Things We Never Said Page 20

  It hardly seems fair on a day when I love you so much to drag you back to 1995, your horrible year with April, but I’m afraid that’s the next photo I picked out, and if I don’t do them in order I’m worried I’ll end up in a right old mess.

  So here goes: things got so bad between you two that I used to daydream that I’d have to leave you, just to keep you and April from each other’s throats. Sometimes I used to come home and worry that one of you might have stabbed the other.

  It didn’t last, thank God, and by the time she hit thirteen you’d both got over yourselves (and each other), and everything was peaceful and lovely again. But for a while, back then, it felt a bit like a war zone. It really did.

  I knew what it was about, of course. It was all to do with you worrying about who April’s father was, and that all started because that stupid secretary from your workplace bumped into us and commented that April didn’t look anything like you. It was just a couple of days before her twelfth birthday and, from that point on, you just never stopped sniping at each other.

  I did my best to placate everyone, but I don’t think I was very good at playing go-between. Because, while I could understand April behaving like a twelve-year-old schoolgirl, I really did think that you should know better and I really did just want to shout at you to grow up.

  I tried to talk to you about it all – I must have asked you what was wrong a hundred times. I wanted you to name it, you see, so that we could get it out in the open, so that we could finally discuss the whole thing. But, until you did, I dared not mention it myself, because I was never quite one hundred per cent sure that you knew. And as far as bringing things out into the open was concerned, you were never any help at all. All you ever did was insist that nothing was wrong, that everything was fine. You always reverted to being such a blokey bloke whenever the subject was our daughter.

  About four years ago, a woman at work mentioned a friend of hers who’d had a paternity test done, and I realised that putting the whole subject to bed had become not only possible, but relatively inexpensive. So I paid a few hundred pounds and got one done. You may remember being quite surprised when I suddenly attacked your feet with the toenail clippers one morning . . .

  I cried when the results came back. Because April is yours, after all. And as soon as I saw those results, I knew that it had been obvious all along, even though I had wasted years and years worrying about it.

  Had it not been the case, had Phil been the father, I’m pretty sure I would have never mentioned the subject again. But it’s done, honey, and it’s all OK. Nature or nurture, everything that April ever becomes is directly down to us! In fact, if you ever unearth that second box of photos, you’ll probably find the test results stuffed down the bottom.

  Now, I know that you’ve probably thought about it a thousand times and I know that you’ve decided, or convinced yourself, that it doesn’t matter one way or the other. You love each other so much, why should it matter, right?

  But I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart, all the same, for being so goddamned classy about the whole thing, for never mentioning it once. Because there were plenty of times when I was being unreasonable and when you needed ammunition to get your own back; there were lots of times when you could easily have thrown that back in my face. So thank you, honey, for not doing that.

  God! I just realised that with you listening to these over such a long period, you’ll have to worry about this whole DNA thing for weeks on end. So now I’m going to have to go back through the tapes and find the Phil one and erase it or record an addendum or something. Note to self: do not forget!

  Emily, the estate agent – young, professional, pretty, albeit with somewhat severe features – talks constantly as they make their way from the car park to the third floor.

  She tells Sean random facts about Cantabrigian Rise, most of which he’s already aware of and others he knows to be patently untrue.

  He had fully intended to come clean about his relationship to the building, but quickly realises that it’s much more fun to say nothing, effectively giving her enough rope to hang herself.

  ‘The roof is completely covered in photovoltaic panels,’ she is saying as they reach the top floor, ‘which means that the electricity bills are almost zero for these units.’

  ‘Photovoltaic, huh?’ Sean says, doing his best to suppress a wry smile. ‘Not just a solar hot-water system then?’

  He sees Emily’s confidence stutter momentarily; he sees the shadow sweep across her features. ‘Um?’ she says, then, ‘No, no, the proper, um, photovoltaic ones. Which heat the water too, so that’s one less thing to worry about, obviously.’

