“I love you, Catherine,” Marc told her as his hand ran up her thigh. “Always remember that at this moment I love you more than anything in the world.”
Catherine snapped back into the present, her wineglass in her hand as she heard a noise on the landing.
“Yes, darling?” Catherine called back.
“I went to the toilet on my own!” Leila informed her proudly.
“Good girl, well, get back into bed, then. I’ll be up in a minute to kiss you. Don’t wake your sister.”
“Too late,” she heard Eloise call out grumpily.
Catherine set the wineglass down on the table.
Jimmy had told her to remember the last time she was in love,
and she had, because despite the huge leap of faith it had taken her to trust her husband with her heart, in the twelve years she had known him she’d never felt the same intensity of emotion for Jimmy that she’d experienced during those few weeks with Marc James. When Marc had walked out of her life, just a few weeks later, she’d felt as if he’d taken with him the part of her that could feel that way again. It frightened Catherine to think that Marc James had been the love of her life. But his was the love that had changed her life—had changed her—forever.
That afternoon in his lodgings had been the most wonderful, most perfect experience of her life.
At last she’d felt that she belonged to someone.
Amazingly she’d felt that he belonged to her.
And then she’d introduced him to Alison.
Six
A
lison looked at the clock on the wall. It was almost eleven, the children had long since gone to bed, and Rosie was curled up in a hot little ball at her feet, twitching occasionally as she dreamt about chasing rabbits. Marc was not home.
This was to be expected, she told herself as she took a sip from what was her fourth glass of wine, on the grounds that she deserved a drink after the day she’d had. It was not unusual for Marc to work late, well into the night, without ringing her to tell her what time he would be home. That was what running your own car dealership was like. Sourcing suppliers, keeping on top of the paperwork, taking out big corporate clients in a bid to supply their company fleet. Especially now that he was opening another branch, there would be a lot of work to do to get everything up to a high enough standard. That’s what he told Alison, and she accepted it because she knew that Marc would be throwing everything into making this new venture a success. That was just him,
or rather that was the way he was now after sixteen years with Alison.
Alison smiled to herself and tried to imagine that dark and brooding young man she had first set eyes on, on that hot summer’s day all those years ago, the heat in his eyes blazing almost as intensely as the sun. He had been the most beautiful thing she had ever seen, like an exotic creature that had somehow wandered into their safe white middle-class town, where everything and everyone looked the same. He was a drifter, without aim or purpose, restless and resentful. The young man he was then didn’t look anything like a man who would one day work himself like a dog to make his business a success, keep his family secure, and buy himself a life in the very same safe white middle-class town that Alison had once begged him to run away from with her. He didn’t look anything like that person she had fallen so hard for at the age of seventeen, the man she’d left everything behind for, including herself.
Once, a lifetime ago, she had dreamt of being a writer. She had talked about it to Catherine often enough, and only Catherine. At school Alison had been the good-time girl, the girl who always sported the shortest skirt she could get away with, or smoke the most lipstick-imprinted cigarettes around the back of the building. Everyone liked her, but nobody took her seriously, except Catherine. When they were about twelve she had confessed to her best friend that she wrote short stories in her diary and that nobody had ever seen them. With her stomach in knots, wild with nerves, she had brought them to school one day and allowed Catherine to read them in secret when they should have been in drama class. Catherine had hugged her and told her the stories were wonderful.
“You could be a writer when you grow up,” Catherine had said, wide-eyed with admiration.
“That’s what I thought too,” Alison had exclaimed happily. “But I wasn’t sure if I was any good!”
“You could do it.” Catherine had seemed certain. “You could do anything.”
Yet the most defining action that Alison had ever taken in her life was to run away with Marc. The moment she had made that decision all of her old dreams had evaporated, and at seventeen she hadn’t given a second’s thought to their passing. She hadn’t really thought about those dreams until now. Until another late night at home on her own without a single thing in her life that felt like hers alone, waiting for the man who was now an entirely different person from the one she had sacrificed everything for.
Alison stopped that train of thought. She could hardly complain that time had changed him; the intervening years and three children had changed her too, even if she worked hard at the gym to try to stem the change as much as possible. Of course Marc was still out at the dealership, getting it ready for the grand opening over the weekend. He would not leave any stone unturned until everything was perfect. Everything else, including his wife, would have to wait until then. Alison knew that because she had created the man he had become, and this, sitting drinking wine alone at eleven o’clock at night, was the price she paid for her creation.
Topping off her wine, Alison looked at the clock again. The house was quiet at last. Dominic had either turned his music off or plugged his headphones in, and the girls had been asleep for hours, Amy drifting into oblivion the second her head touched the pillow, as if her restless dreams would be a welcome escape from the harrowing day her mother had put her through.
Her two daughters’ first day at their new school could not have been more different, and Alison was afraid that that was how it was going to be for them for the rest of their lives. Gemma she didn’t have to worry about. Gemma was exactly like Alison had been as a child. She breezed through every social situation, supremely confident and happy, utterly unconcerned by the children who
did not like her (and there were a few of those because Gemma had a knack for rubbing people the wrong way) and completely besotted by those she chose as her friends.
Amy, on the other hand, could have been a changeling. She was not like her father, driven and single-minded, always chased by nameless demons at his heels, and she was not like her mother. Or perhaps that wasn’t entirely true. Because Alison had not been the same woman when she’d conceived Gemma as she was when she’d become pregnant with Amy. During those three years she’d lost a little of her shine, a little of her certainty. Sometimes Alison worried that Amy was a replica of her mother after all, that somehow she had let her youngest daughter down by not being the person she used to be, by not being the kind of woman who had daughters like Gemma.
