Page 52 of Things We Never Said
‘Something like that,’ Sean says. ‘We should do it again sometime.’
‘Ooh, yes,’ Maggie says. ‘That’d be a right laugh.’
‘You wouldn’t get me on one of those,’ Dave says.
Maggie wrinkles her nose. ‘Dave can’t swim,’ she explains in a confidential tone, reaching out to caress Dave’s arm.
‘Loads of people can’t swim,’ Dave says. ‘There’s not a lot of call for swimming when you grow up in deepest Derbyshire.’
By the time they drop Sean off at the end of his road, he’s feeling exhausted.
Being sociable, he thinks, as he walks along the road, is like a muscle – a muscle he has allowed to atrophy. And the sheer effort of making polite conversation for three hours with Dave and Maggie has completely worn him out.
Still, the good side of that, he realises as he closes the front door, is that he’s glad for once to find himself alone in the house. He hurls himself onto the settee and lets out a long deepahhhof satisfaction.
And then he remembers it’s Sunday. Maggie’s description – her ‘pseudo-revelations’ – is still ringing in his ears. She’d annoyed him by saying that. He pulls a face. He should, perhaps, have said something.
He levers himself from the sofa and heads through to the kitchen where he switches on the kettle and pulls the box from the kitchen cabinet.
Snapshot #16
35mm format, colour. A man looks out through lace curtains at the street beyond. The light from outside is cold and harsh, making the man’s features appear sharp and angular. He looks pensive, or perhaps sad.
Sean studies the photo and remembers instantly what had been wrong. He had made a terrible, terrible mistake at work. He had chosen to clad a small office block on the Cambridge Science Park with marble. But even before all of the marble had been clipped onto the walls, it had started cracking and falling away. One lump had punched a hole right through the roof of a contractor’s car. Had he been in the car, he might have died. Estimates to remove the marble, change the clips and replace it all with granite (which unlike marble would not crack and shatter in the summer heat) had been estimated at almost £200,000. So he had been going to work each morning wondering if today was the day he’d be sacked. Or even worse, sued. He hadn’t been sleeping at night either, and on multiple occasions Catherine had come downstairs at 3 a.m. to find him staring into the middle distance.
He had told her what was wrong but, as so often where his job was concerned, she had failed to grasp the seriousness of the situation. She had said, ‘Oh, you’re only human. Everyone makes mistakes.’ It had been as if she didn’t really believe that anyone could get that upset about work.
So, yes, he remembers this photo being taken. He had been jerked out of his worried daze by the flash of the camera. ‘Don’t look so sad, it may never happen,’ Catherine had said. But it already had happened. Sean just hadn’t known what that meant for his career quite yet.
Eventually he’d started rowing, and not only had the hard physical effort of it diminished his stress levels enormously, but it had given him the opportunity to socialise with one of the partners who was also a rower, and with him on side the situation had eased.
The client had accepted a new composite cladding for the building, which cost less than a third of the original marble, and the supplier of the marble had agreed to take half of the financial hit. So the whole business had just melted away like an ice cube on a hot day, leaving Sean wondering why he had been so worried about it in the first place.
Cassette #16
Hi Sean.
I’ll bet you don’t remember this one. It’s a pretty ordinary photo, after all. I only took it, I think, because I had a new compact camera and I wanted to finish the film off. But it is, as it turns out, very evocative of a certain time, and specifically of another thing we never spoke about: your affair.
Just so you know this from the outset, I never knew for sure who it was with; in fact I’ll go as far as admitting that I was never one hundred per cent sure there was someone else. But back around the time this photo was taken I thought I was pretty sure, at any rate.
It was partly my fault, I suppose. I hadn’t been ‘putting out’ since April was born. Oh, we’d done it once or twice, but it had become rarer and rarer for the simple reason that I no longer enjoyed it. As I was never very good at faking these things, you had slowly stopped trying.
Some nights I’d wake up and realise that you were doing it on your own at the far side of the bed, and I’d feel horribly guilty. But even then it was somehow beyond me to roll towards you and join in. And then, after a while, once I’d realised (or convinced myself) that you were having an affair, I had a whole new reason not to join in – seething resentment.
The thought crept up on me, really, without me even noticing it. To start with, you were distant, distracted. And then you seemed sad whenever you were at home. It was like you always wanted to be somewhere else. That was the impression I had.
And then one day, I woke up and realised that I knew. It was as if I had realised in my sleep.
I did all the usual clichéd things. I went through your pockets; I checked your wallet for receipts while you were in the shower. But there was nothing I could point to and say, ‘What the hell is this?’ So I watched and waited and got angrier and angrier.
I got scared, too. I became terrified that you were going to leave us. I used to cry about it some days while you were at work. I used to imagine myself turning up at Mum’s with April and having to explain that, like all of Mum’s own relationships, it was over – that like mother, like daughter, I had failed. I used to try to picture the type of woman you were seeing and I’d always imagine some clever, young, vivacious, rich degree student and then feel overwhelmed by the knowledge that there were hundreds, thousands even, of women in Cambridge for whom I’d be no competition at all.
Things changed a bit when you started rowing, at first once a week, and then twice, and then three times. You suddenly seemed happy again. Sometimes you seemed almost unreasonably happy. Ecstatic, I suppose, is the word.
I decided, God knows why, that you’d replaced your extramarital adventure with sport. I convinced myself that you were coming back to us. But then I became doubtful again and wondered if you were really rowing at all.
One particular morning it all got the better of me, so I waited for you to leave and then bundled April into the pushchair and almost jogged with her down to the river.