  ‘Obviously,’ Sean repeats.

  They have reached the bright orange door of unit 3F. ‘Here we are,’ she says, sliding the key in the lock and pushing the door open.

  Sean starts to frown even as he steps over the doormat. Because the floor plan, he can see, has been modified. The apartment-width wall, which originally divided the living space into living room at the front and bedrooms at the back, has been removed and replaced by a long wall running from the front window to the rear wall.

  ‘Now, this unit is quite unique, as it happens,’ Emily continues, ‘because the rooms run front to back so that they get both morning and evening light.’

  ‘At the cost of making them very long and thin and removing the utility of the retracting front picture window,’ Sean points out, savagely.

  ‘Yes, well, you can still open the one on the lounge side,’ Emily explains.

  ‘Well, thank God for that,’ Sean comments, extrapolating, as he penetrates further into the apartment, that the original kitchen must also have been removed. He wonders, briefly, if his heart is strong enough to acknowledge such destruction, then braces himself and steps through the dividing wall. He breathes in sharply as he takes in the utterly standard oak-fronted kitchen units in the narrow galley kitchen they have created on the other side.

  ‘These are all brand new,’ Emily says, running her finger across the worktop, ‘so that’s lovely for you.’

  ‘Yes,’ Sean says, flatly. ‘Lovely.’ He’s already attempting to tot up in his mind how much it would cost to put the walls back where they belong and restore the original kitchen units. He’s not sure the workshop, out in Fen Ditton, even exists anymore. ‘So, on price,’ he says, ‘how much room for manoeuvre is there?’

  Emily looks at, or more specifically pretends to look at, a sheet of paper in her ring binder. ‘I’m afraid the answer to that one is none at all,’ she replies. ‘It’s only been listed for three weeks and we’ve already had more than ten offers, all of which have been refused. It’s a seller’s market, I’m afraid. People sometimes offer more than the asking price to secure unique properties such as this one. I’m not sure how well you know Cambridge, but these riverfront properties are few and far between.’

  ‘Right,’ Sean says, ‘then I’m sorry to have wasted your time.’ It has suddenly become urgent for him to leave this building. Because more and more modifications that have been done are popping into his consciousness the more time he spends here, and not one of them is, to his eyes, an improvement. ‘My budget is more in the five fifty bracket,’ he adds, starting to move towards the front door.

  ‘Ah,’ Emily says. ‘Then unless one of the one-bed units comes onto the market – which is frankly a once-a-decade kind of event . . .’

  ‘There are two bedrooms here?’ Sean asks, just for fun.

  ‘Oh, no . . . No, they’ve been knocked into one. As you can see. But this was a two-bedroom, originally. Which it’s why it’s ninety square metres. The one-bed units are nearly all seventy square metres.’

  ‘Sixty-six,’ Sean says.

  Emily glances at him and half frowns, half smiles as she says, ‘Yes. That’s right. Sixty-six.’

  When Sean gets home, he makes a mug of coffee before heading out to the back garden. He sits in the tatty old deckchair and looks back at the house. />
  It’s probably for the best, he thinks with a sigh. He’s not, if he’s being honest with himself, ready to move at all. It would feel like a kind of infidelity towards Catherine, a sort of treason towards April, who still, after all, has her bedroom upstairs.

  Pages, the universe seems to be whispering, cannot be turned this quickly. If only they could.

  He glances up at the top rear window and pictures little April peering out. A memory surfaces of one sultry summer afternoon when he had fallen asleep on a sun lounger only to be woken by the unexpected sensation of raindrops. April and Catherine, hysterical with laughter, had been squirting a water pistol at him from April’s bedroom.

  Now April is going to be a mother in her own right and Catherine has ceased, quite simply, to exist. And yet this still does not feel like a collection of bricks and mortar to be quoted and traded. It still feels like home. And not just his home. Their home.