Gemma had been in the playground when Alison had arrived to pick her girls up, Rosie dancing at her heels and doing her best to chew through her leash. Gemma had raced up full of news for her mother and cuddle for her dog and talk of new best friends who she simply had to have over to tea at the first possible opportunity. They had been about to go round and find Amy when Mrs. Woodruff popped her head out of the reception door and asked Alison to come into her office.
Alison looked down at Rosie.
“I would, but it’s the dog, you see. If I tie her up out here she’ll howl the place down.”
Mrs. Woodruff frowned. “Bring it in, just this once. But for future reference dogs are not permitted on the school grounds.”
Amy and Mrs. Pritchard were waiting in Mrs. Woodruff’s office. The moment Amy saw Rosie her eyes lit up and she rushed over to the dog, burying her face in its fur, her slender shoulders shaking as she sobbed silently, her small fingers wound tightly in Rosie’s coat.
Amy had cried all day. Literally all day, Mrs. Pritchard told her kindly, her sympathetic face crumpled with compassion.
“Why, darling?” Alison asked Amy, gently lifting her face from the dog’s coat. “Why did you cry so much?”
“I don’t like my new teacher,” Amy sobbed woefully. “I want Miss Mill, Miss Mill is
beautiful
and
young
.”
“Um, well.” Alison looked apologetically at Mrs. Pritchard and was relieved to see a twitch of a smile round the teacher’s lips.
Amy’s face disappeared into Rosie’s fur again.
“Not coming tomorrow,” she hiccupped miserably. “Mama, p-please don’t make me come again. I’m
worried
.”
Alison folded her arms more tightly around Amy and set her mouth in a thin line of determination. She knew she had to be firm and force herself not to give in to her daughter’s pleas. Her youngest child had been born fragile and full of fear, equipped with the thinnest of skins, and yet Alison knew that of all of her children Amy was the bravest, because despite her fears, as long as her mother told her everything would be all right, come tomorrow morning she would get up and face the whole terrifying process again.
So now when her tear-stained daughter asked why she had to go to school, even though Alison struggled to find an answer and wanted more than anything to keep her at home and safe by her side, she knew she had to say the right thing. There was no alternative, Amy would have to learn to live her life in this world, as frightening and as harsh as it must seem to her, and all Alison could do for her little girl was to teach her how to cope with it and somehow manage to get through these difficult first few weeks until eventually Amy found the same kind of uneasy peace here that she had found at her old school.
For a second Alison thought of her husband, of his insistence that they move back, and she had to swallow the bitter anger
that rose in her throat. They all seemed to be paying the price for his mistakes, even Amy.
“It will take a while for her to adjust,” she told Mrs. Woodruff apologetically. “I think there’ll be a good few tears till then.”
“Of course,” Mrs. Pritchard agreed. “It takes a long time to settle into a new life no matter how old you are. We’ll get there in the end, won’t we Amy?”
“I’ll try,” Amy said. “It’s just that I’m so
worried
.”
And then it had been Alison who had to try to stop herself from crying.
At least Alison had been able to get the girls home and know they were safe and in one piece, even if one of them was miserable.
She had made Dominic come out of the gate to meet her before Rock Club because she wanted to go in with him, meet his teacher, and pay for the term. Dominic had flung himself into the car, slapping his body into the seat.
“I’ve changed my mind,” Dominic said, tucking his chin into his neck as a few teenaged girls strutted past. “I don’t want to go to Rock Club, it’s for losers anyway.”
Alison looked at him clutching his guitar by the neck and felt her stomach contract in sympathy. He looked as if he felt pretty much the same way she had ever since they had arrived here: like she was waiting to go home to a place where she could relax and be herself, or rather the self she had spent the last sixteen years inventing.
“Don’t be nervous, kiddo,” she told him, putting her arm around him. “It will be fine, you’re a tough kid. Go and rock the joint.”
Dominic’s sideways look was one of pure recrimination.
“I’m not nervous,” he countered, shrugging her arm off of him. “I just don’t want to go in there. It’s totally lame, Mum. And
anyway, how many other kids do you see whose mums made them wait until they arrived to take them in? They’re going to slaughter me and it’s all
his
fault.”
As if to prove him right, three boys about his age and similarly attired in black combats and printed T-shirts slouched past with that same awkward wheeling gate that all boys of a certain age seemed to have, peering at him through the car window as if he were a piece of dirt.
“Look, I have to come in and pay your teacher. I promise that after today I’ll never come near the place again. I’ll even walk ten paces behind you now and pretend I don’t know you.”
She was joking, but Dom exploded out of the car door and took off, taking her at her word.
“Right, well, wait here, girls,” she said. “I’ll lock you in. Keep an eye on Rosie. Don’t let her do any more damage to my leather trim. Don’t open the doors to anyone. I won’t be long.”
“Hurry, Mama,” Amy said, her voice quivering, her big brown eyes looking up at the sky as if it might fall on her at any moment.
“Oh come, muffin,” Alison heard Gemma say as she grabbed her bag. “Let’s play I Spy—I’ll let you win.”
As she walked back into her old school Alison was unprepared for how the building and its surroundings would make her feel.
It wasn’t an especially old building, it had been built in the 1920s, but it was an exact replica of a grand eighteenth-century building complete with palisades, colonnades, and even a chapel. From a distance, set in its own expansive grounds, it looked like a very grand private school, not like the local high school at all.