you have stood by her as well? That would have given the town something to talk about. Man fathers two children born within a week of each other.’

Marc’s laugh surprised Alison. Mirthless and sharp as it was, it seemed inappropriate.

‘I knew she was pregnant,’ he explained. ‘I think I knew long before she did. I was waiting for her to tell me that we couldn’t go to bed because her period had come. I waited for three weeks, four weeks, five weeks and the subject never came up. I knew we couldn’t carry on for ever then. I knew there would be a crunch and I wanted to leave before it arrived.’

‘You knew she was pregnant and you still chose me?’ Alison asked him. Once she would have left it at that, let herself believe that that one action fifteen years ago stood as a testament to how much she had meant to Marc, but not today. Because for once in his life he was being honest and she needed to know the truth, so she asked him another question. ‘Why?’

Marc didn’t answer for a moment, as he looked out towards the horizon. Then, taking a breath, he began to talk.

‘You told Catherine about us. I knew you would sooner or later,’ he said. ‘I’d been expecting it since that first afternoon. It must have been a schoolday because Catherine turned up at the bedsit in her uniform. I’ll never forget it, seeing her there in her blue checked kilt and school sweater. She was crying. She asked me if it was true that I’d been sleeping with you and I said that it was. And she asked me if that meant me and her were over. I was shocked, upset for her even if I didn’t show it. She should have told me it was over, not asked me. She should have been stronger than she was. But she wasn’t strong, I knew that when I got involved with her. I warned her. So I told her that it was; it was over.

‘I braced myself, waiting for her to tell me she was pregnant, but she didn’t. She must have known by then but she didn’t mention it. She just turned on her heel and walked away.’ Marc looked up at the clear sky. ‘It was pouring with rain.’

‘She was coming to see me,’ Alison said, more to herself than to Marc. ‘She tried to tell me about the baby. But I wouldn’t let her.’

‘I went to the pub that night, my first night off in ages. I wanted to get bladdered, really out of it. I didn’t want to think about anything. The work in Farmington was coming to an end; I heard there was some work coming up near Croyden. Not that far away, but on that night it seemed like a welcome refuge. And then suddenly you appeared. I don’t know how you found me …’

‘I looked in every single pub.’

‘Well, you found me. You walked in and all the blokes looked at you, your hair all wet, your top soaked through. All that eyeliner you used to wear running down your cheeks. I saw you and my heart sank. I thought, here we go again. Ding, ding, round two. But I was ready to take whatever you wanted to dish out. I thought I deserved it.’

‘I asked you to go outside with me,’ Alison remembered. ‘Told you I needed to talk to you. I had no idea what I was going to do if you didn’t come, but you did come.’

‘We stood outside in the rain,’ Marc went on. ‘I had both my hands in my pockets and I was staring at my work boots. I couldn’t look at you, because you were the one thing I hadn’t been able to resist, like a bloody greedy kid in a sweet shop. You were the one thing that made me mess up again.’

‘I said, I’m running away from home. I’ve done it already. I’m going anyway, whatever. But I want you to come with me. Will you come with me? And I felt like screaming because I was so frightened,’ Alison recalled.

‘I just kept on staring at my boots, I heard you talking but the words weren’t going in. And then you said, I want to be with you more than anything, I have to be with you and you have to be with me because I know that we are meant to be together. Come with me and I’ll be your family. I’ll stand by you, I’ll help you. I’ll look after you. That’s what you said: I’ll look after you.’

The two sat in silence for a moment, each separately remembering the same event.

‘I could see that you were shaking from nerves,’ Marc said, ‘and the cold probably, I don’t know, but I just stood there with my hands in my pockets looking at my boots and …’

‘… thinking.’ Alison completed the sentence for him. ‘Deciding whether or not to come or go back in the pub and finish your pint. I remember. I couldn’t even believe that you were thinking about it. I mean, I knew that you wanted me, I knew we had this physical thing but, even as naïve as I was, I didn’t think you’d run away with me, not really. I think, even if I didn’t admit it, it was really just some grand crazy gesture. Something I had to prove to myself. I think if you’d gone back in for the pint, like I thought you were going to, I’d have gone back home and gone to bed and my mum would never have known I’d run away at all.’

‘But you said you’d look after me,’ Marc said. ‘And I knew that there was no way a seventeen-year-old girl would be able to look after me, but nobody had ever said that to me before. Not anyone. I didn’t realise how much I wanted to hear it.’

‘And is that why?’ Alison prompted him. ‘Is that why you came with me?’

Marc shook his head, taking a deep breath.