  Sean covers his mouth with one hand and exhales sharply. He has a lump in his throat and his vision is blurring. ‘God, this is hard,’ he mutters as an unexpected convulsion of grief rises from deep within his chest and sweeps, like a wave, through his body. He swipes at the corners of his eyes. ‘Jesus,’ he says.

  Cantabrigian Rise continues to play upon his mind and he finds himself sketching the modified floor plan and the original. He finds himself mentally listing costs and delays and the names of potential contractors who might owe him a favour. He dreams of restoring 3F to its former glory. But he knows that it’s nothing more than a daydream. The place is too expensive, even before factoring in all of the renovations.

  Yet, despite all of his rationalisations, the idea is still floating around on Sunday afternoon as he pulls the shoebox from the kitchen cabinet.

  ‘What do you think?’ he asks the box, as if it might somehow reply. He lifts the lid. He waits. He listens. The air inside imparts no wisdom.

  But then, just as he reaches for the next envelope, he thinks, Wait. When the time is right, you’ll know it. When the time is right you won’t have to force anything. So wait.

  It’s something Catherine could have said. In fact, these are the exact words that Catherine would have said. And in some strange way, it suddenly doesn’t seem to matter whether Catherine still exists, in heaven, or in the ether, or merely as a well-known, much-loved construct inside Sean’s own mind.

  It’s not something that he could easily explain – more of a feeling, really – but in that instant, they amount to the same thing. In that instant, whether Catherine exists or doesn’t exist outside of Sean is immaterial, because it seems to him that all we ever see of each other is the representation we hold inside our own minds. And Catherine does still exist inside Sean’s mind. He still knows her favourite flavour of ice cream and he still knows that she doesn’t like his carrot soup, and he can still hear her saying, as if she were here beside him looking at the box, thinking about his dilemma, ‘Wait. When the time is right, you’ll know it, Sean. So wait.’

  Snapshot #23

  35mm format, colour. Two women of different generations and a child are standing at the end of a jetty. Behind them, the sky is wispy blue, but their wild hair conveys the fact that a savage wind had been blowing that day.

  Sean swallows hard. Because only now that he is looking at this photo does he realise that he has been dreading it.

  He raises it close to his eyes and studies Catherine’s face, and wonders if he imagined it, if time has, perhaps, played tricks on his mind. But no, there it is, that vacant expression, that tongue just visible at the corner of the mouth, that pale transparency, an impression that she was there and yet not there, like a hologram, perhaps.

  They had gone down to Margate to visit Catherine’s mother, who had recently become single again. But Catherine had been absent, distracted and generally peculiar all weekend, like a bad, amnesiac actor unconvincingly playing the role of wife, mother and daughter. Even Wendy had spotted that something was wrong with her. ‘What’s up with that one?’ she had asked Sean, nodding towards the lounge.

  ‘Nothing,’ Sean had said. ‘Nothing at all.’

  But even as he pretended to Wendy, as he pretended to himself, he had known that something was wrong and that it was no little, insignificant thing, either.

  He had avoided any kind of reflection on the subject for the entire weekend; he had resolved to simply hold the question until his wife returned to him long enough to answer it. But when they’d got the photos back a few weeks later, he had bravely asked the question. ‘What were you thinking about when I took that photo?’

  ‘Um?’ Catherine had said.

  ‘What were you thinking about all weekend in Margate? For that matter, what are you thinking about now? Because whatever you are thinking about, it’s not here and it’s not now, is it?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ Catherine had replied. ‘Everything’s absolutely fine.’ And because ‘absolutely fine’ had never once before figured in Catherine’s vocabulary, he had known, definitively, that she was lying.

  He had pretended to believe her, though – not for any altruistic reason, but because it had been easier for him.

  He had just been made a partner at Nicholson-Wallace and was having to work all hours. He didn’t have, he feared, the time or the energy to deal with whatever was going on in Catherine’s head, so he chose, selfishly, to leave it be.

  He had surprised himself by his ability to pretend. There had been a feeling, deep inside, like a stitch when you run, like a sorrow, like a shadow, like a loss. Of course there had been. But he had managed, by concentrating on the demands of work, to keep it for the most part out of consciousness.

  Cassette #23

  Hello Sean.

  I’ve really not been looking forward to this, but in the interests of full disclosure, here goes. I’m so sorry, baby.

  I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this before and I’m not sure if you’ll remember it now, as it was such a long time ago. But you once said, ‘One day, we’ll be dead, and we still won’t have known each other. Not properly. Because no one ever does.’

  What followed was this long and complicated discussion about how well it was truly possible to know another person. We all had, you said, secret gardens, sexual fantasies and shameful things we have said and done, things we would never admit to another living soul.

  I deftly turned the conversation to you by pretending to be shocked and asking you what your secret fantasies were. Which put an instant end to that conversation. You didn’t, evidently, have any. But the reason you’d asked me that question was that weekend in Margate, when you’d accused me of being distant, and had quite rightly sensed that something was wrong. You were totally right, actually. I was there with you in body, but my mind was somewhere else entirely.

  Everything had been great between us, so don’t ever think that what happened reflects on you in any way. Everything was hunky-dory: you’d been promoted, April was being lovely, Solo’s fur had remained lustrous and our home was a happy home. I wasn’t looking for anything at all; in fact, had you asked me, I would have said that I didn’t even have room in my life for anything else. But then I met someone. I met Jake, and for a while he knocked me off my feet.

  He came into the shelter one day to get a kitten for his daughter. He was divorced but his daughter came for weekends and school holidays, he explained, and he wanted a cat so that she’d feel like his place was still home. It was early June and we were overrun with abandoned kittens, but though there were plenty to choose from, most were still too young and were waiting to be weaned or waiting for their shots, or to be sterilised, before we’d let them go.

  Anyway, Jake walked through the door one evening, just as I was about to close up, and I thought, simply, Wow!

  Now this is where the whole thing is going to get tooth-numbingly embarrassing and where it’s probably all going to sound horrifically shallow, too. But this is supposed to be about honesty, and part of that honesty is for me,
as well. It’s about admitting to myself that we humans are still animals at heart, no matter how much we try to pretend otherwise, no matter how sophisticated we’d like to think we are.

  So here it is: the first thing that struck me about Jake was his clothes. I’ve always had a thing for guys in suits, and I know that you know that and I know that you’ve always done your best to ignore the fact for the simple reason that you pretend to hate wearing one. You and I both know that the truth is that, for some inexplicable reason, dressing up in anything out of the ordinary embarrasses you. But that’s been a shame, really, because my so-called thing for men in suits is actually quite a powerful thing. You see? I told you that this would make your teeth hurt. It’s certainly making mine hurt to say these things we never say.

  Jake was a lawyer. In fact, he almost certainly still is. And not a humdrum lawyer either, but a fairly high-flying, corporate lawyer. So he walked into our lowly, shabby cat shelter wearing an opulent, perfectly tailored, five-hundred-pound suit and a silky, perfectly knotted polka-dot tie and a crisp white shirt with cufflinks and braces. And it’s entirely silly, but it all made me go a bit weak at the knees.

  He had electric-blue eyes and what people like to call a strong chin, and good skin and a nice arse and big smooth hands coming out of those thick white cuffs, and when he smiled, which was often, he revealed a set of lovely white teeth.

  He smiled and reached out to shake my hand and said, ‘Hello.’

  When I tried to reply, I just croaked. It took me three attempts before I could even speak.

  I hope you don’t think that I’m trying to rub your nose in all of this, because that really isn’t my intention. I’m just trying to explain what happened in a way that, perhaps with time, you’ll be able to understand. It wasn’t a choice, you see. At any rate, it never felt like a choice. It felt like . . . I don’t know. A compulsion, maybe?