‘It was one reason, but there was another one. A stronger one.’ He looked Alison in the eyes. ‘I was in love with Cathy, Alison. Back then at that very moment, standing outside of the pub in the rain, when you asked me to run away with you like I was some kid in a play and not a twenty-year-old railway labourer, I was in love with Catherine. I loved her, but I couldn’t be a better person for her. I couldn’t make myself be good enough to deserve her. She was the first person I had ever loved and even though I knew how important and how special that was I still went to bed with you, and I kept on going to bed with you because I couldn’t stop. Because for most of my life I’d had nothing. When I got the chance to have everything I took it. But I loved her. If I hadn’t have met you then she would have been enough. She would have been enough until I met the next girl I couldn’t keep my hands off. I loved her, and I knew she was having my baby and I knew I couldn’t be there for her or her kid. I knew I’d mess it up sooner or later. And there you were, standing in the rain, shivering, asking me to run away with you, telling me you’d take care of me. And that meant a lot to me. I didn’t love you, but I knew you loved me. I needed to be loved, I needed to change. So I took my hands out my pockets and put my arms around you and held you until you stopped shivering and I said, “OK then.” I said, “OK, come on, let’s go.”

‘I didn’t run away with you, Al. I ran away from her.’

Alison, still with her chin on her knees, rubbed her toes.

‘So when I told you about my baby, why didn’t you leave me then?’ she asked.

Marc stood up and shrugged his coat off. Underneath it he was still wearing the shirt and trousers he’d worn to the party. He draped the coat around Alison’s shoulders and she gathered the edges close over her.

‘You had the most balls of anyone I’d ever seen,’ Marc told her. ‘Fronting it out in that shitty flea-ridden hostel when I knew you wanted to go home about a million times a day. You stuck it out, you didn’t cave in. The longer you did that, the more I respected you. The more I believed you meant what you said. And then you told me. You said, “Well, I’m having a baby, so there. You know about it now. I’m keeping it, it’s up to you what you do – stay or go, I don’t care.”’

‘I was scared shitless,’ Alison said. ‘I wanted my mum, I wanted Cathy.’

‘I know,’ Marc told her. ‘I looked at you, seventeen, run away from home with some bloke you hardly knew and bollocks all clue about how to look after yourself, let alone my baby in your belly, and I knew I couldn’t leave you. You needed me, and I liked you needing me. I started to need you. Looking after you made me get things done. Made me look for regular work and a decent place to live. Why I couldn’t do that for the girl I loved I don’t know, but I could do it for you. You made it easy.’

‘But you say you love me now,’ Alison said. ‘You are always saying that you love me. Is that a lie too?’

‘Dominic was born and we got the flat, I got the job in the garage. Your dad came round a few times and threatened to kill me. Those first couple of years seemed like a blur and I didn’t have time to think about Catherine, I didn’t have time to think about what had happened to her and the baby. Before I knew it Dominic was four and I’d got the promotion at the garage, remember?’

Alison smiled. ‘Yes, they said they’d put you on sales because all the ladies loved you.’

‘And we’d taken that flat. The two-bed on Seven Sisters Road. I came home from work and you were sitting on the living-room floor with Dominic, playing with Lego or something. You had the window open, and it was a sunny evening. It sort of lit up the back of your hair like a halo. I looked at you and my son sitting on the floor and I felt as if I’d been kicked in the chest by a mule. I realised I loved you both more than anything. I don’t know when it happened exactly, but it was then that I realised. I loved you. I love you. I still do.’

Alison looked out across the horizon. A horse in a field on the hillside opposite was galloping through the wet grass, mane and tail flying, tossing its head in sheer abandon. Alison shut her eyes and tried with all her might to will herself onto that hillside with that horse. But when she opened them again Marc was still sitting on the white-painted wrought-iron garden furniture watching her.

‘Everything’s changed now that we’ve moved back here,’ she said. ‘Now that we’ve found Cathy again. Things can’t go on as they are.’

‘Yes they can,’ Marc insisted. ‘Yes they can. I know it’s weird seeing Cathy again, I know we put her through a lot, but we can come through it, Al, like we always do. We’ve had our problems, and coming back here has stirred up old memories and opened up old wounds, but maybe that is a good thing. Because maybe now we can clean them and let them heal for good. And I love you, I love you so much, Alison.’

Alison looked at him, shielding her eyes against the advancing sun so that she could see his face clearly. He was watching her intently, waiting for her to smile and acquiesce like she always did.

‘The trouble is, Marc,’ she said after a long pause, ‘I’m not sure that I love you any more.’